Explorers and Scientists in China's Borderlands, 1880-1950 9780295804514, 9780295991184

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Explorers and Scientists in China’s Borderlands, 1880–1950

University of Washington Press Seattle and London

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Explorers & Scientists i n C h i n a’ s B o r d e r l a n d s , 1 8 8 0 – 1 9 5 0 Edit ed by Denise M. Glover Stevan Harrell Charles F. McKhann Margaret B. Swain

This book is published with the generous assistance of Whitman College, the Jackson School Publications Fund of the University of Washington, the Russell family (descendants of explorer D. C. Graham), and several other individual donors. © 2011 by the University of Washington Press Printed and bound in the United States of America Designed by Thomas Eykemans Composed in Warnock Pro, typeface designed by Robert Slimbach Display type set in Matrix, designed by Zuzana Licko 15 14 13 12 11  5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. University of Washington Press PO Box 50096, Seattle, WA 98145, USA www.washington.edu/uwpress Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Explorers and scientists in China’s borderlands, 1880–1950 / edited by Denise M. Glover . . . [et al.]. p. cm. Summary: “Profiles pioneering Euro-American scientists and explorers in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century China”—Provided by publisher. “A McLellan book.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-295-99117-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-295-99118-4 (pbk.) 1. Scientific expeditions—China—History—19th century—Congresses. 2. Scientific expeditions—China—History—20th century—Congresses. 3. Scientists—Europe— Intellectual life—Congresses. 4. Scientists—United States—Intellectual life—Congresses. 5. China—Discovery and exploration—English. 6. China—Discovery and exploration—American. I. Glover, Denise Marie. Q115.E985 2011 508.51—dc23 2011014511 The paper used in this publication is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.∞ Frontispiece  Bridge and riverbed, upper Yangtze, 1908. Photo by Ernest Henry Wilson; courtesy Arnold Arboretum.

Contents Preface, by Denise M. Glover xi



Introduction Explorers, Scientists, and Imperial Knowledge Production in Early Twentieth-Century China  3 Stevan Harrell

1

The Eyes of Others Race, “Gaping,” and Companionship in the Scientific Exploration of Southwest China  26 Erik Mueggler

2

At Home in Two Worlds Ernest Henry Wilson as Natural Historian  57 Denise M. Glover

3

Searching for the “Lolos” Tracking Fritz and Hedwig Weiss’s trip to the Liangshan Region in 1913  91 Tamara Wyss

4

Classifying Joseph Rock Metamorphic, Conglomerate, and Sedimentary  116 Alvin Yoshinaga, He Jiangyu, Paul Weissich, Paul Harris, and Margaret B. Swain

5

Franco-Catholic Modernizer Paul Vial His Legacy amongst the Sani Yi  149 Margaret B. Swain

6

David Crockett Graham American Missionary and Scientist in Sichuan, 1911–1948  180 Charles F. McKhann and Alan Waxman

7

David Crockett Graham in Chinese Intellectual History Foreigner as Nation Builder  211 Jeff Kyong-McClain and Geng Jing

8

Science across Borders Johan Gunnar Andersson and Ding Wenjiang  240 Magnus Fiskesjö

Gazetteer  267 References  269 Contributors  287 Index  290

QINGHAI Min Jiang HAN N S MI

S HAANXI

Songpan g

Jiang

Wenchuan

SICHUAN

Zheduo Pass

Mianyang

Guanghan Chengdu

Pingchang h a n HUBEI g Jia er (C ng) Riv e Yichang

Yan gtz

on

Ya l

ng a Jia

DA LIAN G SH AN

Jinsh

Kangding (Tachienlu/Tatsienlu) Emei Mountain Leshan Chongqing Dabao (O Pien) Mabian Xichang

Zhaojue

Yibin (Suifu/Xufu)

G U I Z H OU

YUNNAN Mongolia 0

miles 300

QINGHAI SHAANXI SICHUAN

0

miles

300

HUBEI

GUIZHOU

India YUNNAN Myanmar Bay of Bengal

Vietnam Laos Thailand

South China Sea

Map 1  Areas of Sichuan and Hubei provinces, with sites of exploration by Ernest Henry Wilson, Fritz and Hedwig Weiss, and David Crockett Graham (see chaps. 2, 3, 6, and 7).

Min

g Jiang

Zhongdian (Gyalthang) Xiao Zhongdian Lijiang

Jianchuan

SICHUAN

n Ya

gtz

e

Muli Yongning Lake Lugu Yulong Mountain Yuhu (Nvlvk’ӧ/Xuecongcun)

ve

r

(C

h

Jia

ng

)

GUIZHOU

Heqing

N SHA NG CA

er S a l ween Riv

Tengchong (Tengyue)

Jian g

on Ya l

Jinsha Jiang

Khawakarpo Mountain

Ri

g an

Dali Kunming

Lumeiyi Shilin (Lunan) Haiyi Qingshankou

YUNNAN Me k on

g Ri

ve

r

Mongolia 0

0

miles

miles 300

SICHUAN

200

GUIZHOU

India YUNNAN Myanmar Bay of Bengal

Vietnam Laos Thailand

South China Sea

Map 2  Areas of Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, with sites of exploration by George Forrest, Joseph Rock, and Paul Vial (see chaps. 1, 4, and 5).

llo

w

Riv

er

(Huang He)

Kokonor Lake (Qinghai Lake)

QINGHAI

Ye

Machang Lanzhou Xindian Banshan Qijia Majiayao

GANSU

Anyang

Jia

ze

r (C ve Ri

han

HENAN

g Ji ang)

Ya ng t

ng

Jiang

SICHUAN

Yangshao

S H A ANXI

iang Min J

ng

sha

lo Ya

Jin

KHAM REGION

SHANXI

GUIZHOU YUNNAN Mongolia 0

miles 300

I

SHAN

XI

GANSU

SHA

ANX

QINGHAI

HENAN

SICHUAN 0

miles

300 GUIZHOU

India YUNNAN Myanmar Bay of Bengal

Vietnam Laos Thailand

South China Sea

Map 3  Areas of Qinghai, Gansu, and Henan provinces, with sites of exploration by Johan Gunnar Andersson and Ding Wenjiang (see chap. 8).

Preface

T

his volume is the result of a symposium by the same title held at the University of Washington on January 19–21, 2007, organized by Stevan Harrell and sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities (UW), the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, the Center for East Asian Studies (UW), and Washington Park Arboretum. The symposium brought together a mix of scholars, researchers, and filmmakers for a weekend of exchange and exploration. Included as part of the symposium were oral presentations and films on various explorers/scientists, voucher specimen displays of plants from China from the Burke Museum Herbarium (supervised by Herbarium curator Richard Olmstead), and a visit to the UW Botanic Gardens at the Washington Park Arboretum for a tour (led by horticulturalist David Zuckerman) of Himalayan plants, many of them introduced to American horticulture by the explorers/scientists discussed in symposium presentations. The symposium was organized in conjunction with two Burke Museum exhibits: Vanished Kingdoms: The Wulsin Photographs of Tibet, China, and Mongolia, 1921–1925, curated by Mabel Cabot and featuring slides of colored lanterns taken by American explorers Janet E. Wulsin and Frederick R. Wulsin Jr., and Sacred Portraits from Tibet, curated by Stevan Harrell. Overall, it was a weekend full of discussion and multisensory activities and experiences, with a focus on explorers and scientists on the borderlands in China at the turn of the previous century. In this book we have maintained a diversity of authorship (from anthropologists to botanists to filmmakers). Several of the written texts here vary somewhat from the oral presentations given at the symposium. Each chapter is also accompanied by black-and-white photographs, which were an important aspect of exploration and scientific discovery at the time the xi

explorers/scientists were active (many in fact were taken by the explorers themselves) and which, we believe, augment the written text in a significant way. The book will have wide appeal to those in academia as well as to a more general public interested in exploration and scientific and humanistic endeavors. Publication of this volume has been made possible by contributions from the East Asian Studies Center and the China Studies Program of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington and the Office of the Provost and Dean of Faculty and the Asian Studies Program at Whitman College, as well as by donations from Graham M. Russell, F. Patrick (Pat) Russell, and Vivian Russell. Without the financial assistance of these contributors this book would most likely not have made it to press; we are most grateful for their support. In addition, we would like to thank the Arnold Arboretum, Missions Étrangères de Paris (mep), the Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew and Edinburgh), Whitman College and Northwest Archives, and the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities for archival assistance and/or permission to reproduce without charge photographs by Wilson, Vial, Graham, Forrest, Andersson, and Rock. Denise M. Glover June 2011

xii Preface

Explorers and Scientists in China’s Borderlands, 1880–1950

Introduction Explorers, Scientists, and Imperial Knowledge Production in Early Twentieth-Century China Stevan Harrell

T

his book is about a group of fascinating, mostly male, characters. Most were Europeans or Euro-Americans; all belonged to at least three of the categories of missionary, scientist, humanist, explorer, diplomat, photographer, and author; all were active in the border areas of China between 1880 and 1950;1 and all of them collected knowledge, specimens, and photographs from China during the high tide of overt Euro-American modernist imperialism. They operated at a time when Euro-Americans took it for granted that they dominated the world and that the knowledge they collected and disseminated through their dominance was objective and universally valid, was useful to those who had it, and would contribute to the scientific and social progress of humanity. They were all modernists of one sort or another, believing that progress achieved through science would benefit the world and the species; none doubted that they were making some sort of contribution to this progress. All were physically rugged and adventurous; all had great talent for captivating writing and self-promotion. Otherwise, our cast of remarkable characters is also remarkably diverse. Some were devout Christians, while others were indifferent or hostile to the church; Reginald Farrer was even a Buddhist. Some believed in the superiority of the European race and some did not. Some regarded their Chinese collaborators as equals, while some regarded them as inferiors. Some were social and political activists, while others occupied themselves almost 3

entirely with their science and their scholarship. Père Paul Vial (1855–1917) was a French Catholic priest, missionary, lexicographer, and collector who built a utopian community among minority people in Yunnan. David Crockett Graham (1884–1961) was an American Baptist missionary who went on to be a pioneering archaeologist, ethnologist, and museum director and ended his life believing in the essential equality of all religions. Johan Gunnar Andersson (1874–1960) was a Swedish geologist-turnedarchaeologist who opposed overt empire and colonialism, collaborated with Chinese geologist-turned-archaeologist Ding Wenjiang (1887–1936) to make some of the archaeological discoveries central to today’s Chinese nationalist history, and founded one of Stockholm’s most important museums. Joseph Rock (1884–1962) was a self-educated Austrian with wanderlust and a talent for languages who went on to become a naturalized U.S. citizen and Hawai‘i’s greatest botanist before writing the definitive history and dictionary of the Naxi people, all with only a single term of higher education. Reginald Farrer (1880–1920), George Forrest (1873–1932), and Ernest Henry Wilson (1876–1930) were British botanists who introduced hundreds of popular plants from southwest China to English and American gardens, with the help of largely unsung teams of local specialists. And Friedrich Weiss (1877–1955) and Hedwig Weiss (1889–1974) were German diplomats of Jewish ancestry who chafed at the bourgeois restrictions of Central European society and those of diplomatic service and escaped temporarily to make some of the first and finest photographic and phonographic records of the Nuosu people in southern Sichuan. This diverse, individualist, and adventurous group is bound together not so much by common goals as by a common attitude that emerged from the imperial time and Chinese place in which they operated. The Qing empire (1644–1911) was never as closed-off to the world as Western stereotypes of insular, unchanging China would have it, but relations between the Qing and the imperial powers of Europe became both more intensive and more asymmetrical after the Opium Wars and the unequal treaties of the mid-nineteenth century. At a time when the Qing was already weakening from internal strains on both the ecosystem and the bureaucracy, the British empire was consolidating its hold over India, which had a long border with the Qing territories, and the French were establishing colonial control over Indochina. One place where the French and the British were actively competing was in Yunnan, which bordered on both French Indochina and British Burma, and the two European giants competed for 4 Stevan Harrell

influence in areas as diverse as railroad building and plant collecting. In addition, the unequal treaties had opened China up to Christian missionary activity, and the southwest, including Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan, became an area of competition among Protestant and Catholic missionaries from France, Britain, Germany, the United States, and Canada, among other countries. So the expansion of European and American empire, combined with the weakening of the Qing imperial hold on all its peripheral territories (not just those in the southwest), opened new fields of possibility for missionaries, scientists, explorers, and photographers such as those portrayed in this book. When the Qing was overthrown and the Republic declared in 1911, central control over peripheral territories weakened further, leaving the field even more open, not only to explorers and scientists from the major colonial powers but also to those from more minor players in the colonial game, such as the United States and Germany, or even from noncolonial nations such as Sweden. As the lives of Andersson and Graham illustrate, strengthening Chinese nationalism reduced the power and privilege of foreign explorers and scientists in the 1930s and 1940s, but they continued their work, sometimes in a more egalitarian way, until the Communist Revolution of 1949 put an end to their activities for about thirty years; when they (or should we say “we”?) returned after 1980, everything from the previous era, from epistemological grounding to national and racial privilege to means of transportation, was different. So these stories end, appropriately, in the 1940s. Studying these remarkable lives alongside each other, we not only gain insight into the character traits that make for successful adventurers, synthesizers, and popularizers of science, but more importantly we come to understand some of the intellectual and political characteristics of an age that already seems very foreign to those of us who tread the same ground only two or three generations later. Each portrait in the succeeding chapters of this book reveals some of these elements of the zeitgeist, but in this introduction we would like to summarize and synthesize some of the most important and revealing ones. The explorers and scientists shared the epistemological assumptions of belief in objective, progressive, and universally valid science; close association between scientific and humanistic knowledge; the lack of conflict between scientific and religious ways of knowing and between science and faith; and the union of the natural world and the world of “nature people” in the disIntroduction  5

cipline of natural history. They also shared social and political attitudes and behaviors, including unself-conscious imperialism in relations with Asian peoples, tension between the “big imperialism” of the Euro-American world powers toward Asia and the “little imperialism” of dynastic and Republican China toward its peripheral and minority peoples, and the obligation to mentor local and native peoples to become eventual equal participants in the scientific enterprise. And the explorers’ and scientists’ attitudes and activities provoked a series of interactive responses with and from the peoples who were the objects of their collection, measurement, analysis, and mentoring. These responses included developing a scientific basis for nationalism in reaction to the imperialist project and co-opting the knowledge generated by imperialist science for local and regional purposes. At the same time, we are not really dealing very directly with colonialism here. We recognize that knowledge-gathering in parts of the world outside Europe was essential to the project of colonial domination (Said 1979; Mitchell 1991) and that many of the same techniques that served colonial regimes directly were also of use to these explorers and scientists. In the cases of the British plant collectors described by Erik Mueggler and Denise Glover, colonial or at least imperial military power was crucial to their ability to enlist local people in their projects, which contributed directly to the wealth displayed in English and American gardens. And Vial, along with his fellow Catholic missionaries, certainly benefited from the French empire’s interest in developing extractive relations in Yunnan through its nearby colony of Vietnam. But the fact remains that China was not directly colonized, except in a few coastal enclaves far removed from the stomping grounds of these explorers and scientists. And even in cases where colonial power aided the scientific enterprise, it was not the primary motivation; the motivation was more universalistic, whether it was primarily one of botanical knowledge or of Catholic social justice. For the Americans Graham and Rock, and the German Weisses, there were no direct colonial interests involved. The Swede Andersson was overtly anti-imperialist in his writings, at the same time as he shared the universalist assumptions of progress that were an outgrowth of the imperialist civilizing mission; it is noteworthy that Ding shared these assumptions equally, though he believed in authoritarian government as a necessary evil of modernization, while Andersson was a deeply committed democrat. So while we could argue that without colonialism, there would have been no urge to collect and systematize knowledge of the rest of the world (but see Ibn-Khaldun or even Herodotus 6 Stevan Harrell

for counter examples), we are dealing here with impulses more basic, habits of mind more fundamental, motivations at least consciously more objective than those of explorers and scientists employed directly in colonial administrations at the same time.

Imperial Epistemologies Despite their varied interests, backgrounds, personalities, and methods, all of our characters shared a series of assumptions about how we know the world. Regardless of their widely varying religious, political, and social convictions, they all believed that objective knowledge was possible and desirable and that such knowledge could be gained by scientific observation, experimentation, and analysis. This basic assumption was manifested in their dedication to a series of scientific methods, to the belief that all knowledge—scientific, humanistic, and religious—was part of a single, internally consistent system that when comprehended and applied would yield universal progress, and that much the same set of methods could be applied to the study of humanity and its various cultures as were applied to the remainder of the natural world.

Objective and Classificatory Science The science of imperialistic ages and regimes has been characterized above all by the desire to add to our knowledge, to fill in the white spaces on the map, to delineate who and what lives where and does what. All of these explorers and scientists displayed something close to an obsession with adding to our base of knowledge, whether it was of plants, animals, geology, languages, religions, or customs. Wilson, Forest, Farrer, and Rock “discovered,” categorized, photographed, and collected specimens of thousands of species of plants heretofore unknown to the world of European-language scholarship. Graham collected thousands of insects, thousands of artifacts, and hundreds of mammals, most of them previously unknown or at least uncataloged. The Weisses collected folk songs; Rock and Vial collected vocabulary in the languages of the peoples they studied; Graham collected hundreds of myths and folktales of the Qiang and the Chuan Miao. Many of them seemed to possess an unusual faculty for memorizing names, facts, and locations of things. Both Rock and Wilson are described as “walking encyclopedias” by those who knew them, able to retain and recite prodiIntroduction  7

gious quantities of scientific facts. At the same time, among our subjects only Andersson is known for analytical or conceptual abilities or for contributions to theory or generalizations in his field of scholarship. Rock’s works are almost impossible to read after a while, since they just keep listing things over and over; a second volume of Graham’s Miao folktales was never published because it was just more stories not much different from those in the first volume. It is not that these people were not thoughtful; at one time or another most of them wrote interesting reflections on topics such as the relationship between science and religion or the unequal power relations of Europe and America with Asia. But these are contributions to philosophy or ethics, not to science. Their approach to science, in an age when facts were still there to be collected, was to collect and record the facts. The facts, once collected, needed to be systematized if not analyzed. And the systematization took the form of another characteristic genre of imperial scholarship, the list or catalog, which makes sense of things by making sense of the order of things. One form of list is the dictionary, and both Vial and Rock produced comprehensive, encyclopedic dictionaries of the Sani and Naxi languages, respectively—works that did not just define words and give etymologies but also related the words to the social, historical, and religious context in which they were used. These dictionaries embodied the principle that all the knowledge in a culture could be put into a scientific framework where it would be available as part of the larger, worldwide classificatory project of languages and local knowledge. Because the dictionaries attempted to be so conclusive and comprehensive, in recent years local people have resurrected and reprinted them as part of an effort to recover their heritage after it was partially erased by the even more imperious systematizing project of the Communist Revolution, which also sought universal knowledge but did not recognize the contribution by nonscientific peoples. The other important kind of classificatory text is, of course, the biological taxonomy. Wilson, Farrer, Forrest, and Rock all contributed not only to the taxonomy of important plant families but also to the massive herbarium collections at Harvard and the University of Hawai‘i and to the living lists of the botanical gardens at both those places and at Kew. Both Andersson and Graham were longtime directors of museums, in Stockholm and Chengdu, respectively, where the collections of actual things—from rodents to jewelry—could be preserved, studied, 8 Stevan Harrell

displayed, and interpreted. Perhaps precisely because there was relatively little interpretation of the artifacts, definitions, and other things collected and classified in these projects, they were later susceptible to a variety of interpretations never intended by the collectors. During the period of high socialism, they were forced into the service of both Marxist and nationalist historiography; later during the Reform period, they served as the knowledge base for ethnic revival as collective self-sufficiency turned to touristic interdependence and local intellectual and economic boosterism. Knowledge without much interpretation, it seems, meant that knowledge collected in one age could turn to very different purposes in an age when the universal validity of science began to give way to local relativism.

Science and Humanities: Before the “Two Cultures” Gap Ever since C. P. Snow’s iconic article “The Two Cultures,” published in 1956 (Snow 1956, 1959), we have been explicitly aware of the tension between two ways of knowing: the constructivist epistemology that views all truth as embedded in rhetorical discourses of power, and the scientific epistemology that views truth as knowable and recordable through careful observation and experiment. This epistemological divide has mapped roughly onto a division in subject matter, between the literary or humanistic disciplines on the constructivist side and the disciplines that describe and analyze the natural world on the scientific side. Many scholars (Heringman 2003; Merrill 1989; Cantor et al. 2004) have pointed out that the divide is recent, both in terms of epistemology and subject matter; most of the great scientists of the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries were also philosophers and humanists, and only since the parallel processes of the professionalization of science and the turn toward relativism in philosophy, both of which came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, did the gap become explicit. We are accustomed to think, in the present day, that it is almost impossible to be a generalist, to be expert in both the natural sciences and the humanities. But without exception, all the explorers and scientists portrayed in our collection were explicitly generalist in their orientation, and all bridged the gap between the sciences and the humanities. They were able to bridge the gap of content partly, we suspect, because of their unusually broad range of curiosity, partly because they worked in a part of the world where there were as yet few specialists, and partly because they were not concerned with the fine points of literary technique or phiIntroduction  9

losophy, so that they could apply their boisterous positivism to topics as diverse as voles and vocabularies, fossils and folktales, rhizomes and rituals. As far as the gap in epistemology already existed, their activist, rather unreflective, natures never inclined them to think much about it, to wonder about the sources of their knowledge, to reflect in any sort of self-critical manner about how they knew what they knew; they were in a sense too busy to worry about such philosophical subtleties when there was, in the words of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, “so little time, so much to know.” Rock provides possibly the clearest and most extreme example of this generalist, positivist mind-set. He was originally trained in classical languages and taught himself Chinese and Arabic as a boy. His conversion to botany was entirely serendipitous, a result of his move to Hawai‘i, where he originally taught Greek and Latin, and his conversion to history and ethnology equally so, as a result of his move to China to collect and classify plants. His history and ethnology are much like his science—exuberant, overflowing, factual, and not reflective or reflexive, anymore than was his passion for Italian opera or for chocolate cake on his exploratory expeditions. Graham was more reflective in certain moods, particularly after his retirement to Denver following the Communist Revolution in China. But he saw no conflict or contradiction in collecting and recording folktales and silverware on the one hand and rodents and beetles on the other, in arguing with other missionaries about the literal truth of biblical texts and with Chinese nationalists about the true historical significance of certain archaeological finds or contributing to the entomological collections of the Smithsonian Institution. Both Andersson and his colleague Ding came to archaeology, and thus to historical interpretation, from a background in geology, but in both cases their archaeology led to involvement in the arguments about history and nationhood. For Ding it also led back to his original classical Chinese education; he could still compose shi poetry in the style of the Tang and ci in the style of the Song, and he was able to draw on both the classical tradition of imperial and pre-imperial history and the scientific tradition of geology, in formulating his originally anti-nationalist syntheses. Vial, while a committed Catholic and an anti-evolutionist (Swain 1995), nevertheless drew on scientific methods and made important contributions to the knowledge of local geology, introduced modern agronomic practices to his model farm, and conducted an important topographic survey for the projected Hanoi-Kunming rail line. Even the professional plant hunters were also at least amateur ethnographers; Wilson wrote extensively in 10 Stevan Harrell

his plant-hunting books about the “form of subsistence, marriage customs, religious beliefs, language, social history, and social relations” of the Jiarong people of northwestern Sichuan (Glover, in this volume). Perhaps it was the extraordinary intellectual curiosity of these people or perhaps it was their unusual life-situation where there were no narrow experts around, but it seemed impossible even for trained specialists such as Wilson and Andersson to stick to their specialties.

Photography as Objective Knowledge and Photography as Art From the great volume of critical literature on photography, from Walter Benjamin to Susan Sontag, we know that the view through the lens is anything but objective; it gives us a mechanically reproducible image of a subject, to be sure, but this image gives us the illusion that our machines can mechanically reproduce the object itself, rather than simply reproduce the image, and thus creates the false belief that what we are looking at is the thing photographed, rather than the photograph as a human and subjective construction. Nevertheless, this illusion has a basis in reality; at least in the pre-Photoshop era it was very difficult to fake photographs altogether; the best we could do was to pose and compose. For these explorers and scientists, photography became a metonym or a visual version of their project of objective and classifying science, a mode of representation that fit with the empirical spirit of recording and classifying before analyzing and finding meaning. At the same time, outstanding photographers such as Fritz Weiss, Rock, and Wilson were certainly conscious of the human effort of framing and composition, particularly since the cameras used in those days were yet to possess a fully automatic mode, so that taking a photograph involved much more than pointing and shooting, with the result that the photographer had to be more intentional in posing and composition than does the present-day amateur snapshooter. As Mueggler points out in chapter 1, Forrest and Farrer, along with other explorers, continued and developed an imperialist tradition of using photography as a classifying device, and in fact Rock was one of the first plant collectors to illustrate his herbarium sheets with photographs to supplement the usual line-drawing botanical illustration. But beyond illustrating and “objectively” documenting the classification of plants, animals, and landscapes, these explorers also used them to classify and document peoples, not only the racial types so favored by the ethnology of the early twenIntroduction  11

tieth century but even more so the customs and lifeways of each ethnic group they encountered. Thus photography served as one of the primary means through which nature peoples were classified along with nature in the project of natural history, a grouping whose origins and implications we discuss more fully below. But it would be a mistake, as Glover points out for Wilson and as the illustrations in all our chapters demonstrate loudly for themselves, to think of photography for these people as merely a technology of imperial classification or a way of reifying ethnic and cultural characteristics and distinctions. It was also clearly a conscious form of art. Wilson composed his photographs according to aesthetic rules of proportion and balance and philosophical ideas about inclusion of the viewer. The magnificent images the Weisses created are outstanding examples of portraiture. They may, to be sure, reify the Nuosu as a certain type—noble, stoic, inward focused— that persisted in Western word portraits of them as much as in the pictures. But this does not demean the artistic value of the images; it only means that the high artistic value or aesthetic appeal is a possible lure to the unreflective reader or museum visitor who takes the photograph for the real thing. The better the photograph, the greater the temptation, particularly during the imperial era when viewers were more inclined to approach the photograph with the imperial mind-set assumed. Both the pervasiveness and the uses of photography in the service of imperial science point out the essential unity of science and other forms of knowledge in the works of these explorers and scientists—as science and humanities go hand in hand through their positivism, as science and religion walk side by side in their Christian humanism, science and art are united in their photography. This is perhaps not surprising, for, as Glover points out in her essay, photography was conceived of as analogous to painting in its ability to capture details of life while simultaneously rousing the emotions.

Science and Religion: Glory in Knowing God’s Creation Not all of our subjects were missionaries, or connected with missions. The Weisses seem to have had little connection with the church, though their relations were cordial enough, and we know little detail about the religious allegiances of the three plant collectors, but none of them seem to have been particularly active or devout; Wilson tended to praise Nature rather 12 Stevan Harrell

than any Creator, Forrest mentions little in his writing about the strong religious beliefs of his family, and Farrer was a Buddhist. Rock was more complicated. He was overtly hostile to most missionaries, to the point of writing wicked satires on what he considered their foolish ways and silly practices (Rock n.d.), though he maintained cordial relations with some missionary scientists, including Graham. He had good relations with Catholic youth, perhaps reflecting his own past as an altar boy in Vienna, and he was very interested in the beliefs of the Buddhist lamas he encountered. Some of these explorers and scientists, however, were explicitly religious, and their lives lead us to reconsider our twenty-first-century ideas about science and religion. In our own age we are accustomed to two very different modes of interaction between science and religion. Either they are at odds, as in our controversies about teaching evolutionary biology in schools or about biblical literalism in cosmology, or they are consigned to what Stephen Jay Gould calls “non-overlapping magisteria,” where one could believe in or practice religion and science at the same time, as long as one applied them to separate spheres, one to spirituality and ethics and the other to knowledge of nature (Gould 1999). But several of the scientists portrayed in this book, including the missionaries Graham and Vial but also the secular scientist Andersson, did not see their passionate science and their devout belief as in conflict with each other or as pertaining to separate parts of existence. Instead, they saw science as a way to glorify God through celebrating God’s creation, and they saw religion (or at least religion of a certain kind) as a modern method for emerging from the darkness of superstition and ignorance into the light of ethical behavior and rational knowledge. We can see a spectrum, in fact, among the religious scientists in our portraits. On one end was the Catholic Vial, who believed as much in scientific and technical progress as any modernist did but who nevertheless saw conflicts between faith and reason in some areas, as with evolution or materialism, and always came down on the side of faith. As he famously said in one of his letters, “Pour moi, plus j’étude, plus je connais l’homme, plus je suis catholique.” At the same time, he believed that “science is based on immutable laws” (Vial 1902, 89; quoted in Swain 1995, 152) and that humanity was essentially one in spirit and matter both. Conversion was his object, but it was truly conversion, not abolition, of native spirituality and involved getting people to see the rationality of turning their spirituality toward Christian forms. This process of moving from superstition to true Introduction  13

religion was parallel, rather than antithetical, to the project of developing a rational, educated, and technologically modern agricultural community. Graham began with graduate training in theology, and his purpose in going to China was initially much like Vial’s, to help build what today’s rulers of China might call a “modern spiritual civilization,” in which science and religion replaced custom and superstition. But as his time in China grew longer, he not only became less interested in his missionary work and more absorbed in his science; he also began to doubt the comparative superiority of his own religion over others, a doubt that we can safely say never occurred to Vial. He disputed the biblical literalism of his colleague Thomas T. Torrance because it was an inferior, premodern mode of understanding God’s creation, already superseded by a more accurate, scientific understanding. At the end of his life he wrote essays advocating the essential identity and equal worth of all major religions; what he shared with Vial was an antipathy to the kinds of folk belief that he thought were superstitious and directed toward areas that ought properly to be addressed by science. At the other end of the spectrum was Andersson, who not only was not interested in converting the Chinese but in fact opposed the missionary project as part of his anti-imperialistic convictions; he remained, however, a lifelong devout Lutheran and believed that to understand the world was to glorify its Creator. As Magnus Fiskesjö puts it in chapter 8, “Andersson’s sympathy for China was, however, rooted above all in a Herderian understanding of the world’s nations as flowers in God’s garden that ought to be permitted to grow and flourish each in its own divinely guided way.”

Natural History and Naturvölker Whether they were actively imperialist or anti-imperialist; whether they saw science and religion as opposed, separate, or mutually reinforcing; or whether the takeoff point for their work was religion, science, diplomacy, or commerce, all of these explorers and scientists were closely connected to museums and other collecting and classifying institutions such as arboreta and herbaria. In their connection to museums in particular, they consciously or unconsciously shared in one of the most arrogant assumptions of imperialist knowledge. This was the idea that one kind of collecting institution was for high arts and high culture—the art museum or the museum of Western or Western-nation history—and another kind was for 14 Stevan Harrell

another category, or perhaps another residuum, that is, the world of nature, which included not only the physical world and the nonhuman species that inhabited it but also those varieties of humanity that lay outside the unmarked category of Western Civilization, namely, the nature peoples, or Naturvölker. Nature and nature peoples were combined in the field of natural history and collected and exhibited in natural history museums.2 Wilson included natives and their rituals among the plants of his various treatises; Rock shifted easily back and forth between philology and botany; Graham collected both folktales and butterflies. This mixing of the natural and the primitive may have been, for some of the scientists, merely a natural accompaniment of their generalist proclivities, but it is noteworthy that of all the eclectics in our sample, only Ding, from China, actually wrote about elite culture or employed the forms of classical literature. Even Rock, who was trained in Greek and Latin in a Viennese Gymnasium, did not make a study of the Chinese classics. The Weisses’ collections of Nuosu artifacts and songs went into ethnographic museums in Berlin and Munich, which were devoted to the cultures outside of Europe and not to the classical elite cultures even of the non-European world. The closest that any of these scientists came to bridging the gap between the elite and the folk, or the “civilized” and the natural, was in Andersson’s engagement with the traditional narratives of Chinese historiography as part of his archaeological reconstruction of the ancient Chinese past. Perhaps it is noteworthy also that the museum he founded, called in Swedish simply Östasiatiska Museet but in English given the rather more orientalistic name of Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, was unusual in the West for mixing elite and folk culture, rather than mixing ethnological and natural history collections, as was so common in institutions like the American Museum of Natural History or the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian. Graham’s West China Union University Museum (now the Sichuan University Museum in Chengdu) followed a similar trend, combining archaeological and ethnographic collections with classical art objects such as jade and porcelain.

Political and Social Positions in an Imperial World Whatever their political positions, which were complex and varied, all of these explorers and scientists consciously or unconsciously participated Introduction  15

in an imperial hierarchy in which they occupied positions at or near the top. They took for granted that Europeans and Americans living in China had certain privileges, whether overtly political ones like extraterritoriality, simple but blatant economic ones like traveling with a retinue of servants and helpers, or unself-conscious bodily ones like sedan chairs and special foods. At the same time, their relationships with the peoples and the institutions of China varied greatly and involved complex and negotiated interactions with individuals and agencies both governmental and private and in almost all cases involved training and mentoring natives who, if they lacked the status of full collaborators, would certainly achieve that kind of equality in time. And their relationships with China and its peoples were complicated by the fact that as Europe and America colonized and tutored the world in their self-proclaimed universal values, the embryonic Chinese nation-state carried on its own colonial civilizing project to tutor the people of its own periphery in the virtues of modern nationhood and citizenship. Operating in the borderlands, the Euro-American explorers related to China’s own civilizing projects in complex and sometimes paradoxical ways.

White Privilege in an Imperial Age To be a European outside Europe in the early twentieth century meant privileges almost unconceivable in the twenty-first century. Like so many things discussed in this book, it was about colonialism, but only indirectly. China, after all, had extraterritoriality, but aside from a few small chunks around the coast, it was never a colony, and as East Asian nationalism was on the rise in the early twentieth century, a certain respect had to be paid to national sovereignty and national honor. Chinese officials were in charge, and it was difficult—though not totally impossible given unequal treaties and the ubiquitous gunboats—for Europeans to bully them on minor matters. The privilege these explorers and scientists enjoyed was less about direct political power than about the general assumption that a white person anywhere had a certain high rank in a worldwide hierarchy. In actual colonies, a white person outranked everyone, and the hierarchy was explicitly marked by a huge panoply of colonial ceremony and discipline, backed, of course, by the threat of violence. In China, whites did not necessarily outrank Chinese elites in government, military, or even academic circles. But even as these elites had the unquestioned political, economic, and physical privileges not enjoyed by the ordinary population, a white person 16 Stevan Harrell

shared the privileges of rank with these elites, just by being white. Even though Wilson, Farrer, Forrest, and Fritz Weiss were direct agents of European colonial regimes, while Rock, Graham, Vial, and Andersson were not, as whites they all enjoyed the same kind of privilege. What is striking, however, is that they chose to exercise this privilege in ways that varied greatly, probably more according to personality than to nationality or profession. Forrest discovered the complications of racial hierarchy inside and outside actual colonies when he moved from the overt deference shown him in Calcutta or Mandalay to the necessity to “reach the kicking stage” when challenged by his servants after crossing into Yunnan.3 Forrest, to his credit, was often uncomfortable with this hierarchy, but like so many Europeans of his time, discomfort never led him to discard the privileges of carrying a gun and having people carry him. Rock’s interactions with his Naxi assistants, like everything else in his life, were complex and contradictory. He yelled at them and got into fights with them, apologized, took them to Europe and America, and gave them monetary awards that they considered inadequate. But mostly while in China, he lived a remarkably European and insular life. Naxi people remember him as aloof, unlike his Russian coeval Peter Goullart, who lived in Lijiang. Rock apparently didn’t much like Chinese food, and so he taught his cooks to prepare European food, including his beloved chocolate cake, and to set up his table with white linens and polished silverware wherever he made camp. Vial compromised. He can be seen in many photographs in native Sani dress, and he certainly ate local foods on occasion. But his project was to modernize (one might cynically say gallicize, though that was not his overt intention) the Sani, and so for Vial the privilege of European bodily habits constituted a way not of separating himself from the natives but of drawing them closer to him. The Weisses displayed a different kind of ambivalence to the privileges that in the end they were loath to reject. On the one hand, they were determined to escape the golden cage that had been built for European diplomats in Chengdu and strike out on their own to visit and photograph the mysterious Lolos in Liangshan. But on the other hand, they didn’t exactly backpack their way from Ebian to Mabian, but traveled with a retinue of carriers, interpreters, and guarantors. And when they passed through Xufu (Suifu, now Yibin) in 1917 at the height of the First World War, and were in need of medical attention, they went straight to the white doctors, even though those doctors came from the United States, which had recently declared war on Germany, the country Fritz Weiss officially represented. Introduction  17

In far-off Asia, it seemed, whiteness trumped war, as it did ultimately for Bronislaw Malinowski, an Austrian citizen in British Melanesia (Young 2004). Hedwig Weiss wrote that she was deeply touched by the kindness of the Americans, who almost certainly included David and Alicia Graham.

Explorers and Indigenous Collaborators The role of the indigenous collaborator, interpreter, companion, or research assistant has been important throughout the history of fieldwork by EuroAmericans everywhere, no matter where the scientist’s discipline stands on the spectrum from humanistic to scientific, from folklore to social anthropology to archaeology to botany and zoology to earth science. The contributions of Ely Parker to Lewis Henry Morgan’s work (Michaelsen 1996), or George Hunt’s to Franz Boas’s (Cannizzo 1982), or even Muchona the Hornet’s to Victor Turner’s (Turner 1960), are now widely recognized as central to the research effort. The same is undoubtedly true for the explorers and scientists in China, but we need to be careful, once again, to distinguish the particular nature of the contribution to the effort in each case, ranging from nothing but paid help to mentoring and training to full coequal collaboration. Rock’s and Forrest’s collaborators seem to fall into the category of paid help. Forrest trained a huge cadre of Naxi plant collectors, who would do most of his actual specimen hunting and digging for him, even when he went along to the base camp. But as Mueggler shows here, Forrest in his writings at least saw no need to acknowledge the importance of their contribution, and we know only the surnames of one or two of them—nothing about their personality, their family life, their place in the community, or even the degree to which their traditional ecological knowledge contributed to the success of the project. We have hints that Forrest felt close to some of these men and respected their knowledge and their methods. But for reasons connected probably to the bond of whiteness between him and his employers in the herbaria and his readers in London and Boston, most of these longtime helpers and companions remain anonymous. Rock seems to have drawn an equally firm boundary around the small Englishlanguage world that he shared with his funders and readers; we know of his relationships with Naxi people less from his own writings than from the interviews that He Jiangyu conducted with octogenarian Naxi four decades and more after Rock left Lijiang for the last time. 18 Stevan Harrell

Again, Vial’s relationship with natives seems to fall somewhere in the middle. He was, of course, performing acts of inclusion when he made converts, and he was explicitly mentoring local Catholics and eventually local nuns and priests. The letters that his Han protégée Sister Pauline wrote to his patroness Viscountess Marie de la Salle, “ma bonne mère,” indicate that for Vial the community of Catholics could potentially include nonwhite people and that their contributions to his religious, social, and scholarly efforts were acknowledged; certainly he did not keep them anonymous. His schools taught Chinese, Latin, Sani and French writing. But as he was the king of his little domain in Lunan, he was also the unquestioned leader, the only “real scholar” of his dictionary and his ethnographic works, even though the contributions of Sani people must have been immense. Graham and particularly Andersson, by contrast, entered into true collaborative relationships with native scholars. Although Graham gives little credit to individual Qiang or Miao scholars who helped with his collation of folktales, when he became involved in archaeology in the Chengdu plain and elsewhere, he was no longer the aloof and privileged leader of the research effort but rather a kind of expert consultant to a series of projects undertaken by Chinese for the purpose of explaining and promoting a particular narrative of their own history. Whether in the ethnological research undertaken by the West China Border Research Society or the archaeological researches at Sanxingdui and elsewhere, Graham’s relationships with Chinese scholars were increasingly those of partnership and collaboration, along with the mentoring of promising students, and were far removed from the researches of Wilson, Forrest, or Rock, which were basically a kind of extractive colonialism of information. Interestingly though, Wilson’s writings about China and the Chinese also show a certain respect, which is surprising given his connections with British imperialism, but perhaps more expected given his study of both Western and Chinese history. He realized that imperialisms and global hegemonies are temporary things and pronounced, in a book written when China was in the midst of the chaos following the end of the Qing dynasty, that Chinese civilization was destined to rise again and assume its place among the world’s great nations. Andersson represents the other extreme of the continuum. He went to China already as an employee of the National Geological Survey, headed by Ding, who although twelve years Andersson’s junior, was still his nominal boss. Their work together seems to have been a true and equal collaboration, undoubtedly helped along by Ding’s British doctorate and his almost-native Introduction  19

English, French, and German (Ding appears, however, to have learned little of Andersson’s native Swedish, and Andersson, though he could read and write Chinese, is reported to have spoken only a little, perhaps because he had severe hearing problems; they almost certainly spoke English to each other). We can speculate on the causes of equality in this relationship. Perhaps it was the late date; overt white privilege had declined somewhat with the rise of Chinese nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps it was Andersson’s status as a citizen of a distinctly noncolonial European country. Or maybe it was simply that in collaborating with a polymath of the level of Ding Wenjiang, who could do geological mapping, compile texts in the Yi scripts of Guizhou, and write classical Chinese poetry, any mere mortal such as Andersson would have to exercise extreme privilege just to stay even. Still, even Andersson and Ding’s project did not fall entirely outside the context of its European-dominated age. When the Yangshao excavations were finished, the whole collection was shipped to Stockholm for analysis, with an agreement that half would be retained there and half shipped back to China. Ironically, with the wars in China from 1937 to 1949, only the half kept in Sweden survived.

The Big Imperialism and the Little Imperialism Owen Lattimore observed in 1941 that there were at least two manifestations of dominance in play within China: “In Manchuria I was shocked to see that while the Chinese could rightly claim that they suffered from foreign imperialism, there was a second level of Chinese imperialism against the Mongols” (Lattimore 1990, 26). There were, in short, two imperial projects going on at once, a “big imperialism” in which the Euro-American powers attempted to rule, exploit, and civilize the entire world and a “little imperialism,” much older but smaller in scope, in which the civilizing center of China attempted to rule, exploit, and literize what had originally been the whole world but by the twentieth century had been reduced to the areas under control of the former Qing dynasty.4 These projects overlapped in the Chinese borderlands, causing the explorers and scientists active there to become enmeshed in a complex web of relationships. In this complex situation of overlapping imperial projects, the European and American explorers often identified with the objects of Chinese imperialism rather than with its perpetrators. Hedwig Weiss’s writings epitomize this identification. In her brief acquaintance with the Nuosu she 20 Stevan Harrell

found many traits valued in European culture, to which she contrasted aspects of Han culture that were difficult for Europeans to adjust to. Her descriptions of the hearty laughter of the people and the dignity of the Nuosu ladies echo those of whites who visited Liangshan before and after, from Theodore Jr. and Kermit Roosevelt (1929) to the German racist theorist Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt (1944); her comparison of the harmless naughtiness of a Nuosu boy, acting “just as a German boy would” (WeissSonnenburg 1915, 12) to the cowed obedience of the Confucian filial son expressed indirectly the frustrations often experienced by whites who encountered the strictures of Chinese domestic culture. Forrest expressed this frustration in a similar manner. He complained in his diaries and letters that when he went to a Han community unfamiliar with whites, the people would stand and stare, or “gape” as he put it, while the Lisu and other minority people might show interest, challenge, hostility, fear, or curiosity, but they showed some reaction and did not just “gape” (Forrest Collection [Forrest, Letter No. 5]). Ironically, the explorers’ and missionaries’ attraction to minorities often repeated a trope of childishness that the Chinese themselves had repeatedly employed in reference to peoples of their periphery. Wilson described the Sifan (Xifan, now Qiang) in northern Sichuan as “happy, unsophisticated children of Nature” (1913, 1: 148). And Vial, whose engagement with minority people was the longest, deepest, and most serious among all these figures, referred to them on occasion as mes enfants and considered that their “sweet, honest, naïve, and likeable” nature (1893, 161; quoted in Swain 1995, 150), in contrast to the calculation and cunning of the Chinese, suited them ideally for conversion to Catholicism and for his great communitybuilding experiments. Even Andersson, far less imperialistic in his overall attitudes than the other scientists, still subscribed to some extent to stereotypic attitudes about Chinese. Andersson, who explicitly opposed European political imperialism and colonialism, characterized Ding, his friend and collaborator, as “not a typical Chinese,” for he was “too driving in his work, too demanding toward his collaborators, much too frank in his criticism” (Andersson 1926, 15). It is ironic that Andersson and Graham, both universalists in matters of knowledge and morals and both opposed to domination of peoples by other peoples, ended up providing strong support for Chinese nation-building projects. These projects, in their condescending and sometimes demeanIntroduction  21

ing treatment of the minority peoples whom Graham so admired, were modern instances of the “little imperialism” that agents of the “big imperialism,” such as Graham, so opposed. Andersson’s and Ding’s archaeological studies of ancient Eurasia became evidence for the nationalistic story of the ancient and autonomous origins of the Chinese, even as they drew connections between Chinese and other civilizations farther west. Graham’s Sichuan archaeology, done with Ren Naiqiang, became a key element in the nationalistic history of the spread of Chinese culture from the north China plain to the rest of China. The double irony is that the Sanxingdui site, first excavated by Graham but later worked on by Sichuanese archaeologists in the 1980s, ended up yielding what is now taken as conclusive evidence that Sichuan had an independent high civilization in the late second millennium b.c.e., coordinate with rather than subordinate to the civilizations of the Chinese center.

The Other Side of the Looking Glass When discussing white explorers and scientists, and their activities in other lands, we sometimes forget or neglect to mention that they were not the only ones doing the observing, the recording, the classification, and the analysis. Our own analysis of their attitudes and roles in China would be incomplete without also acknowledging, and exploring to the extent possible, how the white explorers and scientists appeared to those whom they saw and recorded. Forrest was himself quite unnerved by the “gape” of the Chinese natives, and much postcolonial scholarship is obsessed with the Western “gaze.” Perhaps in the single-letter alternation between “gape” and “gaze,” we can discover something about the effect the white explorers and scientists had on the communities they explored and recorded, both while there and afterward, in the legacies and legends that have become part of the local lore of communities on the Chinese periphery. We know most about the local legacies of Rock, Graham, and Vial. According to the researches of He Jiangyu, Rock was not a very popular figure in Lijiang during his stay there. Aloof and eccentric, his undoubted European charm seems to have been lost on the locals, who although they respected him, did not interact with him on a very intimate basis, and he did not contribute materially to the community. Graham, by contrast, is revealed by Geng Jing’s research to have been warmly received at least by his Qiang hosts, staying in their houses, eating their food, and develop22 Stevan Harrell

ing a loyalty among some of his friends that later allowed him to prevail against more conservative forces that resented having an outsider in their community. And Vial, who certainly must have had opponents among the Sani, nevertheless managed to convert several communities to a Catholic faith that would endure in some cases through fifty years of denigration and outright persecution and emerge on the other side of Leninist atheism in the 1980s and 1990s. As with so much else in China, however, the reputation of the white scientists rose and fell with the swings of Chinese politics. Rock, Graham, and Vial were all staunchly anti-communist, and the Communists of course returned the favor; from the 1950s to the late 1970s, they were all excoriated as agents of political imperialism, swindlers who used religion to fool the Chinese laboring people, and thieves who plundered China’s cultural patrimony. Vial was long dead by the time of the revolution, but his Catholic community, which continued to thrive under native leadership after his death, was extinguished in the great socialist experiment, and the followers of the faith that he had brought were forced to abandon their beliefs or take them underground. Rock and Graham were expelled from China, never to return, but their negative example continued to be invoked throughout the Maoist period. It is thus surprising the extent to which the legacies of all three men have been rehabilitated in China’s reform era. Graham’s has perhaps come the furthest, back to respectability and onward to virtual hero worship, at least among the academics with whom he worked. His West China Union University Museum, now the Sichuan University Museum, is probably the most respected university museum in China, and the current director and curators attribute both the wealth of the collections and the quality of the documentation to the example set by Graham when he headed the museum in the 1930s and 1940s. At least two projects to examine Graham’s archives are now under way at Sichuan University, the Sichuan Nationalities Research Institute, the University of Washington, and Whitman College, and as Jeff Kyong-McClain and Geng Jing report in their chapter, his picture and his story are presented very favorably to today’s museum staff and visitors. As Margaret Swain demonstrates in her chapter, Vial’s legacy among the Sani has also been rehabilitated. Only a minority of the families converted by Vial has remained Catholic, but two churches have been rebuilt, and there are once again Sani priests and parishioners. More significant, perhaps, is that Vial is generally recognized for introducing modern agriIntroduction  23

culture and cottage-industry techniques and for his scholarship in particular, which is praised by Catholic and non-Catholic Sani intellectuals alike and is the object of assiduous efforts at reprinting and scholarly use. Even Rock, who was viewed equivocally by many Naxi, has once again become a local hero. At least two of the editors of this volume (Charles McKhann and Stevan Harrell) were each repeatedly called “the second Rock” in the early 1990s by Communist cadres eager both to ingratiate themselves with their foreign guests and to enhance their own reputations by hosting intrepid foreigners in out-of-the-way places. At the same time, Rock’s own story has become one of the tourist attractions offered to visitors to Lijiang and nearby areas.



The age of exploration, so closely connected with the age of empire, is now over, replaced by the consumer empire of global commodity culture. It is perhaps unsurprising, even heartening, that the brave and dedicated explorers and scientists, people of another time, have nevertheless left a legacy in the age of globalization. They are honored in various ways by the local communities they recorded, exploited, and served. The authors and editors of this volume are their much more humble and, we like to think, better-informed successors. We look back with chagrin on their ideas of white or European-American superiority, but still hold fast to their enduring assumption that a universal community of knowledge is possible and to the hope that we can belong to such a community. Some of us are white and some are members of the communities that Rock and Graham studied (and one is a Japanese American, an anomalous identity that shows how problematic have become the once adamantine qualities of race in the imperial era). And so, even as we write our critique of these explorers and scientists, we also wish to honor their memory and laud their courage, their intellectual curiosity, their scientific contributions, and their ability to tell their stories. While we all feel obligated to criticize the assumptions of the age under which they worked, we are nevertheless proud to continue their legacy.

24 Stevan Harrell

Notes 1

Père Paul Vial was a generation older than any of the others, but with the exception of Vial, who died in 1917, and Joseph Rock, who first went to China in 1920, their stays in China all overlapped with one another. 2 Some of Vial’s Sani artifacts were apparently exhibited at the Vatican Museum in 1924 or 1925. We have not yet been able to ascertain the content or the design of that exhibit. 3 Forrest to his mother and family, July 3, 1904, in a private collection; quoted in Maclean 2004, 35. 4 We use the term literize in preference to the usual civilize, because the mark of high culture in China is not the city but the written word.

Introduction  25

1 The Eyes of Others Race, “Gaping,” and Companionship in the Scientific Exploration of Southwest China Erik Mueggler

I

n May 1919, Reginald Farrer was wandering Yunnan’s border with Burma near the village of Hpimaw (Pianma), which Britain had seized from China seven years earlier.1 Farrer was England’s most beloved field botanist, known for lyrical popular books about rock gardening and collecting alpine plants in the mountains of Japan, Italy, and China.2 These books were about vision: how to see the essence of alpine peaks, screes, and meadows and how to concentrate that essence in the jewel-like microcosm of a rock garden. But here, in these tangled and overgrown mountains, he found he could not see. The landscape would not resolve itself into forms that made sense to him, forms that made it possible for him to do the two things that made his life bearable: write and collect plants for British gardens (Shulman 2002). He had planned the present expedition on a whim while in a nursing home recovering from an operation. He had always wanted to collect plants in Yunnan, but he had been warned off, years before, by the preeminent authority on Chinese alpine plants, Isaac Bailey Balfour, Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. Balfour’s protégé, a fiercely energetic working-class Scot named George Forrest, was systematically sweeping Yunnan clean of alpine flowers, with the help of what seemed an army of native collectors (Farrer Collection [Balfour 1913]). In 1914–16, Farrer had gone to China, but he had contented himself with exploring the mountains of Gansu Province; he wrote two books about the expedition. But now, 26

three years later, he was at the edge of the Promised Land. The mountains around Hpimaw were nearly in Yunnan, and they appeared to be just out of reach of Forrest’s “octopus tentacles” (Farrer Collection [Farrer 1919]).3 Maddeningly, however, not a week after Farrer and his companion, E. H. M. Cox, finished their long walk up the N’mai River to Hpimaw, four of Forrest’s men came trekking over the pass from China. Farrer dispatched an urgent telegram demanding that Forrest have his collectors move elsewhere, only to receive the laconic reply, “Regret, cannot recall men” (Farrer Collection [Farrer 1919]). But his chief difficulty was with vision. From the N’mai River to Hpimaw and beyond, “everything lacked shape.” It was a “dead land, with nothing to break the monotony of jungle and hill; all the slopes had the same close-cropped appearance, culminating in ridges that seemed to go on and on for ever” (Cox 1926, 31). The jungle’s colors, though “beyond words,” were “fraudulent,” and its subtropical flora were useless for British gardeners. He tried to sketch the landscape from his veranda in Hpimaw, but he found it impossible, “too absolutely lacking in human interest or emotional appeal of any sort” (quoted in Cox 1926, 32). The dreary jumble of ranges he could see from the veranda was a “tangle of innumerable tribes” as well. He and Cox did not like these “tribes”; they were lazy, dirty, surly, and miserable, “low in the human scale,” in every way a reflection of their impossible, uninhabitable landscape. Depressed by all this, Farrer, in Cox’s words, “shut himself up in his work and clung fiercely to the threads of civilization that were left to us” (Cox 1926, xv, xvi). Soon, however, the party ventured north of Hpimaw into the higher mountains on the Yunnan side of the border. It was the expedition’s turning point: About a mile from Blackrock we turned off the main road and clambered over a small divide covered with oak and alder coppice. We might have been in an English countryside with a dry sandy soil, out of which perked a little sweet-scented Pyrola and Bracken and Bramble, until we met a Lissu maiden decked in her finery and studded with pounds of cowrie shells. Then the spell was broken. She eyed us like a frightened deer and leapt away like a Dryad when I turned the camera on her. (Cox 1926, 61–62)

The Eyes of Others  27

Fig. 1.1  Farrer’s “Lissu maiden,” 1919. From E. H. M. Cox, Farrer’s Last Journey, 64.

