Twitter followers may have noticed a switch in focus with the switch in locale. The UK has some of the richest and most accessible heritage in the world (a statement which, unlike the rest of this blog, I feel somewhat qualified to assert), and recently I’ve been escaping pandemics and invasions into its quiet and unassuming embrace.

In particular, having spent several years tracking down scarce remnants of China’s older dynasties, I’ve started a similar project with the few (but more than you might think!) remains of Britain’s Anglo-Saxon period – about 450 CE – 1066 CE.

I will be sharing more on as the project evolves, but today wanted to jot down some thoughts on a more obscure church, and how a visit led to and exposed some fascinating questions.

(As with all my blogs – I am an amateur and reliant on much cleverer scholars, cited at the end; any mistakes are entirely my own)

A Great Dane

It’s January 1017, and the Danish Prince Cnut has taken the British throne – ruling over a united kingdom of Saxons and Danes after centuries of Viking raids. His hegemony – soon adding Denmark and Norway to a ’North Sea Empire’ – will be short lived, replaced by a Saxon revival under Edward the Confessor before William the Bastard will claim victory 50 years later at Hastings.

Cnut’s accession had been secured by a crushing victory over the Saxon King Edmund Ironside at the Battle of Assandum the previous October. To commemorate the battle Cnut constructed a memorial Minster church at its site, now often – but not universally – located in Ashingdon near the Essex coast. Today a church, St Andrews, sits atop the village, but there is scant trace of 11th century material to associate with Cnut’s foundation.

A curious connection

About 40 miles north-west are the tiny villages (pops. 893 and 332) of Ashdon and Hadstock. The former, with its similar name, has been suggested as an alternate site for Assandum. Circumstantial evidence supports this; reports of ancient bodies churned up by Victorians building a railway cutting at nearby ’Red Fields’, located on the strategic Icknield Way.

But more intriguing hints come from Hadstock’s church of St Botolph, which has a pedigree far longer than anything at Ashingdon. I stumbled into the churchyard after a surprisingly gruelling day hiking the Icknield Way – there are almost a half dozen Saxon churches in this part of Essex. First impressions are of its size, entirely out of proportion with the tiny village over which it presides, and a higgldey-piggldey jumble of restorations – including a hideous Victorian attempt to render the outside in concrete. On closer inspection, the massive church’s nave and transepts have clear diagnostic features for the pre-Norman church I’d come to look for: quoins (corner stones) made from large, alternating long and short blocks; small, narrow windows to reduce draughts into the ancient church; and, inside, mouldings on the arch columns and door frames lacking the grandeur of Norman artifice but instead full of a more intimate vernacular charm.

So could this actually be Cnut’s church – if so, one of but a handful of surviving Scandinavian-built buildings in England?

Turning back the tide

One of the joys of my new hobby is the palimpsest comprising almost every British church; centuries of accretions as parishioners, Bishops, and Kings have patched up, extended, or ’renovated’ to suit their own eye. Hadstock is a prime example – even a neophyte like me can spot pointed arches in the nave (a sure sign they’re 13th century gothic, or later); a Victorian chancel; and a west tower crookedly joined to the nave, betraying it as a later addition.

Archaeological excavation in 1973 prised apart this story. While not settling the debate as to whether this is Cnut’s Minster – certainty maybe now unknowable – supporting evidence was adduced. The church’s nave and north transept are Saxon, probably raised to their current height in a large building campaign in the early 11th century – the right date for Cnut. This built a grand stone tower over a crossing arch – perhaps similar to the contemporaneous Stow Minster near Lincoln – which collapsed by the mid-13th century. Replacement arches were built in the new gothic style, but incorporating the original dressed Saxon stonework at their base. Indeed, the arch supporting the later medieval west tower might also be Saxon in origin – narrower than later designs. The archaeologist, Warwick Rodwell, posited a grand cruciform church, a now lost apse at the east end and smaller apses off the east walls of both transepts.

The beautiful north door would offer the most exciting part of the story. The moulding on the jambs and arch looks Saxon. But the door had been moved; Rodwell’s excavations found it originally sat further west and was moved closer to the transept in the early 13th century. So in 2003 dendrochronologists were called in, a series of microcores establishing the door’s timber as from trees felled around 1034 – slightly after Cnut’s foundation, but perhaps consistent with a door being fitted within his reign. This would also make the door and its metal fittings – still used as the church’s main entrance – the oldest in the country, pipping the much better known Chapter House door in Westminster Abbey (fitted under Edward the Confessor in the 1050s). Macabrely, the door was also coated with a tanned leather which was reputed to be the skin of a Viking slain for violating the church; modern tests were also used here, which found it was (much more prosaically) an oxhide.

As ever, this isn’t the end of the story; the most persuasive counter-argument being made by Eric Fernie in 1983 which compared the door’s upper moulding to a Norman church in Caen, dating it later than Cnut’s post-Assandum church. If correct, for me this in turn returns us to our initial profound mystery – what is an enormous Saxon church doing in this tiny Essex village?

Discussions of angle rolls and sapwood rings moves me well beyond any pretence at expertise and only able to hold my hands up in ignorance; suffice to say the church’s identification with Cnut remains intriguing and far from conclusive, but also a fascinating excuse to read further into the last hurrah of Danish conquest in the British Isles. But little Hadstock’s importance goes deeper still.

A man called Botolph

The 1973 excavation found something else exciting beneath the late Saxon building. For the lower parts of the walls – still visible in the nave – and extensive remains below the floors date to a much earlier church, as early as the 7th century. Discolouration on some of the stones suggested destruction by fire. Dating of charred timbers found in the dig indicated this firing could have been the late 9th century, contemporaneous with the Great Heathen army’s rampage and sacking of the monasteries at Ely, Peterborough, and Thorney in 869.

So what was this church? It’s dedicated to St Botolph (Botwulf), an early Saxon missionary referenced in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle as having built a church at ‘Ikenho’ (Yceanho) in 653/654. This is usually associated with another St Botolph’s church in today’s Iken, on the Suffolk coast; but this has – again – no remains of a Saxon structure, although a reused Saxon cross was found in the tower’s structure during a modern renovation.

You may have seen where this is going. There are some credible suggestions that Botolph’s Ikenho, which was also recorded as destroyed by the Great Heathen Army, may have been today’s Hadstock.

Firstly, the name. Ikenho/Yceanho may related to the Iceni – the East Anglian tribe of Boudica – who were active in East Anglia and gave their name to the Icknield Way, the ancient trackway which I took on my walk to the village.

Secondly, the church itself. Later hagiographical sources refers to Botolph founding his church in a valley with a stream, far from the sea; which fits Hadstock and not coastal Iken. Furthermore, St Botolph’s in Hadstock is the only one known to have held the charter for a fair in the saint’s name – a designation apparently predating the Norman conquest – which should denote considerable significance in its relation to the saint. Another clue from the medieval Liber Eliensis, a chronicle of Ely abbey, refers to Hadstock (then called ’Cadenho’) as founded by St Botolph – and where he lay in rest (“…ibidem quiescente…” III.90). And there is the matter that Hadstock and St Botolph’s Ikenho were likely both destroyed by the Great Heathen Army.

Thirdly, the 1973 excavation found an unusual grave in the south transept. Raised above the Saxon floor level, and inside the transept itself, it must have held someone of status and perhaps subject of veneration (maybe in the apsidal chapel annexed to the transept’s east wall). The grave was empty, which raised an interesting possibility. Sources record that Botolph’s Ikenho church and his grave lay in ruin until 970 when Bishop Aethelwold of Winchester exhumed Botolph’s relics from the ruined chapel where they had been laid to rest – leaving an empty high-prestige grave.

So – is Hadstock the site of Botolph’s original monastery, and his burial place? Tantalisingly, here the trail runs cold – as with the Cnut identification, there’s no knock-out blow, and there are scholars who have railed against the identification (e.g. Martin 1978). If it were Botolph’s 653/4 foundation, the stonework we see in the lower nave could be from the original church – the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle uses the Old English verb ‘timbran’, which is usually translated as ’to build from timber’ but is regularly used for non-wooden buildings such as burh earthworks, and even metaphorically in religious and philosophical tracts; while St Peter-on-the-Wall, a church 50 miles away at Bradwell-on-Sea likewise dated to 654, was built of stone by Botolph’s contemporary Cedd. And if that is right – and it’s an extremely heroic if – it would make this church in little Hadstock the second oldest in England, level with the much more famous St Peter’s and pipped only by St Martin’s in Canterbury (founded by Augustine in 594).

So what?

A little bit of research on an unusual church in a small corner of Essex which, before this project, I had never come across; and which blossomed into a trawl through archaeological reports, saintly hagiographies, Latin and Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, and some great bits of local history.

None of the above claims to prove anything historical – and the two exciting identifications may be wrong. But what I hope it does prove is how the crux of investigating just one church (of more than 40,000…!) can be such a rewarding rabbit hole; and a good amount of affirming distraction at a time when it’s very needed.

(Thanks in particular to Llewelyn Morgan, who dictated valuable parts of Pevsner to me down the phone while I sat in a Caffe Nero)

Further Reading

St Botolph’s Church Hadstock – a Short History and Guide (no date, available at the church)

Warwick, R., Under Hadstock Church (1974)

Fermie, E.,  “The responds and dating of St Botolph’s, Hadstock”, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 136, pp.62-73 (1983)

Martin, E.A., “St Botolph and Hadstock: a reply” Antiquaries’ Journal, 58, pp.153–59 (1978)

Pevsner, N.; Bettley, J. Essex: Buildings of England, Pevsner Architectural Guides (2007)

“Hadstock Church: Opening a door on Saxon History”, The Saffron Walden Historical Journal, 6 and 9 (2003 and 2005)

The Leshan Buddha, UNESCO World Heritage site, rightly ranks as one of China’s historical ’must sees’. Sentinel over the junction of the Min and Dadu rivers, 1200 years on from its construction it is still one of the biggest statues in the world.

But size aside, Leshan is surprisingly unremarkable. A bit of research and a willingness to go off the beaten track grants access to dozens of its brothers across China; dating from the grandest and most refined Tang and Song colossi from the 7th to 11th centuries, all the way back to the earliest forebears hewn into hillsides from the fractured world of China’s Northern and Southern dynasties period between 4th and 6th century.

Caveat Lector

The corpus of Buddhas in China alone is remarkably diverse – beyond the giant seating, standing, or sleeping Buddhas, many more outsized examples sit in temples cast in bronze or carved in plaster, or smaller versions across grotto walls and cliffsides. Below are some indicative examples – from Langzhong, Sichuan; Laitan, Chonqqing; Datong, Shanxi; and Wuwei, Gansu. They date from the Northern Wei through to Tang dynasties.

