Oracle Bones Read online

  ORACLE BONES

  A Journey Between China’s Past and Present

  PETER HESSLER

  for my sisters:

  Amy

  Angela

  and Birgitta

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Map

  PART ONE

  Artifact A: THE UNDERGROUND CITY

  1 The Middleman

  Artifact B: THE WRITTEN WORLD

  2 The Voice of America

  3 The Broken Bridge

  Artifact C: THE WALL

  4 The Overnight City

  PART TWO

  5 Starch

  6 Hollywood

  Artifact D: THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE

  7 At Night You’re Not Lonely

  8 Immigration

  9 The Courtyard

  Artifact E: THE BRONZE HEAD

  10 Anniversary

  11 Sichuanese

  PART THREE

  Artifact F: THE BOOK

  12 Asylum

  Artifact G: THE UNCRACKED BONE

  13 The Games

  14 Sand

  Artifact H: THE WORD

  15 Translation

  16 Flags

  17 Straight to Video

  Artifact I: THE HORSE

  18 Wonton Western

  19 Election

  PART FOUR

  20 Chinatown

  Artifact J: THE CRITICISM

  21 State Visit

  Artifact K: THE LOST ALPHABETS

  22 Encapsulate Prime

  Artifact L: THE MISPRINTED CHARACTER

  23 Patton’s Tomb

  Artifact Z: THE SOLD WORDS

  24 Tea

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Other Books by Peter Hessler

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  THIS IS A WORK OF NONFICTION, AND I HAVE USED REAL NAMES WITH one exception: Polat. The pseudonym is used at his request, because of political sensitivities in the People’s Republic of China.

  This book was researched from 1999 to 2004, a period whose events are still resonating. I expect that in the future we will learn more about these occurrences, and my depiction is not intended to be comprehensive or definitive. My goal has been to follow certain individuals across this period, recording how their lives were shaped by a changing world.

  These people led me to many places—some in China, some in the United States, and others, such as Xinjiang and Taiwan, that are in dispute. Boundaries and definitions often seemed fluid, and so did time itself. The main chapters of this book are arranged chronologically, but the short sections labeled “artifacts” are not. They reflect a deeper sense of time—the ways in which people make sense of history after it has receded farther into the past.

  Polat means “steel” in the Uighur language, and he chose that name because of the qualities that he believed are necessary for anybody far from home.

  Map

  PART ONE

  ARTIFACT A

  The Underground City

  FROM BEIJING TO ANYANG—FROM THE MODERN CAPITAL TO THE CITY known as a cradle of ancient Chinese civilization—it takes six hours by train. Sitting by the window, there are moments when a numbness sets in, and the scenery seems as patterned as wallpaper: a peasant, a field, a road, a village; a peasant, a field, a road, a village. This sense of repetition is not new. In 1981, David N. Keightley, an American professor of history, took the train to Anyang. Afterward, he wrote in a letter to his family: “The land is generally flat, monotonous, one village much like another…. Where are the gentry estates, the mansions, the great houses of England and France? What was it about this society that failed to produce such monuments to civilized aristocratic living?”

  Move back in time, and it’s the same: a peasant, a field, a road, a village. In the 1930s, a foreign resident named Richard Dobson wrote: “There is no history in Honan.” Today, that seems an unlikely remark, because this region is known as the archives and the grave of the Shang dynasty. The Shang produced the earliest known writing in East Asia, inscribed into bones and shells—the oracle bones, as they are called in the West. If one defines history as written records, this part of Henan is where it all began for China.

  But visitors have often wondered about something other than origins. Move back in time once more, to the 1880s, when an American named James Harrison Wilson wrote: “They have stood absolutely still in knowledge since the middle ages.” He explained, “The essence of their history can be told in a few short chapters.” It has to do with trajectory, progress—expectations of the West. In the traditional view of the Chinese past, there is no equivalent of the fall of Rome, no Renaissance, no Enlightenment. Instead, emperor succeeds emperor, and dynasty follows dynasty. History as wallpaper. In A Truthful Impression of the Country, an analysis of Western travel writing about China, Nicholas R. Clifford describes this nineteenth-century foreign perspective: “China had a far longer past than the West—no one would think of denying that—but the past and history are not the same thing. Here in China’s past there was no narrative but only stories.”

  IN ANYANG, AT an archaeological site called Huanbei, a small group of men work in a field, mapping an underground city. The city dates to the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C., when the Shang culture was probably approaching its peak. Nowadays, the Shang ruins lie far beneath the soil, usually at a depth of five to eight feet. Peasants have planted crops for centuries without realizing that an entire city waited beneath them.