After this, up the Salween River, deep into “Lissu country,” the party began to discover the alpine flowers for which they were searching. They found a “self-contained paradise” (Cox 1926, 80), a valley glowing with rhododendrons and primulas. Here, at last, Farrer found his way back into the luxuriant, petal-studded prose that had made him famous: As the wood fails the Blue Primula resumes possession in its upper reaches, but now fat and green and far on in seed; and in the wetter places are drifts of a golden Catha. . . . Down in the dark depths of a ravine and on the shady mossy cushions of its rock wall, a new Primula flares redly purple while P. moscophora in sheeted masses twinkles up at you as you climb the break-leg stairway. (Farrer 1919b, 127; quoted in Cox 1926, 77) 28  Erik mueggler

Fig. 1.2  Lisu couple, 1919. From E. H. M. Cox, Farrer’s Last Journey, 64.

The remarkable contrast between this valley, blazing with visual delights, and the environs of Hpimaw was mirrored by a contrast in the inhabitants, as Cox, in his account of the expedition, made emphatically clear: “[The Lisu] are attractive; the others are not. They are easy to deal with; the others are difficult. They take an interest in what you are doing and never grumble however hard the work may be; the others are dour and confirmed grumblers. In fact the Lissus compare very favorably with the other hillmen throughout the world.” The Lisu women were the “Parisians of the hills” with rakish turbans and parti-color coats: “Some of the girls are actually beautiful.” They visited the home of a Lisu chief. “Here again, we felt at home; for he proved too be a typical hillman, tall, broad-shouldered, and handsome, perfectly mannered, and always with a smile on his face.” “Love of the hills,” Cox concluded, “is a common bond that no language difficulties can separate” (Cox 1926, 70–72). The Eyes of Others  29

These were, above all, differences in conditions for looking and seeing. In Cox’s account (for Farrer never wrote his, dying instead during the expedition’s second year), all the possibilities for seeing closed off by the landscape around Hpimaw opened up again as the Lisu girl seduced the camera from its case. She fled upon seeing it, but it captured her image nonetheless. Her portrait, beside a photo of the Lisu chief’s cousin grinning next to his wife, has pride of place in Cox’s book. Lisu were perfect photographic subjects. They did not challenge the camera with a return stare as did coolies of “other tribes” or, worse still, hide from it in their tiny huts as did Lashi and Maru villagers. Among the Lisu, Cox wrote, “everywhere we were met by smiling faces—such a difference to the usual dourness” (Cox 1926, facing 104; facing 16; 75). Numerous portraits follow of the mountains and valleys of “Lissu country” and of the primulas, rhododendrons, clematis, and Nomocharis harvested from it. This alpine countryside was already part of a familiar visual regime that guided the ways that it could be drawn, photographed, or described as picturesque or sublime (see Carter 1988). Yet Cox’s account makes clear, in a remarkable way, how crucial to this regime were differences of comportment, most often described as differences in how people “look”—surly or shy, dour or smiling. For Farrer and Cox, the possibility of looking at a landscape in familiar, satisfying, and productive ways depended a great deal on how that landscape’s inhabitants returned one’s looks. Conditions of visibility were a persistent concern for colonial travelers and scientists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Control over the act of looking, the power to frame what was seen, and the capacity to regulate the affect attached to acts of looking were at the heart of most imperial projects (Mitchell 1991). Across metropole and colony, imperial men and women created a culture of display, in which exhibitions and photographs presented the colonized world as objectively visible. Historians of colonial photography have explored many of the ways that photography structured the field of vision to emphasize the subjective, empirical gaze of an imperial viewer and to deflect the power of the return gaze (Maxwell 1999; Kaplan 1997; Ryan 1996; Landau and Kaspin 2002). British colonial travelers reproduced the “world-as-exhibition” by following established itineraries, seeing famous sights in predictable ways, and structuring their vision of the landscape around specific aesthetic principles: the sublime, the picturesque, the romantic, the realistic 30  Erik mueggler

(Cohn 1987, 6–7, 632–82). Exhibitions, photography, travel, and colonial science framed and structured the field of visibility—the gazes of “imperial eyes” (Pratt 1992). Much scholarly attention has been given to the ways that imperial men and women looked at the world and how these relations of visibility were entangled with relations of difference, particularly race. As Deborah Poole points out, the production and circulation of millions of photographs of colonized peoples “lent support to the emerging idea of race as a material, historical, and biological fact” (Poole 1997, 15). Theories of race created racial categories in much the same way Linnaean botany created species, by selecting particular, visible features to use to categorize individuals, who could then be seen as equivalent with others in the same category. Racial theorists selected photographs to use like botanical-type specimens, to point out visible features and to serve as standards for comparison. And photographs of colonial peoples circulated widely through public and private archives where, like specimens, they lent themselves to the categorizing and organizing principles of archives. In these ways, photographs both reflected discourses and theories of race and participated in creating racial sensibilities (Poole 1997, 15). Yet projects of racial categorizing were unevenly distributed. Some areas of the world confronted colonial travelers and scientists with relatively uncharted terrain where, late into the nineteenth century, racial “types” had not yet been fixed around particular sets of images. The Andes, the topic of Poole’s book on race and vision, was one such area; the highland peripheries of South and Southeast Asia were another. When the British annexed Upper Burma in 1886, they initiated an extended project to map out the borders around this new addition to empire. It was a military and ethnographic project as much as a cartographic one. Well into the 1890s, some thirty thousand British and Indian troops fought running guerrilla wars with the peoples who occupied the uplands between the Irrawaddy basin and Yunnan, Assam, and Tibet. The administration of these wars required clear ethnological labels for the population: Shan, Kachin, Karen, Wa (Thant 2001, 198–218).4 As the British sought to impose upon reality the dream of a route to the riches of Yunnan, military and scientific travelers extended ethnographic surveys across the border into Yunnan. Two hundred years of Qing ethnographic survey and description had already created a reasonably stable taxonomy of names and geographic distribution, disseminated mainly in local histories written by the Confucian elite The Eyes of Others  31

(Hostetler 2001). British surveyors of Yunnan absorbed this taxonomy, through Chinese gazetteers and conversations with local elites. In 1909, Major H. R. Davies, having completed a survey of Yunnan in the interests of a planned British railway from Burma to the Yangtze, published a definitive account of the province. It included a comprehensive map compiled from route maps made by British officers for the India survey and Indian intelligence departments and descriptions of twenty “tribes of Yunnan,” detailing their dress, language, physiognomy, and geographical distribution (Davies 1909). After 1909, all British and most European travelers to Yunnan carried copies of Davies’s volume and map. Having names was one thing; finding stable ways of feeling and thinking about race and difference was another. While Chinese-language guides and local histories did provide categories of relative savageness, intelligence, and malleability keyed to visible features like dress and physiognomy, these did not all translate well into the British imperial vernacular worked out most explicitly in Africa and India.5 In this regard, colonial travelers and scientists in southwest China were left largely to their own devices. Like Farrer and Cox, many attempted to match complex structures to the peoples they encountered. Stevan Harrell shows how Western scientists found ways to divide the various southwestern peoples called “Lolo” into a pure conquering race and impure conquered races; the people of the conquering race were distinct physically, morally, and intellectually from others, and their superior character could be discerned in a look at their physique and comportment (Harrell 1995b, 70). Colonel Edward Colbourne Baber discovered what he needed to know about this noble race in a glance at their eyes: “They are almost without exception remarkably straight-built, with slim, but muscular limbs. . . . Their handsome oval faces, of a reddish brown among those most exposed to the weather, are furnished with large, level eyes” (Baber 1882, 60). Most work on colonial vision proceeds as though Europeans had an unobstructed field of view for their visual projects, including those articulating vision and race. Little attention has been paid to the obstructing and contorting effects of the eyes of others: to the ways imperial looks were returned, and seen to be returned, across lines of racial difference.6 It is true that these are relations of sensation, of organizing perception for oneself and others. But as relations of sensation, they are social relations, ways of arranging the social world and negotiating one’s place in it. As social beings, our bodies, and our looks, are given to us by the looks of others. 32  Erik mueggler

Fig. 1.3  George Forrest in Dali, Yunnan, with boxes of specimens, 1904. Photo by George Forrest; courtesy Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh.

How we can look depends on our habits of ocular comportment, but it also depends on the habits of others: on how they look at us and how we find our bodies and our eyes to be reflected in their eyes. In the imperial core, Europeans were supported by communities with durable collective understandings of how vision should operate across lines of racial difference: of who could look and who must look away, of how looks were to be read as insolent or acquiescent, admiring or demeaning. At the borders of empire, however, or across them, in lands made obscure by “tangles of innumerable tribes,” travelers and scientists found themselves bereft of these supporting communities and dependent on uncontrollable and often incomprehensible worlds of looks to frame their social lives. They found themselves at the mercy of conventions of ocular comportment that were mostly obscure to them. In particular, those whose enterprises depended largely on vision, their own and that of others—botanists, geologists, zoologists—found their own capacity to see impeded, obscured, or enabled by the character of the looks coming from others. The Eyes of Others  33

This chapter takes up these issues in relation to Reginald Farrer’s fearsomely able competitor, George Forrest (1873–1932). It began with poor Farrer because his expedition to Hpimaw illustrates in a compact, dramatic, and simplified way a process that, for Forrest, unfolded over a much longer period and in a more complex, if more revealing, fashion. Forrest made seven lengthy expeditions to China in search of alpine flowers for British gardens. The first began in 1904; the last ended in 1932 with his death of heart failure while in the field. In his first journeys, he struggled to reconcile the racial landscape of southwest China with what he had been conditioned to expect by the photographs, exhibitions, and collections that represented the colonial world to metropolitan society. He experimented with ways to categorize different others by how they presented themselves to him visually and to reorient his sense of self in relation to them. He began by using Davies’s classification of “tribes” as a rough guide, but he quickly found it inadequate. What was most important about others, what he found to impinge on him most directly, what he found to obstruct or enable his work of seeing and classifying, was how they used their eyes. How people looked at him and how they returned his looks were limiting conditions for his relations to them, deciding whether he could exchange with them, find companionship with them, and collaborate with them. Eventually, he worked out a rudimentary classification of modes of visual exchange. He coordinated these with a racial topology and a rough map of the aesthetic, affective, and botanical qualities of the landscape. On this taxonomy of looks, he founded a companionable working relationship with thirty to fifty men from one highland village. With the help of these men, he became an enormously successful botanical explorer, rendering the vast, mountainous landscape of northwest Yunnan into tens of thousands of specimens, seed packets, and photographs. This collaboration revolutionized the taxonomy of tens of genera and significantly transformed the garden landscapes of England, Scotland, and the Pacific Northwest. In this chapter, I show how the eyes of others participated in this project to render this region of the colonial periphery visible in the imperial core. Forrest was the youngest child of eight, son of a draper. His father, ill for years, died when he was sixteen; he was raised mainly by his four sisters and brother James, a minister. His siblings put him through the Kilmarnock Academy in the industrializing town of Kilmarnock, near Glasgow, where James led a congregation of the Evangelical Union, whose members 34  Erik mueggler

Fig. 1.4  George Forrest’s photograph of George Litton with Lisu women on the upper Salween River, 1904. Courtesy Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh.

believed, against the Church of Scotland, that Christ’s atonement had saved nonbelievers. He became a chemist’s assistant, drying herbs, packing capsules, and making labels. After six years of this, he came into £50, inherited from his father’s brother, and sailed to Australia. He farmed sheep and dug for gold in New South Wales for several years, then returned to live with his mother and three sisters in Loanhead, a coal-mining village in the Edinburgh suburbs. At thirty, he had no profession and no job; he spent his time wandering the hills around Edinburgh, fishing and collecting plants for a Glasgow natural history society. A chance discovery of an ancient stone coffin in a riverbank led him to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland; the society’s secretary introduced him to Balfour at the Royal Botanic Garden. Balfour gave him work in the Garden’s Herbarium, at half the customary minimum wage. At the Garden, he persisted in asking for work as a plant collector and courted Clementina Traill, who worked by his side. His break came when Arthur Bulley, a wealthy cotton broker, who had started a new nursery firm, A. Bee and Company, wrote Balfour asking him to recomThe Eyes of Others  35

mend a young man suited to go to the East to collect plants. Balfour had been studying the many new primulas and rhododendrons that a priest stationed in Dali, Yunnan, Pierre Jean Marie Delavay, had sent to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. He waxed enthusiastic to Bulley about both the province and his new gardener. Bulley contracted with Forrest for a journey to Yunnan of three years at a salary of £100 a year. In May 1904, Forrest promised marriage to Clementina and sailed for Bombay.7 Even at thirty, he had never found his footing in the British class system. His family had been of the ranks of aspiring, mobile entrepreneurs who had wreaked massive transformations in class relationships in the nineteenth century. Class mobility, as much as physical mobility, was the overarching theme of his life, but all his opportunities to exercise such mobility—to gain a secondary education, to immigrate to Australia, to become a colonial explorer—were due to the patronage of others of higher position. This patronage had ambiguous effects, thinning out lines of class distinction in some directions, thickening them in others. Traveling in the colonies immediately presented him with new opportunities for mobility. Colonial states operated through a “rule of difference,” as Partha Chatterjee puts it, where the most salient differences were racial (Chatterjee 1993). Ann Laura Stoler suggests that the work of drawing and redrawing maps of racial difference produced new middle-class sensibilities, organized around images of racial purity, sexual virtue, and proper masculinity (Stoler 2002). This assiduous cartography gave men in Forrest’s position—imperial men, who moved between metropolitan and colonial societies at will but who occupied underprivileged class positions in Britain—new opportunities to recraft their class identities. “White Englishmen were able to use the power of the colonial stage to disrupt the traditional class relations of their country and enjoy new forms of direct power over subject peoples,” Catherine Hall summarizes. “At the same time . . . their own identities were ruptured, changed, and differently articulated by place” (Hall 2002, 65). The brutal distinctions of race and class on display in India unsettled Forrest in a way they might not have an upper-class Englishman. In Bombay, he set out to see the sights. He did not walk, for “no European ever walks”; he rode a gharry, pulled by “gharry-wallahs.” The servants were all servile; they kept salaaming him: “It makes one feel uncomfortable at first.” But the ideologies of race were quickly absorbed, quickly enforced; the servants worked for almost nothing, as he had, “but apparently they are quite pleased with such payment, and to give them more, as I was inclined to 36  Erik mueggler

do, only makes them lose respect for you.” From the seat of his gharry, he saw men and women carrying away the waste of the streets on their backs, men naked but for loincloths and turbans, beggars “afflicted with some disabling and generally loathsome disease.” “I saw the [British] captain kick and hammer one of the porters until I thought he intended killing him, for a most trivial offence.” He found himself reorienting his attitude and comportment toward certain classes. “I can swear at them and order them about now, [but I don’t think] that I shall ever reach the kicking stage.”8 Above all, he discovered opportunities to reaffirm the tenets of his middle-class masculine faith. This faith emphasized that individual integrity and freedom from subjugation to the will of others were at the core of true masculinity. The most fundamental demonstration of masculinity was the capacity to establish, protect, provide for, and control a home (Hall 2002, 27; Tosh 1999). Before leaving Scotland, he had established the foundations of domestic life by promising himself to Clementina, and he would spend the rest of his life working to build a home and provide for his wife and children over the distance between Yunnan and Edinburgh. But here in India, he was learning to reorient his masculine sexual virtue along racial lines. At night, he toured Bombay’s brothel district. There, the filth, nakedness, and wretchedness of racially other bodies that had assaulted him in the daytime streets were concentrated into images of unregulated transgress over bodily boundaries: “In the native quarter . . . the stench is indescribable in places . . . a mixture of sweaty bodies and all sorts of reeking abominations. . . . I never thought it possible for vice to be paraded so openly anywhere. We were continually being tackled by the women, some of whom even went the length of trying to get into the carriage beside us . . . I pity the poor wretches.” In Bhamo, the last steamer port on the Irrawaddy before the frontier with China, he was advised to buy a Burmese girl to take with him. “All the officers in the regiments stationed here . . . keep them. . . . I could get a dozen tomorrow if I wanted them . . . but I wouldn’t touch any of them with a tarry [i.e., black, tar-covered] stick. There is only one woman in the world for me and that is Clem, and she is white all through. . . . I have kept straight all my life and I have every reason in the world to keep straighter than ever.” Rarely have racial and sexual purity been cemented more tightly. He was making decisions, some fleeting, some enduring, about how he would negotiate the lines of difference fissuring colonial society. As he moved away from the colonial centers, he found new uncertainties and new The Eyes of Others  37

opportunities. On the journey from Bhamo to the border town of Tengyue, he experimented with attitudes toward the officials and soldiers he met (Forrest Collection [Forrest diary]). He regarded them all as “Chinese”; later he would make finer distinctions. On both sides of the border, he was passing through what he would come to know as Shan States. Near the border, he found that his caravan (two servants, nine muleteers, and thirty-four mules and bullocks) could not cross the Namsa (Nanwan) river. The party waited several days while the commander of a Chinese battalion requisitioned men from the surrounding villages to build a bridge.9 He had visits from the region’s elite, including the district military commander and a “rather curious old cove,” probably the hereditary ruler (sawbwa or tusi) of one of the states. They exchanged calling cards, eggs, chickens, biscuits, whisky, cigarettes, tinned plums, cherry brandy, and a few words in Chinese, of which Forrest was completely ignorant. “The soldier one . . . is a most kindly and polite little fellow, and I liked him best of all. He at once started to try to learn me Chinese.” It was among the most genuinely goodnatured exchanges with local elites that he would ever record. Across the border, in Tengyue, Yunnan, a tiny cadre of Europeans struggled to impose a regime of difference modeled on India’s. Tengyue was a prosperous little city of about three thousand, with a large merchant class involved in the cross-border trade. As a new treaty port, it had a British consulate and a European-staffed Chinese maritime customs office. Forrest settled in at the consulate and held dinner parties, “among ourselves of course,” with the only other Europeans: the acting consul George Litton, the British commissioner of customs, and the latter’s assistants. They insisted he take a soldier whenever he went out: [The soldier] goes in front and by continual shouting and pushing gets the people to clear out of the way. He makes no bones about shoving some of them almost on their faces. It seems nasty, but it is really the only way, and by doing this the people seem to respect one more . . . Mr. Litton says that if it wasn’t for the punishment which they know would be meted out to them our lives wouldn’t be worth a moment’s purchase, and I believe it from the look of some of them. Of course we go armed, and as they are great cowards this keeps them in check. In coming home from dinner or going anywhere at night we always had an escort of four soldiers and all of our servants carrying huge paper Chinese lanterns, quite a procession. 38  Erik mueggler

Only a few years before, combined European forces had put down the Boxer Uprising, occupied the capital, caused the empress dowager to flee, ransacked the Summer Palace, and forced huge indemnity payments on China. The uprising had not spread to the southwest, however, and remote Tengyue had seen no violence. Still, anonymous placards and notices sometimes appeared on the streets, excoriating the weak Qing government, decrying foreign influence, and agitating against British plans to build a railway from Burma.10 Two months after Forrest’s arrival, Consul Litton telegraphed the Foreign Office to warn that the Chinese authorities had received a rhyming pamphlet stating that foreigners “practice the violation of Chinese women and children and destroy tombs.” In fact, the pamphlet was an announcement, in sober verse, by the Tengyue militia office (tuanlian jü), of reforms that would eradicate abuses and introduce more discipline into training, in order to make the countryside more tranquil, with the ultimate aim of discouraging the foreign powers pressing at Yunnan’s borders (Public Records Office [Wilkinson 1905]).11 Forrest gradually came to understand that the townsfolk of Tengyue were far more interested in peaceful trade than in violent nationalism. In subsequent visits, he abandoned the shows of force to which the Europeans in town seemed addicted. Still, whenever pressed, he drew on the assessment of “Chinese character” that had provoked these demonstrations (“It is really the only way, and by doing this the people seem to respect one more”). After three weeks in Tengyue, Litton invited him on a journey east to Dali, then north to Lijiang and up to the Tibetan town of Gyalthang (Zhongdian) in the far northwest of Yunnan. At Dali, Litton decided to investigate tax corruption at a horse fair at Songgui, a day north of that city. On the way, their servants, hired in Dali, balked at showing them a shortcut. “At last we lost our tempers and Litton started to bully them.” That night, thieves took Forrest’s pony and two mules from the temple in which they were staying. The two Brits gave chase, caught one, and trussed him with rawhide ropes. In the morning, they handed him over to the local magistrate, who ordered that he be given three hundred strokes with a bamboo rod while strung up by his hands, with a weight of fifteen pounds tied to his braid. Satisfied, they went to the fair: I never saw such a beastly rabble in all my life. All the scum of China seem to have collected. . . . A crowd of ruffians . . . followed us about making jeering remarks. . . . Then one of them started to pick up The Eyes of Others  39

stones with the intention of stoning us, but when we saw this we drew our revolvers, and then you never saw such a scatter in all your life. The sight of weapons was sufficient without going even further.

The next day, “we stayed at an inn at Hoching [Heqing] and were troubled by the usual crowd of gapers who followed us about wherever we went” (Forrest Collection [Forrest, Letter No. 5]). These shows of force were founded on the anxious assertion that the people were all “great cowards.” Shortly after his trip with Litton, Forrest made a journey over much of the same territory without a European companion. On his own, he often lost control of these performances, falling into rages, which he later recalled with remorse. In a village near Lijiang: “We also had a row with the people . . . because they wouldn’t unlock their temple door and let us spend the night there. Temper not improving you see! But I think there is some excuse as the average Chinaman would rile the heart of a wheelbarrow.” He shot the lock off, barricaded the door from the inside, and left early the next morning. A few months later, in Jian­ chuan, he commandeered a temple to avoid the yamen and its magistrate— “for I despise the officials as much as the people.” A crowd collected in the temple. A few men began to handle his baggage, and he ordered them out. One, a student, wouldn’t move. “Taking him by the scruff of the neck and the seat of his baggy britches I heaved him out of doors.” The crowd yelled and threw stones at the temple windows. “Tired, hungry, and enraged as I was, this was more than I could stand and I let myself go . . . I seized a stick, rushed out amongst them, and began laying out right and left” (Forrest Collection [Forrest, Letter No. 6]). There was no clear-cut mapping of difference here, as there had been in India, imposed by large communities of Europeans backed by the state. He was feeling his way. His outbursts seem to have been touched off by the threatening or “insulting” behavior of people who appeared not to recognize distinctions that he felt down to his bones. How real was the threat he felt? Certainly, anti-foreign nationalism was rife in those years preceding the 1911 revolution. And surely his posture incited hostility. One can imagine the anger of townspeople thrown out of their temple by an arrogant, pistol-wielding foreigner. But there was more to it than his perception of threat or insult. During his few days in India, his reading of maps of difference had been accompanied by pity, loathing, and continuous reaffirmations of racial and sexual purity. He had seized every opportunity to 40  Erik mueggler

reassert his bodily boundaries: he might gaze at vice, but he would never let it into his carriage. But in China, purity and bodily boundaries were hardly his first concern. Confrontation with difference here inspired rage and hatred more easily than pity and loathing. He so quickly reached the “kicking stage,” mixing it up with all the sweaty bodies. For most in the crowds, like the anonymous “gapers” at Heqing, courtesy rather than hostility may well have been the prevalent mood. These were the same looks that imperial officials expected as they traveled with retinues and gaudy palanquins through towns: they took these looks to evince fear, respect, and obeisance to authority. For Forrest, however, the looks were the problem. Why would the “average Chinaman rile the heart of a wheelbarrow”? It was their ocular posture—what he learned to call “gaping.” The crowds stared at him; the only answer he had to their stares was petty violence. It was not that gaping was always evidence of hostility (though it sometimes was). It was not that it always challenged his superiority (though it sometimes did). And it was not that it always threatened the barriers of difference that he erected between himself and them. In gaping crowds, he had no means of dialogue, no words to learn, no calling cards to accept, no gifts to exchange—no language at all, whether about difference or identity. Mute gaping stilled all exchange; it reduced the interface between humans to the purely visual, a terrible mirror. Kicking, laying about with a stick, grabbing people by the seats of their pants, were ways of breaking the mirror and establishing contact. Soon enough, he found that habits of ocular comportment might be mapped onto this province’s rugged geography. This began to dawn on him during his first journey, with Litton. North of Lijiang, the travelers walked for three days through the deep gorge of the upper Yangtze, in a “magnificent heat.” They climbed out of the gorge to a boggy pass, where they camped in heavy rain. A happy Forrest collected gentians, primulas, and saxifrages—finally finding the alpine flowers he had been sent to obtain. The next day, the party descended to the Gyalthang (Zhongdian) plateau, a triangle of very high land, about ninety miles long, surrounded by mountains and the Yangtze gorge to the south and bordering on the Tibetan province of Kham, known to the British as the “Tibetan marches” to the north. They walked over the plateau in the rain. It was, Litton wrote in his confidential report to the Foreign Office, “most picturesque”: “The wide sweep of barley, wheat, and oat fields interspersed with plots of marsh, the dark pine woods on the lower slopes, the bare mountain tops above, and The Eyes of Others  41

Fig. 1.5  Crowd in Dali, Yunnan, 1922. Photo by Joseph Rock; courtesy Arnold Arboretum.

the sparkling mountain streams below reminded my companion, a Scotch botanist, of a cultivated highland valley in his native land” (Public Records Office [Litton]). Rhododendrons and azaleas choked the foothills. Blue gentians and red euphorbia carpeted the pastures: to the “Scotch botanist,” it was “one huge flower garden” (Forrest Collection [Forrest, Letter No. 6]). In the late afternoon, they came to one of the two towns on the plateau, Xiao Zhongdian. The barley harvest had begun, and the harvesters were holding a festival, eating boiled beef and piles of buckwheat cakes. The whole place seemed prosperous: shining fields; large, white houses; and people who seemed well housed and well fed. As they entered the town, a big man greeted them, finely dressed, with a sword. He was, Litton would later learn, the occupant of a post that rotated among the wealthier families of the area, a position called, in Chinese, huotou. The huotou usually held this post for only a year, during which his household undertook a series of administrative and ritual duties. Chief among these was to feed and house important travelers and to provide 42  Erik mueggler

men and animals to transport them and their baggage on to the next stage. The huotou escorted Forrest and Litton to his house, where they stayed for three days, while Litton recovered from a fever. It was, in Forrest’s words, “a common meeting place of the people”; in Litton’s it was “practically a club.” To his enormous surprise, Forrest found that he liked these people. In a letter to his mother, he decided that what distinguished them from “the Chinese,” whom he emphatically did not like, was the way they used their eyes: “The people came riding in from miles around to see us. However they are much pleasanter than the Chinese, they do not stand and gape as those do. They are very curious regarding things they don’t understand, but once you explain the article to them, they are satisfied and go away. On the other hand the Chinese simply stand and stare with the most ignorant expression imaginable on their faces, and will not clear unless you really chase them” (Forrest Collection [Forrest, Letter No. 5]). Litton, likewise, made Chinese “gaping” a reason to like these people. In his report on the journey, he wrote, “The Tibetan seems to have some blood in his veins and some expression on his face; one does not meet the dead meaningless stare with which the Chinese yokel will favor the stranger for hours together” (Public Records Office [Litton]). The articles these townspeople, traders, and farmers were most interested in were the travelers’ guns. Almost as soon as they arrived, their host urged Forrest and Litton to go shooting with him, but, wet and cold as they were, they put it off till morning. The next day, they walked out into the barley fields around the town and shot more than a hundred pheasants. Forrest took a liking to his host after this, and he described him to his mother and sisters in unusual detail: A regular savage beauty, about 6 ft. 6 ins. tall and 3 ft. 6 ins. broad, I should say, clad in a coarse scarlet Tibetan cloak . . . open at the neck and strapped round the waist, he had scarlet puttees on his legs and huge Tibetan top boots over these. Matted hair hanging down to below his shoulders (no pigtails), and dirt ad libitus, completed his costume. He looked like a pirate out of Gilbert and Sullivan. However, he was a right cheery sort, and he and I got on like a house on fire. (Forrest Collection [Forrest, Letter No. 5])

He was impressed by the man’s “savagery” and dirt, but his description makes it clear that this was a wealthy man, probably a trader, dressed in The Eyes of Others  43

finery. He coveted the man’s beautiful sword, with a scabbard worked in elaborate silver and turquoise. Late the same year, Forrest traveled to the Gyalthang plateau again, without a European companion. It was November and December and very cold. The oil in his shotgun froze, and he had to take it apart and clean it before he could shoot pheasants on his way up the plateau’s gentle valley. He stayed again in the huotou’s house in Xiao Zhongdian. “I really like the fellow in spite of all his dirt,” he wrote. “He is such a big man, and yet as simple, jolly, and kindly as a child.” Again, their companionship centered on rifles and shooting. His host showed Forrest his muzzle-loaded Tibetan flintlock rifle. It was quality workmanship, the best rifle available in Tibet at that time, before the 1911 revolution.12 He took it outside, aimed at a tree on a cliff about eighty to one hundred yards away, and missed. Deciding to “give him an eyeopener,” Forrest got his Winchester from the house, loaded it with its full eleven rounds, and blasted away at a limestone patch on the cliff. “There was a crowd around us by this time, and I can tell you that the group of faces would have made the fortune of any photographer. You never saw such astonishment depicted in all your life.” The two then had a contest with Forrest’s rifle, emptying some fifty rounds into the cliff (Forrest Collection [Forrest, Letter No. 3]). It should not be surprising that Forrest imagined this moment of astonishment as a photographic moment. An association between guns and cameras was commonplace in colonial situations. Paul Landau observes that the technologies of the gun and camera evolved in parallel after the 1860s. Chemicals developed for ready-made cartridges were adopted for use in dry-plate cameras by Eastman and Kodak; elements of the designs of the best cameras were based on the mechanism of the Colt revolver; the technologies moved together toward the capacity to make clean, rapid, repeating shots (Landau 2002). By the end of the nineteenth century, game hunting had become a largely visual enterprise; hunting expeditions incorporated cameras to create visual trophies. Later, Forrest would photograph long rows of Lady Amherst and white eared pheasants hung up by their feet from the eves of his house near Lijiang—between hunting trophies and scientific specimens.13 In addition, travelers who ventured out of reach of the armies and bureaucracies of colonial administrations had little enough to demonstrate their superiority to those they traveled among. Forrest had his sense of personal hygiene: thus his repeated remarks about dirt even at a moment of profound camaraderie. But it was difficult to stay clean and 44  Erik mueggler

Fig. 1.6  White eared pheasants with drying plant specimens at Forrest’s house in Nvlvk’ö. Date unknown. Photo by George Forrest; courtesy Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh.

even more difficult to demonstrate one’s cleanliness to others in a convincing way, especially when they were far better dressed than he. So his gadgets—his Winchester, his camera, his telescope—had to bear most of the burden of demonstrating his difference. Most interesting, the posture of astonishment Forrest elicited in this crowd of Tibetans was nearly identical to the “gaping” of which he accused “the Chinese.” Yet while those looks made him miserably violent, these delighted him—and caused him to immediately think of photography. In other situations, he and his competitors would use their guns to similar effect. The next year, on a journey up the Salween River together, Forrest and Litton fired their rifles in the air to subdue two feuding bands of Lisu into “awestruck silence.” In friendlier circumstances, the inventive Frank Kingdon-Ward made gentler use of his gun. In a village along the Mekong, when a crowd gathered around him, he “took the opportunity of showing them what wizards the English are” and made the cartridge pop out of his breech-loading shotgun in response to his whistle. “The men were so obviThe Eyes of Others  45

Fig. 1.7  Crowd in Qingshui, Gansu, listening to Joseph Rock’s gramophone, 1925. Photo by Joseph Rock; courtesy Arnold Arboretum.

ously taken aback that they merely stared incredulously.” “My gun and my camera,” he observed, “were always a source of great interest to the Chinese” (Kingdon-Ward 1913, 170). Sometimes, other gadgets took the place of the gun. Later, in Tibet, Kingdon-Ward, frustrated in his desire to photograph the “interesting” but shy women of Jana, set up a gramophone in the street, played an operatic prelude, and whipped out his camera to photograph the “enchanted crowd” (Kingdon-Ward 1923, 164). In moments of melancholy, Forrest’s other chief competitor, Joseph Rock, placed his gramophone on the roof of a temple or on the Khampa grasslands, pumped up the volume on an aria of Enrico Caruso or Dame Nellie Melba, and photographed the rapt expressions of those who gathered (Mueggler, forthcoming [a]). Michael Taussig believes that such moments are evidence of a deep European and American fascination with the technologies of mechanical reproduction. He argues that the effect of astonishment cultivated in “primitives” was a reflection of the wizardry Europeans and Americans 46  Erik mueggler

attributed to these technologies. This astonishment, he writes, “restored the mimetic faculty as mystery . . . reinvigorating the primitivism implicit in technology’s wildest dreams, therewith creating a surfeit of mimetic power” (Taussig 1993, 208). It is true that Forrest and his competitors were fascinated by the fascination they cultivated with guns and gramophones. Yet there is more to it than their awe at the mysteries of mimetic technologies. They were all deeply troubled by the sensation of plunging into a sea of others’ looks, where all those eyes framed their sociality in alien terms. Their attempts, in imagination or practice, to generate astonished looks and freeze those looks with a camera were attempts to harness the power of technology to turn the power of “gaping” back on itself. As Martin Jay observes, the eye of a camera, unreadable by those at whom it gazes, holds the viewer still, “static, unblinking, and fixated” (Jay 1988, 7). To generate and capture astonished looks was to draw “gaping” into the familiar field of mechanical reproduction—the field of the “world as exhibition,” through which the peoples, views, architectures, and living beings of colonized places were reproduced and exhibited in the metropole. For Forrest and the other Western botanists wandering southwest China, it was this field that made seeing possible—the kind of seeing, that is, that produced discoveries in the form of seeds, specimens, photographs, and descriptions of spectacular new flowers. In his own work of discovery, Forrest eventually learned to harness the eyes of others to spectacularly successful effect. In 1906, in Dali, missionaries of the China Inland Mission assisted him in hiring two men and three women to help him collect—the only time he would hire women as collectors. Instructing these five to work the Cangshan range, west of Dali, he traveled north to spend the season on the great Yülong mountain range, in Lijiang, where Abbé Delavay had discovered nearly thirty new species of Primula. He had already camped at the southern end of the range, several times. Now, on his way to the range’s southern meadows, he passed through a smaller village called Nvlvk’ö in Naxi, the language of its inhabitants, and Xuecongcun in Chinese. He hired a few of the men he met there as collectors. People in this village shared Naxi ethnicity with the majority of people living in the great loop of the Yangtze, where the river bends around the Yülong range. Forrest usually referred to them as “Moso,” the term Davies used. Sometimes he called them “my Tibetans,” or “Lissoo.” In any case, it was clear to him that they were not “Chinese.” Nvlvk’ö was the highest The Eyes of Others  47

village in the Lijiang valley—more than nine thousand feet in altitude. It was a natural gateway to the Yülong range; the most accessible path into the southern end of the range ran directly through the village. We cannot know with precision how many people lived there in 1906: Forrest estimated “90 houses and huts” in 1913; Rock, who resided there in the 1920s and 1930s, guessed “100 families” (Forrest Collection [Forrest 1913]; Rock 1947, 216–19).14 The cultivated lands around the village were dry, poor, and stony; no rice could be grown, and villagers planted wheat, maize, oats, peas, beans, barley, and potatoes (Rock 1947, 218). In addition, the village owned and managed extensive meadows and forests extending some distance into the range, where villagers herded cattle, collected bamboo, and harvested edible plants. In 1906, a few men from the village helped Forrest hunt for primulas on the Yülong range. Late that season, he grew ill and returned to Dali. But three men from Nvlvk’ö continued to collect on the range in his absence; by September, they had collected some nine hundred species of alpine flora. The men and women working near Dali collected some twelve hundred, and Forrest sailed home at the end of the year having collected about fiftyfive hundred specimens of alpine plants, most from altitudes between nine thousand and fifteen thousand feet. In 1910, he returned to Yunnan, sponsored again by A. Bee and Company. He rented a house in Nvlvk’ö and wandered the Yülong range in the company of two or three men from the village. Others fanned out north, west, and northeast, in groups of two or three collectors, a mule and a muleteer, on journeys of around three weeks each. Upon returning, each party stayed in the village for a few days to review collections and help with the work of drying and labeling specimen numbers. The party would then go out again, often looking for specific species that, based on previous collections, Forrest hoped to gather. The last parties of the season, in September or October, devoted their time to gathering the seed of plants located on previous searches. All his subsequent expeditions were collaborations with men from Nvlvk’ö. Forrest would work out of a base, while parties of Nvlvk’ö men made far-flung journeys into the rugged mountains of the west and northwest parts of the province. On his third expedition, in 1912–14 and 1915, Forrest spent most of his time in Nvlvk’ö, while the Nvlvk’ö men worked north and northwest of there. He returned home after the war started, but he began a fourth expedition in 1917. Sixteen men from Nvlvk’ö made the long journey to Bhamo to meet him. Two or three stayed in Tengyue to 48  Erik mueggler

Fig. 1.8  Forrest’s camp on the Yülong range, 1906. Photo by George Forrest; courtesy Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh.

work the mountains north and east of there; four more stayed in Dali; Forrest’s party picked up more in Nvlvk’ö, then trekked to a tiny Tibetan village on the far upper Mekong, where Forrest settled in for the season and the Nvlvk’ö men explored the immense mountain ranges on both sides of the Mekong for rhododendrons. Some of the Nvlvk’ö men continued to explore the great Gaoligong range extending north from Tengyue, while Forrest went back to Edinburgh. In 1921, he returned to Yunnan, and settled into another Tibetan village on the upper Mekong, while twenty-two men from Nvlvk’ö climbed the huge ranges north of there. In another expedition beginning in 1924, he stayed in Tengyue, while the Nvlvk’ö men continued to work the Gaoligong and the ranges around the upper Mekong and upper Salween. In 1929 and 1930, he stayed in Edinburgh, while the Nvlvk’ö men mounted extremely successful expeditions on their own. He returned The Eyes of Others  49

to Yunnan again in 1931, making Tengyue his base and dying near that city of a heart attack in January 1932, while on an outing to shoot pheasants. He discovered a profound, if grudging, camaraderie with these men. His letters name only three, and then only partially: “Old Chao” (Zhao), his “head man,” indispensable in every expedition, and without doubt the most productive field botanist ever to explore Yunnan; Chao’s younger brother “Lao Si” (Old Number Four); and a Li. Three collectors, two named He and one Chao Yuanpi (much younger than “Old Chao” would have been), signed an inquest at his death, as witnesses. But some thirty to fifty others, all unnamed, worked for him over twenty-eight years. For the sake of the salary he paid them, these men spent years away from home, sleeping in the houses of strangers or in the open and enduring the immense difficulties that this rugged landscaped posed. He tyrannized them; he fired them for insubordination; he fumed at them as “Bolsheviks” when they asked for raises; he scoffed at their rich ritual life when funerals of kin drew them back to Nvlvk’ö. He once even furiously dismissed Chao, only to quickly take him back. But for all this, it is clear that he developed immense respect for them and in particular for Chao, whose toughness and detailed knowledge of plant taxonomy and geography amazed him. His work, so he believed, was in training their eyes. He spent his time with them looking over specimens, making distinctions between closely related species and varieties, and working out notes on aspect, situation, and location for each. With Chao and other expedition leaders, he pored over maps, making notes on routes and place-names and seeking out the places where new species might be most concentrated. His archive includes an extraordinary hand-drawn map of the northwestern most part of the province. It is not in Forrest’s hand; the characters are precisely drawn. It is by someone who knew intimately even the remotest, unmapped regions, west of the Qiu-Salween divide; my guess is that the author is Chao. Forrest spent three decades working to develop a vision of this devilishly complex region as a whole, coordinating the geography of its rivers, ranges, and routes with the geography of its plant life. It is clear that this was a collaborative vision, pieced together by many pairs of eyes. It was a vision built on the foundation of profound difference in ocular training; the landscape the Nvlvk’ö men knew, was, from the start, mainly an aural one, learned through heard ritual texts that mapped out all of northwest Yunnan for them (Mueggler 2009). It was profoundly alien to the landscape of taxonomy, archive, and exhibition that Forrest 50  Erik mueggler

Fig. 1.9  Forrest’s men from Nvlvk’ö, on the road. Chao is on the left. Date unknown. Photo by George Forrest; courtesy Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh.

aspired to compile. But decades of mutual work created a shared visual field, pairs of eyes communicating with other pairs, through indexical gestures at specimens and maps. It would have been far less likely, and perhaps not possible at all, had there not been, from the start, a fortuitous convergence of habits of ocular courtesy. “Since my first year when I failed hopelessly in training them I have never employed Chinese as collectors else I should never have made such collections,” Forrest wrote Balfour in 1920 (Forrest Collection [Forrest 1920]). The main difference between the “Chinese” and these people was the way they used their eyes. Forrest never once writes that he was stared at in Nvlvk’ö, and given his sensitivities, this is evidence enough. Like the Tibetans of Gyalthang, Naxi villagers—and indeed most of the highland Tibeto-Burman peoples living in the province—found staring profoundly impolite. Looking directly at a stranger, particularly one of high status, no matter how strangely attired, was deeply disrespectful. Meeting an official on a path or village street, one looked away and went about one’s own business, satisfying one’s curiosity later, perhaps, from within a doorway or behind a fence. Looks were distinctly gendered as well. For a young woman The Eyes of Others  51

to look directly at a man out of doors was improper; older women could manage more direct looks, but again, not at high-status strangers.15 These were the habits that Forrest had grown up with, or close enough. In the lowland towns, gaping had made camaraderie impossible. The stares of townspeople had created a terrible mirror, turning vision back on itself and inciting “blind rage,” in which physical violence was the only means of making social contact. Upon discovering people who did not gape, he immediately found other means of social exchange: comparing shooting prowess in Gyalthang or producing specimens in Nvlvk’ö. Staring had made seeing impossible as well. When he felt himself stared at, the first thing that came to mind was his own nakedness. After describing the “ignorant expressions” of “the Chinese” to his mother and sisters in 1905, he wrote, “I have become so callus that I can stand now and take a bath with a crowd around me. It was Litton who broke me to that” (Forrest Collection [Forrest, Letter No. 5]). In Nvlvk’ö, and traveling with Nvlvk’ö residents, he could turn his eyes away from himself, toward the landscape around, to find in it the qualities that made seeing productive. One of those qualities was familiarity. The flower-studded heights of the Gyalthang plateau, where he first found camaraderie with locals, had reminded him of a highland valley in Scotland. Another was sublimity. In the meadows of the Yülong range, to which the Nvlvk’ö men led him, he experienced a kind of ecstasy brought about by an extraordinary concentration of species of Primula. Eventually, he would draw the Nvlvk’ö men into a quest to make the mountains beyond the far northwestern border of Yunnan deliver the same sublime feeling by producing an unheard-of concentration of Rhododendron species (Mueggler, forthcoming [b]). It was a complex collaboration, in which quite different habits of vision intersected productively only with difficulty. But at its foundation, I have been arguing, was a matter of different feelings about how one uses one’s eyes politely. Scholarship on imperial travel has emphasized looking as a mode of knowing. Travelers, particularly scientific travelers, brought regions into being by rendering the objects of their gazes into representations—texts, specimens, photographs. And this epistemological work, more often than not, was one of the principal ways that regions were captured for empire as well as for science (Arnold 2006, 3). As David Arnold puts it in his fine study of scientific travel in India, “The idea of ‘the gaze’—especially as exercised by the white male explorer, missionary, administrator, or itinerant natural52  Erik mueggler

ist—has rapidly come to be seen as one of the principal expressions of the wider colonizing process. . . . The exercise of ‘the gaze’ is the prelude to possession in more material and institutional forms, just as travel is more about imposing upon, than learning from, the landscape subject to the itinerant gaze” (Arnold 2006, 29).16 Travel turned the landscape into a spectacle for the traveling eye, and after the mid-nineteenth century, this spectacle was replicated in exhibitions and displays for other eyes, both in the metropole and in colonies (Arnold 2006, 34; Cohn 1987, 632–82; Mitchell 1988). Much of this work of knowledge production had to do with race. Travelers used modes of survey and classification developed for other purposes to make “race” scientific—to found it on concrete, observable, and quantifiable traits. And photography provided a useful model for these “objectivizing” modes of knowledge production: a clear-seeing eye, ideally unimpeded by the vagaries of subjectivity, rendering fields of sight into real objects, which could be classified, archived, and exhibited (Poole 1997, 214). Perhaps it was too useful. The temptation has been to write as though imperial gazes really could be modeled on the kind of vision commonly attributed to the camera in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As though vision could ever be simply that of a sovereign master of two eyes, surveying the world and rendering it as representation. As though acts of vision were not always embedded in a social field of vision, a field composed of the intersections of multiple pairs of eyes, intimate or distant, immediate or deferred, real or imagined. The visibility to others of one’s gazing body is constitutive of one’s gaze; one can only see as a social being if one sees oneself as visible and one’s vision as including, reflecting, embracing, or mirroring the gazes of others.17 In the case of imperial scientific travelers, this is easier to see in places off the edges of the map of empire, where the gazes of others were harder to overlook and where travelers had fewer resources, material and ideological, at their disposal to insulate their own gazes from the eyes of others. This was certainly true for Forrest. In India, where the cartographies of racial difference were clear, the eyes of others did not concern him. Where he found himself ambivalent about difference, racist ideology came to his rescue, leaving him free to engage in the labor, deeply familiar to colonial travelers, of guarding and reaffirming his own racial and sexual purity. The Europeans he found in Tengyue asserted a similar, if far more anxious, regime of difference. But in the interior of Yunnan, traveling on his own, he found himself swimming in a great sea of alien gazes, reflecting his own The Eyes of Others  53

looks back on himself, handing him his own social being on terms that he did not understand. Upon finding that the Tibetans of Xiao Zhongdian did not gape at him, he immediately began to form friendships. He found similar ocular conventions among other highland peoples. Like other scientific travelers in southwest China, he was equipped with an inadequate racial topology, a detailed taxonomy of names, but little guidance as to how to attach feelings and judgments to these differences. But differences of ocular comportment gave him a way: he soon learned to use the qualities of their looks to distinguish the “Chinese,” with whom no real friendship, exchange, or collaboration was possible, from highland others, with whom he could form relationships both companionable and profitable. Crucially, the eyes of others obscured or enabled his own vision. Poor Reginald Farrer’s dreary vision was transformed when the camera captured the astonished glance of a shy “Lissu maiden” poised like a deer in the Salween valley: suddenly, the landscape became as familiar, and as beautiful, as the English countryside. Forrest experienced a similar turning point in Gyalthang. Finding that the looks of the people did not stick to him, he elicited their astonished stares with his Winchester, and he imagined capturing them with his camera and making a fortune through their reproduction. He coveted the power of “gaping”; with the imagined camera, he became the starer, gaping back through hundreds of British eyes. And the Gyalthang plateau seemed as familiar as a valley at home. In Nvlvk’ö, the camera was real. Forrest repeatedly took photographs of the Nvlvk’ö men who worked with him, always from the front, capturing their level gazes. He filed these photographs with thousands of others, of flowers and mountains, from which he selected for lantern-slide presentations in Edinburgh. His aim was, by producing specimens, seeds, field notes, and photographs, to participate in the great colonial project of rendering the world as representation and displaying it as exhibition. And, through the indefatigable work of the men from Nvlvk’ö, he was enormously successful. But they participated in this work not only as laborers but also as seers: looking and looking away in ways that made exchange and companionship with this stranger possible, offering their eyes to his cause, learning to participate, in ways that he could not, in an alien form of vision.

54  Erik mueggler

Notes 1 2

3

4 5 6 7 8

9

10

11 12

The infamous Pianma Incident inspired nationalist ferment throughout China. For an account, see Xie 2000. To give an idea of Farrer’s productivity and range, his books included The Garden of Asia (1904); In Old Ceylon (1908); In a Yorkshire Garden (1909); Among the Hills: A Book of Joy in High Places (1910); The Dolomites, King Laurin’s Garden (1913); The Void of War: Letters from Three Fronts (1918); and The English Rock Garden (1919). His books about his Gansu expedition were On the Eaves of the World (1917) and the posthumous The Rainbow Bridge (1921). Farrer and Cox’s original plan, conceived in fifteen minutes of enthusiastic conversation in Farrer’s nursing home, had been to work the mountains farther north, where Burma and Yunnan meet Tibet. When the travelers reached Rangoon, however, they found that they could not obtain transport to that isolated region. Hpimaw had the advantage of being a British outpost, on a relatively well-traveled route to China (Cox 1926, 5; Forrect Collection [Balfour 1919]). A detailed account of these military, cartographic, and ethnographic adventures, using, however, almost entirely British sources, is Woodman 1962. For comparisons between European racial categorizing and Chinese-language guides to ethnic categories, see Deal and Hostetler 2006. A notable exception is McClintock 1995. All details of Forrest’s early life are from Maclean 2004. The quotations from Forrest in this and the next paragraphs are extracts from a letter to his mother and family, July 3, 1904, in a private collection. The parts of the letter extracted here are quoted in Maclean 2004, 34–37. “Namsa” was most likely Nanzha, where, in 1905, several companies of the Pu’er Border Pacification Battalion were stationed. Public Records Office, Kew, Foreign Office 228/1598. An example, collected by the consulate in Tengyue and reported to the Foreign Office is “Enc. no 2 in Tengyueh no 17 of 22 May 1907,” in Public Records Office, Kew, F.O. 228/1671. The copy of the original pamphlet was included with Wilkinson’s communiqué. This would change dramatically in the 1920s, when warlords in Sichuan began selling rifles to Yi and Tibetan populations east and north of Zhongdian, in exchange for opium revenue, and the British began to supply Lee-Enfield rifles to Lhasa. The Eyes of Others  55

13 In 1928, Kermit and Theodore Roosevelt, sons of the former President, would explicitly transfer the visual vocabularies of African big-game hunting to southwest China in their famous expedition to shoot a giant panda, financed by William Kelly, president of Miehle Printing Press and Manufacturing. Accounts of the Kelly-Roosevelt expedition are Roosevelt and Roosevelt 1929 and Stevens 1934. 14 In 1950, when a census was taken of the Lijiang valley, Nvlvk’ö had 136 households and 816 people. 15 This ethnographic information about ocular courtesy is drawn from the author’s fieldwork in 1989 in Baisha, the market village closest to Nvlvk’ö, and in other nearby villages. 16 Arnold is referring in particular to Pratt 1992 and Spurr 1993. 17 This perspective on the sociality of vision is drawn from Merleau-Ponty [1964] 1968.

