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2 - The Silence of the Past
The Nanjing Belt
The most puzzling archaeological mystery of ancient China came to light in the true tradition of buried treasure when a workman's spade broke through the roof of a long-forgotten tomb.
It was 1 December 1952. The Jingyi Middle School of Yixing City in the Jiang-su Province of China was building a sports field. The first task was to level the ground, for the school authorities had chosen a patch of land dominated by an oblong hillock. Another feature of the site, four curiously shaped mounds, complicated the work. That day, a labourer's shout brought everything to a halt. His spade had penetrated a thin layer of earth and rubble and a hole had appeared, releasing a rush of musty air. Peering into the darkness, the work gang could dimly make out a chamber stacked with dusty objects.
They called the police, who climbed down through the opening and soon announced that the workers had made a major archaeological find. The place was obviously a tomb. After taking into safekeeping a motley collection of grave goods, including five pieces of porcelain, eleven of pottery, some scraps of gold, two pottery stands and 'four gold articles', the police sealed the chamber and the Huadong Historical Relics Working Team was summoned to conduct a full-scale excavation.
The dig revealed that there were in fact two tombs, both built in an unusual style. Each had chambers with an arched roof constructed in wedge-shaped bricks, topped with a square slab. More bricks, laid in a herringbone pattern, covered the floor. The roof was adorned with carvings: circles, tigers or the faces of animals. Conveniently, the 'Number 1 tomb' contained an inscription which enabled the archaeologists to date their find precisely. On one side it read: '20th September of the seventh year of Yuankang the late general Zhou ...'; on the other, the tomb builders had left their official titles and signatures: 'Yicao Zhu Xuan, jianggongli Yang Chun, workman Young Pu made.' This, then, was the burial-place of a nobleman called Zhou Chu.
Zhou could be traced in the historical records. A renowned military man and scholar, he had lived during the Jin Dynasty (A.D. 265-420), and had died fighting the Tibetans in 297. There could be no doubt whatsoever about the dates, and this made one discovery all the more astonishing. Encircling what had once been the waist of a rotted skeleton found in the 'Number 1 tomb' were about twenty pieces of metal, obviously the remains of a belt. 'The factor worth noting,' wrote archaeologist Luo Zong-chen with what proved to be breathtaking understatement, 'is the chemical composition of these ornaments.'
For analysis of one fragment by the Chemistry Department of nearby Nanjing University revealed that it was composed almost entirely of aluminium. Now, although aluminium is widely used in modern life, it was not isolated in the West until the early years of the nineteenth century, and a generation later was still so rare that it was a showpiece of the 1855 Paris Exposition. The production of aluminium requires something thought to have been quite unknown in ancient China: electricity. The discovery of the belt therefore raised a question which fascinated archaeologists, metallurgists and chemists both inside China and far beyond its boundaries: did the Chinese beat European scientists to the isolation of aluminium by a cool 1,500 years?
While it would be going too far to say that archaeologists have become used to pondering such problems - their working lives are usually devoted to the painstaking accumulation of more prosaic evidence of the daily lives of ancient peoples - a few objects like the Nanjing belt have presented them with an irresistible and potentially unsettling challenge. Did the scientists, artists and builders of the past know secrets that their successors have taken centuries to rediscover? Should our ideas about the level of technology achieved by the ancients be drastically revised?
How then did the experts set about finding the answer to the puzzle of the Nanjing belt? As so often happens, they first fell to arguing. In China itself the pages of the academic journals were full of the controversy. In the magazine Koagu, one expert, Shen Shi-ying of the North Eastern Engineering College, reported that he had carried out several methods of analysis on a small broken piece of the belt which he had obtained from the Nanjing Museum. 'But,' he announced, 'the results of these various analyses all pointed to these alloys being silver-based rather than aluminium-based.'
