Oracle Bones

by Peter Hessler

  By his early thirties, he had essentially stopped writing verse. At Yenching University, in Beijing, he spent hours studying the inscriptions of oracle bones and ancient bronzes. As he drifted into archaeology, the early poems seemed reminders of another life that had already passed:

  Are you the one who really wants to know my story?

  Embarrassed, flushed

  Gently I turn over twenty blank pages. I want to write only one line:

  I am a minister’s good son.

  LUCY CHAO WAS also a minister’s child who became a prodigy. At twenty-five, she published the first Chinese translation of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. She taught English at Yenching University, until 1937, when many Chinese fled Beijing in the wake of the Japanese invasion. Years later, in an autobiography, Lucy remembered:

  We moved to the south, and my father stayed in Beijing with my brother Zhao Jingxin [Old Mr. Zhao]…. we moved to an old house in Deqing County in Zhejiang. At that time, I married Chen Mengjia. There everything was cheap and life was colorful. We had fish and shrimp every day. We didn’t need to study, so we often watched the ducks crossing the water.…

  Along with many other Chinese intellectuals, the couple eventually relocated to Kunming, a city in the remote southwestern province of Yunnan. In Kunming, the key Chinese universities reorganized into a new entity known as National Southwest Associated University, where Chen Mengjia taught. Lucy wasn’t allowed to serve on the faculty—rules forbade a couple from teaching at the same institution.

  I was a housewife for eight years. I had traditional thoughts that a wife should sacrifice for her husband. But I was really well educated. While cooking, a copy of Dickens was always on my knee.

  In 1944, the Rockefeller Foundation granted the couple a joint humanities fellowship, to fund research in the United States. Theirs was a unique generation: despite the Japanese invasion and the civil war, a group of promising young Chinese were developing deep intellectual links with the West. Many went to America and Europe to be educated, and most intended eventually to bring their new skills home to China.

  For Chen Mengjia and Lucy Chao, the trip began with a flight from Kunming to Calcutta. The journey “over the hump” inspired Chen to write poetry for the first time in years:

  I cannot see the Himalayas

  Clouds pile high like mountains…

  Everything looks so lonely

  This is a desert of heaven.

  At the University of Chicago, Lucy researched a dissertation about Henry James. For years, she had studied English from afar; now literature was suddenly right at hand. During a trip to Harvard, she met T. S. Eliot, who gave her an inscribed copy of his poems.

  It was said that I became the third biggest collector of Henry James’ books.…My husband and I were determined to spare no efforts to enjoy the cultural education offered by the United States. We went to concerts, movies, and we visited all kinds of museums. We went to watch every sort of opera. When we returned from the States, our luggage was full of books and records; there wasn’t much money left.

  While Lucy studied literature, Chen hunted for bronzes. Many artifacts had been taken out of China during the chaotic nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and few pieces had been studied carefully. Chen hoped to write a definitive book on the subject, combining both Western and Chinese approaches to bronze studies. In addition to his Rockefeller grant, he received support from the Harvard-Yenching Institute.

  28 May, 1945

  My dear Miss Hughes,

  I shall be visiting Kansas City either this coming weekend or the weekend following. I would like to know the most convenient time to visit the Museum….

  The Wanderer earned his name. He traveled to Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Minneapolis, New York, New Haven, Boston, Providence, Princeton, San Francisco. He went all the way to Honolulu. In every city, he contacted museums and private collectors, studying their artifacts. For two years he shifted between the worlds of ancient Chinese bronze and modern American culture:

  14 June, 1945

  My dear Miss Hughes,

  I enjoyed myself very much during my visit to Kansas City and wish to thank you again for your kindness. If time permits I may be able to make another visit before the Fall with my wife…. I spent some time in downtown Kansas City my last evening and finally went to a movie. I feel that the trip was very enjoyable from every point of view….

