Accidental burials

The first place I absolutely needed to see for my current research
project was actually the second place on my itinerary: Jiayuguan,
which is home to a cluster of Wei-Jin painted tombs now open to the
public as a miniature underground museum. But Jiayuguan is only five
hours from Dunhuang, and it seemed like a waste to come so close to
the most significant collection of Buddhist temple art in Gansu and
not stop by for my first look in 11 years. The caves themselves are
relevant to my project, but the restrictions on access combined with
the fact that I saw so many of them in 1998 and the fact that Dunhuang
is so well published made them a sort of second-priority destination;
I was unlikely to get to see anything I hadn’t seen before. But on
the principle that it is always best to see the real thing, I went.
Dunhuang has also got some Wei-Jin painted tombs that are relevant to
my project, as well, but as far as I knew they were not open to the
public.

I settled into a budget hotel in Dunhuang (with in-room internet! The
times, they are a-changin’) and got on the bus to the caves the next
morning, when the sandstorm had blown itself out. I enjoy looking out
the windows of trains and buses, and this was nothing different; but
sometimes it pays off in unexpected ways, as when I saw a large blue
placard by the side of the road directing visitors to the Foyemiaowan
Wei-Jin painted tombs. The existence of such a sign more or less
presupposes that the tombs are open to the public, and I decided to
make a point of visiting after I returned from the cave temples. The
caves were absolutely worth it, research-wise; I paid extra to see
some of the “special caves” and made a few minor but significant
discoveries. I also ran into one of the senior English tour guides,
Ms. Ma, who remembered me from 11 years previously. As she was the
only one I remembered from that time, it was nice to be remembered in
return. The exhibits in the rather deserted exhibition hall are
interesting, too, including many documents that have turned up during
the excavations of the less artistically interesting Northern Caves,
which were mostly used as residences for monks, and occasionally as
tombs. The documents include a double page from a Tang-era codex of
the Book of Psalms in Syriac script, which I was once inclined to see
more or less as just another Silk Road document. This time around I
was oddly moved to see a page of tehillim, well over a thousand years
old and very far indeed from Damascus. Syriac is, if I understand
correctly, a form of late Aramaic that was used in Syria and other
parts of the Near East. The appearance of Syriac in Tang China is
more likely to indicate a (Nestorian) Christian than a Jewish origin
for the book, but still it felt like a kind of connection, of a type
that I might not have felt in the past, and indeed might have scoffed
at.

Having looked my fill, and eaten a dubious vegetarian lunch, I
returned to town on the public bus, and negotiated with a taxi driver
to take me to the tombs. As sometimes happens, the driver was a
talkative local, from a Dunhuang farming family, and his ongoing
narration was worth at least as much as the trip itself. He asked me
why I wanted to go to the tombs, and I explained that I was interested
in the paintings. He’d visited himself and allowed as how it was
worth going down for a look. “Of course, there’s nothing left down
there but the paintings,” he said. I said yes, they were mostly all
robbed long ago. “No kidding,” he said. “When I was a kid we used to
go digging them up and most of the time they were totally empty. I
bet those Tibetans [who occupied Dunhuang from the mid-eighth to the
mid-ninth century, more or less] dug up all the good stuff.”

The Foyemiaowan tombs are located just beyond the furthest extent of
arable land at the edge of the oasis. This is not only where
historical tombs are located, but modern burials take place there too,
as Dunhuang (unusually for a Chinese town) has no crematorium. There
is so much land which is good for little else that burials are not
prohibited as elsewhere in China. I asked my driver how the plots
(which are marked out with lines of stones or bricks on the gravelly
surface, and tumuli that are often reinforced with bricks or concrete)
were chosen. He said that people just went out and picked a spot,
which explains the marking-out of plots - it must be a way of keeping
recent burials from impinging on each other. The other thing that
always struck me about these burials was the way in which the ground
around them is often strewn with garbage: principally old clothing and
shoes. The driver said these are the belongings of the dead, which
are discarded after death because no-one dares to use them. I said
that this seemed wasteful (thinking especially of the usual thrift of
rural Chinese people, and their relative poverty) and he agreed, but
said that the belief in the inauspiciousness clinging to these things
was so strong that nobody could be convinced to wear clothing that had
belonged to a dead person. Similarly, he said that not every taxi
driver could be convinced to drive out to these tombs in the first
place; but since he had played and dug among them as a child, he
wasn’t phased.

