VICTOR H. MAIR: “Yo-Yo Ma contacted me after reading about some of this stuff, and after reading about the mummies. That’s partly how he got interested in the Silk Road. You know who else is fascinated by the Xinjiang mummies? Bill Gates. He went to see them on his honeymoon. He came to Beijing, rented Mao’s private train, and rode it to Urumqi. He went with his wife, his father—a bunch of people. They had six hours in Urumqi. Guess how they spent them? They spent three hours with Rabiya Kadeer, and three hours with the mummies. Gates knew about the mummies from the articles that came out about my research. There’s a great photo from the trip; I wish I could publish it. There’s a mummy in a case. Here’s Bill Gates, looking at it, and here’s Bill Gates’ father. Here’s Melinda Gates, the wife. She has her hand over her mouth. It looks like she’s afraid she’ll get some terrible disease. I wish I could publish that.”
VICTOR H. MAIR is one of the all-time great archaeological conversationalists. The previous paragraph is typical: Xinjiang mummies, Yo-Yo Ma, Bill Gates, and Rabiya Kadeer, the Uighur businesswoman who later became a political prisoner. Her husband is Sidik Haji Rouzi, the Voice of America correspondent whose presence in Oklahoma City inspired Polat and other Uighur émigrés to make their way across the Great Plains. It all connects perfectly, at least during a conversation with Mair.
The professor’s specialty is ancient Chinese. He has translated the Tao Te Ching into English, and he has written a beautifully idiosyncratic translation of Chuang Tzu. (I used Mair’s version, Wandering on the Way, when writing about the spy plane dispute.) Chuang Tzu is an unusual, shapeless text, a collection of apparently unconnected parts, and sometimes it seems that Mair’s mind functions the same way. In conversation, he jumps from topic to anecdote, anecdote to topic. His research is equally unpredictable: he translates ancient texts, studies Xinjiang mummies, and compiles Chinese dictionaries. He was the driving force behind the creation of the alphabetical index for the Hanyu Da Cidian, the twelve-volume dictionary that is a rough equivalent to the Oxford English Dictionary. Other scholars sometimes complain that Mair spreads his net too wide, and he has a flair for publicity that is not typical of academia. But it’s also true that a broader vision turns up unexpected connections. If it weren’t for Mair’s response to a chance museum visit, the Xinjiang mummies might have remained unknown to the outside world.
He frequently passes through Beijing, and we often meet for dinner. He is also a former Midwesterner who joined the Peace Corps—a native of Canton, Ohio, Mair served as a volunteer in Nepal during the mid-1960s. Before that, he was the captain of the Dartmouth varsity basketball team, and he still carries the tall, spare frame of a forward. During one of our conversations about the ancient past, he remarks that once he stole the ball from Bill Bradley at mid-court during a game at Princeton’s Dillon Gymnasium. His riff on the other Bill does not end with Melinda and the Mummy:
“You know, Microsoft contacted us and asked if they could buy our first dictionary when it came out in 1996. It had seventy-four thousand terms, all in alphabetical order. They offered me forty thousand dollars. I said I wouldn’t think about it for less than two hundred thousand.
“Last year we came out with the alphabetical index for the Hanyu Da Cidian, which has three hundred and seventy thousand Chinese terms. It took ten years of work, and probably fifty thousand of my own dollars. Monumental task. Now Microsoft is using various ways to try and get hold of that list. The value is incredible, but they’re trying to get it out of me for nothing. They would have to pay me at least a million. Once they get hold of it, it will revolutionize the software. There are twenty-three thousand different characters. The existing Chinese software only has twenty thousand, so we had to custom-design three thousand characters. That was a mind-boggling problem. When I came back to America, scholars started asking, can I use the disk? And I know that some of these guys have Microsoft connections.”
