Cui Yongyuan (崔永元), one of China’s (few) most “nostalgic and upright” TV gurus, shot a 32-episode documentary named “My WWII” after interviewing 3500 ordinary people in 8 years, but found it hard to sell.

The documentary is part of the serial efforts of Cui Yongyuan to rescue memories from fast-diminishing living witnesses to the major events of 20th century, such as the Long March of 1930s and Chinese mainstream genre movies of 50-70s (rumor has it that he would have wished to work on Cultural Revolution too, but the odds would be tremendous). By interviewing those white-haired old people who had served as soldiers, nurses, teachers etc. in the WWII instead of far-from-the-battlefield experts and scholars, Cui hopes to maintain the “body warmth” of history, and keep the memory of the nation alive.

However, in a time when most media are busy showing sensational headlines, money-oriented fast-date programs, spectacular variety shows, romantic soap operas, readapted (sometimes outrageously grossified) popular novels, sports and other entertainments, Cui’s initiative was politely declined by many buyers due to its “lack of advertisement attractiveness”. Up to now, Cui, who has set up a special donation fund for his oral history ambitions, has spent hundreds of millions of RMB on the above programs, but this former red-hot CCTV talk show host still has a long way to go to make two ends meet.

In view of the fact that Cui once was hit by depression when his reality talk show “To Tell the Truth” (实话实说) was judged as “not entertaining enough”, he might have found a better way to readjust his expectations for a good environment for documentaries in today’s China. Good luck, Cui.

original source from:         

http://ent.163.com/10/0913/07/6GEPPB2J00031H2L.html

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Laotsu Bhodidharma

I am not a follower of Tao or Zen – in fact, if I were, then by the stringent ideas of these creeds, I would not even be writing this article: according to one, you should be achieving the understanding that my article tries to pass on through your own meditative efforts, while according to the other, the forces of the cosmo would naturally make it happen without me doing anything to force it. You could look at analogous cases like a capitalist spending money on propagating the virtues of free enterprise – he should be using his capital to seek the highest return. The Warring States philosopher Yang Zhu was more consistent: he promoted Selfishness as the guiding principle of life, on the hard to refute premise that if everyone does the best for himself, then society as a whole is improved. He left behind no books - if he wrote books and taught students, he would be helping others, hence violating his own principle of selfishness.

The great proponent of Tao was of course Laozi, an archivist at the Zhou royal court during the Later Spring-Autumn period, somewhere during 600 to 500BC. We have virtually no biographical information about him, just brief mentions in several ancient texts. Zhuangzi mentioned him most frequently, but as a sage-hermit figure appearing in fragmentary fables, which tell us nothing about him as a physical person; Hanfeizi discussed Laozi in rather “academic ways”, thus also not being very helpful for biographic purposes. Mentions in several Confucian texts are somewhat more concrete, showing him as Kongzi’s mentor. However, the idea that he was only a mythical or composite figure, and the book Daodejing was written by a later author, was put to rest definitively when a copy of the book was excavated in a Warring States tomb during the 1970s, showing that the book could not have been written later than early Warring States and most probably existed much earlier, though it received some minor editing to end up in the current standard form. The discovery also confirms that Laozi was smoe kind of government official, since the availability of writing material was highly restricted during the Spring-Autumn period and books from that age and earlier were all official documents of one kind or another.

Given the author’s status, Daodejing was not a book about mysticism, religion or even philosophy, but about politics; (It is also useful to point out that 德 “de” originally meant something like “grace” in “X, by the grace of God, King of Y”, i.e., divine mandate.) however, its political views derive from certain ancient mystical ideas, which I show in the following diagram of various ancient Chinese artifacts

folowed by something more Western

the commonality between east and west is the serpent that swallows its own tail, or in the words of Keats the poet: in my end is the beginning.

In the West, the Uroboros serpent was at least 3600 years old, its first kno

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Having the opposites of yin and yang allows a dynamic world to arise, such as the interchange of day and night producing the flow of time, and sexual union between man and woman producing the continuation of human race… Yin and yang are co-existent, mutually enhancing yet mutually limiting; yin cannot exist without yang and yang cannot exist without yin, since each needs the other to define it; there is yin in yang and yang in yin, as in the Ultimate (Taiji) diagram, with a white dot inside the black and a black dot inside the white.

The Taiji diagram is a symbol of the Taoists. Like the Buddhist swastika (卍, also the symbol of the Animist cult of Tibet and the tribal sign of the ancient Qiangs), it was derived from a very old shaman diagram of two entangled snakes.  The black dot in white and white dot in black were originally the eyes of the two snakes. Snakes tangled together in order to have sex, and ancient snake-worshipping tribes used the diagram as the symbol of fertility and reproduction, which then became identified with the productivity of farming, fishing and hunting, such that the figure took on the meaning of the basic elements of existence of the snake worshippers.

The Chinese Hua-Xia tribe was snake worshipping, such that its ancestral divinities, Fuxi, Nuwa and Yellow Emperor, were all human headed snakes. The ancient Hebrews also worshiped the snake: Eve could converse with the serpent, before she learnt to have sex with Adam, which was just a snake-centered fertility ritual. Ancient Egypt and many other regions also had the practice of snake worship. Wall paintings showing Fuxi and Nuwa with entangled tails were numerous in Han Dynasty tombs, but have also been found in Xinjiang indicating that in historical times those localities had similar rites.

In such diagrams Fuxi-Nuwa sometimes held up the sun and the moon, or a golden bird (representing the sun) and a jade hare (for moon, sometimes toad instead of hare), but more commonly they had a compass and triangle (gui-ju), which actually represented heaven and earth: the compass is used to draw the round and triangle to draw the square, in other words, round heaven and square earth. Therefore, Fuxi and Nuwa represented heaven-earth, male-female, as well as other yin-yang concepts.

In a picture above is a compass from above crosses with a triangle below, representing the joining of heave with earth as well as sex between man and woman. Strangely, such compass-triangle diagrams have not been seen in China, but appear frequently in Europe, such as in Greek myths (see illustration above from a Greek mythology book), witchcraft, even as the symbols of an international organization. Is this just coincidence? Or is there some fundamental reason for this?

2. Freemasons

   “My Father’s house has many mansions” – Jesus Christ

In the West there is an international organization called the Freemasons, whose origin was the craftsmen’s guilds of medieval European towns. Today’s Freemasons are more likely to be in some other lines of work, especially vocations in which group cohesion is particularly important, such as policemen, with Masons membership making it easier to maintain mutual support and advancement with fellow members. The organization has various secret rites and worship practices, not to be divulged to outsiders, often giving rise to rumours that Masons are a cult that engages in witchcraft. Is there any solid information? The diagram on the previous page is from their own literature. The presence of the compass and triangle is of course familiar to craftsmen, but it happens to fit the legend of Fuxi-Nuwa. Mere coincidence? The earlier diagram had two figures which were symbols taken from material for European witchcraft. One has the compass and triangle, and the other is similar overall but has instead the Jewish Star of David, six pointed like the compass-triangle combination.

In short, compass-triangle not only appears in Chinese legend, Greek mythology, Freemason tradition and European witchcraft, but also has some connection to the ancient Hebrews; its presence is not coincidental, but systematic. (In each figure there is a serpent swallowing its own tail surrounding the six-point object, also a frequently seen item in European witchcraft; this will be further discussed below.)