56  Erik mueggler

2 At Home in Two Worlds Ernest Henry Wilson as Natural Historian Denise M. Glover

How many people know the size of a mule’s hoof? Quite a number have felt the strength of a mule’s leg and the sharpness of his teeth; his obstinacy is a proverb. But the size of his hoof is another matter. Frankly, I do not know with mathematical exactness but as I lay on the ground and more than forty of these animals stepped over my prostrate form the hoof seemed enormous, blotting out my view of the heavens. —Ernest Henry Wilson, Plant Hunting

T

aken from the forty-third chapter of the second volume of an especially popular book, the above quote is from Wilson’s account of “discovering” what became a significant horticultural lily, Lilium regale (which Wilson refers to as “Her Majesty”), in the western area of present-day Si­chuan Province, near Songpan. The chapter is framed, beginning and end, by an account of getting caught in a rockslide during the course of this particular adventure (Wilson suffered a broken leg from the rockslide; the fractures would cause him trouble for the rest of his life and would amount to what was known as his “lily limp”). In focusing on the visual aspect of his experience in this particular passage, Wilson artfully captures the feeling of being stepped over by his caravan of mules; he notes not what the animals smelled like or how the ground felt underneath him as he lay there, but how his view of the heavens was blocked by hooves. In addition, “size” here is not an absolute measure, but one that can be subjectively experienced. 57

The written and visual aspects of Wilson’s work as a natural historian are worthy of examination, and the intersection between the aim of collecting, categorizing, and describing that was so central to his work (and that of other explorers of his time) and the aim of emoting a response (mostly to the “unknown”) in readers is of particular interest here. Vision played a prominent role in these aims, and Wilson used this sense as a tool for both objective documentation and emotive response. A literary and visual journey through his work shows that Wilson was both a scientist and a humanist with an ability to straddle these two facets of human experience and knowledge acquisition in a particularly compelling fashion. In many ways, Wilson is a typical nineteenth-century natural historian, successfully combining expression with documentation. His work was situated during a time when the division between the “two cultures” (literature and science) had already begun but was simultaneously being questioned by some, particularly natural historians. As Lynn Merrill notes, while most social historians today may associate a discussion of the “two cultures” with C. P. Snow’s famous Rede lecture at Cambridge in 1959 and subsequent publication (1959), the intellectual tension between scientists and humanists dates back at least one hundred years before Snow so poignantly articulated its nature, when the budding field of science was beginning to threaten the privilege long maintained by literary culture: “Science gained so much power that the nineteenth century saw the birth of ‘the two cultures,’ with writers lamenting the yawning gulf between the classical worldview and the upstart scientific one. One of natural history’s great strengths was that for many people it served as a bridge between these two disparate views” (Merrill 1989, 11–12).1 Thus Wilson, in the early twentieth century, was carrying on a tradition that had commenced before his time. In many ways this tradition of natural history, which began as an interest of the upper class in European culture at the start of the seventeenth century, was by Wilson’s time an available genre for the working class throughout Europe and America. Because of the friction that arose between literature and science, works like Wilson’s were undoubtedly as inspirational for a wide audience then as they are now: “The Two Cultures debate is of interest . . . not as an isolated episode in the history of ideas, but because it was the culture medium, the petri-dish agar in which popular natural history grew” (Merrill 1989, 102; emphasis added). Perhaps because of his education in Great Britain, Wilson may have been keenly aware of the tension between literature and science and worked 58 Denise M. glover

purposefully to bridge the gap between the two. Educated in an applied science at a technical school, and from a middle-class background, Wilson exhibits an appreciation for literary expression and knowledge obtained through a broad-spectrum understanding of the humanities that undoubtedly can be traced to the prestige associated with classical training in Great Britain’s university system at the time. Although Wilson did not enter university as a student in England (and there is no indication that he desired to), having a decent grounding in literary classics and their aesthetic forms was an important form of cultural capital that Wilson himself seems eager to showcase in his work. Yet Wilson was also innovative and adds the relatively “new” medium of photography to his work, thus augmenting the literary style of natural history writing to include visual documentation and expression in the form of black-and-white photographs. Wilson’s innovation asks us to consider how, in the historical genre of natural history, photographs functioned as a form of aesthetic documentation that did not necessarily require specialized training in order for the viewer to appreciate it. This particular visual aspect of Wilson’s work—and later works of similar ilk—may in fact have added to the overall appeal of such publications on a popular level. While allusions to historical literature and the use of literary tropes may have targeted a population educated in the classics, the increasing widespread popularity of photography both as a tool of “objective documentation” and as a trigger for aesthetic experience undoubtedly enabled the extensive reach of Wilson’s publications to “common” consumers. There are essentially two sets of Wilson’s photographs that are of interest in this essay. One is the entire collection from his explorations in the interior of China and elsewhere. The bulk of these photographs are now available online through the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University and its Visual Information Access (via) database, which contains more than two thousand images that Wilson took or had taken.2 This full set is useful for examining the proportion of documentary and aesthetic photographs and how this “raw material” relates to Wilson’s published photography (what I am here considering a second set). The full collection of Wilson’s photographs can act as a window into the process of exploration and documentation, while an analysis of those photographs chosen for publication can give us a sense of Wilson’s aesthetic intentions and sensibilities of representation. At Home in Two Worlds  59

The literary and visual facets of Wilson’s published work fit together to create a composite of Wilson himself, of his delights and aversions, and his inquiries into natural phenomena. The contrast, and complementarity, of objective observation and subjective experience is encapsulated in Wilson’s work. By all accounts his publications were read with great interest in his native England as well as in the United States, both by a popular audience and by those in the scientific community.3 By examining several important aspects of Wilson’s work we can come to understand more about Wilson and his projects of exploration, representation, and expression and also find inspiration in Wilson’s ability to be both observant and passionate. At a time when the “divide” between science and humanities is ever widening, particularly within my own discipline of anthropology, the work of Wilson and others can be especially illuminating.4

A Brief Biography of Wilson Ernest Henry Wilson was born in 1876 in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, England, the eldest of six children. His father was a railway worker; later the family appears to have engaged in a floral business, although the nature of this business has been difficult to ascertain.5 Wilson apprenticed at a local nursery as a young man before being employed at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens, during which time he also studied at the Birmingham Technical School and received the Queen’s Prize for botany. In 1897, at age twenty-one, he began working at the Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew); there he won the Hooker Prize for an essay on conifers. Roy Briggs notes the degree of training that Wilson received in both horticulture and botany: Initially his duties [at Kew] were those of any young gardener there and in his spare time he studied for the Higher Grade examination in horticulture administered by the Royal Horticultural Society. He passed twenty-ninth in the first class, and used the National Scholarship he had won to attend a course of botany lectures at the Royal College of Science in South Kensington, passing part 1 of the “Honours” in May the following year. In October 1898 Wilson left Kew and took up the study of botany at the Royal College full time. His intention was to gain qualifications to become a teacher of the subject he had come to love. Hardly had his studies begun, however, when he was presented with a very different career opportunity. (Briggs 1993, 10–11) 60 Denise M. glover

Wilson had contemplated teaching botany as a profession but apparently had little time to pursue this path; being confined to a classroom would probably not have been a fulfilling life for Wilson. Instead, he was offered a position (under recommendation) as a plant collector in China with the firm of James Veitch and Sons. His first task for Veitch (in 1899) was to find the source of Davidia involucrata (variously known as the dove tree, the handkerchief tree, and the ghost tree), which he did.6 During this first stay in China, which lasted more than two years, he also collected thirtyfive Wardian cases of tubers, corms, rhizomes, and rootstock; herbarium specimens of more than nine hundred species; and seed of more than three hundred species.7 As this first expedition shows, he was an ambitious and dedicated plant hunter. His next trip for Veitch was to secure the yellow Chinese poppy, Meconopsis integrifolia. As expected, he accomplished his assigned task with most impressive results, obtaining Meconopsis punicea as well. After working for Veitch on these two expeditions, Wilson took a position as collector with Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum in 1906. He made numerous collecting trips to China and elsewhere while in this position. He received many noteworthy awards, an honorary master of arts degree from Harvard and a doctorate of science degree from Trinity College. In addition, Wilson became Keeper of Arnold Arboretum in 1927 after the death of his close friend and mentor Charles Sprague Sargent. Tragically, Wilson and his wife, Nellie, were killed in a car accident in 1930 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Many have commented on the cruel irony of Wilson’s having survived numerous life-threatening situations in the “faraway” lands of China and elsewhere only to die a seemingly senseless death caused by poor driving conditions at home. Wilson was among the first in a wave of professional plant collectors in the interior of China. His travels took him to western Hubei and throughout much of Sichuan Province, reaching as far north as Songpan (which Wilson found to be one of the more hospitable and agreeable places he visited) and as far west as the Zheduo Pass west of Kangding.8 Others had collected plants in inland China and the Himalayas before Wilson, but most of these men (and most were in fact men) were not professional plant collectors; instead, they were government officials, missionaries, or general naturalists. Wilson is therefore a noteworthy explorer because he had specialized training both in botany and in procuring plants from the wild. His work in China has been recognized as ushering in a new era of plant collecting (sometimes referred to as the “Wilson Era”), in which most of At Home in Two Worlds  61

the significant discoveries and introductions of plant materials from this area of the world were undertaken by people trained in and dedicated to botany and plant collecting as professions. Wilson’s extensive collecting in China earned him the name “Chinese” Wilson (although reportedly he did not like this name), and the list of species procured by Wilson is extensive. He is credited with introducing more than one thousand new species to Euro-American horticulture. Wilson botanized in China for a total of eleven (nonconsecutive) years. In addition, he traveled to Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Indonesia, and Africa during the course of his professional life. By all accounts he was a rugged, fit, and adventurous soul, as photos of him in the course of his travels reflect (see fig. 2.1). His determination and success in securing important specimens from “remote” areas of China and elsewhere are indeed impressive. As many scholars have noted, Wilson’s contributions to Euro-American botany and horticulture are monumental.

Envisioning the Natural The genre of nineteenth-century natural history writing typically pre­ sents objective descriptions of place, people, plants, and animals as well as impressions and reactions to the experiences that writers themselves had in encountering the “unknown” so described (often the descriptions are also embellished or intoned with feeling). Capturing both makes for captivating reading and historically has resulted in widespread appeal. As Merrill aptly notes, “Natural history is aesthetic science, nature closely examined to enhance the pleasure that an ordinary person takes in it” (Merrill 1989, 14). Merrill makes three important points about natural history: (1) it has an aesthetic orientation, (2) the use of sight is central to the endeavor, and (3) it appeals to a common audience. Wilson’s publications exhibit all of these aspects. A chronological examination of Wilson’s work shows that his early writings—particularly full-length books—tend to be dry, with much of the language factual and descriptive and without embellishments; there is little affective engagement for the reader. For example, Wilson begins volume 1 of A Naturalist in Western China with the following: Western China is separated from Thibet proper by a series of parallel mountain ranges running almost due north and south, and divided by narrow valleys. On some maps the name Yun-ling is applied to the 62 Denise M. glover

Fig. 2.1  Wilson with guide after bird hunting, 1909. Wilson’s notes: “Bag of 52 ordinary pheasants (Phasianus decollatus) with self and boy. Phyllostachys mites behind. Altitude 4500 ft. Changyang Hsien.” Photo by Ernest Henry Wilson; courtesy Arnold Arboretum.

whole system, with sections marked Hsueh shan, Hung shan, Taliang shan, and so on. A great many local names, the majority of them unpronounceable when converted to English, are also applied to this system, but outside certain maps no one general name for it exists. Later we shall have much to say about this region, for the time being it suffices to note the general trend of the ranges and a few of their important features. (Wilson 1913, 1:1)

Wilson continues to discuss the important features of this area for the next seventy pages or so, and his writing is peppered with travel accounts. His interest, at least in this excerpt, is in describing and naming these features. It is clear that his goal in this part of the book (the opening) is to document At Home in Two Worlds  63

the geological, topographical, and botanical features of western China (often noting local nomenclature for these features), but also to establish the lens through which the reader views or imagines this area: as an objective, well-informed observer. Here Wilson does not attempt to encourage any particular emotional reaction from the reader, nor does he himself exhibit such a response. Throughout much of the book, Wilson remains the observing empiricist—as do his readers, along with him—and he is quite successful in many ways, as the above passage indicates. Several of Wilson’s observations are of particular interest from an ethnobotanical point of view. For example, in volume 2 of A Naturalist, Wilson gives Chinese names and local uses for plants; in fact, some of Wilson’s “prose” in this volume reads like an ethnobotanist’s field notebook. He dedicates several chapters to subject matters of interest to economic botany and ethnobotany alike. His may be among the first comprehensive descriptions written in English about the production of silk. He also dedicates entire chapters to subjects such as insect white wax (the harvesting of scale insects and their secretions, which are then processed into wax used for candles, medicine, and other purposes); timber trees; Chinese materia medica; fruits; principal crops; and tea production. In this same volume Wilson analyzes the flora of western China in terms of seven vegetation zones (with curious mention of Tibetan peoples noted in the subalpine and alpine zones—but no other human inhabitants noted elsewhere).9 Wilson was not only interested in flora and mountain ranges, although clearly the former was an especially important preoccupation of his. He was also interested in people, particularly those on the Sino-Tibetan border (“Sifan,” Tibetans, and other non-Han peoples) and their political and social institutions. For example, in discussing the Jiarong (Chiarung) tribes in chapter 8, volume 1, of A Naturalist, Wilson describes their form of subsistence, marriage customs, religious beliefs, language, social history, and social relations. His interest in people and culture is undoubtedly part of the larger project of objective description so central to natural history writing. Clearly, these descriptive accounts hold much value from the perspective of documenting and recording an “objective” reality. This seems to have been especially the case for collectors of natural kinds during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One could argue that early European collectors in the area of natural science were especially interested in coming to grips with how what they were “discovering” related to a sense of 64 Denise M. glover

overall order in the natural world. The first European experience of the platypus, for example, was surrounded by befuddlement in terms of how to classify this seemingly anomalous creature (see Ritvo 1998). Furthermore, there is a significant visual element to describing the world and trying to organize it. Merrill contends that the visual orientation of many naturalists is intrinsically connected to the occupation (and obsession) with collecting: “To collect things is to look at them closely” (Merrill 1989, 117). As Timothy Mitchell argues, the nineteenth-century obsession with discerning order out of chaos was grounded in a visual trope of “pictorial order” or “organization of the view” (Mitchell 1991, 2–23); making sense of the world (discerning order) was importantly connected to knowing how to organize it visually.10 Therefore, one had to know at least a little bit about how to see correctly—not any old looking would do. The motif of proper seeing is especially prominent in the writing of John Burroughs, the noted American naturalist. In his 1908 volume Leaf and Tendril, Burroughs dedicates at least two chapters to the topic of vision: “The Art of Seeing Things” and “Straight Seeing and Straight Thinking.” Burroughs begins his work by stating the centrality of proper observation in natural history: In the field of natural history, things escape us because the actors are small, and the stage is very large and more or less veiled and obstructed. . . . By a close observer I do not mean a minute, coldblooded specialist . . . but a man who looks closely and steadily at nature, and notes the individual features of tree and rock and field, and allows not subtile [sic] flavor of the night or day, of the place and the season, to escape him. . . . Power of attention and a mind sensitive to outward objects, in these lies the secret of seeing things. (Burroughs 1908, 7–11)

For Burroughs, one need not obtain formal, specialized education to learn how to see properly. What were needed were abilities of attention and sensitivity that one could cultivate oneself, largely through firsthand experience in the natural world. In many of his articles, Wilson, through references to his experiences, accomplishments, and observations as a plant hunter, establishes authority on whatever subject he is discussing: “As one who has hunted the Lily on cliff and dale, on mountain-slope and alpine moorland, and through At Home in Two Worlds  65

woodland and swamp in many remote parts of China and the Thibetan borderland, and from the extreme south of Japan northward through that pretty country to Saghalien and the lonely shores of the Okhotsk Sea, I propose here to consider, cursorily, how Lilies grow” (Wilson 1915a, 283). The gist of this article, titled “Consider the Lilies,” is that if you want to know how to grow a plant successfully, you have to understand its native habitat—and Wilson himself understands the native habitat of lilies especially well, having traversed through much of it himself during the course of his fieldwork. This sense of authority is based on having had direct observation, or what Charles Darwin termed “ocular proof.” In fact, Darwin’s personal journal highlights the central connection among seeing, exploring, and belief (proof), as Merrill notes that “Darwin frames his revelations in a terminology of sight. The explorer sees, views, observes, beholds, watches. All around him are ‘extraordinary spectacles’ (porpoises jumping, chapter III, p. 37), and scenery, wide views of ‘strange aspect’ (Sierra de la Ventana, chapter VI, p. 102). He hears stories too bizarre to be believed, until he has ‘ocular proof’ (chapter IV, p. 109). . . . As a group, Victorian naturalists revered vision, especially surreptitious sights” (Merrill 1989, 61).11 Wilson’s ocular proof is tied directly to his authority as a plant hunter, a naturalist, and a writer conveying his experience and knowledge to a lay audience. Proper observation and seeing were stressed in nineteenth-century England through a number of venues. Samuel Smiles, a physician and social reformer known for his work stressing the ethic of self-help in building character, argued that keen observation is the mark of a dutiful citizen. As Jennifer Tucker explains: The creed of the humble observer shines through Smiles’s writings. He insisted that the “intelligent eye of the careful observer” gave “apparently trivial phenomena their value,” for “so trifling a matter as the sight of seaweed floating past his ship, enabled Columbus to quell the mutiny which arose amongst his sailors at not discovering land. . . . There is nothing so small that should remain forgotten; and no fact, however trivial, but may prove useful in some way or other if carefully interpreted.” The “repetition of little acts” built individual character and improved “the character of the nation.” Accuracy of observation was the mark of a well-trained civic man. (Tucker 2005, 58; quotes from Smiles 1859)

66 Denise M. glover

In writing for a popular audience, Wilson is perhaps both performing a civic duty himself—by attending to the minute details of ocular importance—and helping improve the overall character of his readers by adding to their experience of the world: a vicarious cultivation of observation skills. Burroughs argued that there must be a balance between objective description and expressive voice in natural history writing, with care taken not to let overzealous expression run wild: “What we want, and have a right to expect, of the literary naturalist is that his statement shall have both truth and charm, but we do not want the charm at the expense of the truth. I may invest the commonest fact I observe in the fields or by the roadside with the air of romance, if I can, but I am not to put the romance in place of the fact” (Burroughs 1908, 123). Or, as he succinctly quips in regard to the debate about how much “imagination” a natural historian can imbue his work with: “Certainly ‘the imagination may be used in interpreting and narrating facts’—must be used, if anything of literary value is to be the outcome. But it is one thing to treat your facts with imagination and quite another to imagine your facts” (Burroughs 1908, 111). Wilson is clearly concerned with laying down a baseline of facts, particularly in his early full-length works. These facts function as “ocular proof,” captured and preserved in language (and also very importantly in the form of photographs, discussed below). The inclusion of these in Wilson’s publications aids the reader in being able to see the objective “truth” to which he refers; it orients the reader to a type of seeing—a witnessing through the visual. But unlike Burroughs, Wilson had another tool at hand for establishing objective truth: photography. Indeed, a striking feature of Wilson’s work is the use of photography. While several other plant hunters explored this area of China at roughly this same time, and published their writings, Wilson’s work alone uses photographs extensively.12 Several historians of Wilson’s life note the trouble that he and his followers experienced in carrying, into the field, the heavy glass plates and camera equipment necessary for photography; where Joseph Rock was famous for lugging along on his expeditions collapsible bathtubs and dinner settings (although some photographic equipment as well; see Yoshinaga et al., this volume), Wilson’s expeditions were possibly equally encumbered with photographic equipment.13 Thus Wilson’s expeditions included an important element of visual documentation; photography was a central, not an ancillary, part of Wilson’s collecting efforts.14 In addition, the effect to which Wilson uses At Home in Two Worlds  67

photographs in his published work sets him apart from some of the other plant collectors of his time. Wilson’s photos are a blend of documentation and composition and are therefore especially interesting as reflections on the mix between empirical observation and expression. In his full-length books and in the articles he wrote for popular magazines, Wilson presents a sampling of the visual in concrete form. He in fact took thousands of photographs, many that were never reproduced in his written work, so an analysis of his photography in the context of his published works is perhaps limited in scope.15 Many of his photographs in this context act as entries in a catalog of identification; yet there are some that are of particular interest because of their aesthetic focus, as I will discuss more at length below. Roy Briggs and Peter J. Chvany note that Wilson seems to have quickly acquired his training in photography before his third expedition to China, from a neighbor and friend, the renowned photographer E. J. Wallis (Briggs 1993, 46–47; Chvany 1976, 182). Wilson maintained his connection with Wallis even after traveling in China and shipped glass plates directly to Wallis from the field.16 In later years, Wilson’s daughter, Muriel Primrose, would explain that her father took great care in selecting subjects to photograph; this process usually included a scouting trip to survey possible locations for shooting, a return trip to the location with the necessary photographic equipment, and sometimes a third trip if previous conditions were not right for photographing; before actually shooting he would analyze a scene from several angles (see Chvany 1976, 211). At least in his later years, Wilson seemed especially deliberate in his photographic choices in the field. The majority of Wilson’s 2,400-plus photographs that are available to view online function as “descriptive” documentation. It appears that Wilson’s main objective in using the camera in the field was to preserve all that he encountered and “discovered” in visual form, available for later analysis, recall, and consumption. Many of the photos capture aspects of travel, such as the boats used to traverse the rivers (see fig. 2.2), or are portraits

Fig. 2.2  Wilson traveled by boat up the Yangtze in Sichuan, 1908. Wilson called this “the Harvard houseboat.” Photo by Ernest Henry Wilson; courtesy Arnold Arboretum. Fig. 2.3  Bridge and riverbed, upper Yangtze, 1908. Photo by Ernest Henry Wilson; courtesy Arnold Arboretum. 68 Denise M. glover

At Home in Two Worlds  69

Fig. 2.4  Dabao mountain range northeast of Dajianlu, 1908. Taken at 13,500 ft. Photo by Ernest Henry Wilson; courtesy Arnold Arboretum.

of towns, gates, and bridges (see fig. 2.3), while others are of flora (mostly trees), natural features (waterfalls or mountain peaks; see fig. 2.4), and important economic and cultural activities (see fig. 2.5). Wilson clearly was very concerned with recording, as accurately as possible, through the visual medium of photography. Many of his photos of trees have a visual likeness to voucher specimens, which try to capture as much morphological information of a plant as possible, especially for purposes of identification. In botanical descriptions of plants, size is also carefully noted. Such an assessment can be conveyed visually through scale, and thus within the frame Wilson often includes people, houses, and other features whose absolute size can be estimated and thus used to deduce the size of the flora he is documenting (see figs. 2.6–2.7). Tucker notes that this use of scale was common in scientific photography of the nineteenth century, where measurement was seen as an important marker of science (Tucker 2005, 150). 70 Denise M. glover

Fig. 2.5  Tea carriers with brick tea in Sichuan, 1908. Wilson’s notes: “One man’s load weighs 317 lbs, the other’s 298 lbs!! Men carry this tea as far as Tachienlu accomplishing about 6 miles per day over vile roads.” Photo by Ernest Henry Wilson; courtesy Arnold Arboretum.

Undoubtedly, photographs as documentation help convey Wilson’s authority and the “truth” of his accounts. William Ivins Jr. summarizes the power that photography gained throughout the 1800s: “The nineteenth century began by believing that what was reasonable was true and it wound up by believing that what it saw a photograph of was true—from the finish of a horse race to the nebulae in the sky” (Ivins Jr. [1953] 1982, 94; quoted in Tucker 2005, 2–3). Or, one might add, to the flora, fauna, and people of far-off places. William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the calotype process of photography, argued that photography could capture the objectivity necessary to science.17 Talbot’s first public announcement, delivered to the Royal Society in London on January 31, 1839, reflected his interest in the invention of photography as an idea as well as a practice. Proposing that the invention of the technique alone illustrated the soundness of the inductive method, whether or not it proved useful in practice, Talbot revealed that he wanted to be associated with a kind of science: pure research At Home in Two Worlds  71

Fig. 2.6  Cercidiphyllum japonicum (Katsura tree) and man, 1910. Photo by Ernest Henry Wilson; courtesy Arnold Arboretum.

Fig. 2.7  Pistachio (Pistacia chinensis) tree and people, 1910. Wilson’s notes: “A magnificent wayside specimen 60 ft high, 18 ft girth. Note buttressed roots and protuberances, altitude 2000 ft., Paoning Fu.” Photo by Ernest Henry Wilson; courtesy Arnold Arboretum.

through the Baconian system. He wrote that photography offered “proof of the value of the inductive methods of modern science.” (Tucker 2005, 20)

Thus photography was importantly linked to the verification of “truth” and facts that the new discipline of science required as its foundation. In essence, the veracity that photographs promised both informed and was influenced by the Victorian occupation with collecting and seeing and by the rising power of the scientific method so reliant on empirical observation and visual witnessing.

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Feeling Natural History In keeping with the tradition of natural history writing, Wilson’s prose is not just descriptive and his photographs do not function only as objective sources of ocular proof. His later writing, such as Plant Hunting (1927), is strikingly different from his earlier work in its quality to engage the reader through various literary tropes and a slightly more expressive tone. This difference can be seen by comparing the opening to A Naturalist (as given above) with that of Plant Hunting: Discoveries of new lands and peoples, explorers of unknown rivers and mountains, valleys and plains have received fair meed of praise down the centuries. But he who has explored these regions for their flowers, their useful and ornamental plants, remains unsung. Fragments of his achievements have been chronicled here and there but his labors in general have not reached the ears of an appreciative audience. Whether it be Dahlia or Gladiolus, Lily or Rose the plant hunter garnered the first parents from which the gardener has produced the marvelous product we today enjoy. (Wilson 1927, 1: xxi)

Wilson’s prose is poetic, the imagery compelling. Perhaps appealing to an American penchant to feel emotionally connected to an underdog or an underrepresented group, Wilson awakens the reader’s consciousness to the unsung heroes of the gardening world. On an emotional level, this is more engaging than a description of geography. In the above passage, Wilson also uses the trope of family to enhance the reader’s emotional connection—less to those unsung heroes than to the “objects” of the plant hunters’ labor: plants themselves. In an earlier work, Wilson infuses the related concepts of pedigree and race into a discussion about the origin of the modern rose as he evokes images of a “primordial” floral past that still exists: “I would I could take the average reader of this magazine to the mountain fastnesses of central and western China, and to certain remote parts of Japan and there introduce him to the wild types—the raw products—from which have been evolved our [modern roses] . . . his or her astonishment would be profound. Truly it hardly seems credible that the Roses of to-day had such a lowly origin” (Wilson 1915b, 255). His language and the overall orientation of this passage echo similar ideas about human lineages (with “remnants” of past human types 74 Denise M. glover

still in existence alongside more “advanced” types) prevalent during the time of his writing. In this same article, Wilson presents the pedigree of modern roses in a chart titled “Parents of the Principal Garden Roses of the 19th–20th Centuries” (Wilson 1915b, 254), noting dates of introduction to Europe (mostly England) from elsewhere (mostly China).18 Clearly, what Wilson is appealing to in this publication is a preoccupation with origins, breeding, and pedigree so crucial in many American and European social circles in the early twentieth century. He has merely extended the concern among the human social world to the nonhuman plant world. By extension, plants become nearly social creatures as well, exhibiting some of the features of people. In discussing a debate about the lineage of a hybrid rose called the “Crimson Rambler,” Wilson uses a fascinating metaphor that aptly represents the anthropomorphic tendency he and other horticultural enthusiasts often display: “I do not think it [the Crimson Rambler] has any Chinese Monthly [Rosa chinensis] blood in it at all” (Wilson 1915b, 254). Clearly, Wilson understood plants well enough to know that their “veins” do not carry blood, yet this is obviously a rhetorical devise of great affect: the reader identifies with the plant, making emotional involvement much more likely. In some of his work, such as a description and brief interpretation of feng shui, Wilson attempts to understand local practices and ideologies in local terms. At other times, however, Wilson finds it more difficult to remain a cultural relativist. When describing the people of the Songpan area, Wilson focuses on their religio-magical practices and thinking, again fascinated with this topic: From the people at their work, either in low crooning tones or in loud chorus, the mystic hymn, “Om mani padmi hom,” is continually ascending to heaven. The chant of the Sifan is decidedly musical, rising and falling in soft rhythmic cadence. I have often listened to them with much pleasure, though from a distance, since if one tried to approach closely they ran helter-skelter away. They are naturally very superstitious, being fond of charms, afraid of evil spirits, and reverence unusual natural phenomena. (Wilson 1913, 1:148)

Although “uncultured,” the people of Songpan are to Wilson amiable and somewhat appealing: “Though my associations with the Sifan were brief I always received the utmost courtesy at their hands, and found much that At Home in Two Worlds  75

was pleasing and interesting among these happy, unsophisticated children of Nature” (Wilson 1913, 1:148). A self-proclaimed naturalist and nature lover (Wilson 1929, vi), he seems particularly enchanted by the “naturalness” of the non-Han people he encounters, although his charm is tempered by a dedication to a rational understanding of the world. This kind of enchantment with “children of Nature” was characteristic of other plant hunters in China during this era and is probably, at least in part, reflexive of disillusionment with European industrial life, manifested in a more generalized romantic sentiment of the “other” (Glover, n.d.). It is in these discussions of “unsophisticated,” “wild” peoples of the frontier regions that Wilson is both ethnocentric and romantic—opinionated about both what disgusts him and what he finds enticing. This mix of experience provides for an interesting and believable read, as one senses the impressions of a man with great curiosity wanting to better understand the world, sure that his ways of thinking and living are among the best while at the same time allowing that other ways of life can result in happiness. Part of what Wilson seems to be hoping to accomplish with the use of emotion in his writing is to inspire action. In the first of a series of articles titled “Traveler’s Letters” (beginning in 1920) in The Garden Magazine, Wilson writes about his experience returning to England after nine years to find that the strains of war have altered English gardening and consequent gardens. No longer can tropical and semitropical plants be maintained by the average English gardener (because of the expense of upkeep associated with greenhouses); instead, Wilson notes, there has been a new interest in hardy flowering plants, many of them introduced from China. In this piece, Wilson, using revivalist language, infuses a nationalistic tone into the cultural construct of the garden, which needs buoying from the United States: Owing to the crushing burden of debt weighting down every European nation the art and practice of gardening must languish unless America comes to the rescue. It is the duty of those in the United States who love flowers, and of every reader of The Garden Magazine in particular, to further by precept and example the gospel of gardens and an increased appreciation of flowers throughout the length and breadth of this great country. (Wilson 1920, 194)

This call to action, grounded in a morality of sorts, was written when Wilson was assistant director of the Arnold Arboretum; only three years later 76 Denise M. glover

Wilson would write in the same magazine a commentary titled “What the Arnold Arboretum Means to American Gardeners” and would expose some of the financial difficulties that the Arboretum was experiencing. In aiming to (re)kindle a love of and appreciation for gardening in the magazine’s readership, Wilson was undoubtedly also looking out for the interest of his profession of plant hunting and propagation. Thus even as a romantic, Wilson was clearly also a practical thinker. In Plant Hunting and other later work, Wilson’s writing developed beyond what it had been fifteen years earlier. Although he remained the interested scientist and observer, Wilson in later works became a composer of words, attempting to engage the reader with literary imagery and emotional appeal. Whether this change in Wilson’s writing style, voice, and apparent goal is due to simply the passage of time (seeing the world in a different light as a result of his age), the development of a skill over time, or particular considerations from the perspective of publishing is impossible to say. But whatever the reason for the change in writing style, the composite Wilson is clearly comfortable with writing fairly straightforward descriptions as well as crafting stories with attention to literary composition. In his writings for popular magazines, even in 1915, Wilson especially engages the reader. His articles are scientifically, historically, and in some cases culturally informative, as he weaves together threads of his own travels to far-off lands with new discoveries and understandings from the worlds of botany, horticulture, and evolutionary science. Wilson pulls the reader in with the use of inclusive and visually oriented language: Journey in thought with me, for a moment or two, westward until west becomes east although we still chase the setting sun. Across this continent, across that broad ocean, misnamed “Pacific,” to Shanghai the gate of Far Cathay; onward and westward up the mighty Yangtze River for eighteen hundred miles, then northward, up its tributary the Min, some two hundred and fifty miles to the confines of mysterious Thibet; to that little-known hinterland which separates China proper from the hierarchy of Lhassa; to a wild and mountainous country peopled mainly by strange tribesfolk of unknown origin; to a land where Lamaism, Buddhism, and Phallism strive for mastery of men’s souls; to a region where mighty empires meet. There in narrow semiarid valleys down which thunder torrents, and encompassed by mounAt Home in Two Worlds  77

tains composed of mudshales and granites whose peaks are clothed with snow eternal, the Regal Lily has its home. . . . There, in June, by the wayside, in rock-crevices by the torrent’s edge, and high up on the mountain-side and precipice this Lily in full bloom greets the weary wayfarer. Not in twos and threes but in hundreds, in thousands, aye, in tens of thousands. . . . For a brief season this lonely, semi-desert region is transformed by this Lily into a veritable fairyland. (Wilson 1915a, 285)

Composed early in Wilson’s writing career, and at a time when Wilson himself was possibly still under the hypnotic sway of his recent “discovery,” this passage captures a romantic sentiment of travel and exploration that was successfully expressed in many of Wilson’s works. Here the reader is drawn deeper and deeper into a “far-off” land; at the end of this long journey through strange and magnificent lands occupied by strange (and magnificent?) people, one is “greeted” by a crowd of lily fairies. One has arrived at a peaceful resting place, in a deep valley hidden from the rest of the world. A sensibility of drawing in the reader is also present in many of the photographs in Wilson’s published works. While only a small proportion of Wilson’s photographs fall into the genre of purely artistic, many of these photos were published in his writings.19 This indicates that Wilson’s work was in fact consciously more comprehensive than it was pure documentation but also, and perhaps more important, that Wilson chose to use photography in his publications to enhance the aesthetic experience of his readers. Wilson never published works of his photographs alone, and whether his photographs were ever on exhibit during his lifetime is difficult to ascertain. Wilson therefore seemed to consider his photographs as part of the larger project of writing. It is noteworthy that the photos that fall into the more artistic genre include people, but they are not exclusively photographs of people. In some photos Wilson appears to have strategically arranged people in the landscape to create a certain aesthetic—one focused on visual balance, the grandeur of nature, and in some cases involvement of the viewer in the photo. For example, in a picture of a bamboo bridge in Sichuan (fig. 2.8), a person stands nearly halfway between the photographer, who seems poised at one end of the bridge, and the far side of the bridge. The viewer, in turn, is drawn into the photograph by the depth and orientation of the bridge 78 Denise M. glover

Fig. 2.8  Step onto the bamboo bridge, 1910. Wilson’s notes: “Showing structure of . . . bridge, laid on 8 cables each a foot in diameter and suspended from two similar cables on either side. Floor of rough wicker work. Shih-chuan Hsien. Altitude 2700 ft.” Photo by Ernest Henry Wilson; courtesy Arnold Arboretum.

that stretches out before him or her; it is as if one could imagine stepping into the photo and onto the bamboo bridge. In a photo of a path lined with cypress (fig. 2.9), Wilson captures the grandeur of the trees, while the person in the photo looks quite small; this Wilson does by centering the picture not on the person, or on the temple behind him, but actually on the point at which the horizon meets the tops of the distant trees. The camera, and Wilson behind it, is poised on the path itself, and although the person seems small, he is centered “below” (in front of) the temple in the background. Similar to the bamboo bridge photograph, the viewer is virtually on the pathway, nearly in line for an encounter with the person walking toward him or her on this path lined with arboreal giants. In this group of photographs, Wilson is accomplishing two things. First, he is inviting the viewer into the photo by positioning a visual entry leading from the center foreground into the inner space of the photograph. In this way, Wilson is transposing the aesthetic of natural history writing, which is “extremely conscious of its audience . . . [going] out of its way to include the audience” (Merrill 1989, 52), into the visual medium of photography. Second, in the cypress tree photo, Wilson purposefully highlights the height of the trees to create a sense of grandeur and perhaps awe at this arboreal scene. Charles Millard notes that trees were a popular subject for Victorian nature photography, especially in focusing on the special qualities of trees over human figures: “Trees . . . possess idiosyncrasies that the figures near them totally lack” (Millard 1977, 25). Thus to some degree the people in the photos are significantly overshadowed and reduced to mere reference points. In his 1919 article “The Romance of the Trees,” published in The Garden Magazine, Wilson chose five photos of trees to include in this approximately five-page essay. Each photo highlights a “famous” tree—either an individual tree or a species of tree that is especially well known. Each specimen is equally magnificent, particularly in size. As explained above, the article focuses on describing some of the basic physiology of trees, contextualizing trees in terms of the earth’s geological history, and, very importantly, encouraging the reader to appreciate the intimate “bond of brotherhood” between trees and people. The photos Wilson chose aid the reader/viewer in experiencing the splendor of trees—due partly to the trees’ overall size (no young specimens were chosen, nor were species of small stature) but also to the histories of the individual trees (four of the five), which are explained in captions, such as this one: “[Photo 2:] The great 80 Denise M. glover

Fig. 2.9  Grandeur of cypress trees, Chengdu, 1908. Wilson’s notes: “Entrance to Chao-chüeh ssu Temple 3 miles outside north gate Chentu City.” Photo by Ernest Henry Wilson; courtesy Arnold Arboretum.

oak at Blenheim, The Marlborough Estate in England. The warmth permeating and living in every line and branch of this famous patriarch enfolds like a divine embrace, accounting for the veneration in which all ages of Britons have held these great trees” (Wilson 1919, 90). Here awe-inspiring trees are visually represented to the reader/viewer, while individual stories are attached to each through the written word. Another of Wilson’s photos highlighting his sense of aesthetics shows an arched bridge flanked by cypress and bamboo (see fig. 2.10). Here three people are positioned in the center of the bridge, just above the peak in its arch. Through the impressive capabilities of digitalized media (but only with a decent print of the photo and a magnifying glass) via the online archive of this and other photos, one can zoom in on this scene at the bridge. Doing so can easily convince one that the three people on the bridge are posing for the camera. Their gaze is diverted from the camera (toward the moving water below), while the people on the margins of the photo’s center (those lurking behind bamboo) are looking directly at the camera and photographer Wilson (see fig. 2.11). Whether Wilson may have had some hand in this arrangement of gazes may never be known for sure. But in this photo, Wilson does not want a gaze into the camera’s eye to spoil his capturing of a “natural” scene on the bridge. Finally, in “Mausoleum with Ornate Mural Sculpturing” (fig. 2.12) (frontispiece 74, vol. 1, A Naturalist), three men sit in front of an elaborate burial chamber. Their positions are perfectly balanced in the composition of the photograph: one sits directly in the center (and is the farthest back in depth), while the other two are seated to the left and right of this center line, just slightly more than halfway to the edge of the photograph. It seems highly unlikely that these men would have “naturally” come into such an arrangement, and one cannot help but sense that Wilson had a most definite role in their placement in this scene. In this photograph, the human “subjects” look directly into the camera. Their gazes look nearly as solid as the architecture behind them does. It is telling that Talbot, who urged that photography could be so instru-

Fig. 2.10  Arched sandstone bridge, 1910. Wilson’s notes: “Pa-chou, altitude 2100 ft.” Photo by Ernest Henry Wilson; courtesy Arnold Arboretum. Fig. 2.11  Enlarged images from arched sandstone bridge. Unlike the people on the photograph’s periphery, those standing on the bridge are not looking into the camera. 82 Denise M. glover

Fig. 2.12  Mausoleum and three men, 1910. Wilson’s notes: “Tomb of two wealthy men (father and son) with very ornate mural sculpturing. Pa-chou.” Photo by Ernest Henry Wilson; courtesy Arnold Arboretum.

mental to encouraging empirical observation, also wrote about his invention in terms of painting, the dominant form of visual representation until the second half of the nineteenth century, and of the emotions that could be evoked thereby through careful attention to detail: “A painter’s eye will often be arrested where ordinary people see nothing remarkable. A casual gleam of sunshine, or a shadow thrown across his path, a time-withered oak, or a moss-covered stone may awaken a train of thoughts and feelings and picturesque imaginings” (Talbot 1844, 25–26; quoted in Merrill 1989, 179). If paintings could stir the soul, so could photography, Talbot believed, precisely because the minutiae of life—which were so readily overlooked by the common gazer—could be captured and more fully appreciated. In Wilson’s photographs with intentional aesthetic, one cannot help but feel Wilson himself present, as composer of the scene. He is inviting the viewer/ 84 Denise M. glover

reader to experience the awe of nature and to visualize him- or herself in the scene. By entering into the photograph, the viewer/reader becomes a witness to the “unknown” that Wilson has discovered, documented, and, in some cases, brought home.

Conclusion Through much of his writing, Wilson aims to teach and inform his readers of important understandings in the fields of botany and other natural sciences. As a natural historian, he does so not just by presenting the facts but also by imbuing the facts with an aura of wonder that leaves one awestruck. In “The Romance of the Trees,” Wilson conveys nearly the perfect blend of the descriptive and the affective. He begins the article with a quote from Genesis 2:920 to highlight the centrality of the tree, as useful material as well as a potent symbol, in many cultures: “And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil” (quoted in Wilson 1919, 90). First, Wilson encourages the reader to marvel at the amazement of how a tree functions: Built of myriads of minute cells piled on and around each other and differentiated into tissues of varying thickness and forms, all is wonderfully adapted to the work to be performed in the life economy of the whole organism. The big roots firmly anchoring the tree to the earth give off tiny rootlets that absorb water and various food salts in solution, which are carried upward through special tissues to the leaves. The leaves—the lungs and chemical laboratory of the tree— breathe in from the air during daylight a gas deleterious to man (carbon dioxide), break this up and exhale a part as pure oxygen, essential for the life of the animal kingdom. . . . No chemical laboratory in the world built by man, and fitted with all the wonderful appliances of modern science, is half so marvellous as the leaf of any one kind of tree. No system of collection and transportation devised by human ingenuity and skill is so perfect as that which serves each and every tree. (Wilson 1919, 90)

Wilson begins this description at the level of the cell. Merrill notes the centrality of the microscope in Victorian natural history, particularly as a At Home in Two Worlds  85

trope about exploring the wondrous infinity of the world: “The microscope was one of several nineteenth-century devices that ‘unveiled hidden beauties’ in the natural world. It was by far the best known, especially by the public. . . . And the microscope played its part, both for serious researchers, who investigated physiology and disease processes, as well as for the amateur naturalist, who could include his or her own blood cells in the pantheon of marvels revealed by the lens” (Merrill 1989, 120). And, one might add, by the early twentieth century the microscopic metaphor would prove quite useful for professional naturalists in urging their readership to consider the “bond of brotherhood, as it were, between ourselves—mankind in general—and certain groups of plants” (Wilson 1919, 95);21 this Wilson notes as one of the objectives of his article. After examining how a tree functions, Wilson briefly explains in “The Romance of the Trees” the geological history of the earth, with particular attention to the position of trees in this history (some as having gone extinct, others as still existing—as “living fossils” [Wilson 1919, 91]). He also discusses the current geographic distribution of plants as being reflective of adaptation to environment. Thus the article that begins with a quote from Genesis takes the reader on an evolutionary tour of the earth’s vegetative history and then ends by emphasizing the important connection between humans and plants (especially trees—hence the title of the article). Wilson has captured it all, it would seem, in this article: religion, culture, science, and emotion. Wilson was an effective nineteenth-century natural historian, successfully combining expressive literary style with empirical documentation. As Noah Heringman notes, natural history remained for several hundred years (beginning in the seventeenth century) a distinctly literary form of discourse on natural phenomena: One of the virtues of natural history, then as now, is that it helps to unite local scholarly efforts in literature and science. The scientific backgrounds of specific texts are important in themselves and as distinct moments of scientific culture, but they are also jointly important as evidence of the shared culture of “letters” and of the epistemological claims of literary projects to explain the natural world. Such claims reflect the historical importance of aesthetic forms for the transmission of scientific concepts. (Heringman 2003, 6)

86 Denise M. glover

Although not all of Wilson’s writing seems especially attentive to aesthetics, it is clear that much of it is. Heringman also argues that fieldwork was a distinctive component of natural history writing (as distinguished from the more theoretically rigorous natural philosophy): “The crucial distinction between natural history and natural philosophy in the Romantic period was that the former called for fieldwork, the component that kept natural knowledge accessible to a generalist public, both in the field and on the printed page” (Heringman 2003, 4). Thus the fact that Wilson conducted fieldwork and based his writings on the direct experience—both empirical and aesthetic—he had gained through this immersion undoubtedly bolstered the popularity of his writing among a public curious about the “unknown” dimensions of the natural and cultural world. Wilson’s commitment to inform, educate, and engage the public in his “discoveries” and adventures, as well as more general scientific understandings of natural phenomena, is in keeping with the aims of democratizing science and cultivating a love of nature among British and American publics at the turn of the twentieth century. Wilson was not an elitist, and he undoubtedly felt that part of his civic duties to his fellow countrymen (and countrywomen) was to share his knowledge and experiences in a meaningful and engaging way. Although Wilson’s professional life was geared toward acquisition of plants for both commercial and “scientific” purposes—the former was how he got his start in plant hunting—this endeavor did not circumscribe his achievements. In addition to his impressive contributions to botanical “discoveries” and introductions, Wilson was a successful writer, photographer, and humanist. Unfortunately, Wilson died only three years after Plant Hunting was published, at the age of fifty-four. Had he lived longer, there may have been more accounts and interpretations of his adventurous travels in China or elsewhere to ponder. Readers are at least fortunate for the works he produced, even if these appear to be less than cutting-edge travel accounts and sit on shelves for years at a time in between library borrowings. Wilson exemplifies an adventurer and scholar who successfully embraced empirical inquiry and expressive artistry and for that reason can be an inspiration to us all.

At Home in Two Worlds  87

Notes 1

2 3

4

5 6

7

8

Epigraph: Wilson 1927, 2:144. Snow published an earlier paper in 1956 in the New Statesman titled “The Two Cultures,” but his 1959 lecture and subsequent publication (1959) are more elaborated and seem to have been what actually launched his ideas into international discourse. Stefan Collini makes a similar argument about the threat of science to literature in the introduction to the 1998 edition of Snow’s The Two Cultures. This database is available at http://via.lib.harvard.edu/via/deliver/advancedsearch?_collection=via. This essay considers several of his more comprehensive works, as well as a sampling of shorter pieces written for popular magazines. Wilson also published in scientific journals and popular magazines such as House and Garden, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Garden Magazine, with more than one hundred contributions to Horticulture alone (Foley 1969, 52). A thorough analysis of his articles in popular magazines could be especially revealing in terms of how horticultural and botanical knowledge was relayed to a popular American—and largely female— audience. Such an analysis has been explored for similar topics in Britain in Henson et al. 2004 and Cantor et al. 2004. Throughout this essay, science and humanism are used to stand for the more general distinction between description based on empirical observation and expression based on subjective and intersubjective experience, respectively. This eliminates important aspects of both science and humanities, such as the importance of theory and explanation in science, but these are fundamental points of departure that are useful to the present essay and Wilson’s work itself. See, e.g., the discussion in Briggs 1993, 9. Finding the “source” of botanical species generally refers to identifying the most probable location in which a particular species first evolved, or at least the location from which a contemporary species radiated outward, especially into the realm of human notice. The Wardian case was an indispensable tool used by plant collectors. The design allowed for transporting live specimens: the bottom of the case was of sturdy construction so that sufficient soil could be placed inside, and the sides and/or tops of the case had glass panels. In A Naturalist in Western China, Wilson notes his affinity for Songpan: “Did the Fates ordain that I should live in Western China I would ask for nothing better than to be domiciled in Sungpan” (Wilson 1913, 1:144). Wilson traveled up the 88 Denise M. glover

9

10 11

12 13

14

15

course of the Yangtze from Yichang to Chongqing to Leshan and beyond. He also ventured on a more northerly land route through Sichuan, which took him through Songpan, Mianyang, and the areas around Pingchang County. For a complete map of Wilson’s travels, see Wilson 1913, vol. 2. In the present essay, placenames are given using contemporary names (based on current provincial borders) and spellings, except for direct quotations (in which case the original name and spelling are used). Additionally, Wilson notes the problems with flooding in the Emei Shan area, which he and, one assumes, the local inhabitants with whom he spoke attributed to overlogging. Nearly one hundred years later similar problems with flooding would persist so that the central Chinese government would officially ban logging on the upper reaches of the Yangtze in 1998. Wilson also comments on the problem of deforesting more generally: “This mountain [Wu Shan], in common with others I have visited, shows only too plainly the destructive nature of the Chinese. Fifty years more, under the present regime, and there will not be an acre of accessible forest left in all central, southern, and Western China” (1913, 1:247). Most of the deforestation, Wilson adds, is for the making of charcoal. While forests did still exist fifty years after Wilson’s time, his comments on the problem of deforestation are insightful, informative, and relevant to similar concerns today; one wonders at how helpful Wilson’s analyses might have been if seriously considered at the time of their writing. See also Mueggler, this volume, for a discussion of the visual focus in the work of Linnaeus. Merrill is here referencing the 1959 edition of Voyage of the Beagle. A search through Darwin’s voluminous work (at http://darwin-online.org.uk/contents.html) reveals that he used the terms “spectacles,” “aspect” (to mean sight), and “ocular proof” frequently both throughout this volume as well as in his other writing. Other noted plant hunters of Wilson’s time who also worked in China include Frank Kingdon-Ward, Reginald Farrer, and George Forrest. Briggs notes that it was not actually until Wilson’s third expedition to China (his first for the Arnold Arboretum) that he used glass plates, taking with him a highquality, whole-plate Sanderson camera as well as a small folding Kodak camera (which used roll film). See Briggs 1993, 46–47. During his employment with Veitch, Wilson apparently used only a “snapshot camera” (Chvany 1976, 182). Sargent, director of the Arnold Arboretum during Wilson’s third and fourth expeditions to China, seems to have had an important role in this inclusion of photography in Wilson’s collecting effort. On November 6, 1906, he wrote in a letter to Wilson: “A good set of photographs are really about as important as anything you can bring back with you. I hope therefore, you will not fail to provide yourself with the very best possible instrument you can, irrespective of cost” (quoted in Briggs 1993, 46). Chvany states that Wilson took approximately ten thousand photographs throughout the course of his professional life: “a total of over 5000 glass plate photographs for the Arnold Arboretum of the plants and locales to which his journeys At Home in Two Worlds  89

16

17 18 19 20 21

took him, plus an estimated 5000 nitrate-base negatives for himself” (Chvany 1976, 181). There appears to be some disagreement as to whether the plates were developed with or without Wilson present. Briggs notes that the plates were not developed until Wilson returned from the field, whereas Chvany implies that Wilson shipped his plates to England for developing ahead of his return. The calotype process of photography uses paper (rather than film or glass plates) as a negative base. I was fascinated to see that the earliest introduction of Rosa chinesis dates to 1781, about one hundred years earlier than I had thought. Of Wilson’s 2,400-plus photographs that I viewed, approximately 1–2 percent fall into a “purely aesthetic” grouping. Interestingly, Wilson incorrectly quotes this as being Genesis 2:8. Such a “bond” is implied in Wilson’s article not just in considering the similitude between humans and plants on the cellular level but in understanding how humans and plants have been interdependent for tens of thousands of years.

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3 Searching for the “Lolos” Tracking Fritz and Hedwig Weiss’s Trip to the Liangshan Region in 1913 Tamara Wyss

. . . later that evening, as we were about to go to sleep, a messenger came to our tent, and asked us to come once more; the mistress wanted to hear the wonderful singing and talking machine again. Among the Lolo, the women also have their say. Inside the house the whole neighbourhood was gathered . . . a young Waze [Nuosu slave] with a beautiful clear voice was singing. His repertory was much larger than we had expected. Lullabies, songs for fighting, for guarding cattle, songs sung at weddings and feasts. And when, after recording, we played them back, all the faces glowed with pleasure and gave out a hearty laughter I had never heard before from the Chinese. . . . It was almost midnight when we retired and for a long time we could hear their voices before they lay down by the fire, wrapped up in their coats. We felt as if we had received a glimpse into the soul of this strange tribe. Aren’t songs, sung by everyone, not the expression of a people’s soul? (translation by Patrick Camiller) —Hedwig Weiss-Sonnenburg, “Von O Pien Ting nach Ma Pien Ting durchs Lololand”

S

ome wax-reel sound recordings, a few photographs, and two collections in museums are what remain of a brief encounter between my grandparents Hedwig and Fritz Weiss and the Nuosu of the Liangshan region.1 They called the Nuosu “Lolo,” and I remember my grandmother speaking of the Lolo with great admiration. They even gave their second 91

Fig. 3.1  Members of Bielu’s family in front of the Weisses’ tent, 1913. Their Han translator stands to the left. Photo by Fritz and Hedwig Weiss; courtesy Tamara Wyss.

daughter, born in Kunming, the middle name “Lolo.” Their short trip in 1913 into the northern Daliangshan region of southwest China became the great adventure story in the family; it was exceptional for the time, as very few Westerners or Chinese ventured into the area until many decades later. The Nuosu mostly did not welcome travelers and regarded people other than themselves mainly as suppliers of labor. For example, after World War II a search was made for American pilots who had crashed in the Liangshan region, but they had disappeared into the mountains, never to be heard from again. During my own research, I met a few Nuosu who triumphantly told me how they had put the Americans to work in the fields or even killed them. When I look at my grandparents’ record of their encounter with the Nuosu, I am interested as much in their motivations as in their findings. Their background and their movements in China set the stage for their fascination with the Lolos. 92 Tamara wyss

Max Friedrich Weiss Max Friedrich Weiss, or Fritz Weiss as he was known, was born in 1877 in Zurich, Switzerland.2 He spent eighteen years of his life in China, from 1899 to 1917. He went there as a young man of twenty-two, having studied Chinese at the Oriental Seminar in Berlin and completed a course in London for the “indoors service” of the Chinese customs service. Why he chose China, he himself could not quite answer. But from his third year at secondary school in Cologne, China became his “goal in life.” Maybe it was because he had a French teacher who knew China and spoke some Chinese that the young Fritz bought a Chinese grammar, but in Cantonese dialect, as he realized later. By coincidence, Berthold Laufer, his senior by three years, went to the same school.3 China certainly took him far from his parents, but I know of no particular reason for him to flee them. His father had been a rather tyrannical figure, who readily gave out blows if his son’s school marks were unsatisfactory, but nothing Fritz wrote suggests a deep dislike for his father, although he seems to have been closer to his mother. Ludmilla Ascherberg, born in Prague, was a pianist from a Jewish family. She had previously immigrated to Australia but returned to Europe upon the death of her first husband and met and married Fritz’s future father, the Swiss director of the NorthEastern Railway, Emil Weiss. Fritz was born in his parents’ company flat above the Zurich railway station—anecdotal evidence that was used to explain, in geographical terms, his rather unsettled life. Like his mother, he loved music and played the piano. Wherever he took up residence in China, or later in Ethiopia, he would take a piano along. China opened up a new world for him and his secret explorer’s ambitions; during a long period of his personal development that stretched from his early twenties to his late thirties, China was his home. I was five years old when he died in 1955, so my recollection of him is rather patchy, but I know from my mother’s account that in old age he would spend his days dressed in a Chinese gown reading large volumes of classical Chinese text. In China he rose quickly in his position. He spent the first year at the customs service and came to dislike it, then transferred to the German diplomatic service. Working first as an interpreter and translator in a number of German consulates, he was soon promoted (in 1905) to acting consul and, eventually, consul. His first posting was in Sichuan, and after 1914 he opened the German consulate in Yunnan. It was a period of German impeSearching for the “Lolos”  93

rial expansion in China, in rivalry with the more established powers of France and Britain, which together with the United States already had representatives along the Yangtze, in Sichuan and Yunnan. That many of his consular letters bear witness to this rivalry helps explain why the Foreign Office allowed him to travel extensively. His professional advance in China would not have happened without this background: Germany’s presence in China changed dramatically after World War I, and Fritz Weiss, like many other former German diplomats, did not return there.

