Who knew?!
By James H. Andrews
Presented to joint meeting of the Chicago Literary Club and the Fortnightly
March 5, 2010
“The weather was very dry in 1974, and the grain was drying in the fields,” the man said. “Our village leaders decided to dig a well, so we found a low place and began digging.
“We found the red earth was very hard about a meter down. On the third day, I dug out something resembling a jar.” One of the men “asked me to dig gently so he could take the ‘jar’ home to use as a container.”
“We didn’t know it at the time,” the man told a newspaper reporter last fall, but actually that jar was part of a ceramic human head. “Then we dug out the body, which was like a statue in a temple.”
The buried pieces were made of terra cotta, a fired pottery material. These and countless other fragments found later at the site have been fitted together, creating an army of thousands of life-size pottery warriors, and their horses. They are known around the world as the terra cotta warriors of China.
Digging for water and finding an army! Who knew?
Americans and Europeans for a long time saw China as a land of mystery, of secrets, of an inscrutable people, who used a language difficult for us to read and to understand. The discovery of these terra cotta warriors—after their creation and burial more than 2,000 years ago, and buried, in formation, under ground—who knew?—bolsters that old sense that China holds many secrets. Despite multiple links today between China and America—in business, education, travel—we often find ourselves saying, who knew?
Several months ago, as I thought about how to address the expression “who knew,” my wife, a regular reader of China Daily, reminded me that the president of China is named, of all things, Hu.
Mr. Hu, whose named is spelled H U, assumed office in 2003 and visited our country last year. I considered his remarkable name. Then I thought about his country, and how it has puzzled us for such a long time. So tonight I will talk briefly about four discoveries that opened our Western eyes, and found us wondering, “who knew?!”
Now back to the warriors. When a local official responsible for cultural relics learned that a large number of terra cotta fragments had been found in his county, he rushed to the site. He was surprised to see fragments of heads, torsos, arms, and legs. He had them trucked to the local museum, and there began to reconstruct the statues. Soon after, a journalist came to see them, and spread the word. Four months later an archeologist was sent to the site and excavation continued, as it does to this day.
The
buried army is part of the underground tomb complex of Emperor Qin shi
huang, who ordered its construction. Qin first
to unite the vast territory the West knows as China and gave it his name. He
declared himself First Emperor in the year 221
B.C. and is known by that name. He ruled
until his death in 206 B.C.
Today tourists from around the world go to the old Silk Road city of Xian, then drive out to see the warriors. By late last year there were almost 60 million visitors.
Visitors walk into a huge structure, with an arch dome covering a rectangle of 1600 square meters (almost half an acre). Facing the visitors, standing below them at ground level, are thousands of life-size troops in battle formation: infantrymen, cavalrymen, archers, and drivers of chariots. The army faces east, protecting the tomb behind them, the resting place of the emperor who ordered their creation.
In the vanguard is a unit of bowmen and crossbowmen, with outer files of archers. Behind them stand 36 files of foot soldiers in armor, originally carrying spears or swords. Behind them is a squad of six chariots, and more infantry squads with a rearguard of armored infantrymen.
No one soldier in this pit seems to look like another, though most of them were made of seven separate parts. There are eight different types of heads. Despite standard body parts, clothing, and weapons, the effect is of individuality and variety. Close examination reveals great care in the modeling. The soles of the kneeling archers’ shoes, made more than 2,000 years ago, are exactly the same as the homemade shoes worn by many Chinese in the 1970s.
Two more pits were found in 1976. Altogether the three pits contain nearly 8,000 terra cotta warriors and horses.
Who knew? Not even President Hu. At the time of the first discovery he was only 32.
We now know something about the China of 2,000 years ago. But how did Europe and the West learn about China in the first place? Who knew it was there? Who knew what it was like? We move on to our next story.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
With these lines, Samuel Taylor Coleridge began his poem, “Kubla Khan.” It was based on a dream he had in 1798 and a memoir published 500 years before by Marco Polo.