Freemasons arose from the Knights Templar of the Crusades, who werededicated to the defense of the Jerusalem Temple, where they discovered ancient documents describing worship practices of the old Jewish tribes. On the basis of these, they formulated some unusual rites to be held in the Temple, which even then aroused suspicion among the other crusading groups, but these were tolerated in the interest of solidarity against immediate enemies. After the failure of the Crusades, the Templars brought the practices back to Europe where they encountered serious opposition, eventually leading to their banning by the French court. Under some pressure, the Pope dissolved the Knights Templar groups, confiscated their properties, and agreed to the execution of some of the leaders. A number of members found refuge in Scotland, where they defused into the local craft organizations, gradually expanding their presence into an international one.

We see from the foregoing that the Freemasons preserved some very ancient worship practices and symbols, and these were shared between East and West. However, as each locality underwent centuries of belief system changes, the old practices fell into disuse and were forgotten, leaving just minor bits, often too fragmentary to make sense of and to be taken seriously.  

3.The Mesh

  “The gods’ mesh is loose, but it is everywhere” – Chinese proverb

In the diagram of the Masonic hall we can see a checkerboard floor, a common enough floor decoration, but again this happens to coincide with ancient Chinese artifacts, namely the mesh pattern frequently seen on Neolithic pottery and jade. While the major presence of such pottery was in the Yangshao sites of Gansu and Shanxi, it is common enough in other regions, and appears to have been connected to agriculture, the practice of burial after death, and pig raising; the old ideogram for Hua (one name for the Chinese people) contains several squares, possibly due to its being derived from the mesh pattern. Also, the Jerusalem Cross used by the Crusaders may have had the same mesh origin.

In comparison, the swastika came from the Indo-European nomads of west Asia, later in age because it was more difficult to domesticate cattle, goats and horses compared to pigs. Indo-Europeans practised cremation, and used little pottery which is difficult to move around and easily broken, keeping their things more often in sheepskin or woven wool sacks. The origin of the mesh pattern might have been fish scales, snake skin or fishing nets; the ancient texts claim that Fuxi invented the fishing net, so that the mesh pattern may have been his personal sign.

The wide spread of the mesh pattern was shown by the following passage from the Record of the Kings’ Reigns of Tibet: “The King furthertransformed into a new Presence, and soon completed the construction of all of the Rosha Hall. He had drawn on the four doors the figure of the stupa, to please the lamas; on the hall pillars the shape of the Rod, to please the chanter monks; on the four corners the swastika, to please the animists; and also the mesh pattern, to please the Tibetans.” While the books was supposedly describing events during Tang times, it was mentioning ancient folk practices. The Tibetans and the ancient Qiangs had some characteristics of the Indo-Europeans as well as the Easterners, and appear to have been the product of a merging of people from east and west. Also, some jade human figures, uncovered from tombs of the Zhongshan state from the Warring States period, have the mesh pattern on their skirts. Zhongshan was known as White Savages, and appear to be former nomads. The mesh pattern also appears on skirts, sometimes sleeves, of jade dancing girls of the Eastern Zhou period.

The mesh pattern is also connected to dragons. From the 80s onward, a number of Neolithic sites and artifacts were discovered in Inner Mongolia and Liaoning province, collectively known as Hongshan Culture. Most notable among the artifacts were the jade objects, in particular jade dragons with pig heads and snake bodies, some with joined head-tail known as “pig-dragons” or “beast-shaped slit rings”, some with separated head and tail looking like the English letter c, known as C-dragons. Further, somewhat earlier or later sites and stylistically related artifacts were also discovered in nearby localities like Zhahai,Xinglongwa, Zhaobaogou, Xiajiadian and others.

The mesh pattern is present on the forehead and chin of the C-dragon, on the dragon bodies on a pottery urn from Zhaobaogou, and on a human-faced fish, with tail curled back to touch the head, found on a pottery jar unearthed in a distant site in Xiping, Gansu. Now tail joining head brings us back to the snake swallowing its own tail in the European witchcraft figures – we have travelled a full circle.

4. Pig dragons

   “In my end is the beginning” – T S Eliot

The tail-swallowing snake of western witchcraft has some resemblance to the human-faced fish of Xiping, but even greater resemblance with the Hongshan pig dragon.Pig dragons may either have the tail joined to the head or separate by asmall gap, but generally the joined ones look more primitive and older, later evolving to the separate type. Tail joining head expresses the idea of “have” and “have not”, or begin and end, being the same, in a perpetually evolving cosmos. This is a Taoist concept, but has its origin in ancient shaman practices. The contribution of Laozi and others was about extending the abstract philosophy to apply to society and life, deriving such political ideals as a nihilist/naturalist government.

There is however an ancient pig-dragon story in Chinese legends, related to Chang-e the moon goddess: the archer Hou-yi fell in love with the fairy of Luo River, and shot her husband the River God whose name was Feng-yi, which is actually the same story as Hou-yi killing Feng-xi and capturing his wife Xuan-qi the Dark Lady – Feng-yi and Feng-xi are just different pronunciations of the same name. In Quyuan’s poem “Divine Queries” there was a passage concerning Dark Lady murdering Yi: “Zhuo marrying the Fair Fox, Lady Xuan co-conspiring; for all Yi’s archer skills, he was jointly eaten”, which referred to the same event as the story of Chang-e stealing Yi’s life-elixir and Feng-meng killing Yi: as Yi found new women, Lady Xuan avenged herself by conspiring with Feng-meng to have him killed.

The River God Feng-yi was a dragon, and Feng-xi was a pig (in some stories known as Feng-zhu); so he was a pig-dragon; Lady Xuan, Chang-e, Fair Fox, Nine-tailed fox… were different names used to various stories to refer to the same woman (Zhuo was a Xia Dynasty usurper who killed an earlier usurper called Yi – it is not clear whether the two Yi’s are the same man.) Hou-yi’s tribe worshipped the sun, while Chang-e’s tribe would have worshipped the moon, so that she was said to have gone to the moon when she escaped back to her own tribe after murdering Yi. The moon waxes and wanes, showing the ability to return to “life” after “death”, hence the moon tribe was said to have the elixir of life. (Other issues relating the to moon tribe or Xuan tribe will be discussed later.)

The idea of the dragon also had many variations. Some of the ancient snake worshipping tribes noted tornadoes occurring in spring and summer, looking to them like a divine serpent waking up from winter hibernation and rising to heaven, with its devastatingly powerful tail on the ground and its head in the clouds where wind, rain, thunder and lightening all occur, thus acquiring the idea of the dragon as the god for water and thunder. The ancient site associated with Shen-nong (Divine Cultivator), the town of Chen (Huai-yang today), has an ideogram that was originally the same as that for lightening, and Shen-nong tribe probably started off as Shen-long or Divine Dragon tribe, evolving from the human-headed, snake-bodied Fuxi-Nuwa tribe. In the beginning the dragons had no legs, as those unearthed in Zhahai, Zhaobaogou and Wengniute County all show, and such attachments as body scales, deer horns, fish tail, bird claws, etc, were added later. An earlier diagram shows the stone assembly dragons of Puyang and Zhahai.

Another type of jade object unearthed in Hongshan in large quantities was the so called “curvy cloud. The primitive versions had four arms like the swastika, also presenting the idea of entangled serpents, and the curvy lines resembled the dragon pattern on the Zhaobaogou pottery urn shown earlier but without the mesh patterns. Later, two such objects were joined together into the more complex, “large curvy cloud” object, whose middle part was then shrunk and peripheral parts expanded to produce the “ghost face” cloud objects, finally simplifying into a bird-like object. However, joining two simple cloud objects with one upside down starts a different line of evolvement, leading to a completely different final result.