Early Travels in China and Contact with Minority Populations Before my grandmother arrived on the scene, Fritz had traveled widely, mostly on foot, horseback, or sedan, through western China. He took a number of fine pictures, drew maps, and published his findings in German geographic magazines. One of the earliest mentions of photography was the picture he took in 1902 in Pakhoi (Beihai), where he was sent to report on the “dubious business” of a German company transporting Chinese workers to Malaysian tin mines. As he proudly noted, this use of pictures was a novelty at the time.4 Other reports describe two of his longer journeys, from Burma to Sichuan in 1907 and a roundtrip from Chengdu into Tachienlu (Dajianlu/Kangding) in 1908. The first is a rather dry account of the route and of various commercial or climatic aspects. But he also recorded traces of the Muslim rebellion of some thirty years earlier, describing, for example, the remnants of a mosque and the shrinkage of the Muslim population. In fact, both his accounts refer to military conflicts between minority groups and the Chinese.5 The report of the second journey is much livelier. He had prepared for the trip by taking instruction in the Tibetan language from a Tibetan monk in Chengdu. He observed the tea production and commerce in the province and remarked on the school reform of Zhao Erfeng’s administration and on the history of the family of the Chielu Tusi.6 In this report, much is said of relations between Tibetans and Chinese; the “Tailing [Taining] Incident” is recounted, and there are many descriptions of forced labor, such as for building roads, and ways the population tried to evade it and how this situation contributed to the deterioration of the relationship between Tibetans and Chinese.7 An edited version of this report was published (Weiss 1910) as were other articles about Yunnan, mining, commerce, and so on (Weiss 1908, 94 Tamara wyss

1909, 1912a, 1912b, 1914), but they were less rich in anthropological information. Although his wife later remarked on his great ability to strike up a conversation with anyone he met, peasant or minister, the published material does not describe many of these encounters. Through his journeys around Chengdu, Fritz struck up a friendship with the So Tusi in Tsao Po (Caopo; today Weizhou). The Tusi provided him with horses and hunters. Back in Chengdu, Fritz organized relay horses to take him as fast as possible, and as often as his business allowed him, on short trips into the area, experiences that might have contributed to his interest in and lack of prejudice toward the Nuosu. Later my grandmother would join him on those trips. Their notes reveal that his position as a German consul enabled them to pursue their own travel interests in more remote areas.

First Contacts with the Lolos I do not know if Fritz met any Nuosu before 1910 or knew much about them; in a report he mentions one of their military attacks (Weiss 1907). But he certainly had heard of the French d’Ollone mission, which during his early stay in Sichuan had crossed part of the Liangshan region, the Nuosu’s homeland. When Henri Marie Gustave, Vicomte d’Ollone went to Chengdu in 1908, he stayed in Fritz’s house. “They carried with them on the backs of mules or porters large quantities of the finest champagne, which were opened in the most liberal fashion whenever the opportunity arose,” writes my grandfather (Weiss 1949, 268). He himself was no stranger to such delights and regularly sent for bottles of his favorite “Veuve Clicquot.” The laurels that d’Ollone had gained from his travels did not let Fritz rest, as he put it. Two years after this meeting he planned a long trip to south Sichuan and Yunnan, along the Anning and Yalong rivers. Secretly, he hoped to make a detour to the “mysterious land of the Lolo tribes,” but somehow—as he stated, “What remains secret in China?” (Weiss 1949, 294)—his plans had been made known to Zhao Erxun, then governor-general. Chinese passport regulations forbade any travel in the areas of the socalled barbarians, and Fritz was well aware of it. A disadvantage of being a foreign official was that the Chinese authorities felt responsible for him, and the killing of the Englishman John Weston Brooke (in 1908) greatly worried them.8 Fritz had a good relationship with Zhao Erxun, which lasted over the years, but of course the governor-general had to find ways to prevent Searching for the “Lolos”  95

Fig. 3.2  Chinese soldiers’ colony of Chihging, 1910. The architecture is a mix of Yi and Chinese elements. Photo by Fritz Weiss; courtesy Tamara Wyss.

him from entering certain areas. He ordered four men from his personal guard and an officer to accompany Fritz and wired to all officials en route warning of his intentions. It was to become a three-month journey, and of the many pictures he took, some from this journey are among his finest.9 Fritz observed the Chinese military forts along the way, farmhouses with watchtowers to guard against attack from the Nuosu. Lonely graves with the inscription “Here lies a loyal soldier” were a reminder of the lack of security in the area. He described the villages south of Fulin as really being military colonies. The villages had been settled for centuries, and their inhabitants could be drawn into military service in return for tax privileges. But the villages were badly fortified, and in case of attacks the people usually disappeared behind the walls of their settlements until the Lolos went away again. When they were able to, the Nuosu would capture 96 Tamara wyss

strong young Chinese and carry them off into the mountains to use as slaves. In short, it was a situation where each group expected to be attacked by the other at any time. One of Fritz’s first encounters with the Lolos was with a tall blind warrior chained at the neck, accompanied by another Nuosu, and led by a much shorter Chinese soldier. Fritz was unable to find out the reason for the warrior’s captivity, or why he was blind, but it was not uncommon for the Nuosu, he writes, to be taken prisoners and blinded. He quotes an example in the press at the time, a ceremony at which soldiers cut the throat of a captured Nuosu and used his blood to bless the flag. Occasionally, he came across one of these mountain people lying drunk in the street and lamented that “for alcohol and salt the Lolo will sell his soul”; the Chinese government, quite aware of this situation, “used both substances in their dealings with this tribe” (Weiss 1949, 300). D’Ollone had traveled from Ningyuanfu (today Xichang) eastward, to what is now called Zhaojue. But in the few years since, the Chinese military had managed to build and fortify a road. Fritz followed it, hoping that in Zhaojue he would be able to make contact with the Nuosu. But the army was now building huge walls around the city, with the help of hundreds of Nuosu conscripted laborers. Every one of Fritz’s steps was observed, and his attempts to make contact with Nuosu leaders were blocked. He therefore gave up after four days and returned to Xichang, before continuing his journey south and later west up along the banks of the Yalong. In an area we now call the Small Liangshan he again encountered Lolos: “But no similarity with their independent brothers further east; they were, as in the Chinese name, ‘Cooked Barbarians’ and full of humility before their Chinese lords” (Weiss 1949, 302). Although the whole journey was rewarding in many respects, he failed in the attempt to meet the Lolos and to venture farther into their area. Meanwhile, the governor-general had contacted the German embassy in Beijing, and Fritz was ordered back to Chengdu. The whole incident was sweetened by the promise of a longer leave to return home, and it was then that he met my grandmother. They became engaged, quickly married, and traveled together to China. Most of the information up to this point comes from Fritz’s memoirs (“Erinnerungen”), which with the use of his notebooks were written much later, in the 1940s and after World War II, for his children and grandchildren. His memoirs provide a detailed account of his stay in China, but regrettably he did not continue them beyond his return Searching for the “Lolos”  97

to China in 1911 with my grandmother. He concludes his memoirs with the remark that he is leaving the continuation to her more “gifted pen.”

Hedwig Margarete Weiss-Sonnenburg Hedwig Margarete Weiss, née Sonnenburg in 1889, was twelve years Fritz’s junior when they married. Her teenage diaries are testimony to her longing for adventure, her wish to see other countries and break away from restrictions, and her love for horse riding and nature. Her other ambition was to become a writer. Her lust for adventure was undoubtedly one of the reasons why she married my grandfather: he could tempt her with life in a faraway country. During her stay in China she started to publish articles about her experiences there, and she continued writing articles until the 1930s. She also wrote a number of children’s books, most of them set in the countries she traveled in.10 She was a great storyteller to her grandchildren, who especially loved the tales she told of her own adventures. Hedwig grew up in Berlin. She was the youngest of four children and, like her sisters, was often dressed as a boy and encouraged to engage in sporting activities. She wrote later that her father always resented having had only one boy. Her father was a well-known Berlin surgeon, and her mother was from a family with a Jewish background; although her family counted Moses Mendelssohn among its ancestors, it was by then far removed from Jewish culture and religion.11 From my grandmother’s writing I sense not a particular closeness to her parents but more an idea that they were difficult to please. They had quite advanced ideas about the benefit of physical exercise for their children and showed a spirit of adventure by buying one of the first cars in Berlin and driving it on a long and quite hazardous journey to France. But they had no professional ambitions or even tolerance for such wishes on Hedwig’s part. If she wanted to travel and live abroad, the natural choice was to find a husband who could give her that possibility. This does not mean that Hedwig and Fritz did not like or love each other, but it was a common interest that brought and bonded them together.12

Back to China Together Hedwig and Fritz Weiss left Berlin in the early summer of 1911; friends and family came to marvel at the huge amount of equipment and luggage they 98 Tamara wyss

Fig. 3.3  Fritz and Hedwig Weiss onboard a junk, 1911. Photo courtesy Tamara Wyss.

would take with them. The Musical Ethnography Department of the Berlin Ethnographic Museum gave them an Edison sound recorder and many wax reels, and they inquired at the Museum of Natural History and Science what they could collect for it in China. (A request for a crippled Chinese woman’s foot was politely refused.) They also took at least two cameras with them, as well as chemicals for developing plates and films. They boarded ship in Genoa and traveled through Suez to Sri Lanka and on to Hong Kong and Shanghai, where they arrived in September. Here they received news of the uprisings in Sichuan but decided to continue, up the Yangtze to Chongqing, and finally arrived in April 1912 in Chengdu. During the journey through the Three Gorges they shared a Chinese-style houseboat with boatmen and trackers, as documented in the photographs they took. They also recorded some boatmen’s songs. During this journey they were probably in much closer proximity to ordinary Chinese people than on any other occasion, everyone depending alike on the skills of the boatmen. It was the period of the uprising in Hankou and Sichuan, the abdication of the emperor, and the establishment of a republic. Hedwig came to Searching for the “Lolos”  99

a China very different from the one she had been expecting. In Yichang the revolution caught up with them, and they witnessed the chase after the Manchu desperately trying to escape on the river. Everywhere flags flew with the Chinese character Han (汉), signifying the Han population.13 Fritz and Hedwig were left rather bewildered, for these two groups had lived peacefully together before. Fritz and Hedwig did not have much sympathy or understanding for the Nationalists and their goals, and to some degree they regretted the disappearance of the “Old China.” This position certainly did not help them in their contacts with the new government in Chengdu. The officials whom Fritz had known were now gone. Hedwig’s attempt to make contact with Chinese women, spouses of the new officials, was not successful. Although the Qing dynasty had given way to a modernizing republic, the position of most women was slower to change. Hedwig describes in her memoirs an encounter that highlights her own contrast with the Chinese women around her: the women of the house were playing mah-jongg when she came to visit, and the conversation quickly turned to her unbound feet; her fingernails, which were not painted or long; the number of her servants; and, finally, her (at the time) childless state—all of which caused great pity among her hosts (Weiss-Sonnenburg n.d.). From this account they obviously had little to say to each other.14 In addition, Hedwig was quite independent minded for her time, and in China she could lead a life free of many social restrictions, even those that would have been imposed in imperial Germany.15

The Journey to the Lolos Fritz had not forgotten his ambition to meet the Lolo of Liangshan, and no doubt Hedwig was equally keen. In November 1913, three years after Fritz’s first attempt to meet the Nuosu of the Liangshan, he set out again, with Hedwig. This time a written record was kept by Hedwig; it was later published in a German magazine (Weiss-Sonnenburg 1915) and is the main source for the following report. Apart from a description of their journey and the difficulties in following it through, the article contains some background information on the Liangshan Nuosu. Hedwig describes what she calls their feudal system: each tribe had a ruler, whose position the most courageous son inherited; the ruling group was the “Black Lolo,” or “Black Bones,” who never did manual labor and only hunted. Work in the fields and at home was done by the 100 Tamara wyss

“White Lolo” and / or the “Wazi,”16 a derogative name for those who were mostly abducted from the Chinese or from other minorities. Although in terms of living conditions there was hardly any difference between these groups, clothes and food being pretty much the same, my grandmother observed that the social gap was immense.17 The goal of the journey, apart from satisfying Fritz’s curiosity and “explorer’s ambition,” was to make some sound recordings of the Nuosu songs and take photographs. Their luggage was large, and as always they took two cameras (one was a glass-plate model) and the sound recorder, a tent, camp beds and chairs, some food provisions, pistols, and presents, all of which was carried on mules and on the backs of Chinese porters. Hedwig stresses that this time they did not disclose their destination to the Chinese authorities and left Chengdu at night. They started by boat and continued on horseback. Through Chinese intermediaries they had contacted the Black Nuosu Bielu, of the Wu Po tribe, who in exchange for a present was prepared to let them travel through his area. They met in the arranged place, but the Nuosu appeared to be wary and withdrawn. They camped outside the last town on Chinese soil, O Pien Ting (today Dabao), in a valley already high up in the mountains. But of course they were discovered, soldiers were sent after them, and Bielu’s son was threatened with punishment; for a while it seemed doubtful whether the trip would go ahead. But in the end Hedwig and Fritz managed to convince Bielu’s son, and they continued their journey. By now they were walking, on a two-day journey through mountains and forest. Hedwig went into raptures about the natural landscape: “Close together the most beautiful trees are growing on the steep slopes, shining in autumn colours. A whole pheasant population rises noisily next to us. Fairylike their blues and gold play with the autumn leaves. And in his own country Bielu’s son is like a different person. Laughing, he jumped down from the rocks and offered me a hand wherever he could” (WeissSonnenburg 1915, 8). My grandmother was impressed by the handsomeness of Bielu’s son. He knew about as much Chinese as she did, and that helped them understand each other. They stayed the first night at the house of a wealthy “Waze,” as she called him, but to me her description of this man seems to indicate more likely that he was a “White Yi.” Their hosts offered them the usual welcome drink, and my grandparents let them try some of the German ham they had brought with them. Hedwig describes the lady of the house: “She Searching for the “Lolos”  101

Fig 3.4  Male members of Bielu’s clan, 1913. Bielu is on the right-hand side next to the camera. On the lower roof, the soles of the boots that the Weisses have put out to dry are visible. Photo by Fritz and Hedwig Weiss; courtesy Tamara Wyss.

is tall and slim, has wonderfully regular facial features, a straight nose and proud flashing eyes under curved brows. With her high collar embroidered with silver pearls, and her long pleated skirt, she looks from a distance like an elegant European lady. Underneath her coat she carries an enchanting naked child, whose round, long-lashed eyes make him look like an Italian bambino” (Weiss-Sonnenburg 1915, 10; translation by Patrick Camiller). The following day, in the afternoon, they met Bielu: “Like a proud Roman tyrant the old one looks. . . . Finally we reach the ruler’s castle—a house like the others, just a bit larger” (Weiss-Sonnenburg 1915, 11). They brought with them a Chinese man from the border region who could speak the language, so communication, she wrote, was no problem. They offered him a present, two tiger’s teeth in a silver setting; it seemed a fitting gift. As 102 Tamara wyss

Fig. 3.5  Probably Bielu’s wife with child, 1913. Photo by Fritz and Hedwig Weiss; courtesy Tamara Wyss.

Fig. 3.6  Arranging headdress, 1913. Photo by Fritz and Hedwig Weiss; courtesy Tamara Wyss.

they sat around the fire, Hedwig after a while took out her notebook. This caused sudden alarm and noise, so she put the book away. The next day passed in a good atmosphere: people seemed to lose their suspicion; the ruler’s “most lovely” nine-year-old son started to play with Fritz and Hedwig, pulling their jackets and then running away, “just as a German boy would do,” Hedwig notes. She continues: “Never in China had I experienced children behaving naughtily like that. Here the little ones tussle on the ground, while the small Chinese are satisfied to curse each other up to the last ancestor without ever touching the adversary” (WeissSonnenburg 1915, 12). They might not have liked Hedwig’s notebook, but “women, men, children are all willing to let themselves be photographed, after we get them to take a Searching for the “Lolos”  103

look through the camera themselves” (Weiss-Sonnenburg 1915, 12). Although people lined up to be photographed, stopping their daily routine and work, there was a naturalness, an easiness, and, at the same time, a dignity about them that was quite striking. These are images of people my grandparents obviously liked. And they show people who felt at ease being photographed, even if they probably had no idea of the result (see figs. 3.5–3.6). The Nuosu were very keen on the weapons my grandparents carried with them, so that when someone suggested a shooting contest Hedwig and Fritz agreed and asked Bielu to have a go with his bow as well. That my grandmother, a woman, knew how to handle the pistol provoked astonishment and pleasure. A day later, this time with a different man to lead them safely, Fritz and Hedwig said farewell. They had another four days on foot ahead of them through wild forest. Hedwig felt reminded of a time when Germany was covered by such forest, two thousand years ago, “when our warlike forefathers, as light-footed as the Lolos, chased through clefts and ravines,” as she noted (Weiss-Sonnenburg 1915, 15). She further compared the heavily armed Roman soldiers, clumsily penetrating the dense forest of ancient Germany, to the Chinese troops and their unsuccessful attempts to conquer Lolo country. When they reached a Chinese border town, their Nuosu companion bade farewell, quickened his steps, and disappeared, “a free, happy person.” East from here they were not allowed. It was in the same frontier town, San Hou Kou, where three years previously the beheaded body of the Englishman Brooke and the bodies of the Chinese who had accompanied him had been handed over. From here, Chinese soldiers walked with them to Ma Pien Ting (Mabian), where the journey ended on a sad note. In Ma Pien Ting, thirty Nuosu were being kept as hostages in the magistrate’s yamen, one from each tribe, my grandmother wrote. From a dark prison cell they were led into the court to be shown: Old and young, indescribably filthy, in ragged coats, gray skin color, and matted hair: they looked frightening. What a difference between them and the tanned Lolos of the mountains! What have a few years in prison turned them into . . . these hostages are held responsible for all misdeeds of their tribe . . . of course they are all Black Bones. . . . Face, hands, and feet black as if covered with soot, feet uncared for with long, bent nails as if they were wild animals kept too long in a cage. . . . 104 Tamara wyss

Like Indians some of them looked, some very ugly, but their features were expressive, weathered, and sharply cut. One never sees anything similar with the smooth-faced Chinese. Some had taken their flutes into the prison, some their Jew’s harp. We recorded the flute player. They were very interested in the process, and when we played them the fighting song recorded at Bielu’s their faces lit up. After the recording the Chinese soldiers chased them back into their dungeon . . . a sad, unforgettable sight. (Weiss-Sonnenburg 1915, 19)

On this sad note her account finishes.

The Weisses’ Journey to the Land of the Nuosu: An Interpretation For Hedwig and Fritz this trip must have been a welcome change from their daily routine and the constraints of life in Chengdu. The trip’s adventurous character is highlighted by the potential dangers they faced, both from the Nuosu and from the Chinese military, which wanted to prevent them from entering the area. They could also feel proud in comparison to other Europeans who had tried and failed, such as Brooke. Hedwig and Fritz accepted the Nuosu caste system; they viewed a hierarchic social order as something natural and strongly identified with the position of the Black Bones, who they saw as equals, as representatives of another power. They admired the Nuosu enjoyment of outdoor life, sharing their fondness for the wilderness and hunting. As my grandmother was very keen on sports, she must have found the Chinese disdain of physical exercise and their sense of decorum quite restricting. The Nuosu appeared more attractive than the Chinese to Hedwig and Fritz. The conflict between Nuosu and Chinese reminded Hedwig of the Romans’ attempt to conquer Germany. She credited the Nuosu for their courage, bravery, and love of freedom. They could identify with the Nuosu ideal of a hero as someone who was, above all, courageous and knowledgeable about nature. They could relate to a seemingly unspoiled life in harmony with nature, where fighting and warfare had immediate goals and people appeared to express pleasure or displeasure without the constraints of etiquette. Even the dirty and ugly Nuosu prisoners seemed more familiar than the “smooth-faced Chinese.” This view reveals something about what they missed in China and their longing for things closer to their own ideals. Searching for the “Lolos”  105

About one hundred years before the time of my grandparents, the idealization of nature was emphasized by the German Romantic movement in art, literature, and music. Part of this idealization was the idea of the “noble savage,” and to Germans the American Indians fit that ideal. James Fennimore Cooper was widely read and emulated.18 And groups of Indians were an important and popular part of Völkerschauen (ethnic spectacles).19 Many of the attributes my grandmother admired in the Nuosu are not too dissimilar from those that she and others admired in the American Indians. She gave her grandchildren many books with North American Indians as important protagonists, and she herself in the 1930s wrote such a book, titled Kaowiik, set during the time of the Battle of the Monongahela and Braddock’s defeat by the Indians in the Anglo-French war in Canada in 1755. The book’s main character is an English boy who grows up with the Delaware and comes to understand and love them.20 In their brief encounter with the Nuosu, Hedwig and Fritz were also following a romantic pursuit of the noble savage; Hedwig brought this pursuit to a close with Kaowiik, although it is much less romantic than her earlier descriptions of the Nuosu. In their search for the Lolos the Weisses had set out to find something quite different from the Chinese way of life, to find what was really “other.” Like travelers and anthropologists in an unfamiliar environment, they were looking for an ideal and for something more familiar to them, even if they had to refer back in time to Germany as it existed two thousand years before. They found those ideals more in the Nuosu society as they knew it than in traditional Chinese society, but their findings reveal more about their own longings than about the other culture. That both my grandparents’ mothers came from Jewish families might partly explain their interest in cultures and countries outside Germany and, more particularly, in China’s minority cultures. In Tristes Tropiques Claude Lévi-Strauss discusses how one of the necessary traits of an anthropologist is a certain distance from his (or her) own culture. My grandparents’ background, more varied than other middle-class Germans’ at that time, would have provided that distance. But individual choice also played a part; for example, Hedwig’s sisters and brother did not follow a similar course in life. Throughout Hedwig’s and Fritz’s lives, and in Hedwig’s writings up until the Nazi period and to some extent even later, a strong identification with (parts of) German culture and history can be detected. 106 Tamara wyss

If their partly Jewish roots did not play a conscious role for Hedwig and Fritz up until the Nazi period, would others in the foreign service in China in the early 1900s, or later in the 1920s, have considered their background significant? Were they in any way different from other German officials in China, in terms of background and interests? I do not have a definite answer. Did Fritz feel like an outsider and overcompensate as a result? He was quite critical toward many of his colleagues, and toward German politics, yet he would write patriotic letters to his superiors and use patriotic arguments so that he would be allowed to undertake this or that journey. Having examined various Foreign Office files of the time, I have surmised that, compared with the majority of his colleagues, his extensive reporting on the situation in China was rather unusual. The same is true of his knowledge of China, his language abilities, and his readiness to travel off the beaten path. Also, for example, on the matter of appearance, he was very fashion conscious. He certainly knew what to wear and which brand of suitcases to buy; on one occasion he even remarks that a senior official whom he met by chance on one of his journeys gazed with envy at his luggage. He was a lover of good food and regularly had packages shipped out from Fortnum and Masons, which he thought superior to similar German suppliers.21 All this would have set him apart from many of his colleagues. Hedwig’s looks and manners and her fluent French and English, which helped her establish social contacts with representatives of other nations, equally contributed to their standing. Few female Westerners would have been in Sichuan or Yunnan at that time, and I know of none who had ambitions similar to Hedwig’s.22 She describes few contacts and no friendships with other women. In any case, she must have been a very singular person and drawn considerable attention to herself. A small German colony in Yunnan included women, and she might have been the object of some envy there. Regarding their time in China, I found only one document in the Foreign Office record that referred to their background and possible “otherness”: a letter from “Der Sachverständige für Rasseforschung” (the expert for racial research) from 1934 inquiring about Fritz’s “racial origin.” The cause for this inquiry was a letter from someone who evidently had known the Weisses in Yunnan and written to the German authorities, denouncing Fritz for being Jewish. The writer did not know Fritz’s further whereabouts and could describe him only as the former German consul in Yunnan. The Searching for the “Lolos”  107

Fig. 3.7  Viewing old pictures, 2005; Tamara Wyss with camera. Photo by Zhou Fengran; courtesy Tamara Wyss.

document is the one indication that someone back in China must have known of their background and felt strong enough about it to motivate a denunciation almost twenty years later.23 These assembled facts provide clues to their otherness within their own culture and put their stay in China and the journey to the Nuosu in the context of their own lives and backgrounds. But there was not only otherness; in many aspects they felt and were truly German, as marked by their upbringing and surroundings. The imperial ambitions of Germany surely helped them realize their lust for adventure; additionally, there was their love for wild nature and all the emotions they shared with fellow travelers (not necessarily German) of the time. And of course their own individual dispositions, especially in Hedwig’s case, led to choices that other members of their families did not make.

108 Tamara wyss

Fig. 3.8  Comparing locations, 2005. Photo by Tamara Wyss.

Epilogue: Visits to the Liangshan Region Ninety Years Later Between 2001 and 2005 I had several opportunities to visit the Liangshan region.24 Among other aspirations, I was hoping to find the descendants of the family my grandparents had visited in 1913 (I was following another German obsession: the past.) A journey in the Dabao region (the O Pien Ting of my grandparents’ time) in 2001 brought no results, as I was told that all the Black Nuosu had left the area. Later, when I was at the point of almost giving up the quest, it occurred to me that because of the strong clan structure still in existence it might be better to focus on members of the same clan rather than on the geographic area of the family’s possible abode. But the clan in question is very large, and in the end it was chance that came to my aid. High up in the mountains, about eighty kilometers north of Meigu, I met an old member of the very clan who was apparently able to recount his Searching for the “Lolos”  109

Fig. 3.9  Two men who remember Bielu’s family, 2005. Photo by Tamara Wyss.

clan’s history going back more than one hundred generations. He knew of Bielu, knew where he had lived, had known his sons, and was able to tell me where I might find a great-granddaughter of his. She now works as an official in the county of her family’s old home. My interpreter and I searched and found her and an old aunt. In amazement they looked at the pictures of their ancestors. Together we set off for the village where Bielu used to live. None of the family lives there anymore. The drive was through beautiful countryside, forested ravines, and waterfalls, reminding me of a Black Forest landscape, and I could understand my grandmother’s enchantment. Cornstalks cover the ground where Bielu’s house once stood; the hills around us were as barren as in the old photographs. People did not recognize the men or women in the pictures; they were taken too long ago. But a curious bystander identified the background in one of the pictures just across the valley; he traced the outline of the mountains, and I could see it was the same. I could even make out the place where my grandparents’ tent had stood, which resulted in a strange feeling of different times being suddenly intertwined (see fig. 3.8). Why was the family no longer here? What had happened to them, to the house? These were the things I wanted to know. 110 Tamara wyss

Two old men, former dependants of the clan, were able to tell me what happened. The house was pulled down by Bielu himself; people thought it had bad feng shui. They remembered Bielu as a very old and blind man. Quite different fates befell Bielu’s sons. One had early on made contact with the Chinese authorities; his descendants are still alive and now live in the city, and it was his granddaughter who traveled with me. But his brother died, together with his whole family, during the time of the famine after the Great Leap Forward.25 He had been taken to a camp with other Black Nuosu, the men told us. Having survived the famine, they were the only old men left in this village. How they survived, they did not know. “Maybe because you were kind,” the young woman traveling with me suggested. “No, nothing to do with kindness; we ate grass, maybe that’s why,” was their answer. But then they asked me, intrigued by the story I told, how was it that my grandparents had been there, what had they said, and how had they been able to communicate. They told me about one of Bielu’s sons, who was so handsome and had such a wonderful voice that people came from far away to hear him sing and marvel at him. When I said that my grandmother had remarked on his good looks too, the pleasure was great. On the good looks of Bielu’s son they agreed, my grandmother and the old Nuosu men.

Searching for the “Lolos”  111

Notes Hedwig’s pen surname was Weiss-Sonnenburg (née Sonnenburg); her legal surname (as given in her passport) was Weiss. I use both names throughout this chapter. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 1

2 3

4 5

6

Epigraph: Weiss-Sonnenburg 1915, 13. Nuosu translates as “Black people”; the Nuosu consider black the most attractive color. The collections are in the Berlin and Munich Anthropological Museums (Völkerkundemuseums). The wax reels are in the Musical Ethnography Department of the Berlin Ethnographic Museum. Fritz Weiss changed the family name “Weiss” to “Wyss” after World War II; both versions had existed in the family in the past. Laufer (1874–1934) became an eminent anthropologist and the first American sinologist. He emigrated to the United States in 1898 and became a curator at the Chicago Field Museum. Like Fritz, he had a Jewish family background. He and Fritz would meet again in 1908 in Chengdu when Fritz was the German consul. Laufer was interested in acquiring Chinese and Tibetan collections for the Chicago Field Museum and asked Fritz if he could advise him on the acquisition of a complete Tibetan temple with all its religious objects; money was no object. Fritz had to disappoint him on this account, as the Tibetans did not at all like to be separated from their holy relics. So Fritz sold him a large Cantonese execution sword; a coat of mail, maybe of Persian origin, which had somehow arrived in Canton; and a strange armored coat trimmed with copper scales. Both pieces were described in Laufer’s book Chinese Armour, which mentioned that the armored coat had obvious signs of use in warfare. But in fact the bullet holes resulted from the use of Fritz’s Mauser pistol during some wild nights of drinking. Unfortunately, the report itself was no longer to be found in the files of the Foreign Office. I do have one picture of the time, which depicts the mentioned workers. Much later, during World War I, when Fritz was by then living in Yunnan, he conducted interviews with Muslims about the uprising; unfortunately, all this has been lost. Those interviews, however, might not have been pursued entirely because of anthropological interest, as the German government by then had an interest in supporting minorities against the British or French colonial powers. Similar pursuit was not unknown to those powers, sometimes conducted through their missionaries. Tusi is a Chinese term for local leader; these were positions filled by appointment 112 Tamara wyss

7

8

9 10

11

12

13

14

during the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. Zhao Erfeng was twice governorgeneral of Sichuan, infamous because of his involvement in the suppression of the “railway movement” in 1911, which was one factor in the downfall of the Qing dynasty. He was beheaded by revolutionary troops late in 1911. His brother, Zhao Erxun, was also governor-general in Sichuan for a period and was much more highly regarded. A clash in 1905 between Chinese gold diggers and the monks of the Taining Monastery (Tibetan: Gathar Gompa) developed into a larger struggle between Tibetans and the Chinese military. Hedwig later recounts from the testimony of the only surviving Chinese the events that led to Brooke’s death. During bad weather, snow, and rain, Brooke became separated from his Nuosu guarantor. Instead of waiting and looking for him, Brooke continued with his Chinese companion into an unknown area. In the next village he could not find a new guarantor. The inhabitants even ran away, not wanting to have anything to do with a stranger who traveled without a guarantor. Brooke continued on and in the next village found a chieftain who was prepared to vouch for him. But Brooke did not want to pay him in advance, and, impatient with the long negotiation, in order to convince the chieftain, Brooke gripped him confidentially by the shoulder. The chieftain misunderstood the gesture, drew his sword, and hit Brooke, who immediately pulled his pistol and shot the chief through the head; the chief was killed instantly. After this incident Brooke’s fate was sealed: a “Black Bone” has to be avenged. Brooke and his companions, apart from the one survivor, were killed. Most of Fritz and Hedwig’s photographs of China are published in Wyss 2009. Two of these books are based on Hedwig’s experiences in China: Das Buch vom kleinen Chinesen Li, which describes the life of a tracker boy on the Yangtze, and Pflaumenblüte und Kai-Lin, which was also published in English, as Plum Blossom and Kai Lin, in 1960. Mendelssohn (1729–86) was an outstanding philosopher of his time and a reformer of Jewish orthodoxy. In addition, he was the grandfather of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, the composer, pianist, and conductor. Fritz and Hedwig met through Hedwig’s uncle, who had spent some time in China and had met Fritz in Shanghai. Back in Berlin, Fritz was invited to dinner at the uncle’s mother’s house, where Hedwig was present. Fritz apparently fell instantly for her; on her side it took more convincing. The ruling Qing dynasty at the time was of Manchu origin, and the Nationalists trying to overthrow the Qing dynasty stressed this fact and referred to their own Han identity as a means of political struggle. Today Han are regarded as constituting 92 percent of the Chinese populace, but the concept of Han is fluid and debated; the Han are not a homogeneous ethnic group. During my own research in Chengdu I met two women who were over one hundred years old—roughly ten years younger than Hedwig—and who at a young age had already had ambitions quite different from those of their mothers. Such women existed, but they were few, and Hedwig did not encounter them. Fritz had Searching for the “Lolos”  113

15 16

17

18

19

20

21

22

a good relationship with some of the old officials of the empire but no special contacts with the young reformers or revolutionaries of the time, thus maybe making social intercourse on a different footing possible. On the whole, social intercourse between traditional Chinese and Westerners was rather limited. I made a film about my grandparents’ stay in China, linking it with today’s sitation in the same places. See Wyss 2005. The contemporary pinyin spelling for this term is Wazi. An earlier spelling was Waze, which is the one that was used by my grandparents in their writing and which I have maintained if directly quoting their work. The gap is still immense, as I experienced during my own research in the area. Everyone marries within his or her own stratum, although into a different clan; there does not seem to be intermarriage between Black and White Nuosu, and everybody knows very well to which clan and stratum another person belongs. A Black Nuosu who marries a White Nuosu loses his or her “Black” position. But the former system of “slavery” is not equivalent to the European model of slavery in antiquity. White Nuosu as well as Wazi could have slaves if they were able to afford them; a family of Wazi, after having served its master over some generations, could become White Nuosu. For example, a particularly popular author of the nineteenth century was Karl May (1842–1912), who wrote many travel novels and books set in North America; most of the protagonists in his books were American Indians, such as the character Winnetou. May had never actually seen the places he described so vividly. His books remained popular throughout the twentieth century in all of the various German states. The phenomenon of Völkerschauen reached its height of popularity throughout Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. On fairgrounds, in exhibition halls, and in zoos, people from different parts of the world were exhibited, often along with other aspects of their livelihoods, such as houses and tools. With the advent of cinema those spectacles lost their appeal; however, in Germany, as early as the seventeenth century, “real” (American) Indian villages with “real” Indians were on display. This attraction was not entirely one-sided; there are many records of American Indians who were pleased with the huge popularity and applause they received in Germany. For example, the Sioux chieftain Edward Two Two (1851– 1914) was buried according to his wish in Dresden, at the Neuer Katholischer Friedhof (New Catholic Cemetery). “Kaowiik” Als die Indianer durch die Wälder zogen was published in 1938 and again after World War II, in the German Democratic Republic as well as the Federal Republic. He was probably knowledgeable in those areas also because of his contact with members of his mother’s extended family who lived in various European countries and farther abroad. Hedwig’s report from the journey back to Germany refers to an encounter with American missionaries at Suifu (or Xufu, now Yibin), and although their names are not mentioned, the people the Weisses encountered probably included David 114 Tamara wyss

and Alicia Graham: “Here at Suifu . . . the children caught a bad cold, the first one on that journey. . . . So we were forced to prolong our stay for a few more days and even had to contact the American missionary doctor. He and also the other American missionaries present were of extreme friendliness toward us, without any hatred toward Germany and the Germans, which, in those times, touched us most pleasantly” (Weiss-Sonnenburg 1917, 11). 23 There were other letters in 1933 and 1934 referring to Fritz’s last year in office in Paraguay; in these the emphasis was on Hedwig as a “Berlin Jewess.” Since my grandmother was not one to talk openly of her ancestry, I still wonder what made people think that she might be of Jewish extraction. But at that time Fritz’s and Hedwig’s opposition to the political development in Germany could no longer be hidden, and the German community in Paraguay was especially nationalistic. Fritz left his office in 1934, a short time before he would have been forced to leave. He tried to find work elsewhere but failed. They spent two years in Spain living on his pension and returned to Germany in 1936 when the German authorities no longer allowed money transfers to other countries. Apart from Hedwig’s short stay in a Gestapo prison, they managed to survive the Nazi period in Berlin, mainly because of their declared “mixed race” status. After the war, Fritz received some financial compensation from the new government. 24 For a more detailed description of this journey, see Wyss 2006. 25 During the Great Leap Forward (1957–59), livestock and crops were confiscated in the Liangshan area, and in the famine that followed a large amount of the population died; some former officials with whom I could talk guessed that in some villages up to 40 percent of the population perished. During the Cultural Revolution, the Nuosu culture, their writing and religious beliefs, and particularly the Black Nuosu, were persecuted; many left the area to live undiscovered in the big cities. The mentioned family also suffered losses; when they were told two decades later that they could file for compensation they refused. They are still worried that one day this compensation could be held against them. While visiting them in the large city apartment where they now dwell, I was left with the impression that it was very important for them not to be recognized as descendants of a Black Nuosu leader.

Searching for the “Lolos”  115

4 Classifying Joseph Rock Metamorphic, Conglomerate, and Sedimentary Alvin Yoshinaga, He Jiangyu, Paul Weissich, Paul Harris, and Margaret B. Swain

J

oseph Rock was a larger than life character, embodying many of the myths and stereotypes about the arrogant but knowledgeable EuroAmerican explorer during the first half of the twentieth century. He metamorphosed from an Austrian servant’s child into a respected, self-taught botanist in Hawai‘i, then a photojournalist and ethnographer in southwest China, before returning to Hawai‘i near the end of his days. He was a conglomerate of taxonomic and observational talents, as well as distinctive personality traits. His scholarship developed as strata through time, informing contemporary botanists, ethnographers, and linguists, including descendents of the people he studied. He produced numerous botanical and ethnographic articles, photo essays for National Geographic magazine, and a lifework on Naxi language and has been the subject of various biographers (Sutton 1974; Aris 1992; He, He, and Rock 2000). Rock’s life, scholarly work, and legacies merit examination from multiple perspectives. Four specialists provide contrasting narratives about him in this chapter: botanist Alvin Yoshinaga explores Rock’s early days on the Hawaiian islands and his enduring importance in botany; Naxi scholar He Jiangyu recounts his arrival and subsequent work with Naxi in southwest China; colleague Paul Weissich reminisces about his final years back in Hawai‘i; and documentarian Paul Harris recounts the filming of a biographical work on Rock, shot in Austria, Hawai‘i, and southwest China, titled A King in China.1

116

Becoming Joseph Rock Josef Franz Karl Rock was born in Vienna on January 13, 1884. His father worked as a servant for a wealthy Polish aristocrat, Count Potocki, raising young Josef Franz and his sister alone after their mother died. Rock grew up surrounded by an aristocratic lifestyle, which he emulated wherever he was in his later years (see the timeline of his travels). While not a focused student, he showed great abilities in languages during his childhood, learning Hungarian from his mother, Chinese by studying on his own, and Arabic from Arabic speakers in Vienna and during a trip to Egypt with the count. These abilities were fundamental to Rock’s later mystique as a very well-educated and credentialed intellectual. A widely regarded legend in Hawai‘i is that by the age of sixteen Rock had taught Arabic at the University of Vienna (Chock 1963), although there are no records of Rock’s ever having had any formal association with that university (Sutton 1974). After his secondary education, Rock had wanted to attend university, but his father insisted that he prepare for the priesthood at a seminary. In the stories that have developed around Rock’s life, his next steps were classic moves of the wandering young hero in search of his quest. Rock left his home and spent several years traveling around Europe, supporting himself with menial jobs, in between bouts with tuberculosis. Serendipitously, at age twenty-one, he sailed off to New York City. He continued to follow an itinerant path, landing in Waco, Texas, in the summer of 1907. There he studied religion and painting at Baylor University for one term, in what turned out to be his only formal higher education. Though doctors suggested that he seek a dry climate for his health, Rock chose to sail for Hawai‘i in the fall of 1907. Many years later Baylor was the first to award Rock an honorary doctorate, legitimizing his self-appropriated title of “Dr. Rock” taken on during his Hawai‘i career. Conflicting images of Rock as a driven loner and as an engaging storyteller with a wide circle of friends grew from the time he first settled in Hawai‘i. Rock’s legacy in terms of his scholarly work in botany, ethnography, and linguistics is very secure. Local memories of him seem strongest in southwest China, where a burgeoning ethnic and scenic tourism industry often evokes his life work among the locals. The village of Yuhu became the site of an ecotourism development project funded by the Ford Foundation in the early 1990s in part because of its historic ties to Rock (Ives 1994; Swope et al. 1997). This project has continued with assistance from the Yunnan Classifying Joseph Rock  117

Academy of Social Sciences and some collaboration with the Nature Conservancy’s Lijiang Visitor Center. While these projects are for local benefit, Rock’s Lijiang legacy also promotes a bit of his old elitist ways. A very highend international resort in the region, the Banyan Tree (2008), claims Rock as part of the cultural landscape in its Web advertisement: Famous voyagers who have lived here include Austrian-American scholar-cum-botanist Dr. Joseph Rock who introduced Lijiang to the West in the early 20th century. Rock was widely known as National Geographic’s “man in China.” . . . It is widely believed that the ShangriLa James Hilton described in his book ‘Lost Horizon’ was based on many articles written by Rock. At Yuhu, 10 kilometers from Lijiang, you can visit a museum showcasing Rock’s memorabilia.

Rock inhabits a cyber landscape in other places besides tourism sites. Institutional archives, a film production site (People and Places), and a personal blog (In the Footsteps of Joseph Rock) provide extraordinary access to Rock’s remarkable photographs. Joseph Rock has moved into the twentyfirst century, continuing to enrich not only people’s understandings of botanical species of Hawai‘i and Yunnan but also ethnohistory and linguistics studies of southwest China.

Joseph Rock’s Botanical Career Alvin Yoshinaga Although Joseph Rock is best known as an explorer and anthropologist of the Chinese borderlands, he also had a shorter, equally brilliant, career as a botanist of Hawai‘i. In the present day, he is still widely regarded within the field as the greatest botanist to have worked in Hawai‘i. Rock’s career as a botanist began soon after he arrived there in late 1907. Having decided to see the tropics, Rock moved from the United States mainland despite physicians’ warnings that the humidity would ruin his health (Chock 1963). En route onboard ship, he lost his money gambling and arrived in Honolulu with only small change in his pocket (Sutton 1974). He was hired as a Latin teacher at Mills School, now the Mid-Pacific Institute. Since Mills School had only three full-time teachers, he was also required to teach natural history, a subject he knew little about. He began learning natural history 118 Yoshinaga, He, weissich, harris, & swain

Fig. 4.1  Chamaesyce rockii (formerly Euphorbia rockii), the first plant named after Joseph Rock. From Warren Wagner et al., Manual of the Flowering Plants of Hawai‘i, 612. Illustration courtesy University of Hawai‘i Press.

on his own so successfully that, by 1908, the botanist C. N. Forbes named a plant, Euphorbia rockii (now Chamaesyce rockii) after him (see fig. 4.1). In September 1908, Rock left Mills School to become a botanical collector, and later botanical assistant, for the Division of Forestry of the Territory of Hawai‘i. By 1909, he had published his first professional paper in a scientific journal, a description of a new species of Scaevola in the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club. During his three years at the Division of Forestry, Rock started an herbarium and developed a network of collaborators among noted botanists of his day. When the Division of Forestry decided to replace the botanical assistant with a forester in 1911, Rock transferred to the then new College of Hawai‘i (now the University of Hawai‘i) as a botanist. He brought the herbarium with him and continued to develop it. In 1913, he became an American citizen, changing his name from Josef Franz Karl Rock to Joseph Francis Charles Rock. From 1914 on, he taught systematic botany at the college. That same year, he was appointed to the Building and Grounds Faculty Committee. Rock began planting a twenty-acre area of the campus that had been set aside for perpetuity as a botanical garden where “no valuable plants need be planted in situations which will later be needed for other purposes” (Chock 1963, 92). By 1918, Rock had planted five hundred species of plants, both native Hawaiian plants from his own collections and exotClassifying Joseph Rock  119

Fig. 4.2  Rock (right) and colleague standing next to a seedling in a wind screen, Hawai‘i (undated, pre-1920). Photo courtesy Paul Weissich.

ics from Asia and the Americas (see fig. 4.2). In 1919, Rock was appointed professor of systematic botany. Curiously, the College of Hawai‘i catalog of that period lists the University of Vienna after his name, although there is no evidence that he ever attended that institution. Later, Baylor University awarded him an honorary degree in 1930, as did the University of Hawai‘i in 1962 (Chock 1963, 97). While at the Division of Forestry and subsequently the College of Hawai‘i, Rock produced the majority of his botanical publications, including most of his botanical scholarship. He traveled extensively through Europe, Asia, North America, and the Pacific, sometimes at his own expense. In 1913–14, he made a trip around the world. In 1916, he visited the Philippines, Java, and Singapore on a trip funded by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ 120 Yoshinaga, He, weissich, harris, & swain

Association. In 1919, he went to Siam, Malaya, and Java (Sutton 1974). In his travels, he visited other botanical institutions, exchanged specimens with them, became familiar with the plants of other regions, and collected propagation material to bring back to Hawai‘i. In 1920, as the College of Hawai‘i became the University of Hawai‘i, the college administration made arrangements to transfer the herbarium that Rock had developed, now numbering twenty-eight thousand specimens, to the Bishop Museum. Rock objected strongly to the move. Taking the transfer over his objections as a personal insult, he quit the college in a huff in May 1920 (Sutton 1974). Rock’s earlier ties with David Fairchild, then director of the Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, proved valuable to him after he left the university. In the fall of 1920, Fairchild hired him as an agricultural explorer assigned to collect propagation material of chaulmoogra (Hydnocarpus kurzii), a Southeast Asian tree used at the time for treatment of leprosy. Rock was well qualified for this task, having already collected chaulmoogra during a 1919 trip to Siam and Burma. His successful trip led to 2,980 trees of this and related species being planted on Oahu by 1922, to provide a domestic source of chaulmoogra oil. The trees began to fruit in 1929, but the fruits were never used. By the early 1930s, researchers at the IG Chemical Company in Germany and the Pasteur Institute in France had developed sulfa drugs, a far more effective treatment for leprosy than chaulmoogra oil. Descendants of the trees that Rock collected can be seen in Foster Garden and Lyon Arboretum in Honolulu.2 Rock spent most of the next three decades in Asia. He passed through Hawai‘i from time to time in his travels, but his scientific activity in Hawai‘i had ceased. Concern about unrest in China led Rock to offer to lend his library to the University of Hawai‘i. In return, the university appointed him research professor of the history, geography, and botany of China and paid him an annual stipend. This arrangement came to an abrupt end in 1940, when, while in Honolulu escaping from the Sino-Japanese War, Rock inspected his library at the university. Finding the collection neglected in a dirty storeroom, Rock reclaimed it. He then resigned from the university a second time, publicly condemned the president of the university for his handling of the matter, and returned to Asia. Needing money after World War II, Rock opened negotiations with Serge Elisseeff, director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, to sell his books. He eventually sold his library of books and some personal papers for $25,000 to the Far East and Russian Classifying Joseph Rock  121

Institute at the University of Washington, where it resides today (Sutton 1974). After Rock was forced to leave China following the Communist victory in 1949, he spent several years wandering through Asia, Europe, the continental United States, and, increasingly, Hawai‘i. By 1953, he resumed working on Hawaiian botany. In Honolulu, Lester and Loy Marks befriended him. Loy, who was born Loy McCandless into a family of wealthy landowners, had a great interest in plants. In 1957, the Marks family became his patrons and made him a permanent guest in their mansion in the hills overlooking Honolulu, where he lived the remainder of his life. He died there of a heart attack on December 5, 1962. His last public appearance was at a meeting of the Hawaiian Botanical Society just two days earlier. His grave is in the McCandless family plot in the Oahu Cemetery, not far from where he spent his last years.

Rock’s Career as a Botanist Rock’s working career falls neatly into four parts. In the first, from 1907 to 1920, he was a botanist in Hawai‘i. He spent the second part, from 1920 to 1949, in Asia. After he was forced to leave China, he was itinerant from 1949 to 1953, during which he produced only two scholarly works. From about 1954, during the final part of his career, he resumed activity as a botanist in Hawai‘i while continuing to work on material that he accumulated in Asia. Curiously, in light of his extensive ethnographic work in China, Rock published no ethnobotanic works except for a list of indigenous Hawaiian names for plants. Table 4.1 classifies Rock’s publications by the periods of his career and year of appearance, based on the bibliography in his obituary by Alvin K. Chock (1963). Though Rock’s first Hawai‘i career from 1907 to 1920 was relatively short, during this period he produced the majority of his botanical publications. All his publications from this period were on botanical subjects. Many remain in use today. His book The Indigenous Trees of the Hawaiian Islands (1913) provided the best record of landscapes and vegetation that now exist only in degraded forms. The Guide to Standard Floras of the World (Frodin 2001, 922) says of it, “This ‘tree book’ has no rivals in the Pacific and but few elsewhere in the tropics.” Rock’s monographs on Hawaiian lobeliods3 (bellflowers) and on Hawaiian Metrosideros remain the foundations for present-day knowledge of those groups. 122 Yoshinaga, He, weissich, harris, & swain

Table 4.1  Classification of Joseph Rock’s Publicatons

Total publications Scientific journals Reports Popular literature Books Other Plants collected

Hawai‘i (1909–21)

Asia (1922–49)

Hawai‘i (1952–62)

51 32 9 5 4 1 28,000

31 12 3 16 — — >100,000

14 12 (4) — 1 (1) —

source: Classification by subject and year of appearance is based on an obituary by Alvin K. Chock (1963). notes: Column headings show where Rock lived at the time. In the column “Hawai‘i (1952–62),” four of Rock’s publications in scientific journals were on Hawaiian botany. The remaining eight were from his work in China. The book A Na-khi-English Encyclopedic Dictionary was published posthumously in 1963 and 1972.

While much of Rock’s taxonomy has been revised, any modern work on the systematics of plants that he studied invariably makes reference to his work. It is fortunate that his work was of high quality, for many of the unique Hawaiian habitats that he described would soon be severely modified, and many species are now very rare or extinct. For many plants that now exist mainly on herbarium sheets, Rock’s observations are the best record of their former distributions and their life histories. An unusual feature of many of Rock’s botanical publications is that, instead of using line drawings and paintings as was common during that era, he illustrated them with photos that he took himself. The high technical and artistic standards of these photos display the photographic talents of his later work in China. Many of the photos are of great value today as records of habitats that are now degraded or have vanished. Although Rock’s career in Asia was longer than his career in Hawai‘i, he produced fewer publications during that period. This is partly because of the losses he suffered in World War II when the ship carrying his scholarly materials from China to the United States was sunk by a Japanese submaClassifying Joseph Rock  123

rine in 1944. Until 1933, his Asia publications were almost entirely in popular periodicals, mainly National Geographic magazine, which sponsored much of his work. In December 1933, feeling that he was becoming too old for the rigors of an explorer’s life, Rock announced that he would cease exploration and concentrate on ethnographic research. From 1934 on, most of his publications were in scholarly journals. During his Asian period, his only botanical publications were a few trip descriptions and field notes. He produced no botanical monographs or descriptions of new plant species. After Rock left Asia for good, he produced fourteen more publications. Among these were four scholarly publications on Hawaiian plants, three from his experiences as an Asian plant collector, a map and index of trees of the University of Hawai‘i campus, and several ethnographic articles in scholarly journals. Rock’s modest scholarly production as a botanist in Asia is surprising considering that, for much of his time there, he worked as a professional plant collector. He collected far more plants in Asia than in Hawai‘i (see table 4.1). He processed his collections and documentation to the highest professional standards. Yet he never published a description of a single new plant species while in Asia. In contrast, a search through the International Plant Names Index shows 132 new plant descriptions associated with his Hawai‘i career, all Hawaiian plants, except for an Australian palm.4 However, this is not the number of present-day plant species named by Rock, as some new species he described are no longer recognized or are considered as synonyms for existing names. Eliminating these names leaves around forty currently recognized Rock species among the thirteen hundred known species of Hawaiian native vascular plants. This number places Rock among the top four describers of new Hawaiian plant species, along with Wilhelm Hillebrand, Otto Degener, and Harold St. John. The International Plant Names Index lists about 140 plants named or renamed after Rock. Of these, about one hundred are from his Asian career. When synonyms and duplicate names are eliminated, the forty Hawaiian plant names correspond to ten currently recognized Hawaiian plant species: a small fern, Adenophorus pinnatifidus var. rockii; three bellflowers, Brighamia rockii, Clermontia clermontioides ssp. rockiana, and Cyanea pohaku (“Pohaku,” rock in Hawaiian, was Rock’s nickname among his friends in Hawai‘i); a spurge, Chamaesyce rockii; a sedge, Cyperus rockii; two composites, Lipochaeta rockii and Tetramolopium rockii; a mint, Phyllostegia rockii; and a pepper, Peperomia rockii.

