Oracle Bones (60 page)

The man weighed less than ninety pounds. He had sunken cheeks and wispy white hair and thin spidery fingers that clutched at his cane. Because of a cataract, his right eye was usually closed, but it flickered half open if he became excited. He still spoke with a heavy Henan accent. Sometimes his assistant had to repeat my questions into his ear, but the old man always answered immediately. His younger colleagues called him the “Living Dictionary,” because his
memory was so quick and exact. If I mentioned a specific artifact, he instantly recalled the year and the place where it had been excavated. Like everybody in Taiwan, he dated events from January 1, 1912—the founding date of the Republic of China. Traditionally, each Chinese dynasty had marked time from its founding, and although the Communists had done away with this system, the Taiwanesse still used it. That was their version of the Year of Our Lord, a sacred reference point; Professor Shih told me the oracle bone cache had been discovered in the “twenty-fifth year of the Republic,” which meant 1936. He remarked that during that week in June they had excavated a clump that contained exactly 17,756 oracle bone fragments.

When I mentioned the name of Chen Mengjia, the oracle bone scholar, the lid of the old man’s cataracted eye wavered.

“I remember him,” Professor Shih said. “We met at National Associated University, in Kunming. He was brilliant, although I didn’t know him very well. His teaching position wasn’t in the Academia Sinica, which might have been one reason why he didn’t come along with us to Taiwan. Later I heard that the Communists killed him.”

DURING THE WAR
with Japan, the Chinese made every effort to keep the oracle bones and other artifacts out of enemy hands. They packed up tons of objects and moved them by train and truck and boat, always one step ahead of the Japanese. After that war was finished, and the struggle with the Communists picked up, the artifacts gained even greater symbolic value. The Kuomintang had a proud heritage—the political party had been founded by Sun Yat-sen—and the weaker it became, the more important it was to curate China’s past. In 1948 and 1949, when the Kuomintang finally fled to Taiwan, moving the ancient treasures was a top priority. Archaeologists had two options: they either followed the best artifacts across the strait, or they stayed in the mainland, where all the good sites were.

The Kuomintang claimed that residence on the island would be temporary. They believed that they would eventually return victorious to the mainland, and the United States and most other nations continued to recognize Taiwan as the seat of China’s rightful government. For decades, Taiwan sent representatives to the United Nations, which, like most international organizations, refused to recognize the People’s Republic. The Communists boycotted the Olympics for more than two decades because the I.O.C. allowed Taiwanese athletes to compete under the flag of the Republic of China.

Over time, this vision of China became increasingly awkward—a massive nation supposedly ruled by a few exiles who were actually stranded on an
island at the edge of the South China Sea. In July of 1971, Henry Kissinger visited Beijing, taking the first step toward U.S. recognition. Kissinger later wrote in his memoirs that “no government less deserved what was about to happen to it than that of Taiwan.” By the end of that year, the Taiwanese delegation had been expelled from the United Nations, and in 1972 President Richard Nixon signed the “Shanghai Communiqué” with the People’s Republic. In that document, the United States acknowledged “that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China.” On one level, the stance was uncontroversial: both the Communists and the Kuomintang were adamant that Taiwan and the mainland belonged together. But they had very different ideas about who should rule this imaginary reunited nation, and the United States tried to position itself on the peripheries of this concept. In 1979, when the United States formally recognized the People’s Republic, Congress also passed the Taiwan Relations Act, which established that Taiwan’s future should be determined “by peaceful means.” The Americans reserved the right to defend the island if it were invaded, and they continued to sell military hardware to Taiwan.

Over the years, the situation remained stable, but the indignities steadily chipped away at Taiwan. Barred from the United Nations and most international organizations, the island watched its political allies slip away one by one. By 2001, fewer than thirty nations recognized Taiwan, a sad coalition of the willing: small countries such as Burkina Faso, São Tomé, Swaziland. Taiwan was allowed to send athletes to the Olympics, but their flag was strictly banned. At the Atlanta Games, during a Ping-Pong competition, American police officers handcuffed a Taiwanese fan and escorted him out of the stands, simply because he had waved his island’s flag.