Jade has a special importance in ancient China because it was supposed to be food for the gods and essential offerings during ritual sacrifices, which were led by the tribal chiefs, who therefore needed to decorate themselves with jade hangings. Further, the jade stones’ great strength allows them to be ground into sharp points and thin blades as weaponry, and jade axes and spears were carried by the tribal chiefs, so that jade objects became the symbols of power and status.

Various fragments in historical records about the Xia and Shang dynasty downfalls mention the acquisition of jade:

“Chancellor Yi was aide to Cheng-tang as he conquered King Jie…the jade treasures were captured, and Jie was exiled to Nanchao”  

“King Wu picked up Shang’s archived jade treasures amounting to fourteen thousand, and jade pendants one hundred eighty thousand”

This is because jade represented power, leading the rulers to urgently capture the palace jade collections. Zuozhuan also has“Spring of Year 15 Lord Zhu arrived for an audience. Lord Zhu held the jade too high and his expression was lofty; Our Duke stooped to receive the jade and his expression had condescension”

The Ancient Book also mentions that Shun, after his succession, met with his lords and governors, handing back the jade objects received from them afterwards. The editor Kong Xida explained the reasons for receiving and returning jade:

“The ceremonial (jade) was originally granted by Yao. Receiving and returning, it was as if Shun granted these anew, so that they subordinated themselves to Shun, to officiate the start of a new overlordship.”

In short, a whole set of ceremonial rituals were related to jade. When a vassal went to see an overlord, he presented jade to express his subordination, while the superior returning the jade expressed his satisfaction with the subordinate, who was being allowed to retain his position. (This procedure may have originated from visitors putting down weapons upon arrival, retrieving them upon departure.) 

5. Silk

“Spring breezes never cross Jade Pass” – Tang Poet Wang Zihuan

The Han dynasty opened the Silk Road to central asia. Silk was the export but what was the import? The fact that the mountain pass at the end is called Yu-men or Jade Pass, showed the importance of Eastern Turkistan jade for the demand in China, and it came from Hetian in the Kunlun Mountains, beginning to be imported in large amounts during Shang Dynasty. 

But silk was also of great importance in Chinese culture. Historical Records has “Yu met his lords at Tushan, with ten thousand states presenting jade and cloth”, and even in Han times, lords presented“jade and note” during imperial audiences to express submission.

Cloth and note were both silk, and presentation of silk as a sign of subordination was illustrated in legends by “After Yellow Emperor killed Chi-you, the Silkworm Goddess submitted silk”.

Since silk was important, only persons of status were allowed to do weaving, with frequent mentions of weaving princesses:

“The grandchild of Emperor Zhuanxu was Maid Xiu. Maid Xiu was weaving, and an egg descended from the black bird; Maid Xiu swallowed it, to give birth to Da-ye…”

“Queen E lived in Xuan Palace, weaving at night; sometimes she toured in the day riding on the floating wood…she met a divine boy, calling himself son of White Emperor”

During Spring-Autumn and Han periods there were still high ladies doing weaving:

Zuozhuan: “When Lord Wen returned from the palace, he bowed to (his mother) Lady Jingjiang, who was weaving… Book of Poems says ‘Ladies’ formal task, silkworm weaving to halt’ meaning that weaving was the official task of ladies, not to be halted without ritual cause”

Historical Records “Concubine Bo was dispatched to the Palace Weaving House…the Han King entered Weaving House, saw the beauty of Concubine Bo, and ordered her to be sent in to his Harem”

Book of Han “King Jing of Han: ‘I personally plow, and the Queen personally keeps silkworms, to provide for the food offerings and ceremonial cloths of the ancestral temple, an example for the realm”

This is not just for the purpose of encouraging work and frugality, but also embodies concepts of religious rituals. There are actually similar stories in the west, though greatly altered: in Sleeping Beauty, the princess was forbidden to touch a spindle, at risk to life; there is also the story of the village girl weaving straw into gold with the help of demon Rumplestiltskin, enabling her to marry the King.

Earlier it was mentioned Lady Xiu became pregnant after swallowing an egg while weaving; there are other stories of princesses swallowing eggs:

“The three maidens were bathing, and saw the Black Bird dropping its eggs; Jiandi took one and swallowed it, hence became pregnant with Qi (founder of Shang tribe)”

“The Yourong tribe had two exiled maidens, for whom a nine storey tower was constructed, and whose meals were accompanied by music. The Emperor sent the swallow to visit them, and it sang enchantingly. The two maidens loved it and strived to catch, covering it with a jade basket. Later they uncovered it to see; the swallow left two eggs.”

Bathing and egg-swallowing were part of the fertility ritual of the black bird tribe, but rituals would not have got Jiandi and Lady Xiu pregnant; pregnancy was due to men participating in the rituals and engaging in sex with the women. These ancient rites were forgotten by the times of Zhou and Han, but some traces were left behind:

The story of Cowboy and Weaving Girl was written into a book in the Jin Dynasty, but was mentioned in Zhou and Han poems and related to very ancient events. The “fairies from heaven” went to Yao Pond to bathe, not because they got sweaty bodies, but to hold a fertility ritual; the Weaving Girl was a daughter of the Heavenly Emperor, in other words, a princess who did weaving; Legends also have several stories of princesses getting lost, with mulberries making an appearance:

“Red Emperor’s daughter learnt divine craft and lived on the mulberry tree of Nanyang E Hill. On New Year’s Day she gathered sticks to build a nest, completing it on 15 January. Sometimes she appeared as a white bird, sometimes as a woman. The Emperor was sorrowful seeing this. Unable to tempt her to descend, he set the tree on fire, and the maiden rose to heaven; hence the name Princess’s Mulberry.”

The various stories had the commonality of the Emperor’s daughter coming back after death and being identified with some nature-related romantic role; this is because they were versions of fertility maiden. The mulberry was the tree of life in Chinese mythology,.

West Asian traditions also have a tree of life, originally a palm, with some similarity between the story of Phoenix resurrecting on the tree of life and that of the heavenly Emperor’s daughter turning into the white bird, and to the following

“The Emperor’s daughter drowned in the East Sea, turning into the Jingwei bird, which called its own name, and constantly picked sticks and stones of West Hill to fill up the East Sea”

6.  Xuan

“The source of all wonders” – Laozi

Legends frequently use the character “xuan”

“Zhuanxu the black spirit Xuan-min, Emperor of the North”

“Gaoyang then gave the commission to Yu in Xuan Palace…”

“Xuan bird with Heaven’s mandate, descend to give Shang birth”

“Qi was the Xuan King, assisting Yu in the flood work and was granted   a major state”

One meaning of xuan was the colour black, arising from the moon worshipping clan that held fertility rites at night, a tradition still maintained in some minority tribes in China. The name “xuan-wu” is used for the snake-turtle combination, originally a snake-frog combination with snake representing male and frog female, in other words a fertility symbol. Guang Xuan Palace was the moon palace to which Chang-e escaped after murdering her husband Hou-yi. Xuan is also a word frequently mentioned in relation to Laozi, with its meaning commonly taken as “abstract and obscure.” This reflects the primeval nature of fertility being linked to an even more fundamental role in the cosmos, and then to philosophical discussions about the fundamental abstractions of thought.