The road to the tombs is a village road, bumpy dirt and gravel snaking
between agricultural fields. The driver explained that most of the
fields were planted with cotton, because of its value as a cash crop;
maize for food was planted in odd corners here and there. I asked,
rather ignorantly, if cotton wasn’t a rather thirsty crop for a desert
oasis, and he said that it wasn’t as bad as I thought; but he conceded
that water usage was approaching crisis levels in Dunhuang. “If we
don’t find a solution,” he said, “we’ll become a second Loulan.”
Loulan (Kroraina or Shanshan) is one of the lost cities of the Lop Nor
region of the eastern Taklamakan desert, abandoned in 330 CE when its
major water source, the Tarim River, changed course, and buried under
the dunes for a thousand years or so until its rediscovery by Sven
Hedin in 1899. It was a strangely precise Silk Road connection for a
local Dunhuang man to make, marked by a kind of sad historical self-
awareness. As the Crescent Moon Lake retreats under the dunes,
however, it is an increasing possibility for Dunhuang and its
burgeoning population.

The tomb itself was worth visiting, although I’m dubious of both its
location and what appears to be its partial reconstruction. I think I
can match it with one of the Foyemiaowan tombs in the original site
report (which I’d already read last month), but a number of details
appeared to have been enhanced for the benefit of visitors.
Similarly, the tour guide (who came with the ticket) provided several
interpretations of the iconography of the tomb which I found
unsupportable - i.e., they couldn’t be explained either by reference
to the images themselves or the original site report. If this
particular group of tombs were more central to my project, I would
want to figure out who had provided these explanations, and whether
there was unpublished material supporting them, or whether there’s
been a certain amount of spicing things up for the benefit of the
tourists. Still, to descend into it and see the way the space is
organized (with a little “kitchen” in a side room, complete with stove
and shelving) turned out to be important to understanding the images
on the walls; so that even with a much duller taxi driver, it would
have been worth the trip. It would have been much less fun, though.

On the road: Dunhuang by air

I’ve been to Dunhuang before, but it was eleven years ago. At that
time, there were very few (expensive) flights, and at any rate the
national airline, CAAC, had not yet really left behind its old
reputation for flying rejected Aeroflot planes on domestic routes -
hence, “China Airlines Always Crashes.” In 1998, the best way of
getting to Dunhuang was by rail, and even then, the railhead was at
Liuyuan, two hours’ drive away across the open desert. It was worth
doing at the time, since the train follows the old Silk Road more or
less exactly from Xi’an west to at least Dunhuang. To watch the
landscape change as the Hexi corridor narrowed toward the ancient
border stations of Jiayuguan and beyond was something worth seeing.
But it was nearly a three-day journey from Beijing, which while
considerably faster than the traditional camel caravan, was still a
long haul.

These days reaching Dunhuang is much easier. Not only has a branch
rail line been extended to Dunhuang itself and a shiny new train
station built just outside town, but the airport has been expanded
significantly (to which project we are also grateful for the discovery
of a new set of Wei-Jin mural-painted tombs) and there are two or
three flights a day from Beijing. The flights are still a bit
expensive (or more accurately, they’re not subject to the kinds of
discounts you can get on more popular flights between major cities),
but then I can now afford a few things I couldn’t in 1998, so I
decided to take the three-hour flight. This was mostly a time
consideration; since I plan to come back to Beijing overland, stopping
at a number of places on the way, I didn’t want to spend three days on
the road at the beginning of the trip.

Dunhuang is actually more or less due west from Beijing, at a distance
of something under 2000 km. The plane can make the flight fairly
directly, unlike the train lines which have to travel nearly seven
hundred km south from Beijing, then follow the Yellow River valley
westward, through the famous Tongguan Pass to Xi’an, and thence
northwest again to Dunhuang. I would guess that the train trip is
well over 3000 km. But from the plane, it is very easy to see why the
train doesn’t travel due west. First there are the two major north-
south mountain chains that frame the province of Shanxi, due west of
Beijing. These soon give way to the dry grasslands of Inner Mongolia,
where visible settlements are even fewer and farther between than
those of water-starved, impoverished northern Shanxi. I saw what
could only have been the northern loop of the Yellow River, enclosing
the Ordos plain, where nomadic peoples and the settled peoples of the
Central Plains have been coming into contact since at least the Han
dynasty. I was surprised to see that the major settlements
(including, as I later found out, the city of Baotou) are on the
outside of the river’s loop (i.e. on its north bank), but it’s easy to
see why - there are several large marshy lakes and the land is
relatively green. I had been under the impression that the Ordos was
a fertile grassland, but its northernmost regions, from the air,
appear to be open gobi.