124 Yoshinaga, He, weissich, harris, & swain

Remembering Rock in Hawai‘ i Today there are few physical signs of Rock in Hawai‘i. There is no Rock monument. The Marks mansion where he spent his last years was condemned for a highway expansion project. Although it was not demolished, it is now abandoned and gradually deteriorating. At the University of Hawai‘i, there are still a few trees that Rock planted, but the botanical garden that he started has been replaced by roads and buildings. There is no Rock Hall or Rock Memorial Courtyard on campus; there was once a Rock Road at the university, but it was absorbed into an extension of Maile Way. In 2009, the Botany Department renamed its herbarium the Joseph F. Rock Herbarium (University of Hawai‘i News 2009). An updated edition of his map and guide to campus trees and plants remains in print and is still distributed free to visitors to the university. In Hawai‘i today, Rock is remembered through his publications, through the plants named by him and after him, and for his reputation as Hawai‘i’s greatest botanist.

Naxi Eyes on Joseph Rock He Jiangyu I am a Naxi, and my ties to Joseph Rock are through “Naxiology,” or the study of Naxi cultural heritage. I published a book in China titled Lonely Journey (He, He, and Rock 2000) to tell the story of Rock’s explorations in Yunnan from Naxi and international perspectives. I also edited a Naxi-Chinese-English version (2004) of Rock’s Na-khi–English Encyclopedic Dictionary, volume 1 (1963)—a definitive study of Naxi dongba pictographs—and hope someday also to translate volume 2 (1972).5 For my own research on Rock’s life and scholarship, I have visited many places where Rock worked or his collections are housed. There I have consulted documents and met several people who actually knew Rock, including his colleague Paul Weissich in Hawai‘i and a “Living Buddha,” Lobsang Yeshe (or Luosan in Chinese), from Lugu Lake in Yunnan. Rock took Luosan’s picture when he was three years old and his father, one of Rock’s few close friends, was the local leader. A reproduction of this photograph is found in Lamas, Princes, and Brigands: Joseph Rock’s Photographs of the Tibetan Borderlands of China (Aris 1992, 127).

Classifying Joseph Rock  125

Rock’s Lonely Journey Rock first traveled to Yunnan as a plant collector dispatched by the U.S. Department of Agriculture during 1922. With a fifteen-horse caravan and nine people, he arrived in the town of Lijiang, but soon chose a Naxi village called Nvlvk’ö 6 (part of Yuhu administrative village) in Baisha township near the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, where he maintained a base until he left China in 1949. From Nvlvk’ö he organized teams of Naxi men as escorts, assistants, and cooks, who accompanied him on explorations that extended to other provinces, including Qinghai, the Tibetan Plateau, and the Kingdom of Muli, now in Sichuan. A skilled photographer, Rock shot high-quality pictures documenting these areas. Other explorers lacked Rock’s strong research financing, which included the National Geographic Society for expeditions in 1923–24 and 1927–30, so his work comprises the most complete collection from these areas in that period. Rock’s friendship with the Naxi began with his mainly botanical research in China and led to his subsequent research into Naxi culture. In 1927, Rock took two Naxi assistants to Washington, D.C., for training by the National Geographic Society. They may have been the first Naxi people to visit North America. This friendship, however, was often hard-won, as the following story shows (He, He, and Rock 2000, 162). Once while collecting, Li Shichen, one of Rock’s field assistants, did not make clear notes about the samples. Rock kicked Li, who kicked him back. A fight ensued, and Rock was beaten up. Rock then tried to kill Li with a gun, but Li got the gun and took it to the American consulate. The consul told Rock to pay off Li and let him go, to settle the argument. Li yelled at the consul, “Rock is human, but I am human too. A foreign doctor has a lot of knowledge, but he has to learn from us Naxi how to behave. I’m just teaching this guy a lesson.” Li also called Rock a gou zazhong (son of a bitch). Two days later Rock bowed to Li and apologized, saying “we are forever friends.” Later, Rock took Li to America. Rock’s working relationship with his Naxi team was often difficult to balance (He, He, and Rock 2000, 229–30). Rewards were one of the things that Rock promised them. When it was time to say farewell to his assistants, Rock gave them a lot of gifts, which basically consisted of things he no longer used. Some assistants were unhappy about these kinds of rewards. But Rock also explained that once a study was published, he would receive royalties and share them. He did share, but some of his assistants 126 Yoshinaga, He, weissich, harris, & swain

Fig. 4.3  Rock at home in Nvlvk’ö, 1920s. Courtesy National Geographic Society. National Geographic, January 1997, 65.

were unhappy with the amounts they received. Being sensitive, Rock felt bad. At one point he invited Li Shichen to travel to Europe with him, but Li refused, which made Rock even sadder. He did, however, have other Naxi friends, including a man named Zhi Hui (He, He, and Rock 2000, 218, 238–39). Once when Rock had returned to America he wrote to Zhi, telling him that he felt physically worse in the United States than he had in China. Rock said that he then considered himself as a person from Baisha and that he wanted to die in China. Zhi realized that Rock was not happy and indeed needed to return. Later (probably in the early 1940s), Zhi traveled with Rock to Hanoi and Saigon, where they watched Charlie Chaplin films together, and it is reported that they had a very enjoyable time. Despite these few close relationships, some older Naxi remember Rock as rich and aloof, a man who did not enjoy fraternizing with other foreigners or with the Naxi residents of Lijiang. Perhaps he did not want to color Classifying Joseph Rock  127

his research with personal relationships and immersion in his research subject, Naxi culture, but this may be overly charitable. He certainly did his best to maintain his Western habits and disciplines as much as possible. My father, born in 1928, has told me some stories along these lines. However, there are other perspectives. In Baisha town elderly people still remember how when they were little, Rock would pinch their cheeks and give them “sugar that smelled bad” (chocolate) (He, He, and Rock 2000, 166). Although he was a foreigner, locals also came to see him as someone from Nvlvk’ö village and therefore were willing to tolerate his ill manners. I think that everyone who interacted with Rock in China must have felt that he was a lonely man (He, He, and Rock 2000, 150–52, 156, 159). Even though they may have found him very charming, he kept his thoughts and ideas to himself. He appeared to have felt abandoned by his own culture, so that may be why he left it. As the leader and owner of an exploration team, Rock also had some sense of superiority as a white man that made him unwilling to show his fear and worry in front of the people he had hired. Some people think that he was gay, since he never married, never had a close relationship with any woman, and abstained from sex. In his diaries he sometimes wrote that he felt that he was having a breakdown and had to face many difficult conditions.

Rock’s Travels During his early days in Yunnan, before 1936, Rock published many photographs and articles in National Geographic and other magazines and also collected and sold plants and dongba manuscripts to various institutions and individuals to help support his research. One of his Naxi-staffed expeditions was to the isolated mountain kingdom of Muli in 1924. Rock related some of his interactions with the king of Muli in his diaries and a subsequent National Geographic article (Rock 1924). It could be said that deep in his heart the king wanted so much to know more about the outside world that he laid down his dignity to this outsider, Rock (He, He, and Rock 2000, 125, 127–28, 133). The king asked Rock if “white people are still fighting” (a reference to World War I) and “who is ruling China now: president or emperor?” He wanted Rock to touch his pulse and tell him how long he would live and for Rock to bring him a telescope to see mountain peaks from afar. Once the king ordered his servants to show Rock photographs of the U.S. White House, Windsor Castle, and Norwegian fjords, which may have 128 Yoshinaga, He, weissich, harris, & swain

been given to him by Frank Kingdon-Ward on an earlier expedition. Rock explained the pictures to the king, and as the conversation turned to photography the king had two cases brought in, containing a French camera and a U.S.-made Kodak camera, photo paper, chemicals, and other supplies. Rock told the king that the film was already exposed, and the king, forgetting his dignity, burst into laughter because he had been swindled: rich Han merchants had given him the cameras and supplies. Later that afternoon, the king sent a monk to Rock’s room to study photography. The monk said that he had only an hour and needed to learn quickly. Rock did not know what to do, but apparently finessed his way out of it. Yongning, a site Rock traveled to on various occasions, was much closer to his base, lying halfway between Lijiang and Muli. Here Rock enjoyed staying on Niluopu (Nyorophu), a small island in the middle of scenic Lugu Lake, where a local official, and one of his best friends in China, had his family compound. Rock once thought to build his own house on the island, but plans were scrapped when a conflict arose. In August 1929, hail in Kangding destroyed the crops of local Tibetans, and some believed that this catastrophe was due to Rock’s collecting activities, to his walking on and around certain mountains, which had offended the mountain gods. These people went after Rock to try to kill him, but someone helped him and he hid on the island until he was able to get away. Often on the move, in 1936 Rock hired an airplane in Kunming, the provincial capital and landed it in Lijiang, a first for the town. This was a huge change from the usual mode of transportation, a caravan route that took more than twenty days from Lijiang to Kunming. Lacking a word for airplane, some Naxi called it an “iron bird.” As the Chinese revolution grew, Rock began to have bad experiences in Lijiang because of the anti-imperialist movement (He, He, and Rock 2000, 215). The other well-known foreigner in Lijiang at the time was Peter Goullart, a Russian working on bank business in the 1940s and the author of Forgotten Kingdom (1955). In contrast to Rock’s style of keeping his distance, Goullart thoroughly enjoyed eating, drinking, and mixing with the locals and generally “participating” in Naxi culture. Certainly, both Rock and Goullart made a big impression on the residents of Lijiang. After moving around in and out of China (He, He, and Rock 2000, 259, 262), in 1948 Rock returned to Lijiang. In 1949 Goullart, who was an acknowledged Communist, greeted him at the airport: “Welcome to the Red world/paradise.” Rock, however, was clearly an “imperialist.” He lived under Red power for a few months, but could not stand it. His Classifying Joseph Rock  129

assistants and servants left him, and the government notified him that he was no longer welcome and needed to leave. His Naxi friend Zhi Hui’s son, with tears in his eyes, asked Rock in English, “Will you come back in the future? I will wait for you” (He, He, and Rock 2000, 262). Rock answered that he would, as everyone said good-bye to him. But August 1949 proved to be the last time Rock was ever in Yunnan.

Rock’s Later Work and Legacy In 1947 Harvard University Press published Rock’s book The Ancient Nakhi Kingdom of Southwest China. It is heavily illustrated with 255 plates, including early examples of color photography. During China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–76), Yunnan government officials ordered that this work be translated as proof of Rock’s crimes as a “cultural spy.” The translator was Liu Zongyue, a former English secretary for Long Yun, governor of Yunnan in the 1930s. Liu’s Chinese translation of Rock’s book was finally published in 1997 and available publicly for research purposes. After Rock returned from China to the United States in 1949, he completed the two-volume work The Na-Khi Naga Cult and Related Ceremonies (Rock 1952), which explained Naxi philosophy regarding human relationships with nature. A strong academic focus characterizes Rock’s work in this period and marks a significant change from his earlier work with National Geographic, which was intended to please broader, more general audiences. While Rock’s later works made him famous in Europe as a scholar of Naxi culture, they were less noticed in the United States, where most people considered Rock primarily a professional photographer and explorer. Rock’s reputation in China improved dramatically in the late 1990s, as the publication of various Chinese translations of his work attests. Destruction from a 1996 earthquake made the town of Lijiang and Rock’s work on the Naxi famous throughout China. Just at that time the old-town neighborhood was made a World Heritage site, and Rock, almost forgotten, was suddenly back as a “poster boy” for Lijiang. Nowadays, anyone who knows anything about Lijiang and the Naxi people also knows about Rock. In one year, China Central TV (cctv) broadcast three different documentary films about Rock. Yunnan media also looks for new stories about Rock, and rumors spread that he had a secret son, now over seventy years old, who still lived in Nvlvk’ö village. Newspapers showed a photo of the vil130 Yoshinaga, He, weissich, harris, & swain

lager, Li Jiwu, and said that his face was very different from his brother’s and similar to Rock’s. I investigated this story in the village, however, and learned that most people thought it was just a fanciful rumor. The people in Nvlvk’ö village highly respect Rock, and he  certainly was no playboy. The Naxi people do like to talk up Rock’s story and will say that he stayed in Lijiang for twenty-nine years. In fact, he stayed longer in Kunming and Vietnam than in Lijiang. Tourism to Lijiang has brought a local revival of all things Naxi, including Rock’s life there. My book about Rock, Lonely Journey (He, He, and Rock 2000), has become a Chinese tourism guidebook. A Naxi from Lijiang bought the old house in Nvlvk’ö village that Rock lived in and began to sell admission tickets. Each year thousands of people visit there. Rock’s contributions to the Naxi and our culture are invaluable. Without him, Naxi dongba manuscripts would never have been preserved completely, and this important aspect of our culture would soon have vanished from the modern day and age.

Pohaku, Gentleman Genius: Personal Remembrances of Joseph Rock Paul Weissich My association with Dr. Rock, as he was called in Hawai‘i, was during the last five years of his life. We first met in 1957, shortly following my appointment as director of Honolulu Botanical Gardens. There I came across Rock checking up on his personal contributions to Foster Garden, including his chaulmoogra tree and his doum palm. Having been advised of his presence, I rather timidly introduced myself. We evidently hit it off since he suggested that I call him Pohaku (Hawaiian for rock), and I rather grandly asked him to call me Paul. If you were permitted to address Rock with his Hawaiian name, you had made it into his “in” group. Three years later he made me the executor of his estate, so I guess I was truly “in.” Although Pohaku traveled away from the islands frequently, while in Hawai‘i he lived in style at the mansion of Lester and Loy Marks, as their treasured guest. They were very fond of him and arranged his suite to be similar to his 1927 study in Lijiang. Rock recognized and liked to be surrounded by beautiful things. He had a great appreciation for artwork, and he was never without his book collection. Among his effects were twelve Classifying Joseph Rock  131

large steamer trunks packed with first-class Oriental art goods, scrolls, and porcelains. Whenever Pohaku was in Hawai‘i we often lunched together and went on field trips on neighboring islands. It was during these trips that I discovered his uncanny memory. Near Pu‘uwa‘awa‘a, on the Big Island, he suddenly asked me to stop the car, and, pointing to a steep slope below us, told me of a fine specimen of Kokia drynarioides (a very endangered endemic) about one hundred feet down the slope. I thought, “Oh, sure,” but was stopped in my tracks to find the specimen. He had not been in that area since around 1912. On Kaua‘i he directed me over a muddy road through a wet rainforest at an elevation of four thousand feet and suddenly asked me to stop. He noted that there was a perfect specimen of Pittosporum gayanum some fifty feet up the steep, soggy slope. It was out of sight, I might add. He asked if I would kindly check for ripe seed. The plant was located exactly as described. Again, he had not been in that area for more than forty years. On the Big Island near Kilauea Crater he wanted me to see the rare endemic Coprosma rhynchocarpa that he particularly favored. He pointed it out in his still heavily accented Viennese English: “Coprrrrrrosma rrrrrrhynchocarrrrpa.” Another facet of his total recall extended to classical music. During a field trip to the Big Island, four-wheeling down from around six thousand feet, I was stunned to hear Pohaku singing the mass in Latin from Mozart’s Requiem, a piece that went back to his boyhood. He was a gentleman of the old school, rather formal in dress and speech and never, well hardly ever, without coat and tie. Fortunately, he had outgrown a documented need for a similar level of formality from those around him by the time I met him, as I was normally dressed in shorts. Even then on our field trips to the neighboring islands he dressed usually in khaki shirt and trousers with the inevitable necktie. This formal quality extended to his conversation. Rock was never stuffy, never boasted of his accomplishments, but was quiet, kindly, and rarely critical of his fellow botanists even when he disagreed with them. His attitude was “whatever light can be cast on a species is a step forward.” I never heard him use foul language or raise his voice. He gracefully accepted compliments with a smile and a gentle tilt of his head. He laughed easily but never loudly. Pohaku was a superb raconteur. His adult conversation captivated his listeners, and he was the center of attention at any gathering. He was equally great with children, which is not generally known. When my family invited 132 Yoshinaga, He, weissich, harris, & swain

Rock to our home, our three boys, then ages seven, nine, and eleven, were entranced by his stories. I well remember his recalling coming face to face with a giant cobra, the deadly hamadryad, in Burma. He spread his arms and his eyes became very large as he told of chasing the snake off. Three little boys’ eyes were out on stalks and their mouths wide open. A similar story involved a tiger. Again three little boys were transfixed, and Pohaku was obviously thoroughly enjoying himself. Rock was a true member of the botanical family “Collectaholiaceae”: his early collections in Hawai‘i were extensive and his later collections in China were vast. One of Rock’s major collections, I believe, was of Asian Rhododendron species. This gives rise to a small story and insight into Pohaku’s quiet sense of humor. He mentioned to me once that he had never married because of his lifestyle in the wilds of southwest Asia but that he had, however, hundreds of children scattered throughout the British Isles. He was greatly amused by the look on my face, which probably said “you didn’t spend all your time pressing plants?” He quickly explained that he was referring to his Rhododendron plantings at the Edinburgh Botanic Garden; at Kew, in England; and at several large private estates. His chuckle was wonderful. Even during the closing years of his life he collected wherever and whenever he was. Tree seeds from the Rio de Janeiro Botanic Garden (where he was embarrassed because his Portuguese had become a bit rusty!) and other seeds from Kew were collected for Foster Garden in Honolulu. He sent Hawaiian fern spores and endemic seeds—Pritchardia and many lobeliads—together with herbarium specimens, to Kew. I was able to see results for myself, after meeting Pohaku in London just prior to the opening of the 1960 Chelsea Flower Show. He introduced me to a Mr. Bruty at Kew, a horticulturist who Pohaku had known for some time. Bruty showed us his wonderful collection of Hawaiian ferns and lobeliads in flower, mostly grown from seeds Rock had sent over the years. Also on that trip, Rock was presented to the queen, an honor I never heard him mention subsequently. Pohaku appreciated the finer things in life. Photographs and stories from his expeditions in southwest China substantiate that even when camping in rough terrain he would send his cook on ahead with instructions to have his formal European dinner almost ready upon his arrival. He enjoyed playing his sizable collection of classical records on his phonograph, all much to the total amazement of the locals. This appreciation was thought to be a product of his early life, having been surrounded by the good food, wonderful music, and courtly manners of his father’s employer in Vienna. Classifying Joseph Rock  133

In addition to enjoying good Viennese food, Pohaku had a taste for chocolate. His was an unabashed boyish yearning for chocolate, and when he took that first bite a look of joy would come over his face. His cook in the wilds of China was furnished with powdered milk and powdered chocolate, and Rock taught him how to make an acceptable chocolate cake and hot chocolate. Years later in 1960, Pohaku and I went on a chocolate-laced tour of Austria after the Chelsea Flower Show. He took me through his beloved Vienna Woods, where we stopped at a onetime monastery overlooking the Blue Danube and enjoyed hot chocolate with whipped cream. We drove through the Prater, a grand amusement park on three thousand acres, once royal hunting grounds, and stopped at an inn for, yes, hot chocolate and Schlag (whipped cream). During our stay, I was his guest at a performance of Verdi’s Masked Ball at the Vienna Opera House. He could hum along with all the major arias. After the opera we went to the Mozart Café for hot chocolate and whipped cream. Pohaku wanted me to know how real Wiener schnitzel tastes, so we dined at the Sacher Hotel, which is well known for its veal cutlets but famous for its Sacher torte, a rich cake almost as firm as solid chocolate. We also had lunch at Demel’s and afterward dug into its collection of chocolates. Besides consuming the finer things in life, Rock also produced things of great beauty. One of his unusual talents was his ability as a graphic artist. I watched him for a short time work on his incredible drawings taken from Naxi manuscripts for his two-volume Naxi-language dictionary. He would lay out the pictographs lightly in pencil, then with an absolutely sure hand complete the drawing in black ink. He did thousands of these. Likewise, he produced Western-style artwork. Shortly after his arrival in Hawai‘i he illustrated a page of the first five verses of the Twenty-third Psalm. It was found at a garage sale and photographed, but the original has since been lost. The drawing and artistry are remarkable and display the kind of talent not usually associated with a scientist of his stature. In what may be the last photo of Rock, he is seen standing next to one of his many Buddhist thangkas (Tibetan religious scrolls with images made by painting or textile arts) (see fig. 4.4). Pohaku died in Honolulu on December 5, 1962, and was buried five days later. His correspondence that I received in his stead after his death is now housed in the Joseph Francis Charles Rock Archives of the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University. Among these documents are letters from his old Yunnan comrade Peter Goullart, his nephews Hans Koc and Robert 134 Yoshinaga, He, weissich, harris, & swain

Fig. 4.4  Last known photograph (1962) of Rock, with a Buddhist thangka. Courtesy Paul Weissich.

Koc, and his Italian publisher, Guiseppe Tucci. Each lost someone special. I lost a beloved friend. The scientific world lost a gentleman genius.

Filming Rock Paul Harris It was mid-afternoon when the airplane landed in Kunming. The cameraman and I, having left a cold and wet Frankfurt behind us, stepped out into the warm air of the Land of Eternal Spring, as Yunnan is known, and were met by the local people we were to work with. Only a few months previously, in preparation for shooting a film in the province on the reopening Classifying Joseph Rock  135

of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, had I heard the name Joseph Rock for the first time. I decided to look him up and came across Michael Aris’s Lamas, Princes, and Brigands: Joseph Rock’s Photographs of the Tibetan Borderlands of China. As a photographer and visual anthropologist with a special interest in historical photography from the Himalayan region, I was immediately spellbound. My subsequent research on collections of Rock’s photographs brought me into contact with the National Geographic Society, the Hunt Institute of Botanical Documentation, the Arnold Arboretum, and the Harvard-Yenching Institute. All of these institutions and their extremely helpful and friendly staff were to prove vital to the completion and success of A King in China, the film that I eventually made about Rock (Harris 2003). The visual orientation I share with Rock created a strong link between his work and my work about him. My process of producing and filming Rock’s story became a process of discovery about Rock. Armed with photocopies of many of Rock’s photographs, and perhaps only a vague idea of who Rock really was, I set off for China. It was February 1999, precisely seventy-seven years after Rock had entered China for the first time and penned the following: At about 5 p.m. we reached the Chinese-Burma border at Chieng Law. A much-faded Chinese flag was implanted almost in the center of the road. To the left of it was a bamboo-wooden shanty where the Chinese official, a small, unwashed fellow but with a kindly smile, gave us a rather nice reception. He had a few soldiers with him dressed in dirty white, with narrow borders along the seams of the trousers and brass buttons. Several Chinese were sitting around dressed in blue. They brought out stools for us and entered into a lively conversation. The official whose name is Wai Kia-ki (like the beach in Honolulu) had been on this border for seven years. We are staying at a poor miserable temple with two little alabaster Buddhas and a small wooden one in the back. The moon rose shortly before our arrival at the wat. The sun was just setting and the hills in the distance were purple, the sky slightly hazy and the full moon was gently riding on the pale lilac haze, herself a pale silver disc, with the land masses clearly showing. (Rock Collection [diary entry 1922]).

After a day or two of assimilation in Kunming, we left for the town and surrounding area of Lijiang, where Rock had lived on and off for almost 136 Yoshinaga, He, weissich, harris, & swain

thirty years until 1949. The original plan of making a film about the monastery’s reopening and its spiritual leader had been reevaluated upon arrival, and although we were still to go there and film the festivities, the focus of the filming had changed to Rock. Because the budget and time allowance remained the same and with only four weeks available, our possibilities were extremely limited. The new plan was to meet and interview people who had known Rock and then follow in Rock’s footsteps, at least part of the way. Filming became a journey of discovery about both Rock and his relationships with the people and landscapes he worked with.7 My journey started in the midst of Rock’s life in China and then moved back and forth in time and place, tracing how Rock became who he was and accomplished what he did. Our Naxi guide in Lijiang was able to arrange interviews with several people who as children had known Rock and whose parents had worked for him in one way or another. Everywhere we went we were received kindly and all were eager to talk about the man they had known more than fifty years previously. In the village of Nvlvk’ö (within Yuhu), for example, where Rock had resided most of the time, we met Zhao Fujin, the daughter of the man who had cooked for Rock on all his expeditions. It was evident that a strong bond had existed between Rock and her father. Rock had taught him to prepare proper Austrian cuisine to avoid having to eat Chinese food, which he detested. I learned that Rock traveled in “style,” taking with him tables, chairs, a bed, a folding rubber bathtub, a gramophone player on which to listen to his beloved opera, and sometimes, when visiting a local ruler, even a sedan chair. As he alighted in remote settlements, the astonished peasants and their rulers believed him to be a foreign prince and treated him as such. Rock clearly understood the Asian concept of “face” and in true Rockonian style, he once said, “You’ve got to make people believe you’re someone of importance if you want to live in these wilds” (Sutton 1974, 15). Wandering through Nvlvk’ö I began to ask myself why Rock had buried himself away in such a small village at the far end of the Lijiang plain. As I looked up at Jade Dragon Snow Mountain soaring above the village, it struck me how peaceful it was here away from the bustle of Lijiang. In fact, this was just the kind of place for someone who needed to concentrate on his writings and collections. One of the photocopies I had with me was of Rock in his house with glass-plate negatives drying above the bed, sitting in front of a small fireplace with his arms crossed and facing Classifying Joseph Rock  137

the camera, at home with being alone and not wanting to be disturbed (fig 4.3). We learned that an enterprising gentleman from Lijiang town had recently bought Rock’s former house and was in the process of turning it into a museum. Not only was Rock remembered in Lijiang, but there even seemed to be a small industry growing around his years in the region (see He Jiangyu above). More of his photographs were to be found in the rather tacky and inappropriately named “Dongba Palace,” which hosted Naxi priests, known as dongbas, and folk musicians and singers, who performed for international and domestic audiences. This booming tourist town is billed as a “living museum” of Naxi culture but is becoming a kind of Chinese Disneyland. Most Naxi do not live in the city, and most Naxi villagers are never visited by tourists, although change of course is also part of rural Naxi life. Rock during his day was aware of numerous changes that were taking place among the Naxi and felt an urgency in his work. His mission was to preserve what could be preserved in the short time he had. This linguist and self-taught anthropologist salvaged and recorded much about Naxi culture.8 The people we interviewed spoke of Rock’s volatile and yet kind nature, his unpredictable encounters with the missionaries and their families stationed there, and his fascination with the Naxi’s most valuable cultural asset, their pictographic religious script. Contrary to those who wished only to destroy it in later years, Rock studied it, preserved it, and made it available for future generations with his two-volume encyclopedic dictionary of Naxi dongba writing (Rock 1963, 1972). He was not the cultural imperialist he had been made out to be by Maoist authorities but, at least in the eyes of some Naxi, a hero whose love of Naxi culture had helped it survive. In a village to the south of Lijiang, we were met by He Wenzhen, a dongba priest. It had been arranged that we would spend a day filming a ritual for the propitiation of the demons of love suicide. In former times, Naxi society is believed by some scholars to have been matrilineal, before (patrilineal) Han moved into the Lijiang plain and took control of the Naxi kingdom. Under Chinese rule, many young Naxi would commit “love suicide” with their true lovers, rather than live unhappily in an arranged marriage, as was the Han custom (Swope et al. 1997, 54). Those who committed suicide became wandering ghosts and caused mischief and disasters, until they were ritually propitiated and their souls allowed entrance to the ancestral kingdom. 138 Yoshinaga, He, weissich, harris, & swain

Having exhausted our interview possibilities and finished our filming in Lijiang, we traveled north to Yongning and Lugu Lake, home to the Mosuo, a matrilineal ethnic group classified by the state as a kind of Naxi, but with a distinct identity and culture. In Rock’s day the journey would have taken just over a week. Although only about two hundred kilometers away, we still needed a day to get there, as the road was more a collection of potholes, and we remembered the Chinese saying quoted once by Rock that a road is good for ten years but bad for a thousand. It was cooler than in Lijiang, and we were quartered in a guesthouse on the banks of the lake, described by Rock as “the finest sheet of water in the whole of Yunnan” (Rock 1947, 323). Behind us stretched the Yongning plain with the town of Yongning and its Tibetan Buddhist monastery. Just as with the Naxi, the Yongning rulers had claimed descent from a Mongol officer left to rule by Kublai Khan on his conquest of Yunnan in 1253. Lying as it did on the caravan trade routes from Southeast Asia to Tibet, Lijiang had absorbed the religious influences of other peoples and displayed them in its adherence to several religious traditions, including its native dongba religion. Yongning and several surrounding regions also had a local tradition, called daba, but largely converted to Gelugpa Tibetan Buddhism about three hundred years ago—with some connections to Lhasa, but not under its direct control. The ruling zongguan, or magistrate, in Rock’s day was A Yunshan (Cloud Mountain). They became firm friends and Rock visited often, calling Yongning his favorite place in China. The magistrate’s residence, on Nyorophu (Niluopu) Island in the middle of Lugu Lake, had a wall around it to protect it from possible bandit attack. A teahouse once graced a corner of the island, and one photograph shows Rock sitting in front of it in 1929 after war had broken out between rival Chinese warlords and left him marooned there (see fig. 4.5). Neither the teahouse nor the residence exists anymore; only a few of the foundation stones are to be found where the house once stood. The magistrate would retreat to the relative safety of the island with his family whenever danger approached. The wall surrounding his compound had loopholes in it to fire at approaching bandits. The magistrate’s youngest son, Talan Luosang Yeshe, had been declared by Lhasa to be the third incarnation of a rinpoche, or an important high-ranking monk, from Drepung Monastery, situated a few miles from Lhasa. Rock was in Yong­ning for the son’s investiture in 1932, and soon after that the magistrate died, leaving Rock feeling a personal loss. Rock would visit Yongning a couple Classifying Joseph Rock  139

Fig. 4.5  Rock on Nyorophu Island, Lugu Lake, 1929. Courtesy National Geographic Society. National Geographic, January 1997, 80.

more times, but with the magistrate gone, it was never the same for him again. Today Talan Luosang Yeshe is over eighty years old. Soon after the Communist takeover in 1949, he was forced to work in the fields as a farmer for many years and his monastery was destroyed. After the tentative opening of China in the early 1980s, he immediately set about looking for sponsors to help rebuild the monastery. It took him fifteen years, but eventually he was able to realize his dream. A couple of days before the reopening of the monastery we were given an audience with him. I took with me the photocopies of Rock’s photographs, many of which were of Yongning and its residents. In an emotionally charged meeting, Talan pointed out to me who all the people in the photographs were. Many of the photographs he had never seen before, and often a tear would swell in his eye as he remembered and spoke about his family, friends, and distant days. I left most of the photocopies with him, for which he was exceedingly grateful. 140 Yoshinaga, He, weissich, harris, & swain

Fig. 4.6  Buddhist butter sculpture of the Goddess of Mercy. Photo by Joseph Rock; courtesy National Geographic Society. National Geographic, November 1928, 589, pl. 5.

The day of the inauguration of the new temple came. A strong wind was blowing red dust across the Yongning plain that made filming difficult, but Yongning was alive with color and new faces. Mosuo and Naxi from all over the region had gathered, and even some Tibetan nomads had come down from the mountains to partake in the celebrations. For days the monks had been making butter sculptures (see fig. 4.6), and the inside of the temple was full of the fumes of rancid butter. As soon as the butter lamps were lit, the smell intensified. The butter sculptures, however, bore the same color as the red earth around Yongning, and none of them seemed as beautiful or as colorful as those shown in Rock’s photographs of butter sculptures made at the same temple many years before. After a few speeches by Communist cadres proclaiming a new freedom of religion for the region, Talan started the proceedings. The doors of the temple were blessed and opened and light flooded in. For the next few hours Talan sat cross-legged blessing everyone who had come. Hundreds of people filed past him all afternoon. I joined the line at the back, having been filming most of the time, and received the Living Buddha’s last blessing of the day. He smiled as he saw me approach and thanked me for having come so many thousands of miles. I thanked Classifying Joseph Rock  141

him also for allowing us to film and partake in the festivities, and we parted as friends, probably never to see each other again. Our time in China was coming to an end. I had wanted to go on to Muli, just a few miles away over the hills, but it was a restricted area and special permission was needed. Rock’s adventures in China were manifold and often dangerous. I only scratched the surface of them in the short distance I traveled in his footsteps, but it gave me an insight into Rock’s China. The material we had shot had potential, and perhaps it would be enough for telling the China part of Rock’s story. Added to this would be other elements of his life, especially Vienna and Hawai‘i. Having financed the trip to China myself, back in Europe I now set about the task of marketing the material to replenish the kitty and uncover those other elements to film. By early 2002, I was in a position to start, and so my research took me first of all to Vienna and then to the United States, including Hawai‘i. There has often been confusion as to whether Rock ever finished school or even went to university. However, the evidence points against either being the case. This confusion was probably caused by Rock himself, for when he arrived in Hawai‘i he saw an opportunity to reinvent himself and styled himself accordingly with a university degree. Rock was schooled at the Schottengymnasium, an elite school in the heart of Vienna, and since his father was only a manservant in the house of a Polish count (Potocki), it is likely that young Joseph’s schooling was paid for by the count himself, who appears to have seen Rock’s potential and who even took him on a trip to Egypt once. Rock’s (rather bad) last school report is from the year 1900, which puts his school-leaving age at sixteen. Also—despite his own claims—there is no record of his ever having been registered at the University of Vienna. He was, however, connected with the university, for the East Asian Department is in possession of a handwritten dictionary titled Handbuch der Nord-Chinesischen Umgangssprache (Handbook of North Chinese Colloquialisms), penned by Rock and dated 1902. As it turns out, the house he grew up in—the count’s, which now houses a McDonald’s restaurant on the ground floor—is just across the street from the university, and as a young man he made ample use of the university’s resources. Although Rock did not do well at school, except in the subjects of decorum and singing, and even though he never officially attended the University of Vienna, by the time he was eighteen years of age, he had already written his first dictionary on a particular aspect of the Chinese language. His attraction to 142 Yoshinaga, He, weissich, harris, & swain

China clearly began at an early age, and life would come full circle for him with the publication of his encyclopedic dictionary of the Naxi religious script (Rock 1963, 1972). Having started with the middle of Rock’s life in China, then moving to his childhood in Vienna, my filming itinerary continued to follow my schedule rather than Rock’s life chronology, although we both ended in Hawai‘i. My next stop was Washington, D.C., home to the National Geographic Society, which Rock visited on several occasions while working for the society in China. Here I was able to see many Rock artifacts, such as the horse saddle and boots given to him by the king of Muli, letters and internal memos, and of course the original glass-plate photographs. The Autochrome and black-and-white plates, shot in the 1920s, were now well over eighty years old, but they had not lost any of their brilliance, especially the Autochromes. From there I went to Pittsburgh to the Hunt Institute of Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon University. This was not a location of Rock’s life, but rather the Hunt Institute is a repository of documentation related to botanists from all over the world. In Rock’s case, this included some old and unidentifiable photographs of him with other people, some of his passports and Chinese passes, correspondences, and Rock’s American naturalization certificate from 1913, on which he had changed his name to the more English-sounding Joseph Francis Charles Rock. Harvard University was my last stop before going on to Hawai‘i. The grounds of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum have many trees and shrubs sent by Rock from China as seeds. Rock’s second and longest expedition in China was for the arboretum between 1924 and 1927. The arboretum’s director, Charles Sprague Sargent, had sent him, as he had many other botanists, to China with a view to collecting seeds from specimens unknown to Western botany. This expedition turned out to be the most dangerous of all for Rock, and more than once he was faced with impending doom at the hands of unscrupulous robbers and bandits. The arboretum has boxes full of old photographs by Rock. They are mostly of trees, plants, and landscapes, but a few I recognized as being copies of photographs I had seen at the National Geographic Society. The Harvard-Yenching Institute also played an important role in Rock’s life. In the early 1940s, when he was running out of money but still had not completed his dictionary, the institute financed his return to China by publishing his two-volume Ancient Na-khi Kingdom of Southwest China (Rock 1947). Translated from ancient Chinese manuscripts and local gazetClassifying Joseph Rock  143

teers and with Rock’s own additions, it is a history and geography of Naxi territory and of the ruling lineages from the days of Kublai Khan to the present. Rock’s arrival in Hawai‘i in 1907 and his early work there is well documented by Alvin Yoshinaga (above). One story that I collected there—that resonates with his propensity for luxury research gear (like the Abercrombie and Fitch folding bathtub, noted above)—is that Rock is said to have had a glass-bottomed skiff built especially for collecting algae at Waikiki Beach. Within a few years Rock became the premier botanist of his time on the flora of the Hawaiian Islands. He had written several books and articles, was now teaching systematic botany at the College of Hawai‘i, and had amassed a collection of some twenty-eight thousand herbarium specimens, now housed at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. By the time he left Hawai‘i after thirteen years, Rock was at the top of his game. It is easy to understand why he liked it so much: the Polynesian air and atmosphere are all-embracing and enveloping and one immediately feels at home there. For a restless soul such as Rock who traveled for five years after leaving Vienna, it became the place for him to settle down for a while and grow some roots. For once, all things clicked into place. His incipient tuberculosis, which he had spent years trying to run away from, cleared up the more time he spent outdoors. He discovered a passion for systematic botany that appealed to his linguistic expertise and structural way of thinking. And the deeper he got into the jungle and off the beaten track, the more he seemed to enjoy himself. In the same year that he changed his name, he published his most important work on Hawaiian botany, The Indigenous Trees of the Hawaiian Islands (Rock 1913). More than just a botanical thesis on the endemic trees of Hawai‘i, it is also a cultural account of their traditional uses in native Hawaiian society. Combined with his pioneering use of photographs, the book became a best seller and set the tone for the rest of his life’s work. The National Tropical Botanical Garden on Kaua‘i reprinted the book once, but it was sold out almost as quickly as the original. There was another side effect of his work that was to become important for the future. Rock appealed personally to many of the wealthy ranch owners and thereby gained access to the hinterlands of Hawai‘i, enabling the production of his Indigenous Trees book. It was also under their patronage that he published a second book, The Ornamental Trees of Hawaii (Rock 1917). His works had an influence on the birth of a conservation movement, as his writings became a foundation on which national parks and nature 144 Yoshinaga, He, weissich, harris, & swain

reserves could be built. He himself managed to convince many of the ranchers to fence off portions of their land to stop the cattle from destroying the vegetation and to keep feral pigs out. Hawaiian conservation today is progressive and exemplary, and Rock would surely have approved. When I left Hawai‘i, the filmmaking process came to an end and the sorting out and editing of eighty hours of material began. While the Chinese interviews were being translated, I screened twenty hours of material from America as well as the thirty-odd hours of archive material picked up along the way from various sources. Even with another thirty hours from China, I still felt that it might be difficult telling the most exciting part of Rock’s story, his expeditions in China. But since there had been no bandits to interview, and since it had been impossible to travel farther north than Yongning, I had to make do with what I had. Eventually, I decided to keep that part of the story to a minimum and illustrate it with photographs. This part of the film works because Rock was an expert photographer and great storyteller, and so wherever possible, I used Rock’s own writings to illustrate the film. To this day Rock’s explorations and works remain largely unknown to the general public outside of Lijiang and Honolulu, if even there, and have not received the recognition they deserve. I hope that A King in China will help correct that situation, telling his story for a global audience.

Classifying Joseph Rock  145

Time Line 1884 1905 1907 1908 1911 1913 1919 1920

1922 1923–24 1924–27

1927–30

1930

1932–33 1935 1938 1940 1941

Joseph Rock born in Vienna Arrived in New York Sailed to Hawai‘i; took his first teaching job Joined the Division of Forestry, Territory of Hawai‘i, as a botanical collector Transferred to the College of Hawai‘i as a botanist; placed in charge of the herbarium, establishing collections and a publication record Became a naturalized U.S. citizen; changed name to Joseph Francis Charles Rock Officially appointed professor of systematic botany at the College of Hawai‘i; left in 1920 Joined the Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction, U.S. Department of Agriculture, as an agricultural explorer; sent on collecting expeditions to Indochina, Siam, Burma, and southwest China Took up long-term residence in Lijiang, Yunnan Led first expedition, sponsored by the National Geographic Society, to Yongning and the Kingdom of Muli Led second expedition, for Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum, to the Amnye Machen mountain range, into the northeast Kingdom of Choni; seeds from this expedition sent to herbaria the world over; photographed Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and religious festivals Led third expedition, sponsored by the National Geographic Society; revisited Yongning and Muli, explored the Gangkar Risum Gonpo and Minyag Gangkar mountain ranges Worked in China, underwritten by Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology for next two years; received an honorary degree from Baylor University Obtained research support from the University of California Botanical Garden in Berkeley Forced to evacuate his library to the University of Hawai‘i because of conflicts between Chinese Nationalists and Communists Evacuated to Indochina as result of Japanese bombing of Kunming Led a collecting expedition to Annam and Cambodia Japanese bombing destroyed the plates of Rock’s four-volume work at a printer in Shanghai 146 Yoshinaga, He, weissich, harris, & swain

1944

1945–50 1949 1954–57 1962

Evacuated from China by plane to the United States, where he became a government expert consultant and geographic specialist; sinking in the Pacific of the warship carrying his effects causes the loss of fourteen years of work Worked as a research fellow of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, returning to China late in 1946 Forced to flee again as revolutionary warfare threatened Lijiang, never to return to China; traveled widely until resettling in Hawai‘i Botanized in Hawai‘i, and traveled extensively Awarded an honorary doctor of science degree by the University of Hawai‘i, where he had been named professor of Oriental Studies, shortly before his death

Source  Modified from the timeline developed by the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University, in its online archives, http://huntbot. andrew.cmu.edu/HIBD/Departments/Archives/Archives-HR/Rock.shtml.

Classifying Joseph Rock  147

Notes All translations are originally by the authors; some have been modified for clarity by the editors. 1 Margaret B. Swain compiled this chapter and wrote the introduction. 2 Lyon Arboretum, University of Hawai‘i, Honolulu, accession records 0630, 1493. Lyon Arboretum was previously named Manoa Arboretum and received the seeds for its plants from Rock in 1919. 3 Lobelioideae is the name of a subfamily of Campanulaceae. In vernacular, they are often called “lobeliads” or “lobeliods.” Lobelia is a genus within Campanulaceae. 4 See the International Plant Names Index, http://www.ipni.org/ipni/advPlantNameSearch.do?find_family=&find_genus=&find_species=&find_inf (accessed June 21, 2007). 5 Dongbas are a kind of Naxi ritual specialist (shaman/priest), whose ritual texts are written in what many consider to be the only (actively used) pictographic script in Asia today—Editors’ note. 6 Both Nguluko and Nvlvk’ö are romanizations of a Naxi place name used by different people at different times. Nvlvk’ö was what Rock settled on, and is consistent with his system of romanization for Naxi. This small community is part of an administrative village named Yuhu, within the Baisha township. 7 Rock’s relationships to the people and places the film crew and I worked with are also explored in our production Web site, http://www.peopleandplaces.de. 8 Rock died in 1962 and was thus spared knowledge of the Cultural Revolution, when his research was denigrated and all the ethnic minorities in China and millions of Han, too, suffered greatly.

148 Yoshinaga, He, weissich, harris, & swain

5 Franco-Catholic Modernizer Paul Vial his legacy amongst the sani yi Margaret B. Swain

I admit without embarrassment, that in my youth I took as much pleasure from following Robinson Crusoe in his adventures as I did in the apostolic journeys of St. Francis-Xavier. Each explorer was, for me, a searcher for the Ideal, and like every ideal must find himself in an unknown country, at the bottom of a valley, near a mysterious river with flowered banks under gigantic trees filtering the sky’s light. I loved only the authors who opened up in a way to this hope and this dream. —Paul Vial, “Nadokouseu”

S

o wrote Father Paul Vial in an article about his call to missionary work in southwest China for his order’s journal, the Annales de la Société des Missions-Étrangères. He continued in dramatic prose about how his youthful “Ideal” of the explorer soon dissipated, when he saw beyond the courage, nobility, and generosity in his imagination and discovered instead egotism, injustice, and hypocrisy rife in that occupation. Instead, he found his Ideal among missionaries, “that of a man happy in sacrifice” (Vial 1905, 257–58). For many years Vial did not lose his joy of discovery, his love for adventure, or his passion for knowledge, as attested by his many popular and academic articles, photographs, religious tracts, Sani-French dictionary, private correspondence, and poetry and by other writers’ descriptions of 149

him. He was a complex mixture of faith, flamboyance, and foresight. Vial helped shape a region’s cultural politics one hundred years ago with his own discourse and practice of sacrifice, conversion, experimental modernity, and indigenous cultural conservation, a Franco-Catholic agenda in tension with the Han imperial regime. Subsequent Communist Revolution and reform led to the erasure and then reinscription of memory about his legacy in the cultural politics of new regimes. Vial’s story has evolved from his own time through years of revolution to the present day. I became entranced with Vial while searching for Western ethnographic materials about the Sani Yi in eastern Yunnan.1 His writings provide invaluable historical and linguistic background on Sani culture. My curiosity about what his life was like, the conditions under which he produced his work, and ultimately what kind of local impact he might have had has continued. Vial’s life story and his scholarly research have become valuable assets for the people he studied and among whom he proselytized.2 Vial worked in Lunan, Yunnan, from 1887 to 1917, in the place where he chose to live out his life as a Catholic missionary of the Missions Étrangères de Paris (mep) order. Vial’s popular essays and private correspondence document the mind and actions of a conflicted colonial imperialist (Swain 1995). He deeply marked the region’s cultural politics with his conversion, education, and modernization agendas, as well as his fierce pro-indigenous Sani stance against Han rule. He was a player a hundred years ago, inserting himself into local politics against the Chinese/Han government and landlords and in favor of “his people.” Vial literally replaced the Han internal colonial system of landlord control over indigenous communities with his own mission farm system modeled in Franco-Catholic modernity.3 Vial was religious leader, ethnographer, linguist, and agent of empire, creating a new society for Sani communities under his control. From his own point of view, Vial believed that the Sani Yi would not be assimilated into Chinese society but instead would be flourishing many decades later, as indeed they are today. “For all of those who only look through a Chinese scope, it is evident that this [group of] people is meant to disappear, or rather disintegrate. . . . I knew an old and excellent missionary who said to me fifteen years ago, ‘To what good is it to evangelize this race? In twenty or thirty years all of our efforts will only result in dying with them!’” (Vial 1898, 38). Vial’s version of Catholic humanism led him to expect continued cultural diversity, including indigenous groups, within the common monotheism of humankind (Swain 1995, 151–52, 169). His hope was that despite 150 margaret b. swain

Chinese pressures they would survive as a distinct cultural, Catholic group. While relatively few Sani are Catholic now, Vial’s history of scholarly and missionizing practices continues to feed group persistence in ways that he probably never imagined. Memory of Vial has been suppressed, manipulated, and exploited to legitimize changing values and worldviews. The Chinese Communist state contested many local histories as part of its cultural and political attacks on the global Catholic Church. Its political discourses created acts of forgetting and remembering in a particular place. As in other socialist states, especially before 1989, the Chinese Communist Party’s (Ccp) discourses of memory reflected Marxist-Leninist ideas about historical process as principles of scientific social evolution where “the past was read from the present, but because the present changed (leaders, plans, and lines of thinking came and went), the past also had to change” (Watson 1994, 2). Official histories were meant to legitimize current power brokers, and so alternative memories and histories had to be denied or driven underground. Many of these denied memories “are now the stuff of which new histories and new states are being created” (Watson 1994, 4). So too with the Sani, who are now rewriting their own history in the wake of its political suppression. Rubie Watson distinguishes between personal memories as experienced privately and recorded individually and shared or collective memories inculcated through images in “the media of memory” as paintings, documents, architecture, monuments, ritual, storytelling, poetry, music, photographs, and film (Watson 1994, 8). This distinction is useful when trying to understand the role of memory in the twisting fate of Vial’s legacy. Those memories are shared, public, official histories produced and sustained by institutions such as the state or the church, and they are personal, the intellectual and emotional possessions of individuals and select communities expressed as private, often hidden, unofficial histories. When official and personal memories clash, merge, or change, discourse and practice shift in a region’s cultural politics. Such has been the case with the memory and legacy of Vial. His Franco-Catholic modernity projects, and the subsequent suppression and vilification of his presence among the Sani during the Maoist era, have been followed by the resurrection and redemption of Vial’s reputation during late socialism, especially by the discourse of diverse local Sani descendants of his cosmopolitan legacy. Versions of Vial as visionary, ethnographer, and linguist are being adapted to very distinct Franco-Catholic Modernizer  151

identity projects of Sani women and men, ranging from religion to ethnicity to government politics.4 These trajectories of his legacy illustrate identity formation in local, national, and global contexts, as well as the complexities of personal and collective memory.

Vial’s Franco-Catholic Modernity in Action Western missionaries in China often documented their own lives as well as the religious cultures that they engaged, for a readership back home (Swain 1995; Gros 1996; Michaud 2007). The times and circumstances in which these missionaries lived presented unique opportunities. In the late nineteenth century, Western imperialism flourished in China after the signing of unequal treaties that ended the Opium Wars. These treaties “gave missionaries the right to travel throughout China, to own property . . . to build churches, and in general to carry out missionary activity however they pleased” (Madsen 1998, 31). Vial functioned much like his confreres in these regards. It was Vial’s eccentric nature, the quality of his work, and his intersection with Sani history that so distinguish him. A number of contemporary scholar missionaries and scientist explorers from Australia, Britain, the United States, and France wrote about Vial’s contributions to linguistic and ethnographic research (Swain 1995; Michaud 2007, 163–67). Vial’s research was also favorably reviewed in academic journals, including commentaries by William Woodville Rockhill in American Anthropologist (1891) about Vial’s first publication on “Lolo” writing and by Edward Harper Parker in the China Review (1898) praising Vial’s original ethnography. In 1911 Vial was awarded the Stanislas Julien Prize by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in France for academic distinction (Michaud 2007, 167). His mep obituary notes that in the midst of his work he found the time to publish research that attracted the attention of scientists and explorers. In a serendipitous collusion with other scientist explorers discussed in this volume, the intrepid Jesuit botanist Jean Delavay in 1891 named a species of primrose after Vial: Primula vialii, or Primevère du Père Vial. George Forrest rediscovered the same species in 1906, naming it after his friend George Litton, but the vialii name has prevailed. Vial’s ethnography has decidedly religious and political agendas, documenting in various ways how “the Chinese scorn the Lolo [i.e., Sani Yi], and the Lolo hate the Chinese” (le Chinois méprise le Lolo, le Lolo hait le 152 margaret b. swain

Chinois) (Vial 1898, 38), as well as imperial China’s incorporation of Sani as rural subjects of the state hierarchy. Vial’s mission exploited the niche provided by French resources and political power, while also reinforcing the distinctions made in Chinese society between Han and local non-Han. Vial allied himself with a people already at odds with the Chinese state and culture, people who did not share the same values or social system, other than as colonized subjects. Rather than replace Confucian state ritual and hierarchy with Catholic or Protestant ritual and hierarchy directly as missionaries did in Han communities, Vial replaced a Chinese colonial system, and an underlying indigenous cultural and social system, with his own.