The xuan idea of thing-nothing being equivalent and able to change into each other, expressed in the snake swallowing its own tail, actually comes from observations of the real world: if you make some people better off, then in relative or even absolute terms, others become worse off; hence, more and less create each other, and by extension, thing and nothing create each other. By further extension, everything in the world came from nothing, and it is unnecessary to ask where the world came from, when it started and when it will end. Since everything is nothing, we ought to live according to the principle, and since richer rulers usually means they are taking too much from the people making them worse off, governments should be minimal. Trying too hard is counter productive, and simple minded citizens produce a peaceful state.

There was some argument over what era Laozi lived in, since some of his most cynical thoughts seem to be the product of a turbulent and harsh age, such as late Warring States. However, not long ago a version of hisDaodejing was unearthed in graves of the Warring State period, showing that his writings existed at least by early Warring States period, and the current versions included editing by later people. The biography contained in Historical Records, putting him into the same era as Confucius but slightly older in age, seems realistic. Warring States / early Han books like Zhuangzi and Hanfeizi frequently mention Laozi and quote from his book, thus providing independent confirmation of his and his writings’ earlier existence.

Laozi’s thoughts have considerable exploitability, with the result that he was elevated to the status of a great divine, not mere sage. Whenever governments find some things beyond their control, they would justfiy their own inactivity by citing Laozi; Zhuangzi’s nihilist ideas are quite different from Laozi’s social and political agenda, but he wanted to drag Laozi along as his fellow hermit; the Taoist movements that arose later were based on ancient shamanism mixed with later propaganda methods, but claimed Laozi as their founder; Hanfeizi also tried to be Laozi’s disciple, because he wanted rulers to maintain a obscure and deep demeanour so that subordinates act according to explicitly specified rules rather than try to outguess how to please the boss.

Around the time, the Hebrews also happened to be writing down their own abstract thoughts, probably from the same concept of nothingness: God had no shape, no name and no locality, but was all powerful and everywhere, in contrast to other middle east tribes that worshipped ore concrete objects, whether images, statues, or objects in nature. The namelessness of God actually was linguistic: Jehova was initially an all vowel chant I-E-O-U-A which could not be written as the early Semetic alphabets only had consonants. It was the Greeks who invented vowels later, by taking some of the Phoenician letters for consonants that have no counterparts in Greek and denoting vowels with them. 

7. Music

     ”Where sincerity reaches, metal and gold open” – Chinese proverb

Besides legends of the Xuan (Dark) Maiden, there is also the Su (Fair) Maiden, about whom the most familiar is the Su-nu Book, on sexual techniques, which reflects her original role of fertility goddess. Su-nu also happens to be related to music

“The Great Emperor asked Su-nu to play the 50-string thither, which sounded mournful and the Emperor could not stop weeping; hence the thither was cut down to 25 strings”

but the musical involvement was due to the same cause, for fertility and harvest worship:

“In the days when the Rustic Soil Clan ruled the world, winds were excessive and hot air settled, with all vegetation growing loose and fruits failing to ripen; so Scholar Da made the 5-string thither, to bring cool air and pacify the living things”

From this fragment, we see that the five string harp had the function of producing plant fertility, allowing the living things to thrive. “During his time, Shun made the five string harp to serenade the south wind” was along the same line.

The Dark Maiden also played music, inventing the war drum for Yellow Emperor. However, the drum was originally used for fertility rites too, and is still used this way today among some minority tribes, with the pounding of sticks on the drum thought of as being analogous to sexual intercourse. That was before the idea of war existed at all. Xuan-nu Book is another text about sex. The Chinese ideograms for both Su and Xuan contain part of the ideogram for silk, showing that Su-nu and Xuan-nu were originally the silk-mulberry goddesses, associated with the mulberry tree of life.

Another set of ancient texts relate music with the phoenix and Shun:

“He then composed the Great Shao tune; after nice verses of the Piped Shao, the phoenix joined the rites, the stones were pounded, and theanimals danced”

which described the heaven-worship of his tribe: after nice verses of Shao has been played, the tribal chief, dressed as the phoenix, descends on the stage to be honoured by his subordinates, who were dressed in their totem costumes. The Shun tribe made music with thither, pipe and stone chimes; later bronze bells were used, and the mention of spirit metal and stone above was really about music.

“The son of heaven acting as king in human world, returning to heaven afterwards as people witnessed with their eyes…all the kingsmentioned above were like this, ascending to heaven when the prince could ride horse”

This was actually just a ritual of sacrificing the old king to heaven, letting the new king succeed. Chinese tribes had the same practice, though historical records were obscure:

“Heaven sent a yellow dragon to take Yellow Emperor up; the people wereunwilling to let him go and held onto his clothes, boots and sword, butthe will of heaven was hard to oppose, and eventually Yellow Emperor rode the dragon and ascended”

Stories of Yu’s father being cut with knife, upon which he either turned into a dragon, or Yu emerged from his body, Yu himself “disintegrated” to cure the flood, and others, all hinted at the same practice. A similar story existed in Korea and in various European versions detailed in Fraser’s Golden Bough.

Another frequently mentioned story is a ruler falling asleep for several days and dreaming of going to heaven, where he heard wonderful music. This appears to be derived from the above discussed practice of regicide: instead of dying to let his successor take over, the old king prefers to revive and succeed himself after going to heaven and hearing divine music. Yet another derivation is the story of stealing fire from heaven. Even in Han times, there was still an annual Cold Food Day on which households went without fire, till the evening when “heavenly flame” was sent out from the palace to relight everyone’s stoves.

The practice was probably related to Zhuanxu’s “separation of heaven and earth”, with his “heaven tribe” maintaining the only sacred fire to worship heaven, while other tribes were to obtain their heavenly flames from his tribe as a sign of subordination. The ancient agriculturalpractice of burning away vegetation in spring to clear the land for crops, with ashes providing fertilization, meant that the provision of fire was done according to a calendar maintained by the heaven tribe, and the person(s) in charge of the fire also had the responsibility of making astronomical observations to know the annual cycle of seasons.

9. Joining heave and earth

     ”The grey disc to honour heaven; the yellow block to honour earth”  - from   the text Zhou Rituals

Around the same time the Hongshan tombs were being discovered in the 80s, archaeologists found large numbers of even grander Neolithic tombsaround Lake Tai in the Yangzi delta, giving them the general name of Liangzhu Culture. Shown below is an excavated “cong” or “holed jade block”, large enough to be called the cong monarch, and having Liangzhu’s characteristic “demon face” and bird reliefs.

Around 4000 years ago all traces of the culture disappeared, probably  due to westward migration caused by floods, and the Shun tribe, which moved from coast regions and sought refuge with the Yao tribe in central china, could be part of this. The feather crown worn by the Liangzhu demon fitted the descent of phoenix ceremony of the Shun tribe, but is also related to the legend of Xingtian, the fighter who continue battling Yellow Emperor even after his head was chopped off, using his breasts as eyes and navel as mouth. (The rather prominent breasts hint that the original deity was female).

The importance of the feather crown was indicated by the fact that the ideogram for “sovereign” huang was originally “feather” above “king”, and Zuozhuan has a story of the Duke of Zheng having a exiled son killed because of his collection of feather crowns, which hinted at excessive ambition.