So a health warning before going any further – I am no expert, and the short typology I’m about to set out is more a helpful way I’ve found to think about the giant Buddhas, rather than any real schemata (it would almost certainly be wrong; and will ignore many examples outside China of which I’m ignorant). But hopefully it gives a taste of the diversity of what may (in more ways than one) feel like a monolithic area of Chinese art and history.

Itinerant Giants

One of the most interesting facets of these sculptural triumphs is their link to a much greater world of Buddhist diffusion and its artistic expression from its routes in the northern Indian subcontinent.

Many if not all of the China giant Buddhas are part of larger (and as artistically vital) grotto complexes; cave shrines and hermitages festooned with painted carvings which, because of their chthonic construction, remain some of the most well preserved bits of early Chinese archaeology. They range from the blockbuster sets at Yungang, Mogao, and Longmen, to smaller sets such as Xiangtang (Hebei) and Guangyuan (Sichuan). Their genesis and evolution is fascinating, complicated, and needs much more than a small blog, but for my purposes its important to note that their first big flourishing in China occurred under ‘barbarian’ Xianbei rulers of the north in the 4th-6th centuries; who themselves were transmitting motifs originating in the brilliant Hindu and Buddhist complexes of northern India. The genealogy can be seen both in the design of the early grottoes; and the evolution of art forms from Indo-Greek and Gandharan prototypes.

Nor is the majestic evolution from larger-than-life images to the titans seen at Leshan and elsewhere an indigenous evolution. By far the most famous cousins are the tragically lost Buddhas of Bamiyan, a pair of Buddhas carved into sandstone cliffs overlooking a gentle valley in central Afghanistan (here I have to recommend Llewelyn Morgan’s Buddhas of Bamiyan – which I last read on an enforced beach holiday in Sanya and which spurred me to track down China’s Buddhas). Other examples include the earlier Avukana Buddha in Sri Lanka; and going further east reveals subsequent transmission, particularly to Japan and Korea.

Learned books have been written on the topic, so I won’t spend too much time labouring this point. Let it suffice to say that its much more interesting (and much more fun) to read the Buddhas as part of a trans-Asian context, and perhaps a microcosm of Buddhist transmission over the centuries.

Buddhas and Buddhas

The early grottoes also illustrate a fun typological challenge, which I won’t answer here but will highlight. When does a colossal Buddha become a colossal Buddha? If the criterion is one of size there’s an almost continuous sliding scale in the remaining Chinese corpus – from slightly larger-than-life instances in Shandong’s Tuoshan 驼山石窟 and Hebei’s Xiangtang 响堂石窟; to ‘really quite big’ versions such as Sichuan’s Guangyuan 广元千佛岩; all the way to the behemoths at Leshan, and also Binglingsi 炳灵寺大佛 and Tianfoshan 天佛山大佛 in Gansu.

Some of the best examples of the form occur integrated into much larger contexts – such as the astonishing (Tang) complexes in Guangyuan, and the later but no less remarkable Dazu grottoes near Chongqing which realise the final incorporation of giant Buddhas alongside non-Buddhist artistic motifs. These are also some of the hardest to find – scattered as they can be across remote hillsides (I at least have incurred many a cut or bruise scrambling up to them), and in my mind can also be among the most rewarding.

Off the beaten track

The central thesis of this little survey was that its really worth spending the time getting to some of the lesser seen Buddhas, and so for the final part of this blog I will go over four of the more obscure sites which stick in my memory.

How do you lose a Buddha?

The story of the Mengshan Buddha 蒙山大佛 illustrates a couple of points. Firstly, how easy they are to lose – the 63m seated specimen on this hillside south west of Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi, was overgrown and forgotten until rediscovery by local archaeologists in the 1980s. It sits at the end of a valley itself distinguished for a number of important artefacts – including a pair of transitional Tang-Song pagodas, and a rare cast-iron Song Buddha – and aside from the incongruous head (one wonders whether a local Party Secretary imposed his fiat on some hapless restorer) well looked after .

Secondly, the Mengshan Buddha was early – probably constructed around 551 under the Northern Qi, themselves a Xianbei group who had settled in Northern China – and therefore is roughly contemporaneous with the Buddhas of Bamiyan, a long slog away 2,500 miles west. One wonders whether the two were known to each other, or even whether there was a transmission of forms (or craftsmen?) along with the Buddhist ideas seeping into this part of China at the time.

The ugly stepsister

Rong county, Sichuan, lies about two hours drive from the much more famous Leshan city, along a route worth lingering on for a number of pretty Song pagodas and smaller historic sites. The odd looking giant Buddha here (荣县大佛) is in some ways a better preserved version of Leshan, particularly as it retains the huge wooden shed which allows pilgrims and monks closer access to the Buddha (and functions at its base as a temple).

Like Leshan, as well as other sites like Langzhong 阆中大佛 and Qishan 齐山双佛 in Sichuan, and the giant of Dunhuang 敦煌南大佛 in Gansu, the Rong county Buddha dates to the Tang Dynasty, widely regarded (although in some ways unfairly – other dynasties give them a run for their money) as the highpoint of medieval Chinese art. In particular, the patronage of devout Buddhist rulers such as Empress Wu Zetian (and despite the anti-Buddhist pogrom of Tang Wuzong) led to the sprouting of multiple temples and giant Buddha projects. Many art historians would regard these as much more strongly adapted into a local art form than the earlier Xianbei productions; and setting the stage for later refinement under the Song.

Head above the rest

The third example is a slight cheat, as there’s no evidence of a full Buddha – and significant scholarly (as well as practical) argument against one having existed. But I couldn’t resist including the hilariously outsized artefact tucked into small Dayun temple 大云寺 in Linfen, Shanxi.

This giant iron Buddha head, including the hairdo, is about 6m tall. It’s commonly regarded as dating from the 7th century Wu Zetian building campaign and was originally coated in a now mostly lost painted plaster daub. The head is hollow and in its later history, at least, served as a store for religious texts.

I would like to imagine the Dayun head was originally made for some megalomaniacal project which is now gone or, more likely, fell apart under very real engineering and cost concerns. At the very least, it is an extremely attractive and equally interesting footnote in the story China’s big Buddhas.

Beach boys

Finally, a set of three Buddhas from coastal Fujian. These are the latest of my examples, dating to around 1216 under the (southern) Song who governed this region of China after losing the north to Mongol invasions. Tucked inside the (recently rebuilt) Nantian temple 南天寺石窟 and leaning out from a coastal rock outcrop they’re really pretty, and unusually far to south (and east) for giant carved Buddhas; they also parallel (at a stretch) a world-famous carved sculpture of Mani in a Yuan temple a short drive to the north, although perhaps dictated by the rock medium more than a particular genetic relationship.

What next?

Much more has and could be written (although I struggle to find accessible stuff in English – hints welcome!) on both giant Buddhas and the amazing network of grottoes; and I am grateful to two of my travel companions who have catalogued this much more systematically than me. There’s also a great deal to be said of the carved mega-Buddhas in Korea and Japan; and I have my sights on a future project to start wrapping my head around their antecessors in the Indian subcontinent. For now I hope this general introduction gives at least a superficial overview, and gets more people engaged in these often

oraculum Iovis inter aestuosi / et Batti veteris sacrum sepulcrum…

Between the oracle of sweltering Jupiter / and the sacred tomb of ancient Battus…

(Catullus Carmen 7)

An overtly ambitious attempt to explore the backstreets of Guangzhou in the most sultry of summer weeks has been foiled, with the tumid humidity bursting into a thunderstorm now lashing the city’s old town. Luckily a strategic bar and the foresight to bring my laptop gives me an opportunity to seak shelter – physical and spiritual – and go back through my photos into something cooler; the dark and chilled chthonic underworld of Chinese history.

Kingdoms of the Dead

An oddness of China – a country with (by most reckonings) almost four thousand years of mostly continuous imperial history – is the apparent paucity of grand imperial mausolea open to the aspirant tomb raider. Contrasted to the comparable longevity of Pharaonic Egypt – where tour groups can ply a famed sepulchral valley – or even imperial Rome – where, despite a penchant for cremation, the vaults holding the cinerary urns of Augustus or Hadrian still loom over the eternal city – it’s not easy to get into the tombs of China’s most famous dynasts.

The legendary tomb of the First Emperor Qin Shihuang – where, in a set of ancillary pits, the grand Terracotta Army was discovered in 1974 – lies untouched, with a combination of pragmatic archaeological concern and more traditional reverence keeping the excavators away. This is replicated elsewhere – Han Wudi, the Emperor whose army marched to Central Asia and beyond, lies in a virgin tumulus; Wu Zetian and her husband Tang Gaozong, rulers at the height of China’s golden age, are entombed beneath an intact mountain; Song tombs buried in Henanese fields.

But against this background, there is actually much more nuance than I originally thought. For those who wish to find it, there are plenty of necropoleis and sepulchres waiting to take you into their chill embrace.

…facilis descensus Averno:
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hic labor est.

…the descent to Hades is easy:
The doors of black hell lie open day and night;
But to retrace your steps, and to escape to the airs above,
There’s the challenge, there’s the rub.

(Vergil Aeneid 6.126-129)

Sacrifices and superstition

The earliest of rulers who we might venture to call ‘Chinese’ – with similarities in language, rite and ritual, and art and architecture – are the Shang, a dynasty based in and around present-day Henan in the 2nd millennium BCE. And we have a lot of their tombs – deep shafts dug into the earth, lined with sacrificial offerings.

These offerings, however, go beyond the usual semi-precious metals and triumphs of craftsmanship. For the Shang had a penchant for interring slain animals and horse in the tombs of their rulers; and even grislier, sacrificed slaves and retainers to accompany Kings and Queens to the great beyond. The biggest known complex of these are at Anyany, where the old Shang capital of Yinxu 殷墟 once lay. Elsewhere on China’s central plain, buried pits of petrified chariots and skeletal horses from the Shang and their successors the Zhou have been laid open to the air – a Pompeian preservation afforded by careful excavation in the soft loess soil which entombed then.

It’s China, but not as we know it

While the depth of time and relative lack of grandiosity has left the Shang tombs for us to plumb, elsewhere accidental discoveries of kings existing outside the formal dynastic hierarchy has given us some of China’s best subterranean finds.

Builders on a hill north of Guangzhou’s former walled city in 1983 found stone slabs – mined in quarries to the city’s southwest – entombing the King Zhao Mo 赵眜, who until his death in 124 BCE had ruled an independent ‘Kingdom of the Southern (Nan) Yue’ 南越国 from what is now Guangzhou (his palace has also been found under the city centre). While there’s much we do not know about the Nan Yue – including whether the level of Sinicisation seen in Han-authored contemporary texts is on the mark – they probably spoke a language somewhat like Vietnamese (loan words remain as a relic strata in modern Cantonese), and the Zhao dynasty held themselves as independent and equal to the Han Emperors in Chang’an (Xi’an).

