Oracle Bones (32 page)

He showed me some of the parts of the house that he hoped to preserve. The antique doors in the main building would be donated to the Modern Literature Museum, along with an ancient engraved decorative brick known as “Elephant’s Eyes.” We stepped outside, and the old man escorted me across the darkened courtyard. The afternoons were growing shorter now; the temperature was crisp. He pointed out a spot in the courtyard where, decades ago, a bomb shelter had been excavated.

“That’s from the Cultural Revolution,” he said. “Mao said that everybody had to have a bomb shelter. America was the number one enemy at that time.”

He still insisted that he wasn’t going to move until they forced him. “The law courts will come, the police will come, the ambulance will come,” he said grimly. “It will be exciting.”

A Chinese newspaper reporter arrived, and the three of us moved to the living room. The reporter was young, and she seemed intimidated by the old man and the foreigner. Or perhaps she struggled with the futility of documenting a story that couldn’t be told. Stammering, she asked her first question: “Have you moved your things yet?”

“What do you think?” the old man shot back. “Can’t you see that all of my things are right here?”

The woman looked at the walls: the calligraphy and the patriarch, Abraham Lincoln and the boy Jesus. She smiled weakly and tried another question: “Are you unhappy?”

“Of course we’re unhappy! Wouldn’t you be unhappy? We’ve been threatened by this for two and a half years, and now we’re in our eighties!”

Politely, I excused myself and left the courtyard. The maid closed the door behind me. I headed north, walking back across the invisible line that marked the protected district. At home in Ju’er Hutong, everything was quiet.

October 23, 2000

At three-thirty in the afternoon, my cell phone rang.

“They’re going to
it on Thursday morning,” the old man said. “There’s nothing more I can do.”

He explained that they would move in with some friends, temporarily. There was no emotion in his voice. He spoke in Chinese, and then he switched to English.

“That’s all I have to say. There’s no other reason for my phone call.”

He hung up before I could respond.

October 26, 2000

I awoke knowing that this would be a long, grim day. It happened to be a Falun Gong anniversary: at one o’clock, protestors were planning to demonstrate on Tiananmen Square. But first, in the morning, I walked south from Ju’er, listening to the early sounds of the
hutong
. The vendors were out—beer, vinegar, soy sauce. Rice, rice, rice. Birds whistled in the scholartrees, their voices thin in the autumn air.

The courtyard sat just south of Kuanjie intersection, on the east side of the street. An eviction notice had been glued to the front door. Nearby, on the old gray wall of the compound, somebody had pasted an advertisement for the Beijing City Economic Crimes Exhibition—a deliberate touch of
Chai nar
irony, perhaps.

Old Mr. Zhao and his wife had left the day before. They went quietly: no police, no ambulance. But even without their presence, the demolition became an event. Dozens of reporters, both Chinese and foreign, gathered before eight. At exactly 8:20, fifteen court officials arrived. They dressed identically: white shirts, black suits, black ties. Red badges pinned to their breasts. They secured the building, making sure that nobody was inside.

At 8:30, a flotilla of white police cars arrived. More than fifty officers surrounded the complex, assisted by plainclothes cops. They cleared the sidewalks, stringing up plastic yellow police barriers. They bullied passersby and harassed reporters. A couple of photographers had their film confiscated; a few foreign television reporters were detained. One Chinese journalist was slightly injured in a scuffle.

The workers came last. They were migrant laborers from Sichuan province; one of them told me that he had been hired for less than two and a half dollars a day. Each man carried a pickax. The Sichuanese started on the roof—chipping off tiles, spraying up dust. The walls were next: plaster, mortar, brick. Dust, dust, dust.
. A bulldozer swung in from the southern entrance. Dump trucks followed. It was a beautiful autumn day; the sky was high and blue and there was not a cloud in sight. By late afternoon the courtyard was history.

ARTIFACT E

The Bronze Head

THE PAST IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION. IT LIES UNDER HOUSES, BENEATH
highways, below building sites. Usually, it reappears by chance—somebody digs, something turns up. In the end, luck discovers most artifacts in China.

This pattern is humbling to any archaeologist or historian, because even the most magnificent discoveries have the most mundane derivations. Somebody gets sick and the tortoise shell that he buys for a cure happens to be an oracle bone. In 1974, during a drought in northern China, peasants outside of Xi’an dig a well and strike the Terra-cotta Army of Qin Shihuang. In 1976, as part of a national campaign to emulate the model commune of Dazhai, the residents of Anyang are instructed to level all hills in order to create better farmland. It’s another genius idea of Mao Zedong’s, and it has no agricultural value—but the digging uncovers the tomb of Lady Hao, which contains the richest collection of Shang bronzes and jades ever found.