BACK TO THE horse. Professor Mair has published a paper: “The Horse in Late Prehistoric China: Wresting Culture and Control from the ‘Barbarians.’” According to the archaeological record, the people in the central plains of China—the ones who eventually became “Chinese”—were relative latecomers to riding. Their nomadic neighbors led the way; by the fourth century B.C., northern tribes began using mounted archers in battle. According to traditional history, the nomad warriors represented the greatest threat to the farming people of central China for the next two thousand years. It wasn’t until the eighteenth century, when the Europeans arrived in force, that the Chinese empire met a more formidable opponent.
In Anyang, archaeological digs have uncovered the earliest evidence of horses in the central plains: animal skeletons, as well as the “ghosts” of buried chariots. The Shang seem to have imported both the horse and the innovation of the chariot from the steppes of the north. But archaeologists have found relatively few horses or chariots, and there is little evidence that the Shang actually used the vehicles in battle. They may have been strictly for display, and there are signs that the Shang experimented with sheep-drawn carriages. Even in the centuries that followed, the Chinese didn’t seem quite at home on horseback. Rulers worried that by adopting Central Asian innovations—mounted warfare, the fashion of trousers—the Chinese might be tainted by “barbarian tribes.” In his paper, Mair describes the Chinese as having a “strained attachment to the horse.”
But he believes that the animals served a key cultural function, because they motivated the Chinese to exchange with other groups. In Mair’s view, traditional history overemphasizes the threat of the northern “barbarians”: the Chinese glorify the Great Wall, and they often note that dynasties made their capitals in the north in order to defend against outsiders. This is where Mair applies the neat twist of the iconoclast: maybe defense wasn’t as important as trade. Perhaps Chinese culture took root in the northern regions of the central plains because of contact with outsiders. He also notes that, in the twentieth century, the nation’s political geography suddenly shifted, with leaders coming from the southern regions: Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao. Is it coincidence, or a reflection of the south becoming the new contact point with the outside world?
One evening in Beijing, during a particularly wide-ranging conversation, Mair tells me another theory about the horse: it may have played a role in the origins of Chinese writing.
“IN CHINESE ART, it’s almost always a foreign groom who is standing with the horse. When you look at paintings, the groom is usually a Sogdian, or a Uighur, or some other group. The Sogdians were from what is now Iran. The Chinese had to trade with all of these groups to get horses. In some periods they were trading with the Uighurs, sometimes for tea. The Uighurs went nuts for tea. There was a huge trade with them during the Song dynasty, which was bankrupting itself buying horses from the Uighurs. They traded silk and tea for horses. Someday, I want to write something about this. I’ll call it The True History of Tea.”
Listening, I shudder through a clipper’s flashback:
STUDENTS
STYLE
SUPERPOWER—“NEW THREAT”
SUPERSTITION
TEA
Professor Mair keeps talking. “There are all of these misconceptions about tea,” he says. “Until the Tang dynasty, the Chinese saw it as a barbarian drink, a southern barbarian drink. The Buddhists were the first to give it legitimacy. And it became economically legitimate during the mid- to late-Tang, because of trade with the Uighurs. In the earlier periods, though, it was barbarian. There are Chinese texts that compare it to urine.
“That’s a book I’ll probably write after I write The Origins of the Chinese Writing System. I believe that the writing system came as part of a package deal. The horse, the chariot, the bronze technology, the writing—they all came together. They all appeared during the Shang, in a space of about four hundred years. If you get really strict about the useful appearance of these things, then it’s a window of about two
hundred years. Two of these things almost certainly came from the outside: the horse and the chariot. And now there are even some Chinese archaeologists who are writing about the possible Western introduction of bronze technology.”
In all my conversations with scholars, I’ve never heard anybody theorize that Chinese writing wasn’t homegrown. Mair’s theory is that writing developed through contact, direct or indirect, with literate cultures of the Near East. I ask Mair how others in the field react to the theory.
“I don’t even like to talk about this,” he says. “The writing system is the culture; it’s the civilization. It’s very touchy. In 1987, I analyzed part of the oracle bone writing, and I produced a three-hundred-page manuscript, but I felt like it wasn’t finished. I wanted to put it into archaeological context. I think it’s the most important thing I’ll ever write. But I’ve been interrupted by the mummies, the dictionary.