The Ordos is only halfway to Dunhuang. Westward from the river we
flew over hundreds and hundreds of miles of unrelieved desert, with
only the wavelike patterns of sand dunes visible from above. It was a
startling landscape, stretching to the horizon in an uninterrupted
sheet of pale yellow. At first I thought it was eye fatigue that made
the horizon begin to blend into the sky above it, so that blue slowly
gave way to an undifferentiated sand color. Eventually, noticing that
it was possible to catch occasional glimpses of ground here and there,
I realized that we were flying over a massive sandstorm; and as the
landing announcement went out over the PA, I realized that we were
going to land in one.

The air inside a sandstorm, you will not be surprised to find, is
turbulent, and the landing was extremely rough. The pilots must have
been flying entirely on instruments, as the only thing visible outside
the windows was a roiling yellow haze. When the ground came into
view, it was considerably closer than I had expected, but also oddly
familiar; the airport is of course located just outside the oasis,
where Dunhuang’s residents have buried their dead for at least two
millennia, and the gravelly surface of the ground is marked for miles
around with tomb mounds ancient and modern. To land at Dunhuang, you
fly in over the houses of the dead, in the broad corridor between the
oasis and the Sanwei mountains. It is not the route taken by most of
Dunhuang’s visitors over the centuries, but it follows a similar
route, and the first sign of human habitation is the same: clusters of
man-made tumuli rising above the barren ground, with the dusty
greenery of the oasis in the middle distance.

Property Rights in the Afterlife

I recently read the excavation report on a set of fourth- and early fifth-century tombs found near Dunhuang. Few of them had any of the wall paintings I was interested in, but a good number contained exorcism flasks and tomb deeds, two kinds of document/artifact that I find fascinating for what they imply about the connections (and disconnections) between the worlds of the living and the dead.

Exorcism flasks or douping are ceramic bottles with long handwritten inscriptions on them, found in pairs in the tomb chambers. The inscriptions usually start with the name of the deceased and the date of his or her death. There then follows a formula which seems to describe a kind of ritual performed by the living, often something like “We have placed these flasks, the five grains, and the lead men in the tomb.” The five grains are soybeans, wheat, foxtail millet, common millet, and (depending on who you ask) either rice or hemp seed. They are the ancient staple crops of China, named as such in some of the oldest books that now survive. The lead men are crude humanoid figures cut from sheets of lead, found in many of these tombs as well. Why these three things should have been put into tombs is a mystery; but it’s clear from the inscriptions that, having once put them into the tombs, the living thought the dead should be satisfied. The formula usually ends with some kind of exhortation to the dead never to return to the world of the living. “The living and the dead walk separate paths!” proclaim the inscriptions. It’s not the stuff of which lamentations are made; there are no hopes of holding on to the person who has died. Rather, there seems to be a distinct sense that however beloved the deceased might have been, it was crucial to ensure that the spirit of the recently dead should not hang around the living.

Tomb deeds are another odd genre of artifact: I’ve seen lead ones (with inscriptions carved into sheets of lead) in museums, though the ones at this site were inscribed in ink on big flat tiles. They are essentially deeds of ownership for the land occupied by the tomb, made in the name of the deceased, and valid and defensible in the courts of the underworld. They exhort the deities of land ownership in the afterlife to confirm the deceased in his or her land rights, and to protect such rights from incursion by demons.

