Barbarian Caves or Han Tombs? Republican-Era Archaeologyand the Reassertion of Han Presence in Ancient Sichuan

Jeff Kyong-McClain

Twentieth-Century China, Volume 35, Number 2, April 2010, pp.4-24 (Article)

Published by The Ohio State University PressDOI: 10.1353/tcc.0.0029

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JEFF KYONG-MCCLAIN

Volume 35, No. 2

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BARBARIAN CAVES OR HAN TOMBS? REPUBLICAN-ERA ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE

REASSERTION OF HAN PRESENCE IN ANCIENT SICHUAN

JEFF KYONG-MCCLAIN, UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS AT LITTLE ROCK

When Zhang Zongxiang (!"#) was appointed magistrate of Lushan

County ($%&) in Xikang Province ('()) in 1941, he likely despaired at his

misfortune of being sent to govern such a remote and ethnically troubled spot.1

Shortly after his appointment, however, an archaeological discovery near Lushan

buoyed his spirit, arousing simultaneously his national and local pride. Anthropolo-

gist of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands Ren Naiqiang (*+, 1894-1989) excavated a

Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.) cliff-side tomb and several stelae there in the

spring of 1942.2 An enthused Magistrate Zhang sent rubbings of the tomb bricks and

stelae to China’s Minister of Education, Chen Lifu (-./ 1900-2001), to Xikang’s

Han Chinese warlord governor Liu Wenhui (012 1895-1976), to the Central

Political College in Chongqing (34), and to the National Central Museum, then in

Lizhuang (56), Sichuan. In his letter to Chen Lifu, Zhang delighted that the

archaeological evidence proved that the region, though in the early 1940s appearing

so desolate and removed from Chinese civilization, “once had such prosperous

culture.” Further, Zhang proudly informed Chen that, in light of the discovery, he

had “called upon the elder gentlemen of the county to search the ancient classics, in

hopes of a better understanding of the preservation and spread of our nation’s

quintessence (78 guocui).”3

For Magistrate Zhang, the archaeological discovery of a Han-era cliff-side

tomb, especially once matched up with evidence from Chinese classical texts,

seemed to prove both the antiquity of and the geographical spread of the Chinese

nation into what appeared, in his own day, to be a very un-Chinese place. Zhang may

or may not have been aware that it was only very recently that archaeologists had

An earlier version was presented at the Critical Han Studies Conference and Workshop at Stanford University, April 2008. I would like to thank Poshek Fu, Laura Hostetler, James Leibold, Akira Shimizu, and Zhou Shurong for their support and comments as the article took shape. Also, I owe many thanks to James Carter and the anonymous reviewers of Twentieth-Century China for their many insightful comments and apt criticisms. Financial support for research came from a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grant. 1 Xikang was a short-lived province in the late-Republican period, carved out of parts of eastern

Tibet and western Sichuan. On the province, see James Leibold, “Un-mapping Republican China’s Tibetan Frontier: Politics, Militarism and Ethnicity along the Kham/Xikang Border,” Chinese Historical Review 12:2 (2005): 191-227. 2 Ren Naiqiang, “Lushan xin chu Han shi tu kao (An investigation into recently excavated Han

sculpture and inscriptions near Lushan),” Kangdao yuekan (Guide to the Xikang monthly) 4:6-7 (1942): 13-33. 3 Zhang Zongxiang to Chen Lifu, Letter, 10 July 1942, Second Historical Archives of China

(SHAC), Record Unit 5, File 11713.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA

April 2010

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begun to call the cliff-side caves that dotted the landscape in Sichuan “Han Dynasty

tombs (9: Han mu)” rather than “barbarian caves (;<= Manzidong),” as

centuries of previous Chinese antiquary tradition had named them. Foreign and

Chinese archaeologists, beginning in the first decades of the twentieth century, had

determined that the caves had nothing to do with the lifeways of barbarians, but

everything to do with a respectful Han burial. A few of the more circumspect

archaeologists were careful to differentiate between Han as an era and Han as a

people group, but many others either obscured the distinction or, in Han-nationalist

fervor, outright conflated the two.4 This paper traces the changing discourse about

these caves and shows the way the new discipline of archaeology was used to situate

a Han Chinese presence in ancient Sichuan, and consequently squeeze non-Han

inhabitants into ever-smaller spaces. Chinese nationalist archaeologists (both state-

sponsored professionals and independent amateurs), and even some foreign explorers

in Sichuan, operated under a set of colonialist assumptions that theorists of archae-

ology call “disassociation” and “appropriation.” Based on a social evolutionary

perspective, archaeologists beholden to such assumptions first disavow that certain

archaeological remains could possibly have been made by indigenes near at hand,

and then suggest, instead, that the site or artifact must have been constructed by the

evolutionarily more advanced culture, which, as it happens, is just then seeking to

solidify its claims to the surrounding territory.5

Archaeology emerged in China (as in most places on the globe) concurrent

with the rise of the idea of the nation-state, and as a handmaid to the work of nation-

4 The very idea of “Han” as a distinct ethnic group-cum-nation that could be traced back histori-

cally thousands of years had just itself emerged in the late nineteenth century as a tool for revolutionaries attempting to rally opposition to the Manchu empire. Kai-wing Chow, “Narrating Nation, Race, and National Culture: Imagining the Hanzu Identity in Modern China,” in Construct-ing Nationhood in Modern East Asia, eds. Kai-wing Chow, Kevin M. Doak, and Poshek Fu (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 47-83. Once the (now) “foreign” Manchu rulers were overthrown, the problem became how to nationalize, under Han Chinese rule, the vast space of the former Qing Empire, to turn it into the geo-body of a nation. Part of the solution rested on the creation of “the minzu paradigm,” whereby Han nationalists sought to categorize all other peoples in the former Qing domains along cultural and evolutionary lines and then use such constructs to explain why and how all must eventually unite with the Han, the pinnacle of evolutionary development in Asia. Jonathan N. Lipman, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), xx-xxii. This complicated process is discussed in detail in James Leibold, Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and its Indigenes Became Chinese (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). On the changing nature of ethnic identity in China more generally, see Wang Mingke, Huaxia bianyuan: Lishi jiyi yu zuqun rentong (On Chinese borderlands: Historical memory and ethnic identity) (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2006). 5 “Disassociation” and “appropriation” are usually described as operating in U.S., Canadian, and

Australian colonial contexts. See Ian J. McNiven and Lynette Russell, Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology (Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2005).

JEFF KYONG-MCCLAIN

Volume 35, No. 2

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building elites.6 One component of this new nationalist project was the re-writing of

history to downplay dynastic history and emphasize instead the Han Chinese people,

who were assumed to have long lived throughout the Chinese national geo-body.

Initially, efforts towards the creation of such a national history were bedeviled by the

apparent conflict between the much-beloved “science,” with its radical skepticism so

evident in Gu Jiegang (>?@ 1893-1980) and the “doubting antiquity school (ABC yigupai),” and the absolute need to find “China” and the “Chinese” in the remote

past, no matter what problems were exposed in traditional texts. Archaeology

appeared to offer a solution to this conundrum, as it could corroborate texts and fill in

gaps, and thus offer a scientifically reliable national history.7 Liang Qichao (DEF

1873-1929), for instance, though despairing that the development of archaeology in

China had been stunted by too many philosophers, was hopeful that, in his day,

archaeology would lead to a more robust national history by “correcting the many

mistakes found in earlier histories and filling in historical events that were not

recorded in the histories of antiquity.”8 This newly authenticated national history

could then be taught to the people, in order to mold them into good national citizens.