Another piece gave similar results, but yet another fragment, originally sent to a different analyst, really did seem to contain aluminium. Yet Shen Shi-ying remained sceptical and concluded: 'It is impossible to tell from its structure whether it was made in ancient times. At the same time, it was unlike the product of a 1960s factory.' He suggested that the aluminium might have been made at the beginning of this century, but added cautiously, 'This is only a supposition, and to know definitely, all round research in depth is called for.'
Stung by Shen's reservations, and particularly by his suggestion that the piece of metal which analysis had proved to be aluminium had been introduced into the tomb at a much later date, perhaps by grave robbers (who had undoubtedly broken into the tomb at some time in the past), one of the original excavators, Luo Zong-chen, published a riposte.
The belt pieces, he wrote, were certainly of the Jin period, for most of them 'were underneath the accumulated earth, showing that they had never been disturbed'. Luo also attacked Shen's assertion that most of the fragments found had turned out to be silver. Four pieces, he conceded, had indeed been shown to be silver, but four others were made of aluminium.
The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s which so disrupted Chinese academic life, brought the controversy to an abrupt end with nothing resolved, but by then the story was out. One of the many experts in the West who learned of the Nanjing belt was Dr Joseph Needham of Cambridge University, author of the monumental Science and Civilization in China, and perhaps the greatest authority of all. He was intrigued and did not entirely dismiss the idea that the ancient Chinese had somehow found a way to isolate aluminium. 'For the present it would be unwise to rule out the possibility,' he wrote in 1974.
One group of Western scientists, however, did not stop at simply expressing interest in the Nanjing belt. In 1980, inspired by Joseph Needham, Dr Anthony R. Butler and his colleagues, Dr Christopher Glidewell and Sharee E. Pritchard, of the Chemistry Department of the University of St Andrews decided to continue the search for the truth, begun a quarter of a century earlier in China. In 1986 their report was published, and was eagerly consulted by scientists and lay people whose curiosity had been whetted by the Chinese controversy. Its title, 'Aluminium Objects from a Jin Dynasty Tomb - Can They Be Authentic?' held out the promise that the three investigators had found an answer to the mystery.
They began by acknowledging that modern research into Chinese science and technology has revealed many previously unsuspected scientific and technological achievements, some astonishingly advanced. 'Consequently we believe that no report of a medieval Chinese chemical achievement, however remarkable, should be rejected without adequate modern re-assessment.' Even so, they judged that the production of aluminium in the Jin Dynasty, an age without electricity, 'would have been truly remarkable'.
The St Andrews researchers then went on to pose questions which many had asked but none had proved able to answer: 'How reliable is the archaeological evidence? How reliable are the chemical analyses? What metallurgical techniques were available at that date? Is it possible to prepare an aluminium alloy by any of them? If an aluminium alloy was prepared, was it by design or by accident?'
Their discussion of the archaeological evidence did not detain them for long. They argued that standards of excavation are high in China - the painstaking manner in which the first emperor's terracotta army has been uncovered and preserved at Xian is one of the most recent examples - and concluded that 'there can be little doubt that the aluminium artefacts were found in the tomb'. They also gave short shrift to a suggestion that the belt had somehow been 'planted' by grave-robbers:
It is difficult to see why they should have left the silver objects in place an
d have carefully inserted pieces of aluminium for the confusion of future excavators. A tomb-robber is scarcely likely to have had scraps of kitchen utensils about his person and to have discarded them accidentally. It would also need a miraculous breeze to replace the dust.
Butler and his colleagues devoted most of their paper to the central question: Did the Chinese of the Jin Dynasty have the know-how to produce aluminium? While the modern method of isolation uses electricity, aluminium has been produced in furnaces, though these need to be extremely hot. The Chinese certainly had furnaces capable of producing high temperatures, perhaps as great as 1,500°C, but, the St Andrews team concluded, these would have been capable of making metal containing only very small amounts of aluminium. And there was no method available to Jin Dynasty metallurgists which would have enabled them to manufacture aluminium of the purity of the metal found in Zhou Chu's tomb.