The Life and Times of Paul Vial Paul Vial was born in 1855 and spent his youth at the apostolic school in Avignon in preparation for the priesthood. During his fourth year of study, at the age of seventeen, Vial’s teachers introduced him to twenty-sevenyear-old Viscountess Marie de la Selle as a potential benefactor.5 It was hoped that she would provide for his expenses because his family could not. The official mep biography of Vial mentions her as a very generous person and a confidante who provided good advice. The mep obituary of Vial elaborates some on his relationship with the pious de la Selle, who was his “affectionate sister for the rest of his life” (mep Archives). She never married, maintaining her status as a daughter of a devout elite family who supported numerous church projects. There is no question that she bankrolled Vial’s missionary and scholarly work in China. This partnership not only complemented Sani ideas about gender relations but, I would argue, complicated Vial’s mission and legacy. Their private memories, preserved in extensive correspondence, resonate with a discourse of sacrifice embedded in their French Catholicism. While Vial subsequently entered the Jesuit novitiate, he was dismissed in 1874 and redirected to the mep order in 1876. He was ordained in September 1879 and left for Yunnan the following month. After arriving in China and studying Chinese at the Kunming vicariate, his first post was to a mission in the hostile Han community of Yangbi near Dali in western Yunnan, from 1881 to 1885. There are several defining moments in Vial’s life in China that seem the stuff of the Robinson Crusoe genre of explorer adventure writing that he so loved in his youth. Two of these incidents are codified in virtually every biography on him, from the mep Archives Franco-Catholic Modernizer  153

including Vial’s own auto-ethnography to an unpublished Sani memoir (Qi 1981). Both events entail arduous effort and a brush with death. The first occurred soon after he had settled into Yangbi, when he chose to lead an expedition into Burma. The second happened ten years later in Lunan, when brigands physically attacked him at his newly built mission. The British engineer-explorer Archibald Colquhoun inquired into the twenty-seven-year-old Vial’s services in 1882, to help with his exploration into Burma following a trade route south of Yangbi. Vial leaped at the chance, neglecting to ask for permission from the bishop. While this was a fantastic adventure for Vial, he was docked a year of advancement in his mep affiliation for leaving his post. However, Vial’s absence probably also saved his life because the locals massacred his colleague at Yangbi while Vial stayed with the mep mission in Mandalay (Michaud 2007, 159). In a fascinating later reversal of official sentiment, the 1895 annual bishop’s report for Yunnan by Monsignor Ernest (mep Archives) praises Vial as the only missionary in Yunnan who had ventured into these unknown tribes along the Burmese frontier, a place “as mysterious as central Africa.” Vial’s travels, bringing him into contact with interesting non-Han peoples and his growing antipathy toward the Han, helped shape his future work. In 1885 Vial was sent to a new post in eastern Yunnan. From there he hiked around the countryside, producing a map as he went (mep Archives), looking for a new site to establish his own mission among a local ethnic minority. By 1887 he had located just what he had sought, the Sani (Gni), a Yi group, who were living in and around Lunan county and who like many 154 margaret b. swain

Fig. 5.1  “Sani Family of Lumeiyi.” From Paul Vial, Les Missions Catholiques 25, no. 1255 (1893): 295. Fig. 5.2  “On the Road for an Apostalic Trip.” From Paul Vial, Les Missions Catholiques 25, no. 1253 (1893): 271. Fig. 5.3  Paul Vial in indigenous dress, n.d. Missions Étrangères de Paris, Archives.

linguistically related groups were called Lolo in Vial’s day. He obtained permission from mep headquarters to start a regional mission and with the extraordinary funding from the viscountess had the resources to build a church, residence, and school quickly in the community of Lumeiyi. Vial was entranced by what he found: the karst scenery, Sani village life, and neighboring Yi groups including Axi and Nasu, whom he included in his evangelizing road trips (figs. 5.1–5.2). He set about learning spoken Sani and the sacred written Sani language from his religious rivals, the bimo, or the male Sani religious leaders who created and controlled these texts. As Vial wrote in his numerous missives to his order’s missionary magazine, he saw the local indigenous folk as ready for conversion, almost latent Christians, albeit rather childlike. Writing in the orientalist discourse of his day, Vial found the Sani much more like “us” (Europeans) than “them” (Chinese) (fig. 5.3). A second defining moment in Vial’s life relates to his now well-honed antipathy toward the Han and the Chinese state. By 1892 he was settled in Lunan and had become known for his defiant resistance to local officials, demanding justice for “his” Sani parishioners. That year, in what was widely construed as retaliation for these actions, unknown assailants attacked Vial on his mission’s grounds, gravely wounding him with numerous stab wounds.6 Vial fought them off, surviving the next few days with the help of Sani medical specialists. He then began an arduous circuit seeking further medical assistance, traveling three days to Kunming, later trekking down to a French colonial port in Tonkin (Vietnam), sailing to Hong Kong for surFranco-Catholic Modernizer  155

gery and then by ship to France for additional treatment, before returning to Lunan in 1894. These events burnished his legendary reputation among his fellow explorer/adventurers and missionaries, his status as a potential mep martyr back in France, and his local legacy in Lunan. As soon as he was able to, Vial continued work on his publications for both scholarly and popular audiences, publishing a number of reports from France in 1893 and giving public lectures. He also worked on his ethnography of the Sani, which was ultimately published in 1898. Among his essays, Vial included transcriptions and translations of Sani sacred texts, such as the “Epic of the Creation of the Sky and Formation of the Earth” (fig. 5.4). Over the years, Vial published many photographs, including some of ritualized male wrestling matches and the “lion” dance, but never, to my knowledge, photographs of Sani religious practitioners, or bimos and sherma (usually female clairvoyants).7 Perhaps there was some ambivalence on Vial’s part, as bimos were not only his competition but also his language and lore teachers. He raises the point when he discusses the term bimo in his ethnography and whether it should be translated as “sorcerer” or “priest.” Vial concluded that “it would be more accurate to translate bimo as priest, if I were not afraid to profane this word” (Vial 1898, 12). It was Vial’s own concept of what a priest should be to his congregation that led him into a controversial project that lasted for the rest of his life. In 1896 he purchased land east of Lumeiyi in Lunan County and over a number of years planned and constructed a place he called St. Paul la Tremblaye, his experimental model community. Named after his patron saint and the family estate of the viscountess in France, this mission was an exercise in social engineering to promote modernity in religion, education, housing, irrigation, and sanitation and to generate income.8 The village, now called Qingshankou, supported a French Catholic mission station and school until the late 1940s. St. Paul la Tremblaye became Vial’s second headquarters, the site of his Sani-language printing press and the place where he hoped to build an advanced school. It did not hold all of Vial’s attention, however, since he continued to travel. Sometimes it was to escape Chinese anti-imperialist unrest, as when he visited Vietnam in 1900–1901 during the Boxer Rebellion and briefly considered taking up missionizing there among Miao (Hmong) communities (fig. 5.5). He was also very intrigued with the French construction of the Vietnam-Yunnan railway, publishing a detailed topographic study of the route in 1906 (fig. 5.6). During this time 156 margaret b. swain

Fig. 5.4  “The Lolo’s ‘Epic of the Creation of the Sky and Formation of the Earth.’” From Paul Vial, Les Lolos: Histoire, religion, moeurs, langue, écriture, 42.

Fig. 5.5  Paul Vial and a Miao child. Les Missions Catholiques 32, no. 54 (1900): 331.

Fig. 5.6  “Topographic Profile of the Tonkin-Yunnansen Railway.” From Paul Vial, Annales de la Société des Missions Étrangères 54 (1906): 331.

he continued work on his massive Sani-French dictionary (Vial 1909), a study of the Sani writing system and spoken-language grammar and vocabulary. The resulting text was published with the financial assistance of de la Selle and used in mission schools until the 1949 revolution. It has become hugely valuable to Sani linguists and ethnographers, both because of its understanding of Sani language and culture and because of the subtext of cultural conversion, with entries for words in Sani language 158 margaret b. swain

to convey European ideas (e.g., “cupid” and “pope”) that show how Vial constructed this new reality. One area of Vial’s life that holds particular fascination is his understanding and manipulation of Sani gender norms and the roles of various women in his missionizing and research efforts. French colonists in general abhorred Confucian patriarchy, preferring their own European style. Vial studied women’s position in Sani society, which he saw as relatively equal to men’s, and targeted them in various ways. He reported the efficacy of tempting women toward conversion with gifts of pearls in 1890 and carried a sack of pearls for this purpose up until his death in 1917. Vial worked the crowds and found that the men enjoyed his pictures and European artifacts, while women wanted him to play his harmonium and hoped for some beads (Vial 1893, 200–201). From his perspective, this was neither a frivolous pursuit nor just a matter of individual souls, since women controlled day-to-day education within the home. He believed that if he could shape the mothers at church and the daughters at school, he was well on his way to meeting his goal of transforming Sani society into a modern FrancoChristian community. His colleague Père Alfred Lietard reported (1904, 106) that by the 1890s in many villages schools were in place, which Vial financed both with contributions from France and Sani village “requisitions” (Vial 1917, 547). Students were taught using Catholic religious materials translated into Sani script, as well as materials in Chinese and French. Vial’s early assistants in his work were a series of Chinese nuns, followed later by Sani lay and ordained leaders, as well as other European clerics. These nuns provided critical services and a unique role model for young Sani women. In this society where practically everyone married, Vial had introduced a new way of reproducing a new social form through celibate group membership, which did not attract any Sani nuns for several generations, whereas the first Sani priest, Father Pierre, was ordained in 1909. There is no mention of specific nuns in the mep obituary of Vial; they are completely in the background. Vial, however, writes about them. Before his second anniversary with the Sani (in 1890), Sister Colombe “came to take the place of the one God retired” (Vial 1893, 293) and started work with schoolchildren. She ran interference for Vial with his superiors and local officials, sending him reports in the field. Around 1900, Sister Pauline, a Han novice who was then twelve years old, joined the mission (fig. 5.7). Pauline, said Vial, “very efficiently seconds me in my mission among the young” (Vial 1917, 537). Vial recounted how a group of Sani girls begged him Franco-Catholic Modernizer  159

Fig. 5.7  Collage of Vial’s photographs; note “Pauline Yang,” middle row, on left. Annales de la Société des Missions Étrangères 62 (1908): 64.

to let Sister Pauline come to their school, because they wanted her to teach them how to use the sewing machine “and yes, how to pray, too” (Vial 1917, 538). Pauline also had an active role in Vial’s research, using her great ability in languages. She transcribed work for Vial including materials on Miao vocabulary and grammar. Among Pauline’s letters written in French to de la Selle and collected in the mep Archives is a 1908 letter that demonstrates her ability in the Sani writing system and also produces Catholic religious text in Sani translation for the viscountess. These letters also open up a fascinating window onto Vial’s relationship with his patroness, as Pauline addresses the viscountess as “my good mother” and signs off as “your only and all loving daughter, Pauline de la Tremblaye.” While it is not at all surprising that Pauline refers to Vial as “my father” given clerical terminology and the explicit patriarchy of the Catholic church, numerous other letters from Vial to de la Selle substantiate a fictive family unit, parenting the young Pauline. Vial’s partnership with de la Selle provided extraordinary emotional and financial support for his numerous research and missionizing projects. These partners corresponded regularly in carefully numbered letters over more than thirty years. Reading Vial’s letters to de la Selle reveals a pattern of pious flattery and romantic imagery followed inevitably by reports on the mission and numerous requests for goods, ranging from cases of red wine to typewriter ribbons, and of course funds. There were various unresolved tensions about gender relations in Vial’s identities as patriarchal priest and masculine explorer/researcher and in the gender equitable dynamics of his long-distance partnership with de la Selle and their Sani mission. His ultimate hope was for a Sani society that highly valued the education of both boys and girls in reading and mathematics. As he concluded in his last published letter: “If education of boys is necessary, that of the girls is all the more important, for what the mother has the children have, and the Lolo woman possesses all that one could hope for to become an excellent household chief” (Vial 1917, 547). This focus on women and the valorization of modernity as knowledge of many cultures in many forms shaped the progress of his mission and its legacies. Vial died at age sixty-two (sixty-three in the Chinese system) in St. Paul la Tremblaye, having been in ill health for some time but still busy teaching and planning for more schools. His death and funeral at his mission is well documented in various missionary reports (mep Archives). The history of his mission and its subsequent fate was soon obscured by revolution within China. Franco-Catholic Modernizer  161

Vial’s Franco-Catholic Modernity Erased Following the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, all Catholic missionaries exercised less overt power. In the subsequent decades, most missionaries were reluctant to give up their control, and only a few reformers among them advocated for the ordination of more Chinese priests (Madsen 1998, 32). Vial, often at odds with his superiors, was one of those who worked to create local leadership, established by 1909 in his region with the ordination of the first “native” (Sani) priest. Other mep missionaries continued working in the region after Vial died. In a move to specifically “break the dominance of French missionaries over the Church” (Madsen 1998, 33), the Vatican in 1919 pushed for creation of a Chinese clergy. However, the Chinese Catholic Church continued to be treated as a mission territory controlled by the Vatican’s Office of the Propagation of the Faith. This situation, followed by decades of revolution, set the stage for the Communist victors soon after 1949 to expel missionaries as agents of a rival foreign central hierarchy in their midst and to set about to control all religious life. Anti-communist rhetoric from the global Catholic Church inflamed an already difficult time, and many Chinese Catholic leaders were imprisoned by their own state. A primary vehicle for this domination was the creation of regional Chinese Catholic Patriotic Associations to control church governance, finances, and propaganda. The Vatican in 1952 condemned all Catholics who cooperated with this state organization (Madsen 1998, 37), and the lines were closely drawn for the next four decades. Strong community spirit helped Catholics throughout China survive persecution during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), when all churches were closed or destroyed and all overt religious practice was punished. In the post-Mao era, new cultural politics of reform and opening included some relaxation of religious restrictions. Priests were released from prison in 1979, church property was returned, and the government revamped its methods of control through the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association.9

Erasure of Paul Vial’s Legacy In Lunan Yi Autonomous County, Vial was codified as “the enemy” during the years following Communist liberation. He became an easy target for anti-imperialist propaganda. Especially incendiary was the landlord role that Vial had taken on with a great sense of irony, because he himself had 162 margaret b. swain .

spent so much effort rallying against Han landlords who controlled Sani peasants (Swain 2001). However, Vial could find no better mechanism to engage the Sani who had become enmeshed in the Chinese system than to act as a functional equivalent of it in his model community. The Communists’ logic was that Vial was no better, in fact he was worse, than most landlords because this class standing was multiplied by his foreign imperialist anti-Chinese pro-global Catholic ways. It could be said that much of the oppression of which the Communist regime accused Vial was also played out during its watch. Communities that were reshaped by Vial’s Catholic “feudal estates” were then remade into state communes in a continued push for modernity and development. Vial’s replacement of indigenous religion with Catholicism was replaced by belief in Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought. The subaltern status of indigenous people like the Sani marked in Vial’s mission as “my children” gave way to the state’s view of minority “little brothers,” or infantilized people in need of protection and modernization (Harrell 1995a). In Lunan, official county histories described in the briefest of terms how it had been an outpost of French imperialism, and Vial, referred to by his Chinese names “Deng Mingde” or “Baolu,” was its agent. Vial became an anathema not only because he was a foreign Catholic imperialist but also because he was someone who had cataloged and codified Sani cultural history, a history then deemed backward and unscientific. In 1964, during a wave of anti-foreign imperialism just before the start of the Cultural Revolution, religious persecution of Catholics crested in Lunan with public book burnings, mass rallies, and targeting of parishioners. Being Sani and affiliated with the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association was problematic; having allegiance to the Vatican was nearly impossible. Catholicism was still an issue forty years later when I began my research in Lunan.10 Officials warned me not to research contemporary Catholics, but I could study their past, which is what I set about to do. During the 1990s, various Catholic laypeople, clergy, and Communist Party officials told me their personal, often brutal, memories of what had happened in Lunan/Shilin County. These memories help me understand something about how Vial was being reincorporated or not into shared public memory within the region’s cultural politics. I got to know a man, barely literate and dirt poor, whose elite Catholic family lost everything when their house was burned down by their neighbors in the early 1960s. I met a Sani nun who at age eighty-eight was eager to name her persecutors still living in the county Franco-Catholic Modernizer  163

town, while she also expressed forgiveness and marveled at how times have changed for the good. There were also tangible hidden transcripts from the Catholic era, personal documents sealed up in walls, put away for decades, which people began to take out into the light in the 1990s. These included prayer books and catechisms in Chinese and Sani, a memoir, Vial’s publications, and schoolbooks in French used through the 1940s. I learned that Vial’s brass type set of Sani characters, used in the production of his dictionary and by several subsequent generations of mep missionaries to print church materials, was melted down on order of party officials. In the early twenty-first century, popular cultural use of Sani Yi writing, despite various dictionary projects and scholarly studies (Bradley 2001, 210), lags way behind its potential especially in comparison with Nuosu Yi success. The Sani language is not taught in schools, and thus this aspect of Vial’s legacy is denied. What role the association with foreign imperialism and Catholicism played in an indigenous writing system’s suppression seems clearer than any continued effect on its later revival (Zeng 1998). I was shown where church ritual artifacts and books had been locked away in government offices, but not shown the items themselves. They were still “too hot” in the early 1990s, but some years later they were being considered for museum display or even for return to congregations. One of the many sticking points for repatriation then was the question of return to what congregation, representing the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association or the underground Roman Catholic Church. The efficacy of the state project left no one in the county government who could read French, just when it became politically possible to think about Vial’s legacy again in the late 1980s. This situation, however, would change, often through guarded cooperation between Catholics and party members through reconciliation.

Vial’s Franco-Catholic Modernity Redeemed Vial’s local comeback at the turn of the twenty-first century was due to a confluence of contradictory actors and discourses. Global Catholicism, Chinese state religion policy, international researchers, Yi and Han intellectuals, and the Lunan/Shilin County history and tourism bureaus were all involved. The regional Catholic community promoted Vial’s civilizing and proselytizing projects. Vial’s scholarship that had cataloged Sani language and customs from a hundred years ago became valued for the pur164 margaret b. swain

poses of heritage documentation and commoditization. My modest role in this process during the 1990s, collecting and sharing Vial’s texts and photographs that had been preserved in Europe and elsewhere but lost within China, ultimately linked me to individuals of diverse identities: Catholic, academic, bureaucrat, Sani, Yi, Han, and foreigner.

Legacy among Sani Catholics Vial’s reappearance in the public memory began as contacts with coreligionists linked Lunan Sani with the global church. Above ground were people working with the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association offering a limited sense of religious freedom as defined by the state. Underground were ties to the Vatican, through emissaries from Paris, Rome, Hong Kong, and Taipei who assisted lay leaders of house churches and the few remaining priests. One of the lay-led house churches during the 1990s was in the village of Lumeiyi, the site of Vial’s first church and residence and home to Vial’s last living student, Qi Rubai, who died at age ninety-six in 1989. It was the eldest of Qi’s three daughters and her husband who became the village’s lay leaders. The second daughter has the distinction of being the first Sani woman to have graduated from university, in 1966. This timing, coinciding with the start of the Cultural Revolution, denied her the opportunity to use her education as a folklorist. Instead, she and her husband were sent far from Sani territory to be schoolteachers in northern Yunnan for almost three decades. The third daughter graduated from medical college in Beijing and ultimately immigrated to the United States, where she raised a family and practiced alternative medicine. While the three women are a direct link with Vial’s aims, the opportunities of a later generation of Sani women reflected the history of gender and ethnicity constructs in the Chinese state: in the 1990 national census data for Lunan County on university students by ethnicity and gender, women made up 22 percent of Han and 16 percent of Sani students. Vial had dreamed of a 50-50 ratio for Sani women and men. In the 1990s, the second daughter, Qi Jiawen, and her husband, Zeng Guopin, retired back first to Lumeiyi and then to a new apartment in Kunming. Of the three siblings, I know the stories of this couple the best, having heard their personal memories of loss, bitterness, and hopes for the future. As children, they studied in French, using Vial’s dictionary and ethnograFranco-Catholic Modernizer  165

Fig. 5.8  Zeng Guopin and Qi Jiawen with their FrenchSani dictionary, 1998. Photo by Margaret B. Swain.

phy of the Sani, which they had hidden away for years (fig. 5.8). The family also holds a handwritten memoir (in Chinese) by Qi’s father (Qi 1981). This memoir is a wonderful example of the ethnographic subject looking back, the discourse of someone trained by Vial, writing about his teacher and the meanings of his project over the years as the local Catholic mission grew and contracted, was vanquished under Communism, and then slowly became possible again. The very fact that the memoir was written is testimony to faith and resilience in the face of change. The first chapter of Qi’s memoir is about Vial and his times. It starts with a chronology of the Sani Franco-Catholic mission, followed by ten short sections on Vial’s life and projects. Information about Vial’s mission building from the first seven sections is summarized below. Qi organized this material into topics: “I. Building the Church in Lunan County Region,” “II. The Burglary,” “III. Establishing Schools,” “IV. Hydro-construction (Irrigation and Wells),” “V. Mediation (Interacting with the Han Officials),” “VI. Publication,” and “VII. Conversion.” These sections all agree substantially with Vial’s own writings on such topics (which Qi did not have access to), but the voice and choice of details 166 margaret b. swain

are relevant to Vial’s legacy. Qi details how Vial (Deng Mingde) first bought seventy mu of land in Lumeiyi and built some ten buildings. These included his residence, a church, a school, and a stable. Vial later bought two hundred mu at Qingshankou (what Vial called St. Paul la Tremblaye, which Qi does not note). There he built more than twenty houses and school dormitories. The first thing he built was his stone residency, with a big door. He also built more than thirty grass huts, in rows, with a wide road down the middle so that carts could go through; dug a village pond; and put in a well. In front of every house there was a field, and next to or in back of the houses were vegetable gardens. He recruited Miao people to come live here, but they did not like rice fields. Later he recruited Yi (some Sani) people, several dozen, and paid them for their fieldwork. Nearby this development, Vial bought thirty more mu of land in Weizi and built about thirty houses there. He also built a church at Maoxuedong. Everywhere he built, he kept several dozen books to use in teaching the believers gathered at his missions. The last three sections of Qi’s chronology, provided here in direct translation, provide a particular view of Vial’s life that is not addressed in Vial’s own publications, although some details resonate with his personal correspondence. VIII. The Partner in His Cause [Tade shiye de hezuozhe]: Father Deng [Vial] knew a lady in France who came from a noble family. She promised that she would not marry for her whole life. They treated each other as brother and sister [yixiong, yimei]. They had an agreement when Vial went to China. One person would labor, the other would give money [chuqian, or “not pay back”], to collaborate. Therefore, Vial had funding for all of his construction, in agreement from his sister. The lady even paid for regular life expenses and household stuff. For more than thirty years, this lady contributed uncountable funds and goods. His grave memorial stone had two pieces, with the same meaning in Yi writing and French, saying, “Souvenir a mademoiselle cooperatrisse de mes oeuvres chez les Nspas. Paul Vial 1880,” “jinian wo zai sanizu shiye zhong de hezuozhe XXX nushi”:11 “Commemorative/ memento of the lady co-worker in my cause among Sani people.” On each stone, there was the same carved relief: two doves flying together with their shoulders touching, carrying a cross together. This represented their wholehearted shared commitment, heart and soul. But Franco-Catholic Modernizer  167

during the “4 old things” campaign this memorial was broken up and scattered!12 IX. Regular Life Father Deng [Vial] designed all management of everyday life, all construction, and his career [as a priest], he kept reading and writing. He would receive more than 10 pieces of mail every month, and he would read them one by one and reply one by one. His life was very regulated and every day he had specialty [imported] foods—coffee, milk, and grape wine. That’s why he could persist and read, and continue his work with these things. X. One Construction Incomplete One year before Father Deng [Vial] died, he planned to build a new middle school in Qingshankou. He wanted it to be as good as in the city. He got an agreement from his lady, but unfortunately he worked too hard, and he died there in 1917 at age sixty-three. He is buried in the center of Sani country in Weizi. (Qi 1981)

Qi Rubai’s son-in-law Zeng Guopin grew up in Qingshankou and went to Catholic school in the same building, still standing in 1998, where Vial had died. The mission’s printing press had run up on the third floor. For much of his adult life, Zeng and his wife had no way of openly honoring their past, other than giving their children the family name of Qi. In the late 1990s, they become involved in an international community of Yi studies scholars and pursued their intellectual interest in Sani Franco-Catholic modernity. Zeng worked on a language project for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (unesco) and traveled to Germany to deliver a paper on bilingual education in Lunan, at a Yi studies conference. He also circulated a proposal, drawn up with his wife and written in English, to establish the Research Institute of Sani Folk Culture.13 They sought private funding to create a center in the county for the recording and preservation of Sani written and oral knowledge, collected from elderly Sani religious leaders. Motivation for the center came from their perception that Sani people must modernize but are loosing their culture and becoming assimilated, echoing Vial’s original projects of modernity and cultural diversity. At a Yi studies conference that followed, Zeng delivered a paper titled “A Summary Exchange between the Western Culture and Sani 168 margaret b. swain

Fig. 5.9  Lumeiyi church, 2000. Destroyed in 1991 and rebuilt in late 1990s. Photo by Margaret B. Swain.

Culture” (Zeng 2000), which specifically highlighted the role of Vial in past regional development and cultural conservation. There is another Qi family member, a nephew of the patriarch, directly involved in the church. Father Ki (i.e., Qi) served in Malaysia for many years, after his ordination. Having semiretired at the turn of the twenty-first century, he now travels back and forth to the reopened church in Lumeiyi. There, Father Ki works in a new, very modern church complex, built during the late 1990s in part with international donations and with reparation funds from the state to pay for damage to church property. For many years after the Cultural Revolution, the congregation (with a base of several hundred members) would not allow the government to pull down the damaged old church, covered with slogans proclaiming “Long Live Chairman Mao.” They preferred to let it stand as a monument to their shared memories of suffering, while they developed plans for a new church (fig. 5.9). Father Ki’s personal history sharply contrasts with that of the other surviving Sani priest, Père Laurent Zhang, or Zhang Wenchang, who also still served congregations in rural Lunan. Father Ki escaped the turmoil of Franco-Catholic Modernizer  169

revolutionary China, while Father Zhang was imprisoned for some twentysix years (Swain 1995, 183), forbidden for the duration to use French or Sani language. Just months out of prison, Father Zhang set about to purposefully resurrect and redeem the memory and lifework of Paul Vial. He selfpublished a biography of Vial (Zhang 1987) and translated Vial’s French into Chinese for republication of his Sani dictionary. The biography has significant sections that parallel Qi Rubai’s discussion of Vial’s modernistic development schemes, his scholarship on Sani language and culture, de la Selle’s role and influence, and Vial’s partnered gravestone. Zhang also writes extensively about Vial’s anti-Chinese sentiment, referring to it as a regrettable flaw in Vial’s makeup. These efforts have reached just a small audience. What seemed like a great plan, the government publication of Zhang’s translated dictionary, dead-ended when county officials repressed any distribution. Its associations with past, unsanctioned memories apparently ran too deep, as did the explicit Franco-Catholic sentiments of Vial often given as vocabulary words and examples. Despite repeated efforts, I have seen a copy only once, back in 1991. Father Zhang then focused on building a new church in Haiyi, his childhood community. Completed in 1998, it is a striking physical contrast to the Lumeiyi church. If architecture expresses shared memories, then these distinct buildings speak volumes about the two communities that made them. The Lumeiyi church is stark and functional, a typical modern Chinese construction of the late socialist era, including its sign in English reading “Catholic Church” (fig. 5.9). During its construction, the township party offices actually occupied space, but they had been moved out after Father Ki arrived. Zhang’s church, and it was carefully planned by him, is a paean to his personal memories and fanciful aesthetics, a little gem of French colonial style in the Sani hinterland, with Sani writing inscribed on its walls (fig. 5.10). Zhang, then in his late seventies, lived out his memories as a very modern, cell-phone-connected traveling priest who has never been outside China.

Legacy among Sani Researchers Non-Catholic local intellectuals also appreciated Vial’s scholarship cataloging Sani language and customs. Their publications have taken Vial’s legacy another step, continuing more than one hundred years later his cosmopolitan project incorporating Sani people and culture into the world 170 margaret b. swain

Fig. 5.10  Heiyi church, 1998. Built by Laurent Zhang in 1998. Photo by Margaret B. Swain.

at large. One of these very productive researchers is Huang Jianming, a Sani, who grew up in Lunan/Shilin County and is now a Central Nationalities University professor based in Beijing. Huang has pursued international connections through the Yi studies conferences. During a county field trip we took together in 1995, he questioned me about what I knew of Vial and told me of his respect for Vial’s scholarship, noting how the missionary had been truly demonized by local cadres during his childhood (Swain 2000). In 1998 Huang visited the mep Archives in Paris, to research Vial’s writings. Another one of Huang’s projects in the late 1990s was a book series popularizing Chinese writing on Sani and other Yi culture, published with the Shilin Tourism Bureau. The volume Essays on Yi Studies by Foreign Scholars (2000), coedited by Huang and Bamo Ayi, came out just in time Franco-Catholic Modernizer  171

for the Third International Yi Studies Conference in Shilin, which Huang helped host, again extending Vial’s legacy. Huang worked on Vial’s writings with a translator for the French texts, to produce his 2003 book Baolu Weiyani Wenji (The Collected Works of Paul Vial). Rather than use Vial’s Chinese name, Deng Mingde (used by Catholics), he chose to transliterate it as a Yunnanese approximation: Baolu (= Paul) Weiyani (= Vial). He includes a wide range of Vial’s materials available in the mep Archives, ranging from published reports and a religious text to letters and poetry, and his book was published in collaboration with mep. An appendix biography of Vial (Huang 2003, 445–51) is a direct translation of the mep obituary, which includes a brief reference to de la Selle. Huang had once jokingly asked me years ago about Vial’s “woman friend,” a strong memory of Vial in popular Sani cultural history (Swain 2000). There is no commentary except in his afterword, and the foreword by Zhao Deguan gives some critical analysis (Zhao 2003). Huang clearly makes the point that he is not a Catholic, and he details his collaboration with Father Zhang as he worked on the book (Huang 2003, 460). Father Zhang’s prior translation of Vial’s French-Yi dictionary into Chinese must have been invaluable to Huang’s project. Huang is also careful to locate his work in international Yi studies, mentioning my early interest in Vial. Most remarkable about this book perhaps, given the Cultural Revolution and its lingering aftereffects, is that some 116 of its 462 pages are dedicated to Huang’s translation and textual analysis of Vial’s 1909 catechism, written in Sani script. Huang’s forte is translating directly from Yi writing. This question-and-answer document was a primary tool in Vial’s later missionizing efforts and a banned text for decades after the revolution. Along with his French-Sani Yi grammar and dictionary, Vial’s work standardized the Sani Yi language and writing system. This in itself is a significant achievement that Huang admires and respects. Another Sani scholar, county party history bureau chief Ang Zhiling, is a state official but also a colleague of Zeng, Zhang, and Huang. Official Ccp county histories until the mid-1990s had very little to say about Vial, other than to condemn his mission in a few lines. Ang, however, has had an on-again, off-again working relationship with Catholic scholars. In the mid-1980s, he cooperated with Zhang in an attempt to bring his retranslation of Vial’s dictionary to press. In the mid-1990s, Ang worked with Zeng on Bradley’s (2001) unesco project, interviewing elderly bimos and transcribing their written texts, much as Vial had done one hundred years 172 margaret b. swain

earlier.14 Ang was an invited participant to the second Yi conference. The paper he prepared, “The Religious Beliefs of the Yi People in Lunan County, Yunnan Province” (Ang 1998), provides a fairly evenhanded description of two religious systems, Catholicism and primitive religion, neither of which the author, a confirmed Marxist, practices. For what may have been political reasons, he was detained from attending the conference at the very last moment. While China’s cultural politics may intervene, the transnational Yi research community is clearly a factor in any reopening of Vial’s legacy. This community gained some formality with the First International Yi Studies Conference in 1995, hosted by Stevan Harrell at the University of Washington. Yi studies had become a recognizable field in the 1980s, when Yi scholars trained in various “cosmopolitan disciplines” and foreign scholars were allowed to study the Yi (Harrell 2001, 8). Following the first and second conferences, the third, a mega-event, was held quite literally in Vial’s backyard, Lunan/Shilin Town, the county seat. Several papers about Vial’s work were given, and a conference field trip to Lumeiyi included a stop at the church and a chat with Father Ki. The buzz at the end of the conference was that the fourth would be in France, in Vial’s birthplace, but it was held instead in Sichuan. The very thought was a remarkable affirmation of the memory and legacy of Vial, all the more so because the Sani constitute such a small part of the total Yi population.

State Agencies and Party Officials Intellectuals who work at state agencies and are involved in historical research must be mindful of the Ccp’s cultural politics, as the stories about Ang demonstrate. The head of the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences, He Yaohua, admonished me to be careful around Catholics. In fact, He has published studies of Lunan/Shilin County without even mentioning the French colonial era (He 1994). Subsequently, he has written book prefaces for several projects that do have something to say about Catholic history in Lunan/Shilin. In the massive 1996 Lunan Yi Autonomous County Annals, the county history chronology includes references to the French era and in the “important persons” section Vial is mentioned. Following publication, an addendum sheet, produced from Vial’s photographs that I provided to various officials (I know because my handwritten labels are clearly visible) was made available for tipping into this section of the Annals. Franco-Catholic Modernizer  173

Another 1996 book, the Lunan volume of China’s National Collection: One-Hundred-County Economic and Social Investigation, has a section on Catholicism and Vial’s work and concludes with a quotation from an elderly Catholic about belief in the Ten Commandments within the context of socialism. Finally, the special volume He edited with Ang just in time for the third international conference, Shilin Yi People (2000), includes various references to the French, Western religion, Catholicism, and Vial and his mission. Of particular note are an article on tourism research in Shilin that discusses Catholic history as a potential resource and a well-referenced article on the Catholics of Shilin Yi Autonomous County by Zhao Deguan (2000), a young Sani intellectual and at the time county chief. Zhao draws on the work of Father Zhang and Ang and discusses my 1995 study of Vial. Zhao later obtained a PhD and has risen further in the provincial party structure, keeping his Sani ties while moving out of the county to higherlevel positions. In the 2003 introduction he wrote to Huang’s edited volume Zhao asserts that Vial was the first researcher of Yi culture, a point of pride (Zhao 2003, 5). The marketing potential of Lunan/Shilin County’s cosmopolitan heritage, made possible by French colonialism, is something the Shilin Tourism Bureau is exploring. This hook would target both international tourists and domestic tourists looking for global sophistication. While refurbishing Vial’s grave would be a nice gesture, making it a tourist site would be remarkable. Less far-fetched, however, would be museum displays featuring Vial’s wonderful photographs or even tours to the newly constructed churches and other locations. The commoditization of Vial’s legacy as a tourist attraction may not be too far off. In a six-language Chinese travel Internet site, the text on Stone Forest Park states that the park was “officially founded in 1931, but at the turn of the 20th century, a French missionary named Paul Vial revealed its wonder to the West” (Cadieux 2007).

Conclusions: Legacies of Father Paul Vial The legacy of Vial as explorer-ethnographer-linguist-missionary continues on the ground where he once lived a century ago. His legacies of scholarship, Catholicism, cultural diversity, social change, and public works forming schools, churches, and communities are again out in the public sphere and in written history. His lifework is visible now in relation to subsequent Communist revolutionary conditions and later reforms. Cultural politics 174 margaret b. swain

and memory animated discourses of suppression and vilification and now animate the resurrection and redemption of Vial’s Franco-Catholic modernity, especially by the work of diverse Sani descendants, as it were, of his legacy. Versions of Vial as visionary, ethnographer, and linguist are being adapted to very distinct identity projects of Sani women and men, ranging from religion to ethnogenesis to government politics. Vial’s legacy could be parsed by any of these, but to ask an obvious question, where are the women? Several strong women are featured in Vial’s story, the viscountess and the nuns Colombe and Pauline, but they are barely mentioned in official mep accounts and disappear without an end to their own stories. In essence they, like Vial under Ccp revolutionary times, have been erased. Sani stories reveal details about local perception of Vial’s relationship to de la Selle and about his poignant memorial tombstone. One of the primary goals of this mission partnership was to create a modern Sani society that highly valued the education of boys and especially girls. Vial’s student Qi Rubai clearly understood this message and promoted his daughters’ education, but their experiences were rare exceptions during the Communist era. A review of those who locally engaged Vial’s legacy in print during China’s reform era in the late twentieth century shows that they were all men, except for Qi’s daughter and granddaughter. But times and state education policies change, so that young Sani intellectuals, female and male students in college and graduate school, are reclaiming their linguistic and cultural heritage through the study of Sani written language in the early twenty-first century. Vial’s imperialist “liberation” of sacred texts from the control of bimos and his uses of this writing system for proselytizing and educational goals also created the basis for a secular written language accessible to all women and men, decades before the state acted.15 That was indeed revolutionary, radically shifting the gender access of Sani cultural knowledge. Vial and de la Selle’s mission expected to promote educated Sani women and men who would ultimately make use of Vial’s scholarship on Sani culture and language. While this is not happening in a utopian Franco-Catholic society as they envisioned, Vial’s legacy is now being redeemed within a Sani sociocultural nexus. Ccp discourse is reviving, albeit still cautiously and with “socialist characteristics,” the memory of Paul Vial. Likewise, local people, who earlier responded to the Ccp regime by hiding away dangerous personal and shared memories of the French, Catholicism, and Vial, have found it safe Franco-Catholic Modernizer  175

again to remember publicly. This has played out in the discourse of Yunnan’s regional cultural politics, which has been shaped by both the imperial and then socialist central state and by the location as a political and cultural crossroads for several millennia. As China moves into an era of globalization, Vial’s legacy then becomes a sign of reinternationalization and modernity, as well as a colonial, transnational past. The revival of Vial’s legacies has involved various collaborators including outsiders like myself, tourism promoters, local Catholics, Marxists, and Sani researchers. A rival form of Christianity, from international Protestant evangelical and development groups that have moved into Lunan/Shilin County, promotes its own interpretations of what Vial had done before them. All of these actors are creating cosmopolitan projects that refract Vial’s Franco-Catholic modernity, with multiple goals, levels of power, and unpredictable results.

176 margaret b. swain

Notes Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. This epigraph translation was refined by Molly McGee, on January 19, 2007, Seattle WA: personal communication. 1

Epigraph: Vial 1905, 257–58. In my first research efforts (Swain 1995) I used materials I could access in California, and they proved to be substantial. Vial’s evangelizing popular press essays published with photographs in Les Missions Catholiques magazine were readily available through my university’s library, as were his major scholarly works, including an 1898 ethnography and a 1909 dictionary. I also found other people’s writings about Vial in books shelved next to his in the library section on early twentieth century exploration in China. These Western explorers also wrote observations about one another. The one recent Chinese work I had about Vial was written by Father Laurent Zhang, published in Kunming in 1987. 2 Subsequently, I have used archived letters, documents, photographs, and society reports by and about Vial at the Missions Étrangères de Paris headquarters. Jean Michaud’s (2007) study of mep “incidental ethnographers” includes Vial among these French Catholic missionaries on the Tonkin-Yunnan frontier from 1880 to 1930 who often wrote in-depth about the people they were trying to convert. Aurélié Névot’s (2008) study of Sani bimos builds on Vial’s work. Searching for Paul Vial on the Internet leads to various authors, the mep Archives, and more far-flung results, from botanical references to Yunnan tourism descriptions, to proselytizing Protestant missionary sites. A body of published and unpublished sources on Vial in Chinese by Sani intellectuals is also now available. 3 This chapter inspired the following, much more entertaining, riff from Stevan Harrell: He was the very model of a modern Franco-Catholic With money from the vicomtesse and tol’rance from the bishopric He knew some fourteen languages and thirty-seven dialects He didn’t shy from pointing out translations that were incorrect He wrote a catechism in the obscure Gnipa syllab’ry Collecting native medicines to keep himself well pill-a-free He purchased land in setting up efficient modern farm estates While doing weekly battle with imperious Chinese magistrates He wrote the first and still the finest French and Lolo diction’ry Franco-Catholic Modernizer  177

His letters while embellished some, were hardly ever fiction’ry In short in matters economic, ritual and ethNOgraphic He was the very model of a modern Franco-Catholic (January 2008) 4 While the intersections of these Sani identities in terms of race/ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, religion/philosophy, and age are deeply intriguing, as is the overt masculinity of Vial’s project, these are themes for future exploration. I focus here on Vial and the people whom his life has affected to exam Franco-Catholic modernity. However, this investigation of how the colonized subject gazes back through time is firmly situated in feminist analysis (McClintock 1995). 5 The backstory here could easily constitute a book, for which my colleague Aurélié Névot has suggested the title Vial and His Women, to include the two of us, who are so entranced by his story and his work. The correspondence between Vial and de la Selle is pious and tormented, sexually charged and romantic, as well as prosaic. Many of his letters to her are preserved in the mep Archives, but her letters to him are preserved only to 1880, with a few random letters after that. Névot posits that de la Selle died in 1910 (personal communication, Paris, January 22, 2008), since that is when Vial’s letters to her stop in the mep Archives, but several documents there show, and Sani histories indicate otherwise, that she was alive in 1916. More research is needed. 6 Névot cautions that the attackers could have been otherwise disenfranchised Sani (personal communication, Paris, January 22, 2008). 7 It is actually the tiger dance, and it is performed for funerals and other events. 8 Vial first tried to entice Miao (Hmong) people to settle there, but to no avail. Sani farmers were recruited to fill the village. There are striking parallels between Vial’s community development project and the Cornell–Vicos Peru modernity project, which challenged ideas about applied anthropology, international development, and cultural interventions from the 1950s to the 1970s. Although Vial created a community to support his mission, while Vicos took over an existing hacienda for altruistic research, both projects had at their heart ideas about restructuring the lives of local indigenous people tied to a feudal agricultural system, promoting a range of liberating ideals and practices about modernity. For more on the Cornell– Vicos Peru project, see its Web page, http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/vicosperu/vicos-site/index.htm. 9 This was the case in Lunan, where several Sani priests returned to minister to their congregants and communities reclaimed church grounds and were compensated for their losses. 10 Lunan was renamed Shilin County in 1997 to signify the huge Shilin (Stone Forest) tourist site within it borders. 11 The two pieces are translated into Chinese in the manuscript; the Yi writing and transcription are not given by Qi. 12 The campaign refers to the Cultural Revolution. These details are completely missing in mep reports on Vial. I saw the shattered remains of Vial’s headstone in 178 margaret b. swain

Weizi during 1998 while traveling with the Qi family. 13 This project was not funded at the time. 14 These projects were unthinkable under Maoism and the Cultural Revolution, and it is notable that it was more than fifteen years after that era ended before this kind of work began again. 15 While Zhang’s translation of Vial’s French dictionary into Chinese was rejected by government officials in the 1980s, a government Chinese-Sani written and spoken language dictionary using the international phonetic system (also adhered to by Huang in his work) was published in 1984, although it was not widely distributed in Lunan/Shilin.

Franco-Catholic Modernizer  179

6 David Crockett Graham American Missionary and Scientist in Sichuan, 1911–1948 Charles F. McKhann and Alan Waxman

Another thing about myself is that I love science and I love religion. I think we need both. I do not think that they need be antagonistic. Some of the greatest scientists are religious and say that Man needs religion and that the facts of life and science are best explained by belief that there is a supreme mind and personality in the universe, planning and guiding it, the equivalent of what we mean by God. Science need oppose religion only if religion is superstition, which it need not be. Worship is a normal function of a human being, and many of the people who get completely upset and need the help of psychiatrists are people who have lost their faith in God, and their religion. Many have been returned to normality when their faith has been restored. Man is normally a religious being, and should be. —David Crockett Graham, “Memoirs”

F

rom 1911 to 1948, David Crockett Graham lived in China as a missionary, educator, natural historian, museum curator, and anthropologist. It was, as they say, an “interesting time”: from the fall of the Qing dynasty— through a period of intense warlordism, anti-foreign protest and violence, outright war with Japan, and civil war—right up to the Communist victory and the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Graham was also an interesting person and fortunate to have been posted in a fascinating place. One of a handful of Western missionaries whose scientific work was respected by other scientists—and of even fewer scientists whose religious 180

work was respected by other missionaries1—he lived and worked among a dozen or more small ethnic groups (minzu) in the spectacular mountains and gorges terrain of what is now western Sichuan and eastern Tibet. Graham’s Christianity (Northern Baptist) included a large dose of progressive humanism and a belief that all religions had positive value.2 During his three and a half decades in China, he made studies of Sichuanese temples and folk religion and of the religions of several minority groups in the area—most notably the Ch’uan (Chuan) Miao (Miao of Sichuan), Lolo (Yi/Nuosu), and Ch’iang (Qiang)3—much of which was published in the 1920s through the 1940s as articles in the Chinese Recorder and the Journal of the West China Border Research Society (which he edited for a time). More of it was published in monograph form by the Smithsonian Institution after he retired to Englewood, Colorado (Graham 1954, 1958, 1961).4 Although he was interested in all religions, for the first half of his career in China, Graham was directly supported by the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society (abfms), and he spent the second half of it teaching (and preaching) at West China Union University—the region’s largest, and Christian, university (since 1950 part of the secularized Sichuan University). If Graham’s mission was to spread the Gospel to all Chinese, what was the significance of his deep interest and apparent openness to local religions in Sichuan? Where did his commitment to evangelical Protestantism end and his intellectual commitment to comparative religion begin? What was his faith, and how did it influence his study of Chinese religions?5

The Early Years Graham was born in Arkansas in 1884 but moved with his family to northeastern Oregon and then to Walla Walla, Washington, when he was still very young.6 Soon after their move west, a series of tragedies struck the Graham family: Rinderpest killed off father’s sheep, pigs, and cows, and the flume broke and spoilt the crop. Mother died [of tuberculosis] and was buried, and my younger brother Isaac died. Father’s money was all used up. He said to us children, “I expected to leave you money when I die, but now I know I can’t. I will move to town and work to give you an education.” So he moved to Walla Walla. There Louis got typhoid and died. Later Melford hit a neighbor boy younger than himself with his David Crockett Graham  181

finger on the cheek and ordered him off the haystack. He yelled as if he were killed and told his father Melford had hit him. The father came running, kicked Melford with kick after kick until Melford fell to the ground, then kicked him through under the barb wire fence. It must have broken Melford’s spine, for he could not walk after that. He was taken to the hospital and died there. After all this, father was plenty poor, owning nothing but the furniture and the wagon and two horses.7 (Graham [1953] 2007, 3)

Graham’s mother, Elizabeth Atchley Graham, gave birth to nine children, but by the time she died and her husband William had settled in Walla Walla, only four were still alive. William worked hard as a laborer, but the family remained poor and often depended on the charity of neighbors. Graham describes his parents as “deeply religious.” His maternal grandfather was a Baptist preacher, and Graham himself joined the Baptist church just out of elementary school. With characteristic gravity, he later recalled: “My conscience had been tormenting me because I was not living the way I thought or knew I ought to. I expected some marvelous experience when I was baptized, but nothing happened. Never-the-less, from that time on I lived as exemplary a life as I could. I attended church and young people’s meetings and often took part. I also sang in the church choir” (Graham [1953] 2007, 5). By working odd jobs during the school term and wheat harvest in summers, Graham cobbled together enough money (with some scholarship aid) to attend Whitman Academy and then Whitman College, graduating in 1908. He was tall (about six feet two inches), naturally athletic, and played sports all through school—football, basketball, and track. He also enjoyed the outdoors and made frequent camping and hunting trips into the Blue Mountains, just east of Walla Walla. Graham’s high school and college years came during the peak of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (svm), an offshoot of the Young Men’s Christian Association (ymca). It was a natural turning for someone as religious as Graham, and he was elected first chairman of the Whitman College ymca Bible Study Committee and later chapter treasurer and president.8 The svm originated in 1886 as part of the great Protestant revival headed by the charismatic evangelist Dwight L. Moody. As svm historian Clifton Phillips describes it: “Within a dozen years the svm had spread to 182 Charles Mckhann and alan waxman

Fig. 6.1  David Crockett Graham and his sister, Elmina. Whitman College Yearbook, 1908.

hundreds of college campuses and was enlisting thousands of college youth in a veritable religious crusade, whose ambitious slogan was ‘The Evangelization of the World in This Generation’” (Phillips 1974, 92). During Graham’s time, the SVM dominated the China mission field in America. For the period 1886–1919, the svm recorded 8,140 “sailed volunteers” (recruits who not only pledged but actually got on a boat), of which 2,524 were bound for China (Phillips 1974, 105). At the peak of mission activity in China in 1925–26, there were about 8,300 Protestant missionaries in China, of whom 5,000 were American. More than half of these had gone through the svm pipeline (Lian 1997, 6; Hersey 1985, 84). Graham first “heard the appeal” at the Pacific Coast Student Conference at Monterey, California, in 1907. Shortly thereafter, on the advice of his local pastor, he applied to Rochester Theological Seminary to prepare himself for the mission field (Graham [1953] 2007, 21). During three years at Rochester, two important things happened to Graham: he married Alicia Morey (from nearby Fairport, New York), and he got a strong dose of liberal theology. One of his teachers, Walter Rauschenbusch, was a leader in the Social Gospel movement, which sought to apply Christian principles David Crockett Graham  183

through outreach programs to problems such as urban poverty and racial inequality. Rauschenbusch was a sharp critic of American society, especially as it undermined the overseas mission project: “‘The social wrongs which we permit,’ he wrote in 1907, ‘contradict our gospel abroad and debilitate our missionary enthusiasm at home.’ The non-Christian peoples, either directly or indirectly, see ‘our poverty and our vice, our wealth and our heartlessness, and they like their own forms of misery rather better’” (Rauschenbusch, quoted in Hutchison 1974, 121). Graham greatly admired Rauschenbusch, describing him as “a great social reformer, writer, and a wonderful teacher” (Graham [1953] 2007, 28). From Rauschenbusch, he developed a broad and self-critical view of American Protestantism and sought to divorce the mission project from cultural imperialism in Asia. David and Alicia were married in June 1910, and in September 1911 they left San Francisco by steamer to serve in China with the abfms. They were assigned to Xufu (Graham spelled it Suifu; it is now Yibin) in southern Sichuan Province, but before they even reached Shanghai they learned that the Qing dynasty had fallen and that many of the missionaries from western China had retreated to the foreign concessions in Shanghai for safety. After delaying for more than a year in and around Shanghai, during which time their first child, Margaret, was born, they traveled up the Yangtze River by boat to Xufu, arriving in April 1913. Not counting two yearlong furloughs back to the United States (1918–19 and 1926–27), the Grahams spent the next nineteen years working as missionaries in Xufu, during which time Alicia gave birth to five more children—all girls except for David Jr., who died in infancy.9 Graham’s work over two decades in Xufu involved about four parts missionizing and one part science. His early years were devoted almost exclusively to the former, but he took special pleasure working the outstations, a practice that novelist John Hersey refers to as “itinerating” (Hersey 1985, 105). As Graham remembered it: “For days or weeks I would hear nothing but Chinese, which was good for me, very helpful in learning the language . . . [but there] were times when there were bands of robbers in some parts of the Suifu field, making it impossible to . . . go to the outstations” (Graham [1953] 2007, 43). Graham’s itinerating took him into the remote mountains of southwest Sichuan, where he first became familiar with some of the area’s minority peoples (mainly Miao, Yi [Nuosu], and Tibetans [Zang]), who, along with the Qiang in the northwest of the province, were later to be the subjects 184 Charles Mckhann and alan waxman

Fig. 6.2  Alicia Graham, with daughters Margaret, Ruth, Harriet Jane, and baby Dorothy, summer 1922, at their cottage at Mount Emei. Photo by David Crockett Graham; courtesy Whitman College and Northwest Archives.

for much of his ethnography. Graham’s adventurous streak clearly was a large part of what got him interested in the natural and human sciences of the Tibetan borderlands. With a name to live up to and a childhood that included all kinds of outdoor activities, it is not surprising that Graham fell in love with the scenery, the wildlife, and trekking around Xufu and southwestern Sichuan. It was truly a wild frontier, too, with dangers both natural and human. Fond of bird hunting and a crack shot with a rifle, Graham never had to put his martial skills to work on bandits, but they were a constant threat, and his expeditions generally included armed escorts. Reading Graham’s papers, one has the sense that his summer expeditions were hard on Alicia, who remained at home with the children (or at their summer cottage) and who frequently suffered from ill health. One also senses that David was loathe to give the expeditions up. Although David Crockett Graham  185

Fig. 6.3  David Crockett Graham with guns. Date unknown. Courtesy Whitman College and Northwest Archives.

Fig. 6.4  Armed escort. Date unknown. Photo by David Crockett Graham; courtesy Whitman College and Northwest Archives.

Fig. 6.5  David Crockett Graham with butterfly net on a precarious mountain “road.” Date unknown. Courtesy Whitman College and Northwest Archives.

there was no clear financial incentive—the Smithsonian paid his expenses for collecting natural historical specimens and some cultural artifacts, but no salary—he went summer after summer into the mountains for several weeks at a time. An attachment both to the landscape and its peoples is unmistakable in his spicy reworking of Rudyard Kipling’s “Mandalay”: In Tibet a dark-eyed fair one Met I on a mountain road As she went to far-off Lhasa, On her back a heavy load. And I said, “O nutbrown beauty, Come and go away with me; Come and go to far-off Scotland, Evermore my spouse to be. I have brothers there a plenty; sisters with their golden hair; David Crockett Graham  187

They will welcome you, my fair one, To the fireside’s ruddy glare.” “Nay, my friend,” replied the fair one, “That can truly never be. I have now five sturdy husbands, Strong as any you can see.” “Galli, galli [good-bye, good-bye], fair Tibetan, We must part to meet no more. May the love of your five husbands Cheer your heart till life is o’er.” (Graham Collection [Graham 1923])

All this is not to say that Graham neglected his mission at Xufu. He began with weekly prayer meetings, Sunday service, and Sunday school, and within a year he added a Thursday service because “from fifty-nine the first service, attendance had increased to one hundred and thirty-seven” (Graham [1953] 2007, 44). Obviously angling for more support, he wrote in his report to the West China Baptist Mission Conference in 1914: “One could hardly ask for a better field for evangelistic work than Suifu. Three strong evangelists could well be employed, and the results would justify the expense” (Graham [1953] 2007, 44). Besides preaching, Graham also tried to gain converts by indirect means. He started a branch of the Red Cross and established a Young Men’s Association, of which he remarked: “There was a gap between most Chinese and the Christians [i.e., Christian Chinese], and I used this method to reach them and to get their cooperation in projects that were a benefit to the people. We presented talks about health, morals, religion—we had a bathroom and a game room, and the first softball team at Suifu. And we did get the cooperation of the Chinese from the start” (Graham [1953] 2007, 45). As he remembered handing off the Xufu mission to Chester Wood in 1930 after almost twenty years, “I had taken the church in 1911 with a little over 100 members, and left it with nearly a thousand” (Graham [1953] 2007, 79).