The same is true of some of the burial vaults of ‘barbarian’ kingdoms who occupied most of what we now conceive of as north China after the Han dynasty’s collapse. The desert north of Jiayuguan – the last fort on the Great Wall – is pockmarked by noble tombs of the Northern Wei dynasty, who ruled this area c. 390–530 CE, with delicately painted bricks showing everyday life in their (Mongolic?) Xianbei kingdom.

Vassals and petty princes

Off the beaten track of grand imperial dynasts, some of my favourite tombs are those of lesser branches of imperial families – the princes and princesses serving in royal courts; despatched to govern provincial fiefdoms; or married off to strategic partners.

The most famous of these discoveries was at Mawangdui, a hillside in Changsha which concealed the tomb of Li Cang 利蒼, appointed Marquis of Changsha, his wife Xin Zhui 辛追 (d. 168 BCE) and her perfectly mummified corpse, and some of the best preserved tomb artefacts known from the Han Dynasty.

Further east along the Yangtze watershed, in Yangzhou, the near-contemporary tomb of Han Wudi’s son Liu Xu 刘胥, the ‘Guangling King’ appointed to rule over this (at the time) remote corner of empire, was discovered buried in a hillside, with the wooden palace-like tomb complex now laid bare (having previously been looted) for the curious. While both have been relocated to custom museums for protection, it’s not hard to soak up the ethereality of their excellent presentation.

Another collection lies north of Xi’an, skirting around the tombs of Wu Zetian and Tang Gaozong. While the sumptuous frescoes lining the burial passages into these deep crypts have been removed for specialist preservation (and curation) in the Shaanxi History Museum, the deep shafts and coffin halls have been left in situ.

Tomb raiding goes disastrously wrong

So why haven’t more of the grand imperial mausolea been cracked open and thoroughly explored?

A large part of the answer lies in the fate of the Dingling tomb 明定陵 of Ming Emperor Wanli 明万历, which was sealed in 1620. In 1959, under the newly founded People’s Republic of China, the country’s leadership took the decision to conduct a trial excavation – showing off the new China’s scientific expertise, glorious heritage, and using the first project as a test ahead of more thoroughly excavating the other 13 Ming tombs in the complex north of Beijing.

While initial excavation was a success – a deep shaft draining off water before excavators prised open the marble gates, revealing the untouched treasures and royal sarcophagi – disaster was to come with the follow-up. The delicate metal, wooden, fabric, and silk artefacts had been undisturbed for centuries; now stored improperly in a drafty, poorly built warehouse they rapidly putrified and decayed in Beijing’s harsh climate. Catastrophe dogged catastrophe, culminating in the horror of the Cultural Revolution – Red Guards from Beijing marching to the museum in 1966, removing Wanli’s corpse before hanging it from a tree for class crimes. The destruction of the Dingling tomb’s artefacts was complete; and it was to lead to an indefinite prohibition on future excavation.

This was not even the first serious modern destruction witnessed on the resting places of China’s emperors.

In 1928, during the fractured period known as the ‘warlord era’, local big man Sun Dianying decided to mount a smash and grab on the Qing tombs located in the Hebei countryside north east of Beijing. A column of troops would drive up to and thoroughly plunder the greatest tombs of the recently deposed Manchu dynasty, looting and devastating tombs including those of Empress Cixi – whose body, less than 20 years dead, was manhandled for its jewel-encrusted clothing – and the Kangxi and Qianlong Emperors. The artefacts were carted off for the black market; the bodies discarded.

The lost and forgotten

Most of the above are hardly off the beaten track – many line the pages of Lonely Planet, and the rest are easily signposted by eager taxi drivers or local tourist bureaux. Glorious as they are, therefore, as I go through my albums and diaries, they do not rank in my top tier of necropoleis and sepulchres.

Several months ago I found myself in Dingzhou, a small city in Hebei most famed for its Song pagoda (the tallest in China, and which doubled as a watchtower spying on the encroaching Liao). With time to kill before my train I found a spattering of listed relics – a mosque, a closed off temple – behind a primary school. And behind them all, a small tumulus – with (once I had parted with 5 RMB for the entrance ticket) a tiny, perfectly preserved Han dynasty brick tomb, likely dating to the first century BCE and occupied by a minor Han King.

Breath catching as I emerged from the entrance tunnel, craning to see bricks scrawled on by their architects two millennia prior, the tomb was a paradigm of quiet, tranquility, and isolation, ignorant of the urban sprawl concealing it from above.

And, really, what more could one want?

8th century Luoyang must have been astonishing. To the west of ruined older Han and Northern Wei capitals, the Tang built one the world’s biggest metropoleis. Rivalling Baghdad and Constantinople, a million people thronged a city host to Sogdian traders, Nestorian Christian missionaries, Arab and Byzantine envoys; while artisans expanded the awesome Longmen grottoes to its south, built soaring pagodas and palaces, and ringed with massive rammed earth walls.

As with many of China’s imperial capitals, Tang Luoyang has long been submerged beneath the calamitous waves of China’s blood soaked history, its wooden halls incinerated by fire, before the silt and flotsam of years of re-inhabitation and construction levelled its walls – reducing the southern suburbs to low fields occasionally rinsed by a shifting Luo river, and lesser cities reinterpreting and remapping the royal palaces and wide boulevards. But today’s visitor is not met with the level sands of a Shelley-like lost kingdom; and only partly by identikit modern urban sprawl. Mirage like, massive Tang simulacra rise from Luoyang’s city centre – a huge wooden tower, the Tiantang 天堂; next to it, the squat and heft Mingtang 明堂 throne hall; to the south, imposing palace gates; and, across the river, a full Tang city gate – the Dingding gate 定鼎门 – flanked by intact walls and que 阙 towers.

Of course these are not miraculous survivals of history’s vicissitudes, but modern projects by the Luoyang government to resurrect the city’s Tang heyday – tourism sites with hefty admission fees, offering punters the opportunity to swan massive concrete squares while donning rented Tang-era mantles. Concrete and steel has replaced the short-lived earth and wood long since obliterated – in some cases only decades after their original construction.

A personal intrusion to the narrative – and driver for today’s blog: I have an instinctive disdain for these projects. There are practical issues; under Luoyang’s centre are eons of archaeology, tentatively excavated but now irreparably marred by concrete foundation piles and modern superimpositions. More abstract concerns also trouble me. Historical reconstructions are rarely perfect – absent a blueprint or drawing (almost never available for pre-modern remains) the modern architect imposes interpretations which may vary widely from historical reality (Arthur Evans’ concrete reconstruction of Minoan Knossos a particularly notorious example). Secondly, choosing what – and how – to reconstruct is unavoidably synchronic – choosing one moment in time to privilege for posterity and erasing its complex, layered mutability. Wu Zetian’s pleasure palaces were but a flash in Luoyang’s millennia-long narrative; and politics inevitably creeps into which society or civilisation to prioritise in the rebuild.

My prejudices aside, there are lots of reasons to support these reconstruction mega projects. In many parts of China, the original they ape has been so utterly lost there is little archaeological cost to a fit of creativity. Take the Northern Song capital at Kaifeng – once mighty Bianjing before its sack by rampaging Jurchen Jin. Wars and, regularly, apocalyptic floods from the Yellow River have left very little of the Song city – two pagodas in the north and south of the city, and tattered Ming-era walls around its former inner city. Here, resurrection of the years immediately preceding its sack – before it faded into relative obscurity – is understandable, even if the execution can be seen as gauche.

Elsewhere, modern history’s darkest days bear responsibility. Many of China’s finest religious structures were irreversibly broken by rampaging Red Guard in the 1960s and 1970s, their ‘Cultural Revolution’ targeting the ‘four olds’ of pre-Communist China. Amid the shattered wreckage of China’s heritage – the looted temples of Confucius’ hometown, Qufu; the toppled spires of cathedrals in Beijing and Qingdao; the Cantonese ancestral halls turned into printing presses and grain stores – rebuilding was a vital part of the healing and reconnection with an assaulted national identity, reaching back across the lacuna of the Mao era. In particular, as China’s Buddhists, Christians, Muslims and other faiths brushed off their hidden scriptures and rescued icons, arguments around heritage authenticity would be extremely churlish when set against smouldering lamaseries (Tibetan areas were particularly badly hit) and whitewashed shrines.

Lastly, standards of preservation and repair differ in places where wood – rather than stone or brick – was the primary architectural mode. While not quite the ritual reconstruction seen elsewhere (e.g. the Ise Grand Shrine in Japan), replacement of rotten architectural elements is usual and necessary and gives real headaches dating wooden structures – and allowing fewer ideological issues when contemplating full-scale reconstruction. Further, reconstruction was de rigueur for many historical dynasties as a legitimising act of sacral euergetism and piety – hence the number of much older foundations in China now almost exclusively filled with buildings from the energetic Qing Qianlong and Kangxi eras (both Emperors massive temple builders over extremely long reigns in the 17th and 18th centuries).

And sometimes this is done extremely well. The thesaurus of Chinese history, dusty and dry Shanxi, has astounding wooden survivals from the Song and even Tang era – lovingly preserved in recent years, with leaning or collapsed elements consolidated or replaced as minimally as possible, leaving the ancient timbers and artwork to be viewed for generations to come. Elsewhere, gaudy reconstructions can also serve as excellent museums of the (excavated, subterranean) ruins of their forebears – including in Luoyang, where the reconstructed Dingding gate covers the opened remains of the Tang original; or in Xi’an, where work to ‘restore’ the Tang Daming palace has involved exposing and preserving the foundations of its palaces and walls.

Moreover, historical snobbishness runs the risk of occluding why these projects have been done. Tourism is one of the greatest development engines for poorer parts of China, bringing investment and tourist cash to post-industrials cities in the interior chafing under declining industries and pollution, stimulating a shift to a service-orientated economy. The most famous – and controversial – must surely be the Shanxi coal capital of Datong, the transformation of which by ambitious Mayor Geng Yanbo was shown in an (excellent) documentary – and involved the clearances of tens of thousands of families in order to rebuild Ming-era city walls almost entirely from scratch. While methods are rightly criticised, modern Datong is lifting itself from a notorious reputation and bringing more visitors to its extent (and ‘real’) Liao temples and world-class Yungang grottoes.