So what is the answer? How can it be that pieces of almost pure aluminium should turn up in an ancient tomb? With a touch of the theatrical, the Scottish researchers saved their theory for the last paragraph of their report:
We are led to suggest, for want of something better, [they wrote] that the aluminium was introduced as an academic prank by a participant who was probably greatly embarrassed when he realized the consequences of his actions. Fortunately for scholars in the West, the Chinese themselves were the first to doubt the authenticity of the claims. It is perhaps a mark of our regard for the enduring genius of the Chinese people that the claims were taken seriously for so long.
The St Andrews paper seemed to have settled the argument. Hoaxes, of course, are nothing new in archaeology, and the story of the Nanjing belt was duly dubbed 'the Chinese Piltdown' after the most celebrated hoax of modern times, in which a weird amalgam of a human cranium and an orang-utan's jawbone, unearthed in the south of England in 1912, was successfully passed off for some forty years as the skull of an important 'missing link' in the evolutionary chain.
Yet in 1985 the Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences reported a discovery which revived the possibility that aluminium had been available in China at the time of General Zhou's burial. Geologists from the Shenyang Institute of Geology announced that they had found grains of 'native aluminium' in Guizhou Province. 'Native aluminium' is extremely rare, indeed only a handful of claims for its discovery have ever been made. According to the Chinese geologists, their specimens contained 'some copper and sulphur, also chromium and iron' and were harder than pure aluminium, but they were satisfied that they had been found 'in a situation where contamination by men was eliminated'.
The report brought this comment from Dr Anthony R. Butler of the St Andrews team:
I think the evidence for the presence of native aluminium is good but the manner of its production is obscure. The grain size indicates that it could not possibly have been used to make the Nanjing belt. For native aluminium to have been used for that, an even rarer geological process, giving lumps of aluminium rather than grains, would be necessary. While this is a possibility, made more possible by the discovery of grains of native aluminium, it remains a remote hypothesis. However, a general rule is never to underestimate the Chinese. After all, they did invent the compass, printing and gunpowder.
The Stone 'Doughnuts'
The achievements of the ancient Chinese were also much discussed in the course of a controversy that arose after the discovery of mysterious artefacts off the coast of southern California.
In 1973 a US Geological Survey ship dredged up a peculiar stone from 13,000 ft (4,000 m) down on the bed of the Pacific, off Point Conception. Roland von Huene, the geologist who first examined it, soon noticed something odd: the stone had a hole in the middle, and 'had clearly been made by tools'. The underwater 'doughnut' was covered with manganese deposits, which suggested that it had been on the ocean floor for some considerable time.
The 'doughnut' was quite a curiosity and when, two years later, a whole hoard of similarly worked stones were located off the same coast, historians of the sea really began to get excited. Two professional divers, Wayne Baldwin and Bob Meistrell, had been exploring a reef off the Palos Verdes peninsula when they saw at least twenty stones lying 16 ft (5 m) down amidst the seaweed. They brought a few to the surface and stored them in a yard outside a diving shop at Redondo Beach, south of Los Angeles.
The discovery of a few old stones does not often make the headlines, but the theories advanced to explain the purpose and presence of these 'doughnuts' off the Californian coast became big news. The stones, the theorists argued, were ancient ships' anchors of a type often found in the Mediterranean Sea. Sailors used to bore a hole in a heavy rock, tie a rope through it and cast this primitive anchor overboard when they wanted to moor their vessel. But it was the explanation advanced by a group of Californian academics, that sent the reporters rushing to their typewriters.
The stones, they opined, were anchors lost from Chinese ships which had visited America 1,000 years or more before - centuries before Columbus. James R. Moriarty III and Larry Pierson expressed little doubt. 'Stylistic comparisons with historical, archaeological and ethnological data indicate great antiquity for the anchors,' they wrote. 'Geologic studies show that the stone from which they were made is not of Californian origin ... It seems clear to us that Asiatic vessels reached the New World in pre-Columbian times.'
