Authors: Michael Meyer
CHAPTER
4
My wife’s family migrated to Manchuria in the
1930
s, when her maternal grandfather left his ancestral village on the coast east of Beijing. Frances was not sure when, exactly, he went north, or why. San Jiu didn’t know, either.
“There is no romance in my family,” she said. “I’m sure he went north for work, and that’s all. No soldiering, no joining the resistance against the Japanese, no chasing after his one true love.”
“Who can say?” San Jiu added, sounding resigned, not defensive.
Her grandfather was buried here, but like all graves around Wasteland his was plowed under during the Cultural Revolution campaign to eliminate old customs, such as burying—not cremating—the deceased in the fields they tilled. The tradition lived on in other parts of China. When the snow melted, the mounded, unadorned earthen graves rose like pitchers’ mounds amidst green fields latticed with trails that resembled base paths. In Wasteland the dead laid unmarked beneath the soil. Urban Chinese slandered farmers as being
tu
: soiled, or earthy. The dirt coated their clothing and burrowed into the cracks of their skin. In the end they went under and into the loam.
It had long been this way around Wasteland, where archaeologists had excavated clusters of burials, including areas of five hundred single bodies placed in stone cists dating back to the Paleolithic, Neolithic and Bronze ages. The large-scale cemeteries included foundations of solid houses, abundant farm tools, axes, fishhooks, spears and net weights and crops such as soybeans and millet. The finds evinced that the people who resided here five to seven thousand years ago lived a sedentary farming life, shattering the popular conception that the Northeast was long a vacant backwater before nomadic horsemen swept in to civilize it. Some archaeological sites even suggested habitation dating back two hundred thousand years.
Aboveground in Wasteland, we could not see any evidence of past settlements, of graves, of history that went back any further than the painted political slogans fading on redbrick walls under the bright Manchurian sun. History here was personal, and living, stretching back only as far as each resident could remember.
Scattered across the region’s far north, center, and south, however, three sets of ruins explain Manchuria’s deeper past.
On the train to Tonghua, a small city two hundred miles southeast of Wasteland, I sat beside a woman my age and her twenty-month-old son. The child, plump and happy, grabbed at my glasses, fingered my beard, and drooled as he pounded on the window at the passing cows. We sat in hard-seat class, on unpadded, straight-backed benches, and for stretches she asked me to hold him. The baby cooed; the voices of Wasteland’s aunties rang in my ears:
You’re not getting any younger
.
Tonghua was where Chinese brainwashers conditioned Sergeant Raymond Shaw for murder in the
1959
novel
The Manchurian Candidate
. His handlers brought Shaw to a room where “all of the furniture was made of blond wood in mutated, modern Scandinavian design . . . Each cubicle contained a cot, a chair, a closet, and a mirror for reassurance that the soul had not fled.”
It was a perfect description of my Tonghua hotel room. The county seat, neither large nor small, was one of those places where it wasn’t clear if the half-standing buildings, sprouting rebar, were being demolished or constructed.
Seventy miles further southeast down the tracks, in the border town of Ji’an, I saw both. Workers poured cement for foundations of what would become an international duty-free market. It would be sealed so North Koreans could enter via a new bridge spanning the Yalu River but not pass into greater China.
“The entire village is being torn down,” a man pulling tiles off his home’s roof told me. “We’re being relocated so the Koreans can learn how to do business.” Across the river, Koreans languidly pedaled old bicycles. Others crouched, washing clothes in the frigid water.
Two thousand years ago, this land was the seat of a kingdom named Koguryo. Koreans and Chinese debate its provenance: the former claims it as its ancient culture, while the latter—calling it Gaogeli in Chinese—holds it was “a regime established by ethnic groups in northern China, representing an important part of Chinese culture.” So read the sign posted outside a royal tomb dated
37
B.C.