  Outside of the United States, Chen visited Toronto, Paris, London, and Oxford. In 1947, after a trip to Stockholm, he wrote a letter to the Rockefeller Foundation:

  I was received by the Crowned Prince in his castle to see his own collection and had the honour of talking and discussing with him for two hours.

  That year, Chen completed a draft of the book—photographs and descriptions of 850 vessels. Before returning to China, he sent the manuscript and photographs to Harvard; editing would be conducted by post. Langdon Warner, a Harvard professor, wrote a letter to Chen: “It takes a brave man to face the difficulties—political and financial—of Asia today and I admire you for going back at this time.”

  In Chicago, Lucy stayed behind to finish her doctorate. By the time she finally headed across the Pacific, at the end of 1948, the civil war in China had passed the turning point:

  While I was on the boat [to Shanghai], I heard on the loudspeaker that Tsinghua and Beijing universities had been liberated. [The Kuomintang general] Fu Zuoyi’s troops were in trouble….

  The traffic between Beijing and Shanghai had stopped, so I had to find some way to get there…. Luckily, a plane that was carrying grain for Fu Zuoyi was going to Beijing, so I took it. The plane landed at the Temple of Heaven. When we passed Tianjin, the People’s Liberation Army soldiers fired at us from the ground. There was no ladder for us to descend…we just jumped onto a bunch of quilts that had been laid out on the ground….

  The capital was divided, with some sections under Communist control and others still held by the Kuomintang. Chen Mengjia was in an area that had already been taken by the Communists.

  I asked somebody to send a message to my husband saying that I had returned, and when the gate of the castle was open I wanted him to meet me. Three weeks later, the gate was open. Beijing was liberated.

  THE GATE SHUT almost immediately. In 1950, the Korean War broke out, and communication ended between China and the United States. In Cambridge, Harvard professors waited to hear from Chen about his book on bronzes; in Beijing, Chen waited for the political climate to soften. He kept busy by reading oracle bones. In 1956, he published A Comprehensive Survey of the Divination Inscriptions from the Wastes of Yin. The phrase “Wastes of Yin” refers to the Anyang region, where so many pieces of bone and shell had been excavated over the years. From these fragments, Chen re-created the Shang world: calligraphy, grammar, geography, astronomy. Warfare and sacrifice; gods and royalty. When the Beijing publishing house paid Chen, he used the fee to purchase an old courtyard home near the city center. Above the entrance, he erected an inscription: THE ONE-BOOK HOME. That turned out to be a sad divination: Within two years, Chen Mengjia would be banned from publishing in the People’s Republic. And in the United States, his book about bronzes never appeared.

  Despite the ban, the Institute of Archaeology printed its own version of the book, using the notes that Chen had brought back with him. The editing was sloppy; mistakes were made; many of the photographs had been stranded at Harvard. For good measure, the Chinese edition included an introduction criticizing Chen Mengjia. His name didn’t appear below the title, which was unlike anything else ever produced by Rockefeller money:

  Our Country’s Shang and Zhou Bronzes

  Looted by American Imperialists

  NOWADAYS, THERE ARE only approximately thirty oracle bone scholars worldwide. In the United States, the most respected expert is David N. Keightley, a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley. Keightley never met Chen Mengjia, and he knows little of his personal story. But the America
n has researched in the tracks of the Chinese scholar, and he still uses the Chen book that survived—the volume on oracle bones and the Shang world. “That book was supremely important,” Keightley tells me during one of our conversations at his home in the Berkeley Hills. “It’s a wonderful book. He lays everything out there—the rituals, the sacrifices, the time frame. It’s very old, but it’s still a very good place to start.”

  Like Chen Mengjia, Keightley has spent his academic career piecing together fragments. He compares the bone inscriptions to notes on a score—a type of code that, in the right hands, becomes music. There are snatches of song, pieces of tunes. Melodies: certain themes recur so often that they create harmony. Keightley has perused some thirteen hundred divinations about rainfall, all from the period of the Shang king Wu Ding, who ruled from roughly 1200 to 1189 B.C.

  This month there will be a great rain.

