Authors: Peter Hessler
Oracle Bones (23 page)
Quietly, the city passed the anniversary of the NATO bombing. There weren’t any protests or public commemorations; a few stories appeared in the foreign press, but that was all. The evenings turned warm, and we sat late in the restaurant, watching the traders. Some of them had also become old stories: the money changers in the black Audis, the Uighur trader who had burned his forearm with cigarettes.
One day, a group of men from the North Korean embassy stopped at the restaurant for lunch. Polat was eating with some Uighur friends, and they watched the North Koreans for a while. Finally, Polat stood up and walked over to the other table.
“I like that pin,” he said, pointing to an image of Kim Il Sung on one of the men’s lapels. “I’ll give you one American dollar for it.”
The North Korean ignored him. Polat said, “Two American dollars.”
The North Koreans stood up and left without finishing their noodles. We never saw them in the Uighur restaurant again.
THAT SUMMER, POLAT
purchased a new identity. One day, while visiting some clothing markets near the American embassy, he met a Chinese man who introduced himself as a “visa consultant.” They struck up a conversation, and the man gave Polat his business card:
Cultural Exchange Company, Ltd.
Polat visited the office, which was near Yabaolu. For eighty-eight hundred dollars, the man offered to arrange everything—paperwork, visa application, plane ticket. Polat returned a few times, to make sure that he could trust the company, and then he finally agreed.
The first step involved creating a believable story. The man studied Polat’s passport, jotting down all previous international trips, and then he created a parallel identity that matched up perfectly. He decided that Polat should have an advanced degree from a Chinese university, and he should be involved in high-level trade with companies around the world. Most important, he should be rich.
Through contacts, the man acquired new documentation. One government-stamped paper certified Polat’s advanced degree, and another document established him as the owner of a large trading company. A bank statement proved that he had the equivalent of nearly three hundred thousand American dollars in the bank. He received a new Chinese residence card that testified to the existence of four children. With so many kids to take care of, and so much money in the bank, Polat could be expected to return to China after a trip abroad. There was no reason for anybody in the U.S. embassy to suspect him.
He never told me about his new identity until everything had already been arranged. When he explained the plan, he emphasized that, technically, the documentation was not
jiade
. The papers themselves were completely authentic; it was simply the information conveyed within the documents that was false. Polat’s new life was as real as paper could get.
For the American side, it was even easier—no need for government forms or bank statements. The Cultural Exchange Company had a contact in Los Angeles, who composed a letterhead for a fictitious company and prepared an invitation. The letter was brief, vague, and written in Special English:
Dear Mr. Polat,
I’m very glad to invite you to visit United States in October 2000 for two weeks.
The purpose of this visit is to inspect our product and meetings with some American companies. There are companies in the United States that are selling such products in wholesale quantity. However, you have to see the goods and negotiate the price.
The day before the visa interview at the U.S. embassy, the consultant grilled Polat for five hours, to make sure he had his story straight. The tale accounted for every trip that Polat had ever taken, claiming them for his new identity, until even the bad ones—the spoiled grapes in Nepal, the infested clothes in Kazakhstan—became the triumphant journeys of a shrewd businessman. Every step led naturally to where he was now: a rich man, a father of four, and a business owner preparing to make a routine two-week trip to Los Angeles.
The actual interview at the embassy took less than five minutes. Afterward, Polat remembered being asked only two questions: how long did he plan to stay in the United States, and had he been born, as his passport stated, in Xinjiang? Polat answered: Two weeks, and, Yes. The official stamped his passport and said, “Welcome to America.”
THE UNDERGROUND CITY, LIKE SO MANY OTHER ARTIFACTS IN ANYANG,
was rediscovered through the power of writing. During the twentieth century, this region became the most carefully excavated in China, and all of the work can be traced back to the oracle bones. Generations of Chinese—archaeologists with maps, peasants with Luoyang spades—have come here in search of the earliest known writing in East Asia.
The quest began with disease: a sick man, a sick nation. In 1899, in Beijing, a relative of Wang Yirong became ill with malaria, and a doctor prescribed a traditional Chinese medicine whose ingredients included “decayed tortoise shell.” An old shell was purchased from a local pharmacy. Before grinding up the object, somebody noticed that it was inscribed with characters that resembled ancient Chinese writing. They showed it to Wang Yirong, who was a Qing government official, a director of the Imperial Academy, and an expert in ancient bronze inscriptions. He studied the object, and then he purchased others.
Nowadays, many historians believe that this tale of malaria is apocryphal, and there are disputes about the precise date of rediscovery. But there is no doubt that Wang Yirong was the first serious collector of the inscribed shells, and he certainly purchased them from Beijing medicine shops, where the objects were known as “dragon bones.” In Chinese, scholars came to call them
jiaguwen
—“inscriptions on shell and bone.”