The pace of rediscovery accelerates with Reform and Opening. Now the driving force is economic rather than political—no more campaigns to “Study Dazhai.” And the market, which proves skilled at destroying old cities, is an equally efficient excavator. This is the
yin
to the bulldozer’s
yang
: old cities like Beijing disappear, and courtyard homes like Old Mr. Zhao’s are torn down, but the construction opens up ancient tombs and underground cities at an unprecedented rate.
Chai nar
’s economy develops the past even while destroying it.

In Jinsha, a construction company is building a strip known as Commer
cial Street when the workers stumble onto a cemetery that is at least three thousand years old. A highway crew outside of Xi’an uncovers pits containing the terra-cotta figures of Han Jingdi, the fourth emperor of the Han dynasty. In Luoyang, developers dig the foundation for a shopping mall and find a royal tomb that dates to the Eastern Zhou. Archaeologists work like salvage crews: whenever a construction project unearths an ancient site, the specialists are called in to finish the job.

On July 23 of 1986, at eight o’clock in the morning, in the Sichuan province village of Sanxingdui, a group of peasants are digging clay in order to make bricks when they suddenly uncover a cache of beautiful jade pieces. Archaeologists step in, and over the course of that summer they excavate two huge burial pits that date to around 1200
B
.
C
.—contemporary to the Shang. The archaeologists find eighty elephant tusks; more than four thousand cowry shells; artifacts of gold, jade, stone, amber, and pottery. Most impressive are the bronzes, whose technical quality and artistic style are clearly the work of an advanced civilization. The bronze figures include a tree that is more than thirteen feet in height, a statue of a man that stands over eight feet tall, and more than fifty bronze heads. The style of the bronze figures is completely unlike anything ever discovered in China—in fact, the next known example of human statuary doesn’t appear on the archaeological record for nearly a millennium. The Sanxingdui figures don’t look remotely like the artifacts of Anyang, which is seven hundred miles away. The pits in Sichuan contain no oracle bones or inscribed bronzes—not a single word of writing. Nobody has any idea who made this stuff.

IN CHINA, WHERE
political power traditionally derives from the center, it seems natural to imagine culture the same way. Chiang Kai-shek believed that minorities such as the Uighurs and Tibetans were originally Chinese; they had simply drifted away from the central plains, and then their language and customs changed because of centuries of isolation. During the early twentieth century, archaeologists described ancient China in roughly similar terms. Civilization developed along the middle Yellow River Valley, in parts of the central plains like Anyang, and then the culture spread outward. The Chinese envisioned their roots as unified—and a desire for unity motivated them to excavate in Anyang during the years of invasion and civil war. Archaeology helped hold China together.

Elsewhere in the world, during the middle of the twentieth century, such notions of cultural diffusion came under attack. In the Near East and the Mediterranean, many specialists recognized that such ideas could be politically
motivated, and they began to explore other possible explanations for cultural development, such as exchanges between different groups. China was slow to adopt such theories, in part because of its modern investment in the notion of unity and continuity. But there was also a narrow body of evidence: most archaeology had been focused on Anyang.

Beginning in the 1980s, however, the culture of Reform and Opening helps prepare people for different ideas. There’s a sudden sense of discovery as migrants and travelers start to recognize the nation’s diversity. In the 1980s, authors such as Gao Xingjian (
Soul Mountain
) and Ma Jian (
Red Dust
) take long journeys and later publish books that describe obscure corners of their country. By the late 1990s, Tibet and Yunnan are becoming popular tourist destinations for middle- and upper-class Chinese. Minority cultures are celebrated for their differences, albeit in a kitschy way—dance troupes, colorful costumes.

Meanwhile, construction sites uncover artifacts that don’t fit neatly into the traditional perception of ancient China. In the 1980s, archaeologists in the southern region of Hunan and Jiangxi argue that their bronze vessels are so different from the Shang that they should be considered a separate culture. Initially, most Chinese scholars resist such theories, but the evidence of Sanxingdui marks the tipping point. After taking one look at the bronze heads, it’s impossible to argue that the culture simply emanated from Anyang. There’s an obvious artistic independence, and the same can be said for the artifacts in Hunan and Jiangxi. Archaeology helps break China apart.

In the end, so much depends on circumstance—what happens to be found, how the find happens to be perceived. A person’s relationship to an artifact can be shaped by nationalism or regionalism. Perspective is critical: if one believes that he stands at the center, then diffusion seems natural. But a culture looks completely different if you approach it from the outside and then work your way back in.

P
ERSPECTIVE
I

Distance:
7
,
536
miles. Location: Room
406
, McCormick Hall
,
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
.
Commentator: Robert Bagley.