A mention of the origin of the word “emperor” di is also in order: it was from the bundled reed figure used as the idol for worship, a harvest practice still seen in Europe today, with the last bundle of wheat being tied together for worship during harvest festivities (the thinking being that the corn spirit would move away from the sickle during harvesting, ending up in the last bundle). During Zhou Dynasty it was part of Chu state’s feudal duty to provide reeds used in ceremonies: wine was poured onto the bundled reed figure, symbolizing the god drinking wine. It could be seen that while “huang” came from hunting bird tribes, “di” came from agricultural tribes.

The structure of the cong has a square cross section with round portions at upper and lower ends, for round heaven and square earth, and a hole in the middle denoting the linking up between the two. The demon face appears to be related to the taotie monster face that is characteristic of Shang bronze utensils, while the two pairs of eyes might be related to the ghost-expelling, four-eyed fang-xiang mentioned in texts of Zhou ceremonies. However, for the most part, by Zhou times the shamanistic significances of the jade objects had been forgotten, while jade, oftenin somewhat different shapes and more decorative forms, continue to be used for ritualistic purposes with everyone vaguely acknowledging their importance without really understanding it. Confucius was quoted to attribute to jade various fine properties analogous to desirable characteristics of the noble person, which only serves to show that he too did not know the real reasons for the importance of jade.

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In the Spring-Autum Chronical of Zuo Qiuming 左传 an obscure entry dated around 640BC says: Lord Zang of Zheng liked to collect snipe feather hats; Duke Wen was offended, and ordered to have him assassinated. 郑子臧好聚鹬冠，郑文公恶之，使盗杀之 Why should a mere sartorial preference produce such a drastic outcome? We have to go back  another 3000 years to find the answer.

Archaeologists found in China two neolithical centres of jade worship: the Hongshan sites in northern china yielded a relatively small number of objects, but with highly imaginative designs and polished execution (considering the primitive tools available at the time) that challenged our modern, patronizing view about the ancient state of mind; the southern Liangzhu sites are even more impressive: there are great numbers of them spread over much of middle eastern china seaboard, and they are of a large scale, with each tomb situated on a soil platform that would have required thousands of people to pile up, and many yielding hundreds of jade items per tomb. While the majority of these lacked the artistic refinement of Hongshan jade, the more complex objects pose their own challenges to our understanding of the ancient people.

The picture of a two-faced demon, with numerous variations, appears frequently on Liangzhu jade objects, mostly on the ritual “cong”,

but occasionally also on axes and discs. A cong usually have the demon face on each corner, but one large cong has demon faces in the corners as well as in the middle of each side, with a pair of bird signs separating the frontal and corner faces.

Judging by the Liangzhu tombs and the complex ritualistic thinking presented by the variety and elaboration of jade objects, the Liangzhu people had a highly organized social system, which somehow left no trace in historical records. We have no idea what happened to the Liangzhu people, other than that around 2000BC they disappeared from their original locations, but some subsequent sites showing Liangzhu influence were found in the surrounding regions such as Shandong, Guangdong and Taiwan.  In any case, it appears that one thousand years after the Liangzhu people’s disappearance, when writing was invented, the Chinese world had already lost all knowledge of them. No signs of them were found in any historical records or legends, and when archaeologists discovered the tombs, the jade objects caused astonishment and incomprehension all around.

The orignal design of the Liangzhu monster face has a demon wearing a large feather hat, with a second face on his chest, the eyes being the breasts and the mouth being the navel (which links to the ancent legend of 刑天, whose head was chopped off by Yellow Emperor but he continued fighting using breasts as eyes – the legend probably arose from a burial ritual for headless warriors killed in battle) – the upper face is the main one and the lower one subsidiary

Obviously, the large feathered hat is of considerable ritualistic significance. In various later folk tales, there were divinities descending from heaven wearing a feather crown, which reminds us of the “descent of the phoenix” ceromony of the Shun (pre-Shang) era: after the playing of the nine divine tunes, the leader of the Shun tribe would appear on stage to receive the submission of his subjects, and presumably his phoenix costume would include a feather crown.

This explains why Duke Wen took offence at Lord Zang’s collection of feather hats: it signified interest in the royalty status associaed with the objects- though the Liangzhu traditions were unknown in Spring-Autumn times, certain vague ideas lingered.

In any case, post-Liangzhu, when the symbol spread to other tribes, its meaning did not always get correctly understood, such that the lower face was thought to be the main one and the upper face was part of the feather hat, producing new designs

then human faces got replaces by other animals, e.g., bird above/human head below, a natural move for a bird worshipping trible

and man wearing tall hat changed to bird wearing high hat

man wearing high hat leading to blade like jade designs

next came bird with two human heads, expanding to a circular structure that will become the toothed disc

a Xia dynasty plate with turquoise pieces fitted on copper plate also has the double face – by the age of metal, the orginal two faced Liangzhu demon has gone “abstract”

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European cultures have just a vague notion of the phoenix, being a mythological bird that is reborn in the fire. West Asia has a more specific notion: the phoenix is a bird associated with fire, but has its rebirth on the tree of life, which happens to be a palm – the tree of life design frequently appears in Persian rugs – while not always looking like a palm, the branch-leaf structure is clearly closer to palms than trees.

But you have to go to Chinese mythology to get a self-contained story that has apparently the same mythological origin: the daughter of Emperor Yan the fire god died early (for various different reasons in different versions of the story) but returned to life on the mulberry, the Chinese tree of life, in the form of a bird. However, this bird, in some stories called Jingwei, in others supposed to be a stork, is never called phoenix.

We therefore have three fragments of legends derived from ancient orally transmitted tales whose original version could no longer be recovered, and in China, an altogether separate set of traditions arose relating to this magical bird called phoenix, divine but unrelated to fire or tree of life.

In fact, the specific name “phoenix” seldom appears in Chinese mythological tales, whereas the dragon appeared early in totemic and shamanistic worship,  while specific birds like the swallow were totemic and the sun was believed to be a golden crow, the phoenix legend had a later appearance, in the age of Shun and Shang, i.e., around 2000BC, as the divine animal associated with wind (whereas the dragon was associated with water/thunder) and the messenger from heaven. ”Descent of the Phoenix” was part of a ceremony in which, after the playing of the nine divine tunes, the Shun tribe’s chief, wearing a feather headress, would appear on stage to receive the acknowledgement and submission of his subjects. It thus had a different status to the tribe that worshiped it compared to the status of the dragon in tribes that considered themselves to be its descendants, an expression that is occasionally used even today, while it is almost unheard of for a Chinese to call himself  “descendant of the phoenix”. The Yellow Emperor or some other ruler was said to have the phoenix descend on him as reward for sage rule or divine devotion, but these were more moral tales rather than historical event descriptions.

To find the origin of the concept of phoenix, it is necessary to go back to its earliest representation in ancient artifacts left behind by our ancesters from whom we have no written records. Instead, we have to rely on objects made from long lasting material such as pottery or stone. The following are jade representations of the phoenix from the neolithic era, with some later adaptations:

.

The first was from a 5000 year old Manchurian tomb, while the second was from a Shang tomb though it could have been made earlier. The third was from a Spring-Autumn era site, but despite its different shape and decoration, the overall idea remains: a crowned bird with elaborate long tail feathers but comparatively simple wings in a side profile. The look of the phoenix would seem to be based on the pheasant, not on predator birds like the eagle or owl, for which the jade representations tend to be frontal emphasizing the open wingspan

Unfortunately, no additional information, e.g., cave paintings, pottery symbols, were left behind to help us understand the specific meanings of these objects.