All museums tell stories; China’s tell political ones. Often, as at these ruins, the museum or historic site is posted as a “patriotic education base.” Such shrines—interpreted by the local propaganda department—present historical events as leading, inexorably, to the Communist Party’s victory in the Chinese civil war. In Beijing’s National Museum of China, the display concerning the nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion against the Manchu dynasty depicts it as a pre-Marxist version of a peasant uprising without mentioning that its murderous leader believed he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. In Tibet, museums seem to exist only to assert to visitors that the territory “had long been a part of China.”
Like most frontiers, the Northeast pushed back against that neat narrative. These ziggurat-shaped tombs looked more Mayan than Manchurian: seven levels of huge stone blocks rose in receding steps. The tombs dotted the fields around the town, strung together by former castle pediments and low rock walls. The remains spilled across the Yalu River; in
2004
, UNESCO added the ruins on both sides of the border to its list of World Heritage Sites, North Korea’s first. In the fifth century
A.D.
, a Koguryo ruler moved its capital to Pyongyang. In the eighth century a Chinese army toppled the kingdom, establishing a toehold in the Northeast.
I had Ji’an’s ruins to myself. On a hike into a valley where once a palace stood, the only other person I saw was a farmer leading an ox. On my walk back out, the ox was tethered to the front bumper of a stuck taxi, towing it across a rocky stream. The cabbie said he was looking for me; he had heard a tourist was wandering around out here.
He dropped me off at the largest tomb, fenced and requiring an expensive ticket to enter. “These pretty ones are fake, you know,” a woman selling roasted yams said. “The real ones are the mounds of rubble you see around here. These have been rebuilt.”
I found no proof of this, and the woman was wearing a T-shirt that read, in English,
GOD SAVE THE TEENAGERS OF AMERICA
. But comparisons to old photos suggested that the photogenic ruins had been touched up. That was in line with everything I would see across the Northeast, where its history, unlike in the rest of China, felt present. Not the nation’s Five Thousand Years of History, but the parts made in recent lifetimes. Even its ancient ruins looked new.
The first time I visited the city of Harbin,
160
miles northeast of Wasteland, was to update a guidebook on a job that no one else would take. It was
1998
, and its tourist bureau handed out a promotional magazine meant to lure visitors. The cover story was headlined “Police, Police Vehicles, Police Dogs . . . Are So Close to Us.” (I loved the tension-building ellipse.) Later, pressed between pages like a treasured leaf, I found a napkin upon which I had scrawled the word
depressing
eleven times.
Now Club Med operated a ski resort outside town, Starbucks anchored downtown’s cobblestone pedestrian thoroughfare, and Disney sponsored Harbin’s frenetic Ice Lantern Festival. Millions of visitors descended on the city to view two-foot-thick frozen Songhua River ice blocks fashioned into thousands of lighted designs that ranged from life-size pandas to a scale replica of the Eiffel Tower.
Frances joined me there for a long weekend. Her inner attorney marveled at what a carnival looked like in a pre-litigious society. Kids hopped across a course of three-foot-tall ice pedestals and swooped down four-story ice slides, while the adults—fueled by cheap bottles of Ice River beer—clenched knotted ropes to rappel sheer ice walls and, in go-karts, dodged the horse-drawn sleighs that jingled across the Songhua. One night we watched a large, smiling man teeter on the lip of a luge chute as his friends, who called him Fatty, urged him to go first. You got the feeling that Fatty always had to go first. He leaned forward, and was gone. His howling fur-coated mass receded into the dark.
“This place is a death trap,” Frances said. But the only casualties were to our teeth, inflicted by candied hawthorn berries that somehow got even harder in the cold.
“This is really a zero-return snack.” The petrified fruit stuck to my molars as their bamboo skewer jabbed the inside of my cheek, drawing blood.
“One day lawyers will put a stop to all of this fun,” Frances said with a smile. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”
We were in Harbin to see the remains of an all-but-forgotten dynasty that was the precursor to the Manchus’ rule of China. The ruins were said to be twenty miles outside town in a place whose name sounded like a sneeze: Acheng.
