‘That’s not a wise thing to do,’ snarled the driver. ‘Those foolish tourists don’t understand the Great Wall’s history: writing one’s name on one of its bricks is a death knell.’
As China has become wealthier, and more people can travel to see the Wall for themselves, large numbers have thoughtlessly carved or penned their names on its bricks. At Badaling it’s difficult to find a single brick without graffiti. By early 2014 the amount of graffiti on the Wall’s bricks had become such a problem that the authorities managing one of the other main tourist Wall sections close to Beijing, Mutianyu, decided on a controversial attempt to contain it. Graffiti is allowed within one of the interiors of a battle platform. Its inside walls are draped with changeable covers; once filled up, they are replaced.
In our attempt to deal with this vandalism, and preserve the Wall, I think the driver’s version of Meng Jiangnü’s legend is the one we should promote, if only for its potential as a haunting deterrent.
3.
The Enemy at First Sight
Bronze face of a Xiongnu warrior
In my eyes, the historical value of an object lies in its ability to initiate an inter-generational conversation, and this object, a face in bronze, certainly does. It’s a unique piece among hundreds of bronze artefacts in the collection of the late Mr Purevjav Erdenechuluun, collected between 1996 and 2011 from all over Mongolia, and only recently put on display in a vault under the largest equestrian statue in the world, of Genghis Khan, outside Ulaanbaatar.
To me, it was a face that stood out from a crowd. In the museum’s exhibition hall stands a map depicting where various artefacts were excavated or collected. An array of thumbnail photos shows arrowheads, totems, lance motifs, swords, daggers, knives, belt buckles and animal decorations. It was from this map that the Xiongnu warrior gazed out at me. As I looked into his eyes, I pondered whether I was meeting a representative, generic face or some particular individual. When we stare into the face of a Qin terracotta warrior, it is thought we are seeing an actual person; perhaps I was engaging in a similar historical dialogue when I looked into the eyes of this Xiongnu warrior.
It may be the tiniest object of the entire fifty, but its date – from the second century BC – means it is around twenty centuries old. If we assume that generations occur every twenty-one years or so, or five times per century, then this object allows us to connect with a person from around 100 generations ago. It was a time when two large and powerful empires were in conflict. The bronze was found, and is assumed to have been made, in Dundgovi Aimag, or ‘Middle Gobi’, Province, a landscape where the steppeland deteriorates in quality towards the south, becoming desert.
At about the time this object was created, circa 145 BC, the Chinese chronicler Sima Qian, author of Shiji, or Records of the Grand Historian (see Object 11), was born in present-day Hancheng, Shaanxi Province. Our knowledge of the Xiongnu, or Huns, comes entirely from Chinese sources, and that means Sima Qian; the Xiongnu themselves were illiterate and without a script of their own. Even the History of the Later Han (Hou Han Shu), written five centuries after Sima Qian, used Shiji as its main source.
Sima Qian described the Xiongnu as the earliest nomadic enemy of ancient China, and the reason for the building of the first Wanli Changcheng, or Great Wall. This small bronze, probably a belt decoration, is a very rare self-depiction of a Xiongnu, or a Hunnu, as they called themselves, which means ‘People of the Sky’.
The Chinese, however, had a different view of the Xiongnu, whose lands occupied a vast swathe along China’s northern edge. In accordance with China’s Tianxia political and philosophical scheme of geographical hierarchy (‘All Under Heaven’ – or, more directly, China at the centre of the world), the Xiongnu were demonised as foreigners at the edge who refused to acknowledge Chinese superiority. Indeed, the Hunnu militarily challenged Chinese domination, eventually inflicting major defeats on the Western Han, and forcing its early emperors into humiliating appeasement policies (see Object 15).
The Xiongnu were said to have used knives to scarify their own faces in order to appear more bellicose. A plausible explanation of the evolution of the character xiong – 匈 – is that the central cross component represents those facial scars, beneath a helmet. The Xiongnu were commonly described as marauders who produced nothing but the meat and milk they consumed, and who owned nothing of value except the goods they stole or extorted from their productive Chinese neighbours.
