In Manchuria

by Michael Meyer

  “Typical stubborn pride,” Frances said. She thought it masked the thin skin that came with growing up somewhere far from the center of culture and power, of feeling insignificant. “As tough as we seem, Northeasterners care about face more than other Chinese.”

  “You sound stubbornly proud of that.”

  Frances laughed. “I guess I just proved my point.”

  Off-site, we learned that Wanyan Aguda was a crack cavalryman, routing the superior forces of other northern tribes and allying with the Mongols to push further south into Chinese territory. His empire was the forerunner of the Manchus’.

  In the shrine above his Acheng tomb, a painted cement statue depicted Wanyan Aguda as a mirthful brute in a sable-trimmed yellow silk robe, sitting on his throne. Aside from us, his audience consisted of colonies of fading red ladybugs, frozen to the ceiling.

  When Manchu cavalry, assisted by a traitorous Han Chinese general, stormed through the First Pass Under Heaven, seized Beijing, and took over China in 1644, they sought to keep part of the Northeast as their cultural preserve. The Great Wall was, in fact, a series of shifting fortifications, and the previous dynasty’s territory had extended north of it. To demarcate their homeland, the Manchu built a one-thousand-mile-long barrier that started at the pass and wishboned deep into the Northeast. Made from soil and trees, they called it the Willow Palisade.

  This lesser wall divided Mongol, Manchu, and Han Chinese areas of settlement, protected imperial hunting lands, and secured the court’s lucrative sable and ginseng trades. In 1754 the Manchu emperor Qianlong described the barrier in a five-verse poem that began:

  West reaching to the Great Wall, east connecting with the sea,

  A row of willows forms a line marking the inside and outside.

  There is no strategic fortification to guard this border,

  Nor construction of walls that exhausts the people.

  Unlike the Great Wall, little of the palisade remained. I searched alone for its ruins around Wasteland, which had been within the Manchus’ restricted zone, but the barrier’s existence was seen only in the name of a neighboring town. The road to Ninth Platform, a former palisade signal tower, ran through villages called Birchbark Factory—for the saddle and stirrup materials it provided Manchu cavalry—and Barracks.

  The palisade eroded, in part because the fence was not made of stone but of parallel dirt berms divided by a trench and topped with willows lashed in line with rope. It fell into disuse as the Manchu dynasty waned. A team of British explorers crossing Manchuria in 1886 found that the barrier had “no more existence at the present day than the Roman Wall. The wooden gateways are, however, still maintained as Customs barriers, and all traffic passing through them must pay transit dues. Only an occasional mound or row of trees marks the line where the palisade originally stood.”

  My students at Number 22 Middle School had never heard of it. They stared blankly when I wrote its name in Chinese, Liutiaobian, on the blackboard. No one in Wasteland knew what I was talking about, not even Ms. Guan, who was Manchu. Frances had never heard of the palisade, either. “But it’s such a pretty name, like the title of a poem,” she said over Skype. “School never taught us about it. Anything we learned about the Manchu was bad anyway, since their dynasty had failed. The Great Wall got all the attention. Even though the wall failed to stop the Manchu from conquering Beijing.”

  The Northeast held a trove of museums that were sanctioned shrines of patriotic education. They did not invite a visitor to consider a place or event’s multiple and often competing narratives but rather told the one that ended in Liberation, 1949. Often, stereo speakers in the final exhibit room played the song “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China.” In it I heard the faint echo of the theme from Bonanza scoring the cowboy-celebrating museums I visited as a child in the American West. Instead of posing next to bison skulls and carved wooden Indians, Manchurian museumgoers took pictures wearing fan-shaped coronets like a Manchu princess at the Qing dynasty tombs. They rode horses at the Manchukuo Puppet Emperor’s former stables and ate army rations at the Resist America and Aid Korea war memorial.

  But still I visited, curious to see what contemporary China valued as history and what it discounted. Outside the capital-m Museums were places I came to see as lowercase sites that evinced the Northeast’s past and how it shaped China’s present. A Shinto shrine standing shuttered in a city park. A warlord’s former mansion. A grotto not carved with Buddhist statues but topped with one of the Virgin Mary. A ghost town around a once-bustling train station. A synagogue near an onion-domed cathedral.