But sometimes this can go disastrously wrong. China is littered with examples of terrible and destructive ‘renovation’, but for me (perhaps arguably) the most tragic is the Tang bell tower of Kaiyuan Temple 开元寺钟楼 in Zhengding, Hebei. When architectural history Liang Sicheng visited in the 1930s, he found a sagging, decaying building, but one that was unmistakably 8th century Tang Dynasty in its structure – a unique and (for wooden buildings) almost unimaginably old survival from China’s fêted imperial heyday. Liang noted the motley assemblage of external features – a Jin or Yuan lower course; rebuilt Qing upper story – but ranked it as one of only two buildings he found with original Tang wooden structure (the number is now 4 or 5, depending on ultimate identification of a few recent finds). The building surely needed saving – and this was done in the late 1980s, when the Zhengding government commissioned a renovation programme that involved tearing down the original structure, replacing most elements, and rebuilding it in a fabricated ‘Tang’ style obscuring and destroying its heritage, including the rich collage of later restylings which are as much part of the building’s tapestry. Today few original elements – resin coated door, a bell – survive from the original build.

So where does this leave us? For me, travelling around a decent chunk of China and its archaeology, there is an all pervading sense of epistemological uncertainty – an unstable and uncertain irreality of whether what you are witnessing is new, old, authentic, or the imagination of an urban planner or construction baron in the late 1980s. The philosophy of whether this matters – questions of the ship of Theseus (or Trigger’s broom) – lie beyond my ken, as to questions of how a historian or archaeologist should respond to it – an endless search for the orientalist-fetishised ‘real China’? – but it remains an inescapable question if one chooses to act as connoisseur of China’s heritage.

All photographs my own

The following is from a visit to Chaozhou and Shantou in December 2019 – a warm Guangdong summer day before the world changed.

By the time I entered Qianmei village (前美村) the exhausted sun was starting to tickle the eastern mountains, a geological and cultural bulwark separating the fertile plains of Guangdong’s east Chaoshan region from the wilds of Fujian’s upcountry. A series of territorial barks inspired me to keep distant from the town’s northern gate, instead wending my way into the narrow alleys demarcated by moss-stained walls which stretched along a sluggish canal.

Guangdong – once a malarial jungle populated by the Baiyue 百越 people, ancestors of today’s Vietnamese – was always on the periphery of classical China: reduced by the first emperor Qin Shihuang, crushed by hordes of Emperor Wudi’s Han troops, but with full Sinicisation and absorption into dynastic China relatively late. Today’s profusion of languages – including Cantonese and Chaoshan’s Teochew ‘dialect’, far removed from the north’s Mandarin – recall these plural substrata. As a result, the south is more lacking in my first love of Chinese history – the desert forts of the Silk Road, colossal tombs of past dynasty, monolithic temples and religious grottoes. But its openness to the outside – many of the world’s ‘overseas Chinese’ have roots in migrants and traders from the southern littoral – brought prosperity and a cultural vitality more open to foreign artistic and cultural influences. Over the past few years I’ve become increasingly drawn to tracking down the often remote villages which, in defiance of the vicissitudes of 20th century Chinese history, preserve a memory of China’s fin de siecle period in the late 19th century.

Qianmei backs onto a local tourist attraction, the vast mansion of emigre Chen Cihong 陈慈黉, who returned to his hometown in the 1900s after making a fortune trading in South East Asia. Behind are a fascinating collection of decrepit mansions, their stately architecture now subdivided into smaller homes and workshops populated (seemingly entirely) by elderly Chaoshanese monoglots, impervious to my attempts at Mandarin or Cantonese convention. These fade into the alleys of the older village which – as with many in the region – is centred around a communal pond, with an assemblage of handsome courtyard houses tessellating across the countryside.

Poking my way into one of the open houses, I was met by a beaming elderly couple. In the courtyard of their late Qing home Mrs Liu squatted on the concreted floor, buckets of local fruits spread across the plunge pool (the central roof is open with a recess in the floor to collect rainwater), methodologically being packaged for sale on one of China’s prodigious e-commerce sites. Mr Liu obviously saw my surprise at his perfectly accented Mandarin; as a teenager, he explained, he had got hold of a transistor radio which he used to listen to state news broadcasts, practising Mandarin to complement his Teochew mother tongue.

Besides their (to my mind) objective beauty, villages like Qianmei – where they survive – provide a tangible anchor through the past century of China’s astonishing history, which in a country of often self-imposed amnesia can be hard to trace. With buildings dating to the end of the Qing imperial period, these modest collection of homes and shrines have stood buffeted by the collapse of dynasty, revolution, civil wars and foreign invasion, famine and political persecution, and finally China’s breakneck modernisation. Many still bear the scars – like the indelible red characters and Mao busts daubed on walls, left by the angry youths who had come to smash up any trace of China’s millennial culture and history at the height of revolution.

Mr Liu, it was to turn out, was a simulacrum of his village’s history. Although in his late 80s, Liu sprung up the narrow steps leading to his home’s second story and onto the flat rooftop which overlooks Qianmei’s fields and the distant mountains. A cool breeze caressed us from the east, scudding reddening clouds into the sun’s path as it set in the west.

‘One of my first memories is fleeing there,’ Liu remarked, pointing to the darkening peaks. ‘I was six or seven when the Japanese came. We heard the news as the Guomindang [KMT – China’s governing party in the 1930s] retreated and left the village before they arrived, up to the mountains where they wouldn’t reach’. The nearby coastal city of Shantou (Swatow) and its environs had been invaded in 1939, taking out one of South China’s most important ports to blockade Chiang Kai Shek’s beleaguered government. Liu reminisced about the confused period of occupation – KMT troops caught retreating inland, local guerillas and partisans, but also those who joined the occupying forces.

We chewed the fat some more before Liu showed me into the upper story of his house, which had been in his family for decades. A pair of broad open windows overlooked the courtyard where Mrs Liu continued her packaging operation; Liu pointed to holes in the upper and lower lintels. ‘There used to be bars here,’ he explained, tracing their form against the dusky sky. ‘I remember tearing them out in the ‘50s – they were iron, and everyone wanted to make more’. In a directionless attempt to rocket agricultural China into the industrial big league, as part of his ‘Great Leap Forward’ (1958-1962) Mao had inspired Chinese across the country to produce steel by building small garden furnaces, stoking them with low quality coal and feeding any available ‘waste’ metal in to produce fresh iron. The result was predictable – poor quality furnaces with insufficient temperature to produce anything beyond useless slag, while government quotas led to families like Liu’s to literally strip their houses apart to produce more raw metal.

Behind the window was a threadbare bedroom; undecorated aside from a small table and bedding strewn on the floor. This was the Liu family guestroom, ready for when family visited. Closing the room were two plain panel doors. Liu tapped then with a wry smile; when he was a boy, he remembered, they had been decorated with bold splashes of paint, Daoist and Buddhist mythological scenes in the famed Chaoshanese vernacular style. When the Red Guard had arrived, China’s Cultural Revolution snapping hot on the heels of the Great Leap Forward, Liu had preempted the threat of violence for harbouring the imagery by removing the doors and – performatively – throwing them onto a pyre the activists had set up in the centre of Qianmei.

I chose not to press Liu too far on his remembrances. He seemed phlegmatic and comfortable discussing what to him must have seemed ancient yesteryears; and perhaps this small village escaped the worst excesses of China’s bloody modern history. But the suffering – death, starvation, destitution, and indescribable violence – that witnesses to China’s history from the late ‘30s to late ‘70s recount were too familiar to me, even as many of the stories are consciously consigned to undiscussed history. Elsewhere these scars are often marked by an absence – a pagoda destroyed by invaders’ artillery, a village depopulated by collectivisation, a shrine torn down to the shrill catcalls of political slogans – but Liu’s age and willingness to talk gave a presence to the history, one I felt uncomfortable cajoling him into discussing too much.

As I went to leave, Liu and his wife pressed a bag of their fruit – wax apples – into my hand; I had a long journey back to Guangzhou, they remarked, and might get hungry. How did they know? Well, their son was nearby – not Guangzhou, but Shenzhen, the famed boom city which had drawn rural migrants from across China as it grew in the early ‘80s. Liu junior had moved there, and was now with his family; he still came home, only sometimes, not enough; they could talk on the phone, but he seemed less interested in his roots. Even his Chaoshanese, Mrs Liu told me, was going – they had to speak in Mandarin, as linguistic walls reinforced those of distance, age and – increasingly – cultural dissimilitude between generations.

The light was starting to get fade as I plucked a route back out of the village (still mindful of the dog). Here again, the Lius served as avatars for the village itself; the only sign of youth a rusting basketball hoop on an empty court, while stooped silhouettes picked their way through lines of washing drying in the cooling air. A young man came out of the dark, trying to talk but unable to articulate words – apparently with learning difficulties, and I guessed abandoned to a life in the village of the old while his peers left, without education or much support.

It’s easy to dehumanise the rural and the ancient in China – to extremes of both touristification, displacing residents and despatching the real history and culture of a village to commoditise and sell to urbanites; and neglect, where the old slowly fade from existence, denuded of the young who have left for education and prosperity in county towns and cities, and leaving abandoned artefacts for architectural connoisseurs, robbed of any context, meaning, or relevance by the departure of the owners who raised them. The Lius seemed happy, not least to talk to an interested face, but the sunset over Qianmei was hard not to associate with their stranding – tethers to not one but several lost worlds, granted a peaceful, gentle, but final close as they, their village, and their memories faded from memory.

With Guangzhou wreathed in atypical smog, today seemed as good a day as any to ensconce in the study, a quietly stewing kettle of wuyishan black tea to my side, and try to get back to the blog.

Following a few trips to some of the odder colonial ventures in early modern China – the concession at little Yichang far up the Yangtze; France’s lost Kouang-Tchéou-Wan 广州湾 colony in present Zhanjiang – the lived experiences of these remote imperial outputs has been occupying me. The sheer surreality of diplomats, missionaries and business folk setting up stall in isolated Chinese towns – where even today a foreign face elicits gawping and catcalls – with a full assemblage of familiar architecture, street names; shops, telegram offices; churches and cathedral. Who were these people? And as importantly, how must it have felt for the average Chinese laobaixing to hear of a remote treaty in their distant capital, leading to boatloads of foreign devils strutting along the quayside, content in their extraterritoriality?

And so I wanted to reflect a little bit on one of the weirder ports – little Wuzhou (梧州 – or Ngchow in Cantonese). As I don’t have access to much archival material, this is going to be mostly my own reflections and memories from my potter around late last year.

A life removed

So, our scene: Wuzhou now sits on the Guangxi-Guangdong border, deep into China’s hinterland at the head of the Xi River 西江 which flows down to Guangzhou and the Pearl River Delta. Now a sleepy inland city, it was once a veritable trade entrepôt – pre-1949, up to 80% of Guangxi’s trade poured through the city. As part of their growing encroachment into Qing-ruled China, in 1897 the British Empire opened a Consulate in Wuzhou to manage the growing British stake in this trade.

The first thing that strikes is how grim life must have been for the Consuls and their staff. Of the first batch of Consuls dispatched to China in the early 19th century, 1/3rd died in post – leading to the British to establish a Shanghai branch of the Office of Works in 1867, to launch an urgent campaign to build proper premises.