The Making of a Scientist Graham took an academic post in Chengdu in 1932, but he continued his 188 Charles Mckhann and alan waxman

mission work while on research and collecting trips for the West China Union University Museum and as co-pastor of the Chengdu Baptist Church. The shift in his interest toward science dates to his first tour in Xufu and especially to his first furlough, when he returned to the United States to study for a master’s degree in divinity at the University of Chicago (1918–19). Professor A. Eustace Haydon, a pioneer in the study of world religions, leader of the humanist movement, and chair of the Department of Comparative Religion, taught the course Science of Religion, in which he advocated a broadly comparative method. He also lectured on primitive religion and the psychology of religion, leading Graham to write a master’s thesis titled “Indications of Primitive Chinese Religion in the Confucian Classics” (Graham 1919). Graham also credits Haydon with directing him toward the study of (Han) folk religion in Sichuan—which became the basis for his doctoral thesis in 1927 (Graham 1928) and later his Folk Religion in Southwest China (1961). Along with Rauschenbusch, Haydon also shaped Graham’s theological orientation toward ecumenical humanism. Haydon was an ordained Baptist minister (like Graham) but later became active in the Unitarian Church. Graham was attracted by Haydon’s pragmatic and sociological bent, but he held back from his extreme naturalist theology, in which, among other things, he referred to man as “the earth child” (Graham [1953] 2007, 56). During that first year in Chicago’s Hyde Park, Graham also gained the acquaintance of two anthropologists at the nearby Field Museum: sinologist-archaeologist Berthold Laufer and future founder of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, Fay-Cooper Cole. Cole was one of Franz Boas’s early students, and he shared his mentor’s commitment to a four-field anthropology, his strong connection to the museum world, and a concern for preserving cultures that were disappearing in the face of modernity. All of these concerns Cole passed on to Graham, when the latter took anthropology and archaeology courses from him during his next two furloughs (1926–27 and 1931–32). The abstract for Graham’s doctoral thesis reveals the extent of his conversion to the American anthropology of his day: A significant trend among modern anthropologists is an emphasis on intensive, first-hand studies of racial groups. Instead of gathering David Crockett Graham  189

unrelated facts from different parts of the world and classifying them in convenient pigeonholes, out of which theories are developed, or beginning with theories and searching for facts with which to prove them, the modern anthropologist makes thorough studies of existing races, and allows his theories to emerge as hypotheses from the facts that are found. There is need for a similar movement among students of religions. Most of the writers on Chinese religion have two biases, apologetics and animism. They assume or try to prove the superiority of Occidental over Chinese culture in every respect, or conclude that all the rich and complex phenomena of Chinese religion can be included under the one term “animism.” There is need of a large number of intensive studies in which the objective method is used. (Graham 1927–28, 433)

A third strain of Graham’s science was natural-historical. While itinerating in the mountains around Xufu, he met up with a number of European scientists collecting natural historical specimens for their national museums. Feeling strongly that the United States should get in on the act, he wrote to the United States National Museum (usnm, now the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History), offering up his services. During his 1918–19 furlough, he was invited to Washington, D.C., where he was hosted by ornithologist Alexander Wetmore, briefly trained in collection and preservation techniques, set up with a collecting kit—including a Kodak camera, barometer, traps, and other equipment—and sent back to China with funding (Graham [1953] 2007, 61). Over the next twenty years, he made fourteen summer expeditions and several shorter trips along the Sino-Tibetan frontier (mainly in western Sichuan Province), where, as he was fond of saying, he collected “everything alive, except human beings and botanical specimens” (Graham Collection [Graham 1931]).10 A letter of receipt dated June 18, 1930, from the acting assistant secretary of the usnm, William Ravenel, lists the contents of a typical Graham shipment: “2 turtles, 1 snake, 3 toads; 97 bird skins, and 78 bird skeletons; 536 insects; 2,000 shrimp and 6 crabs; 25 mollusks and 1 tape-worm; 27 mammal skeletons and 45 mammal skins; 186 fishes; 16 glass and stone snuff bottles from the Ming and Manchu dynasties” (Graham Collection [Ravenel 1930]). By his own reckoning, in the course of his career Graham sent more than 400,000 specimens to the usnm/Smithsonian, including representatives of 9 new genera and 240 new species; 29 of the new species and genera were later 190 Charles Mckhann and alan waxman

Fig. 6.6  David Crockett Graham with John Tee-Van (American Museum of Natural History) and one of the pandas that were sent to the Bronx Zoo, 1941. Courtesy Whitman College and Northwest Archives.

Fig. 6.7  A collecting expedition breaking for lunch. Date unknown. Photo by David Crockett Graham; courtesy Whitman College and Northwest Archives.

named after him (Graham [1953] 2007, 95).11 Graham did not catch them himself, but his most famous prize was a pair of giant pandas, which Chiang Kai-shek presented to the United States government in 1941 (Graham, [1953] 2007, 106; Walravens 2006) (see fig. 6.6).12 Graham’s first collecting trip for the usnm was in the summer of 1923, and he kept it up nearly every summer, adding in ethnographic research on Chinese temples and on Miao, Yi, and Tibetan mountain communities. He also conducted anthropometrical studies of the area’s ethnic populations. Ravenel wrote to him in 1924: “Dr. Hrdlicka has noted with some interest your statement with reference to the possibility of securing some skulls of aborigines. He is very much gratified at the prospect and states that it David Crockett Graham  191

would be better still if you could also secure and forward some good portraits of the natives, more particularly those who show a close resemblance to the American Indian” (Graham Collection [Ravenel 1924]).13 Figure 6.8 is one of the portraits he collected. Others show the subject in profile, and reveal further his interest in physical anthropology and racial classification. He remarked in a field diary: “I used the Broca scale [for rating skin color] on a Tibetan, and he registered Broca No. 25. The Tibetans vary much in skin color, but are generally much darker than the Chinese. Their hair is generally dark, but varies from straight to curly. They nearly always have the Mongolian slant to their eyes. Their noses vary from high and thin to low and broad” (Diary No. 10, August 11, 1930, in Walravens 2006, 214). Not surprisingly perhaps, some of Graham’s fellow missionaries took issue with his increasing attention to science in the 1920s, and they eventually persuaded his boss—James Franklin, foreign secretary of the abfms—to intervene. Franklin tried to convince Graham to quit his collecting trips, but to no avail. Graham insisted that he was doing it in his spare time, although in fact he skipped a mission conference Franklin organized in the summer of 1930 in favor of a field trip to Tatsienlu (now Kangding) (Graham [1953] 2007, 78). Graham completed his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1927 and returned to Xufu alone, as a result of the volatile anti-foreign climate in the wake of the Nanjing Incident earlier that year. Without his family to occupy him, the newly minted Doctor Graham researched and published prolifically over the next few years and was eventually offered the position of curator of the West China Union University Museum of Archaeology, Art and Ethnology (later to become Sichuan University Museum). The move to West China Union University was funded by the Harvard-Yenching Institute and arranged by university president Joseph Beech and Harvard-Yenching Institute director Serge Elisseeff. Graham tried to retain financial support from the abfms, but the society refused. In a letter apparently to Randolph Howard, assistant secretary for the abfms, Graham recalls how the first Jesuits in China used science as a means to attract converts.14 His reasoning in his 1934 annual report to the abfms (Graham Collection)—in which he tries to cast his museum work as “mission service”—must have appeared as thin to the society’s directors then as it does to us today: “The museum itself increases the prestige of the university among many people, and the university is a Christian institution so that it is in a way a form of evangelism. Through the museum we have estab192 Charles Mckhann and alan waxman

Fig. 6.8  “Bolozu tribesman” (on Graham label). Date unknown. Photo by David Crockett Graham; courtesy Whitman College and Northwest Archives.

lished contacts with the aborigines from near Tatsienlu and Tsagulow, and some of these have made enquiries about the Christian religion. Note—a Jia Rong leader was converted—the first contact with him was through me and the museum.” Through his own active collecting of contemporary, historical, and prehistoric Han and minority cultural artifacts from around Sichuan, and through the purchase and donation of artifacts from other parts of China and abroad, Graham greatly improved the West China Union University Museum collection. Until 1938, he continued to collect natural historical specimens for the Smithsonian (Graham [1953] 2007, 92), but his interests became increasingly anthropological and archaeological.15 Graham’s ethnographic research was much the sort of “salvage” anthropolDavid Crockett Graham  193

ogy then popular in American universities. His writings show that he was deeply concerned that the modern world was pressing in on the peoples of western China, that their traditional beliefs and customs were being eroded, and that his job as anthropologist was to record for posterity those beliefs and customs. Perhaps the single greatest testimony to this project is his Songs and Stories of the Ch’uan Miao, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1954 but compiled mainly during his later years in Xufu, with the help of several Chuan Miao assistants and missionary colleagues working in the Miao districts.16 While at West China Union University, Graham also served as editor of the Journal of the West China Border Research Society, in which many of his own writings were published.

Religion in Southwest China Graham didn’t just love science; he loved a lot of sciences. And he loved a lot of religions, too: “Interracial, international, intercultural, and interreligious contacts can be of great benefit. Practically every religion has something of value to contribute, and this should be appreciated, evaluated, and made positive use of by all concerned” (Graham 1961, 215). He made studies of Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist classics; a wide range of (Han) Chinese folk religious practices; and the religions of the Miao, Tibetan, Yi (Lolo), and Qiang (Ch’iang) minorities. Graham believed in the universality of religion and in its perfectibility: I believe that man is by nature a religious being and needs religion, worship, and a good religious philosophy of life in order to be and to do his best in the world. I also believe that as the Chinese and all the human race become more enlightened, those religions that take advantage of and exploit ignorance and superstitions will gradually be abandoned, and that the religions that become the strongest will be those that contribute most to ennoble and enrich the lives of individuals, the family, society, and the world. All religions including Christianity should reform and improve where and when possible, so that each can make its best possible contribution for the uplift of mankind. (Graham 1961, 225)

Graham’s published doctoral thesis, Religion in Szechuan Province, China (1928), and his posthumously published monograph, Folk Religion in South194 Charles Mckhann and alan waxman

west China (1961), cover topics familiar to any student of Chinese religion: ancestor worship and ghosts; birth, marriage, and death rituals; theories of yin-yang and feng shui; the use of protective charms and incantations; annual festivals for earth gods, ancestors, ghosts, et cetera; divination and offerings; and community and noncommunity temples and sacred places and the gods that inhabit them. Among the most valuable contributions of his doctoral thesis may still be the detailed plans he made of eleven Buddhist and Taoist temples, mainly in and about Xufu (Yibin) and Mount Emei in southern Sichuan.17 Graham emphasized that as a scientist his goal was to present Chinese religions objectively (Graham 1928, 9; 1961, 110) and that in the first place, this meant finding out and recording “what the people themselves believed and thought” (Graham 1961, 110). His accounts of local religious beliefs and practices are rich in detail, and he offers few obvious judgments on their content. At the same time, the organization of his most comprehensive work on the subject, Folk Religion in Southwest China (1961), reflects the contemporary thought of both Chinese literati and Western students of comparative religion. Reminiscent of Robert Redfield’s “great tradition / little tradition” thesis (Redfield 1956), but perhaps absorbed through Haydon, Graham distinguishes between religions in China that have strong textual bases—what he calls the “great religions” of Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, and Christianity—and the “popular or folk religion” of the illiterate masses. Like Redfield, he sees the two as mutually determining (Graham 1961, 110), although ultimately, as in Marcel Granet’s classic study of Chinese Religion ([1922] 1975), he accords primacy to the folk tradition: Chinese religion may be compared to a large tree which has a main trunk, three large branches, several smaller branches, and many twigs attached to the trunk and branches. The main trunk from the ground to the top of the tree is the popular religion of China, and the main branches are Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. Since the T’ang dynasty, Islam has had a place, and in recent years the Christian religion. Smaller branches are the Ju T’an [Altar of the Scholars], Wu Chiao [Religion of Magic], and T’ung Shan She [Society for Cooperation in Goodness]. The twigs are the numerous sects of Buddhism and Taoism and of the lesser religions.18 (Graham 1961, 45)

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Unfortunately for us, this passing arboreal image with which he opens the main section of Folk Religion in Southwest China (1961), is about the closest Graham comes to articulating a general theory of Chinese religion. Detailed but not particularly “thick” in the Geertzian sense, ethnographic description, not theory, is his forte.19 Still, there are two lesser threads that run through Graham’s work that bear closer examination: his functionalism and a kind of tacit evolutionism. Graham regards the religious impulse as universal, but his understanding of the source of this impulse is conflicted. In his doctoral thesis, he makes the claim—similar to Bronislaw Malinowski’s functionalism—that religion derives from “basal human needs,” which he identifies as “food, protection or security, sex, and play or amusement” (Graham 1928, 9). Graham is by no means alone among sinologists—even today—when he argues that Han “folk religion” and the religions of the Qiang, Miao, Tibetans, and Yi have a strong practical orientation. And for the most part, he seems to regard that practicality as not only natural but “good”: “The people of [Si­chuan] are primarily concerned with the solutions of life’s practical problems. Food, sex, protection from enemies, from the forces of nature, and from demons, and play are among the elemental needs. Religion is very practical. It is the technique for securing satisfaction for these needs and achieving a satisfying life” (Graham 1927–28, 434). At the same time, it is not at all clear in his writings that Graham holds Christianity to a similar standard—that is, that it too in the first instance serves “basal needs.” This leads to the second thread, an implied but ill-defined evolutionary hierarchy, in which the higher religions also serve higher functions—in particular, with respect to the moral and spiritual development of the individual. In his summary discussion of China’s “great religions” in Folk Religion in Southwest China, he emphasizes what he considers to be the positive ethical doctrines of each: The character and teachings of Confucius were high and noble, and the purpose of Confucius was to reform people and society so as to bring order, peace, and prosperity to the world. . . . The original philosophical Taoism has some high moral and spiritual ideals. In its conception of the Tao, there is an approach to that of a supreme god, eternal, good, spiritual, and creator of all things. In its ethical teachings there is emphasis on goodness and integrity of character. . . . Elements of strength in Buddhism are: 1) Its ability to adapt itself to 196 Charles Mckhann and alan waxman

different environments; 2) Its repudiation of caste; 3) Its strong organization; 4) Its missionary zeal and its sense of a world mission; 5) Its moral teachings, especially the first five commandments [8 fold path]; 6) Its spirit and practice of reverent worship; 7) Its compassion for human suffering. (Graham 1961, 219–22)

Paradoxically, considering his interest in the “lesser religions,” where all of these “great religions” ultimately fail, in Graham’s eyes, is where they rub up against the great trunk of the folk religion tree: For centuries Buddhism and Taoism, in order to win the allegiance of the masses of the Chinese people, have stooped to their level. They have encouraged the belief that through charms, incantations, the worship of gods, pilgrimages to sacred mountains, contributions to priests and to build or maintain temples, and through magical religious ceremonies, practical benefits could be obtained, leading to a more successful and satisfying life in this world. During recent decades many Chinese have learned that this is not true, and their faith in their religion has been greatly weakened.20 (Graham 1961, 188) For many centuries religious Taoism identified itself with the superstitions of the Chinese people and so won and held their allegiance. But what has in the past been a great asset, has in recent years become a decided handicap. The people of China are emerging into a new age, characterized by an intellectual and psychological awakening and enlightenment, when religions using primitive methods and psychology and preying on the superstitions of the ignorant are doomed to rejection. (Graham 1961, 56)

While the political insecurity of the Republic of China was certainly a factor, Graham attributed the decline in temple worship that his surveys documented to a failure of traditional religion in the modern age: Something very serious was happening to the religions of the Chinese, and the temples were like a thermometer by which this could be imperfectly measured. Between 1911 and 1948 more than half of the temples of Sichuan had been destroyed or occupied and changed into buildings in which there was no worship. Three-fourths of the remainDavid Crockett Graham  197

ing temples were occupied, being used primarily for other purposes, and worship was only a minor affair. These temples were “gasping their last breaths.” . . . What was happening was the greatest social, psychological, and religious revolution in the history of the Chinese people. (Graham 1961, 214)

Torn between his progressive Christian faith and his scholarly lament over the loss of traditional practices, Graham was ambivalent about the changes he saw in Sichuan’s religious culture. He regretted the decline of religious institutions during the tumultuous Nationalist years, yet was buoyed up by a belief in religious progress—an “awakening,” he called it—and a conviction that successful religions in the modern era need to follow the path of Enlightenment thinking: “During the past centuries of human history the people of all races and nationalities have had to come out of ignorance, superstition, and comparative savagery into an age of enlightenment, and the highest stage of enlightenment, the perfect society, is still in the future” (Graham 1961, 218). Graham employs the terms “enlightenment” and “civilization” to distinguish between educated Chinese elites and the masses and between Han (Chinese) generally and the non-Han ethnic groups of the Sino-Tibetan frontier. This triple distinction of civilized/primitive, elite/folk, Han/non-Han is characteristic of Confucian thought and persists in China today. Graham’s “enlightenment” has specifically Western connotations, however. Without ever defining it, he associates it with science and contemporary Western medicine, education, and social thought, including especially ideas about racial and gender equality. Whereas a commitment to science led some classic Enlightenment thinkers to question religious thinking altogether, Graham promotes a kind of positive religious humanism. In order to adapt themselves to the modern world, Christianity and other religions need constantly to reevaluate their doctrines and practices: “Old customs that are good and not harmful may and should be continued. In some cases, like the Christian Christmas festival, the old custom may well be continued with a new and better interpretation. But if the old custom, like foot binding, is harmful and cannot be given a new and better interpretation, the custom should be discontinued or a better one substituted for it” (Graham Collection [Graham 1944]; quoted in Graham 1961, 218). Comments like these suggest that while Graham acquired from his anthropologist mentors a method for ethnography and fieldwork, he rejected the principle of cultural relativism in 198 Charles Mckhann and alan waxman

its strongest form, along with the thesis that culture constitutes an organic totality. Whereas Ruth Benedict and other Boasians of his day stressed the integrity of cultural patterns, Graham’s model is more mechanical and progressive: bits and pieces can be substituted and rearranged to produce a more satisfying whole. Graham addresses in one of his earliest published writings (Graham 1926) a topic that had long troubled other Christians in China, the socalled rites controversy—namely, whether beliefs and rituals concerning the ancestors constitute a kind of “worship” of ancestors qua deities or are (merely) “commemorative” filial acts. His early view of the Miao is that “they do not regard their ancestors as deities, and assert that their worship simply includes feelings and acts of commemoration and reverence” (Graham 1926, 304). Yet he goes on to describe in detail how the dead are offered various raw and cooked food sacrifices as sustenance. He later revised this thesis along class lines when he wrote: “Enlightened Chinese do not regard the ancestors as gods, so that to them the practice of the ancestral cult is not idolatry. But the more ignorant masses . . . do regard the deceased ancestors as deities.” Presumably in reference to his own mission, he continues, “Christian enlightenment should enable a family to commemorate deceased ancestors with love, gratitude, and reverence, without the idea that they are gods” (Graham Collection [Graham 1944]; quoted in Graham 1961, 218). He goes on to suggest that certain practices of ancestor worship are “harmful” and should be discontinued. Included are expensive funerals for the dead (which he says can bring economic ruin); the idea that the dead need food, clothing, houses, money, et cetera (which he labels “a waste”); the belief that the spirit that resides in the ancestral tablet is a deity; and the conviction that ancestors who are not offered spirit money and food will become ghosts (demons) and harm people. The question of whether ancestors are deities that reside in the tablet and are worshipped as such is part of a larger question in Graham’s work that John Flower and Pam Leonard (n.d.) have raised concerning supernatural power. In a passage quoted above, Graham dismisses the idea that “all the rich and complex phenomena of Chinese religion can be included under the one term ‘animism’” (Graham 1927–28, 433), but he continues to struggle over the relationship between physical objects and supernatural power: Is the god really present in the image? Is the image to be regarded as the deity himself? In Szechuan province the answer is yes. When the David Crockett Graham  199

people or the priests pray to an idol they feel they are praying to a real god who can understand and help them. Beyond this they do not think. They simply regard the image as the god himself. The following explanation, given by a priest on Mount Omei, is of special interest. The god is only one and invisible, but in each temple may be an image of the god. He is in space, but he is capable of being anywhere, and when the people worship him in the presence of the image, he is there, and becomes actually embodied in the image, so that the image is the god. (Graham 1928, 68; emphasis in original)

Flower and Leonard argue that “Graham saw this belief in the embodiment of the god in the image as the defining distinction between primitive superstition and religious belief” (Flower and Leonard n.d., 1). But although Graham believed that this was a primitive characteristic of Chinese folk religion, he does not disparage it so much as try to explain it. Drawing on the literature of comparative religion, he links the idea of embodiment to the Polynesian concept of “mana”: “In the study of the popular religion in Szechuan Province, the mana concept, that of a strange and mysterious potency permeating all striking, powerful, strange, and mysterious things is a primary key for the understanding and interpretation of that religion” (Graham 1928, 79). Things possessed of this mysterious potency inspire “emotions of awe and wonder” (1928, 80), whether simple objects or the experience of a spectacular landscape. He finds no single name for it, but sees it as underlying the ideas of yin and yang, tai yi (the grand unity), qi (breath), feng shui, and shen (god). Years later he tentatively concluded: “It seems the word ling, or some combination of it with another Chinese word, ought to designate the mana concept” (Graham 1961, 119). This conclusion is not far off from many current understandings of Chinese folk religion (e.g., Sangren 1987 and Thompson 1996). Graham’s humanism allows him to explore the philosophical concepts of Chinese religion(s), and he applauds their use in bringing about what he regards as the “moral development” of the individual. What he rejects outright—as several of the preceding passages make clear—is anything that smacks (to him) of superstition or supernaturalism.21 While some may regard religion and superstition as two sides of the same coin, Graham, in his enlightenment faith, regards the latter only as the repository of irrationalism, waste, fear, and folly. He is ever optimistic that these things can be identified and eliminated through a continuing process of self-realization. 200 Charles Mckhann and alan waxman

That this kind of moral telos contradicts the principles of evolution as laid out by Charles Darwin is not something that he ever clearly addresses.

Graham and His Missionary Contemporaries In order to clarify Graham’s position as missionary and scientist, it is useful to contrast him with some of his contemporaries. Compared to many of his fellow missionaries in Sichuan, he was quite liberal. One example concerns the doctrine of “devolution”—of passing on leadership roles in the Protestant churches to Chinese nationals. Graham was strongly in favor of it, while some other missionaries lampooned it as “devil-lution.” Graham remarks quite candidly: “This reached a climax in the Convention at Yachow in 1925. The opposition disappointed me a great deal, and caused me to spend more of my spare time collecting for the Smithsonian Institution and in research” (Graham [1953] 2007, 61). Another bone of contention was Graham’s work among the Miao. After itinerating for some time in Miao territory, he eventually arranged for some young men to attend school in Xufu.22 The Chinese (Han) Christians of Xufu despised the Miao students and convinced some of Graham’s American colleagues that they should discontinue the Miao mission. A motion was passed to this effect at the Xufu conference, and the Miao mission was handed over to the English Methodists at Zhaofeng (Graham [1953] 2007, 62). 23 Paradoxically, some missionaries inverted the Chinese paradigm and regarded the frontier “barbarians” as morally superior to the Chinese. One of these was Graham’s senior colleague, Thomas T. Torrance. Torrance served as a missionary in Chengdu from 1889 to 1934, first with the China Inland Mission, and later with the American Bible Society. One of his favorite mission fields was the region of northwest Sichuan inhabited by the Qiang (Ch’iang). He first visited the region in about 1915 and returned many times thereafter. Graham also researched and wrote about the Qiang and he says of Torrance’s relations with the Qiang: “He sincerely loved them and tried to help them by opening schools . . . and by giving them good bulls and cockerels with which to improve their stock. The Ch’iang also loved and respected Mr. Torrance . . . [but] also told him that they were monotheists, and he [erroneously] believed them” (Graham 1958, 96–97; our parenthetical insertions). Graham regarded many of his fellow missionaries as overly conservative when it came to the Bible, its interpretation and promulgation (Graham David Crockett Graham  201

1961, 225). At a Baptist conference in Chengdu in 1915, one of the attendees suggested that their relative lack of success at converting the Chinese might be due to “too little emphasis on the second coming of Christ.” Graham responded in his own address that he “got very little inspiration from the idea that the world could only be saved by a catastrophic second coming of Jesus . . . [and that he] . . . drew much more inspiration from the belief that the world has already lasted millions of years and will probably last millenniums more” (Graham [1953] 2007, 43). Torrance was a fundamentalist, and he interpreted Qiang customs through a strict biblical lens. Ultimately, he determined that the Qiang were in fact “ancient Israelites,” sent by God to Sichuan. He titled his book China’s First Missionaries (Torrance 1988, 26). Torrance’s case for the “lost tribe” thesis begins with visceral sense impressions: “To enter the Chiang country for the first time is an unforgettable experience. The European especially, after living amongst the Chinese, rubs his eyes and wonders if what he sees is a delusion or not. He seems to be in the Near East instead of the Far East, the villages are so Biblical-looking and their inhabitants so dissimilar in appearance and manner to their neighbors. . . . What a long way they seem from home!” (Torrance 1988, 36). In a review of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Western language accounts regarding the neighboring Yi nationality (also known as Nuosu, Lolo), Stevan Harrell (1995b) notes that missionary authors rarely invoked race as a distinguishing feature, whereas scientists frequently did. Torrance’s account of the Qiang goes against this general trend. He acknowledged that cranial measurement data distinguishing Qiang from other local populations (collected by Morse and Yoh 1934, cited in Graham 1958) were inconclusive, yet he insisted that one could physically differentiate a Qiang subject: “The more one mixes with the Chiang the more he finds that they are a unique race in West Sichuan. They differ both from the Chinese and others close to them. The Chiang man is, as it were, a Jew on the border. . . . Even when he is of mixed blood . . . he can scarcely be hidden. The purer sort have unmistakably a Semitic cast of features” (Torrance 1988, 36). Physical anthropology having come up short, Torrance turned to another science—ethnology—and his book is a veritable catalog of Qiang customs and beliefs, most of which he links directly to biblical sources as evidence of the Qiang’s Near Eastern ancestry. Precursors for Qiang watchtowers and roof parapets, for example, are found in the books of Ezekiel 202 Charles Mckhann and alan waxman

and Deuteronomy. Qiang houses are dark (Luke 15:8), and their cooking pots hang in the smoke (Psalm 119:83). Qiang water vessels and ploughs, songs and dances, marriage customs and the levirate, all have their origins among the ancient Israelites (Torrance 1988). Above all, however, it is religion that ties the Qiang to the Hebrews. They worship God “on high,” erecting altars on their rooftops, at which they burn fragrant cypress twigs and offer the blood of the lamb: “On the altar stands a piece of white rock as a symbol of Deity—not of a Deity, but The Deity. Behind the altar are two projecting, perforated slabs for the insertion of a green branch of a tree. Beneath these stones, built into the wall, is the mark of a cross. . . . A lamb without blemish is slain and its blood sprinkled. The ceremony of sacrificing is called ‘the paying of vows’” (Torrance 1988, 34–35). The use of white rocks particularly captivated Torrance, and he came to refer to Qiang practices as the White Religion (see Fig. 6.9):24 “The history of finding out the secrets of the White Religion . . . became as fascinating to us as the preaching of Christ was to them. One’s whole soul was thrilled. The old and the new met together; the law and the Gospel kissed each other; truth sprang out of the earth and righteousness looked down from heaven” (Torrance 1988, 61–62). Torrance blames neighboring Chinese for some misconceptions concerning the Qiang. For example, they refer to one Qiang group as the “Bae-lan” or White Orchid Qiang, which he regards as a misnomer: “A Chiang scholar of repute insists that ‘Bae-lan’ is a [bad] transliteration. . . . ‘Bae’ approximately is the sound for ‘Ab,’ and ‘lan’ for ‘ram.’ He firmly believes that this is conclusive proof that the Chiang are the descendants of Abram or Abraham” (Torrance 1988, 66). Torrance’s dislike of the Chinese runs deep. They are almost completely morally bankrupt: “To make one’s escape from a heathen environment and to reside for a time among the Chiang is to live in an entirely different moral atmosphere . . . a positive spiritual depression which is uniformly present where idolatry is rampant, passes away in their midst” (Torrance 1988, 52). And while the Chiang have kept their religious purity, the Chinese have fallen from grace: “While retaining the name of God [shangdi] and admitting freely . . . that no other is comparable to Him, they have inexplicably sought unto dead men deified and gods of their own creation. The utter baseness now of some of their beliefs would defile the pages given to their description” (Torrance 1988, 50; our parenthetical insertion). Compared to Torrance’s work, Graham’s ethnography The Customs and Religion of the Ch’iang (1958) is a model of dispassionate scholarship. David Crockett Graham  203

Fig. 6.9  Qiang shrine, with Graham’s pith helmet in place of the white stone. Date unknown. Photo by David Crockett Graham; courtesy Whitman College and Northwest Archives.

He covers many of the same topics—natural setting, economy, architecture, marriage and the family, and religion—but regards them as wholly indigenous institutions and part of a larger, regional complex. Without ever commenting on Torrance’s theology, it is clear that Graham rejects his anthropology entirely. In a long passage labeled “The Tradition of Hebrew Origin,” Graham takes up the salient points of Torrance’s arguments and rebuts them one by one (Graham 1958, 96–101). They sacrifice goats, not lambs; they are polytheists, not monotheists; Bailan is not a transliteration of Abraham; their flat-roofed houses, stone watchtowers, sacred groves, and worship of white stones are common throughout the Sino-Tibetan 204 Charles Mckhann and alan waxman

frontier; and “there is not one physical characteristic of the Ch’iang that would convince a physical anthropologist that they are of Jewish descent” (Graham 1958, 100). In short: “There is no evidence that the Ch’iang are descendants of the Hebrews. All the evidence is to the contrary. Their language, customs, and physical characteristics indicate that they belong to the Burma-Tibetan branch of the yellow race” (Graham 1958, 103–4). Graham’s systematic rebuttal of Torrance’s arguments now appears wholly justified, but at the time it cost him a lot of social capital. After he first published his findings in the Journal of the West China Border Research Society (1942–45), he was criticized by fellow missionaries and by former West China Union University Museum curator, fellow Baptist, and close friend, Daniel Sheets Dye.25 Almost diametrically opposed to Torrance in his experience of things Chinese was another of Graham’s colleagues, Frank J. Rawlinson. Like Graham, Rawlinson was a product of Rochester Theological Seminary and one of Rauschenbusch’s students. He preceded Graham at school by a decade, but the two became close friends in China. Editor in chief of the Chinese Recorder (1914–37), an influential Shanghai-based nondenominational Christian journal, Rawlinson published nine articles by Graham between 1928 and 1936, including translations of Buddhist and Taoist texts, as well as observations and analyses of Chinese folk religion in Sichuan. Both the content and the timing of these articles are significant. The mid-1920s were the heyday of American missions in China, but they were also, not incidentally, a time of rising anti-foreign sentiment among Chinese. In March 1927, Nationalist troops attacked foreign legations in Nanjing, killing six foreigners. A near panic ensued, and over the following months approximately five thousand of the eighty-three hundred Protestants then resident in China fled the country (Lian 1997, 12). Rawlinson stayed on, and Graham, who was away on furlough at the time, returned before the year was out. Like Graham, Rawlinson developed a deep appreciation of Chinese humanist philosophy and religion. In a lecture at the Peking Language School in the mid-1920s, he praised the ethical content of Confucian thought and suggested a likeness between Confucius and Christ that for some of his listeners bordered on blasphemy (Lian 1997, 76). Eventually, Rawlinson’s extreme liberalism, coupled with his appreciation of Chinese religious thought, led to a questioning of his own Christian faith, from which he never fully recovered (Lian 1997). Graham did not experience this David Crockett Graham  205

kind of moral crisis, but his genuine interest in Chinese religion was in line with Rawlinson’s thinking. It took courage for the two of them to publish the things they did for a missionary audience in the aftermath of what became known as the Nanjing Incident. Where Graham and Rawlinson differed sharply was in their political views. Both were highly sympathetic to Chinese nationalism, but whereas Rawlinson dabbled in “red theology” and felt that China needed a twoparty system that included the Communists, Graham loathed them (Lian 1997, 80). Two years after Nanjing, Rawlinson wrote to a friend: Of course, I might raise the question as to how long the one party can carry on the government and exclude the left or a modified communist party. Here I may only venture a conjecture or two. Undoubtedly the communists are still active under the surface, and furthermore, the leftists are not satisfied, they want a more direct voice in government. . . . On the other hand, I am personally convinced that the elements of the left will eventually have to have a voice in the government and that it will have to be a two party rather than a one party affair. (Letter to A. L. Warnshuis, January 31, 1929, quoted in Varg 1974, 324)

Graham saw things differently. Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Soong Mei-ling, were Christians. Graham knew Soong slightly (he presented her with the pandas in 1941), and he met Chiang at a reception at the Military Officers Training Academy in Chengdu a short time later: “When the generalissimo gave his address, the fineness of his face was noticeable— he is a great moral and spiritual as well as political leader. There was no excitement or hatred in his speech such as characterizes Hitler’s. The generalissimo and the Madam are truly among the world’s greatest leaders” (Graham Collection [Notebook No. 10]). His view of the Chinese Communists was less favorable: World Communism today is as imperialistic a force as any movement the world has ever known. It aims to conquer the world for Russia in the name of Communism. . . . It is totalitarian, anti-religious, atheistic, materialistic, giving no freedom civil or religious. Little value is given to the individual, and millions are to be sacrificed. . . . By 1927 China was almost in Communist hands. . . . At this time China was saved from the Communists by Chiang Kai-shek. (Graham [1953] 2007, 90–91) 206 Charles Mckhann and alan waxman

Torrance and Rawlinson’s responses to Chinese religious thought are polar opposites. Torrance casts the Chinese as idolaters whose base beliefs are unmentionable and devotes himself to the Qiang, in whom he imagines his own past. Rawlinson, in contrast, immerses himself in the Chinese past and makes of it his present, ultimately forsaking his own tradition—a man “gone native.” Graham sits between the two, but closer to Rawlinson. His lifelong allegiance to the Baptist church reflects his strong commitment to the Christian project, and yet he is not blind to alternative and even opposing religious views. On many occasions his intellectual understanding, as well as his social and political sympathies, ran against the grain of his fellow missionaries, and ultimately, we suppose, it was this push (as much as the pull of science) that led him to trade the mission for the museum in Sichuan.

Conclusion From the standpoint of contemporary anthropology, David Crockett Graham’s modernist Christian biases in his interpretation of Han and nonHan religions in southwest China stand out fairly vividly. They are much weaker when viewed against the anthropology and mission projects of his own time. His commitment to a broad humanism—he went on to be a leader in the early civil rights movement in Denver after his retirement—to cultural relativism, and to the method of participant observation coupled with rigorous historical research, all mark him as a thoroughly modern anthropologist. Behind the science (or perhaps because of it) he held an unflagging belief in progress and in the perfectibility of the human spirit, including his own. Concerning the latter, he seemed by the end of his days rather pleased with his efforts, and in a reflective moment shortly before his death in 1961, he recalled a meeting from years earlier: “In Rangoon in 1940 I had friendly contacts with an Indian Christian, from whom I learned much about Indian culture and art. Once when Gandhi was mentioned I said, ‘My idea of Gandhi is that he is a man who does not call himself a Christian, but who in some ways is more Christian than I am.’ Said my Indian friend, ‘If more missionaries had that attitude, more Indians would become Christians’” (Graham 1961, 215).

David Crockett Graham  207

Notes This essay was first presented at the symposium “Explorers and Scientists in China’s Borderlands, 1880–1950,” University of Washington, January 19–21, 2007. A revised version was presented at the anthropology department at Macalester College in April 2007. We thank our colleagues at both venues for their helpful comments, Whitman College for providing us with an Abshire Award for collaborative student-faculty research, and members of the Graham family for their comments and support. Any mistakes in fact or skewed interpretations are ours. 1

2 3

4

5

6

He was in this respect nearly the antithesis of Joseph Rock, stationed in nearby Lijiang (see Yoshinaga et al., this volume), whose relations with missionaries were notoriously poor but who maintained a good relationship with Graham. The Northern Baptist Convention, founded in 1907, became the American Baptist Convention in 1950 and American Baptist Churches usa in 1972. Graham used the term “Chinese” to refer to the dominant ethnic group in China, the Han, and the term “Sichuanese” to refer to Han people from Sichuan Province. We use the term “Sichuanese” in the same way and the terms “Han” and “Chinese” interchangeably, despite the obvious problems. We refer to non-Han ethnic groups collectively as “ethnic minorities” (shaoshu minzu) and individually by their current common ethnonyms (e.g., Miao, Yi, and Qiang, as given here). Archival materials concerning Graham’s work in China are housed at Whitman College’s Penrose Library, the Sichuan University Museum, and the Smithsonian Institution. In the interest of self-disclosure, some mention of the connections between Graham and the authors of this chapter is in order. Like Graham, Charles McKhann earned his B.A. from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington—where he now teaches anthropology and Asian studies, with an emphasis on minority religions in southwest China—and an M.A. and PhD from the University of Chicago. Alan Waxman earned his B.A. in anthropology at Whitman College in 2008, exactly one hundred years after Graham. The material for this section comes mainly from four sources: Graham’s “Memoirs” ([1953] 2007); his personal papers in the Whitman College Archives; a senior history thesis at Whitman College, written by Susan Brown (1986); the preface to Graham’s Folk Religion in Southwest China (1961); and the “Guide to the Papers of David Crockett Graham 1923–1936” (1984), by Gerald Rosenberg, at the Smithsonian Institution Archives and Special Collections. Graham’s “Memoirs” appear to 208 Charles Mckhann and alan waxman

7 8 9

10

11

12 13 14

15 16

17

18

19

have been written about two years before Alicia’s death in March 1955. An original typescript copy exists in the Penrose Archives, Whitman College. His grandson, F. Patrick Russell, prepared and circulated an electronic version in 2007 and kindly shared it with us. Pagination in this chapter refers to this electronic version. There is some uncertainty as to the spelling of the murdered boy’s name. In various places it appears as Melford, Molford, and Mulford. His sister, Elmina, served for a year as president of the Whitman College Young Women’s Christian Association (ywca) chapter. Actually, Alicia and the girls did not return for Graham’s third stint at Xufu (1927–31). It was just following the so-called Nanjing Incident (see later discussion) and therefore considered too dangerous. Alicia and some of the girls did go with him when he later moved to Chengdu. We are unclear as to whether he ever collected human remains for the Smithsonian, but he did offer to do so (see later discussion). The decision not to collect botanical specimens was probably imposed on him by the Smithsonian. Ernest Henry Wilson was already involved in collecting botanical specimens for the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University, and he was followed by Joseph Rock (see chapters by Glover, Mueggler, and Yoshinaga et al., this volume). Stephanne B. Sutton, in her biography of Joseph Rock, writes that Rock, who also collected for the usnm in the same general region from 1922 to 1949 (but was funded by the National Geographic Society), “amassed a grand total of 60,000 herbarium specimens, 1,600 birds and 60 mammals” (Sutton 1974, 19). We suspect that Graham’s much higher total may be due to the fact that he included copious amounts of insects, which he shipped in bulk but tended to count as individuals. There is another photo of John Tee-Van, one of the pandas, and Soong Mei-ling, wife of Chiang Kai-shek, but it is of poor quality and not worth reproducing. Aleš Hrdlička was a physical anthropologist at the usnm. The first page of this letter—containing the date and address—is missing from Graham’s papers. It appears to have been written in 1931 to Howard (Graham Collection). Kyong-McClain and Geng (this volume) treat Graham’s archaeological career in more detail. In all, he collected “752 songs, legends, historical and etiological traditions, and short stories” (Graham 1954, iv). Most were published in the 1954 volume, but 276 were slated for a second volume—endearingly titled “More Songs and Stories of the Ch’uan Miao”—which exists as a manuscript but was never published. He also collected a large number of Taoist charms, some of which he commented on in his writings, but most of which remain unanalyzed in his personal papers in the Whitman College Archives. Ru Tan (Ju T’an), Wu Chiao (Wu Jiao), and Tong Shan She (T’ung Shan She) are syncretic sects found in Sichuan. The “lesser religions” include the religions of the region’s minority ethnic populations. The same is true of his Songs and Stories of the Ch’uan Miao (1954), which is a compendium of Miao songs, stories, et cetera, classified according to topic, but David Crockett Graham  209

20

21 22

23 24 25

with little commentary or analysis. As other authors in this volume point out, this idea of science qua observation and description—the “simple” recording and classification of facts—was quite normal during the period under consideration. This passage seems to suggest a golden age when Buddhism and Taoism were less corrupt than in Graham’s day. Whether this springs from his familiarity with Confucian historiography or is a product of his more Western imagination, or a bit of both, is unclear. We are indebted to Jeff Kyong-McClain for sharpening our awareness of this point, although it is embedded in Flower and Leonard’s discussion, as well. One of these, Yang Feng-tsang, went on to become Graham’s research assistant, introducing him to Miao customs, helping arrange for the collection of the stories that were later published as Songs and Stories of the Ch’uan Miao (Graham 1954), and accompanying him on his summer collecting trips (1922–32). Apparently, the relationship between Graham and Yang was quite close: Graham made several photographs of Yang and his family, and Graham’s daughters remembered Yang with fondness years later (personal communication). We are unable to determine the date of this conference. It appears to be 1920. White, he reminds us, is the symbol of purity and goodness. See Kyong-McClain and Geng (this volume) for more on the relationship between Graham and Torrance and on their ethnographies of the Qiang. Torrance was also involved in a number of archaeological excavations in Sichuan and collected for the West China Union University Museum. Like Graham, he considered himself a scientist, and in fact his son, Thomas Forsyth Torrance, went on to become a world famous theologian at the University of Edinburgh, specializing in the reconciliation of Christianity and science. More biographical research on Torrance would make a worthwhile project.

210 Charles Mckhann and alan waxman

7 David Crockett Graham in Chinese Intellectual History Foreigner as Nation Builder Jeff Kyong-McClain and Geng Jing

Kangding has two recently established Protestant churches. Although there are no believers among Kangding residents, the churches are important as stations for American and British explorers. If one aims to obtain a true picture of Kangding, the churches are essential. Just recently they hosted the American National Geographic Society’s Professor Rock . . . an American merchant of Indian tea and a British missionary who came up from Yunnan to clandestinely investigate the tea industry, and a party collecting biological specimens [headed by David Crockett Graham] . . . most reports on the economy and science of Xikang Province are coming from Europeans and Americans who use these churches as their base. —Ren Naiqiang, “Kangchu shicha baogao di’er hao—Kangding xian”

A

s anthropologist Ren Naiqiang traversed Xikang Province in 1929 conducting county-by-county surveys at the behest of warlord Liu Wenhui, Ren was struck by the apparent success of foreign explorers at understanding the “true picture” of China’s borderlands. Ren firmly believed in the power of the social and humanistic sciences to build and transform a nation and lamented that most Chinese did not share Western explorers’ enthusiasm for study of the borderlands. Ren also noted the close association between Christian missions and borderlands research, as the Kangding churches served as outposts for various scientific and social 211

scientific studies. Although Ren was not initially pleased that the Western missionaries seemed to hold the keys to understanding the borderlands, he decided in the end to join them and during World War II took a post at Chengdu’s Protestant West China Union University. There he directed the university’s Tibetan studies program and hobnobbed with dozens of missionary-scholars who were expert in a wide array of academic disciplines and had conducted research in southwestern China, including among them the elder statesman of the region’s ethnography and archaeology, a man who had beat Ren to Kangding, David Crockett Graham. The collapse of the Qing empire in 1911 sent politicians and military leaders scrambling for new ways to bind together the new nation-state. Intellectuals theorized the meaning and ancient origins of the “Chinese nation” (Zhonghua minzu) in this empire-cum-nation (Leibold 2007). Working against these efforts toward philosophical unity and political hegemony were regional power holders, geographic isolation, foreign imperialism, and ethnic minorities, sometimes themselves inspired by modern notions of political independence. “National self-determination” (minzu zijue) was an attractive slogan of the May Fourth movement, but what exactly was, and who was included in, the Chinese national self? The answer could not be definitively decided by any one quarter, and brute military force often settled the question in individual cases, but anthropologists were among those who sought comprehensive answers to these questions of definition. They did so by attempting to understand who exactly inhabited the territory of the new China (usually assumed to be commensurate with the borders of the Manchu Qing dynasty), how these groups were related historically, and how they should be related today. Ethnography and archaeology were two technologies that anthropologists used to attempt to reach a consensus on these issues. Although the demands of a China-centered history might suggest that one look for the origins of ethnography and archaeology in Chinese history itself (and one can productively do so), still it remains true that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western practitioners played a large role in establishing them as modern academic disciplines in China. In Si­chuan, this was probably even truer than in other places, both because Sichuan was simply geographically remote from centers of Chinese academic power and because Sichuanese provincial warlords steadfastly resisted the intrusion of central authority, both political and academic, when it did try to expand its reach in the southwest (Kapp 1973). Thus, well 212 jeff kyong-mcclain and geng jing

into the Republic, it fell to Western scholars, trained in the United States or Europe, to explore the region, relying on friendly contacts with churches and local power holders (both Han and ethnic minority chieftains), some of whom might have resisted cooperation with researchers more clearly connected to the Chinese center. Graham was one such Western scholar, and in his thirty-six years in Sichuan, he established himself as the leading ethnographer and archaeologist of Sichuan, and arguably the entire southwest, during the Republic of China (1912–49). As a missionary, financed by the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society and engaged to varying degrees throughout his career in propagating Christianity, Graham certainly fits within the missionary phase of the “succession of civilizing projects” on China’s southwestern periphery (Harrell 1995a, 17). However, in his ethnographic and archaeological work, Graham in many ways is best understood as a pioneer in building a new Chinese national history and national body in the southwest. Rarely do Graham’s ethnographic and archaeological studies appear even remotely concerned with converting the Chinese or the ethnic minorities to Christianity. Rather, they show a strong interest in converting the ambiguities of tradition regarding ethnic identity and the ancient past into precise modern notions suitable for citizens of a modern Chinese nation-state.

Graham’s Ethnography Chinese tradition (indeed, most traditions) did not have a clearly defined concept of an ethnos or nationality. Rather, in general, the view prevailed that there was a civilizing center and a periphery, and the space between these two grew increasingly “barbaric” the farther one moved away from the center. The peoples who inhabited the periphery were not studied systematically as discrete ethnic units but were alternatively awarded recognition on the basis of their adoption of Confucian values, or otherwise declared to be like wild beasts and feared (Fiskesjö 1999).1 In either case, the concern was less the peoples themselves than what they represented in terms of defining who the civilized Chinese were. So, for instance, Wang Ming-ke notes that “‘the Qiang’ [of Chinese historic writings] was not necessarily a ‘people’ that had continuity in time and space; instead, it was an ethnic boundary of the Chinese in constant flux” (Wang 2002, 136). This disregard for precise ethnic distinctions crumbled with the fall of the Qing, and in its place arose a frantic search for definable (and therefore manageGraham in Chinese Intellectual History  213

able) peoples who could be a part of the Chinese Nation, either through genetic and cultural assimilation or in multiethnic harmony. Still, while early twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals were seriously vexed by the problem of creating precise definitions of the many nationalities in their borderlands, and while they recognized the necessity of ethnography as a discipline to sort them out, most initially took a more traditional tack and immersed themselves in the complicated and often contradictory world of ancient texts. They labored over the precise meaning of tribes and place-names in the oracle bones, the Shanhaijing, the Yu Gong, and other sources, taking on faith that what they learned from these texts was connected to China’s current situation. Until Japanese invasion forced many eastern-based scholars out of their ivory towers and into the ethnic laboratory of the southwest, few investigated for themselves the various ethnic peoples, leaving ethnographic fieldwork in large part to foreigners, often missionaries like Graham (Wang 2002, 138). In 1912, after just one year of Chinese language training in Shanghai, Graham and his wife, Alicia, moved to Xufu (Yibin) in Sichuan, where they would remain for the next eighteen years. Chinese who lived in cultural centers, such as Beiping, Nanjing, and Shanghai, often thought of Sichuan Province as beautiful, remote, barely civilized, and teeming with exotic tribes (Kapp 1973, 70).2 Xufu, nestled along the north bank of the Yangtze River about midway between Chongqing and Chengdu, was a quintessential Sichuan city in this regard. Although the city itself had been under Chinese political and cultural sway at least since the Han dynasty, across the river the story was different. One Song dynasty traveler described the ominous sense of native eyes peering at him from the verdant foliage of the south shore of the Yangtze as he approached Xufu (Glahn 1987, 12). Ming and Qing colonialism pushed those eyes deeper into the forests, but during the Republic, the town remained in close proximity to non-Han Sichuan. Stationed in such a place, it is not too surprising that Graham picked up an interest in ethnography early on in his stay. Like many missionaries, he was inclined toward the study of Han culture in part for missiological purposes, as a way of understanding the mission field. For Graham, the Han of Xufu became his first informants, and he published a few short accounts of their customs in the West China Missionary News (Graham 1929). However, the Han may have seemed somewhat like a known commodity to Graham since missionaries had written about them for decades, and Graham early on became interested in the peoples outside of ordinary Han civiliza214 jeff kyong-mcclain and geng jing

Fig. 7.1  Tibetan caravaneers taking their noon meal. Date unknown. Courtesy Whitman College and Northwest Archives.

tion, the peering eyes from across the river. Graham often made preaching trips into remote outstations where he might encounter a Miao from the border with Guizhou or a Yi from Pingshan. Yet even more significant for Graham’s developing interest in the ethnic others of the southwest were the summers he spent trekking across Sichuan collecting faunal specimens for the Smithsonian Institution (see fig. 7.1). On these trips through Miao, Yi, Tibetan, and Qiang country, Graham’s curiosity was piqued. Collecting during the summer of 1921, Graham spent his first extended time in the “Miao” areas of southern Sichuan.3 He studied Miao language, inquired after Miao customs, eventually took on a Miao research assistant (see fig. 7.2), and subsequently wrote his first brief ethnography, an article titled, “The Ch’uan Miao of Southern Szechwan.” The account is basically a list of mostly unconnected observations: “The women wear short skirts instead of trousers, and do not bind their feet. The men resemble the Chinese more closely than they do the Lolos.” Graham suggests his missionary Graham in Chinese Intellectual History  215

Fig. 7.2  Yang Fong Chang, Graham’s Chuan Miao field research assistant, and his wife. Date unknown. Photo by David Crockett Graham; courtesy Whitman College and Northwest Archives.

status noting that Miao music is “attractive . . . [bearing] a slight resemblance to the chants often heard in Christian worship.” He also shows an interest in the complexion of the Miao, finding them to be surprisingly light skinned. Finally, he encourages “a more thorough study of these people,” which he would in fact undertake in the next two and a half decades (Graham 1922–23, 56). Graham continued throughout the 1920s to publish increasingly detailed ethnographies in the Journal of the West China Border Research Society and in missionary journals. Most were, like the above, based on observations made somewhat on the fly during his summer collecting trips, and they show little awareness of any particular anthropological theory. This amateur approach changed in 1932, when he returned to Sichuan after a year and a half of advanced study in the anthropology departments of the 216 jeff kyong-mcclain and geng jing

University of Chicago and Harvard University, including work under Franz Boas’s student, Fay-Cooper Cole.4 From this experience Graham picked up a mildly Boasian approach to doing ethnography, which emphasized respect for the culture of the informants, less overt attention to evolutionary development, eliminating bias in the researcher as much as possible, and putting a premium on extended fieldwork. Thus when Graham returned to Sichuan, he attempted to apply this new model of ethnography to study the peoples of the southwest. On his return, Graham joined the faculty of the Protestant West China Union University in Chengdu. The university was established in 1910 by the joint efforts of five mission boards, from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, and soon became a leading center of reformminded higher education in southwestern China, winning the praise of foreign and Chinese scholars alike (Huaxi xiaoshi bianweihui 1990) (fig. 7.3). The university was already the preeminent center for anthropological research in the southwest when Graham joined. This was partly due to the potential missiological usefulness of anthropology and in part simply because Chinese national and provincial universities (West China Union University’s potential competition in this matter) in the early 1930s still tended to slight the social sciences in favor of the hard sciences, which were initially thought more pertinent to building a strong state (Chiang 2001, chap. 1). From its earliest days, the school offered courses such as Humanity and Ethnology as well as Race and Anthropology. In 1914, the university set aside funds for the establishment of a museum of archaeology and ethnology, and in 1922, dozens of faculty along with other interested missionaries from around the southwest, Graham included, founded the West China Border Research Society in order to render “a service for ourselves, for the Chinese, for the world,” by conducting all and sundry forms of scientific research of China’s borderlands, with special attention to ethnographic research of non-Chinese peoples in the region (Morse 1922–23, 5). Still, despite West China Union University’s undisputed preeminence in southwestern anthropology, from a disciplinary point of view, the first two decades of anthropological work were considerably amateurish. People with master of divinity degrees or bachelor degrees in various sciences conducted most of the anthropological research, with the result that it was sometimes plainly conversion oriented, or more often, like Graham’s early work, short and substandard. Graham’s arrival in 1932 brought the authority of U.S. disciplinary anthropology to bear on West China Union UniverGraham in Chinese Intellectual History  217

Fig. 7.3  Education building at West China Union University. Date unknown. Photo by David Crockett Graham; courtesy Whitman College and Northwest Archives.

sity’s anthropological project, and Graham quickly became the backbone of the university’s anthropological research. This shift toward a more academically rigorous anthropology was not without its conflicts, and Graham sometimes offended his predecessors by criticizing their views as simplistic or biased, or by marginalizing them, as he aimed for his own ethnographic work to achieve importance well beyond the small circle of Sichuan-based missionary-scholars. The most poignant example is Graham’s conflict with Thomas T. Torrance over whether the Qiang had Hebraic origins.5 Aside from obvious disciplinary difference between the theology of Torrance and the ethnology of Graham, Graham’s interpretation was much more suitable to Chinese nationalism in that it planted the Qiang more readily in Chinese national history, rather than Central Asian or Western history. Aside from disputing with other missionaries, Graham made many contributions to ethnography in the southwest, especially with reference to the Qiang (fig. 7.4). Though less known today, Graham’s contributions to the study of the Qiang are in no way inferior to the studies of the Naxi by Joseph Rock. As a cultural anthropologist, Graham’s professional sensitivity made him aware of the cultural shock from the outside world that ethnic minority society received under the multifarious pressures involved in Chinese state encroachment and Western cultural and economic soundings in the area. Graham approached his ethnography then with a “salvage anthropology” perspective, which he picked up in part from his time with Cole at Chicago. Under this approach, Graham sought to preserve a 218 jeff kyong-mcclain and geng jing

Fig. 7.4  Qiang village of Mu Shang Chai showing terraces and watchtower, 1942. Photo by David Crockett Graham; courtesy Whitman College and Northwest Archives.

detailed knowledge about the Qiang for posterity, believing it inevitable that ethnic distinctives would wither away in time. This attitude, on the one hand, meshed well with the general belief and practice of the Nationalist state, which held that eventually all frontier peoples would be assimilated (tonghua, or sometimes hanhua) into the great river of the Chinese. On the other hand, it inspired Graham to diligence as he attempted to record all he possibly could about Qiang lifeways. Taking seriously the importance of getting to know the real Qiang identity, if only to be preserved in a museum in the future, Graham spared no effort to record all he could about Qiang cultural practices and history. For example, Graham meticulously recorded Qiang religious rites and annotated religious manuscripts, including writing down thorough descriptions of entire processes of the rituals of the Qiang priests, the shibi, marking every ritual text with phonetic symbols and translating them into English (figs. 7.5–7.6). Graham also followed the shibi through each moment in a given ritual and recorded his observations, which were later supplemented by discussions with the shibi themselves. So, for instance, Graham described the important community-wide “paying the vows” ritual in great detail, including this passage describing the initial moments of the ceremony: Graham in Chinese Intellectual History  219

Fig. 7.5  Qiang priest. Date unknown. Photo by David Crockett Graham; courtesy Whitman College and Northwest Archives.