Polo describes the central audience hall of a palace of the Great Khan of China:
“The building is altogether so vast, so rich and so beautiful that no man on earth could design anything superior to it. (Who knew?) The outside of the roof is all coloured with vermilion and yellow and blue and other hues, which are fixed with a varnish so fine and exquisite that they shine like crystal, and lend a resplendent lustre to the palace as seen for a great way round. This roof is made, too, with such strength and solidity that it is fit to last for ever.”
Who knew of such marvels?
Marco Polo left Venice in 1271, spent 17 years in the empire of Khubilai Khan, then returned home after a journey of 24 years. He was the first European to reach the heart of Cathay, or north China. He traveled all the way to the Pacific, to Tibet and Burma and India. He became the confidant of Khubilai Khan, and governor of the great Chinese city of Yangzhou. His memoir was sometimes called The Book of Marvels.
From Polo we learn about the kowtow. In their first meeting with the Great Khan, the Mongol ruler of China, the three Polos—Marco, his father and his uncle—“kneel before him with great reverence, and humble themselves the most that they are able, stretching themselves out on the earth.” Who knew?
Khubilai Khan had become emperor of China in 1259. He established his court at what is now Beijing. His kingdom was the largest and most populous empire in the history of the world until that time.
He entertained thousands to mark his birthday and the new year. He made elaborate hunting trips, accompanied by trained lions, leopards, and lynxes that chased and often captured boars, oxen, bears, and wild asses. Khubilai himself, Polo says, “always goes on four elephants, on which he has a very beautiful wooden room, which is all covered inside with cloth of beaten gold and on the outside it is wrapped round & covered with lion skins.”
The Khan’s life was not all pleasure. He encouraged commerce. “I believe there is not a place in the world,” says Polo, the worldly trader from Venice, “to which so many merchants come, and that dearer things of greater value and more strange come into this town . . . than into any city of the world.”
Who knew?
In 1416, some 125 years after Khubilai Khan, the Ming emperor of China ordered construction of a complex of palaces in Beijing that we know as the Forbidden City. It covered 180 acres. Its palaces, temples and other buildings, made of painted wood, hold some 900 rooms. Twenty-four emperors ruled from that place.
Although located in the heart of Beijing, the Forbidden City was surrounded by walls and moats. It has had, as one writer puts it, a metaphorical life. There was the reality of the walls that hid the imperial court. There was also the mysterious but powerful perception, in the West especially, of a secretive and hidden world that symbolized what so many people saw as the enigma of China.
The Forbidden City itself did not seem to be a real place occupied by real people. And of course it was not meant to be. People believed that the emperor was the son of heaven, the center of the universe. His palace should be “the pivot point of the four directions and symbolic center of the empire.”
The most tangible evidence of the Forbidden City for many of us in Chicago came in 2004 when the Field Museum mounted an exhibition entitled, “Splendors of China’s Forbidden City: The Glorious Reign of Emperor Qianlong.” We were impressed, even dazzled. There were beautiful objects, treasures from the Palace Museum in Beijing, evidence of a wealthy and magnificent court. But this Qianlong—who was he?
Qianlong was a Manchurian. He ruled from 1735 until his death at age 88 in 1799, more than 60 years, longer than any other Chinese emperor. Who knew?
And he ruled absolutely, over a vast empire—5.5 million square miles, greater than at any time before or since, and a population, when he died, of more than 300 million. It was the richest empire in the world. Who knew?
The Field exhibition portrayed a talented and hard-working ruler, a family man, a dedicated Buddhist who grasped the importance of balancing church and state, a competent arts connoisseur and daring patron, and a lover of both publicity and privacy. Qianlong was one of the most prolific poets of all time. Who knew?
The emperor delighted in pomp and circumstance, for which the spectacular palace was well suited, giving him, among other things, the opportunity to display in a regal manner his herd of thirty elephants.
But Qianlong and his family did not like living in the Forbidden City, and did so only three months a year. Its spaces were ill-suited to his work, to managing the vast empire, and to the outdoor recreation he loved.
Later rulers didn’t like the Forbidden City either. One 19th century emperor said the place was like a warren of “dank ditches with vermilion walls and green-tiled roofs.”
A lady in waiting said that “the courtyards were small, and the verandas very broad. . . . [T]he rooms were in absolute darkness even in the middle of the afternoon.”