This nation-building promise of archaeology at first, however, appeared to be

compromised by the fact that foreigners conducted most archaeological excavations

in China in the early decades of the twentieth century, often with the result that

antiquities left China and archaeological interpretation was ambiguous regarding the

origins of the Chinese nation.9 The solution to the foreign problem was codification

6 For some discussion of the discipline’s emergence in relation to nineteenth-century European

nationalism, see Bruce Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, Second Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), especially Ch. 6. For several case studies of the phenomenon, see the essays in Philip L. Kohl and Clare Fawcett, eds., Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). On the idea of the nation-state as the new category, which crowded out both traditional and contending modern conceptualizations of human relationship and organization, see Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 7 Fa-ti Fan, “How Did the Chinese Become Native? Science and the Search for National Origins in

the May Fourth Era,” in Kai-wing Chow, et al., eds., Beyond the May Fourth Paradigm: In Search of Chinese Modernity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 183-208. This point is also made in Leibold, Reconfiguring, 125-7, and in Q. Edward Wang, Inventing China through History: The May Fourth Approach to Historiography (Albany: State University of New York, 2001), 123-7. 8 Liang Qichao, “Zhongguo kaoguxue zhi guoqu ji jianglai (The past and future of archaeology in

China),” in Wei Juxian, ed. Zhongguo kaogu xiaoshi (A brief history of archaeology in China) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1933), 8. 9 Most problematic on this count was the so-called Western Origins Theory of Chinese Civilization

(Xilaishuo), which French Sinologist Terrien de Lacouperie first put forward in the late nineteenth century and which held that Chinese civilization originated in Mesopotamia. The excavations of Swedish archaeologist J.G. Andersson at Yangshao and then in Gansu in the early 1920s initially seemed to support such a theory, suggesting a link through Central Asia (though Andersson’s own pronouncements on the matter were quite circumspect and willing to wait for more evidence). On the theory and its critics, see Chen Xingcan, Zhongguo shiqian kaoguxue shi yanjiu, 1895-1949 (The history of prehistoric archaeology in China, 1895-1949) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1997), 113-33, and Fan, 186-90. For a sympathetic account of Andersson’s work in China, see Magnus

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA

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and enforcement of the Antiquities Protection Law (BGHIJ Guwu baocun fa)

and the establishment of a state-sponsored archaeological unit within Academia

Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology.10

Fu Sinian (KLM 1896-1950), the

Institute’s head, invited Harvard anthropology graduate Li Ji (5N 1896-1979) to

lead the archaeology section in 1928, which Li did with enthusiasm, advancing state

control over archaeological practice and nationalist interpretation for many years to

come.11

Speaking for all Academia Sinica archaeologists, Li wrote hopefully about

the future spread of archaeological research throughout the entire area of China: “We

believe that in order to strengthen the national consciousness (OPQR minzu yishi),

we must construct a reliable history, and that in order to attain such a believable

history, we must advance ever further the work of archaeology.”12

The question

arose, however, over how one could be certain to find “China,” and thus advance

“national consciousness,” when excavating sites in the multi-ethnic borderlands, 50%

of the entire area of China, according to one Guomindang frontier specialist.13

A

discursive shift about the historic landscape, such as is described below, offered one

possible avenue for advancing nationalist archaeological interpretation into such

places.

SICHUAN AND THE TRADITIONALLY MULTIVALENT CLIFF-SIDE CAVES

Sichuan Province, located in the Southwest far from centers of cultural and

political power in the North and East, bordering Tibet, and inhabited by dozens of

disparate ethnic groups, presented one of the larger challenges to the unity of China,

from antiquity right through the Republic. Although few, if any, Republican-era

scholars doubted the written history that Sichuan was annexed by the Qin and Han

dynasties respectively, and thus in some sense made Chinese, the close and persistent

presence of so many ethnic minorities throughout all succeeding dynasties and into

the present seemed to leave open for question the exact geographic extent of its

incorporation into China.14

Even the written history attested that every era required a

Fiskesjö and Chen Xingcan, China before China: Johan Gunnar Andersson, Ding Wenjiang, and the Discovery of China’s Prehistory (Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 2004). 10

On the explicitly state-directed nature of the research enterprise in the early years of Academia Sinica, see Chen Shiwei, “Legitimizing the State: Politics and the Founding of Academia Sinica in 1927,” Papers on Chinese History 6 (1997): 23-41. 11

On Li’s activities, see Clayton D. Brown, “Li Ji: The Father of Chinese Archaeology” Orienta-tions (April 2008): 61-66. 12

Li Ji, ed., Tianye kaogu baogao (Report on archaeological fieldwork) Institute of History and Philology Special Publication 13 (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1936), preface. 13

Hua Qiyun, Bianshi yanjiu (Frontier Affairs Research) 2:2 (July 1935): 2. Hua was operating under the assumption that the entire Qing imperial realm was now “China.” 14

One popular guidebook claimed that Sichuan, during the Republic, contained 161 distinguishable ethnic groups. Lou Yunlin, Sichuan (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1941), 38. Such an exact (and large) number was absurd, though it does indicate the compulsion to classify among nation-builders. The ethnonyms were finally rectified, and number of ethnic minority groups brought down to more manageable size during the Communist-led “Ethnic Classification Project (minzu

JEFF KYONG-MCCLAIN

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Sima Xiangru (STUV 179-117 B.C.E.) or a Zhuge Liang (WXY 181-234) be

dispatched to pacify the barbarians, as they grew restless and seemed to threaten that

outpost of civilization, Chengdu (Z[).15

Leaving the written record, the material

record regarding the sinicization of much of Sichuan was scant. Although the

Chengdu Plain had ample stelae and tombs to attest to connections between Sichuan

and the Central Plains (\] Zhongyuan, widely believed the supreme fount of

Chinese Civilization by nationalists) since at least the Qin/Han era, once one moved

downstream from Chengdu, or up into mountains to the south or west, material

evidence of such connections was scarce. For modern nationalists, such a precarious

situation would not do. Much better would be a history, buttressed by material

remains, which could emphasize stability and connections with the Central Plains for

as much of the province as possible. Unfortunately for national history, what did

exist away from the Basin were dozens upon dozens of what the local people called

“barbarian caves,” found on most major waterways in Sichuan and particularly

densely clustered near Jiading (^_, contemporary Leshan `%) along the Min

River (ab), on the Yangzi River near Xufu (cd, today’s Yibin ef), and north

of Chongqing along the Jialing River (^gb).16

Being so numerous, the caves were, of course, well-known before the arrival

of modern archaeology. What is notable about earlier, pre-archaeological Chinese

discussion of the caves is the variety of possible interpretations regarding their origin

and function. To some, such as Southern Song (1127-1279) poet and minor official

Lu You (hi 1125-1210), the caves, which he called simply “stone caves (jk shi

xue),” had spiritual import. In a poem about a cluster near Jiading, Lu claimed that

they were originally centers for the manufacture and storage of Daoist elixirs of

immortality (lm xian dan), noting their auspicious proximity to the holy mountain

Emei (no%), and appropriately situated alongside the strong flowing waters of the

Min River.17

Lu’s mystical understanding of the caves, however, was not the only

shibie),” of the 1950s. On the Project and its ideological framework, see Thomas S. Mullaney, “Ethnic Classification Writ Large: The 1954 Yunnan Ethnic Classification Project and Its Foundations in Republican-Era Taxonomic Thought,” China Information 18:2 (2004): 207-41. 15

On continuing efforts to civilize Sichuan in the Qin/Han, Sanguo, Song, and Qing periods respectively, see Steven F. Sage, Ancient Sichuan and the Unification of China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), J. Michael Farmer, The Talent of Shu: Qiao Zhou and the Intellectual World of Early Medieval Sichuan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), Richard von Glahn, The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), and Yingcong Dai, The Sichuan Frontier and Tibet: Imperial Strategy in the Early Qing (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009). 16

These were, at least, the areas most often visited by archaeologists in the Republican era. For a good map showing the locations of the caves, as known to archaeologists by the mid-1980s (far more than were ever identified during the Republic), see Luo Erhu, “Sichuan yamu de chubu yanjiu (Preliminary research on Sichuan’s cliff-side tombs),” Kaogu xuebao (Journal of Archaeology) 2 (1988): 133-68. 17

Lu You, “Cang dan dong ji (Notes on the medicine caves),” Wei nan wen ji (Collected essays from south of the Wei River), juan 18.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA

April 2010

9

interpretation in his time. In Hong Shi’s (pq 1117-1184) compendium of studies of

inscriptions, the Li Shi (rs), one finds a description of another cliff-side cave, also

near Emei Mountain. An eyewitness describes entering the cave and finding a coffin

filled with mud. The investigator then notes several inscriptions throughout the cave,

of which he made rubbings. According to the inscriptions, the cave was the tomb for

three relatives of a certain Zhang Bingong (!ft): Zhang’s wife, her son, and the

son’s wife, and was constructed during the reign of Emperor Han Zhangdi (9uv, r.