The idea that ancient seafarers reached America before Columbus is nothing new. Claims that the Chinese got there first rest on an account in a history of the Liang Dynasty, which nourished from A.D. 502 to 557. In 502 a monk called Huishen appeared at the court of the Emperor Wu Ti and told of a journey he had made to a wonderful country called Fusang. According to the mariner monk, it lay 20,000 li (6,500 miles) to the east of China.
Some later scholars, particularly those of the mid-nineteenth century, discovered in Huishen's narrative what they took to be uncanny similarities between Fusang and America, and on this somewhat slender evidence the idea that the Chinese had sailed in their junks to the New World took hold. It even survived a thorough debunking by Gustaaf Schlegel of the University of Leiden, Holland, in 1892. Schlegel argued that since Huishen's story clearly exaggerated some of the marvels he had seen - he had told of mulberry trees thousands of feet tall and of silkworms 7 ft (2 m) long - his estimates of the distance he had travelled to reach Fusang might well be inaccurate too.
From his description of the features of the country, Schlegel deduced that the fabulous Fusang had really existed, but was much closer to China than Huishen had admitted. Schlegel identified it as a large island near Japan called Sakhalin.
The discovery of the 'Chinese anchors' off California, however, revived the diffusionist arguments. In 1980 support for the American theorists who believed the anchors were evidence of a pre-Columbian landfall off California came from China itself- in the form of an article written by a leading maritime historian, Fang Zhongpu. According to Fang, 'many Chinese historians believe that the Fusang the monk Huishen had visited is today's Mexico', and he welcomed what he deemed to be this proof of 'friendly intercourse between China and America in ancient times', and argued that Chinese junks and seamen of 1,500 years ago were well capable of crossing the Pacific.
Meanwhile, however, analysis of the Palos Verdes stones by the Geology Department of the University of California at Santa Barbara, dealt a blow to the diffusionists' claims. The analysts found that the stones had not originated in China, but had come from the local Monterey shale.
Professor Frank J. Frost of the same university had been sceptical of the claims made for the Chinese, and he seized on the geologists' report in a bid to clear up the mystery.
Presumably someone already in California shaped these stones and drilled holes in them. Both the large number of objects (about 20) and the wide distribution over more than an acre of ocean bottom would seem to rule out any conceivable pattern left by a shipwreck. Instead, the impression left is of an area where boats anchored frequently and
occasionally lost their anchors. The question remains, therefore, what frequent visitors came to this reef and anchored using primitive weight anchors made of local stone?
Frost soon found an answer: the Chinese. Not the early Chinese, however, but immigrants from the Pearl River delta who had settled in California in the nineteenth century and had started a flourishing fishing industry. They had brought with them the technology of their native land, and sailed the California coast in traditional junks and sampans.
To moor their vessels, they probably used the same kind of anchors as their forefathers - stones with holes bored in them. 'It is hard to resist the working hypothesis that the Palos Verdes stones represent evidence of nineteenth-century California Chinese fishermen who made frequent visits to a reef rich in marine life,' wrote Frost. He added: There is no other human agency in the history of the California coast that had both a need for implements made of local stone and the means to get them where they are found today.'
Professor Frost's arguments are rational and convincing, but can they be said to solve the 'Chinese anchor mystery' once and for all? There can, of course, be no definitive answer. The methods of the Chinese fishermen of California died with them and, as Professor Frost observes, 'unfortunately, a hundred years ago other Californians were more interested in driving the Chinese fishermen out of business than in studying their technology'. There is still a remote possibility that Chinese mariners did visit America before Columbus and fashioned anchors out of local stone, but if a mystery can be explained simply, it is perverse to settle for any more outlandish solution.
Chronicles of the Strange and Mysterious Page 4