Five years ago it looked the same way. Who knew!
We now turn to Tzu Hsi, the Dowager Empress of China, who ruled China as the power behind the throne for almost 50 years.
The Empress Dowager exercised power through her position as regent or co-regent for two child emperors. She moved into the Forbidden City as an imperial concubine at age 16, and five years later gave birth to the emperor’s son. When the emperor died soon afterward, Tzu Hsi had herself named co-regent for her son, then 4. He died at 18, and the Dowager, overcoming both tradition and internal opposition, made her 3-year-old nephew emperor and served as regent for him until1887. In 1898 she pushed the emperor aside and ruled until both died in 1908.
Sometimes known derisively as the Dragon Lady, Tzu Hsi personified what one writer calls “the untold story of the Forbidden City.” Stories of dark plots and savagery at the court of the Empress Dowager repelled and intrigued people in China and throughout the world.” She was reputed to be a blood-thirsty, profligate, ignorant ruler with scandalous sexual habits.
We now know that most of these characterizations are false. But for much of the 20th century, who knew?
Outsiders knew little about the Dowager Empress or the inner workings of the court until the last years of the 19th century. No foreigners even met the Dowager until 1898, when she was 63 years old.
For most of that century China’s isolation and power were under assault by European and American traders and the Japanese military. Most public knowledge of China came from the world’s leading newspaper, the Times of London. Although it was quoted all over the world—the Chicago Tribune ran its reports—the paper’s correspondents in Beijing and Shanghai had no sources inside the Forbidden City, and the Beijing correspondent did not know the Chinese language.
Beginning in 1898, with the help of Chinese dissidents and their own vivid imaginations, Times correspondents began reporting so-called “inside” stories: The Dowager was keeping the young emperor prisoner, doping him on drugs and alcohol. She had embezzled money earmarked for building a modern navy, using it for extravagant improvements to her Summer Palace. Furthermore, the dowager’s chief palace eunuch was not a eunuch at all, but one of her endless lovers and fellow conspirators.
These reports were elaborated in a book, published in London in 1905, China under the Empress Dowager, Being the History of the Life and Times of Tzu-Hsi, compiled from State Papers and the Private Diary of the Comptroller of Her Household. The authors were J.O.P. Bland, the Times Shanghai correspondent, and Edmund Backhouse, a Beijing resident who bragged about his inside knowledge. The best-selling book has since been discredited, and in 1940 the “private diary” was proved to be a forgery.
One of their stories is that, as the court was fleeing the Forbidden City during the Boxer Rebellion, in 1900, the Empress Dowager ordered eunuchs to get rid of the emperor’s favorite concubine, known as the Pearl Consort:
“The enraged Empress Dowager shouts, ‘Throw this wretched minion down the well!’—whereupon the hapless young woman is thrown to her death.”–in a well.
Son of Heaven! Who knew?
We began tonight with the digging of a well, and the subterranean secrets that were uncovered. We conclude with a story of murder by drowning, in a well. This last story may be true, but probably is not. Who knows?
As children, many of us were told that if we were to dig a very deep hole in the back yard, straight down, through the center of the earth, we would find ourselves in China. Not true.
But children in China were told the same thing—if they dug, far enough, they would reach America.
Who knew?
Sources
Barme, Geremie R. The Forbidden City. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Fairbank, John King. China: A New History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Yu Fei. “Solders of fortune” and “Archeological ‘heaven.’” China Daily, US Edition, Oct. 19, 2009.
Hesseler, Peter. “Rising to Life: Treasures of Ancient China. National Geographic, Nov. 2001. On line at http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2001/11/ancient-china/hessler-text. Accessed Jan. 2010.
Ho, Chuimei, and Bennet Bronson. Splendors of China’s Forbidden City: The Glorious Reign of Emperor Qianlong. New York: Merrell Publishers and the Field Museum, 2004.
Meng Jianmin and Zhang Lin, Editors-in chief. Awakened: Qin’s Terra-Cotta Army. Xi’an: Shaanxi Travel & Tourism Press, 2001.
Rossabi, Morris. Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Seagrave, Sterling, with the collaboration of Peggy Seagrave. Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
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