75-88).18

Hong does not provide any commentary on this discovery, but it shows that

at least some scholars recognized the caves to be tombs from an early date. Still, the

interest seemed to lie solely in the existence of text inscribed on the inner pillars, and

not much on the meaning of the tomb as history. The question of ethnicity of

occupants, be they dead or living, did not occur to Hong Shi.

It is not clear exactly when the idea of “barbarian caves” gained prominence

in local understanding. By the nineteenth century, however, it seems to have become

the dominant interpretation of the caves. Although in the vicinity of Jiading there

were many such caves, the Jiading gazetteer of 1812 makes scant mention of them,

and they certainly do not figure as sites of historic worth. When it does mention

them, however, it confirms what was becoming the established understanding of

them as barbarian homes. The gazetteer does not call the former cave owners

“Manzi,” which all later archaeologists would claim was the common understanding,

but rather the “Lao caves (w=),” using a different ethnonym to describe the

barbarian other.19

The gazetteer reads: “The Lao caves are caves chiseled into the

sides of cliffs. They are everywhere in the valleys. They are several zhang (x) wide

and several dozen zhang deep. Tradition has that they were dug by the Lao people

during the Jin and Song dynasties.”20

The compiler had either been into a cave or

received a report from one who had, as evidenced by the measurements. It may be

that there was no coffin to suggest otherwise, but in any case, the compiler deferred

to an apparently already well-established tradition of barbarian workmanship for

their origins, though the gazetteer does not specifically say for what use (living or

burial) the Lao dug the caves.

After the signing of the Treaties of Tianjin in 1858, Western explorers began

to travel up the Yangzi from Shanghai to Sichuan to scout potential missionary or

commercial opportunities. Those interested in the historic landscape in Sichuan

invariably noted the caves and reported back to their constituencies what they were

18

Hong Shi, Li Shi, juan 13, 9. 19

On the use of the term “Lao” for all non-Han in this area of Sichuan during the Song Dynasty, see von Glahn, 20-24. 20

Cited from Wolfgang Franke, “Die Han-zeitlichen Felsengraeber bei Chia-ting (West-Ssuchuan) (On the Han-era cliff tombs in Jiading (West Sichuan)),” Studia Serica VII (1948): 19-39. One zhang equals approximately 3.3 meters.

JEFF KYONG-MCCLAIN

Volume 35, No. 2

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told by their local guides: that the caves were the ancient homes of the Manzi.21

The

first Western explorer to draw attention to the caves was Alexander Wylie (1815-

1887), a missionary translator known for his work with James Legge (1815-1897).

Wylie traveled through Sichuan in 1868, and subsequently reported on the caves to

the Royal Geographical Society in London: “As an object of antiquarian interest,

there are few things in China that surpass the remarkable caves of the Man-tsze, one

of the early races, who were exceedingly numerous and powerful in that part of the

country. Their dwellings in the cliffs still remain in great numbers, alike suggestive

to the archaeologist and the historian.”22

Subsequent Western explorers followed

Wylie. So, for instance, Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen (the Red Baron’s uncle)

(1833-1905), while conducting reconnaissance in Sichuan in 1870 for German

commercial and geographical interests, wrote back to his Shanghai office that during

the Song Dynasty, the Manzi occupied much of southern Sichuan, as evidenced by

“their vestiges in [the form of] those cave dwellings dug out of the red sandstone, to

which Mr. Alex. Wylie has first drawn attention.”23

Likewise, the Manzi caves

fascinated British consular official E. Colborne Baber (1843-1890) on his 1877 trip

through “Lololand,” as he called it, in southern Sichuan.24

Baber did not rely solely

on Chinese guides for this identification, but also spoke with a man he identified as a

“Lolo chief,” who insisted that the caves were the homes of his ancestors, thus

confirming to Baber that the “Manzidong” designation was correct, despite his

suspicion that caves would get terribly smoky were one to light a hearth.25

Thus it was that by the turn of the twentieth century, the cliff-side caves in

Sichuan were almost unanimously understood to have been the residences of

barbarians. The Jiading Gazetteer, local opinion, and even Western explorers were all

agreed on this point. The older Song Dynasty possibilities, that the caves may have

been tombs, or Daoist apothecaries, do not seem to have persisted into the late-Qing.

Taken as a whole, however, it can be said that before the twentieth century, tradition

allowed several interpretations, and whether or not they indicated a barbarian

presence on the Sichuan landscape was not a great concern. The imminent arrival of

the modern nation-state, with its preoccupation with ethnic identification, and the

21

Manzi is another ambiguous ethnonym, best understood simply as an identifier of a non-Han other. Herold J. Wiens, China’s March toward the Tropics (Hamden, CT: Shoe String Press, 1954), 67-70. 22

Alexander Wylie, “Notes of a Journey from Ching-too to Hankow” Proceedings of the Royal Geographic Society of London 14:2 (1869): 169. 23

Baron von Richthofen’s Letters, 1870-1872 second edition (Shanghai: North China Herald, 1903), 186. 24

Most Western explorers followed the Chinese practice of calling the people now associated with the Yi ethnic group (Yizu) in southern Sichuan the “Luoluo” (or Lolo), which many Yi came to believe, with reason, was a derogatory term invented by the Han Chinese. On this, see Stevan Harrell, “The History of the History of the Yi” in Stevan Harrell, ed., Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 63-91. 25

E. Colborne Baber, Travels and Researches in Western China (London: Royal Geographical Society, 1882), 132-41.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA

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11

concurrent rise of modern nationalist archaeology, would leave little room for such

ambiguity.

A JAPANESE ANTHROPOLOGIST AND WESTERN MISSIONARIES DISCOVER HAN IN

THE CAVES

The opening of Chongqing as a treaty port in 1891 brought foreigners to

Sichuan. Among them was the first professional archaeologist to visit Sichuan,

Japanese anthropologist Torii Ry!z" (yz{| 1870-1953), who visited the

province in 1902.26

Torii, a professor in the Anthropology Department of Tokyo

Imperial University, went to Sichuan with the principal aim of conducting a prelimi-

nary ethnographic investigation of the Miao people (}P) in the Guizhou-Sichuan

border area. While traveling down the Min River from Chengdu, toward the provin-

cial border, he was impressed by the numerous caves. In his subsequent report on the

trip, Torii records that although he was aware of what he called Baber’s “proof” of

the Manzi origin of the caves, and even though his local Chinese guides were in

unanimous agreement with Baber that the caves were Manzi, he entertained doubts

about this conclusion. Initially, Torii admitted, his hesitation was purely a hunch, as

the “Horizontal Caves (~= jp. !d!, ch. hengdong),” as he in apparent scientific

neutrality called them, were strikingly similar to ones in Japan, which were well

known among archaeologists to be Japanese tombs, not barbarian homes.27

After sailing past the caves for several more days, Torii finally disembarked

at a cluster of caves near Jiading to have a look for himself. He wrote that he felt

compelled to know which ethnic group (OP jp. minzoku, ch. minzu) built these

caves and when. After inspecting forty to fifty caves (presumably not too carefully),

Torii felt convinced that his earlier suspicions were correct and that conventional

Chinese wisdom and the nineteenth-century Western explorers were both far off

base. The caves were not traces of a barbarian civilization, but evidence of the work

of the Han ethnicity (9P jp. kanzoku, ch. hanzu) in ancient Sichuan. Torii provided

seven reasons for this radical revision of tradition: the internal structure was typical

of a tomb, not a residence; the existence of decorative pottery and human remains; a

place suitable for a stone coffin; inscriptions suggesting an Eastern Han Dynasty

origin; the resemblance to the Japanese horizontal caves; decorative features that

looked to him Han-Chinese (some of which had Chinese characters on them); and

finally tiles decorated with Chinese motifs like humans, horses, and fish. In conclu-

sion, Torii emphatically declared, “There are absolutely no barbarian characteristics

26

For more on Torii’s role in the formation of Japanese anthropology, see David Askew, “Empire and the Anthropologist: Torii Ry!z" and Early Japanese Anthropology,” Japanese Review of Contemporary Anthropology 4 (2003): 133-54. Torii would later take the lead in many Japanese colonial archaeological projects in Manchuria and Korea, cf. Hyung Il Pai, Constructing “Korean” Origins: A Critical Review of Archaeology, Historiography, and Racial Myth in Korean State-Formation Theories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), Ch. 2. 27

Torii Ry!z", Jinruigakujo yori mitaru Seinan Shina (Southwest China seen from an anthropo-logical perspective) (Tokyo: Fuzanbo, 1926), 613, 616.

