John Keay - China

With further such imaginative licence the well-preserved female corpse discovered at a neighbouring site became ‘the Beauty of Kroran’ (or ‘the Beauty of Loulan’). She had gone to her grave in tartan plaid of Celtic weave, and when a copy of her head was re-fleshed by a plastic surgeon for a TV documentary, she looked almost presentable. Personalising the mummies in this way was irresistible; for to Mair they were not only ‘life-like’ but decidedly Mair-like. It was a case of instant recognition, then ardent adoption. The American had found family.

And therein, for the Chinese, lay the problem. ‘The Tarim Mummies’ (Tarim being the name of the river that once drained the now waterless Tarim basin of eastern Xinjiang) are mostly not of Mongoloid race but of now DNA-certified Caucasoid or Europoid descent. Some had brown hair; at least one stood 2 metres (6.5 feet) tall. They are similar to the Cro-Magnon peoples of eastern Europe. So are their clothes and so probably was their language. It is thought to have been ‘proto-Tocharian’, an early branch of the great Indo-European language family that includes the Celtic, Germanic, Greek and Latin tongues as well as Sanskrit and Early Iranian.

But Mair and his disciples would not be content to stop there. Several hundred mummies have now been discovered, their preservation being the result of the region’s extreme aridity and the high alkaline content of the desert sands. The graves span a long period, from c . 2000 BC to AD 300, but the forebears of their inmates are thought most probably to have migrated from the Altai region to the north, where there flourished around 2000 BC another Europoid culture, that of Afanasevo. Such a migration would have consisted of several waves and must have involved contact with Indo-European-speaking Iranian peoples as well as Altaic peoples. Since both were acquainted with basic metallurgy and had domesticated numerous animals, including horses and sheep, the mummy people must themselves have acquired such knowledge and may have passed it on to the cultures of eastern China.

According to Mair and his colleagues, therefore, the horse, the sheep, the wheel, the horse-drawn chariot, supplies of uncut jade and probably both bronze and iron technology may have reached ‘core’ China courtesy of these Europoid ‘proto-Tocharians’. By implication, it followed that the Europeans who in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries AD would so embarrass China with their superior technology were not the first. ‘Foreign Devils on the Silk Road’ had been active 4,000 years ago; and thanks to them, China’s ancient civilisation need not be regarded as quite so ‘of itself’. It could in fact be just as derivative, and no more indigenous, than most others.

Needless to say, scholars in China have had some difficulty with all this. Patriotic sentiment apart, national integration has also seemed to be at stake. ‘Xinjiang separatists’ – who would prefer to be called ‘Uighur nationalists’ – were reported to have readily adopted Mair’s findings in order to contest Beijing’s claim that their province was historically part of China and so bolster their own claim to autonomy. The mummies had become heavily politicised, and the Chinese authorities found themselves suspected of wilfully neglecting the conservation of mummy sites, obstructing research, suppressing its findings and concealing such evidence, including the mummies themselves, as was already available.

Feelings ran high, though they may now be subsiding. The Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people who have been settled in Xinjiang since no earlier than c . AD 600, and who then adopted Islam, can scarcely claim to have much in common with Chalcolithic Europoids of the second and first millennia BC who spoke an Indo-European language and of whose beliefs next to nothing is known. Uighur ancestors could have intermarried with later Tocharian-speakers; equally they could have obliterated them. Moreover, the People’s Republic of China is not postulated on the basis of there being a single Chinese race or a historically defined territory. The Uighurs, like the Tibetans and other minority groups, may have good reason to resent ‘Han’ supremacism, but history can be an unreliable ally.

Whether the mummy people played a part in the transfer of technologies and raw materials is more worthy of debate. Certainly China’s main source of jade has always been in the Kun Lun mountains in southern Xinjiang. Jade objects, like those cut for the tomb of ‘Lady Hao’, have been geologically sourced to the Kun Lun, and any people occupying the intervening region may well have been involved in the supply of jade. Metallurgy is less certain. Though the Afanasevo people produced small copper implements, according to the latest research ‘they did not know how to melt or cast metal’. 14Judging from the artefacts so far credited to the mummy people, neither did they, although around 900 BC it would be in Xinjiang that iron would make its Chinese debut.

Horses, horsemanship and chariots are a different matter. They, like jade, were almost certainly acquired by the Chinese from their central Asian neighbours. Chariots first appear in burials, sometimes complete with horses and charioteers, at Anyang ( c . 1240– c . 1040 BC) and other Shang sites. Their large many-spoked wheels have been declared the first wheels to be found in China and their horses the first draught animals found in China. There is no Chinese evidence for the earlier development of wheeled transport or of horsemanship. But the assumption that these skills were indeed acquired from outside China does not mean that they came from Xinjiang. As will be seen, China’s equestrian neighbours in Mongolia are a more likely source.

Until such time as sites like those in Xinjiang and Sichuan have been more extensively explored, the uncertainties outweigh the certainties and speculation has free rein. By way of contrast, the sprawling city-site located at modern Anyang in Henan has been subjected to exhaustive excavation. It lies at the heart of what was ‘core’ China, and at Anyang, more than anywhere else, the archaeologists could be reasonably confident of exciting finds.

Interest was first stirred, so the story goes, when in 1899 a pharmacist in Beijing was found to be supplying malaria sufferers with a medicinal powder supposedly ground from old ‘dragon bones’. Dragons never having been that plentiful, the bones were in fact an assortment of flat scapulas (shoulder blades) from cattle plus numerous plastrons (ventral or underbelly shells) from turtles; but they looked old, and some had what appeared to be writing scratched on them. This discovery was made by a malaria patient whose brother happened to be a noted scholar of ancient Chinese scripts. When the latter recognised the scratched characters on the bones as similar to those found on some of the later Shang bronzes, the hunt was on.

After much prevarication and long sleuthing, the bones and shells were traced back to villagers living in the vicinity of Anyang. Stocks from there seemed inexhaustible. Amateur collectors, many of them foreigners, found a surprising number for sale in Beijing’s antique stores; and since the scratched characters could be transferred to paper in the manner of brass-rubbings, scholars worldwide found ample employment in trying to decipher them. Meanwhile suppliers, instead of scraping off the squiggles that devalued good ‘dragon bones’, had begun scratching them on to take advantage of the curio market. ‘A hundred forgeries for every genuine piece’ was how the historian H. G. Creel described the situation in 1935; collections of bones, ‘not one of which was genuine’, were ‘being bought for many hundreds of dollars’. 15