Six years ago, in May 2005, Jane and I made the 10 hour train trip from Hohhot…
…where we were teaching at the Inner Mongolia Medical College, to Yinchuan, the capital of Ningxia. This province is little known to Western tourists, but it’s full of incredible things.
Ningxia is China’s second poorest province ( Qinghai is even more impoverished). But poverty is the last thing you think about as you walk round Yinchuan, or look down on it from the main pagoda, Chengtiansi Ta:
Everywhere there are new buildings and wide streets, and a general sense of prosperity. One street we walked through specialised in mobile phones and other entertainment and communications equipment – badges and playthings for the new elite, who were milling vigorously all around us.
And another anniversary’s looming: on May 16th., 1966 Mao Zedong launched The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. On our third day in Ningxia we hired a car to drive us around some sites associated with a people known as the Western Xia (Xi Xia), and, quite unexpectedly, I found myself thinking about issues of culture and transformation, athough not necessarily in ways Mao would have approved.
The Xi (Western) Xia lived in the area that is now Ningxia Province between 1038 and 1227. They were originally called the Tanguts, and they lived on the Tibetan plateau until the pressure of ethnic Tibetan harassment drove them northwards. They built a powerful kingdom, which the Chinese Emperors had to respect, and an advanced civilisation, bringing with them the Buddhism of Tibet – which, ironically, they spread northeast into the Mongol territories. Genghis Khan thought they’d be a useful satellite, but they refused to buckle under and were powerful enough to beat off several Mongol attacks. Genghis made another attempt and the crafty Western Xia sneaked some archers with poisoned arrows into his camp, and one of them managed to fatally wound the great Khan himself. As you can imagine, Genghis was not a forgiving kind of person. He didn’t take it like a good sport, but ordered the complete obliteration of the Western Xia.
Well, that’s one version of the story anyway. It’s what, for example, our guide at the Western Xia tombs told us. Unfortunately, there are other versions. Some have the Great Khan dying ‘of natural causes’, in others, enfeebled by old age, he falls off a horse, and dies of his injuries. So in these versions he presumably orders the massacre not out of revenge but because of the kind of person he was.
Whatever the case, this wasn’t quite the last massacre he ordered, but his almost dying words were followed to the letter by his subordinates, and the whole culture was, apart from the kind of remains that we are about to look at, obliterated indeed.
In fact, it was something of a surprise to discover that the Twin Pagodas – our first stop – were actually built in 1986 – I guess the originals were destroyed by the Mongols, as close to the East Pagoda we saw the ruins of a temple that had been burnt down round about 1227 when Genghis’ men were doing their obliterating. The East Pagoda’s 39 metres high, but unfortunately we weren’t allowed to climb. Both the East and West Pagodas are heavily and beautifully decorated – fearsome looking wild animals, presumably to scare off evil spirits and evil men – designs of sun, moon and clouds, the corners decorated with pearl and flame designs.
Close to this pagoda we saw a stone roller. This area was once full of Buddhist temples and the monks used to grind their own grain. And there was a heaped collection of bricks and tiles, some still showing their colouring – mostly shades of ultramarine – which illustrates the high technological achievements of the Western Xia.
What’s more, when we inspected what looked like a pile of old wood, it turned out to be the remains of the columns of a temple built in 1075. Ironically, something had survived until November 1990, when it was ‘exploded down by some lawless people’, as the English explanation put it. Wouldn’t you love to know more? But it’s an ill wind, as they say: when the ruins were examined, some Buddhist scriptures were discovered which, it was claimed, are the oldest printed books in the world.
The West Pagoda’s about 41 meters high (2 metres higher than the East, so ‘twin’ is a slight exaggeration). Let me quote the signboard:
32 arhats (Buddhist saints), 40 gods, 144 animal faces and 88 corner drawings cover the pagoda and make it colourful and magnificent.