JEFF KYONG-MCCLAIN

Volume 35, No. 2

12

to the tombs, rather, they display purely Han characteristics.”28

What motivated this

Japanese archaeologist to find Han where earlier scholars believed there to have been

barbarians is not clear from his report. In part, it probably stemmed from his discipli-

nary training, which would not allow him to accept tradition at face value, but

required hands-on investigation of the site and comparison to other known entities,

such as Han tombs in other parts of China. Second, as suggested by his hunch based

on the Sichuan caves’ supposed similarity to ones in Japan, it may be that Torii

already entertained a notion of one united Asian race, an idea he would strongly

advocate later based on his work in Korea.29

In any case—ironic given later national

hatreds—it was a Japanese archaeologist who pioneered Han Chinese nationalist

archaeology in Sichuan.

After Torii, other foreigners in Sichuan continued to advance the thesis that

the caves were Han tombs, not barbarian homes. Prominent among them for his

persistence was the Protestant missionary Thomas Torrance (��� 1871-1959).

Torrance, born in Lanarkshire, Scotland (also the birthplace of David Livingstone),

went to China as a China Inland Mission missionary in 1896 and was stationed in

Chengdu, where he remained until his retirement in 1934.30

Like many missionaries,

Torrance was interested in Chinese history and the ways he thought it fit within

God’s universal plan. Typical of Torrance’s early attitude is a short book he wrote on

Chengdu’s history, based on his translation of traditional histories like the Huayang

guozhi (��7� Records of the states south of Mt. Hua), where he praises the

morality and ingenuity of the ancient “Shuh-Chinese” (that is, the Chinese living in

Sichuan/Shu (�)), but then laments the deleterious influence of Buddhism on them,

and concludes hoping that the original greatness of the Chinese tradition in Sichuan

can be recovered through Christian faith.31

Though he had no training as an archae-

ologist, because of his extensive career in Sichuan and his knowledge of ancient

texts, Torrance gained a reputation in the foreign community in China as a specialist

on Sichuan’s past. Thus, his 1910 article on the caves, appearing in the Journal of the

North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, made quite an impact, and was

routinely cited by both foreign and Chinese archaeologists, many of whom do not

seem to have read Torii’s account.

In the article, Torrance was not exclusively interested in the cliff-side caves,

but in “burial customs” in Sichuan more generally, both past and present. It was his

understanding of the caves, based on his year-long investigation of caves along the

Min River near Jiading however, that most attracted other scholars. After dispatching

28

Ibid., 619-21. 29

Cf. Askew and Pai. 30

A few pages on the life of Torrance can be found in a recent biography of his more famous son, a University of Edinburgh theologian specializing in the relation between science and religion. See Alister E. McGrath, T.F. Torrance: An Intellectual Biography (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 6-16. 31

Thomas Torrance, The Early History of Chengtu: From the Chou to the Close of the Shuh Han Dynasty (Chengdu: Canadian Mission Press, 1916).

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA

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13

of the notion that anyone could possibly live in the caves as the locals supposed,

because of the risk of suffocation, he turned to the question of the ethnicity of the

caves’ builders. Torrance believed that the large amounts of copper cash, which he

dated to the Han Dynasty, combined with the Chinese-language inscriptions found in

some caves, was strong evidence against barbarian origins.32

Even more damaging to

a Manzi claim on the caves was Torrance’s observation of the similarity in interior

design between the cave tombs and the numerous mound tombs on the Chengdu

Plain, which no one claimed belonged to anyone but ancestors of the Han Chinese. It

bothered Torrance that all Sichuan Chinese he spoke to were so confused about their

own history and mistakenly named them “Barbarian caves.” Torrance’s solution was

to blame the confusion on the late-Ming murderous depredations of Zhang Xian-

zhong (!�� 1606-1647), which necessitated Qing re-colonization of Sichuan with

people from other provinces wholly unaware of Sichuan’s historical landscape.

Faced with barbarians all around, these Qing-era immigrants simply assumed that the

caves had belonged to them. Torrance believed that his investigation proved “beyond

all reasonable doubt that these caves, in the Northern section at least, were tombs of

the Chinese and not of the so-called ‘Man-Tze’ or aboriginal inhabitants.”33

Like the

Western explorers and Torii before him, Torrance sustained the interest in determin-

ing the ethnic group best associated with the caves, and he, like Torii, found in favor

of the Han Chinese. Any search for motivation, why Torrance would put Han into the

spaces where generations of local opinion had believed Manzi to reside, involves

some amount of speculation. A reasonable possibility is that at that time, considering

his interest in linkages between Chinese and Christian belief, Torrance saw his

Christian civilizing mission as most compatible with Han Chinese culture, in the face

of what seemed the more base practices of the ethnic minorities in Sichuan.

If there was any question as to the reliability of Torrance’s testimony, as a

missionary and only an amateur archaeologist, he soon had the opportunity to act as a

local guide to professional archaeologists, who usually confirmed Torrance’s

findings. For instance, Torrance guided French anthropologist Victor Segalen (��� 1878-1919) to the same Jiading cliff tombs in 1914, and Segalen bolstered

Torrance’s conclusions with his own more wide-ranging knowledge of Han-era

tombs of the Central Plains. Neither Segalen, Torii, nor Torrance was content to have

the caves simply dated to the Han dynasty, but advanced a Han ethnic interpretation

regarding the caves’ origins. Segalen disparaged the thought that barbarians, rather

than Han, could produce the art found in the caves: “The viewer will note the regular

form of the caves and the clever construction, it is clear that it would be impossible

for barbarians to decorate a natural cave thus, it is just too high a level of cultural

32

Thomas Torrance, “Burial Customs in Sz-chuan,” Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 41 (1910): 70. 33

Ibid., 65.

JEFF KYONG-MCCLAIN

Volume 35, No. 2

14

technique for them.”34

Unlike Torii and Torrance, Segalen offered one Eurocentric

caveat: the practice of burial in a cliff-side cave rather than in a mound did not seem

Chinese, so he hypothesized that the Chinese in Han Dynasty Sichuan were some-

how influenced by the diffusion of Egyptian cave burial techniques.35

Another with archaeological training who visited Torrance and the caves

was Carl Whiting Bishop, Assistant Curator of Oriental Art at the University of

Pennsylvania Museum. Interestingly, after his 1915 investigation, Bishop did not

fully accept Torrance’s views, but created his own hybrid explanation, that the caves

were Manzi tombs.36

Shortly afterwards, however, Bishop reversed course, claiming

that the preponderance of evidence brought forth by archaeologists and ethnologists

now led him to the conclusion that the caves were the tombs of Near East-influenced

(à la Segalen) Chinese in Sichuan, not barbarians.37

Ironically, as archaeologists lined up to praise the pioneering work of the

missionary Torrance, Torrance himself began to have second thoughts and published

a mild rearguard effort against the now dominant interpretation. Though not denying

that the caves might be tombs belonging to Han Chinese people, a considerably more

circumspect Torrance now suggested that archaeologists were jumping to conclu-

sions when they had to give a clear-cut ethnic designation to the caves. Rather,

Torrance emphasized the mingling of cultures that occurred in Sichuan during the

Han Dynasty, noting that the border between the Chinese-run Chengdu Plain and the

barbarian inhabited mountains was merely political and that culture flowed both

ways.38

Whatever the sensibility of this new position, this about-face can be ex-

plained in part by Torrance’s growing belief that that barbarians, especially the

Qiang (�), were morally superior to the Chinese. Throughout the 1920s, Torrance

developed a thesis that the Qiang were a lost tribe of Israel, sent by God to save the

corrupt Han.39

As such, Torrance no longer saw evidence of Han colonization in

Sichuan in a positive light.