While current Chinese literary references to phoenix has a female connotation, in contrast to the male connotation of dragon, this is a relatively recent custom, perhaps from Tang dynasty onward. In Han times, dragon/phoenix were both used to denote an outstanding man, with perhaps a slight bias towards power for dragon and phoenix for subtlety. In the novel Three Kingdoms, for example, the expressions respectively refer to Liu Bei’s two advisors Zhuge Liang and Pang Tong, the former known as Crouching Dragon for supposedly being a hermit before joining Liu Bei’s team, the latter as Phoenix Chick for being the younger son in his family.

The Spring-Autum/Warring States Chu region has perhaps the largest collection of artistic representations of the phoenix, a tradition that appears to have been inherited from the Shangs. We see many such expressions in figures weaved or printed on silk, or drawn on/sculptured into lacquer; in particular, there are figures showing the dragon and the phoenix guiding the spirit of a dead person to heaven, and a phoenix fighting with and defeating dragons and tigers. The following diagrams provide a sample of objects discovered in tombs of the era:

the phoenix of later generations is little changed, merely more decorative

but also more often appearing in dragon-phoenix combination

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the origin

The idea of the dragon arose from snake fertility worship. The story of Eve and the serpent showed that (a) Eve, the mother figure of the Hebrew tribe, could talk to the snake, meaning that the tribe had an affinity to the snake (b) The serpent taught Eve and Adam to have sex, meaning that for the tribe the snake symbolized sexual knowledge and fertility (c) God condemned the snake to craw on its belly, meaning that before this the snake could rise up, in other words, the specific snake the tribe worshiped was the cobra, which was also worshiped in other locations of the world including Egypt and India. However, as the Hebrews exited from their primitive pagan state, they underwent religious changes, and the snake turned into an evil figure, just as sex turned from a religiously worshiped activity to something private, even shameful.

The widespread nature of snake worship in primitive times could be discerned from the above diagram showing ancient rock carvings from several European location with figures of entangled snakes – these were clearly predecessors of the swastika, the symbol of the Indo-Europeans. The Yin-Yang figure is actually showing two entangled snakes, and the white dot in the black part and black dot in the white part were just the snakes’ eyes – they were later given philosophical interpretations that there is a little Yin in Yang and a little Yang in Yin. The three medievals witchcraft diagrams, each showing the Uroboros serpent that swallows its own tail, are more recent, but we have vague stories that they represent ideas much older than middle ages. For example, by joining the head with the tail, the figure says “the end is the beginning”, in fact the same idea as the Taoist notion “thing and nothing are the same; from the void arose the universe”. Laozi lived 2500 years ago, but in fact sophisticated coiled snake figures made from jade were discovered in Chinese tombs dating 5000 years ago; since it took a long time to develop the skills and tools needed to carve jade, the idea of Uroboros must have existed long before then.

The association of snake with fertility presumably has something to do with the resemblance of snakes to the penis, the swastika showing our primitive ancesters observed entangled snakes mating and thought this important. Further, snakes hibernate in winter and emerge in spring, as if to signal humans to start planting, thus associating with agricultural productivity – fertility again. Some snakes can kill a human with just one bite, showing their fearsome power requiring appeasement by worship. These are just the more obvious reasons for snake worship.

However, the dragon is much more than the snake, being associated with cloud, rain, thunder, lightening, river, sea, etc. How did this major conceptual leap occur? I feel the cause was the tornado, which looked like a giant black snake with its head in the clouds and a powerful, highly distructive tail on the ground, accompanied by cloud, thunder, lightening and rain. Because tornados usually occur in spring and summer, they looked like giant snakes that woke up after winter hibernation and flew to heaven. In short, the dragon was the primitive tribes’ idea of the heavenly snake, a cut above the snakes that stayed on the ground. The association with rain, however, soon extended to all water, and dragons were assumed to reside in rivers and seas as well.

 the neolithic dragon

The above diagram shows ancient artefacts discovered by archaeologists from several locations in China. Each shows some version of the coiled snake body attached to a particular head. The jar on the left was found in northwestern china, presumably a wine vessel used in shaman rituals. The two jade dragons were found in Manchuria, one obviously related to the Uroboros, while the other showing just a hint of the swastika. The pottery urn came from a site in Inner Mongolia, with the extended snake body curvaciously winding around the surface, attached to heads of pig, bird, deer and some other animal too defaced to discern. The particular stylistic representation seems to be related to the green jade dragon in some way.

We do not know when the neolithic people arrived in China, nor where they came from, but given the commonality in ideas between east and west, the snake worshiping people must have come from a common point of origin, perhaps in India because of the cobra worship (to be further discussed below.)

the Taoist dragon

The pottery and jade objects with the dragon motif were all used for some shamanistic ritual that we do not understand. The two ground sculptures of the dragon shown in the above diagram are better understood: they are mythical animals that tribal shaman chiefs would ride to go to heaven. This constitutes a significant departure from the ideas of the previous era: the earlier thinking was totemic, that the people of a tribe and their worshiped animal are one and the same, that the people that worshiped the snakes were themselves snakes that had take the human form. Under the Taoist thinking, dragon and people are separate, and a dragon is merely a medium through which special humans can reach heaven. Later, this idea would further evolve, making it possible to believe that anyone that performed the right rituals, chants, meditations, etc, would acquire cosmic power and become immortal, that you can control the medium that reached heaven.

the Zhou dragon elaboration

Around 3000 years ago the Chinese tribes began to have the idea of a territory and therefore statehood – previously, a tribe stayed in one place only as long as the location provided plentyful animals for hunting/fishing and the soil remained fertile; when things became less abundant, the people simply moved to another place. When population increases made it harder to freely migrate, people had to learn to make better use of the territory they already occupied. It took many centuries of learning and practising before they were able to breed and raise animals in enclosed pastures and sties, and to rotate crops and fertilize their land with their own waste products so that the soil remained productive year after year.

The Zhou nobility used the dragon as their emblem, with the king using banners showing two entangled dragons, one rising and one descending; other nobility were only allowed to show the descending dragon.

The above examples of jade dragons show that they were more decorative than religious. The “end is beginning” design still appeared occasionally, but its meaning was probably lost to the people. Various elaborations had creeped into the dragon’s appearance.

the Han composition dragon

For the Hans, the dragon was first of all a historical and legendary object. The top diagram shows Fuxi and Nuwa, the Chinese equivalent of Adam and Eve (with the additional detail that they were brother and sister, and their marriage was incestious – the Chinese idea of original sin), half human and half snake, standing up (like cobras do) with tails coiled together (snakes mating). One holds the compass, used to draw round circles, and one the right angle, used to draw squares, hence symbolizing round heaven and square earth.

