Oracle Bones (24 page)

LIU E DID
a little bit of everything. He was a scholar and a physician; he ran a weaving factory and a salt business. He was known for his expertise in mathematics, mines, railways, and water conservancy. He advised the government on how to control the persistent flooding of the Yellow River. And he was a great collector of antiquities, which is one reason why he acquired Wang Yirong’s oracle bones. Like his friend, Liu E worked fast, publishing the first book of oracle-bone rubbings in 1903.

But also like Wang Yirong, Liu E had bad luck when it came to foreigners and politics. Later that decade, he was punished for illegally selling government-stored millet to foreigners. The charges were trumped-up, and in 1908, he was exiled to Xinjiang—China’s Siberia, the end of the world for an educated gentleman. A year later, Liu E was dead.

We should perform a beheading sacrifice at Qiu Shang.

We ritually report the king’s sick eyes to Grandfather Ding.

There will be calamities; there may be someone bringing alarming news.

A CURSE SEEMED
to travel with the oracle bones; or perhaps the artifacts merely distilled a curse that had settled onto imperial China. These were hard times, as Liu E himself had explained in a novel called
Lao Can Youji
, “The Travels of Old Derelict.” In his introduction, Liu E wrote:

Now we grieve for our own life, for our country, for our society and for our culture. The greater our grief, the more bitter our outcry; and thus this book was written. The game of chess is drawing to a close and we are growing old.

Another victim of the curse was Duan Fang—viceroy of the Qing, provincial governor, and one of the greatest collectors of antiquities in all of China. He particularly loved ancient bronzes (some fine pieces originally from his collection now reside in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Gallery). The oracle bones also caught Duan’s attention, and reportedly he offered more than three ounces of silver for each inscribed word. A middleman working on behalf of Duan was one of the first to trace the artifacts back to Anyang.

Duan had a reputation for being open to foreigners; during the Boxer Uprising, he had sheltered a number of missionaries in Shaanxi, the province that he governed. After the foreigners put down the uprising, the Qing government was forced to apologize and pay indemnities, and they finally began to institute significant modern reforms. In 1905, an imperial edict appointed five special commissioners who would travel in Western countries, observe the foreign governments, and return with ideas about how to create a Chinese constitution. Along with another official, Duan Fang was chosen to lead a delegation to the United States and Europe.

In January of 1906, he arrived in San Francisco with an entourage of sixty, as well as 750 pieces of luggage, each of which had been labeled, in Chinese and English,
HIS IMPERIAL CHINESE MAJESTY’S SPECIAL MISSION.
The timing was slightly awkward. In the United States, racist exclusion laws prevented Chinese from entering the country, but President Theodore Roosevelt declared the Qing party exempt. Professor Jeremiah W. Jenks, acting as President Roosevelt’s personal representative, gave a speech to greet the delegation in San Francisco:

Of course, you will understand, as every one in the two countries does, that it is, and will be, the policy of the United States to exclude from this country the Chinese laborers. On the other hand, the other classes, including scholars especially, and the distinguished officials who are conducting the affairs of the government, it does give us, and will give us, great pleasure to welcome….

According to contemporary newspaper reports, the Qing delegation used the special exemption to smuggle in at least one Chinese laborer whom they had befriended on the boat.

The trip went well. Duan Fang was part Manchu and part Chinese—sometimes, he carried two calling cards, one for each of his family names—and he cut an impressive figure. He wore a full-length fur coat during the commission’s visit to West Point (where it was four degrees below zero, and where Duan Fang became particularly interested in an automatic door and a mechanical potato peeler). He met President Roosevelt in the Blue Room of the White House. He visited Harvard, Columbia, the United States Treasury, and Standard Oil. He stopped in Nebraska to see the state penitentiary. In Europe, he greatly admired the military uniforms, and after his return to China he adopted the practice of being photographed in the dress of the Chinese Imperial Guard.