Recent archaeological finds throughout Mongolia (examples of which abound in the same private collection of which this bronze Xiongnu face forms a part) evidence a different side to the Xiongnu story: that they produced large quantities of exquisite goods themselves. The majority of artefacts, some utilitarian, others clearly for decorative or ritual use, show their people’s close relationship with nature. Common motifs such as the deer, gazelle, ibex, argali and camel highlight the Xiongnu reliance on hunting wild beasts for food and clothing, and on domesticating some for transport. Among the latter, the horse held pride of place in the nomadic society, becoming the most revered and prized of the ‘six snouts’ (the others were the sheep, goat, cow, yak and camel). If man is in the picture at all, he is usually shown anonymously, impersonally.
This object is different. This man has a roundish face, large eyes, a broad nose and a moustache above quite thick lips. His head is wrapped in a scarf. The Xiongnu were the first truly federated nomadic people; they created a state in 209 BC that was ruled by a shanyu (equivalent in stature to a khan). It stretched from Korea in the east to the Tianshan or Heavenly Mountains in the west, from Lake Baikal in the north to the Ordos Desert in the south. The steppe confederacy’s timely establishment made it an effective counterweight to the might of the newly unified dynastic Qin empire, which defended itself with the Wanli Changcheng. Some researchers believe the unification of China under the Qin actually catalysed unity across the steppe as a means of building an effective military response to the larger, more powerful entity of imperial China.
DESCRIPTION: Bronze ornament of a Xiongnu face; measures 3 centimetres by 3 centimetres; second century BC
SIGNIFICANCE: Image of the first powerful steppe people: the Xiongnu, or ‘Huns’
ORIGIN: Undurshil Soum, Dundgovi Aimag, Mongolia
LOCATION: Museum of the Great Hunnu Empire, Erdene, Ulaanbaatar; private collection of the late Mr Purevjav Erdenechuluun
The precise reason for the object’s crafting and its journey down 100 or more generations is open to debate. It has a ring-like opening on its reverse, thick enough for threading onto a sash or leather thong, so it seems most likely it functioned as a belt decoration. Belts were important adornments of the nomads, symbolic of the wearer’s valour and status. They functioned as hangers for everyday tools and weapons, ranging from awls to knives and swords. According to Mongoliin Nuuts Tovchoo, or ‘The Secret History of the Mongols’, the first historical account of steppe life from the early thirteenth century, the exchange of belts was seen as an oath of allegiance between friends.
To us, this tiny belt decoration shows the true face of a people who were the prime reason behind the first Great Wall’s construction – people who made objects of beauty themselves, who did not have scarred faces, and who called themselves the Hunnu.
4.
Observing a Ceasefire
Painting of a Mongol archer
It was in 2003 that I first saw the Mongol archer on horseback, in the most unexpected of places: cantering within a dimly lit cabinet in the gallery of Chinese art in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. I was immediately entranced by my chance meeting with him, so far from his homeland. Neither the museums at either end of the Great Wall, at Shanhaiguan and Jiayuguan, nor those which showcased national collections in the capital, Beijing, had such a clear illustration of the nemesis of China’s northern frontier between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Produced by a Chinese artist in the gongbi style (of realistic portrayal), this was the first image
I had seen of a Mongol, the nomads whose invasions took all of China from Han majority rule, and whose threatening posture, after their ousting, led to the construction of China’s greatest Wall, that of the Ming Dynasty.
Gazing at the image, I saw a true likeness. With a recent visit to Mongolia fresh in my mind, I noticed that this man rode the stocky Mongolian breed still used on the steppe today (see Object 25). His bow, too, was of the recurved composite design (see Object 8), a fragmented example of which I’d seen in an Ulaanbaatar museum. His boot looked exactly the same as an armour-plated pair in the same museum (see Object 26). And he wore the flowing ‘dell’ robe still worn by the steppeland herders of today. The painting was described as having been produced in China.
I wondered under what circumstances a Ming artist might have made a painting of a Mongol. They were commonly perceived as the arch-enemy. Could it have been for familiarisation?