While Wuzhou benefited from this, its location cannot have made things easy. Late 19th century China was poor and rural. The nearest diplomatic posts lay over mountains to the south west (Beihai) or several days steamer to the east (Guangzhou). Conditions would have been tough. A Consul in Beihai earlier in the century was once awoken to find his bedding being carried out by a horde of dozens of enormous rats, invading the warmest house in the city. Summers in Guangxi are seething; and abutting the river, with wetlands around the city, conditions would likely have been malarial with little hope of good quality medical care. In flood, the main city would be submerged, residents using boats to access their homes via the second floor – and one suspects ruining sanitation for months.

The compound was equipped for some leisure – a tennis court, stables, a sheltered yard in the residence. And the British were not the only foreigners – aside from itinerant traders, further up the hill (still) stands an American missionary school.

Ships carrying victuals and supplies would have been frequent. And throughout its life, the Consulate would have seen Wuzhou’s development – now marked by dilapidated but beautiful colonnaded streets in the old city centre, the qilou 骑楼 architecture characterising south China and East Asian diaspora cities showing the former prosperity. But this was not a wild city of sin like Shanghai, or a leafy enclave like Guanzhou’s Shamian island or Xiamen’s Gulangyu. The community would have been small and – I would guess – inhabited by those who lacked the ability or ambition to head to more profitable and comfortable posts elsewhere in the country. Think less ‘exciting frontier’, and more the venal and tragi-comic colonial settlement of Katha, painted so well by Orwell in Burmese Days.

The sneer of cold command

Wuzhou is an unusual post in that the land was acquired by perpetual lease – whether intentionally or not, a signal of intent to the local population. The local museum still displays the boundary stone demarcating the entire hill which hosted the Consulate as British territory, forbidding locals to even set foot on their ancestral land. It’s not hard to imagine the insult and injustice felt.

Its location allowed the Consulate easy access to the river and wharves, while the residence was removed from the city to offer some protection from disease (and local strife). But as a result, the spatialisation of the Consulate – again, whether by design or accident – oozes superiority. It looms not only over a nearby Daoist temple, but also looks across the river – and down – on Wuzhou’s ancient temple complex to the Dragon Goddess 龙母, the local deity. At the same time, the Consulate’s relation to the old town of Wuzhou – sited on lower ground across the river – could have not been better designed for a garrison or fort. While not militarised, the omnipresent sight of the outpost, arbitrarily occupied by a foreign, cannot but have chafed.

Interactions and tensions

Throughout its existence, the Consulate was a source of local tension and a target of ire. A series of incidents – disputes over shipping and British citizens’ extraterritoriality (the right to be treated under British rather than local law), shootings by trigger-happy Sepoys – led to a febrile atmosphere. This was further inflamed by the wider context of China’s overthrow of the Qing, nationalist revolution, and growing rhetoric against foreigners. In 1926, on the first anniversary of the anti-imperialist May 30th movement (itself motivated colonial police in Shanghai shooting protestors), mass protests broke out in Wuzhou against the Consulate.

The entirety of the local staff resigned. With the post becoming increasingly unviable, in 1928 the British Consul-General in Guangzhou signed an agreement with Guangxi’s provincial chief to return the whole territory. A stele – now the source of much local pride – was erected next to the Consulate to mark the reclamation.

This background sets the tone for what dialogue and interaction there might have been between the foreign community and locals. With local staff and the need to actually do business, there must have been some degree of bilingualism – but I would imagine mostly mono-directional, with the local Consuls unlikely to take the time to learn Wuzhou’s Cantonese dialect, a supposition borne out by increasing misunderstandings and clashes. In Qing and then warlord China, there would have been little motivation to leave the compound’s relative safety to risk poor hygiene, brigands, and anti-imperial locals. And at risk of being uncharitable, the apathetics I envisage being posted here do not fit the mould of the Sinophile yearning to understand and form links with his (for they were all men) posting country.

Undoubtedly, the foreign presence brought prosperity to Wuzhou – the city’s extant architecture bears testament. But this would not equate to just distribution of the fruits – one imagines unfair monopolies between foreigners and local toadies (one again thinks of Orwell’s corpulent U Po Kyin), driving corruption and exploitation of the less fortunate. With no redress for abuses from the British or their local favourites, not to mention the lost dignity of the imperial imposition looming over their city, even the most tolerant British or Chinese would have struggled to find a venue for dialogue and interaction. The Consulate’s early demise would bear this out.

The end and legacy

It is difficult for an amateur like me to trace the impact of colonialism to today’s China, as one has to chart a course through the huge rupture 1949 and the Communist victory brought to the country. Even the longest lasting enclaves – Shanghai, Tianjin – were rapidly denuded of their foreign populations, with the private industry and cultural baggage they had brought rapidly collectivised and Sinicised. This is even more the case for a small outpost like Wuzhou, lasting only thirty years and never bringing more than a tiny minority population.

The experiences of those who’d lived there – on both sides of the imperial divide – still fascinates me, and I’d welcome any pointers to easily accessible archive material or accounts to challenge and hopefully overturn some of the above assumptions. For now – and as much as possible in China, where imperial submission and colonial humiliation still remains an intensely sensitive issue – I will try and chart a course that stays receptive to the cold reality of the unequal treaties and foreign adventuring, while still appreciating the remarkable architectural, social and cultural legacies that they left in their wake.

It’d taken me almost an hour to cycle a sweltering 10 miles to Tianning Temple in south west Beijing, taking to the bike in a misguided attempt to trace the boundaries of the old Liao capital.

As I recovered in the shade of the 12th century brick pagoda, I fell into conversation with two fellow visitors. Making small talk I learnt they were railway engineers from Jilin, located down south by their state owned enterprise.

While we chewed the fat on our shared experiences of moving to the big city, another figure shuffled around the corner. He greeted the pair; a slightly hunched but otherwise sprightly older man, his age accentuated by a wizened beard and the blocky hat I vaguely recognised from Daoist temples. One hand clutched a gnarled stick; he wore a heavy woollen jacket over a grey tunic and baggy trousers. His accent was almost incomprehensible – a mishmash of strong vowels, palatalised consonants and dropped syllables testifying to a childhood isolated from the clipped and more gentle Mandarin of younger generations. The Jilin boys told me he was from Hebei – a friend from somewhere.

‘But do you know what he is?’ one of them asked. ‘He’s a wuxi.’

Puzzled – I’d never heard of a wuxi before – I let him slowly explain the characters.

‘Our friend is a 巫觋 wuxi  – a wizard. He’s a Daoist and can do magic!’

The older man gave me a toothy grin and tipped his stick towards me.

‘He’s 120 years old and can predict the future. He doesn’t work here, but sometimes comes along to help people know what’s going to happen.

‘Do you have 信仰 xinyang?’ chipped in the second engineer, using a word more easily translated as ‘belief’ rather than the more formal 宗教 zongjiao ‘religion’.

‘No,’ I replied, ‘although my family are Christians.’

‘That’s not what I asked!’ he chuckled, ‘Do you have xinyang? Do you believe he can predict your future? Westerners and young people are so sceptical. But it’s real, believe us.’

 

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Slightly over a year later: I had moved south to Guangzhou, and grabbed a quiet weekend to nip across to Chaoshan along the province’s eastern border. Speaking a unique language closer to Fujianese than Cantonese, and with a culture marked by a strong ethnolinguistic identity and entrepreneurial spirit which has resulted in Chaoshanese (‘Teochew’) being among the most prominent of emigre overseas Chinese, I had been looking forward to a relaxed weekend soaking in the smaller cities and countryside.

‘Do you have xinyang?’ I asked Mr Liu, who had invited me to share some of Chaoshan’s distinctive gongfu tea in his backstreet cafe. It was a warm morning, and he had been teaching me how to properly prepare the tea while proudly introducing his hometown of Chaozhou and its people to me.

‘It’s complicated,’ he replied, deftly twirling the tea cups between a pair of tweezers. ‘Us Chaoshanese aren’t like other Chinese; we’re more open. It’s not for me, but some Chaoshanese have churches, mosques, even in small towns – it isn’t an issue if someone has a foreign zongjiao.’

‘Not zongjiao,’ I politely rebuffed, ‘xinyang – your beliefs, traditions – is there something specifically Chaoshanese?’

‘Oh! Yes, of course,’ he grinned, ‘although now the young are forgetting them.’ This was a common remark I’d keep hearing on the trip. ‘We Chaoshanese are very traditional; we have lots of xinyang. Keep an eye out on the streets and the temples – you’ll see.’

Maybe his comments boosted my powers of observation, but after I left I started seeing things novelties almost immediately. Like many Chinese cities, Chaozhou has a large Buddhist temple – famed for its gilded hall and antique Tang Dynasty statuary. But what struck me were the local families busying themselves with temple rituals, laying candles, hanging banners, or busily collecting funds for their temple association looking to restore the main hall’s roof. And so to throughout the backstreets of cities and towns – small shrines stoked with incense, hunched elders paying obeisance, roughly hewn statues cloying with wax. In Chaozhou and other small villages to the south I saw some of the most intimate and quietly beautiful temples of my whole time in China – to 妈祖 Mazu / 天后 Tianhou, the Fujianese-born Empress of Heaven and protector of sailors, or to other local gods I’d never heard of.

‘Who do you worship here?’ I asked the attendant at the temple of 青龙 Qinglong south of the city centre. I was interested; but also trying to distract him from incessantly petting my arm, enraptured as he was with its paleness and blond hair.

‘This is Qinglong – it’s special to us Chaoshanese.’

‘So this is a type of zongjiao?’ I replied. ‘Like Daoism or Buddhism?’

‘No,’ he rolled his eyes, thankfully loosening his grip, ‘it’s our xinyang. He protects sailors, like Mazu in Fujian. I suppose you could call it Daoist. Or maybe Buddhist. I’ve never really thought about it. It’s complicated.’

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The previous Spring Festival – Chinese New Year – a colleague had invited me, stuck alone in Guangzhou, to celebrate the festival with her family in Shantou, a city south of Chaozhou. ‘I’ve got to warn you though, it will be really boring. If you want to see traditions you’re out of luck – we just sit around and ignore each other.’

Braced as I was for a quiet weekend, albeit with company other than my own, I grew increasingly puzzled when I was told we would accompany the extended Shantou clan to visit the ancestors.

‘We’re going to a cemetery?’ I asked, thinking back to Christmas wreath laying at grandparents’ graves as a child.

We congregated in an unlit backstreet, where the family owned an unoccupied tenement building. Cousins, aunts, uncles drew up in cars; bags of fruit, dried food, an unplugged rice cooker full of fresh rice appeared from boots and backseats. We traipsed up four stories of the empty building to the top floor, where. a bare concrete room was furnished only with a high wooden altar surmounted by three incense-filled bowls and a series of jars.