But as we were approaching the West Pagoda, I had realized something interesting. I was experiencing this outing as a replay of T. S. Eliot’s ‘return’ to East Coker, the small village in Somerset from which the Eliot family set out for the US. TSE describes this visit in the second of the Four Quartets, and, taken as a whole, the Quartets, which date from the late 30s and early 40s, constitute a meditation on time, history and culture. Amongst other things, Eliot is trying to come to terms with his experience as an American ex-pat, some of whose deepest memories are 3,000 miles away (see The Dry Salvages), who believes in the powerful determining effects of culture, yet has become an Englishman (but one who was always pleased to be told that you could hear the American accent underneath). Now here was I, part of my mind, as my great TEFL-in-China predecessor William Empson averred in his own case, invented by Eliot, come to examine the remains of what might have seemed a totally alien culture, but experiencing it as some kind of return to origins. But, I htought, there are some crucial differences between my consciousness and Eliot’s
It’s partly that the development of the world economy (so-called ‘globalisation’) has now advanced so much more than in the early twentieth century that the whole idea of ‘national culture’ has been transformed. Eliot, round about the time he was writing The Wasteland in the early 1920s, was considering become a Buddhist, but he decided that this wasn’t possible for cultural reasons: Buddhism was a way of thinking and feeling, not just a set of metaphysical propositions, and Eliot was reluctant to undertake the task of becoming a different, non-Western, person. To him this seemed a massive shift, one, if achievable at all, only possible through huge effort and painful sacrifices.
Well, becoming a Buddhist hardly seems a problem now, not a big deal if that’s what you want to do. A quick mental count reveals that amongst the people I’ve known reasonably well in the last 20 years Buddhist and Hindu monastics (all European, and all ex, which is how come I’ve known them) outnumber Christian ones, and atheism/agnosticism/scepticism, mostly arrived at in later life through the stripping away of Christian culture, represents overwhelmingly the largest single world view. And there’s enough from the Asian religions in the everyday culture of educated westerners to give a flying start to those young people I’ve met who have taken on themselves, for example, Tibetan names and Tibetan identities.
Cultures these days are starting places, areas that will always be zones of greatest familiarity, but they aren’t ways of looking at the world we’re saddled with forever. And I think for ‘my generation’ there’s more to it than just globalisation and the day by day availability of fragments from every culture in the world in our literal and metaphorical high streets. As we ‘baby boomers’ grew up, we collectively cast off the culture we had been initiated into – I think that’s why so many of us are fascinated by the much more thoroughgoing Chinese ‘cultural revolution’, although we’d like to deny any real links with such a bloody and irrational process. Many of us realised that we didn’t believe in any form of Christianity, that we didn’t want to be stuck with the models of ‘male’ and ‘female’ passed on from our parents, and that Yoga or Tai Chi were the exercise systems we wanted to practice. The culture of my childhood seems so alien to me now it’s like it came from another planet.
So my gentle nostalgia, my sense of returning to what could not have been but still felt like some kind of origin amongst these rocks and hills, was a sign of how little traditional Englishness could mean to me, or anyone exposed to the ineluctable necessity of remaking their inherited worldview, and then plunged into the dark world’s fire of our current fiercely global existence
But all that’s left of the once rich religious life of this area is a small ‘shrine’, where we were invited to ‘pray to Buddha’ by the resident priest (who says Western understandings of Eastern religions are always superficial compared to the real thing?). More tempting were the glimpses I caught of the fortune tellers working next to the Buddha statue.
Our taxi sped away from the Twin Pagodas, our driver honking loudly at every opportunity, sometimes when the road was empty as far as the eye could see. We were headed for the Helan Mountains and their famous rock art. These engravings were left by a nomadic people who moved through this part of Ningxia long before the Western Xia, 1,500-10,000 years ago in fact (as you’ll gather from this rather rough estimate not much is known about these people).
The driver dropped us off at the entrance to Helan Kou (Pass), the main viewing area. There’s a special raised walkway which enables you to stroll past some drawings in their original locations, and many more on stones that have been moved there so you can see them. I’m not sure how I felt about the fact that most of the drawings had been outlined in some kind of chalk to make them clearer. It did make them clearer, but….