That notion had contemporary significance. The war in Iraq was raging, and American troops had been issued a pack of playing cards depicting the fifty-two most wanted members of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The US Defense Department had explained the logic: it was a method of making known their arch-enemies, the most wanted men in Iraq, to US troops. It gave them targets with high price tags.
Yet this Mongol was not clad in armour, ready for war, but was dressed in a traditional dell cloak. Its blue was a significant colour, being favoured for festival occasions. He is shown wearing a serene expression, carrying his bow and quiver full of arrows. He has certainly not been humiliated or demonised by the artist for propaganda purposes.
The subject belongs to a category that barely seems to exist in Chinese art. Can’t we say that most art is produced for appreciation? Traditionally, in China, that had meant a stock of unchanging genres: peaceful images of birds, insects, fish, flowers and idyllic landscapes, complemented by the highest form of art, not brushstrokes but calligraphy. This painting has none of that: it’s a maverick subject, without a calligraphic character. I don’t think it was painted for appreciation.
I asked Freda Murck, an American who has studied Chinese painting for thirty years, for her opinion. She happened to be in London and went along to the V&A, where the curator of Chinese paintings, Zhang Hongxing, showed her the mounted scroll.
‘The quality is low and it has serious authenticity problems, which is funny to say as it has no attribution,’ commented Murck. ‘The brushwork is wobbly and undistinguished.’ She also noted that it had a number of collector’s seals, recording its ownership and appreciation; one of the Qianlong Emperor had clearly been faked in an attempt to enhance the object’s value.
Wang Ning, a former Sotheby’s Chinese art expert, pointed me towards works by esteemed horse painters, notably Zhao Mengfu, the Yuan Dynasty artist. Looking at his works, I saw art for art’s sake. I felt the peace, timelessness and emotion of grazing one’s own horse, training one’s own steed, all captured by Zhao Mengfu’s magnificent brushstrokes. He painted from inspiration, and for others’ appreciation. When I returned to my archer, the question of the reason for its production loomed even larger: art for what sake?
I asked a number of other experts – not of art, but of Ming history and steppe history – to comment, but they shied away from the challenge. The painting is an anomaly. It doesn’t conform. It doesn’t belong to any genre or school. So that invites us to think outside the square.
If it wasn’t produced for familiarisation, demonisation or appreciation, then for the purposes of the Ming Great Wall’s story I would categorise it as a product of what I might call ‘accommodation’. Following the restoration of Han rule after almost five centuries’ domination of North China by people of northern nomadic origins, various policies were pursued by Ming emperors to prevent a repetition of that history: another invasion and period of rule by the Mongols.
While border defence construction was the cornerstone of the dynasty’s defence policy, its rulers employed other approaches too, including what was termed ‘checking barbarians with barbarians’ and ‘fighting barbarians with barbarians’. Both policies included the cross-border exchange of goods, which ranged from occasional to regular in frequency. Some became known as horse-tea markets, and at such venues nomads came to trade with merchants. I wonder, therefore, whether this painting might have been painted on such an occasion, indicating such an interaction. Here, the Mongol is depicted realistically, not as a foe. He is in traditional garb, not battle dress.
DESCRIPTION: Gongbi-style painting of a Mongol archer
SIGNIFICANCE: A rare image of a nomadic warrior
ORIGIN: China, anonymous artist, mid to late Ming (sixteenth to seventeenth century)
LOCATION: Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Regardless of its artistic quality in the eyes of experts, this painting for us is a revelation. It gives insight into a little-known moment, a ceasefire of sorts, within an otherwise long and violent history. This mounted archer sat briefly and peacefully to be painted; those before him rode in waves, charging as cavalry, fighting battles.
5.
Just Add Water
Pottery sherds from the desert floor
When I visited my first museums as a child, I ignored the typical welcome that most curators have in store for visitors: an avenue of cabinets containing broken bits of pots. I always breezed past these dull artefacts, hurrying toward the exciting, glistening antiquities of gold.