  The layers of earth accumulated over time. This site is bordered by the Huan River, and periodic floods have deposited alluvial soil onto the field. There is also loess: thin, dry particles that originated from the Gobi and other deserts of the northwest. Loess is easily windborne, and over the centuries, layers of it have been blown south and then redeposited in places like Anyang. In northern China, the yellow earth can be as deep as six hundred feet.

  Elsewhere in the world, archaeologists search for ridges and mounds, visible signs of buried structures. But here the naked eye isn’t adequate; a two-dimensional view of Anyang reveals only flatness. The men in the field work under the direction of a young archaeologist named Jing Zhichun, who explains the challenges of research in a place like this.

  “You have to look at the landscape in a dynamic way,” he says. “You have to see the landscape evolving. It might be completely different from what it was three thousand years ago. We’re looking at human society in three dimensions; it’s not just the surface that matters. We had to add another dimension: the time dimension. You can look all around here and see nothing, but in fact this was the first city in the area. If you don’t add time, you’ll find nothing.”

  The workers are local peasants, and they dig with Luoyang spades—the characteristic tool of Chinese archaeology. In Luoyang, one of China’s many former capital cities, generations of grave robbers practiced their craft to the point of technical innovation: a tubular blade, cut in half like a scoop and then attached to a long pole. If you pound the blade straight into the earth and twist it slightly, you extract a core of soil about half a foot long and less than two inches in diameter. Do it again and again—dozens of times—and the hole becomes a tiny shaft that penetrates six or more feet, bringing up deeper cores. When the shaft is deep enough, the dirt samples might contain bits of pottery or bone or bronze, or perhaps the hard tamped earth that was traditionally used to construct buildings.

  Thieves developed the Luoyang spade, but during the first half of the twentieth century, Chinese archaeologists adopted the tool for their purposes. An experienced archaeologist can take a core from t
he deep earth, examine its contents, and determine whether he stands above an ancient buried wall, or a tomb, or a rubbish pit. The dirt plugs reflect the meaning of what lies below; they are like words that can be recognized at a glance.

  For years, Jing and the others have been reading the earth in this part of Anyang. They began with a systematic survey, digging holes across the fields and checking for signs of buried structures. One series of random corings turned up an object: tamped earth, twenty feet wide, lying six feet beneath the surface. As they surveyed the underground structure, they realized that it ran as straight as an arrow. They followed it across the soybean fields, accumulating tiny holes and piles of cores in their wake. Three hundred yards, a thousand yards—more holes, more cores. When the object suddenly stopped, they discovered a ninety-degree bend: a corner. At that point they realized that it must have been a settlement wall, and since then they have continued tracing the boundary and other interior structures. They are mapping a city that no living person has ever seen.

  This is an early stage of archaeology; after the coring is finished, they will undertake more extensive excavations. But Jing never seems rushed to get there. He moves slowly, deliberately. He is thirty-seven years old, a friendly man with a quick smile, and his face is a work of simple geometry: round head, round cheeks, round-rimmed glasses. He grew up in Nanjing, but he studied archaeology at the University of Minnesota. His cultural references are broad and sometimes they catch me by surprise. During one of our walks above the underground city, he tells me to avoid thinking of the Shang as a dynasty in the political sense.

  “A lot of people talk about the Shang as if it was very big,” he says. “They’re looking at the ancient state as if it were a modern state. People find Shang artifacts everywhere and they think, well, this region was part of the Shang state. But you have to make a distinction between cultural and political control. I would say that in terms of political entity it was actually very small—maybe no bigger than three river valleys. But the cultural influence was much bigger. It’s like if I buy McDonald’s here, you wouldn’t say that I’m in America. It’s the culture.”

  THE PEASANTS SWEAT in the autumn sunshine. Their poles move in an uneven line, following the invisible path of a buried wall. The men dig a hole, take a few steps, dig another hole. If you watched from a distance, without any concept of the underground city, the work would appear to be a meaningless ritual: peasants with poles, marching across the dry soil. A hole, a few steps, another hole. A peasant, a field, a road, a village. A hole, a few steps, another hole.

  Outline of Ancient Chinese History

  1

  The Middleman

  May 8, 1999

  I WAS THE LAST CLIPPER AT THE BEIJING BUREAU OF THE WALL STREET Journal. The bureau was cramped—two rooms and a converted kitchen—and the staff consisted of two foreign correspondents, a secretary, a driver, and a clipper. The driver and I shared the kitchen. My tools were a set of box cutters, a metal ruler, and a glass-covered desk. Every afternoon, the foreign newspapers were stacked above the desk. If an article about China seemed worthwhile, I spread the paper on the glass, carved out the story, and filed it in the cabinets at the back of the main office. They paid me five hundred American dollars every month.