“I believe that there was a lot of traffic across the steppes. I think the Iranians were the unsung heroes of East-West communication. The Sogdians. I believe that one of the latest-period mummies that we found in Xinjiang was a Sogdian. A huge guy, about six-four. But in history they were totally invisible. So many things that were essential to Chinese culture have not been well known in history.”
WHEN I WRITE a short piece about the bronze horse of Wuwei, the New Yorker fact-checks the story, making late-night phone calls to the Silk Road. The tale of the accidental rediscovery—Guo Moruo and Prince Sihanouk in a museum storeroom—is independently confirmed by officials in both Lanzhou and Wuwei. Everything looks good, and then, just after the magazine has gone to press, a note arrives from Thailand:
Dear [New Yorker]:
Thank you for your message.
As I have found no reference to HM King Sihanouk meeting the poet Guo Moruo during my research, I have submitted your message to His Majesty who replies that he never encountered such occurrence.
I hope this is helpful.
Sincerely,
Julio A. Jeldres
Official Biographer of HM Samdech Preah Norodam Sihanouk
The King Father of Cambodia
18
Wonton Western
November 7, 2001
BEFORE GOING TO THE MOVIE SET, I MET POLAT’S FRIEND. WE TOOK every possible precaution, especially with regard to telephones. After my plane landed in Urumqi, I took a cab into town, found a pay phone, and hung up after one ring. He called back with a one-sentence message: the name of a public park. I didn’t turn on my cell phone, in case the authorities tracked the receiving station. Reportedly, the Chinese had tightened security in Xinjiang; just across the western border, the war in Afghanistan was less than a month old.
Near the gate of the public park, I recognized him by his blond hair. We had met once before, in Yabaolu; he was the Uighur who occasionally played a foreigner in Chinese movies. We shook hands and found a bench at the back of the park. He pulled out an envelope: twenty hundred-dollar bills. I put the cash in my money belt.
“I’ll mail the check this week,” I said.
“When are you going back?”
“Not until January,” I said. “I’ll see him then. But I’ll send the check to a friend of mine in Washington.”
The man kept glancing around. In Xinjiang, where there are so many ethnic groups, neither of us looked completely foreign. But anybody who heard us speaking Chinese would know immediately that at least one of us had come from the outside. He asked me how Polat had seemed during my last visit.
“OK,” I said. “He was in a bad neighborhood, but he’s moved. I haven’t seen him since the terrorist attacks.”
“Is he going to have problems with his documents?”
“I don’t think so. He already has asylum. He was lucky they approved him before September eleventh. I’m sure it’s a lot harder now.”
“His wife is nervous,” the man said. “I think she’s afraid to go.”
I had decided not to visit her because it was best to minimize my contact during this period. A foreign journalist in Xinjiang was too conspicuous; handing over the cash was enough of a risk. I asked the man about the political climate.
“Let’s walk around the park,” he said. “It’s better if we don’t sit here too long.”
HE TOLD ME that Polat’s family hadn’t had any problems, although they had been questioned when he didn’t return to China. The family had friends in the Urumqi police force, which helped. In any case, the authorities now seemed concerned with bigger issues. Polat’s friend had heard about a Uighur being imprisoned in Kashgar because the government believed that the man’s sons had trained with Al Qaeda. I asked if there were many Uighurs who had joined the Taliban.
“Not many,” he said. “But there are some. Anyway, it’s a good excuse for the government.”
We returned to the park entrance. I asked if he had appeared in any movies lately.
“No,” he said, laughing. “It’s bad money anyway. I hope to do some export trade in Dubai next year. What’s the movie you’re writing about?”
I was in Xinjiang to research a story about Jiang Wen, one of China’s most famous actors, who was appearing in a Chinese Western.
“Where are they filming it?”