No matter what country you are in, the first exhibits to greet you in most museums are the pots. Broken pots. Many of the pots we use today have not changed much since our distant cousins used them, hundreds or even thousands of years ago – another reason they fail to capture the imagination of most people. But, as any archaeologist will confirm, we’ve learned much more about our past from the pots our ancestors made, used and dropped than from their more artistic antiquities. The latter are the gushing socialites who give good first impressions; the former, the pots, are the quiet, unassuming friends whose qualities are slower to emerge.
I can tell you that you feel much more enthusiastic about broken old pots when you’ve found the pieces yourself. When you pick up a potsherd and examine it, the excitement that wells up inside you is not because the broken pottery is so many hundreds of years’ old. It arises when you think about what the pot might have contained, who might have used it, when and why.
So, let’s discover some together. We are walking along a section of the Great Wall. The age, location and morphology of the rampart are not vital; the Wall is six to eight metres high and made of mud (and it’s among the best-preserved Great Wall of its type that I’ve ever seen). This part of the Wall is in Ningxia, running along the edge of dry foothills that rise in height westwards, growing into the Helan Mountains. It’s a desert region pocked with patches of drought-resistant shrubs. Unsurprisingly, there’s no permanent human presence here. But there used to be. Evidence abounds in the remains of the Great Wall, which records man’s one and only major intrusion into this hostile landscape.
The evidence rises before us in a spectacular way: a towering high and immensely long rampart, clearly a sizeable human effort made under testing environmental conditions. It was both a survival challenge for the men who operated this defensive structure and a logistics challenge for its builders – the planners and strategists who organised the army families to do the labour.
Walking beside the Wall, we’re attracted by the pieces of pot strewn across the desert floor. It seems that every ten steps, a piece of pottery glistens on the surface of the earth. We start to collect the sherds. The largest are about the size of a small hand, the smaller ones the size of business cards. Most are glazed, and slightly curved. The broken edges reveal that they are very coarse sand pots, with thick, vitreous glazes of different colours: dark brown, lighter brown, bluish-purple, greyish-green. A mosaic builds up. I take a photograph.
What were they used for, and why do they remain in such quantity? I sent the photograph to Wang N
ing, a ceramics expert formerly of Sotheby’s. ‘The photo is very interesting, although it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to figure out the age of the sherds,’ he writes. ‘The vessels would seem to have been utilitarian – the glaze indicating they were probably used for water retention; unglazed pots are porous. Judging by the lipped rims on some of them, the earliest possible date for them would be Ming, but they could also be much later, even as late as the twentieth century, because water storage jars never changed much from Ming times.’
DESCRIPTION: Glazed pottery sherds
SIGNIFICANCE: An indication of the large amount of water used in certain sections of the Wall
ORIGIN: Found beside rammed sections of Ming Great Wall in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, China
LOCATION: Author’s collection, Beijing
So we know the jars were used for water storage, and that they do almost certainly date from the Ming, when people either built the Wall here or were garrisoned upon it. But why were the pots so large, I wondered. From their curvatures I estimated they were about an arm’s length in diameter, and more than waist-high.
I found what I believed to be the missing link within an hour; like the potsherds themselves, it was right beside the Wall. A piece of stone, worked, not natural in shape, that had a hollowed centre into which a pole-like handle could be inserted. It was the rock head of a broken ramming tool used by the Wall builders, who tamped down the damp earth within a wooden frame as they built up, layer by layer, the seven-metre height of the Wall.
Another memorable Great Wall experience provided the background details. As a geologist, I had learned to appreciate the guiding principle of uniformitarianism: the idea that present processes show us how past environments were created. In China, I knew, occasionally it was possible to see how things were done in the past from how they are still being done today. In Gansu I had stumbled across a team of villagers building a rammed-earth wall. They used versions of the tool I had found, and did their ramming work to the collective chant of a folk song about Meng Jiangnü’s tears bringing down the Wall (see Object 2). Strangely, they were working on a day when summer thunderstorms rumbled all around, and it was raining. I asked why.
Great Wall in 50 Objects Page 3