  Collectively, these sites were unique to the Northeast, to its onetime conception as “Manchuria.” On an early nineteenth-century map, the line marking the Willow Palisade drew a tent across the region’s heart. I searched for it there.

  Train number 7515 was a throwback to China’s ancient transportation past of a decade before. The slow trains emptied in favor of high-speed lines, but a ride on those was as silent and sealed as in a Learjet’s cabin. I preferred the older carriages, whose open windows and hard seats made you feel the journey as you would when flying in a prop plane. As the train rocked past a landscape that read like run-on sentences of tilled fields ending in smokestack exclamation points, I sipped a cup of Marxism brand instant coffee (“God’s Favored Coffee!” the package promised in English).

  Once the train passed Fushun—home to one of the world’s largest open-pit coal mines—the air cleared, revealing a sharp blue sky, piles of dried cornstalks, and pine-shrouded hills. Though no modern map marked the palisade’s remains, I traced its former outline by circling villages whose names ended in men (gate). One lay 250 miles southeast of Wasteland, in a county named Qingyuan, which meant “Origin of the Qing,” or the Manchu dynasty.

  Legend held that the Manchu’s founding father was born there in the sixteenth century, during the Ming dynasty, which ruled part of the Northeast and its native Jurchen tribes. The boy was orphaned and raised by a Han Chinese general, who saw the child’s seven birthmarks as a portent that he would usurp Beijing’s Forbidden City throne. The Chinese emperor ordered the boy killed, but his adopted Han mother warned him and he fled on horseback into the thick forest with his dog. The general killed his wife, set the woods aflame, and slew the dog. As the general closed in, a flock of magpies cloaked the boy, concealing him from harm. Later he would establish sacred rites honoring his mother, anoint the magpie his lineage’s patron spirit, and forbid the eating of dogs. (He also ordered that Jurchen women would never bind their feet and that his male subjects would shave their temples and braid their hair in a queue.) He would create the Manchu writing system by adapting Mongolian script, build a smaller replica of the Forbidden City palace in the Northeast, and become the first khan of the House of Aisin Gioro, the family that would rule China until 1912. His name was Nurhaci.

  He died in battle against Han Chinese forces before the capture of Beijing. His son would establish the Qing dynasty and in 1635 decreed that the Jurchen were now named the Manchu, as was their homeland. The word’s etymology is uncertain: it could mean “intrepid arrow.” Another interpretation says it originated from Manjusri, a Buddhist bodhisattva, or enlightened being, whose name meant Gentle Glory.

  Today, most of China’s Manchu live in the Northeast yet make up less than 10 percent of the region’s 110 million residents and less than 1 percent of China’s total population. Many live in clusters such as the Manchu Autonomous County of Qingyuan, population 100,000.

  It was the type of place whose first glimpse made me want to run after the train as it pulled away from the empty platform. The forlorn one-room station was a relic of the Japanese occupation. Now, with its robin’s-egg-blue façade coal-stained and peeling, it looked like a forgotten toy in a dirty sandbox.

  There were no taxis or a bus stop or even a traffic light in sight. Experience had taught that when I didn’t know what to do in China, ceasing movement would present someon
e who did. I stood still in front of the train station.

  Within minutes, a beefy, ruddy-cheeked man emerged from his Wholesale Tobacco/Alcohol/Sweets/Teashop. Instead of asking to whose family I belonged, he bellowed: “Today is a good day to get married! Yesterday was for funerals, today is for celebration.”

  He cited the folk almanac. My spirit rose: here was someone acquainted with tradition. No crowd gathered; aside from me and the man, named Li Changchun, no one else seemed to inhabit Qingyuan.

  Instead of a business card, Mr. Li handed me his national identity card, which in China lists a person’s ethnicity. His said “Manchu.” When I asked about the Chairman Mao pin on his lapel, Mr. Li furrowed his fluffy eyebrows in the expression that meant Why not? “I’m Chinese!” he exulted. Mandarin didn’t hyphenate a person’s compound identity as American English does. Frances was Chinese-American, but Mr. Li wasn’t Manchu-Chinese. He was Chinese, and a Manchu, in that order.