The artifacts had uncanny timing. They appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, in the post-Opium War years, as the Chinese empire was steadily disintegrating, piece by piece: north Burma and Kowloon to Britain, Tonkin and Annam to France, Korea and Formosa (Taiwan) to Japan, Manchuria to Russia. The Germans took mining rights; the French took railroad concessions. The Americans renounced outright imperialism, and their Open Door Policy sounded protective of China, but in practice it meant more of the same. More foreign missionaries, more foreign businessmen. By the end of the nineteenth century, anti-foreign anger in Shandong province had inspired ragtag bands of peasants and laborers who called themselves the Boxers United in Righteousness. They targeted foreign missionaries and Chinese Christians; there were mobs and murders. The uprising spread across the country, and the
Qing government made halfhearted attempts to put it down, but secretly many leaders were pleased by the popular resentment.
Despite the instability, Wang Yirong made quick progress interpreting the oracle bone inscriptions. That was the true magic of the artifacts: from the moment of their rediscovery, they could be interpreted, unlike Egyptian hieroglyphics, which remained unintelligible for centuries until the excavation of the Rosetta Stone. Chinese characters are the oldest writing system still in use, and Wang Yirong suspected that the turtle shells might push back China’s written history even farther. He believed that the objects dated to the Shang dynasty—a period that was sometimes described as mythical by nineteenth-century foreign scholars because no Shang writings had been found, apart from some brief inscriptions on bronze vessels.
But the Boxers worked faster than Wang Yirong. They slaughtered missionaries and foreign engineers; they cut telegraph lines and tore up train tracks. By the summer of 1900, foreign armies began to gather in the treaty ports, and there were clashes with Qing forces. In June, the empire finally sided with the Boxers, declaring war on the foreign powers. In the capital, mobs besieged foreigners who had retreated into churches and embassy compounds.
As a Qing official, Wang Yirong was asked to serve as commander of some of the Boxer forces in Beijing. He accepted, reluctantly: he knew that the Qing was too weak, but he also knew that duty was more important than reason. On August 14, an army of twenty thousand foreign troops—mostly Japanese, Russian, British, American, and French—easily captured Beijing. The foreigners entered the city from the east; the empress dowager and the young emperor fled to the west, heading toward Xi’an. But for Wang Yirong, flight was not an option, and neither was humiliation. In Xila Lane, near the heart of the old city, the scholar drank poison and leaped down a well. He was accompanied in death by his wife and eldest daughter-in-law.
After the suicides, about one thousand of Wang Yirong’s oracle bone fragments were acquired by Liu E, a friend and fellow scholar.
The king, reading the cracks, said: “There will be harm; there
will perhaps be the coming of alarming news.”
If we raise 3,000 men and call upon them to attack the
Gongfang, we will receive abundant assistance.
In the next ten days there will be no disasters.
THE BONES CONSIST
of cattle scapula and turtle plastrons. These objects were probably used because they provide a flat surface for writing (the plastron is the undershell that protects a turtle’s belly). In Shang rituals, the objects were deliberately weakened through the drilling of small notches into the back. Diviners then applied a hot object to the notches, until the surface cracked. Somehow, this moment captured the voices of the other world—departed ancestors of the Shang king, as well as various Powers that controlled the natural forces of wind and rain and flood. Sacrifices were offered, and the Shang often requested advice about upcoming events. In subsequent ages, this kind of scapulimancy was sometimes described as “the voice of the turtle.”
The cracks were interpreted by the king and other diviners, and echoes of their statements can be found in the inscriptions. We often think of writing as history, and traditional Chinese culture is characterized by its tendency to idealize the distant past. But the irony of Chinese archaeology is that the earliest known writings attempt to tell the future:
In the next ten days, there will be no disasters.
The king goes to the hunting field; the whole day he will not
encounter great wind.
Di will not put an end to this settlement.
The longest oracle bone statement is less than two hundred characters, and most are much shorter than that. Apart from some brief inscriptions on bronze vessels, this is the extent of known Shang writing. Archaeologists believe that the Shang also wrote on tablets made of bamboo, like subsequent cultures in this region—but bamboo deteriorates quickly in China’s central plains. Rainwater passes easily through the dry soil, and perishable materials don’t last long in a place like Anyang. This characteristic makes Chinese archaeology different from that in other parts of the world. Egyptian papyrus can survive for centuries, because of the arid climate. In the Near East, where ancient cultures wrote on durable clay tablets, excavations have uncovered a full range of documents: royal proclamations, tax records, schoolboy exercises. One can hear the words of Sumerian children as well as kings. But from the Shang, only the voice of the turtle still speaks:
Tonight there will be no disasters.
The king’s dream was due to Grandfather Yi.
In performing an exorcism to Father Yi, we cleave three bovines and pledge thirty decapitated victims and thirty penned sheep.
The artifacts themselves have the beauty of old ivory. Centuries underground have left them with a slightly golden hue, and the years have also separated the objects from the trappings of craftsmanship. Nobody knows precisely what kind of tool was used to create the notches in the back. The Shang writing and carving implements have never been found. It’s unclear exactly how the Shang acquired so many shells and bones. The artifacts have been completely disengaged from the act of creation, like a book sent from heaven.