These two kinds of artifacts tell us a lot about the way in which the afterlife was imagined in fourth-century Dunhuang. As in later periods, it appears that the afterlife was assumed to be socially and politically parallel to this one - that there would be aristocratic and official ranks, a military hierarchy, and a system of government bureaucracy not unlike that of dynastic China. In some later ghost stories, it’s not uncommon for a deceased soul to arrive in the underworld only to find he has died by clerical error, and must be sent back (hijinks usually ensue, especially if his family is quick to cremate). This seems to be combined with an older idea that the passage to the afterlife is a potentially dangerous one, from which the soul must be protected. One of the oldest poems in Chinese, the famous “Summoning of the Soul” from the Chu ci, is an exhortation to the soul of a recently deceased prince of Chu to return to the tomb prepared for him, and not to wander too far off; it enumerates the dangers of the demons of the four directions in excruciating detail. (The Chu ci have been translated as “Songs of the South,” still pretty widely available if I recall correctly.) Given all the dangers of wandering freely in the spirit world, it would seem crucial to have a refuge to which to return at any time; and given the bureaucratic nature of the underworld, it was apparently important to have clear title to your own tomb in case of a property dispute (if another tomb impinged upon yours?). But also, the world of the dead and the world of the living were properly separate, and spirits were not to go travelling between them at will. This seems to be the message of the douping: We’ve prepared everything properly for you, so be satisfied and remain in your own realm, no matter how much you may want to return.

Makes you think department

Seen in the bookstore the other day: A tall and husky Buddhist monk, pushing a shopping cart groaning with books, and humming along to the Muzak version of “Careless Whisper” that was playing on the PA. On the top of the stack of books: the Chinese translation of “It Takes a Village.”

On not reading "Anne of Green Gables"

Spending all my time in the library isn’t great for my blogging, and
it gets a bit mentally overwhelming too. In search of some escape
other than Chinese TV documentaries, I’ve found some free English
books online at a site which offers a few of my childhood favorites,
including several of the Dr. Dolittle books by Hugh Lofting, and a
handful of the Anne of Green Gables books by Lucy Maud Montgomery.
These were so beloved by me as a child that I was completely beside
myself when my father’s bagpipe band’s competition schedule took them,
and thus us, to Prince Edward Island for the weekend of my tenth or
eleventh birthday. This weekend was memorable for a number of other
things, including the Great Family Clam Chowder Debate (“whole or
chopped?”), a trail ride that delighted my horse-loving soul, and a
terrifying thunderstorm in which choosing a campsite on a bluff
overlooking the salt marsh suddenly seemed far less picturesque. But
visiting PEI was something I’d always wanted to do, and I remember
drinking it in deeply.

I don’t always remember why I loved particular books as a child; I was
a prolific reader, more of a literary gourmand than a gourmet, and had
more or less read through the entire collection of our small-town
public library, whose robust collection of Edwardian young-adult
fiction probably influenced me more than I’d prefer to admit. I cared
about good writing, I do remember that, but usually there was more to
it than that. Re-reading Anne of Green Gables, I realize now that one
of the things that drew me to these books in particular was their
powerful love of place. The stories are sweetly humorous, if
sometimes rather moralizing, but overlaying everything is an abiding
and deep love for rural Prince Edward Island as a place, with its
fields and farmhouses and woods and the sea always nearby. In the
character of Anne Shirley, the author has created a figure who I think
must share her own love of the island; it is hard to imagine where the
deeply affectionate (and affecting) descriptions of the woods and
hills in all their seasons might come from. As described by Lucy Maud
Montgomery, it is a place not unlike where I grew up, and Anne as a
young girl occupies its fields and orchards in a way not unlike my own
relationship to the land in childhood. This makes it hard to read,
because of course my choices have taken me very far away from that
place; at the moment, so far away that if I went further I would begin
to grow nearer. And that, of course, may be where the story goes next
- but in the meantime I have to be careful not to read too much Anne,
for fear of homesickness.

Losing Liulichang

On Friday afternoons the reading room in the Archaeology and Museology
Institute is closed, so this Friday I decided to troll the bookshops
of Liulichang, as I have done many times before, for books I need for
this research project (and for new publications). Since I had to be
downtown at 7 for Friday night services, it made sense to go in a
little early - it takes at least an hour to get downtown, so one wants
to get as much done as possible when one goes. I took the bus, then
the subway, getting off at Fuchengmen to photograph a wonderful shop
sign I’d seen from a bus (a halal eatery whose English sign reads “The
Huguosi Noshery”) and then getting on again to ride down to Qianmen.