The two figures below, one a jade pendant found in the grave of a local prince, and the other a paper rubbings taken from brick sculptures, show the dragon in even more elaborate forms than the previous Zhou jade dragons: the dragon now sported highly decorated crowns and tail feathers like birds, and it had legs and a torso like a mammal/reptile – the dragon was trying to be everything all at once.

the imperial dragon

It took another thousand years, in Song Dynasty, before the dragon settled on the design we know it today, by royal decree. The head had standardized to something like a horse’s head, but with horns of a deer; the feet were those of eagles, while the tail was that of a fish. Its body is now covered by fish scales. Specific rules were made on who was entitled to wear robes with which particular dragon design, though details changed with ministerial discussions and whims of the particular emperor. The ultimate taboo was the five-claw dragon that only the emperor could have on his robe.

modern chinese dragon

With no royalty ruling China, the dragon has lived on as a traditional decorative motif. Even its previous connotations of ambition, talent, maleness (in contrast to the female phoenix – male dragon/female phoenix is actually a fairly recent concept), etc, have largely gone into disuse. You have to cite Bruce Lee (Li Xiaolong – Lee the little dragon) and Crouching tiger-hidden dragon (for Hongkong and Taiwan people accumstomed to kungfu movies, an old fasioned story, though new to Americans and some mainlanders) to be reminded of these ideas.

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Retired professor Zhang Huicheng (张惠诚) recently published a book named “History of Chinese Court Coups” (中国历代宫廷政变), which recorded many mishaps and conspiracies that accidentally led to the demise of a certain kingdom or dynasty. One story goes like this:

In the year 605 BC of the Spring and Autumn Period (54 years before birth of Confucius), the newly enthroned king Zheng Linggong (郑灵公) ruled the Kingdom of Zheng (small part of today’s Henan province) . He had two ministers respectively named Zigong (子公) and Zijia （子家）, both blessed with royal bonds and prominent positions in the court.

One day on their way to the court, Zigong’s finger suddenly started moving by itself. ”This is a sign that I’m going to eat something really delicious today! It never fails! ” explained Zigong to the surprised Zijia. Right enough, news soon came that Zheng Linggong was hosting a banquet to treat all his ministers a good soup of giant tortoise from the Kingdom of Chu. Zigong was extremly proud of his prophet finger, and exchanged loud giggles with Zijia in the court.

“What? You think your finger is always true?” after learning why Zijia and Zigong giggled, Zheng Linggong jested, he then made up his mind to show this boastful minister some lessons. So when the soup was served, he ordered it to be distributed to every official from high to low, only deliberately omitting Zigong. “See?” he laughed merrily, “in the final analysis it is your king who decides your chance of a good feast, not your finger!”

Feeling humiliated by the king’s untimely joke and losing face in front of all his peers, Zigong turned red, and then suddenly jumped up towards the soup pot (a huge one, of course, those that we see in museums as giant bronzeware of holy and mysterious patterns). Overseeing all the obligations of ceremonies and regulations, Zigong dipped his finger in the soup, licked at it (some say he even got a piece of meat to chew in his mouth). He then turned to the audience and declared, “well, I think my finger still rules here!” Then without even looking at the king, he flew out of the court.

Now it was the king’s turn to handle the embarrassing situation, and he handled it with no less dignity and royal outrage. “How dare he act like this in front of all the officials of my kingdom? Is this kingdom so small that we couldn’t even afford a knife to behead such an impudent bastard?”

All the officials knelt down to beg for the king’s leniency, with no vail. Zijia also tried to appease the king by bringing Zigong to apologize, only ended up in greater tense. In the meantime, Zigong, who understood himself as a threatened exile, briskly moved on to form a small team of assassins, persuaded Zijia not to take side with the “rotten” king, bribed the servants of Zheng Linggong and then killed him on a good night when the king was staying in a fasting palace during a royal ceremony.  The king was then reported to have died from disease, and the throne was immediately passed down to Zheng Xianggong (郑襄公)  after another legitimate heir Prince Quji (公子去疾) refused to take it for fear of public scold. A very quick coup indeed.   

This story was recorded by Zuo Qiuming in  Tso Chuan （左传·宣公四年）, and by Sima Qian in Historical Records （史记·郑世家）. It gives rise to the Chinese term 染指，or  ”dipping one’s fingers in”, meaning interfering with other’s affairs for the purpose of getting a lion’s share.

The model Chinese philosopher Confucius, however, blamed this assassination on Zijia who failed to protect his master even when he knew his peer was conspiring against him, thus he even changed the text of his compiled history Annals of the Spring and Autumn Period to tell this same story. It was Zijia who killed the king, wrote he.

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The tomb of Tian Yi, a eunuch who defied the emperor for the people

Studded with China’s most prestigious universities and sizzling digital products markets, Zhongguangcun is often compared with Silicon Valley of the United States. But for centuries, it was known for a retirement home for the eunuchs in this area.

The emasculated domestic servants of the royal families were called Taijian (太监) or Zhonggong (中官 ), which supposedly gave the area its name. As the nationalist revolution put an end to Manchu dynastic rule of China in 1911, the tradition of castrating men to be eunuchs became a badge of shame that was associated with inhumanity of the past rulers. But even in the 20s, the abdicated Machu emperor Puyi still hired a castrated man as servant. In 1996, Sun Yaoting, the man known as China’s last eunuch passed away at an advanced age of 94.

After the communist party took over in 1949, the new government replaced the character Guan (官 ) with another character (关 ) of the same pronunciation. This could be a tactful attempt to conceal the embarrassing origin of the place.

In general, history doesn’t look kindly on the eunuchs, who were usually depicted as greedy, scheming and cruel crooks and sexual perverts. That might owe to the fact that history was mostly written by the mandarins who were well versed in Confucian doctrines and despised the bunch of illiterate and incomplete men. That said, there were a few exceptions who were looked upon favorably by the historians, among whom, Tian Yi (1534 – 1605), a Ming eunuch was known for his integrity and courage. According to history, Tian ran the risk of offending the Wanli emperor, insisting the emperor should make true of his previous promise to abolish a unpopular tax. The emperor was so infuriated that he pulled out his sword and threatened to kill Tian. Despite the episode, on Tian death, the emperor held a four day mourning and ordered to build a big mausoleum for him in the west of Beijing. The mausoleum has developed into a Buddhist temple for the elderly eunuchs who had nowhere to go and nothing to do.

Ming dynasty was the golden age of eunuchs. Not only some elite eunuchs endeared themselves to the emperors, they also played significant political role and wielded considerable political clout. Instead of being refined to domestic duties in the palace, they were sent to the front as military supervisors and emperors’ deputies, they acted as spies and gathered evidence of conspiracies against emperors, they were sent on sail to explore the uncharted territory. These important posts gave the eunuchs great power that often went unchecked, which naturally lead to corruption, abuse as well as notoriety.

Still there were eunuchs of extraordinary accomplishment. Cai Lun, an eunuch living in Han dynasty is believed to be the inventor of paper. An even better-known example is Zheng He, who is arguably China’s greatest navigator. According to be book 1421, Zheng lead a fleet and discovered many places unknown to the so-called civilized world.

“[...] On the 8th of March, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen sailed from its base in China. The ships, huge junks nearly five hundred feet long and built from the finest teak, were under the command of Emperor Zhu Di’s loyal eunuch admirals. Their mission was ‘to proceed all the way to the end of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas’ and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony. The journey would last over two years and circle the globe.

When they returned Zhu Di lost control and China was beginning its long, self-imposed isolation from the world it had so recently embraced. The great ships rotted at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America seventy years before Columbus and circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. They had also discovered Antarctica, reached Australia three hundred and fifty years before Cook and solved the problem of longitude three hundred years before the Europeans…”

However, when Ming’s successor, the Manchurian reflected on Ming’s downfall, they attributed it largely to the power-grabbing eunuch clique. More strict rules were institutionalized to give tighter control on the eunuchs. They were banned from giving opinion on even the most trivial political affairs and would never be allowed to step out of the Forbidden City before retirement.