But they still had the artifacts. Regardless of international humiliation, the Taiwanese could take pride in the fact that they had done a far better job of protecting China’s past than the Communists. The Kuomintang built beautiful institutions such as the Palace Museum, where some of the most impressive artifacts were exhibited. And they provided excellent funding for archaeology and history, allowing a man like Professor Shih to spend decades excavating his notes.

The old man’s office was located in the Institute of History and Philology, where a younger archaeologist gave me a tour of the storage room. The room was climate-controlled and neat; artifacts had been carefully organized into drawers and boxes. Bronze spears from the Shang rested in bundles of ten. On the floor sat a two-hundred-pound bronze
ding
, or cauldron, that had been excavated from a royal tomb in Anyang. There were two big boxes of the oracle
bone fragments that had been discovered in 1936. The young archaeologist picked up one of the tortoise shells, which had been blackened by the diviner’s tool thirty centuries ago. He gave me a colloquial translation of the parallel statements that had been inscribed into the object:

In these days our country will be good.
In these days our country will not be good.

The shelves also held an antique Royal typewriter, a tape measure, and a surveying tool whose old-fashioned label read
KEUFFEL & ESSER CO., NEW YORK
. The young man told me that the items had been used by Professor Shih in Anyang. His excavation tools had also become artifacts, catalogued and preserved in the same storeroom as the ancient bronzes and oracle bones.

PROFESSOR
S
HIH TOLD
me that the move to Taiwan had been an easy decision. “I came here in January of 1949, from Nanjing,” he said. “I had become a sort of refugee, moving constantly. I had already moved eight or nine times. Taiwan was just one more transfer. Think of it this way—if somebody moves all of your research materials, your life’s work, then what do you do?”

In the 1990s, when the mainland’s Institute of Archaeology invited him back for conferences, he decided that he was too old for the trip. But he still kept up with recent discoveries, and he responded immediately when I asked if he had heard about the mapping of the underground city.

“Tang Jigen is in charge of it,” the old man said. “I’ve been told that they’re still in the research stage, but they found a big wall and they think it’s a city. That’s something we never discovered. We never had an opportunity to excavate and study a walled city like that.”

He paused, and then he looked at me with his good eye. “Beijing doesn’t have a city wall anymore, does it?”

I told him that the Communists had torn it down almost forty years ago.

He said, “But Xi’an still has its wall, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. They’ve protected it.”

He paused again, as if shifting his mental image back to Anyang and the underground city. His right eye remained shut. “Well, we never had the opportunity to research something like that wall,” the old man said. “We conducted some surveys there but never found the city. There was already so much for us to do at Xiaotun. They have time to do it now. Of course, when I was there it was only countryside; there wasn’t any airport.”

I was impressed at his knowledge of the site—the airport had been built
by the Japanese, after archaeologists like Shih had fled to the southwest. Much later, when I was back in the mainland, I mentioned the interview to Tang Jigen, the young director of the current Anyang excavations. Tang was in his late thirties, a rising star of Chinese archaeology; he had done graduate work at the University of London. He had never met Professor Shih—once, when Tang hoped to attend a conference in Taipei, the Taiwanese had denied him a visa. But he wasn’t surprised by my report about Professor Shih’s familiarity with the current survey. Tang told me that he had faxed maps of the underground city to Taiwan, so Professor Shih could keep pace with the new discoveries. That link between generations was another type of virtual archaeology: the young men in Anyang, reading the earth cores; and the old exile in Taipei, reading the faxed maps and remembering the fields that he had abandoned so long ago.

PROFESSOR SHIH’S WIFE
met us for lunch. Juan Hsing was an elegant woman of eighty-five years, with perfectly coiffed white hair. She was sharp-eyed and alert; during lunch, she kept glancing at a canary-yellow cell phone. Throughout the meal, she used her chopsticks to select appropriate bits of food for her husband.