  The bureau was located in the downtown embassy district, a couple of miles from Tiananmen Square. In a neighborhood to the north, I found a cheap apartment to rent. It was a mixed area: old brick work-unit housing, some traditional hutong alleys, a luxury hotel. On one corner, next to the sidewalk, stood a big Pepsi billboard illuminated by floodlights. It was still possible to live quite simply in that part of the capital. Restaurants served lunch for less than a dollar, and I biked everywhere. When the spring evenings turned warm, young couples played badminton by the light of the Pepsi billboard.

  At most other foreign bureaus in Beijing, clippers had already become obsolete, because everything was being computerized. In the old days, paper files had been necessary, and young people accepted the job because it provided an introduction to journalism. A clipper sometimes helped with research and, if a big news event broke, he might do some spot reporting. On the average, the job required only a few hours a week, which left plenty of time for travel and freelance writing. A clipper could learn the ropes, publish some stories, and eventually become a real China correspondent. I had some previous experience in the country, teaching English and studying Chinese, but I had never worked as a journalist. I arrived in Beijing with three bags, a stack of traveler’s checks, and an open-ended return ticket from St. Louis. I was twenty-nine years old.

  The small bureau was pleasant—the crisp smell of newspapers, the smattering of languages that echoed off the old tiled floors. The foreign staff and the secretary spoke both English and Chinese, and the driver was a heavyset man with a strong Beijing accent. While filing the clipped stories, I thought of the subject headings as another language that I would someday learn. The folders were arranged alphabetically, by topic:

  DEMOCRACY

  DEMOCRACY PARTY

  DEMONSTRATIONS

  DISABLED

  DISASTERS

  DISSIDENTS

  Complicated topics were subdivided:

  U.S.-CHINA—EXCHANGES

  U.S.-CHINA—RELATIONS

  U.S.-CHINA—SCANDAL

  U.S.-CHINA—SUMMIT

  U.S.-CHINA—TRADE

  During my early days on the job, I hoped that the files could provide useful training. I often pulled a folder and read through dozens of stories, yellowed with age, all of them circling around the same topic. But inevitably I started skimming headlines; after a while, even the headlines bored me. To amuse myself while working, I read the file labels in alphabetical order, imagining possible storylines to connect them:

  SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

  SECRETS &

  SPIES SECURITY

  SEX

  One section of Ps read like a tragedy, complete with hubris, in all of six words:

  PARTY

  PATRIOTISM

  POLITICAL REFORM

  POPULATION

  POVERTY

  Another series seemed scrambled beyond comprehension:

  STUDENTS

  STYLE

  SUPERPOWER—“NEW THREAT”

  SUPERSTITION

  TEA

  Once, I pointed out this sequence to the bureau chief, who remarked that sooner or later every China correspondent has to write an article about tea. In May of 1999, when a United States B2 plane took off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, flew to Belgrade, and dropped a series of satellite-directed bombs on the Chinese embassy, killing three Chinese journalists, the Wall Street Journal created a new file: U.S.-CHINA—EMBASSY BOMBING. It fit next to EXCHANGES.

  I HAPPENED TO be in the southern city of Nanjing when the attack occurred. That was my first research trip: I planned to write a newspaper travel article about the history of the city, which had been the capital of China during various periods. Nanjing was the sort of place important events always seemed to march through on their way to some other destination. Over the centuries, various armies had occupied the city, and great leaders had come and gone, leaving nothing but tombs and silent memorials of stone. Even the name itself—“Southern Capital”—was a type of memory.

  Artifacts had been strewn everywhere around Nanjing. Outside of town, the emperor Yongle of the Ming dynasty had commissioned the carving of the biggest stone tablet in the world as a memorial to his father, the dynastic founder. In 1421, Yongle moved the capital north to Beijing, for reasons that remain unclear, and his engineers left the tablet unfinished. Supposedly they had never figured out how they were going to move the object.

  When I visited the stone tablet, there were only a handful of tourists at the site. The quarry was mostly overgrown, with young trees and low bushes creeping up the rolling hills. The abandoned memorial consisted of three parts: a broad base, an arched cap, and the main body of the tablet itself. The limestone objec
t lay on its side, as if some absentminded giant had set it down and then wandered away. It was 147 feet long, and the top edge stood as high as a three-story building. Over the centuries, straight streaks of rain runoff had stained the stone face, like lines on a child’s writing pad. Apart from those water marks, the surface was completely blank; nobody had ever gotten around to inscribing the intended memorial. Visitors could walk freely on top. There weren’t any rails.

  A young woman named Yang Jun staffed the ticket booth. She was twenty years old, a country girl who had come to Nanjing to find work. Young people like her were flocking to cities all across the nation——more than one hundred million Chinese had migrated, mostly to the factory boomtowns of the southern coast. Social scientists described it as the largest peaceful migration in human history. This was China’s Industrial Revolution: a generation that would define the nation’s future.