Over thousands of years of continuous tradition, eunuchs had developed their own collective identity. For example, they had their own semi-god patron of trade, who is a Ming eunuch. According to the mythology, Gang Bing (刚秉 ) was a soldier who castrated himself to prove his loyalty to the emperor. A temple, located in the area now known as Babaoshan, was originally built to commemorate the man of extraordinary courage.

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Beijing’s Panjiayuan antiques market, located inside the southeast Third Ring Road, is known throughout the country as one of the best places to go to purchase artifacts from China’s turbulent 20th Century and its several millennia of dynastic history.

I personally like to visit Panjiayuan every few months to check out the long aisle of used book dealers who offer an astonishing variety of printed material: last year’s remaindered best-sellers, pirated editions of big-name novelists, diaries from the 1970s bound in attractive covers and containing stories of mundane life written in spidery fountain-pen handwriting, old copies of newspapers, foreign medical texts, and once in a while a hidden gem, like a decent-quality Republican-era copy of a book long out of print.

But there’s far more at Panjiayuan than just books. Here’s how a writer for the Lotour website described a visit to the market:

When you follow the flow of people under the large canopy, you can take your time to inspect the stalls containing all kinds of second-hand goods, anything you could possibly want: old furniture, the essentials of a writing studio, old-style books, works of calligraphy, used periodicals, ceramics, coins both foreign and domestic, bamboo carvings, religious artifacts, and relics of the Cultural Revolution. Wares of all types are laid out on stalls on the ground, but dross is mixed with the gold: the many imitations include copies of Ming and Qing-era paintings or the works of famous modern-day artists, reproductions of ancient ceramics passed off as genuine articles, dyed jade, fake bronzes….so you must exercise caution before opening up your wallet, and make sure you’ve gotten a good look before you make a selection. If you’re looking for old ceramics here, there’s no chance of finding anything high-quality, but sometimes you’ll be able to find something passable, like late Qing or early Republican china, or pottery from the Neolithic period or the Han Dynasty. The majority might be reproductions, but this is an excellent place for training your eyes. You can treat it as a learning opportunity, or a way to improve your discriminatory abilities. Pick things up and look them over without caring too much for whether they’re genuine or fake.

At one stall, this Lotour editor found an old-style lock. At a glance it was obvious that it had been artificially antiqued, but when asked, the seller claimed that the lock was a late-Ming, early-Qing lock. The seller also claimed to be an old Beijinger who had worked a stall at Panjiayuan for more than a decade selling pieces from old Beijing.

How do you improve your chances of discovering genuine antiques? Ma Weidu’s quote tells only half of the story: Panjiayuan’s early morning activity can be seen only on the weekends, when the true collectors come out to trade.

From Monday to Friday, the market is open from 8am to 6pm and caters largely to tourists who are looking for mementos of their visit to Beijing. Fakes and reproductions predominate. But on Saturday and Sunday, the gates open at 4:30am. It is in the early hours of those two days that dealers of genuine antiques join the usual array of vendors selling knock-offs and imitations.

Of course, finding a true treasure still requires a trained eye, but your chances are better on the weekends.

Images via Tencent Digital

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A romantized version of the princess' story

Another speculation put the ownership of the tomb to Kong Sizhen (孔四贞 1635-? ), the only princess of Qing Dynasty of Han ethnicity.

Kong’s father, Kong Youde (孔有德 ?-1652 ), was a former Ming general. Kong and his troop were originally stationed in Dengzhou, where the elite forces of the empire army equipped with heavy artillery and muskets were trained. When Kong was order to reinforce the Manchu front, Kong staged a mutiny and captured Dengzhou. His plan was to exploit the chaotic situation and take control of the whole Shandong peninsula as soon as possible to establish a junta independent of Ming. But in another city Laizhou, he met strong resistance, which gave the Ming emperor enough time to organize a counterattack. Kong was subsequently defeated by the attacking Ming forces and retreated to the coastal Dengzhou.

After months of besiege, Kong abandoned the stronghold. Over ten thousands rebels, including Kong, took the sea and fled in fleet. They later landed on the mouth of Yalu river and surrendered to Manchu. The Portuguese manufactured high power artillery and tens of thousands of muskets brought by Kong were the most advanced weaponry of that time and they were later used to slaughter the Ming troops on the Manchu front. Kong’s troop became the vanguard in the military conquer of the China proper.

After Manchurian took over China, Kong and some other highly-decorated Han generals were knighted as “wang”. Kong’s title was “lord who stabilizes the south”. Wu Sangui, another surrendered Ming general who opened the Shanhaiguan Great Wall pass for the Machu military, was “lord who stabilizes the west”.

Kong was granted a manor in Guangxi, where he owned his own troops and lived like a king, until he was defeated by the remainder of Ming troops and committed suicide to avoid capture. According to history, Kong burned himself and his wives with their treasures. Before his suicide, he sent his son and daughter out the besieged city. Kong wished the son could be a Buddhist monk, instead of follow his suit to be a general. However, all Kong’s surviving family members except his little daughter Kong Sizhen, were captured and killed.

The orphan girl fed to Beijing where she was treated as a royal member by the Manchurian court. She was officially adopted by the queen mother of Shunzhi and proclaimed princess. This, however, was more of a gesture to show the new ruler’s fair-handedness in treating Han ethnicity and to strengthen the loyalty of the Han Chinese who were still fighting against their compatriots for the alien administration.

When Sizhen was sixteen, the queen mother decided to marry her to the emperor Shunzhi. However, the emperor was enamored of another woman and would not marry her. When the queen mother proposed to find her a husband again, Sizhen told her that her father, when alive, had promised a loyal subordinate called Sun Long to marry her to Sun’s son. Sun Long died in the battle of Guilin, but his son survived. The son was summoned into the palace to marry the princess. After they got married, they were sent to Sizhen’s father’s manor in Guangxi, which had been recaptured by Qing forces.

Years later, Wu Sangui, the “lord who stabilizes the west”, grudged over not being trusted by the Manchu ruler, decided to transgress against the emperor and invited Sun Long to join his revolt.

After initial hesitation, Sun refused under the influence of his wife. Wu subsequently sent his troops to attack Sun, who was killed in a fight. The princess was captured by Wu and was put in a house imprisonment. Overall, she was treated well. It was partly because Wu Sangui and her father Kong Youde were once allies – they were both collaborated Ming generals. More importantly, Wu, like the Manchu court, also wanted to use the princess for their own propaganda machine.

After Wu’s revolt was put down. Kong Sizhen, the Han princess was rescued after her six years of home imprisonment and taken back to Beijing which she had left for 16 years. She gave up the manor and troops inherited from her father and lived in the Forbidden City until she died.

But is Kong Sizhen the princess in the tomb? Maybe not. According to a news report of 2005, there were actually two princesses buried in the tomb: they were Zhuangjing Heshuo Princess, who was the third daughter of Jiaqing Emperor and Zhuangjin Gulun Princess, the fourth daughter of Jiaqing Emperor. Both of them died in 1811, at the age of 31 and 28 respectively. In 1967, an excavation which was carried out by the government for better preservation and the new subway construction confirmed the identities of the owners of the tomb.

In 1997, a Taiwanese romance novelist who paid a visit to Beijing heard the fairytale version of the story and adapted it for TV screen. The TV drama turned out extremely well-received. In the TV drama, the princess was an illegitimate daughter of Qianlong with a woman he met in one of his trips.

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