Oracle Bones (55 page)
Authors: Peter Hessler
During my dinner with Shirley and Huang Xu, I asked if they thought that the events would affect them. “We don’t export much to America right now,” Shirley said. “Actually, some people have been saying that if the dollar drops it will help our exports to other parts of the world.”
Her husband added that even the possibility of an economic downturn didn’t frighten his friends. “It’s all relative,” he said. “The Chinese often say that you only feel poor if you’re next to somebody who isn’t poor. If the whole world drops and we drop with it, then things haven’t really changed.”
Initially, I had trouble believing this—I doubted that somebody in Wenzhou would agree to reduce his income if that meant that people in America would suffer more. But then I realized that this wasn’t viewed as an active choice. The Chinese looked at distant, uncontrollable events and searched for some consolation in the worst that might happen. It was a passive, remote worldview, and it came from a hard history, but it had also been encouraged by a distinctly human gap in the flow of goods and culture. The world might not seem a smaller, more understandable place if you sent off cigarette lighters and received Hollywood in return.
Near the end of the meal, I asked Shirley how she imagined the average American would view her. She was twenty-six years old, with big black eyes and an easy smile. Back in Fuling, I had known her as the best student in her class, but now she seemed to describe somebody else.
“I’m sure they’d say I’m poor, and backward, and of a low education level,” she said. “I think that Americans look at Chinese like this. They wouldn’t know where Wenzhou is—in their eyes, it’s just another city in China.”
AFTER THE ATTACKS,
William Jefferson Foster became even more dedicated to studying English. Almost every evening, he wrote in his journal, tracking events and compiling vocabulary lists:
milestone
maul
lounge
lodger
lobe
kidney
keepsake
jockey
In addition to transcribing the Voice of America, he also translated articles from the Wenzhou newspapers:
Mid-east area countries are our city’s important trading partners. Wenzhou-made clothes, lighters, leather shoes, small medals are exported to these area countries via shipping…. After 9-11 terrorist attacks in U.S.A. the situation in Afganistan has intensified. Wenzhou’s exported products will be asked to give extra wartime money according to international regulation.
When he translated items from the national wires, he signed them proudly at the bottom:
Xin Hua News Agency
U.S. President George Bush made adress at the press confrerence in the White House on late evening of October 11th, he said that Sudam is an evil person. Because he has been trying to make large-scale deadly weapons since the Gulf War.
Bush says that these days’ attack is aiming at Afganistan. But shortly after that the anti-terrorism attacks will be extended to other countries in the world….
Bush says American has known that that Sadam has been concentrating on producing massive deadly weapons and says Sadam is an evil. Meanwhile Bush urged Iraq give permission to UN weapon inspectors’ entry to Iraq.
Translated by William Jefferson Foster
THE HORSE IS A DIVERSION. IN THE MIDDLE OF A LONG JOURNEY ACROSS
northwestern China, I decide to stop in Wuwei, a small city in Gansu province. Wuwei is not my final destination, and the interlude isn’t planned; but the basic routine is familiar. Sometimes, while traveling through a place known for some important archaeological discovery, I’ll stop and ask questions about the find. Invariably, my perception of the artifact changes dramatically in the course of a few hours.
Wuwei is known as the home of the Flying Horse. The object is now exhibited in the provincial capital of Lanzhou, but it was originally discovered in Wuwei, where a tomb contained a procession of bronzes: thirty-eight horses, twenty-eight foot attendants, seventeen warriors, fourteen chariots and carts, and a single ox. The tomb dated to the third century, near the end of the Eastern Han dynasty.
Of all the figures, one stands out. The horse is less than two feet tall, but its shape is magnificent: in full stride, nostrils flaring, tail blowing in the wind. Three hooves are in midair; the fourth rests lightly upon the back of a sparrow. It’s become known as the Flying Horse. China Tourism has adopted the artifact as its national symbol; everybody recognizes it as an icon of Chinese culture and history. That’s the image in my mind when I arrive in Wuwei.
THE WUWEI CURATOR
is named Tian Zhicheng. We meet in the local museum, which is located in a massive fifteenth-century Confucian temple complex. Its size is a testament to the former importance of this Silk Road city. But the days of trade along the Gansu Corridor are long gone, and Wuwei has faded: dusty, remote, forgotten. The temple buildings are rotting; the wood is cracked and the paint peels. Tian explains sadly that the city doesn’t have enough money to maintain the complex. He pours me a cup of tea, and then he tells the story of the Flying Horse, which was discovered at the height of the Cultural Revolution.
“They found the horse on September thirteenth, 1969,” he says. “Marshal Lin Biao had told the Chinese people that they should dig air raid shelters, in case China was attacked by the Soviet Union or America.”
Tian explains that local peasants were shoveling under a Taoist temple when they stumbled onto the tomb. Because of the anarchy of the Cultural Revolution, archaeology was essentially nonfunctioning, and the peasants handled the excavation. Afterward, they kept the bronzes in their homes until somebody from the Wuwei cultural relics bureau finally collected everything. Eventually, the artifacts were taken to the provincial museum in Lanzhou, where they were forgotten in a storeroom.