  Today the king will hunt; the whole day it will not rain.

  That we are not rained on means that for this settlement Shang some Power is making disasters.

  The bones make music, and they also tell stories. The Shang are obsessed with the dead—in their world, departed ancestors have power. If neglected, they punish the living through sickness, misfortune, and natural disasters. When a ruler becomes sick, or if there is some problem with the weather, the royal court performs divinations, trying to discover which unhappy ancestor demands a sacrificial offering. Sometimes the Shang negotiate with the dead: on one excavated fragment, an inscription proposes sacrificing three human prisoners to an ancestor. But there must have been an unsatisfactory crack, because another inscription follows: five human prisoners. After that, the divinations end. The ancestor must have been satisfied with five deaths.

  “Another nice example is the toothache divination,” Keightley says, opening his own book on the oracle bones, Sources of Shang History. He turns to a black-and-white rubbing of an oracle bone that also dates to the reign of Wu Ding. The rubbing shows the reverse side of a cracked turtle plastron, whose oval shape is marked by drilled pits and inscribed characters. Some of the original Shang words are hard to make out, and Keightley’s book reproduces the plastron with clearer, modern characters:

  After opening the page, Keightley sets the scene. “The king is going on a campaign, and he has a sick tooth,” he explains. “He’s trying to figure out what to do about the tooth, and he needs to know which ancestor is responsible.”

  Four names have been carved into the object: Father Jia, Father Geng, Father Xin, Father Yi. All are of a single generation—the king’s father and three uncles—and all are already dead at the time of the divination.

  “It is Father Jia, it is not Father Jia,” Keightley reads aloud, in Chinese, running a finger across the characters. “It is Father Geng, it is not Father Geng. It is Father Xin, it is not Father Xin. It is Father Yi, it is not Father Yi.”

  For each ancestor, multiple divinations have been performed—cracks across the plastron. The object is like a three-thousand-year-old detective’s notebook, eliminating possibilities one by one.

  “And then we have another inscription: ‘Offer a dog to Father Geng and split open a sheep,’” Keightley says. “That’s why I think it’s Father Geng who was causing the illness.”

  Keightley pauses and looks up from the page. At sixty-nine years old, he is a tall, thin man with sharp gray-blue eyes. “Those are the notes,” he says. “We have to supply the music ourselves.”

  IN ANCIENT CHINA, it seems that somebody was always lining up the notes. Order, regularity, organization—these characteristics impress archaeologists and historians. Even three thousand years before the Shang, in Neolithic times, there is a striking regularity to the burial pits of the central plains. Those early cultures followed a practice that is described as “secondary burial.” The dead were buried, and then, after a period of time, the bones were exhumed, cleaned, and arranged into patterns. Sometimes, bones were piled neatly, with the skull lying on top. In other tombs, skeletons were carefully laid out, their heads all pointing in the same direction. Order, regularity, organization.

  When Keightley looks at such tomb diagrams, he sees art and writing. In his opinion, everything is connected: the same instinct is at work, the desire to regulate the world.

  “If you look for the origins of the Chinese writing system, I think it’s a mistake to look for naturalistic pictures,” he says. “What you have to look for are diagrams—structures where they are abstracting, codifying. The same impulse that is working in the religious sphere is also working in the cultural sphere. If you want to see more evidence of impersonalization, look at the taotie.

  “These are not naturalistic pictures; they are highly structured, dictatorial designs. Pattern and order are fundamental. They seem to be imposing a code. There is a shared cultural sense of what to do, how to think. My impression is that this is fairly unique to China. When do you see the first portrait of a king in China? I don’t even know the answer to that. In Egypt you have early portraits of kings, of high officials. In China, you get nothing like that. Clearly they take pleasure in depicting important powers, forces, presences in an abstract way.”