  A thick gold loop girded his neck, looking like a felling chain around a redwood. He smoked cheap Lesser Panda cigarettes. He smelled of pine tar. He was the first person I had ever met who didn’t flinch when I said “the Willow Palisade.”

  “Uh,” he replied. “I’ve never seen it with my own eyes, but I know the village you mean: Ying’emen. I’ll take you.”

  I liked Mr. Li.

  He woke a driver—asleep on a mah-jongg table—who took us to the village, and a low brick house. “The oldest woman in the county lives here,” Mr. Li said. “We’ll ask her.”

  We entered the home without knocking to learn that the oldest woman in Qingyuan county was in the hospital. We drove back to town and found a frail woman named Yu Huifang tethered to an intravenous drip. She sat upright, expressing no surprise at the strangers who arrived to ask about a relic.

  “Seventy years ago you could see the palisade here,” she said. “Now it’s gone; the trees were chopped down for firewood, and the moat was used for planting. It’s all eroded now. No trace exists. No one cares about our Manchu history, after all.”

  She reclined, closed her eyes, and told us to find a man named Liu Liangjun. “He wrote a book about the palisade.” Research in China is horizontal: one person passes you on to the next, like knots joining rope.

  It was after dark; Mr. Li, ever the host, brought me back to town and stood rounds of Heaven Lake brand beer, named for the mythical lake atop the Ever-White Mountains. The beer tasted flat and watery. “Like the lake, maybe,” he suggested.

  We parted until morning. Open fires illuminated the town’s curbs; it was the start of the Manchu ghost festival, when families spoke the name of the dead and air-mailed fake money to them via flames. “It’s a way of remembering their spirit, to let them know you still care,” a woman told me as she burned a paper sheet of gold coins. The woman didn’t ask after my family, only if I could help her start a new one. “I need to find a husband. Single men leave Qingyuan to find work.”

  In my hotel room, the local access television channel broadcast classifieds. Kenny G’s alto sax played as the ads scrolled past: a Liberation truck for sale, bags of homemade fried spiced peanuts available on Pioneer Road. A government notice urged viewers to “despise counterfeit money; cherish the people’s money.” Then a series of lonely-heart ads:

  • Man, 76, divorced, 1.67m, owns a house with heat. No burdens. Looking for a woman 76 or younger. Beauty doesn’t matter. I’ll spend all my time loving you!

  • Woman, 43, healthy, tender, and warm, graduated middle school. Seeking a man aged 62 or younger.

  • Woman, 53, 1.55m, retired, responsible, good quality, no burdens. Wants to watch the sunset with you tonight.

  Outside, the fires flickered, then died.

  The historian did not own his book, so the next morning he walked us to the middle school. “They have a copy there,” Liu Liangjun said. “It’s only sixty-five pages, but it tells the old tales.” He looked like most historians I had met in China, dressed in a polo shirt tucked into highly buckled slacks and with a graying shock of hair that suggested electrocution.

  We arrived at the school to find its principal out back, hoeing a row of onions. In fluent English he asked if I knew what used to stand on the school’s site. “A Buddhist temple?” I guessed correctly. In rural areas, temples had often been converted to schools and police stations. “It was pulled down during the Cultural Revolution,” the teacher said, pointing at a worn cornerstone. “That’s all that remains.”

  The principal, Mr. Li, and I followed the historian down a dirt road that we had to step off to allow a tractor to pass. The historian’s book had gone missing from school, and so he would instead show us the story. We stopped at a mud embankment divided by the road. The historian pointed to a stubby, leafless willow trunk. No plaque marked the spot. “The Willow Palisade,” he said.

  This gate sat on the eastern flank of the barrier, which once streteched 700 miles from near Wasteland south to the Yalu River border with North Korea. It marked the imperial hunting grounds—equal in size to the state of Maine—in which Han Chinese were forbidden to settle. In the third verse of his poem about the palisade, the Manchu emperor Qianlong wrote:

  Like the fence that is seventy li long,

  The Hunting Reserve exceeds several times its confines.