‘These are the ashes,’ my colleague wearily commented, ‘We keep this building for them to live in. Sorry, this will be over quick.’

One by one the family set out their food on the altar before praying in sequence to the ancestors – incense stick in hands, a few words, a set number of bows. And then they gathered around to chat – needling my colleague with an interrogation about her plans to get married, buy a house, have children.

‘It’s so awkward,’ she told me on the way back for dinner, ‘every year we have to go through the same questions so the ancestors can join in. It’s the one day of the year we get to talk to them, and the older generation are obsessed with these things.’

‘I thought you weren’t religious?’ I asked in surprise – my colleague was a pragmatic, self-avowedly rational and overtly atheistic young Chinese urbanite.

‘I’m not!’ she replied. ‘But this is xinyang. It’s complicated.’

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My final evening of the Chaoshan trip, I had ended up again having tea with an old local – an antiquarian who carefully tended a collection of Song Dynasty porcelain he and friends had dredged from the local estuary.

We had just gone through a bruising political conversation, me quietly nodding along to his regurgitation of the more extreme views currently in vogue in state media: on Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the American trade war. In a bid to turn things back to safer ground, I fell back on the question still puzzling me.

‘What is xinyang, Mr Chen? I keep hearing that the Chaoshanese are traditional people, and I see the difference with the Cantonese – but how do you view it?’

‘Hmm, xinyang,‘ he mused, refilling his tea cup. ‘Obviously the young don’t have it; they just care about science, work, making money. It’s more something for my generation.’

‘I suppose that gets to the root of the problems we’ve been talking about,’ he continued. ‘The youth today – without xinyang, what do they have? I suppose you could call it 道德 daode [ethics] – without the link to who we are and what we believe, how do they know how to behave?’

‘So that’s to say your generation still believe in the gods – in Mazu and Tianhou, or the Daoist sages?’

‘Not at all!’ he replied, slightly annoyed. ‘Next you’ll be saying the world is flat. I know there’s no afterlife, no hell underground. We know why it rains – we don’t need to pretend there’s a supernatural force controlling it like the olden days. No, that’s not xinyang. What I mean is the link to the past – where you came from, who you are, and the way you act. Some concept beyond buying a house, indebting yourself to a mortgage. I think that’s where we’ve gone wrong. We need xinyang to keep us rooted and put it in perspective.’

‘I still don’t understand,’ I pleaded. ‘If it’s just tradition and not zongjiao, why do people bow at shrines, pray for luck before exams, host the spirits of ancestors at Spring Festival? Don’t the people in the temples believe in the gods?’

‘Hmm.’ he conceded. ‘I suppose it’s complicated.’

 

 

 

Five kilometres east of the old city on what only 15 years ago was and paddies by the Pearl River gleam a trio of towers, emblematic of Guangzhou’s rediscovered international confidence, and the latest chapter in a story which plies through the city’s complex history and relationship with its wider world.

South is Canton Tower, a collaboration between Dutch architects and British engineers, a futuristic hyperboloid and the second tallest tower in the world. North are the Guangzhou Twin Towers – the 103 storey International Finance Centre and 111 storey CTC Finance Centre, the crowning glory of Guangzhou’s international Zhujiang New Town. Inside the British- and American-designed colossi are leading international companies, hotels, and some of the 60+ consulates which have accompanied Guangzhou’s meteoric ascension to the world stage in the past two decades.

Guangzhou, sited on the Pearl River Delta and with access to Asian trade routes and (latterly) the markets of Hong Kong, is a city where the wheels of history turn more obviously than many. The immediate origin of today’s prosperity lies in Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reform programme, opening up free trade zones across south China to unleash the industry and creativity of the Chinese people after decades of suffocation under Mao’s state-led economy. But from the pre-Qin Baiyue Kingdom which ruled Canton in the 3rd century BCE, and in whose tombs Parthian and Roman glassware has been found, China’s Southern Gateway has always attracted coteries of traders, missionaries and travellers who have set up shop and much more. The city’s story is one of pulses of opening and closing, allowing and then stymying the international tides that have periodically enriched – materially and culturally – the entrepôt.

Journey from the West

Within the formerly walled old city of Guangzhou sits one of its most striking temples – the 六榕寺 Liurongsi ‘Temple of the Six Banyans’. Presided over by a much restored pagoda (one of the tallest buildings in old Guangzhou, and the core of which dates to the medieval Song Dynasty) the site itself dates back to 537 and the Liang Dynasty, one of the many power which spent over 300 years brawling over the remains of Han China.

Its patron was the Liang Emperor Wu. A devout Buddhist, his foundation of the temple came to a backdrop of Buddhist expansion in China – which had first entered from India in the later years of the Han, and which flourished as Mahayana Buddhism over the following centuries. 70 years later one of China’s most famous adherents, Xuanzang, would start his epic ‘journey to the west’ to bring back Sanskrit manuscripts to the Chinese capital Chang’an (present Xi’an). Guangzhou, then the port city of Panyu, was one of many of the conduits through which Buddhism circulated through South East Asia; interred in the original temple were the relics of Cambodian saints transported to the trade town.

Lighthouse of Mecca

Founded only a few decades later, and situated a short stroll to the south past shops specialising in air conditioning units, LEDs and kitchenware, is among my favourite sites in Guangzhou: the 怀圣 Huaisheng ‘Grand Mosque of Canton’, also known by a misattribution of its unique 光塔 guangta minaret as the ‘Lighthouse Mosque’.

Alongside the flow of Buddhist and East Asian traders into 7th century Panyu/Guangzhou came a new force on the world stage – the Arab traders fanning across the Indian Ocean and beyond as the vanguard of Islam’s expansion across the world. Legend has the mosque founded as early as 627 CE by the first Muslim missionary to China; what we do know is that Muslim traders in this period were bringing their wares and religion to communities across China’s southern seaboard, with mosques and Arabic gravestones appearing along the Guangdong coast and further east in Quanzhou and Fuzhou in Fujian. By the 8th century Guangzhou is recorded as the route back home from the Islamic world for at least one Chinese survivor of the Battle of Talas,  the disastrous defeat in present Kazakhstan of the Tang Dynasty by an alliance of Abbasid and Tibetan forces which forever put a limit on westward Chinese expansion.

The current Huaisheng Mosque dates to at least the 11th century Song Dynasty, with restoration under the Yuan in the 14th century; documentary claims put the Minaret even older, as far back as the Tang who jockeyed with the Abbasid Caliphate for hegemony in Central Asia. If the mosque is this old, it witnessed troubled times for open Guangzhou: in 758 Arab and Persian pirates sacked the port in which they had been growing an increasing presence; and in the 878 ‘Guangzhou Massacre’ the Tang rebel Huang Chao butchered tens of thousands of Arab and Persian Muslims, Zoroastrians, Jews, and Christians in a classic case of economic woes scapegoated on immigrants. For fifty years the port remained shut.

These pulses of opening and closing continued for centuries. Under the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty, whose global networks for the first time brought non-Han Tibet, Yunnan, Mongolia and Manchuria into Chinese-orbit, Guangzhou was visited by the famous Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta who stayed with Muslim merchants in the city for two weeks; he would go on to visit other Muslim communities in Quanzhou, Fuzhou and Hangzhou. Barely a century later, the Ming Dynasty restored Han rule to China, but under the 15th century Yongle Emperor issued a devastating proclamation to shut the Empire’s ports to the world – with repercussions far beyond the rotting treasure junks in Chinese harbours.

Church of the East

Alongside Muslims, for centuries Christians had made their homes in Guangzhou. The victims of the Guangzhou Massacre counted many among their number. Throughout China the Nestorian Church had been making inroads for centuries (see previous blog), leaving their mark in south China with funerary stelae.

Tolerance for Nestorian Christianity and other denominations was marked under the Mongols, and included a Roman Catholic Archdiocese in the capital Khanbaliq, present Beijing. This was repudiated by the Ming as part of their Sinicizing retrenchment, pulling back a tide that would not wash back until Jesuit missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries.

 

Guangzhou was no exception. In the 1320s the enterprising Franciscan friar and missionary Odoric of Pordenone made his way to the Pearl River Delta on the trail of Franciscan missionary stations; he recorded a Guangzhou thrice the size of Venice. And in 1582 the founder of modern Christianity in China, Matteo Ricci, landed in Guangzhou.

But Guangzhou’s opening – and our thread of its towers – took a backseat during the Ming and early  Qing, the Manchurian nomads who swept into the country in 1644 and placed their Tunguskic ruling class and language over the conquered populace. But the world continued to move on as the Age of Navigation brought European sailors to East Asia – the first Portuguese arriving in the early 16th century to persistently antagonise the population of Guangzhou before settling on Macao as their hub, gradually being welcomed alongside Dutch, British, French and other merchants as part of the famous ‘Canton System’ of limited international trade with Qing China. Through this system, from 1757 all foreign trade was organised through a series of 行 hong (Cantonese), associations of Chinese merchants exclusively operating from Guangzhou (Canton).

It was in this context that the final towers of our tale appear. As the Canton system broke down, French and British forces ushered in the Opium Wars to blast back open the doors of trade in Canton and China – the ‘gunboat diplomacy’ which would fatally cripple Qing China. In 1841 British forces overran gun emplacements in the Pearl River and stormed Guangzhou, forcing it to be opened up by treaty the following year. With land captured by British forces and under terms of reparation granted to them, the French Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris acquired prime real estate in south Guangzhou on which they built one of the county’s most spectacular Cathedrals. Started in 1861 with granite shipped from Kowloon in Hong Kong (making it, along with Notre Dame in Paris and Westminster Abbey, one of only three granite cathedrals in the world), the twin Gothic spires of 圣心 shengxin Sacred Heart Cathedral loomed above the low-lying Qing city as their modern analogues do over today’s Zhujiang New Town –  matched only by Huaisheng Mosque to their west, and Six Banyan Temple to the north.

 

Epilogue

As the 20th century rolled along the towers of Guangzhou met further depredations as the country once again closed itself up after 1949, expelling the foreign community, businesses and consulates which looped around its southern edge on Shamian Island. Sacred Heart was vandalised by Red Guards and turned into a warehouse in the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution; Huaisheng Mosque similar victimised during the reign of Mao’s revolutionaries; and Banyan closed alongside hundreds of other destroyed traditional temples in the campaign against the four olds.

Only with 1979 and Deng’s policies of reform and tolerance were they gradually restored and reopened, and slowly repopulated by both local believers and immigrants. On my last visit Sacred Heart was filled with Korean devotees taking part in a weekly Korean-language service; and Huaisheng plays host to the new generation of Middle Eastern and African  Muslims who have come to trade in a new Guangzhou famed for its textile and manufacturing exports. And so as the old towers of are left in the leafy suburbs of old Yuexiu District, saved from the highways which tie it to the new city with its towers of glass and steel to the east, the wheel of Canton’s history continues to turn.