It was a quixotic effort, however, for the debate was by then pretty much set-

tled in favor of Han over barbarian. Lest there be any doubt, American Baptist

missionary David Crockett Graham (X�9 1884-1961) promptly shot down

34

Cited from Se Galan, Zhongguo xibu kaogu ji (Notes on the archaeology of western China), Feng Chengjun, trans. (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshu guan, 1930), 26. For the original French account, see Victor Segalen, Gilbert de Voisins, and Jean Lartigue, Mission Archéologique en Chine (1914): L’art Funéraire a L’époque des Han (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1935 (1923))” Ch. 9. 35

Ibid., 41. Segalen may have been influenced here by the hyperdiffusionism of G.E. Smith (1871-1937), who believed all culture to have originated in Egypt. Trigger, 220-1. 36

Carl Whiting Bishop, “The Expedition to the Far East,” Museum Journal 7 (1916): 97-118. 37

C.W. Bishop, “The Problem of the Min River Caves,” The Chinese Social and Political Science Review 10 (1926): 46-61. 38

Thomas Torrance, “Notes on the Cave Tombs and Ancient Burial Mounds of Western Sze-chwan,” Journal of the West China Border Research Society 4 (1930-31): 89-90. 39

This thesis is most fully developed in Thomas Torrance, China’s First Missionaries: Ancient “Israelites” (Chengdu: Canadian Mission Press, 1937).

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA

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15

Torrance’s reversal. Graham had spent almost twenty years in Xufu as a missionary

before moving to Chengdu in 1932 to head archaeology at Chengdu’s Protestant

College, West China Union University (�'���� Huaxi xiehe daxue). Before

accepting his new post, Graham spent just over a year of study split between the

University of Chicago and Harvard, excavating Indian mounds in southern Illinois

with the former, and studying archaeological theory at the latter.40

On his return to

Sichuan, so flush with academic authority, Graham took to rooting out amateurs, like

Torrance, and advancing “China” further and further into Sichuan’s past.41

In a

lavishly illustrated 1932 publication for the Smithsonian Institution, Graham

confidently reasserted the caves’ Han Chineseness in the face of any aboriginal

ambiguity.42

If Torrance’s reversal of opinion could not stand in the face of disciplinary

archaeology as represented by Graham, by the early 1930s, in any case, it was

becoming increasingly difficult for foreigners to excavate in Sichuan and so continue

to interpret the caves in one way or the other. Despite their disagreements, Torrance

and Graham teamed up with the intent to excavate several cave tombs near Pengshan

County (�%&) (77 km south of Chengdu) in early 1933, but were arrested by a Liu

Wenhui-affiliated local militia for theft of antiquities.43

Still, the foreign archaeolo-

gists and missionaries had set the stage, the ambiguities of tradition surrounding the

caves had largely been replaced with the assured results of an ethnographic-focused

archaeology, and Chinese archaeologists would soon take up the mantle of finding

Han China in Sichuan’s remote past.

40

For more on Graham, see Charles McKhann and Alan Waxman, “David Crockett Graham: American Missionary and Scientist in Sichuan, 1911-1948,” in Denise Glover, et al., eds., Explorers and Scientists in China’s Borderlands, 1880-1950 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, forthcoming). 41

Graham left his greatest mark on this account by finding what he claimed to be Zhou Dynasty materials at a site in Hanzhou, Sichuan. See Graham’s “A Preliminary Report of the Hanchow Excavation,” Journal of the West China Border Research Society VI (1933-1934): 114-31. Chen Xingcan calls Graham’s excavation at Hanzhou “Sichuan’s first true archaeological excavation.” Chen, 198. Ironically, given Graham’s proclivities, the same site would acquire worldwide fame after 1986 as “Sanxingdui,” known for its dissimilarity to the Central Plains. On Sanxingdui, see Robert Bagley, ed., Ancient Sichuan: Treasures from a Lost Civilization (Seattle and Princeton: Seattle Art Museum and Princeton University Press, 2001). 42

David Crockett Graham, The Ancient Caves of Szechwan Province, China (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1932). Kangding-based China Inland Missionary J. Huston Edgar, who was, like Torrance, undergoing a conversion of sorts from seeing the Han Chinese as civilizers of the borderlands to seeing them as invaders, apparently wrote in defense of the caves as being aborigi-nal, not Chinese. The article was never published, but Graham had a Han-centric rebuttal ready just in case. D.C. Graham, “A Reply to Mr. Edgar’s Article on the Artificial Caves,” Box 9, Graham Papers, Whitman College Archives, Walla Walla, WA. 43

They got off with only a night in jail and a mild scolding, as Liu Wenhui, sensitive to possible international ramifications, told the Pengshan magistrate to tread lightly. On this affair, see Sichuan Provincial Archives, Republican Archives, Record Unit 41, File 691.

JEFF KYONG-MCCLAIN

Volume 35, No. 2

16

WARTIME CHINESE ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE TOMB BONANZA

Prior to the War of Resistance against Japan, Chinese nationalist intellectu-

als, although certainly interested in the ethnography and archaeology of the South-

west, found few opportunities to go there themselves to conduct fieldwork. Most had

to remain content to compare such ancient texts as they could find in their libraries in

Nanjing or Beiping, and theorize their meaning for contemporary southwestern

China, leaving actual fieldwork to foreigners like Torrance and Graham.44

This

situation changed in almost an instant when Japan invaded China’s heartland in July

1937 and forced the hasty evacuation of the Nanjing government to Wuhan and then

further up the Yangzi to Chongqing.45

Following the government to the Southwest

were dozens of universities and research institutes, which set up shop in Chongqing,

Kunming (��), or Chengdu.46

The historians and archaeologists of the govern-

ment’s own Institute of History and Philology and the China Central Museum

regrouped at the small Sichuan village of Lizhuang, near Xufu, the location of

several cliff-side caves.47

The government worked to mobilize all sectors of society during the war.

For historians, this meant pressure to inspire the people to resist the Japanese. In

order to shore up a unified national history, the Ministry of Education held a confer-

ence on history and geography education in China, where Minister of Education

Chen Lifu encouraged historians to do away with words like “legend” or “myth”

when speaking of ancient China and instead to emphasize the brilliance of the Three

Sovereigns and Five Emperors (���v Sanhuang Wudi), and educator Li Dong-

fang (��� 1907-1998) urged attendees to tell Chinese history as the story of the

heroic Han people and their territorial expansion.48

Still, doubters persisted. Gu

Jiegang, for one, continued to confound nationalist intellectuals by attacking ancient

texts as unreliable and declaring ancient Sichuan (�� Ba-Shu) to have been largely

free from any influence from the Central Plains before the Qin and Han conquests.49

44

Wang Ming-ke, “Searching for Qiang Culture in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” Inner Asia 4:1 (2002): 138. 45

Cf. Kapp, 136-9. To date, this massive exodus has been little studied, though for a good place to start, see Stephen R. McKinnon, Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees and the Making of Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 46

For one well-documented example, see John Israel, Lianda: A Chinese University in War and Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 47

On Lizhuang as a cultural and academic center during the war, see the romanticized account in Liu Zhenyu and Wei Wei, Zhongguo Lizhuang: Kangzhan liuwang xuezhe de renwen dang’an (China's Lizhuang: A humanist archive of exiled scholars during the War of Resistance) (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 2005). 48

Wei-keung Chan, “Contending Memories of the Nation: History Education in Wartime China, 1937-1945,” in Tze-ki Hon and Robert J. Culp, eds., The Politics of Historical Production in Late Qing and Republican China (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 175-6. 49

Gu Jiegang, “Gudai Ba Shu yu Zhongyuan de guanxishuo ji qi pipan (The theory of a relation-ship between ancient Ba-Shu and the Central Plains and its criticism)” Zhongguo wenhua yanjiu huikan 1 (1941): 173-231.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA

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17

Gu was roundly criticized for such intransigence by Fu Sinian who, although not

originally opposed to some sort of multi-ethnic origin for China, was disturbed by

what he took as Gu’s flippant dismissal of ancient unity, particularly dangerous

during a time of war.50

Archaeological evidence was needed as hard proof of the

ancient connections between the Central Plains and Sichuan, which would somehow

stand for and inspire the people to move toward national unity and patriotic action,

which modern nationalists so desired.