“They didn’t recognize the value of those pieces,” Tian says. “Nobody really noticed them until the early 1970s, when Guo Moruo accompanied Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia on a trip through Gansu. They toured the museum, and afterward Guo Moruo asked to see the storeroom. The moment he set eyes on the Flying Horse, he knew that it was something special. He said that it was by far the best object in the museum. And that’s how it first became famous.”
Guo Moruo: romantic poet, oracle bone scholar, historian who was compromised by his association with the Communist Party. Prince Sihanouk: exiled
king, friend of China, notoriously mercurial figure. Somehow, they make a perfect pair, traipsing through the museums of the Silk Road during the Cultural Revolution.
After talking with Tian, I visit the empty tomb, which has been restored for tourism. At the ticket booth, I ask if any of the original peasant excavators still live around here, and a woman gives me a name: Wang. The man’s home is nearby, a simple dugout that has been carved into the dry Gansu soil. It’s essentially a cave with windows and a door. The man’s wife plants herself firmly at the entrance.
“He can’t talk to you,” she says.
In the countryside, when women reach middle age, they often acquire a certain solidness that seems to draw from the earth itself. It’s also true that in these areas a foreigner tends to attract a crowd. The more people who show up, the more solid Wang’s wife becomes. She stands in front of the door, arms crossed. She remarks that the excavation was unofficial; she doesn’t want trouble. I try to reassure her: there’s no risk; this is a story about history; it will only take a minute.
“He’s too drunk to talk to you,” the woman finally says.
A ripple of laughter passes through the crowd. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon, and, at an altitude of over five thousand feet, the desert sunshine falls like a hammer. Obviously, the woman is grasping at straws, and so I keep trying: I’ve come all the way from Beijing; I won’t stay for long; I just want to ask a few questions. The crowd murmurs support, and finally the woman shrugs: “Go ahead.”
Inside: as dank as a tomb, as dirty as a dump. A half-dressed man sprawls on a wooden chair—skinny arm dangling, white head lolling. Mr. Wang, amateur archaeologist, discoverer of lost treasures, liberator of bronze armies, is snoring. The cave reeks like a
baijiu
distillery. That’s the image in my mind when I leave Wuwei.
IN 1987, VICTOR H. MAIR
, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, led a Smithsonian tour group through Xinjiang. In Urumqi, at the provincial museum, he happened to wander into a back room and saw three bodies under glass: a man, a woman, and a small child. They had long noses, deep-set eyes, and blond hair. They were remarkably well preserved—the most intact ancient corpses that Mair had ever seen. A curator told him that dozens of such bodies had been discovered recently in Xinjiang.
They were accidental mummies: preserved by the environment rather than technique. Xinjiang’s Tarim Basin is as far as you can get from an ocean, and
rainfall is rare; winters are brutally cold. A body buried in the salty soil can last for centuries, or even millennia; some of the Xinjiang corpses are over three thousand years old. Their clothing is remarkably intact. They wear fur-trimmed coats, felt boots, and long stockings. Their wool patterns are plaid. They have blond or red hair, full beards, and features that look European. They seem completely out of place in a desert of western China.
Like many artifacts, the corpses were essentially excavated by Reform and Opening. In the 1980s, as the national economy grew, the government pumped investment into Xinjiang. There was a political motivation: officials hoped that rising living standards would placate the Uighurs, and meanwhile Han Chinese migrants were encouraged to settle in the region. Xinjiang was the only place in the country where significant numbers of migrants arrived to farm. Sometimes, when they tilled a new field or started a construction project, an ancient corpse appeared. As more Chinese arrived, more foreign-looking bodies came out of the earth. The symbolism could have been uncomfortable—while modern Xinjiang became more Chinese, the ancient past looked more foreign—but initially nobody made much of the artifacts. The mummies were essentially unknown to the outside world when Victor H. Mair visited the Urumqi museum.
During the early and mid-1990s, Mair returned repeatedly, escorting foreign specialists. Working with Chinese and Uighur archaeologists, they collected samples, and it turned out that the corpses’ clothing contained particularly useful information. The twill weave—a plaid design of blue, white, and brown—was extremely similar to textiles discovered in the ancient tombs of Germany, Austria, and Scandinavia. The clothes seemed to confirm Mair’s first impression: these people were Indo-European.
The Tarim Basin sits near the exact center of the biggest land mass on earth. Like many parts of Central Asia, the formal history is thin and scattered; the past seems as empty as the landscape. All you need is a spark—some amazing artifact—and then the human imagination begins to fill all that space.
In 1994, the mummies were featured in
Discover
magazine, and then
Reader’s Digest
reprinted the story. Other publications followed suit, speculating that the corpses could be evidence of early contact between East and West. Television crews traveled to Xinjiang; the Discovery Channel titled their program
The Riddle of the Desert Mummies
. A PBS documentary was hosted by Alan Alda,
M*A*S*H
alumnus. The Uighurs began to call the corpses the “Uighur mummies”; in their view, the bodies were excellent evidence that the Chinese had no right to be in Xinjiang. In fact, Mair and other scholars speculated that the corpses may have been the ancestors of the Tocharians, an ancient people
who disappeared around the ninth century
A
.
D
., when the Uighurs’ Turkic ancestors first arrived in significant numbers. The Turkic settlers may have even wiped out the Tocharians, absorbing some of their genetic material along the way—a possible explanation for why some Uighurs have fair features.