When thoughts are in your mind, they always find some kind of reality to latch onto. The first thing the drawings reminded me of was the self consciously ‘primitive’ stick man figures of some twentieth century European artists. It seemed that I was determined to see cultures as freely flowing into each other across boundaries of time and space, and it didn’t matter that few Europeans, artists or otherwise, had ever heard of Helan Shan. More and more, I think of cultural activity as a common human project, always liable to throw up intriguingly similar answers to apparently diverse questions because of the almost identical genetic basis that underlies all we strive to do.
So why shouldn’t these resonant artworks be just as much ‘mine’ as the cave drawings in Altamira or Lascaux, which most of us now think of as part of our common European heritage.
We walked past representations of a lizard, an antelope, a group with some obviously human figures… and then Jane and I strolled off the walkway into the valley, following couples and families in search of picnic spots and wild flower sightings. A stream freshened the air, so I no longer felt I was with TSE on that day of ‘unusual heat’ when he journeyed into rural Somerset. I noticed frequent veins of quartz colouring the rock, a kind of natural counterpoint to the human decorations we had come to see. It was beautiful, very beautiful, and it gave me a sense of the way in which the artworks were produced by people on the move, people going from somewhere to somewhere, for specific purposes. I don’t think anyone really knows why they decorated some of the areas they passed through with these images of animals, men, women, and, in one case, a sheep or goat fold, the only artificial building in all 20,000 of the Helan Shan petrogylphs. The Museum inYinchuan fell into vague waffle about self-expression when it came to explaining what the pictures were actually doing there (it could have been perfectly clear in the Chinese version, of course), others think the images are Shamanistic (which is the current leading theory of European cave art), others – well, it’s all speculation.
We got back to the walk way and soon found the sheepfold, which is in the top left hand corner of a ‘picture’ which included two goats and a figure in the bottom right which some said was a bird (funny place to put a sky though) and others a spaceman in a helmet. Hurrah! Even here in remote rural Ningxia people have heard of Eric Von Daniken’s theories about ancient astronauts. If I had felt homesick for a Europe in which it seems that any idea can find its devotees as long as it has absolutely no evidence to support it, this would have made me feel comfortable again. I never said that cultural diffusion was always a good thing!
This man is climbing close to one of the most famous images, sometimes known as the Sun God.
(For some much better photos see http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/china/helan_mountains_gallery.php)
But this is the image I found most intriguing:
The accompanying sign named this as ‘Two human faces with facial organs’. I think they mean faces with phalluses. In any case, the Western Xia, when they came along a millennium or two later added 5 characters to this rock; they mean ‘capable of vitalising upright laws’ and the people who added them thought that Buddhism could be spread worldwide through the magic of these drawings. I was struck yet again by the way in which cultures feed into each other, sometimes through misunderstandings, as here. But I don’t think that ‘error’ is really the issue.
When we bring yoga or tai chi into English culture we enrich ‘Englishness’ and we are not honour bound to practice the same yoga they do in India or the same Tai Chi as they do in China. Let’s all steal, borrow, pay back, understand, misunderstand, change, restore and argue in a delightful chaos of cultural exchanges.
In the past, many of us hoped for more than this, for a new culture built to satisfy all human faculties, one that would enable the life systems of the past to be thrown into the dustbin of history. It was in this spirit that Mao launched his cultural revolution in 1966, and the disasters of the following years are one of the many reasons why, in my opinion, this hope is no longer tenable. The best we can do now is to build our personal and sub-cultural ways of living in a creative engagement with all we can find out about the cultures of the world, both past and present. In the future, maybe things will be different again, right now let’s do it the Western Xia way!