 

All photos taken by the author

Just over 100 years after the unification of  ‘China’ under the First Emperor, the bellicose Han Dynasty began to extend tendrils of diplomacy, trade and conflict west. The states and peoples encountered offered the first indirect links to the flourishing Western states of Greece and the Roman Empire poised to replace them – the nascent Silk Road – but also an interesting footnote that may have led to the only clash between the the European classical world and imperial China.

China Rising

In the late 2nd century BCE, Han China was in the ascendant. Under the leadership of the ‘martial’ Emperor, Han Wudi, Han generals had repudiated decades of passive acquiescence to take the fight to their nomadic bête noire, the Xiongnu, whose depredations from the north had cast a deep shadow over the cities and people of the central plains. After a series of startling victories the Xiongnu had been driven from the Ordos loops north of the Yellow River, while for the first time Chinese armies began to open up the Hexi Corridor through present Gansu and Xinjiang into the oasis cities of the Taklamakan desert – what would become the Silk Road.

In 104 BCE Emperor Wudi of Han China began his most audacious gambit yet. Under the leadership of general Li Guangli, Han armies set out to conquer the Central Asian kingdom of Dayuan 大宛, separated from the the capital Chang’an by over 2,500 miles of foreboding deserts, mountains and fiercely independent city states. The war is ascribed by Sima Qian to a desire to obtain the 天马, the famed blood sweating ‘Heavenly Horses’ of the Ferghana Valley, but it’s likely geopolitics paid a bigger role – a show of force projection so far into unknown territory to demonstrate the unstoppable reach of the imperial armies.

The war dragged on for a further three years. When the Dayuan capital of Ershi 贰师 finally fell to Han forces in 101, it immediately sent shockwaves through the region：

“自貳師將軍伐大宛之後，西域震懼，多遣使來貢獻”

“And after the Ershi General [Li Guangli] conquered the Dayuan, the Western Regions shook with fear, and sent many envoys [to Chang’an] to pay tribute.” (Hanshu 96a)

In doing so a new hegemon was established in Central Asia, the Han both guaranteeing territorial security and stimulating an increasing exchange of goods, information and people between Chinese East Asia, Indo-Aryan Parthia and its satellite states, and eventually Imperial Rome. A little over a century later, the scale of trade led Roman historian Pliny the Elder to lament:

“minimaque computatione miliens centena milia sestertium annis omnibus India et Seres et paeninsula illa imperio nostro adimunt: tanti nobis deliciae et feminae constant.”

“And at the lowest estimate, each year India, the Chinese and the Arabian peninsula draw one hundred million sesterces from our Empire: that’s how much our luxuries and women cost us.” (Hist.Nat.12.41)

Empires’ Most Distant Outpost

So who were the people of Dayuan, whose capital Ershi was to prove a crucial hinge between East and West?

From detailed Chinese accounts, a location roughly in the Ferghana Valley is largely beyond dispute. Straddling modern Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, far from a historic terra incognita this had for centuries been in the orbit of a decidedly foreign kingdom – the Greco-Bactrians, ruled by the descendants of Alexander the Great’s Macedonians who had conquered the area in the early 320s BCE. Bringing his armies into the Ferghana after vanquishing Persia, Alexander would fight a two year guerrilla war against the Scythians, in the process founding a walled city on the Jaxartes (Syr Darya) river which he settled with Greek and Macedonian mercenaries (Arrian Anabasis 4.4). Now modern Khujand, Takijistan, the new foundation would be dubbed Ἀλεξάνδρεια Ἐσχάτη – ‘Alexandria the Furthest’ – and marks the furthest ever Greek expansion into East Asia.

Two centuries later, extensive numismatic evidence shows warrior kings of neighbouring Bactria maintaining fiercely Greek self expression, while archaeological studies of their cities in present Afghanistan such as Ai Khanum attest to deep and sophisticated Greco-Hellenistic identity in Central Asia up until the mid-2nd century. The area around Bactra (modern Balkh, around 300 miles south of the Ferghana Valley) was still demonstrably Greek ruled (at least) at the time of Han Wudi – coins give us the names and identities of his Greco-Bactrian contemporary Heliokles I and his neighbour the Indo-Greek Menander I.

The etymology of Dayuan (literally ‘The Great Yuan’) gives us our first clue that the people the Han encountered were related to their Greek neighbours south of the Pamirs. Yuan (perhaps /ʔʉɐn/ or /ĭwɐn/ in Middle Chinese) sounds like the contemporaneous Sanskrit ‘Yavana’, the common term in Indian texts to refer to the Into-Greek and Greco-Bactrian kingdoms of Central Asia (itself ultimately deriving from the Greek ethnonym of Ἴωνες /iōnes/ ‘Ionians’). Indeed, the descriptions given of Dayuan by the envoy Zhang Qian, who Wudi had sent to explore the region, could describe a Greek-like people (although equally fits Indo-Iranian Sogdians or Bactrians):

“宛左右以蒲陶为酒，富人藏酒至万馀石，久者数十岁不败。俗嗜酒。。。自大宛以西至安息，国虽颇异言，然大同俗，相知言。其人皆深眼，多须髯，善市贾，争分铢…”

“Around the Yuan [region] people make wine from grapes, with the rich storing up over 10,000 stones [a liquid measure] which can last for ten years without spoiling. The people are very fond of wine... Although the states from Dayuan west to Anxi [Parthia] have different languages, their customs are similar and languages mutually intelligible. Their people all have deep eyes, profuse beards; their merchants are excellent and will fight for tuppence…” (Shiji 123)

Some historians of Han China (e.g. Loewe, Dubs) discount the idea that the Dayuan encountered by Zhang Qian and Wudi’s forces still retained any Greek character, and for good reason. Zhang Qian’s mission to Central Asia and Wudi’s invasion was in part to seek allies created by a seismic political shift over the preceding decades: the ingress of a new nomadic people, the Indo-European Yuezhi 月氏 (ancestors of the Kushans and called the Tokharioi in Greek sources on the end of the Greco-Bactrians). Displaced by the Xiongnu from their home in Gansu in the 170s, masses of Yuezhi and other displaced peoples had poured into Dayuan and would eventually snuff out the last Greco-Bactrian king, Heliocles I in the 130s.

The loss of Greek-led political sovereignty over the wider Ferghana and Bactrian regions is therefore fairly clear cut. But culturally and perhaps ethnically, there are indications that Dayuan continued to hold onto its Greco-Macedonian roots.

For starters, Zhang Qian reports that Dayuan was comprised of walled cities, ruled by local kings (unlike the nomad people pouring into the region, but also broken up from the grand Hellenistic Kingdoms they succeeded). Most interestingly he also notes its customs, governance and cities were the same as those of Daxia 大夏 to the south – the Chinese term for the Greco-Bactrian kingdom which coins show had remained Greek-ruled until less than a decade before his survey.

This brings us to point two, the issue of time. In 208 BCE, Seleukid King Antiokhos III journeyed north east from his capital in Syria (his famous ‘anabasis’) to reimpose rule on the breakaway Greco-Bactrian kingdom of Euthydemus. The kingdom he encountered in Afghanistan, as related by Polybius (11.34), is a fully functional Hellenistic ‘great power’ led by Greek speakers leading Greek-style armies. He was met with a prescient prediction from King Euthydemus:

“πλήθη γὰρ οὐκ ὀλίγα παρεῖναι τῶν Νομάδων, δι᾽ ὧν κινδυνεύειν μὲν ἀμφοτέρους, ἐκβαρβαρωθήσεσθαι δὲ τὴν χώραν ὁμολογουμένως, ἐὰν ἐκείνους προσδέχωνται.”

“For the nomad horde is considerable, threatening both of us, and should they be let in its commonly agreed our lands will be utterly barbarised.” (Plb.11.34.5)

Within a century this menace would arrive.  What is interesting for our purposes is that according to Polybius, almost within Zhang Qian and Han Wudi’s parents’ lifetimes Central Asia hosted a distinctly Hellenistic kingdom still tied to its Mediterranean metropoleis, contrasted in traditional Greek racial terms with the Yuezhi and Saka who would topple it. To put another way: chronologically, Zhang Qian could (just about) have met an elderly local who as a child witnessed Antiokhos’ entry to Bactra. And their borders lay within a week’s journey of the Ferghana Valley city attacked by the Han, with which it shared close historic political links: Apollodorus of Artemita (contemporaneous to Wudi) is even recorded as saying that the Greco-Bactrian kingdom extended as far as China (Strabo.11.11.1) , which allowing for embellishment may imply continued claim over their northern neighbours well into the 2nd century. So we are not talking about vastly different epochs between Han entry into Central Asia, and previous Greek hegemony.

Our third reference is Quintus Curtius, the (likely 1st century CE) Roman historian of Alexander the Great. There are numerous historiographic issues with Curtius’ works, but he clearly had access to extensive sources and lived alongside well-informed authors on the east such as Strabo, Pliny and Apollodorus. When describing Alexandria the Furthest in the Ferghana, Curtius notes:

“….quorum posteri nunc quoque non apud eos tam longa aetate propter memoriam Alexandri exoleverunt.”

“…whose descendants even now, because of their memory of Alexander, after such a long period of time have not disappeared.” (Plb.11.34.5)

 

The Latin here is not immediately obvious – “posteri…exoleverent” could be just referring to local recensions of Alexander myths in Central Asia. However, contemporary Latin authors mainly use the verb much more concretely to describe the loss of cultural rites – e.g. clothing fashions (Tac.Ann.14.21), traditional religious practices (Tac.Ann.11.15), old civic customs (Suet.Gal.4). A very plausible reading therefore is therefore that around the reign of Claudius (43 CE) Curtius believed the Ferghana valley still held Greeks who in some way retained their Alexandrian cultural identity; and even if his sources were out of date, this may make the Greek identity of the Dayuan people encountered by the Han a century prior to Curtius writing plausible .

The final point is a tantalisingly hard to date tapestry (left) excavated in the 1980s in Lop county, southern Xinjiang (near present Khotan). The contents are overtly Greek – a diadem wearing, Caucasian (note the blue eyes) soldier clutching a spear with tip much like a Macedonian sarissa, and with a centaur motif on the band above.

For me, this shows that at some point there were Macedonians trading produce with or influencing artisans in Central Asia – overwhelmingly likely neighbouring Greco-Bactrians. And, given trade routes (below) and the intervening Pamir range, these Macedonians were far more likely to be the Ferghana valley based Alexandrians described by Curtius than those from further south.