Everybody was solicitous around the old man—at the institute, he had two full-time assistants, and the younger archaeologists spoke of him fondly. It was tempting to view him as a type of mascot, a link to an age that had become sentimental in the eyes of Taiwanese whose families had come from the mainland during the mid-century. And his body was so frail that the clarity of his memory seemed as oracular as the Shang bones. Whenever he spoke, I had to remind myself that these weren’t simply stories; he was remembering a life that had been permanently disrupted by politics and history.

It was election week, and at lunch the younger people talked about a fight that had broken out at a rally the day before. They were excited—the young Taiwanese loved the political campaigns. Juan Hsing frowned and remarked that she disliked talking about such matters, and her husband agreed.

“My research is about ancient times, and that makes contemporary events seem far away,” he said. “My understanding grows smaller all the time. I listen to the news, but not too often.”

He told me that he enjoyed watching a television show called
Wonders of the Mainland
because it featured places that he had known as a young man. When I asked if he would vote, he shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Saturday is my wife’s day. She decides what we do on Saturdays.”

I asked, “If you vote, whom will you vote for?”

“I haven’t thought about it,” he said, and then grinned. “Anyway, it’s a secret.”

Juan Hsing fussed that the old man should eat more. Near the end of the meal, I asked him what year they had been married.

He looked up—silence. For the first time, the professor was stumped by a date. He muttered to himself, counting the years, and then his wife cut in.

“It was the forty-fourth year of the Republic,” she said.

“So it was after you had already moved to Taiwan?”

“That’s right,” she said.

THE ISLAND’S HISTORY
was layered with arrivals from abroad. Aboriginal tribes had lived there since Neolithic times, and then, during the seventeenth century, significant numbers of settlers began arriving from the mainland. In the second half of that century, the Qing formally incorporated Taiwan into the empire, but the island wasn’t administered closely. It became a base for traders and frontier-style settlers, many of whom had originally come from Fujian.

In 1895, after being defeated by Japan in a series of battles, the Qing ceded Taiwan to the victors. (The Qing statesman who negotiated the treaty explained that the loss wasn’t so bad because on Taiwan “the men and women are inofficious and are not passionate either.”) The Japanese ruled the island, known in those days as Formosa, until the end of the Second World War. Unlike Nanjing and other mainland cities, where Japanese occupation was short and brutal, Taiwan functioned as a colony for half a century. The Japanese built roads, railways, and other basic infrastructure, and their schools prepared the native elite to be part of the empire. Even today, many Taiwanese speak positively of the Japanese—an attitude that seems completely foreign to a mainlander.

After the Japanese surrender and the Chinese civil war, the Kuomintang introduced another layer of colonialism to the island. When Chiang Kai-shek’s government fled to Taiwan, the newcomers were outnumbered, but they ruled with a firm hand. The Kuomintang maintained a state of martial law; the press was strictly censored and political dissidents were imprisoned. But the economy flourished, in part because the free market had strong links with the United States. Over time, the United States became less comfortable with its role: American military support protected Taiwan, and trade benefited the island, but the Kuomintang reflected none of the political ideals that America supposedly valued.

During the 1980s, U.S. officials pressed for reform. Chiang Ching-kuo, the
son of Chiang Kai-shek, developed into the sort of figure who is rare in small, repressive countries: a dictator who essentially paved the way for the defeat of his own system. In 1987, the Kuomintang lifted martial law, and two years later they legalized opposition parties. Over the next decade, the Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, became the most powerful opposition group to the Kuomintang. The DPP was supported primarily by native Taiwanese who had no interest in the “one China” concept, and in 1999 their party platform began describing Taiwan as an independent country. In 2000, the DPP candidate, Chen Shui-bian, won the presidency.

As politics shifted toward the native population, perspectives on culture and history changed accordingly. The Taiwanese began to emphasize the island’s native past instead of the traditional dynasties of the mainland, and history books were rewritten from Taiwan’s point of view. Schools began teaching Minnan, the native tongue of most Taiwanese, which previously had been banned by educational institutions. The island commemorated its own sensitive date: February 28, 1947, when the Kuomintang had responded to antigovernment demonstrations by massacring thousands of Taiwanese civilians.