Outside, the September evening settled silently, and the old man kept talking, always shifting back and forth, English and Chinese, Chinese and English.
THE CHINESE TOOK enormous pride in their history, especially around foreigners. The descriptions of a continuous civilization could be lulling, and it took me a while to realize that in fact I had seen almost no buildings that were truly ancient. Initially, I believed that this was simply because they had all been demolished. The twentieth century had been destructive, and I assumed that architecture was one of many elements of Chinese culture that had suffered.
But when I saw old buildings that had actually survived the centuries, like Old Mr. Zhao’s courtyard, they usually consisted of materials that had been replaced over the years. His home, like the Forbidden City or any traditional Chinese temple, was built of wood, brick, and tile. In China, few buildings had been constructed of stone. Some sections of the Ming dynasty Great Wall were faced with stone, but that was a defensive structure, not a monument or a public building. Chinese structures simply weren’t designed to withstand the centuries.
Many of the people who seemed most concerned about architectural preservation had links with the West. Old Mr. Zhao spoke in terms of cultural preservation, and he put me in contact with another Beijing activist, a half-Chinese, half-French woman who was trying to preserve the hutong. But average residents of the old city seemed less interested in these issues, even when they were forced to vacate their homes. Often, they were angered by the corruption of local officials, and they complained that they had been unfairly compensated. But the issue tended to be personal rather than cultural; I rarely sensed a deep attachment to the hutong.
In the past, the Chinese had paid remarkably little attention to architecture. During the Song dynasty (960-1279), there had been some effort to identify and classify the features of traditional structures, but otherwise there wasn’t much methodical study. Architecture remained an open field in the 1920s, when two young Chinese, a man named Liang Sicheng and a woman named Lin Huiyin, went to the University of Pennsylvania to study. In 1928, after completing their degrees in architecture, they married and returned to China.
For much of the following decade, the young couple developed the first systematic classification for native Chinese architecture. They traveled throughout the north, searching out old buildings and making painstaking sketches. Not far from Beijing, they found the Temple of Solitary Joy, which dated to 984. In Shanxi province, they located the Temple of Buddha’s Light, which had been built in 857. This remains the oldest known wooden temple in China. Later, after the Communists came to power, Liang Sicheng unsuccessfully campaigned for the preservation of the old city wall.
In 1940, he described the difficulty of his and his wife’s research: “Since there existed no guides to buildings important in the history of Chinese architecture, we sought out old buildings ‘like a blind man riding a blind horse.’”
Often, the couple depended on peasants for information:
My experience was that local people were not interested in architecture. When I told them I was interested in antiquities they would guide me to their stone stelae inscribed in earlier times. They were interested in calligraphy…, impressed by the written word, not the carpenter’s handiwork.
After reading Liang Sicheng’s comments, I thought of my former students in Fuling. Even in the English department, they had been assigned hours of practice in Chinese calligraphy; often I walked into the classroom and saw dozens of students hunched over their brushes, writing a single character over and over. They could tell me immediately who had the best calligraphy in the class, and who was second, third, fourth. And it had shocked them that my own English handwriting was so sloppy. They couldn’t believe that somebody with my background—educated in literature at two universities—still couldn’t write.
In Fuling, my students had recognized some beauty in the written word that wasn’t apparent to a Westerner like me. And in Beijing, I sensed that I saw something in the old city that wasn’t obvious to most locals. Ever since childhood, like any Westerner, I had learned that the past was embodied in ancient buildings—pyramids, palaces, coliseums, cathedrals. Ionic, Doric, gothic, baroque—words I could recall from junior-high lessons. To me, that was antiquity, but the Chinese seemed to find their past elsewhere.
October 20, 2000
The old man was irritable. He had dressed neatly, in a gray turtleneck and blue blazer, and he received me in his living room. But his eyes moved impatiently and he resisted my attempts at small talk. He had won a tournament match that morning, but he refused to tell me the score. “If I play eighty-year-olds, it’s not interesting,” he said with a wave of his hand. “They’re too old.”
All legal appeals had been exhausted. The final hope was that a top-ranking cadre would take a personal interest in the case, but that was unlikely. Old Mr. Zhao told me that some friends had arranged another apartment, in case the command was made. All around their courtyard home, other buildings had already been reduced to bricks and dust; earlier in the day, the final neighbors had moved out. The elderly couple were the last people in the hutong.
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 o
ld 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 Commercial 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.
PERSPECTIVE I
Distance: 7,536 miles. Location: Room 406, McCormick Hall,
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey.
Commentator: Robert Bagley.
Professor Bagley is a scholar of ancient Chinese bronzes, and he has a reputation for brilliance and exactitude; often he criticizes the tendency of historians and archaeologists to make assumptions without evidence. He has clear blue eyes and a careful way of speaking. When I interview him for a National Geo-graphic article, he emphasizes that traditional mindsets in China have been slow to respond to new discoveries.
“The classical historical tradition
,” he says, “is always interested in seeing a single line of development, from an early ruling empire that passes down legitimate rule to its successors, so they don’t talk about anything outside that one line of descent. And the oracle bones of course see everything from the Anyang king’s point of view—it’s like that New Yorker map, where most of the world consists of Manhattan.”
He continues: “One of the difficulties here is that archaeological funding has been concentrated on Anyang and other northern sites, because the written historical record tells you that this is what matters. But there is a real irony in that the really sensational finds have been accidental, in places like Sanxingdui. Sanxingdui is telling us something that we never saw the likes of before.”
Scholars have theorized that the culture of Sanxingdui may have had links with Central Asia, or India, or Burma. But these aren’t neat connections: the bronze heads don’t closely resemble other known artifacts. It’s possible that they are simply the work of an advanced civilization that developed in Sichuan and then disappeared.
“There is a point of view,” Bagley explains, “in which you could say that no find outside the Yellow River Valley, no matter how strange or spectacular, is as important, because twenty-five hundred years of Chinese tradition says that the middle Yellow River Valley is where we all come from. Now, to a foreigner who doesn’t have a psychological investment in what is China, then I can look and say, well, a lot of interesting things were going on around 1300 B.C. Some of those things became very central to Chinese history in later periods. Some of them, for reasons that aren’t clear, don’t seem to have a big afterlife. In Sichuan you don’t have people continuing to make big bronze statues. But if you just look at 1300 B.C.—forget the word ‘China,’ because there’s no yellow patch on the map. If you just look at the eastern end of the Asian continent, there are a lot of interesting things going on, and there’s a lot of diversity. There are highly civilized societies in several places that are in touch with each other, related to each other—but distinctly different.”
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