“In the countryside outside of Shanshan,” I said. “In the desert. It’s supposed to be good scenery.”
I asked the man what he thought of Jiang Wen.
“He’s better than most Chinese actors,” he said. “But I won’t watch any movie they film out here. I’m sure it will be nonsense.”
We shook hands and the man apologized for not being able to invite me to his home. After leaving the park, I switched on my cell phone. The following morning I hired a cab and drove for five hours. We skirted the north rim of the Tarim Basin, watching the scenery grow increasingly desolate until at last we reached the edge of the Flaming Mountains.
DURING MY SECOND day on the movie set, on the fifth take of the last scene, just as the late-afternoon sun was turning desert orange, an actor rode his horse straight into a wooden beam. The object was part of an entrance gate, and the set designer had made a critical mistake: for a man on horseback, the beam was exactly neck-high. The rider tried to get his hands up at the last moment. He was one of six actors who were riding abreast and moving fast; in the movie they played renegade Tang dynasty soldiers who, in hopes of protecting a Buddhist relic, were attempting to escape an oasis called Big Horse Camp. The Tang had ruled from A.D. 618 A.D. 907, and that was the period that witnessed the flourishing of Buddhism in China. The Tang also produced some great poetry. The actor hit the ground hard and didn’t move. There was a lot of dust, and the air was growing cool; the sun hung low and sharp above the Gobi Desert. You couldn’t have asked for better light.
The scenery was perfect, too. The Flaming Mountains were treeless, scarred by ridges and gullies, and the dry flanks changed color—brown to red to gray—with the day’s dying light. A trace of snow ran white across the highest peaks. Down below, past the entrance gate, lay the graveled expanse of the Gobi. The desert stretched flat into the horizon, broken every now and then by a pale patch of alkali. The emptiness of this landscape had always been good for films. During the 1950s and ’60s, when the nation was closed to much of the outside world, Chinese filmmakers sometimes went to Xinjiang and other western regions when they wanted to depart from the norm. They made substitutes for foreign movies: domestic exotica.
Now the movie crews had returned to western China, but this time they hoped to export the scenery. A year earlier, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon had been hugely successful in the United States, earning over 120 million dollars at the box office. Some of the most striking scenes had been shot in the desert, and now it seemed like everybody in the industry was back in the west. Miramax had invested in an action movie called The Touch, which was currently being filmed in Gansu. The director Zhang Yimou was shooting another foreign-funded martial arts film called Hero, which was set partly in Gansu and Inne
r Mongolia.
Here at the edge of the Flaming Mountains, Columbia Pictures was making Warriors of Heaven and Earth, which was billed as a Chinese Western. They had a big budget, by Chinese standards—six million dollars—and the cast was excellent. Zhao Wei, one of China’s most popular actresses, played the female lead. Kiichi Nakai, a Japanese star, had been imported to play a villain. But the big news was that Jiang Wen was working again. A year and a half earlier, he had won the Grand Prix at Cannes for Devils on the Doorstep, a war movie that he had directed. The Chinese government had banned the film, accusing Jiang Wen of disrespecting the nation’s history, and since then he hadn’t been allowed to act or direct in a big-budget production. The Western was an attempt at a political comeback—an action film set in a remote time period that wouldn’t threaten the Communist Party.
The movie’s subject was safe, but the horses were another issue. Earlier on the day of the escape scene, the Japanese actor had been injured while riding. A couple of weeks before that, a Chinese actor named Li Bukong had dislocated his shoulder after being thrown by a horse. Wang Xueqi, another actor, had taken a bad spill and cracked some ribs. Wang played a Turkic bandit leader—he wore hair extensions and blue contact lenses. One stuntman was still in a hospital near the Kazakhstan border. A crew member in charge of food services had broken his ankle. Even the production coordinator had been thrown by a horse. Jiang Wen, who was thirty-eight years old, had injured his knees and back during sword fighting scenes, but thus far he was one of the few actors who hadn’t fallen off his horse.
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