But he also picked up some foreign habits that were less acceptable in China. He was dismissed from his post as provincial governor after being accused of disrespect during the empress dowager’s funeral in 1909. Allegedly, Duan had permitted photographers to shoot the cortege, and a cinematographer had recorded the last solemn rites. (Duan also allowed trees within the mausoleum complex to be used as telegraph poles.) After his dismissal, he accepted a position as superintendent of a new nationalized railway, funded by foreign loans. By now, anti-Qing and anti-Manchu sentiment was building, and it finally exploded in October of 1911, when battalions of soldiers mutinied in Wuhan. The revolt quickly gained momentum, and the court ordered Duan Fang to transfer imperial troops to Sichuan province.

The leader of his own army turned against him. At the end, Duan Fang reportedly tried to convince the rebels that he was actually Chinese, not Manchu; but by then it was too late to switch calling cards. The rebels beheaded him, buried the body in Sichuan, and carried the head to Wuhan: a grim symbol of their commitment to overthrow the Qing.

On the other side of the world, on a train bound for Kansas City, Sun Yat-sen read about the Wuhan uprising in a Denver newspaper. By Christmas, he was back in China; on New Year’s Day of 1912, he took office as “provisional president” of the new Chinese republic. The last Qing emperor, Puyi, abdicated on February 12. Shortly after that, Sun Yat-sen lost out in a power struggle with the warlord Yuan Shikai—a man who had married a son to Duan Fang’s daughter. But neither Yuan Shikai nor Sun Yat-sen would be strong enough to lead the nation; by 1925, both were dead. China was left to the looming threats of the future—the warlords and the foreigners and the prospect of civil war.

We will pacify the Wind with three sheep, three dogs, three pigs.

Today there will not be someone bringing bad news.

In the next ten days there will be no disasters.

FROM THE BEGINNING,
Beijing pharmacists had been smart enough not to reveal the source of their “dragon bones.” They tried to corner the market, lying about the provenance of the artifacts, whose popularity quickly spread. By 1904, foreigners started collecting, inspired by Liu E’s book. Many of these early collectors were missionaries: the Reverend Frank H. Chalfant, the Reverend Samuel Couling, the Reverend Paul Bergen. Often, they sold or donated the artifacts to museums: the Carnegie Museum, the British Museum, the Royal Scottish Museum.

It didn’t take long for fakes to appear. In the curio markets of Beijing and Shanghai, artisans learned how to engrave Shang characters into bone, and they also learned how to spot suckers. The Reverend Paul Bergen proudly presented seventy oracle-bone fragments to the White Wright Institute, but most turned out to be forgeries:
jiade
. Meanwhile, Chinese collectors such as Duan Fang figured out the source for genuine oracle bones and sent middlemen to Anyang. Local peasants dug like crazy. In 1904, a visiting search party clashed with residents; there was a fight and then a lawsuit. Finally, a disgusted local magistrate decided: No more excavating for oracle bones.

But a ban was useless in a place like Anyang. The peasants followed the rhythms of weather and politics: they dug for bones during the hard years, when the floods ruined crops, or a drought hung heavy, or a warlord battle interrupted the planting season. Sometimes, a discovery happened by pure luck. In 1909, a local landowner named Zhang Xuexian harvested potatoes and stumbled upon an impressive cache of scapula fragments. Villagers often said that Zhang got rich by digging for vegetables. The story spread, and finally, in 1926, a group of bandits captured Zhang and held him for ransom.

Zhang’s family had only one option for raising quick cash. They allowed other villagers to dig on their property, under the condition that all profits from oracle bones would be shared fifty-fifty. The peasants divided into three parties. After that initial division, however, there was no further attempt at central planning. Each group began to dig as quickly as possible, and all three happened to aim at a single spot beneath the earth. As they approached this invisible goal, and the trio of tunnels drew closer, the earth finally collapsed. Four men were buried alive; they were lucky to be rescued. That was the end of Zhang Xuexian’s ransom dig.

The king, [reading the cracks], said: “There will perhaps be thunder.”

The king, [reading the cracks], said: “Greatly auspicious.”

Tonight there will be no disasters.