My head buzzing with such thoughts, the driver honking as vigorously as before, we speeded off for towads our final stop, the Western Xia tombs, the resting place of 9 kings (or 8 kings – accurate information on these things is hard to get if you don’t read Chinese). We started in the museum, full of seals, bowls, figurines and other objects; but what most struck me were the books – works by Confucius and Mencius as well as Buddhist scriptures. These people were obviously cultural syncretists, drawing on the culture of China as well as the Buddhism they’d brought with them fromTibet (and, I was to learn later in the museum, also incorporating elements from the Muslim Uighurs to their West). They had their own pictographs for writing, based on Chinese characters, but even more complex and hard to learn. One of the paintings on display, ‘Preaching Scene’ was a masterpiece. In my opinion, it’s worthy to stand alongside all but the very greatest European religious art.
Our stroll through the grounds to the next section was enlivened by a sales assistant trying to charge us 6 RMB for an ice cream clearly marked 1.5 RMB. ‘3 RMB?’ she suggested perkily when we drew the price to her attention. But then we met a charming young man who, apologising for his poor English, told us that he was to be our guide through a set of dioramas illustrating Western Xia history. He was a charming and knowledgeable guide, and his English was certainly adequate to the task in hand – although it was rather strange to hear him describe Genghis Khan as ‘a great Chinese hero’. I’ve got used to that view in Inner Mongolia, but walking, as it were, over the ashes of his victims, ‘hero’ wasn’t the word that sprung to my mind. But I bet Olaf Tryggvason never anticipated anything like the York Viking Centre.
Up until now, I’ve been portraying the Xi Xia as gentle and civilised Buddhists. These images showed their other side. The dynastic history was the usual story of violence and treachery, while they were just as ready to fight the Chinese Song Dynasty as to co-operate with it. And as for the tombs that we were about to view, well, they were built of earth and brick and there was obviously a temptation for the builders to skimp on materials and produce mounds that were less than perfectly hardened, so after their work was done an archer was chosen to inspect the result and fire an arrow into it from close quarters. If the arrow stuck in, all the workers were killed. If it bounced out, the archer was the one that got it. Now that’s the kind of quality control procedure we associate with the worst excesses of the Thatcher era!
There’s only one group of tombs open to the public, the resting place of the third Emperor. Their shapes reminded me of beehives and breast, and the general plan was to build a Royal tomb and then erect close by a number of subsidiaries for consorts and counsellors – I don’t know if these were filled ‘in due course’ or if their tenants had conveniently died soon after. Apparently they also used to build empty tombs to divert robbers.
The tombs are now crumbling picturesquely, which I think adds to their appeal. Their decay gives out the Shelley message about the futility of kingly self-aggrandisement…
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.
…but at the same time their continuing grace, and the way they’ve still kept their basic shape so many centuries later, encourages us to also think that fine human achievements remain to inspire and delight people of a kind their creators could never have envisaged.
It was a sunny day, the hills in the distance (I’m a sucker for hills in the distance), the sense of history, the pleasing shapes – even the piped music – all lulled me into a sense of serene acceptance. Just the kind of unthinking conservatism that the aging Mao, marginalised from power after the failure of the Great Leap Forward, wanted to fight against one last time on that day in May almost 40 years ago. He launched a campaign against the ‘four olds’: old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. The antiquated ways that, he believed, were the main obstacle to the building of Chinese socialism. In 1981 the Chinese Communist Party declared the events that followed ‘an error comprehensive in magnitude and protracted in duration’ – a judgment with which it is hard to quarrel’. I don’t think there will ever be – nor should ever be – another attempt to create culture more or less from scratch.
So I was standing there after a day in which I had become more and more convinced that only an engagement with the past, albeit the complete human past, not just our own small ‘national’ bit of it, was the only way forward. Perhaps Ozymandias, speaking through his Royal Western Xia cousins, was mocking me for my naivete. And goodness knows what Mao was saying as he reflected on all that had happened to China in the last 50 years.
P.S. On the last full day of our stay in Ningxia we made the trip to another monument of the Xi Xia, the 108 Dagobas, perched above the Yellow River. Getting there wasn’t straightforward, but we were rewarded by one of the most strange and impressive sights I’ve seen anywhere on earth.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