Qianmen is almost completely unrecognizable (see my Flickr stream for
details - link in the sidebar - now that Flickr is back up I can post
pictures again). It’s been made into a pedestrian street with new
shopfronts which are reconstructed versions of the ones found there in
the late 19th and early 20th century - you can see the historical
photographs posted here and there on the walls for comparison. You
pass under a gigantic pailou (memorial arch) of the kind that stood
across many city streets until the great Beijing Soviet-style facelift
of the 1950s. Most of the shopfronts are still empty but the street
is clearly about to be unveiled. Trolley tracks run down the street,
which is paved with stone slabs, and standing on a siding across the
street from the Zhengyilou city gate is a sleekly enameled camel-
colored trolley, named “Qianmen No. 1.” It needs only men in trilby
hats and Chinese robes, with round tortoiseshell glasses, to complete
the picture of early 20th century China. I was so disoriented that I
forgot Liulichang is on the east side of Qianmen, between Qianmen and
Hepingmen. I got halfway down Dashilar before I gave in to my
disorientation and had a red bean popsicle instead. Thank goodness
some things haven’t changed. I'll find Liulichang some other time.

The Swallows of Beijing

There has been a settlement on the site of Beijing at least since the
Han dynasty, and if you believe the paleoanthropologists, since before
the last ice age (although as far as I know it is unlikely that the
hominids of Zhoukoudian were the ancestors of any modern people now
living). The city was established as Ji, the capital of the state of
Yan, during the Warring States period (5th century BCE). But Beijing
didn’t really get going until the tenth century or so, when it became
one of the regional capitals of the Liao dynasty. It has had many
names over the years, but one of the recurring ones is Yanjing, or
“Capital of Yan,” referring to its early history. But the name Yan
means “swallow,” and so it can also be thought of (especially by
literal-minded early Chinese learners, as I was when I first came
here) as the City of Swallows.

Another word which I learned on that first trip, and savored with the
same poetic literal-mindedness, was the verb “to stroll.” It is “san
bu,” literally, “to scatter one’s footsteps.” It was something we did
in the twilight, after the close of another scorchingly hot summer’s
day, escaping from airless apartments to wander through the streets in
the comparative cool. Everyone was out on the sidewalks, and you
could buy watermelons and spit out the seeds as you walked, or munch
various fried things on skewers. I don’t know that anybody sells
whole deep-fried sparrows on a stick any more, except in ersatz snack
streets like Wangfujing, and spitting watermelon seeds is probably
considered anti-social in a post-Olympic world. People used to come
out in their pajamas, perhaps fresh from a shower, if they were lucky
enough to have bathing facilities at home, with plastic slippers on
their feet; in fact, they used to walk along back from the public
showers in their pajamas, with an enameled tin basin full of bath
supplies. Beijing has smartened up so much that it is no longer quite
the thing, I think; but I have to say I miss the sight of some skinny
old guy with a bristling white brush-cut, badly shaven, in singlet and
blue striped pajama bottoms, ambling along the street, pulling a jerry-
rigged toy car by a piece of rope, with a toddler in split-bottomed
pants riding along like a king, gazing archly at everyone he passed.

Those split-bottomed pants are still worn by the not quite toilet-
trained; and another thing that hasn’t disappeared is the practice of
shaving the hair of very young children quite off in the summertime,
so that they really appear entirely genderless (but quite cool and
comfortable). I have seen a number of boys or possibly girls sporting
this look. Beijing isn’t any cooler now than it was then, and
people still come out in the evenings, but so many people live in
housing estates now that most of the strolling seems to happen in more
semi-private spaces; and in any event, the streets have been adapted
to car traffic in such a way that they can’t possibly be the gathering
places they once were, at least not out here in the newly built
suburbs. I should spend an evening in town one of these days to see
if it’s different.

Beijing was not named Yanjing for its swallows; but in fact it has
many, and they can often be seen in gyroscopic flight over the parks
and waterways of the city, doing their part to combat the insect
population. The sun sets late in Beijing in the summer, and the
swallows hunted well into the evening. As dusk deepened, in those
days, you would become aware of a new fluttering motion that had
replaced the sleek dancing dives of the hunting swallows. After dark,
the bug hunt was carried on by Beijing’s thousands of little bats.
The bat is a sign of good fortune in traditional China, because the
word for bat (the “fu” in “bianfu”) sounds like the word for good
fortune (fu), and their flight overhead was a kind of blessing on the
city as everyone gathered in for the night.