The cliff-side caves were particularly useful for a Han-centered, nationalist

vision of a unified China. If, as Baber had suggested, some Yi (�) claimed that the

caves belonged to their ancestors, then there existed a real challenge to imagining the

historical geography of Han China in much of Sichuan.51

Further, what if the Yi—the

“independent Luoluo (�.�� duli Luoluo)” as many Chinese and Westerners

called them—were to claim the territory of the caves? The Yi had, in fact, offered

violent and sustained resistance to the Qing in the Empire’s last decade.52

During the

Republic, they were said to number nearly 3,000,000, and nationalist scholars fretted

that the Yi “live in darkness, as they are not yet aware there exists a nation-state (7� guojia).”

53 Thus, naming so many caves throughout so much of Sichuan “Manzi-

dong” may have seemed to pose not only an emotional drag on national sentiment,

but in fact a real threat to the political unity of the nation.

The first Chinese scholar of renown to investigate the formerly barbarian

caves was Shang Chengzuo (� ¡ 1902-1991). Shang was a senior researcher

affiliated with Jinling University’s Chinese Culture Research Institute. While in

Nanjing, and at a position at Peking University before that, Shang had established

himself as an authority on oracle bones and published widely on the subject. He was

even more predisposed than most of the refugee archaeologists to emphasize the

marginality of Sichuan in the grand scheme of Chinese history. Indeed, Shang’s

writings while in Sichuan suggested that the Southwest was in dire need of the

civilizing center, raising the ire of native Sichuanese antiquarians who imagined a

50

On the Fu-Gu conflict, see Leibold, 138-40. 51

Some Republican-era Chinese anthropologists also believed “Manzi” simply meant “Luoluo” (that is, the Yi). See Lin Yaohua, Liangshan Yijia (The Yi of Liangshan) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1947), preface. Lin conducted anthropological fieldwork in the Yi region of Sichuan in 1943, with funding from Harvard-Yenching, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the China Coloniza-tion Society (Zhongguo kangjian kenzhi she). 52

Wei Yingtao, Sichuan jindai shigao (An outline history of early modern Sichuan) (Chengdu: Sichuan renmin chubanshe, 1990), 347. 53

Zeng Wenwu, “Ruhe anjing Daliangshan zhi Luoluo (How to pacify the Luoluo of Daliang-shan),” Zhongguo bianjiang (China’s Frontier) 1:1, 22. Zeng suggested Han male colonization and marriage to Yi women and intense Sinicizing education efforts as the primary solution. This followed the usual (though not consistent) Guomindang policy of attempting to turn the ethnic minorities in the Southwest into Han (Hanhua). See David M. Deal, “Policy Toward Ethnic Minorities in Southwest China, 1927-1965,” in Tai S. Kang, ed., Nationalism and the Crises of Ethnic Minorities in Asia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), 33-40.

JEFF KYONG-MCCLAIN

Volume 35, No. 2

18

nobler past for their province.54

When Jinling University moved, during the war, to

the campus of West China Union University, Shang took the opportunity to investi-

gate the cliff-side caves near Xinjin (¢£), 45 kilometers south of Chengdu, and

published the most detailed archaeological exposition of the caves to date. Shang

measured dozens of caves around Xinjin, catalogued hundreds of articles from the

caves (sculptures, cash, pottery, and tiles), and took rubbings of inscriptions. Shang

was well-versed in the tomb culture of the Central Plains, and had even participated

in an excavation of a large Han Dynasty tomb in Changsha just months before while

en route to Sichuan. With this knowledge as background, Shang was convinced that

on all accounts (with the exception that the tomb was in a cave, not a mound) the

Sichuan cliff-side caves matched Han tomb practices throughout China.

Shang, it should be noted, did not make it his main goal, as did the Western-

ers and Torii before him, to try to fit an outright ethnic label on the caves. Still, he

did imply such identification, contrasting the high Chinese civilization evident in the

caves with apparent absence of such qualities among barbarians. In his report on the

caves, he refers his readers back to the importance of burial for Chinese, citing

Confucius and Mencius, and declaring that for Chinese, “filial obedience is not

limited to parents while they are alive, but continues after death in the funerary ritual

and finds its greatest importance in the tomb.”55

Investigating the tombs revealed to

Shang that they were examples of lavish burial (¤¥ houzang), thus representing

Chinese filiality par excellence and contrasting with the simple, unfilial burials of

non-Chinese. It was an embarrassment to Shang that for so many centuries Chinese

had been confounded about the origins of these caves, thinking they had anything to

do with non-Chinese barbarian practices. Though Shang believed that the peasants

could not be expected to know better, he found it particularly shameful that the

literati never corrected the masses. In a twist on this conundrum, Shang suggested

that it was ethnic Han chauvinism that caused the initial confusion, as Han Chinese

believed barbarians to be incompetent in all things, including home construction, so

they put them in the caves. Shang was, thus, thankful to the foreign scholars (espe-

cially Torrance and Segalen) for setting the record straight about the caves’ origin

and use, but he also blamed them for letting word slip to the common people that the

items were of value. Shang wrote, “After these two, the villagers learned that the

burial goods (�¦ mingqi) could be exchanged for money, and now every year

54

See, for instance, Shang’s doubts about ancient Sichuan’s bronze capabilities and Chengdu-based antiquarian Huang Xicheng’s outraged response: Shang Chengzuo, “Chengdu Baimasi chutu tongqi bian (A critique of the bronze ware excavated at Chengdu’s White Horse Temple),” Shuowen yuekan (Shuowen monthly) (August 1942): 18-22, and Huang Xicheng, “Du Shang Chengzuo Baimasi chutu dongqi bian hou (Thoughts after reading Shang Chengzuo’s ‘Critique of the bronze ware excavated at White Horse Temple’),” newspaper clipping, available in the archives of the Sichuan University Museum. 55

Shang Chengzuo, “Sichuan Xinjin dengdi Han yamu wamu kaolüe (Investigations into the Han cliff tombs and tile tombs around Xinjin, Sichuan),” Jinling xuebao (Nanking journal) 10:1-2 (May-November 1940): 1.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA

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19

during the farming holiday, the mountains around Xinjin are swarming with treasure

hunters.”56

He concluded his investigation emphasizing the importance of the caves

in showing the spread of Chinese civilization, and calling on the government to step

up their protection from the hordes of looters and begin their own scientific investi-

gation.

Shang’s call for immediate government oversight of the cave tombs was not

heeded, but scholars in the wartime capital of Chongqing soon discovered the caves

to be an important source for understanding the history of Sichuan and its long-

standing connection with the Central Plains. The new capital-based scholars fre-

quented nearby caves and then published their findings in varied historical and

cultural journals. Often, these scholars focused their investigations, as did the foreign

scholars before, on refuting the local tradition of barbarian ownership, as for in-

stance, did Fang Xin’an (�§¨ 1902-1970) in his meandering reflection on the

caves, “The So-Called Barbarian Caves” published in the Weekly Review.57

Fang’s

attention was initially drawn to the caves along the Jialing River north of Chongqing

because of newspaper accounts about Chongqing’s poor using them as air raid

shelters during Japanese bombing of the city. Fang, a linguist and historian by

training, began his discussion by putting everyone in their place (be they trained

archaeologists or Sichuanese peasants) by declaring, to begin with, that the cliff

caves were actually xue (k) not dong (=) as they had been almost unanimously

referred to, as the latter term, according to Chinese etymology, referred only to

natural caves, and the former to manmade ones. His philological if not archaeological

authority thus established, Fang admitted, in a concession to the older barbarian

homes thesis (and perhaps in implicit response to Shang) that primitive peoples

everywhere did once live in caves, adding what he took to be shocking to his readers,

“our ancestors included.”58

Man-made caves such as these were, according to Fang,

one step up the evolutionary scale from living in natural caves, and one step below

free-standing houses. However, on the basis of the existence of coffins in some

caves, inscriptions suggesting burial in others, and the Hong Shi’s Song-era descrip-

tion, Fang determined that the Chongqing man-made caves (©ªk rengongxue)

were not the homes of either barbarians or Chinese, but tombs. Still, it was left to

decide whose tombs. Using the same evolutionary reasoning, Fang concluded that

they belonged to “our country («7 woguo)” rather than barbarians of the periphery.