  In our erection of borders and regulation of people, ancient ways are preserved,

  As it is enough simply to tie a rope to indicate prohibition.

  But the frontier is as much a process as a place. After the Manchu conquered Beijing, their army and its families moved to the capital in such numbers that at first the court enticed Han Chinese to repopulate the area. A 1653 decree offered seed, draft animals, and deferred taxes to farmers willing to reclaim northern land. The act was rescinded only fifteen years later, however, and by 1681 the Willow Palisade was built, sometimes incorporating walls erected in previous dynasties meant to repel the “barbarians.”

  Yet over the next two hundred years there were as many edicts forbidding as encouraging Han Chinese settlers (and banished convicts). Restrictions were lifted during times of southern famine, or to populate areas such as Wasteland where Russia showed territorial ambitions. Jilin city—Kirin, or Girin Ula, in Manchu—became a strategic center after the emperor opened a naval port there in 1676. A Jesuit priest who accompanied the emperor to inspect Jilin’s shipworks wrote: “In this city they make their boats in a particular manner. The inhabitants always keep a great number in readiness to repulse the Muscovites, who often frequent these rivers and endeavour to take away the pearl fishery from the Kiringers.”

  In the end, it wasn’t the Muscovites but Chinese settlers who arrived in droves. As the Qing dynasty faltered, racking up debt, local administrators needed to raise their own revenue. Their only available asset was land. In the 1870s the imperial hunting reserves and pastureland were opened to homesteaders and the palisade became superfluous.

  The school principal interrupted the historian. “This area is ripe for tourism!” he said, pointing to the near distance. “You see the dip in the hills where the Willow Palisade came down? There’s a lake up there where we can add tents and picnic areas and then rebuild the Willow Palisade. It’s so easy: Just plant trees. I’m telling you, it’s so easy. Think about it. It’s willow trees! It won’t cost much, it’s just trees. But the local leaders won’t listen to me.”

  Our group walked back to the school and stepped across the street to the village’s only restaurant. Stacked at its entrance was a neat row of drying corncobs topped by a row of severed German shepherd paws. So much for the Manchu founding father’s order forbidding his people to eat dog.

  At the table, the historian sat quietly, the headmaster was talking (“Trees! Easy! Cheap! Trees!”), and Mr. Li held the menu. “I’m a vegetarian,” I lied. A policeman in uniform joined us, said that he was Manchu, and knew the location of Qingyuan’s most valuable artifact. “It’s in my basement.”

  Grasping the type of large iron ke
y ring I thought only existed in Westerns, the officer led me down the police station stairs. “It’s in here,” he said, pointing at a door. “In the boiler room.” The lock clicked and the cop tugged at the metal door. On the dirt floor I saw a rusting bell as tall as my knee, inscribed in Manchu and Chinese script. “Welcome to our museum,” the officer joked. “It’s all that remains here of our Qing dynasty.”

  The historian suggested I look for the Willow Palisade on its western flank, where it formerly divided Manchu and Mongolian pastures. It was 120 miles from Qingyuan, and there was less development out there, the historian said—fewer roads, little construction. But more wind: surely, I thought, less of the structure would remain. Even in his eighteenth-century palisade poem, the emperor Qianlong described its diminishment:

  I spurred my horse along the Palisade;

  It was so low I could have jumped over it.

  The deer go back and forth and can sometimes be caught outside;

  Building it is the same as not having built it.

  When I later made the trip west, I assumed that the bus would deposit me in an ancient village where another Manchu shop owner and another historian—distant cousins of Qingyuan’s, perhaps—would step forward and show me the way. Instead, the bus discharged me in a town named New Citizen at a gleaming station as large as a regional airport. While everyone inside the terminal was friendly and engaging in the Northeastern way, offering syrupy pinecones to eat (for the seeds), asking why I didn’t have kids, yelling into cell phones, and making inquiries, no one had heard of the Willow Palisade.