Although the route took us along the expressway, the bus, like many in the Northeast, played a video showing
Er Ren Zhuan
, the regional opera. A shirtless actor in yellow silk pants asked his female counterpart—plump and shimmering in a pink silk pantsuit—her surname.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you,” she replied coquettishly. “You’ll want to eat it.”
He guessed a name that is a homophone for rice, then one for vegetables.
“Wrong again!” the actress crowed.
“I give up. What’s your name that I’ll want to eat?”
“Poo!”
Clap clap clap
went the recorded audience.
“I’ve seen this one before,” Frances said. The actress gyrated comically to a hip-hop beat, exhorting the audience to
yaoqilai, yaoqilai, yaoqilai
: “Shake it!” The bus pulsed with high treble.
The driver pulled to the side of a narrow road lined with birch trees. “Here you are,” he yelled above the video’s din. He pointed to a small green sign that looked like it had just been clipped by a passing truck. One side was bent back, and we leaned to read, in Chinese and, instead of Manchu script, English that said:
JIN DYNASTY CAPITAL SITE
.
The arrow pointed at a fallow cornfield. At its edge, Frances knelt before a calf-high stone house. It was a replica of the single-story homes in the distance. Carved above its small front door were characters that read
SHRINE TO THE EMPEROR OF THE SOIL
. “I’ve never seen one of these,” she said. “I thought they had all been smashed during the Cultural Revolution.”
I hadn’t seen any around Wasteland, either. The shrine was a relic that would have been targeted by Red Guards bent on destroying “old customs, culture, habits, and ideas.”
Frances looked around at the empty plain and said, “Maybe the Red Guards never made it out here.”
Who had? We walked on, toward the village, expecting a fence or a ticket taker, or at least an auntie selling postcards and socks. The only sound was a barking German shepherd chained in a courtyard. Its owner emerged from his house, asking to whose family we belonged.
“We’re looking for the Jin dynasty ruins.”
He pointed across the dirt lane at a chest-high gate standing alone, unattached to a wall or fence. It swung open in the wind. We stepped through, and tried to imagine the palaces of a people who, one thousand years before, ruled much of China.
The Jin (Gold) dynasty was founded in
1115
by a clan of the Jurchen, an equestrian Northeastern tribe skilled in archery and related to the Tungus, a Mongolian race. After pushing their dominion into southern China, the Jurchen moved their capital to present-day Beijing, naming it Zhongdu (Central Capital), and constructing its central chain of lakes. The city’s population grew to one million. The Jin emperor ordered these Northeastern palaces razed in
1157
to show the permanence of the Jurchen migration. Six decades later the Jin fell under a barrage of flaming arrows launched by Mongolian horsemen. Their leader, Genghis Khan, marked every citizen for death; the streets of Zhongdu ran slippery with melted flesh. It would be five centuries before the Jurchen, renamed the Manchu, returned to take the throne.
All that remained of the original palaces were stones marking where building foundations once stood, and—flanked by cottonwoods standing straight as sentries—a carved tablet perched atop a stone tortoise. Facing an empty field, the inscription announced the capital’s name.
At the rear of the site we found a cement slab painted with characters that said the ruins were excavated in
2000
. After nearly nine centuries under the soil, all that remained were stones and the palace footprints, built at a time when Europe was emerging from the Middle Ages, developing the Gothic style, building the Arsenal of Venice, and forming the Knights Templar. The wind and light were strong on the Manchurian plain, and chips of the painted description of the Jurchen court flaked off the slab like sunburned skin.
The last legible sentence said a Jin emperor was entombed a half mile away. The grave was a three-story trapezoidal dirt mound flecked with spindly elms growing aslant from the wind. We descended into a clammy low-ceilinged room to find offerings of plastic pears and apples before a stone crypt: the final resting place of Wanyan Aguda, founder of a dynasty named for gold.