Fang wrote, “We know that tomb burial (:¥ muzang) is a comparatively progres-

sive system, and that before tomb burial all peoples used sky burial (´ tianzang),

which is emblematic of the most barbaric system of burial.”59

Thus, Fang reasoned

that the caves in Sichuan must be Chinese tombs because the barbarians in the area

56

Ibid., 6. 57

Fang Xin’an, “Suowei mandong (So-called barbarian caves),” Xingqi pinglun (Weekly Review) 15 (March 1941): 11-13. 58

Ibid., 11. 59

Ibid., 12.

JEFF KYONG-MCCLAIN

Volume 35, No. 2

20

(Fang pointed to Tibetans in particular) still used sky burial. Still, Fang found the

idea of a cave tomb at odds with typical Chinese burial practices, and so concluded

his essay by suggesting, like Segalen, that the Chinese may have learned it from

Egypt. This early example of Chinese-Western civilizational communication

bypassed groups like the Manzi who were not ready for such advances. Fang’s was

not a rigorous investigation, but it does suggest the general interest in and the

prevailing opinion about the caves. More importantly, whether arguing from evi-

dence, as Shang, or from evolutionary theory, as Fang, all roads led to Han Chinese

tombs and away from barbarian quarters.

Although the largest concentration of caves excavated during the Republic

lay either north of Chongqing on the Jialing or south and southeast of Chengdu along

the Min River, bordering on areas then occupied by Yi and Miao, the cliff-side caves

pushed against other ethnic frontiers as well. The cliff tomb that so excited Magis-

trate Zhang of Lushan lay about 150 kilometers west-southwest of Chengdu en route

to Tibet. The archaeologist Ren Naiqiang was a graduate of Yanjing University’s

Anthropology Department and moved to the Southwest in 1929 when he was hired

by Liu Wenhui to conduct comprehensive surveys of the newly formed Xikang

Province.60

In his report on the tomb, Ren did not label the site as a “cliff tomb (!:

yamu),” nor did he mention that locals ever referred to it as a “barbarian cave

(Manzidong).” Subsequent archaeologists did, however, declare Ren’s find to fit

within the Han Dynasty cliff tomb category. If he was not quite aware of the wide-

spread cliff tomb phenomena in the region, he did, however, make it a point to link

his discovery to what he took to be the work of the Han ethnic group in the region’s

remote past. Ren’s primary contribution was to seek out correspondence between the

cliff tomb and Chinese texts, primarily the Huayang guozhi and the Shiji (­®).

According to Ren, the tomb was convincing material evidence for what the texts

recorded about the early expulsion of the “Southwestern barbarians ('¯° Xi’nan

Yi)” from this region and the arrival of Han Chinese to this area. Ren showed his

ethnographic bent more overtly than did some more cautious archaeologists, writing

that the tomb proved that “[d]uring the Western Han, the Han people (Hanzu) were

already numerous in Lushan and all the nearby counties.”61

Commenting on the caves during wartime attracted the attention of educated

Chinese from around Sichuan province, not just professional anthropologists. The

sheer number of caves made it easy for amateur antiquarians to make discoveries

every bit as interesting as trained archaeologists. One such part-time explorer was

Yang Zhigao (±²³), a doctor of modern medicine in Jiading who spent the

summer of 1941 visiting caves throughout the province, paying particular attention to

the ones near his home at Shiziwan (´<µ). Yang subsequently wrote a short report

on his investigation for the West China Union University humanities journal. Yang,

60

Ren’s early ethnographic, cartographic, and other studies of Xikang can be found in Liu Wenhui’s border studies journal, Bianzheng. 61

Ren, 22.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA

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21

like so many before, was fixated on refuting the barbarian caves thesis. Very aware

of the close proximity of Han and “barbarian (Manzi)” in Sichuan’s history, Yang

was sympathetic to those who confused the function and ethnic ownership of the

caves. Still, Yang urged widespread recognition that the caves could not possibly

belong to the Manzi, but rather belonged to “our country.” Struck by the caves’

intricate decoration, Yang was convinced that, given the present backward state of

the southwestern barbarians, plainly their ancestors would not have been able to

achieve the magnificence of the caves, which must have come instead from the

aesthetically and technically more advanced Han people. Such being the case, the

caves were repositories of China’s “national quintessence,” and Yang concluded by

urging the government to step in and protect Sichuan’s many cliff-side Han tombs.62

There was, then, by the early 1940s, little room left to dispute that the caves

represented Han rather than barbarian achievement. Chinese nationalist academics

and amateurs had lined up to publicly declare the Han nature of the caves. However,

there was at least one Chinese scholar willing to buck the trend, British university-

trained literary scholar and translator Qian Gechuan (¶·¸ 1903-1990). Qian, for

one, found a certain romance in the idea of the existence of “barbarian caves” in the

midst of the violent war-ravaged China of his day. Qian’s ruminations might not

warrant attention as advancing an archaeological understanding of the caves, except

that he published them in an article in the wartime’s leading history and archaeology

journal, Shuowen yuekan (¹1º» Shuowen Monthly). Writing under the pen

name Wei Gan (¼½), Qian described his experience in the barbarian caves near

Jiading. Qian discovered the caves while fleeing the city to avoid Japanese bombing.

Qian does not seem to have read the accumulating archaeological reports, and based

his understanding on his own investigation and on listening to the local people’s

insistence that the caves really were barbarian. Quite unlike the archaeologists, Qian

still believed local history as it was told locally. Because of inconvenience of

inaccessibility, however, Qian could not completely believe his informants that the

caves were ever homes. Rather, he decided that they were barbarian tombs, and, in a

nod to written history, the Lao of the 1812 Jiading gazetteer in particular. According

to Qian’s ethnographic understanding, cave burials were typical of barbarian

practices everywhere, and he cited an example from the islands of Southeast Asia.

With literary flourish, Qian ended his exposition on the “barbarian tombs” noting the

irony that barbarians two thousand years ago had built the very caves into which he

and many Chinese now fled to avoid barbarian (Japanese) bombs. Thus, Qian offered

his gratitude to Sichuan’s early barbarians who were now, as fate would have it, the

foremost defenders of civilization.63

62

Yang Zhigao, “Sichuan yamu lüekao (A brief account of Sichuan’s cliff tombs),” Huawen yuekan (West China Union University humanities monthly) 1:6 (August 1942): 29-30. 63

Wei Gan, “Leshan de mandong (The barbarian caves of Leshan),” Shuowen yuekan 3:4 (October 1941): 83-85. Qian’s interest in Southeast Asian comparisons, fanciful in 1941, turned out to be prescient. When Academia Sinica moved to Taiwan, the caves began to receive more sustained attention as cultural markers across national boundaries. See Ling Shunsheng, “Zhongguo yu

JEFF KYONG-MCCLAIN

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Qian’s fanciful understanding of the caves, despite its place in a reputable

magazine, never caught on, and was, in fact, ignored by all subsequent archaeologists

and historians. The time was not ripe for a return to barbarian origins and, for all

practical purposes, the case had already been closed: the caves represented Han

Chinese civilization, not traces of barbarism. As such, they could be culled for

evidence for various other theses about Chinese history and culture. When, in 1942,

for instance, an archaeological team from Academia Sinica excavated the caves in

Pengshan, the team simply assumed that all artifacts gathered were Han Chinese, and

subsequent reports from this excavation were used to contribute toward an under-

standing of general trends in Chinese art history.64

Anthropologist Feng Hanji (¾9¿ 1899-1977) used the Han cave tombs as one piece of evidence to prove that

Chinese culture was not static, as Western scholars and some Chinese reformers

claimed, since they proved that Han people could adapt to different circumstances.