The devil is in the detail: due to looters destroying the archaeological context, date estimates for the tapestry range between 3rd century BCE to 4th century CE. Earlier proves nothing for our argument – its beyond dispute that Greeks were in the Ferghana around 300 BCE, and this is a long time from Wudi’s invasion. For historical reasons I am more inclined to a date in the centre of this range shortly before Han expansion – when trade routes to the Tarim basis oasis cities were being opened up, but before the nomad incursions into Central Asia. If so, this is perhaps the strongest evidence for a Greek identification with the Dayuan – and the tantalising possibility of serried Macedonian phalanges meeting Li Guangli’s Han troops in 104.

So where was Ershi? As I have alluded to above, in principle I think the most likely identification is Khujand – i.e. Alexandria the Furthest. Archaeological and historical evidence tells us this was the biggest Greek colony in the Ferghana, and if we agree on a Greek identity for ‘Great Ionian’ Dayuan it would be the most logical location for the capital. The 3rd century Weilue 魏略 by Yu Huan 魚豢, an account of later Silk Road routes, almost certainly mentions a powerful Alexandria the Furthest in the Dayuan region (see the excellent linguistic argument for its identification under §24 here). However, when describing Dayuan the Hanshu chronicles actually refers to a 貴山 Guishan as the capital (HS.96 “大宛國，王治貴山城”), elsewhere in the section only referencing 貳師 Ershi obliquely as Li Guangli‘s title (the ‘Ershi General’) in his war against Dayuan. Conversely, the Shiji of Sima Qian clearly describes Ershi as a city, origin of the heavenly horses and the target of Li Guangli’s campaign (e.g. Shiji.123: “宛有善馬在貳師城“). Finally, another part of the Hanshu (in the annals of Wudi’s reign) describes Guangli executing a king of Dayuan, presumably after conquering a capital at Ershi (HS.6 “貳師將軍廣利斬大宛王首”) and the choice of a new ruler from local nobles. 

I don’t know what to make of this – there have been numerous suggestions for the locations of Guishan and Ershi (tending to assign Khujand, i.e. Alexandria the Furthest, to at least one); perhaps Ershi was strategic military fortress-cum-bolthole, or we are dealing with two competing toponyms for the same place (cf. the well known problem with historic Troy as Ilion/Wilusa or Troy/Troia). From my inexpert Classical Chinese, I would also note that Ershi 貳師 literally means ‘second [military] division’ and I do wonder if there has been textual corruption or poor readings of the source material originally referring to a military detachment or commandery.

Nonetheless, I think we can still draw some tentative conclusions. Firstly, the Kingdom of the Heavenly Horses had until very recently been Greek ruled, and likely still maintained a recognisably Greek character (and perhaps even Greek style army) when the Han went to war with it. Secondly, the capital of Han Wudi’s furthest western conquest was by historic accident also the site of Alexander the Great’s furthest eastern colony – and may well have been the same city taken in 101. 

Crassus’s Lost Legions

For the final part, we jump forward 70 years to a battle on the Han frontier, and to the 1940-50s and the theory of American Sinologist Homer H. Dubs.

Dubs noted (see bibliography) an unusual passage from historian Ban Gu in the Hanshu, recalling the Battle of Zhizhi in 36 BCE between the Han and Xiongnu somewhere on the Talas River in southern Kazakhstan. As the Xiongnu forces leave their city;

“…又出百餘騎往來馳城下，步兵百餘人夾門魚鱗陳，講習用兵。”

“…and over one hundred horse riders arrayed below the city, and over a hundred infantry came out of the gate in fish scale formation, and practised their manoeuvres” (HS.70)

Dubs’ leap (allegedly spurred on by great William Tarn) was to first assume the unusual formation above could refer to the Roman testudo ‘tortoise’ formation of interlocking shields. But whence Romans in Kazakhstan? Dubs then pointed to the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE, 17 years previously, where over 10,000 Romans soldiers were taken prisoner after the Parthians obliterated an army led into Syria by the Roman triumvir Marcus Licinius Crassus. Pliny refers in passing (Hist.Nat.6.18) to King Orodes bringing these prisoners to Margiana (Merv, present Turkmenistan), while Horace laments on their marriage to Parthian barbarae (Odes.3.5). Dubs contended that these Romans fled their captivity, enlisting as mercenaries in Xiongnu service and leading to their appearance at the Battle of Zhizhi.

The second leap was what happened to these soldiers. The Hanshu records that after the battle, defeated Xiongnu troops were distributed to allied kingdoms in the region. Dubs noted that a 5 CE Han register lists a town called Liqian 驪靬 in Gansu; Liqian is a non-Chinese loanword used elsewhere to refer to Rome, from which Dubs hypothesised this was where the lost legionaries were settled. This part of the story has had a long life, cropping up regularly in newspapers and journals, spurred on by a prevalence of supposedly Caucasian features around the site of Liqian in modern Yongchang County, Gansu (which has recently erected a theme park-style ‘European town’ and even funded a terrible romcom inspired by the myth). 

While his paper is a cracking read, needless to say there are numerous problems with Dubs’ imaginative theory both from Roman history and modern evidence (genetics show the people of Liqian, while maybe connected to the ancient Caucasian people of western China such as the Yuezhi, are certainly not Romans). However, in light of the above discussion on Dayuan, there are a few intriguing further considerations to note:

• The Hanshu puts the battle of Zhizhi as near Kangju – the same territory as Yu Huan’s Weilue (above) sites Alexandria the Furthest. Modern Taraz, a proposed site for the battle, is only 200 miles from Khujand and Dayuan.
• Dubs etymologises Liqian, which is used elsewhere in Han documents for Rome, as a transcription of Alexandria (with the Egyptian metropolis used as metonym for the whole Empire). This must be right; but there is equally no reason it cannot also be right for Alexandria the Furthest.
• Li Guangli may have defeated Dayuan 70 years previously, but this was not a Mongol-style obliteration – the territory was left intact, with a new local king chosen and a tribute relationship with Chang’an.

In his 1957 article Dubs roundly dismissed a Greek identity for the fishscale formation at Zhizhi and the ancestors of Liqian, asserting that interlocked Macedonian aspis shields would not achieve this image. Perhaps he is right; I would also contend we should be flexible in visualising a three-character Chinese hapax legemon. Either way, my sense is we should first look to the embers of Greek civilisation in Central Asia, and their fascinating possible interactions with a newly risen China, when mapping out the hints and suggestions of east meets west in the first century BCE.

Bibliography

Most of the above comes from my own (perhaps hopelessly naive) reading of primary source material, but I also found the following useful when putting together:

Twitchett, D and Loewe, M (eds.) (1986) The Cambridge History of China I: The Chi’n and Han Empires, 221 BC-AD 220 

Sampson, G. (2008) Defeat of Rome in the East: Crassus, the Parthians, and the Disastrous Battle of Carrhae, 53 BC

Dubs, Homer H. (October 1957). “A Roman City in Ancient China”. Greece and Rome Vol.4 no.2  

Hill, John E. (2004) The Peoples of the West from the Weilue 魏略 by Yu Huan 魚豢: A Third Century Chinese Account Composed between 239 and 265 CE Quoted in zhuan 30 of the Sanguozhi Published in 429 CE (Draft English translation) at https://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/weilue/weilue.html 

 

 

 

“There’s no Church, but we did find the first man over there!”

As we nauseously crawled up the hills wrapping around Fangshan, a rural district south west of Beijing city proper, our driver gesticulated proudly at the improbably large museum being erected by the roadside. The site of one of modern anthropology’s more controversial findings, the homo erectus ‘Peking Man’, whose bones were lost in the brutal period of Japanese occupation, Fangshan’s attempts to redefine itself as a tourist beacon were still undermined by the lacklustre infrastructure and half-hearted attempts by municipal government. Further up the hills, the overgrown and abandoned tomb complex of Imperial China’s Jurchen Jin dynasty was marked only by a cracked carpark and the skeleton of a neglected visitors centre, a few locals collecting butterflies on the 12th century terraces and processional way.

The voyage had been prompted by a grainy black and white photo and caption in Beijing’s Capital Museum – the Fangshan District ‘Temple of the Cross’, a bona fide remnant of Nestorian Christianity’s presence in 1st millennium China. Nestorian Christianity, also known as the ‘Church of the East’ (or in Mandarin: 景教 Jingjiao ‘The Luminous Religion’), originally a Sassanian Persian offshoot of the Syriac Church, entered China early in the 7th century. Its most famous attestation is arguably the 8th century 大秦 ‘Daqin’ (an early Chinese term for Rome) stele in Xi’an (the Tang Capital), a record of the 150 years since Nestorian Christianity was established in Tang China. Driven underground or even into extinction by persecution, the religion had a resurgence in the Yuan Dynasty, with Marco Polo commenting on Christians in Southern Fujian province and with records showing a number of bishops and dioceses shadowing the new Mongol administration based in Khanbaliq (Beijing).

So, while Christianity in China is more normally associated with the Matteo Ricci and the missionaries of the Qing, a Tang Church deep in northern China is perhaps more remarkable than inexplicable. And indeed, after switching to foot for a light climb for the last few miles, we came across a cleared terrace in one of Fangshan’s valley with the footprint of a modest building and stelae attesting to this remarkable site – Beijing’s earliest Church 十字寺: Shizisi, ‘Temple of the Cross’.

The two stelae and other remnants uncovered by Republican archaeologists in the 1930s allow us to piece together the history of a site which tells a story of the vicissitudes of unstable North China, historically an area on the fringes of Han Chinese control and often lapsing into ‘barbarian’ orbits. Founded as a Buddhist precinct by the (Han) Eastern Jin Dynasty in 317 CE, Chongsheng Temple 崇圣院 was converted to a Nestorian Church under the new Tang Emperor Taizong as early as 638 CE – merely 3 years after Christianity officially entered China, and at the start of the feted Tang Golden Age. The first stele records how the Liao Dynasty, the Khitan Empire which emerged out of Manchuria to wrest control from the Tang, converted Chongsheng back to Buddhism in the 10th century. The second (below) records how in the 1350s the crumbling Yuan Dynasty – who had swept into Northern China a century previously, wiping out the ‘barbarian’ Jurchen Jin on their way to smash the forces of the Song – reestablished the Nestorian Church, giving in the moniker ‘Temple of the Cross’. This was the title it bore until the Ming, who had at long last reinstated Han rule over the Beijing area, rededicated the complex to Buddhism in the 16th century before it faded from history and disappeared into ruin.

The Temple of the Cross isn’t a sight of great ruins or mystery like the Daqin Pagoda, an alleged Nestorian monastery outside Xi’an, nor does it embody the pivotal significance of old Silk Road centres in Xinjiang or Shaanxi. But there is a satisfying story told in this secluded corner of Greater Beijing, a story which perhaps tells much more about the complexities of ‘China’ as it interacted with the world outside its borders over the ages.