  The Sanxingdui bronzes are different—even though they are stylized, they still depict the human form. When Keightley refers to “China,” he means the central plains, where the Shang developed and where the modern Chinese have typically sought their roots. This region gave birth to Chinese ancestor worship, which is one of the culture’s defining characteristics. And ancestor worship, in Keightley’s opinion, naturally contributed to bureaucratic organization and the conservative thought of Confucianism.

  “When you look at the Shang ancestors, you find that they have their jurisdictions,” he says. “The more recently dead deal with the small things; the ones who have been dead for longer deal with the bigger things. They get more power as generations pass. My point is that this is a way to organize the world. People are in charge of different things. I describe this as generationalism, the sense that power accrues with age.”

  In classical Chinese literature, the hero is essentially a bureaucrat. He organizes and regulates; in battle, he is better known for making plans than he is for fighting. The early Chinese classics don’t linger on descriptions of warfare—the gore of death, the muck of the battlefield. “You don’t get that attention to dirty detail that you have in the Iliad and the Odyssey,” Keightley says. “It’s all about what the person does, what his talents are. It’s very pragmatic, very existential.”

  Keightley has published a paper on this topic: “Clean Hands and Shining Helmets: Heroic Action in Early Chinese and Greek Culture.” He compares the Greek classics to the closest Chinese equivalent—the texts of the Zhou dynasty, which followed the Shang. The Zhou are credited with establishing many of the philosophical foundations of Chinese culture, including some of the most important early works of literature: the Book of Songs, the Book of Documents, and the Zuozhuan. The composition of these texts ranged from around 1000 to 400 B.C. Confucius, who was born around 551 B.C., two centuries after the fall of the last Zhou ruler, idealized the dynasty as a model of appropriate culture and customs.

  In contrast to the literature of ancient Greece, the moral world of the Chinese classics is remarkably orderly. In ancient China, the good are rewarded and the bad are punished. Gods do not come down to earth and behave badly. There is no tragedy in ancient Chinese literature. The dead function in essentially the same way as the living, except with greater power. Order, regularity, organization.

  “The trouble with the dead in Homer is that they don’t know beans,” Keightley says. “They are described as ‘the stupid dead.’ They have no power; they can do nothing. In the Odyssey, Odysseus visits the underworld and talks with Achilles, who doesn’t know what’s going on back in Greece, or even if his son and father are alive. It’s quite unlike the Chinese dead, who assume power as they become older. The Greeks don’t do this. What the Greeks do is develop a hero cult, w
hich is opposed to the ancestor cult. The Greeks are trying to build a city-state, as opposed to the lineage state, where you have a polity that is run by and for a group of powerful families. The Greeks did not encourage that.”

  Keightley’s conversations are timeless. During our meetings, he shifts constantly: sometimes he touches on the Shang period, then the Zhou, and then modern China. Once, he remarks that the Chinese seem to produce bureaucracy as instinctively as the West creates heroes. But he emphasizes that this is not a value judgment; in fact, the need for Western-style heroism—decision, action—might naturally produce war. Historians have long theorized that Europeans educated in the Greek classics were particularly willing to rush headlong into the First World War. In one of his papers, Keightley quotes William Blake: “The Classics, it is the Classics! That Desolate Europe with wars….”

  Back again, to prehistory. When I ask how ancient China and the West developed such different worldviews, Keightley points to the landscape. In the central plains of ancient China, climate patterns were more regular than in the Mediterranean and the Near East. And China’s two main river systems—the Yellow, the Yangtze—both flow from west to east. Each river is modular: there isn’t much change in latitude, which means that crop patterns are similar upriver and downriver. There was little incentive for trade; ancient civilization was naturally agrarian. People who travel less are less likely to exchange ideas and technologies.

  “Essentially I’m playing the role of the geographical determinist,” he says. “I believe the climate of ancient China was very benevolent, and this encouraged the kind of optimism that we see in the culture. There is a flood myth, but the ancestor Yu solves the problem. Again, we have an ancestor who is competent; he does things. And in ancient China there is no evil act. There’s no sense of original sin. There’s no interest in theodicy, in explaining evil in the world.