“What do the local people call these tombs?” Feng asked. “They most certainly do

not call them the tombs of the ancestors of the Han people, or even tombs of some

relatives of the Han people, but rather, they call them barbarian caves, because they

have determined that their ancestors could never have been like this. But, from [the

fact they are Han] it is clear, Chinese culture has changed much since the Han

dynasty.”65

Zheng Dekun (ÀÁÂ 1907-2001) used the tombs as examples of the

marginality of Sichuan in Chinese history and the province’s dependence on the Qin

and Han peoples for the importation of culture and customs.66

Scholars of Chinese

architecture like Liang Sicheng (DÃZ 1901-1972) and Chen Mingda (-�Ä

1914-1997) likewise used them as examples in their work on the development of Han

Chinese architecture.67

Teachers brought aspiring archaeology and history students to

the cave tombs as they provided easily accessible (from Chengdu or Chongqing)

training sites, and reinforced in their students the Han nature of the tombs.68

In at

least one case, a local Mass Education Office (OÅÆÇÈ Minzhong jiaoyu guan)

Dongnan Ya zhi yazang wenhua (Chinese and Southeast Asian cliff burial culture)” Guoli zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo jikan 23, Part II (July 1952): 639-79. 64

Nanjing bowuguan, ed., Sichuan pengshan Handai yamu (Han Dynasty cliff tombs in Pengshan, Sichuan) (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1991). 65

Feng Hanji, “Wenhua de juedingxing yu geren (Cultural determinism and the individual),” Huawen yuekan 1:4 (June 1942): 2-8. 66

Zheng Dekun, Gudai Sichuan wenhua shi (History of Ancient Sichuan) (Chengdu: Ba-Shu shushe), 202. 67

Liang Sicheng, Zhongguo jianzhu shi (A history of Chinese architecture) (Taibei: Mingwen shuju, 1981), 39-40; Chen Mingda, Chen Mingda gu jianzhu yu diaosu shilun (Collected works of Chen Mingda on the history of ancient architecture and sculpture) (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1998), 7-8. 68

See, for instance, the description of the party from the China Central University History Department in Chang Rencang, “Chongqing fujin fajue zhi Handai yamu yu shique yanjiu (Research on Han Dynasty stone que and cliff tombs excavated near Chongqing),” Shuowen yuekan 2:2 (May 1940): 43-46, and the team of archaeology students led by Cui Jiayu, “Sichuan Mandong fajue ji (Report of an excavation of a barbarian cave in Sichuan),” Minzuxue yanjiu jikan (Ethno-graphic Research Journal) 6 (August 1948): 31-36.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA

April 2010

23

participated in an excavation of a cave tomb, probably in order to fill a local museum

with Han Dynasty artifacts, thereby linking their locale with China’s glorious past.69

So it was that, by the end of the war, thanks to the work of both Chinese and foreign,

professional and amateur archaeologists, Chinese nationalists of all stripes knew

beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Sichuan cliff-side tombs represented, as Zheng

Dekun would triumphantly put it, “a western branch of the great artistic achievement

of the Han Chinese.”70

CONCLUSION

Under the imperial system, though existence of barbarians could provide real

threats to dynastic power, requiring violent suppression or educational transforma-

tion, it did not occur to anyone that purported remnants of barbarian life, such as

their cave homes, would in any manner shake the foundations of rule, nor does it

seem that anyone’s identity as “Chinese” was particularly troubled by close proxim-

ity to caves of dubious provenance. However, the notion of an ethnic nation brought

with it a quest for authenticity in both ancient time and space. Because of the

concurrent arrival of those handmaids of nationalism—modern historiography and

archaeology—which attacked tradition as foolishness, the meaning of these caves

could not be left alone for wanton interpretation. So it was that the many caves along

Sichuan’s rivers were studied with a new eye and widely publicized to be Han tombs,

thus stretching out the area of ethnic Han settlement to riverbanks, some far from

Chengdu, from which an older imagination had seen savage eyes peering out.

Despite the concerted efforts of the Republican-era archaeologists, both

Chinese and foreign, however, the idea that the caves belonged to the Manzi never

completely died off in public memory. One online Chongqing Morning News article

recently reported on the discovery of a group of “mysterious Barbarian caves,” citing

a sixty-some-year-old local, Mr. Zhou, who recalled, “When I was a child my father

told me that these caves were made by black-skinned barbarians to serve as their

homes.”71

It may yet turn out Mr. Zhou’s dad was right, and under the new “regional-

ist paradigm” in Chinese archaeology, where funds and publication opportunities

reward the discovery of difference from the Central Plains (except in Tibet), there are

growing signs that not every cave in Sichuan need belong to ethnic Han.72

Recent

69

Cui, 34. 70

Cheng Te-k’un, “An Introduction to Szechwan Archaeology,” West China Union University Museum Guidebook Series 3 (Chengdu, n.p,: 1947), 6. 71

“Jiangjin Shuangfuzhen shanya jingxian 20 duo shenmi ‘Manzi dong’ (The surprising discovery of 20-some mysterious cliff-side ‘barbarian caves’ in Jiangjin County Shuangfu Village),” Chongqing chenbao (Chongqing Morning News), 16 December 2006 http://cqtoday.cqnews.net/system/2006/12/16/000709909.shtml Accessed 18 December 2007. 72

On the tendency in archaeology in China to look away from the Central Plains, see Lothar Von Falkenhausen, “The Regionalist Paradigm in Chinese Archaeology,” in Philip L. Kohl and Clare Fawcett, eds., Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 198-217.

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24

scholarship tends to simply date the caves to the Han Dynasty, and not attribute to

them any particular ethnic ownership.73

Or, in line with Qian’s speculations, some

have linked the caves in Sichuan with others in southern China and well beyond into

Southeast Asia, even considering possible non-Han ethnic groups as the caves

builders, such as the Pu (É).74

Plainly, “getting the story straight” no longer means

finding a Han in every cave. Though welcomed, this liberalizing of interpretation

plainly comes well after borders were set and “national history” triumphed over

indigenous understandings (both Han tradition and aboriginal understandings of the

region’s history). For this, the current regime can thank the unified efforts of Western

missionary, Japanese imperial, and Chinese republican archaeologists. JEFF KYONG-MCCLAIN is assistant professor of history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His research focuses on the intersection between the growth of academic disciplines (particularly archaeology and ethnography) and nation-building in early twentieth-century Sichuan.

73

See for example, Sichuan daxue lishixi kaogu zhuanye yazang keyan xiaozu, “Sichuan Wuxi Xingzhuba yazang diaocha qingli jianbao (The report on the results of an investigation into the cliff burial at Xingzhuba, Wuxi, Sichuan),” Kaogu yu wenwu (Archaeology and Cultural Relics) 6 (1984): 22-24. Also, see Fan Xiaoping, Sichuan yamu yishu (The art of Sichuan’s cliff tombs) (Chengdu: Ba-Shu shushe, 2006) and Susan N. Erickson, “Eastern Han Dynasty Cliff Tombs of Santai Xian, Sichuan Province,” Journal of East Asian Archaeology 5 (2005): 401-69. 74

Yu Feng, “Guanyu yazang de jidian sikao (Several thoughts on cliff burial)” Zhongnan minzu xueyuan xuebao 21:4 (July 2001): 57-59. It should be noted that after Academia Sinica moved to Taiwan, anthropologist Ling Shunsheng began to rethink the meaning of the caves in this direction. See Ling Shunsheng, “Zhongguo yu Dongnan Ya zhi yasang wenhua (Cliff burials in China and Southeast Asia)” Lishi yuyan yanjiusuo jikan 23:2 (July 1952): 639-79.