THE ORACLE BONES
appeared during a crisis that ran far deeper than politics or economics. By the early twentieth century, foreign armies had proved to be far more powerful than the Chinese, and foreign political systems were certainly more efficient. But some Chinese intellectuals believed that even history was a Western advantage. Westerners perceived change as natural: the pharaohs disappeared; Greece collapsed; Rome fell. Without the weight of a continuous history and the conservatism of Confucianism, Westerners seemed more likely to look ahead. And rather than being shortsighted—tonight there will be no disasters—the Western view of the future expected tangible, long-term progress.

Western history was also more fluid. There had been key moments during which Europeans had transformed their culture through an infusion of ancient values half-familiar and half-foreign, like the Renaissance and the neoclassical Age of Enlightenment. Even archaeology fit neatly into the Western tradition of change. In nineteenth-century Europe, the new discipline of archaeology was dominated by the rising middle class, whose descriptions of ancient ages—from stone to bronze to iron—reflected a modern faith in material progress.

In China, though, intellectuals looked back and saw nothing but more Chinese history. Emperors and dynasties, emperors and dynasties—the endless spiral of time. At the turn of the century, the culture suddenly felt suffocating, and radicals proposed doing away with almost everything traditional. In the early 1900s, one group of Chinese intellectuals called themselves the Doubting in Antiquity School, because they questioned the traditional historical texts that had been copied and studied repeatedly through the ages. To these skeptics, early “dynasties” such as the Xia and the Shang lacked evidence. The intellectuals perceived history as a trap—a set of hidebound traditions that had prevented China from modernizing.

These doubters dismissed the oracle bones as forgeries. In response, the defenders of traditional Chinese culture worked hard to interpret the fragments, hoping to prove their authenticity. One of the most brilliant scholars was Wang Guowei, who used the oracle-bone inscriptions to perform a breakthrough reconstruction of the Shang royal genealogy. By studying the names found on the
artifacts, and comparing them with classical histories, Wang proved that the books and the bones matched up. His work was a crucial step toward making the Shang truly historical—a culture that had left trustworthy documents.

For Wang Guowei, the oracle bones represented only one element of an obsession with the past. He was a committed monarchist; he believed with all his heart that the Qing should regain power. This vision was shared by Puyi, the last emperor, who, after his abdication, had remained inside the Forbidden City. Within the vermillion walls, life functioned as if nothing had changed. Time was still marked by the imperial calendar, dated by Qing rule, and Puyi continued the traditional rituals. In 1923, he appointed Wang Guowei as Companion of the Southern Study, a position that involved the cataloging of palace treasures. For one year, Wang lived in this last fragment of empire, studying old paintings, dusty scrolls, and bronzes that had turned green with the centuries. In 1924, a warlord finally forced the “emperor” to abandon his palace. Less than three years later, realizing that the empire was gone forever, Wang Guowei drowned himself in the former summer palace of the Qing. After his death, a fellow scholar wrote a memorial:

Whenever a culture is in decline, anyone who has received benefits from this culture will necessarily suffer. The more a person embodies this culture, the deeper will be his suffering.

Later that decade, archaeology finally brought the doubters and the traditionalists together. The discipline had always appealed to skeptics, who pointed out that the oracle bones had not been “scientifically” excavated. Meanwhile, intellectuals all across China had been calling for the adoption of Western science and philosophy since the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Even the traditionalists supported archaeology, in the hope that excavations could uncover final proof of the Shang. In 1928, the newly founded Institute of History and Philology selected Anyang as the site of the first ever Chinese-organized archaeological dig.

The scholars knew that the nation was at risk and time might be short. Officially, the Kuomintang ruled China, but there were threats everywhere: brutal warlords in the north, dedicated Communists in the interior, Japanese invaders in the northeast. Over the next decade, events moved quickly, and so did the Anyang digs. In 1928, exploratory excavations near the west bank of the Huan River uncovered 784 pieces of inscribed oracle bones. That same year, the Japanese assassinated a northern warlord, as part of their campaign to establish military control in Manchuria. The Kuomintang officially established
their new capital in Nanjing, in part to avoid the chaos of the north. Under pressure from the Kuomintang, the young Mao Zedong fled to the Jiangxi Soviet, in the interior.