The men [of the procession] are dressed in white homespun hemp clothing, which is undyed. The first master of ceremonies goes in front, and the others follow in single file. He carries the Abba Mula, or patron deity of the priest, on a wooden platter. Before the Abba Mula is taken down, the priest worships it, chanting some of his “sacred books” and burning incense to it. Then follows the second master of ceremonies, carrying three flags made of white paper. These flags are stuck up on the way at important points, and at the altar where the goat is offered. (Graham 1958, 59–60)

Currently, there are very few shibi left in Qiang society because young people do not see the value in such a position, and many shibi traditions, most of which were passed on orally, have been lost over time. Under such circumstances, Graham’s records on the Qiang language, history, and especially religion described above remain of high value for the contemporary ethnologist. Since a stranger’s presence during Qiang religious rites is considered taboo, it is striking the amount of access Graham obtained and is suggestive of his ability as an ethnographer to find acceptance in the community 220 jeff kyong-mcclain and geng jing

Fig. 7.6  Making offerings, priest (shibi) in the background. Date unknown. Photo by David Crockett Graham; courtesy Whitman College and Northwest Archives.

he studied. Because of his respect for the local people and their culture, Graham gained the support of many Qiang elite. Still, there were some Qiang who considered Graham’s presence less than auspicious, and he had to negotiate his place in the Qiang community between the poles of full acceptance and suspicious resistance. Some Qiang were willing, even enthusiastic, to provide Graham with necessary information and material. In July 2007, author Geng Jing conducted field research in some of the same Qiang areas that Graham had visited long before. In Luobozhai village of Wenchuan County, Geng interviewed the oldest shibi in the village, ninety-two-year-old Zhang Fulian. Zhang explained that his family is a shibi noble family. When he was very young, his father, Zhang Huashan, received as a guest a foreigner, whom they called Pastor Ge (from Graham’s Chinese name, Ge Weihan). Pastor Ge had brought with him a cook, and for the first four days, Pastor Ge ate his cook’s food separately from the Zhang household at dinnertime. However, on account of the high position of shibi in Qiang society, many villagers often invited them to perform rituals, after which the people would give the shibi remuneration in the form of food, such as chicken, corn, potatoes, Graham in Chinese Intellectual History  221

and so on. Thus Zhang Huashan’s cupboards were always overflowing, and after explaining this situation to Pastor Ge, he invited him to share in the Zhang family meals. Pastor Ge agreed, and from then on he both lived and ate with the Zhangs for four months, which helped to establish his credibility with the local village people. Further, Zhang Fulian related, the local people became convinced of Pastor Ge’s good morals, and he was thus able to gain even more trust from the local people, which further aided his research. Because of this reputation, Pastor Ge could even persuade some Qiang who lived in remote mountainous areas to move to Chengdu in order to assist him in his research. Not all Qiang were on the Pastor Ge bandwagon, however, and Zhang Fulian also talked about issues that concerned some members of the community. There were those who refused to communicate with Graham, worrying that it might bring them unnecessary troubles. These people would either entirely refuse to talk with him or, if cornered, provide him with wrong information. When Geng asked Zhang what the response was when word got out in the village that Pastor Ge was coming, Zhang related the following story. On one occasion, when Pastor Ge had just left Luobozhai village, two trees fell over in a nearby sacred forest, and a small snake was discovered in a grave mound. Some local people thought these were bad omens for the village, and linked them to the recent presence of Pastor Ge. Word spread that perhaps this was a sign of impending calamity, that “people’s pulse would weaken” and that the village population would shrink. At that time, Zhang Fulian’s father, despite his respect for Graham, was also worried. Fortunately for Graham’s continued ethnographic access, the village population did not decrease, but continued to thrive, and eventually people simply forgot about the affair. Still, the account suggests that Graham’s presence was not unanimously welcomed in the village. Graham’s ethnography, built as it was on a rigorous notion of fieldwork, seemed to attain a very high level of objectivity, especially when compared to the work of people like Torrance. In addition, Graham’s apparently real respect for his informants furthered his ability to conduct successful fieldwork, since informants were eager to share information with him. Tension remained, however, around who ultimately benefited from this ethnography. During the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–45), the ways in which Graham’s ethnographic work dovetailed with the aims of the Nationalist state in the borderlands became increasingly evident. As the war forced the nation’s capital to Sichuan, the state became increas222 jeff kyong-mcclain and geng jing

ingly aggressive in bringing the borderlands and their inhabitants under its control, and it encouraged anthropologists to submit their services to the state. The Ministry of Education exerted increasing pressure on scholars to tell the story of Chinese history as the story of the harmonious integration of various people-groups and sometimes, more ominously, as the tale of the heroic and benevolent Han people and their territorial expansion (Chan 2007, 175–76). The academic community never submitted completely to this Nationalist vision, but at the same time, most agreed that China needed somehow to develop its borderlands and bring the disparate peoples together into one nation. Graham was able to offer his anthropological expertise to the state through his affiliation with the Border Service Department of the Church of Christ in China (Zhonghua Jidu Jiaohui Bianjiang Fuwu Bu). The Border Service Department was a government-sanctioned outreach activity of the Chinese church (not the missionary denominations). Zhang Bohuai, former president of Qilu University, directed the department, and its leadership board was entirely Chinese, with the exception of Arnie Crouch, the English secretary. The department was funded by various sources, including the national Chinese government, relevant provincial governments, the American Red Cross, and donations collected from churches in China and the West (Yang 2006). The aims of the unit as described in the inaugural issue of its journal were, “in the spirit of Christian service, [to] elevate the morals of the border people, offering them every kind of service, widen their knowledge, relieve their hardship, reform their lives, and promote the unification of the peoples, thus enriching the power of the nation” (Bian­ jiang fuwu 1943a, cover). Through this organization, leading Christian anthropologists like Li Anzhai, Yu Shiyu, Liu Enlan, and Graham offered their services for the border peoples, the Christian church, and the Republic of China. The role of the Han anthropologist was complicated in this process, as members of the organization expressed disgust at colonial and developmentalist mind-sets, in favor of a more relativistic “cultural studies” (wenhuaxue) approach, but at the same time always aligned with a Nationalist regime plainly bent on a kind of development-driven colonialism.6 For Graham, too, his Boasian training did not seem to preclude cooperation with a state that wanted the rapid influx of Han into areas where previously there had been few or none and wanted very much to quicken the withering away of the ethnic other in the name of national unity. Graham in Chinese Intellectual History  223

As part of the Border Service Department, Graham and the other anthropologists joined with doctors, preachers, and educators to advance the department’s goals throughout Sichuan and Xikang. In many areas inhabited by ethnic minorities, they worked to establish “service centers,” which became the nodal points for the department’s medical, educational, and research operations. The first was named the West Sichuan Service Center and was located in the Qiang area of Wenchuan County. Graham, already very familiar with the region, was chosen by the organization to lead Chinese college students from all the Chengdu-based universities to work in this center during the summers of 1941 and 1942. The University of Chicago, probably because of Graham, became involved with the Wenchuan center by donating audiovisual equipment, which could be used for educational and propagandistic purposes (Bianjiang fuwu 1943a, 20). Graham was most likely selected to be a staff member of the center because of his long-standing familiarity with the Qiang areas, and surely his own research benefited since he was afforded more opportunities to travel to Qiang country and continue his ethnographic research. Graham’s work with the Border Service Department also translated into wider publicity for Graham among Chinese anthropologists. The department, in cooperation with Li Anzhai’s West China Union University– based Border Research Institute, funded a special exhibit on the Qiang at the university’s museum in May 1943. Graham’s exhibition was arranged in four displays: the scenery of Qiang country, Qiang antiquities, Qiang religion, and Qiang daily life. Except for the antiquities, the displays primarily consisted of Graham’s photos and color sketches of Qiang life and land. During the show’s run, Graham gave a well-received lecture, titled “The Customs of the Qiang,” to interested parties (Bianjiang fuwu 1943b, 23). The Border Service Department also expanded Graham’s reach by translating portions of Graham’s ethnography into Chinese in the late 1940s.7 Graham remained active in the Border Service Department until his retirement and return to the United States in 1948. After the founding of the People’s Republic (1949), politics intervened in a new way, and though Graham’s overall view regarding the place of the ethnic minorities within China did not differ radically from the official principle of a “unified multicultural state” (tongyi duo minzu de guojia), it became politically expedient for anthropologists in China not to mention Graham in their work.8 Although Graham quite enthusiastically exhibited the “will to classify” and must be considered a forerunner of ethnic clas224 jeff kyong-mcclain and geng jing

sification (minzu shibie) in Sichuan, early People’s Republic anthropologists involved in this project would not have admitted as much (Mullaney 2011). The feeling was mutual, and just as Graham fell from favor among Chinese anthropologists after liberation, so too did Graham grow to despise the work being done on the mainland. When the American consulate general in Hong Kong issued a report on Fei Xiaotong’s “Minority Groups in Kweichow Province,” Graham wrote the consulate a scathing letter on August 19, 1952, upbraiding it for even giving the drivel the time of day, dismissing Fei’s work wholly as “Communist propaganda” (Graham Collection [Graham 1952]). Fei’s portrayal of the prerevolutionary life of the ethnic minorities as utterly dismal and their revolutionary life as uniformly joyous deeply irritated Graham, and he wrote bitterly that he “would certainly like to make my own investigation as to the treatment of the minority groups of China and Tibet by the Communists, but of course that is impossible.” Despite these suspicions, the break between Graham and the anthropologists who remained in mainland China was not nearly that great, and Graham’s friends and students continued to work, under his disciplinary influence, for the new regime. After the era of Cold War name-calling subsided, Graham’s name was promptly returned to a place of honor among anthropologists in Sichuan.

Graham’s Archaeology The modern discipline of archaeology emerged in China, as it did elsewhere, at a time of rising nationalist sentiment. The discipline, with its newfound authority as a scientific method for studying the past, was thus often called on to provide evidential support for the idea of an authentic nation with roots in the remote past. Since modern democratic sentiment could not accept the genealogies of kings or emperors as defining the nation as a historic community, the nation instead had to be rebuilt by modern historiography, which told the story of a “people” existing through time, and by relying on new readings of older histories and the assured results of archaeology.9 In China, the need for a truly national history with scientific support seemed doubly important as doubters of China’s written record proliferated at the same time as the nation was besieged on all sides. Led by iconoclast Gu Jiegang, some historians took to destroying the nation’s history as found in texts, putting the onus on archaeology as the only escape route for a full recuperation of Graham in Chinese Intellectual History  225

the lost history. As one early Chinese archaeologist who was hopeful put it: “Archaeology can straighten out the confusion brought on by conflicting and myth-making texts” (Wei 1933, 1). In China’s heartland, the late 1920s and early 1930s saw the increasing power of the Chinese state over archaeological research, in the form of Academia Sinica’s excavations and national regulation. This general tendency of the nationalization of archaeology did not hold in the southwest, which, starting with the Republican Revolution and even more so after the Northern Expedition (1926–27), became increasingly less connected to the center of Chinese political and academic power. In the southwest, the push to forward modern archaeological studies and in the process supplant older notions surrounding the ownership and interpretation of antiquities fell mainly to Western academics and, surprisingly, in large part to Graham himself. Graham, unfailingly, used the scientific authority of the new discipline to locate “China” firmly in the ancient past of Sichuan. It is impossible to pinpoint when Graham determined to pursue archaeology as a serious component of his overall research. Certainly, as with so many missionary-scholars before him, he always approached sinology as a comprehensive project that required the combined efforts of all the social sciences and humanities. From an early date in his mission in China, Graham appreciated the importance of Chinese history, at least insomuch as it related to his Christian mission, if not yet on its own terms. While serving in Xufu, Graham used his knowledge of the Chinese classics in an effort to lessen the charge that Christianity was a foreign religion (yangjiao). In one 1916 tract, reminiscent of famed missionaries before him, including Matteo Ricci, James Legge, and Robert Morrison, Graham merged Christian and Confucian concepts, explaining that the Confucian ideal of the Gentleman (junzi) was most effectively attained through Christianity. Graham goes on to write that these Christian junzi will be able to strengthen the struggling nation as they help the people return to the good “rules” (guiju) of the classics and away from the corrupt “customs” ( fengsu) of modern Chinese (Graham Collection [Graham 1916]). Written in the early years of China’s New Culture movement, during which authors called for varying degrees of abandoning tradition, Graham’s interest in the purity of the Chinese past seems a tad quixotic, but it is suggestive of his early belief in the importance of understanding the Chinese past for the present national crisis. As with other scholars in China at the time, Graham’s move from interest in China’s textual past to its material past was probably a short step. 226 jeff kyong-mcclain and geng jing

In the relatively small community of missionaries in Sichuan, he would have known of the early archaeological work of Torrance in and around Chengdu and J. Huston Edgar in eastern Tibet. What may have tipped the scale in terms of inciting interest in archaeology, however, was his friendship with Daniel Sheets Dye, the West China Union University Museum curator. Dye and Graham were both American Baptists, and from an early date, Graham supported Dye’s museum activities, publishing calls to missionaries to do their “Christian service” and help make the museum the best in western China by sending it natural history, archaeological, and ethnographic specimens (Graham 1924). Graham followed his own advice, and as he crisscrossed Sichuan in either of his roles as Baptist preacher or Smithsonian naturalist, he collected artifacts, which he forwarded to Dye in Chengdu. As a long-established missionary in Sichuan, Graham had an inside track to antiquities that outsider archaeologists would have lacked. Converts who learned that Graham was looking for such-and-such objects were wont to give artifacts to Graham, perhaps in exchange for favors or simply out of a sense of Christian service. In one case, a Christian-convert Yi headman named Li Mingfeng visited the Leshan church when Graham was passing through, providing Graham with Yi antiques, which were then promptly sent to Dye’s museum (Graham Collection [Graham, “Memoirs,” 79]). In 1930, anticipating his appointment to the faculty of West China Union University, Graham gave up his mission at the Xufu Baptist Church. It was understood that he would take the lead in establishing an archaeology program at the school and replace Dye as museum curator, devoting a significant portion of his time to reorganizing the museum along scientific lines, a job for which Dye admitted he had no time.10 Whether the university job offer was conditional upon his obtaining further education or Graham himself simply wanted more expertise, before heading to Chengdu, he used a sabbatical from his mission beginning in the winter/spring of 1931 to expand his anthropological and archaeological skills in the United States. Graham, always conscious of a distinction between professional and amateur, surely wanted to establish himself as an archaeologist and not simply a collector of antiquities. Graham first enrolled in a one-semester course in archaeological fieldwork supervised by Cole at Chicago. Remembered primarily as a “remarkably effective organizer and administrator” (not a theorist), Cole as chair of the Anthropology Department was perhaps most effective at disbursing Graham in Chinese Intellectual History  227

department funds toward his own great interest, excavating as much of Illinois as possible (Stocking 1980, 17, 27). Under Cole, Graham learned the methodologies of scientific excavation, first in the classroom and then during actual excavations of Indian mounds in southern Illinois, where Cole sent all his archaeology students to train. Mound digging was de rigueur for aspiring archaeologists in the United States. To locate and catalog the Native American past was considered useful to American nation building at the time, as one of Graham’s textbooks said on the matter: “In order to deal with these resources intelligently and to make them a real service to the State, all archaeological and historical Indian sites must be located and classified” (Wissler 1923, 9). For Cole, excavating the mounds of Illinois was part of telling the story of “man in this land we call America” (Cole and Deuel 1937, 1). Impressed with Graham’s promise as an archaeologist, Cole put him in charge of one of the excavation teams. For Graham, managing his first excavation was not easy, and he seems to have had the most trouble at first simply relating to the other archaeology students. Graham’s Baptist religious beliefs, not least his teetotaling, conflicted with the general tenor of the anthropology students, who tended toward a secular view and loved, in Graham’s words “to raise Ned” on the weekends in the small southern Illinois towns (Graham Collection [Graham, “Memoirs,” 83]). According to Graham, they eventually came to respect Graham’s stubborn persistence of belief, his archaeological abilities, and even his sobriety, and they finished the job under his leadership with impressive results. Cole, at least, was pleased with Graham’s work on the excavation, and Graham used Cole’s recommendation letters to impress other archaeologists for the remainder of his career. With this practice under his belt, Graham moved to Harvard, where he spent one year studying anthropological and archaeological theory under Alfred M. Tozzer and Ernest A. Hooten. As a student at Harvard, Graham was following in the paths of several leading figures in Chinese archaeology, including Li Ji and Liang Siyong, who had enrolled in the same courses just a few years before Graham.11 In fact, during his stay at Harvard, one of his classmates was none other than Feng Hanji, who was a first-year graduate student in the Anthropology Department in the 1931–32 academic year. Although neither knew it at the time, Feng, a native of Hunan, would become Graham’s neighbor in faculty housing at West China Union University just after World War II and then go on to become a major figure in Sichuan archaeology well into the Communist era. While at Harvard, 228 jeff kyong-mcclain and geng jing

Graham was trained in how to understand and interpret archaeological cultures through reading the works of archaeologists like V. Gordon Childe and A. L. Kroeber. From them he picked up an emphasis on understanding cultural change through the processes of diffusion of superior technologies.12 Graham would return to Sichuan and find diffusion of an advanced culture from the Central Plains into peripheral Sichuan a very compelling interpretation of his data, one that, as it happened, meshed nicely with nationalist-tinged archaeology throughout China. Armed then with a year and a half of archaeological theory and practice, Graham returned to southwest China to establish scientific archaeology in the region. Almost immediately after having set up shop in Chengdu, Graham had the opportunity to implement his new archaeological knowledge in a large way. The excavation most foundational to the discipline in the southwest was Graham’s 1932–33 dig at Hanzhou (Guanghan), about thirty kilometers north of Chengdu. Chen Xingcan has dubbed Graham’s activity at Hanzhou “Sichuan’s earliest true archeological dig, which had great influence on our understanding Sichuan’s ancient culture” (Chen Xingcan 1997b, 198). The dig was significant not only for the artifacts unearthed but perhaps even more so for helping establish a paradigmatic “scientific” archaeology in the southwest, important for replacing older ways of viewing and owning antiquities. The actual site was discovered by a farmer of some means named Yan Daocheng, who in 1929 had several hired hands digging new drainage ditches for his fields.13 Yan’s workers began finding pieces of jade jewelry and reported this to their employer. As it turns out, Yan was not yet enlightened as to the nature of the “artifact” as something of national import, and he began to scatter his discoveries to various women in the Hanzhou area. Fortunately for archaeology and the nation, a certain Reverend V. H. Donnithorne, who led the Protestant church in Hanzhou, was itinerating in the surrounding countryside when he heard of the discovery at Yan’s place and reported it to Dye, who in turn told Graham. Yan perhaps sensed that he was on to something better than previously thought and was coy when Graham first paid him a visit, giving him a few trinkets to take back to the museum in Chengdu but denying him permission to excavate on his fields. Graham, undeterred, went above Yan and appealed both to the magistrate of Hanzhou and to the Sichuan Provincial Education Bureau. At the time the bureau was under the direct control of the warlord Deng Xihou, a longtime friend of West China Union University. The exact negotiations that Graham in Chinese Intellectual History  229

ensued have not yet come to light, but the next time Graham returned to Hanzhou, he was accompanied by the magistrate and a contingent of soldiers, to “protect” the site, in the second round of negotiations with Yan. This time Yan saw the scientific and national value of his find and agreed to turn the artifacts and the entire site, his fields, over to the magistrate, who in turn turned the responsibility over to Graham and the museum. Thus was the precedent established in Sichuan of the hierarchy of governmentapproved museum and archaeologist as proper caretakers of “national treasures.” Of course, Graham’s interpretation of the findings were also important in terms of nation building, as he used his Childe-inspired diffusionist theories to understand the artifacts as an expansion of the culture of the Central Plains into ancient Sichuan. During the several months of excavation, Graham and his assistant curator, Lin Mingjun, found large jade discs, hundreds of jade beads, stone axes, and innumerable wheel-thrown pottery shards. Graham was immediately struck by their similarity to artifacts recently discovered near the Yellow River, and in understanding his material, Graham made frequent comparison to the famous sites still being excavated at Yangshao, Shaguotun, and Anyang, calling the find evidence for “the oldest Chinese culture yet found in Szechwan. . . . Its materials closely resemble the late Neolithic and Shang dynasty cultures of Honan and Shantung provinces” (Graham 1937a, 172). Graham theorized about the spread of those advanced cultures into Sichuan, suggesting Sichuan’s marginal status vis-à-vis the center. More important, Graham dated all the Hanzhou artifacts to around the founding of the Zhou dynasty (ca. 1100 b.c.e.), which then put “Chinese” material culture in Sichuan at almost a thousand years earlier than any hitherto discovered artifact. Graham summarized his interpretation this way: “Either the people who lived in Hanchow were non-Chinese whose culture had been greatly influenced by the early Chinese cultures of central and northern China, or Chinese people and Chinese culture have been in Szechwan much earlier than has formerly been supposed” (Graham 1937a, 129). Chinese scholars, once apprised of the discovery, were quick to support Graham’s interpretation. Guo Moruo corresponded with Lin Mingjun and wrote that Graham’s estimation of an early Zhou date was probably correct. Further, Guo took Graham’s work as suggesting that the Shu of the oracle bones was indeed the Shu of ancient Sichuan, thus implying that Graham had heralded great evidence against the doubters of Chinese antiquity like Gu Jiegang (Graham 1937a, 230 jeff kyong-mcclain and geng jing

130). Zheng Dekun (Cheng Te-k’un) likewise used the Hanzhou artifacts to prove the existence of “Chinese tradition” in what he termed the Aeneolithic period of Sichuan, 1200–700 b.c.e. (Zheng 1949). Most of the material excavated at Hanzhou ended up, as per the agreement of the Sichuan Provincial Education Bureau, in the West China Union University Museum of Archaeology, Art and Ethnology, where it could be valued and preserved as evidence of an ancient Chinese Sichuan, to be used by scholars and displayed for the public. Organizing the museum consumed much of Graham’s time in Chengdu. Under Dye, the museum’s collection was housed in various closets across the campus, with parts of it on display in a hallway now and then. Under Graham, the museum would attain fame in China and around the world for its thorough collection of archaeological and ethnographic specimens of the southwest. When Graham became curator, the Harvard-Yenching Institute began to contribute to its maintenance, supplementing the school’s own support. Museums were valued at the time for their potential educational impact in forming right attitudes toward national history among the citizenry. As one writer pointed out in the Journal of the China Museum Association, the museum was a key site for the rejuvenation of the nation, by which he meant the unified Chinese nation. Citizens who visited museums would be inspired to contribute to the nation of today, after having gained a better understanding, through archaeological displays, of the thousands of years of amalgamation among the ethnic groups that contributed to the formation of the modern Chinese nation (Wang 1936, 14–16). Most museums whose purpose was national consciousness-raising operated in large cities in eastern China, but the West China Union University Museum pioneered this type of institution in the southwest. By the end of Graham’s first year in charge of the museum (1933), the institution had accumulated more than seventy-six hundred artifacts. These were gathered through Graham’s own excavations, given as gifts from both Westerners and Chinese, or purchased from street antiques peddlers, who quickly learned that they had a regular buyer in Graham. Although the largest part of the collection was “Chinese,” the artifacts represented the diversity of the southwestern borderlands, and in fact the world, as the following list of specimens by category and number shows: Chinese: 6,100; Tibetan: 880; American Indian: 361; Japanese: 100; Australian Aboriginal: 72; Yi: 27; Ch’uan Miao: 25; Palestinian: 22; Neolithic Europe: 20; Canadian: 4; African: 4; Burmese: 1 (Graham n.d.). Graham’s global connecGraham in Chinese Intellectual History  231

tions enabled such a wide array of worldly artifacts in remote Sichuan. The Smithsonian Institution donated at least some of the Native American implements, and Harvard University’s Peabody Museum, those from Europe.14 Presumably, missionaries returning to Sichuan from pilgrimage in the Holy Land brought the artifacts from Palestine. Ultimately, however, those artifacts were more like curiosities, and Graham focused attention on material culture from within China’s borders. Graham’s own theory of the role of the West China Union University Museum in society fit neatly with the general idea of national rejuvenation: “The museum should be a means of cultivating among the Chinese themselves an appreciation of China’s past. It should use scientific methods in archaeological excavations to help unearth and recover the unknown history of West China” (Graham n.d.). Graham believed in this mission statement and was a tireless promoter of the museum, advertising it in both English and Chinese trade journals and in newspapers to keep it in the public’s eye (Graham 1936, 11–16). Scholars who visited the museum under Graham’s directorship, both Western and Chinese, were unanimous in their praise of the museum, often comparing it favorably to larger museums in China or the West. Scholars like Johan Gunnar Andersson, Joseph Needham, and Owen Lattimore all visited and were duly impressed (Tao and Wu 1998, 256–57). Chinese archaeologists too were surprised to find a museum of such high caliber and with such an extensive collection in an area (Sichuan and the southwest) that they had thought a backwater. Historian and archaeologist Wei Juxian visited the museum in 1939 and after receiving a personal tour from Graham’s assistant, Lin (Graham was overseas at the time), wrote up a detailed report of the museum’s contents for the leading archaeological journal of the time, Shuowen yuekan. Wei was struck by the breadth of the collection and believed, contrary to some opinion but in agreement with Graham, that the museum’s Paleolithic artifacts were authentic and that the Neolithic materials evidenced clear connections to the Central Plains (Wei 1941). Throughout the mid-1930s, Graham continued to stock the museum with results of his excavations, which grew ever more frequent. He was involved in excavations of Han dynasty tombs and Song dynasty kilns, the assessment of various steles, and investigations of sites like that of the ancient Bo people and their mysterious suspended coffins. Most of his reports on these and other archaeological investigations were published in the Journal of the West China Border Research Society. His positive rela232 jeff kyong-mcclain and geng jing

tionship with the Provincial Education Bureau seems to have smoothed the way for his role in excavating in Sichuan, though as the decade wore on he ran into occasional trouble as a foreigner involved in digging up Chinese artifacts and on one occasion was briefly arrested by troops nominally loyal to warlord general Liu Wenhui, though Liu came to his aid in the end. Any conflict that might have been brewing between Graham and various regional power holders over control of national artifacts was abruptly snuffed out by events of a much larger scale. When Japan invaded the Chinese heartland in 1937 and forced the relocation of the capital to Chong­qing, Sichuan, the Nationalist government brought with it its entire research apparatus, including the archaeological unit of Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology.15 The government’s archaeologists, and the China Central Museum, set up shop for the duration of the war in the small town of Lizhuang, along the Yangtze River and very close to Graham’s original Sichuan home of Xufu (Liu and Wei 2005). With the sudden arrival of the dominant names and organizations in Chinese archaeology, Graham the archaeologist found himself in a somewhat precarious position. On the one hand, he was the local expert, archaeologically speaking, and he could guide the newcomers through an understanding of Sichuan archaeology. On the other hand, the Institute of History and Philology wanted to be very clear that the institute and not some local scholar, and surely not a foreign missionary, represented the nation in archaeological enterprise. Graham’s status was not entirely bleak, since he had long tried to cultivate good relationships with scholars in Academia Sinica. As early as October 27, 1933, just after his return from the United States, Graham wrote a letter to the better-connected Davidson Black (Graham Collection [Graham 1933]) asking for his assistance in securing official recognition for West China Union University’s Museum of Archaeology, Art and Ethnology, even suggesting that perhaps Academia Sinica might be able to take it on as its own museum in the southwest, with Graham as curator. Although Graham’s exact intentions for such a proposal are not spelled out, and nothing seems to have come from it, the suggestion does indicate that Graham saw the museum as national in orientation, for the benefit of China, and was not afraid of submitting to the central archaeological authorities. Graham had had other positive interactions with some Academia Sinica archaeologists over the years as well. For instance, on Graham’s tour of north China in 1936, Academia Sinica archaeologist Jia Lanpo, in charge of the Peking Man excavation at Zhoukoudian, gave Graham a personal tour Graham in Chinese Intellectual History  233

of the excavation and donated a deer skull from the site for display at the West China Union University Museum (Graham Collection [Graham box 5, folder: “A Visit to the Cave of Peking Man”]). Graham reciprocated and sent duplicates of his artifacts to the archaeological section of the Institute of History and Philology, thereby continuing to prove that he was not pilfering Chinese antiquities for any personal or imperialistic gain (Graham Collection [Liang 1937]). Still, despite the cordial relationship between Graham and Academia Sinica’s archaeology unit, Graham would not be allowed into the mainstream and would have to be willing to give over control of the archaeology of Sichuan, as was made clear during the 1937 expedition of the Xikang Geological and Archaeological Team (Xikang Dizhi Kaogu Dui). John Gunnar Andersson dreamed up the investigation in consultation with Graham, but Academia Sinica president Fu Sinian approved the trip on the condition that they travel under the leadership of Academia Sinica fellow Qi Yanpei and bring along Sichuan University geologist Zhou Shaohe. Further, any artifacts discovered would belong to Academia Sinica, which would deposit them at Sichuan University, and only if there were duplicates might Graham have a claim on them for the West China Union University Museum. Graham was important to the group as a guide, and the entire party stayed at the China Inland Mission church in Kangding, which was overseen by Graham’s friend Reverend Robert Cunningham. Shortly after Graham’s return to Chengdu, the university’s newspaper reported enthusiastically on the expedition as a triumph for both Graham and Chinese archaeology (Huaxi xiehe daxue xiaokan 1937).16 In reality, however, it signaled a change whereby Graham’s archaeological expertise would be increasingly marginalized. The Xikang team was suggestive of things to come, and although Graham was allowed occasionally to conduct small-scale excavations, it became increasingly difficult for him to obtain the necessary permission from Academia Sinica. For instance, although he discovered the Liulichang glassware site, Academia Sinica would not give him permission to dig. Echoing Chinese nationalist complaints that foreigners were looting Chinese relics, Graham objected that these increased restrictions, on him in particular, resulted in peasants pilfering national treasures that rightly belonged in a museum, for the government could not organize with enough efficiency to prevent the theft (Graham 1939, 36). This complaint seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Still, Graham managed to continue his own trun234 jeff kyong-mcclain and geng jing

cated archaeological work by studying surreptitiously opened tombs, such as those near Puxizhai in the Qiang area of Sichuan. In his report on the tombs, he was at pains to emphasize to any reading Chinese nationalist archaeologist that he was law-abiding, writing that the tombs were opened “without the previous knowledge of the writer, who here and elsewhere had to urge the people not to open such tombs because he had not the legal permission to do such archaeological work” (Graham 1944, 34). Still, if his access to these tombs would have irked Academia Sinica archaeologists, his interpretation surely would not, as he found the artifacts contained within the tombs to show unmistakable Chinese influence, thus proving the power of Chinese culture to affect this remote region during the fifth through second centuries b.c.e. Right after the close of World War II, the Yenching Journal of Chinese Studies published a list of the four most important wartime archaeological studies in the southwest. Graham was involved directly in none of them. All four were supervised by Academia Sinica and conducted primarily by Academia Sinica personnel. However, Graham’s influence could be mildly seen in two of the sites, one an excavation of the Han dynasty cliff tombs in Pengshan County, which Graham had pioneered several years before, and the other, the excavation of the Tomb of Wang Jian, in which Graham’s protégé Zheng Dekun was invited to participate (Yanjing xuebao 1946). In other behind-the-scenes ways as well, Graham’s influence in archaeology remained strong, despite his considerably less overt authority and power. When Zheng, in cooperation with the Sichuan Provincial Museum and the Central Daily (Zhongyang ribao), curated a wildly popular special exhibition on the evolution of Chinese jade art in May 1945, much of the collection was the result of Graham’s excavations and purchases over the previous fifteen years (Huaxi xiehe daxue xiaokan 1945, 6). In Graham’s last years before retirement, though the heyday of his archaeological work in Sichuan was over, his impact remained evident. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, Graham’s legacy in the archaeology of the southwest experienced a sharp downturn only to rebound after the relative openness of the reform era. Graham did not immediately come under attack by the new academic establishment, though his successor as curator of the West China Union University Museum of Archaeology, Art and Ethnology, Calvin Bright, was widely portrayed as a thief and imperialist and, on the lighter side, simply as an incompetent.17 The delayed criticism of Graham is probably due to the Graham in Chinese Intellectual History  235

fact that people like Feng Hanji and Wen You dominated the disciplines of archaeology and prehistory in Sichuan in the first years of the People’s Republic and were themselves on good terms with Graham while he was in Chengdu. Further, while Graham did take some artifacts with him out of Sichuan when he retired in 1948, items that he gave to the Smithsonian, the number appears to have been quite small, especially in comparison with the large number he preserved in the museum (Graham Collection [Kellogg 1950]). As the politicized climate failed to lessen, and in fact increased during the Korean War, Graham’s archaeological activities did finally come under assault, and he was called, by none other than the president of West China Union University, Fang Shuxuan, in a May 13, 1951, article for the West Sichuan Daily (Chuanxi ribao), “a criminal who robbed almost all the graves of Pengshan County” and whose sole purpose in becoming museum curator was to ease his theft of Chinese antiquities (Fang 1965, 205). Despite the attacks, ultimately few could deny the archaeological and national significance of Graham’s work, and though he was not mentioned by name, the sites he pioneered continued to attract the attention of Si­chuan archaeologists.18

Conclusion After a generation of drought, there is today something of a Graham renaissance taking place in the academy in Sichuan. Not only has Graham become popular for his massive contributions to scholarship on Sichuan, but he is also viewed, in light of the reform and opening-up policy (gaige kaifang), as an exemplar of Sino-Western cultural exchange (Zhong-Xi jiaoliu) for scholars today. Translations of his writings are often available in Chengdu’s major bookstores. Photos of Graham are prominently displayed in the halls of the Sichuan University Museum, formerly the West China Union University Museum, and in the Sanxingdui Museum’s gallery of the history of the Hanzhou (Guanghan) excavation. The current director of the Sichuan University Museum has declared that Graham’s contributions to the scientific and systematic study of the archaeology and ethnography of the southwest, as well as his role in museum building, “will go down in history” (Li and Zhou 2004, 2). While it appears that Graham’s time has finally come, in another way, Graham’s time has perhaps passed. With the borders of the Qing empire now considerably more set as belonging to the modern Chinese nation236 jeff kyong-mcclain and geng jing

state, Graham’s nation-building project in ethnography and archaeology may not appear quite as vital. In archaeology, the “regionalist paradigm” has come to dominate the scene, and there are rewards to be had for finding difference from the Central Plains in the remote past, something that does not seem to have occurred very often to Graham (Falkenhausen 1995). Quite strikingly, the Hanzhou site (now Sanxingdui), at which Graham pioneered scientific archaeology and asserted ancient Chinese presence in Sichuan, is today known worldwide for a major find in 1984 that is considered the leading example of a highly unique civilization with only marginal connections to civilization near the Yellow River (Bagley 2001). Many reports, though happily favorable to Graham, somewhat misleadingly characterize Graham as the discoverer of Sanxingdui, as if Graham had been a pioneer in advocating regional differences in antiquity (Duan 2005, 272–73). Though he in fact began excavation at the site, he did not find the bronzes that most associate with the site, and his interpretation of the artifacts he did find was contrary to contemporary interest in the plurality of origins. Early twentieth-century Chinese nationalist ethnography and archaeology called for understandings that unified rather than split the new nation-state, and in that project, Graham participated enthusiastically.

Graham in Chinese Intellectual History  237

Notes We thank Charles F. McKhann, Denise M. Glover, Stevan Harrell, James Leibold, and Laura Hostetler for their many helpful comments on earlier versions. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are our own. 1

2 3

4

5 6

7 8

9 10

11 12

Epigraph: Ren 1929, 19. Still, a kind of ethnography did exist in some areas during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), as the Manchu-led empire tried to use this new technology to shore up its turbulent borders. See Hostetler 2001, and for examples from before the Qing, see Shin 2006. One can easily confirm this generalization about Sichuan’s exoticism by perusing Shanghai-based middlebrow journals like Dongfang zazhi and Liangyou huabao. In his use of the ethnonym “Miao,” Graham registered his tendency to view the peoples he encountered through the lens of the Han, as Miao is a Chinese term for people who self-identify as Hmong. See Schein 2000. For more on Graham’s earlier encounter with Cole when studying theology at Chicago, see McKhann and Waxman, this volume. Graham made Boas’s acquaintance through Cole and was invited to lecture in one of Boas’s classes at Columbia University in the fall of 1939 (Graham Collection [Graham 1940]). On the particulars of the debate, see McKhann and Waxman, this volume. A good example of this bifurcated thinking can be found in Li 1943, 1–3. Many Han anthropologists criticized the violent and blatantly biased views of some Nationalist leaders and some Han people but still advocated that the solution to the “problem” of the minority peoples was massive amounts of (more friendly?) Han flooding into tribal areas. See, e.g., Xu 1941. See, for instance, the translation of Graham’s Qiang work in Bianjiang fuwu 1947. Graham’s ethnography maintained some traction with anthropologists in Taiwan after 1949; one Taiwan-based scholar even credited Graham with pioneering the anthropological museum in China (Bao 1964, 36). On archaeology’s role in this process, see Thomas 2004; on the new national history in China, begin with Duara 1995 and Harrell 1996. Archaeology was, before Graham’s arrival, already a requirement at the school for anyone majoring in Chinese studies, though it is not clear who taught the course; perhaps Dye did. See Sili Huaxi xiehe daxue yilan 1930, 51. On Chinese archaeology’s roots in the Harvard program, see Li 2007, chap. 4. Graham’s thoroughly underlined copy of Childe’s Bronze Age is now housed at the 238 jeff kyong-mcclain and geng jing

13

14

15 16 17

18

Sichuan University Museum. On Childe’s diffusionist paradigm, see Trigger 2006, 241–48. This description is based primarily on Graham 1933–34. For slightly varying accounts, see any number of contemporary accounts of the history of the Sanxingdui site (as it is known today), such as Xiao 2002, 23–35. Stevan Harrell relates that when his mentor, Deng Yaozong, visited the Native American Makah Cultural and Research Center Museum, in Neah Bay, Washington, in 1996, Deng, who had no English ability, was able to identify many of the artifacts and their uses by memory, from courses he took at Sichuan University with Feng Hanji in the 1960s. It seems likely that his knowledge owes something to the collection Graham gathered in Chengdu. Personal communication with authors, March 18, 2009. On the state-building intent of Academia Sinica research, see Chen Shiwei 1997. On this expedition in general, see Andersson 1939 and Graham 1937b. Compare the news section of Huaxi wenwu 1951, 31. According to Tong Enzheng, as related to Harrell, Chinese archaeologists in Sichuan had quite a good time with Bright’s Chinese name, Bai Tianbao, calling Bright’s tenure as museum curator the Tianbao zhi luan, a name for the chaos in Tang China during the An Lushan Rebellion. See, e.g., Wang and Jiang 1958.

Graham in Chinese Intellectual History  239

8 Science across Borders Johan Gunnar Andersson and Ding Wenjiang Magnus Fiskesjö

At present Westerners are in a chastened mood and no longer suffer from the[ir] superiority complex. Let us therefore also give up ours, and face our new environment without false pride, but with calm confidence, for to adapt ourselves to the conditions created by the industrial civilization which is conquering the world is not only our duty but also our indisputable right. —Ding Wenjiang, “How China Acquired Her Civilization”

Science Conquers the World?

I

n 1914, when Johan Gunnar Andersson (1874–1960) (fig. 8.1) was invited by the Chinese government to advise on how to prospect for metal ores and build a modern mining industry, the disillusioning effect of the First World War on the appreciation of European and Western nations and ideas had not yet arrived among contemporary Chinese intellectuals. Many still perceived Western-derived universal Science as a good thing, which would generate a tide of education and progress, across all national borders, raising all boats, including China’s. One of the key Chinese believers in Western Science was Ding Wenjiang (also known as V. K. Ting [1887–1936]), founding director of China’s National Geological Survey (ngs) and Andersson’s foremost host and interlocutor during the eleven years he was to spend in China (fig. 8.2).1 Ding had recently returned from a university education in Britain and, like Andersson, had formed a firm belief in Science in the service of humankind. 240

Fig. 8.1  Johan Gunnar Anders­son in the field in Henan Province, 1918. Courtesy Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, archive no. F3289.

They were not alone: in the scientists’ circles in Beijing existed a “camaraderie precariously won in a world of hostile nationalisms” (Furth 1970, 53).2 Of course, at the same time, like most people in their era, they took for granted the existence of nations and nation-states, with disparate needs and interests. But scholars like Ding and Andersson (who often hosted or attended such “salons” [see fig. 8.3]) also shared in a fundamentally anti­ nationalist credo that scientific fact would always trump nationalist irrationalism and dogmas. In this belief they were wrong. The unexpected archaeological discoveries made in China by Andersson in the 1920s, which challenged orthodox understandings of history but were encouraged by Ding preScience across Borders  241

Fig. 8.2  Ding Wenjiang in an undated photo (ca. 1925). From Andersson, Draken och de främmande djävlarna, frontispiece.

Fig. 8.3  International scientist salon in Beiping (Beijing): a meeting of the National Geological Survey (China) at the house of Amadeus Grabau, 1936. Ding Wenjiang on far right, with cigar; Wong Wen-hao on far left. Courtesy Teilhard de Chardin Foundation.

cisely for this reason, were eventually subsumed into a new, nationalist narrative.

Ding Wenjiang and the Chinese Setting Andersson and Ding had both trained as geologists and natural science generalists, but they shared interests in everything from fossils to ethnology and politics. They were also avid field-workers and explorers, of the sort who keep climbing around in the surroundings of their camp long after their field expedition’s helpers and horses have settled for the day. This was one reason they actually did not meet until the year after Andersson’s arrival in 1914: Ding Wenjiang was himself away from Beijing on one of his journeys. Andersson offered this evaluation in the dedication of one of his first Swedish books on China, in 1926: It was in the spring of 1915 . . . that my great personal experience in China began. That is when V. K. Ting [Ding Wenjiang], the Director of the National Geological Survey, returned to Peking from a long research trip to Southwestern China. He came back with a rich trove of scientific materials from the high plateaus and the malaria-ridden valleys of Yunnan, eager to sit down and work through his maps, diaries, and fossils, but also at the same time full of ideas for new field ventures. Thus began a collaboration with him that lasted until the time when he, after a pleasant evening hosted by him in Tianjin, came with me to say good-bye at the Mukden night train, which got me on my way home [in 1925]. . . . [Ding Wenjiang] may not count as a typical Chinese: For that he is too driving in his work, too demanding toward his collaborators, much too frank in his criticism, and has too keen a sense of merciless justice. But as one of the most advanced members of today’s Chinese intelligentsia, he is a shining representative of his people. (Andersson 1926, 9, 15; from the lengthy “Dedication” to Ding Wenjiang)

For some reason, Andersson’s entire twelve-page Swedish-language dedication to Ding was deleted from the American translation of 1928. Perhaps his lengthy appreciation of Chinese equals in science was regarded as incompatible with the rather more widespread Western view of Chinese scholars as apprentices, not equals, of the West. Science across Borders  243

In fact, Ding had few equals. After excelling in the classical schooling arranged by his wealthy family in the small town of Taixing, in rural Jiangsu, he had studied briefly in Japan, then geology and zoology in Glasgow, Scotland.3 (He had also traveled widely in Europe and mastered three modern European languages; his superb command of English was often the source of marvel of native English speakers.) Returning to China just before the revolution of 1911 and obtaining one of the last degrees granted under imperial rule, he quickly joined the efforts to build a modern government under the new Republic. In 1913, at age twenty-six, he was made head of the small geology office in the Ministry of Industry and Commerce’s Mining Administration Bureau. In the very same year, instead of pursuing commercial applications further, he set up a geology training program and a research center, the forerunner of the ngs (formalized in 1916). He soon became instrumental in recruiting, and making full use of, foreign talent in teaching and research. Being suspicious of what he saw as misguided Chinese arrogance, he advised his Chinese colleagues in typical pointed fashion that the frequently encountered difficulties in Sino-foreign collaboration were “not always the foreigners’ fault.”4 From the next year until 1925, the ngs was to be the home base of Andersson, who left the same job (as director of Sweden’s Geological Survey) to go to China. Who was this Ding Wenjiang, thirteen years Andersson’s junior, who so impressed Andersson? Ding’s erudition, charisma, and perseverance in fieldwork clearly were important. Andersson, too, was an avid field-worker and had struggled through the hardship of polar expeditions in pursuit of scientific discovery. In China, he soon noticed the clear contrast between the admirable field-worker spirit of Ding and the widespread disdain for field research among the traditionally bookish elite (see Fiskesjö and Chen 2003). Overall, Ding’s career involved both institution building (including the promotion of science, especially geology, at institutions of higher learning) and field research; both served the general purpose of mapping China’s natural resources so that they might be better exploited and serve as the foundation of modernization and progress. Several of Ding’s own expeditions focused on China’s southwest. First, in 1911, on his way home from Europe to his native rural Jiangsu and to the city of Shanghai, he made a solitary detour from Haiphong in Vietnam (from where he could have sailed to Hong Kong and Shanghai) and via Yunnan along the old post routes up through Guizhou and Hunan, practic244  Magnus Fiskesjö

Fig. 8.4  “Geological party welcomed by Lolos, S. W. Szechuan,” ca. 1928. From The National Geological Survey of China, 1916–1931, pl. 10.

ing his Glasgow surveying and mapping skills along the way, while donning a fake pigtail and composing classical poetry lamenting the poverty of local people (Wang 1989, 7–8). Then, in 1914–15, having established himself in Beijing, he went on the lengthy expedition from which he was to return and meet Andersson; the main task he set himself was to map the coal, tin, and other ores of the mineral-rich southwestern region, but also to collect fossils—the first modern paleontological collecting in China (Grabau 1931, 153). In 1928–29, Ding returned to fieldwork in the southwest for the most comprehensive survey work of his entire career, of the geology of southwestern China (fig. 8.4). This survey included applied geology, as in reconnaissance work for a future railway connecting this impoverished region to the commercial centers of southern China.5 Why this focus on southwest China (beyond the geological interest of the region)? Several biographers offer a significant clue to this question: the graduation exam topic offered to Ding as a thirteen-year-old, in 1900, was to discuss the Han-era emperor Wudi’s expansion of the Chinese empire into the distant southwestern frontier region, famously inhabited by “barbarians.” Ding wrote an excellent essay in response (Wong 1947, ix; Furth 1970), extolling the civilizing effects of the expansion. His fascination with this region as a paradigmatic case of “backwardness” jolted into contact Science across Borders  245

with more “advanced” civilization remained, and his later education in universal Science would never appear incompatible with the ancient theme of Chinese-directed development under the guidance of strong and wise leaders. Thus while geology and geography were Ding Wenjiang’s primary fields of inquiry, he also engaged in linguistic, ethnological, and other investigations, all of which were connected to the main guiding vision of assessing nature in the service of modernization. Given the solid but frustrating classical training Ding had received as a child in Jiangsu Province, it is also not surprising that he also often sought to use and update traditional knowledge of China using the methods of modern science. This is evident in his new edition of the famous Ming dynasty southwest travelogue Xu Xiake youji (Travelogue of Xu Xiake), by Xu Hongzu (1586–1641), characteristically accompanied by maps and annotations based on Ding’s own observations of facts on the ground, and in his similar treatment of another Ming-period forerunner to scientific observation, the sixteenth-century Tiangong kaiwu (Exploitations of the works of nature). But the same rationale, I believe, also underpinned his descriptive and classificatory work on non-Han languages like the Zhuang of Guangxi (Ding 1929); his collecting and editing of religious texts in Yi (“Lolo”) script, in the monumental, posthumously published Cuanwen congke (Collected Yi inscriptions [Ding 1936]); and also his ethnological interests, which included tentative attempts to collect physical-anthropological bodily measurements from those same Yi people as well as more casual ethnological notes.6 Ding’s basic, confident empiricist-positivist stance reveals itself everywhere, as, for example, in his passionate rejection of the Chinese anthropology of the French sinologist Marcel Granet (1884–1940). Granet famously deployed Durkheimian theories of society’s worship of itself to maintain order and cohesion, to create a synchronic, powerful interpretation of an imaginary ancient China, which Ding faulted for omitting both historical fact and social evolution (Ding 1931b). Beyond publishing in strictly scientific formats, Ding’s agenda naturally also included efforts to popularize his science. This included books like the leisurely Man you san ji (Random notes on leisurely travels), initially published serially in 1932–35 in one of the influential journals he helped found in 1932, Duli pinglun (Independent critic; the other was Nuli zhoubao [Endeavor], which started in 1922). This indicates the absence in Ding’s work of any compartmentalization of Science from contemporary Chinese politics. 246  Magnus Fiskesjö

In his capacity as one of China’s foremost scientists and experts on things Western, Ding participated in the Chinese delegation to the 1919 Versailles peace conference. He thus experienced firsthand the affront against China perpetrated by the Western powers of the day, when they handed over the Chinese possessions of defeated Germany to Japan. This offense, as is well known, touched off the May Fourth, or New Culture, protest movement of 1919, which fueled Chinese nationalism and reinforced the sense of urgency in the matter of modernization. Among the leading figures in these developments was the famous modernist reformer Hu Shi (1891–1962), who was a close friend of both Ding and Andersson (and was to take a keen interest in Andersson’s archaeological discoveries) (Chen and Fiskesjö 2005). Ding’s role in the New Culture movement is less widely known, but in fact he quickly rose in the footsteps of older reformers like Liang Qichao (for whom he served as a guide in Europe in 1919) and alongside figures like Hu. Ding himself became famous as the New Culture movement’s main scientist and one of the foremost protagonists of Science as a tool that could save China. The whole thrust of Ding’s work was based in a positivist understanding of science. Ding vigorously defended his views, notably in the so-called Science and Metaphysics debate of 1923, where he sparred with others, including Liang, who—in the wake of Europe’s senseless World War I— concluded that the West and its science were materialistic and inferior to the spiritual strength of China’s own traditions.7 While Ding embraced and built on the beginnings of science in traditional China, he rejected the association of science with Western depravity as nonsense and passionately argued for its universal value. He was sympathetic to eugenics and argued for an enlightened scientist-official elite as China’s hope to push forward quickly (see Gu 2005; Furth 1970). Ding did not turn to Marxism and communism, as did a number of other intellectuals disappointed with the West. But he was clearly much influenced by his own observations, in 1933, of the authoritarian, rapidly industrializing Soviet Union (see Ding 1998b), which much impressed him and confirmed his own view of religion (broadly understood to include the state ideology guiding Soviet progress) as “the natural impulse to sacrifice the self and the present for the greater good of mankind” (Kwok 1965, 120).8 Against this background, we can better understand Ding’s argument, as well as why he alternated between academic and government positions hoping to make precisely such sacrifices. Once, he even set aside his strong Science across Borders  247

urge to do research and investigate with his own eyes and took a stab at becoming just that sort of new scientist-official (in effect, a modern reformulation of the old Chinese ideal of scholar-officials)9 that he had envisioned (by serving for a short while in 1926 as governor of the region of Shanghai). Apart from stints in the mining business (to save up money for his extended family), he also continued to help build modern government institutions, such as Academia Sinica, the new national academy of sciences for which he briefly served as secretary-general (in 1934), and also, significantly, “specially promoted ethnological and philological studies in the Southwest” (Wong 1947, xvii).10 This seemingly boundless energy was extinguished prematurely when Ding’s life was cut short by a leaking gas pipe in a Hunan hotel, in 1936. This also concluded the cordial friendship and professional interaction and correspondence he had with Andersson, the Swedish explorer, ever since his arrival in China and throughout Andersson’s stunning early career in archaeology, to which he was to devote himself, with Ding’s blessing, from 1921 onward.

Johan Gunnar Andersson and the New Archaeology Andersson was born in 1874 in Knista, rural Sweden, where he grew up on an old bergsman, or “mountain man,” farmstead, combining farming and iron ore mining.11 He returned there in old age to pursue farming and is buried in Knista. At an early age he became fascinated with observing the natural world. He pursued geology and other subjects at Uppsala University and around the turn of the nineteenth century participated in expeditions to both the Arctic and the Antarctic. In 1906, already an accomplished scholar, he was appointed director of Sweden’s Geological Survey. In this capacity he hosted the International Geological Congress in Stockholm and served as coordinator for the global project The Iron Ore Resources of the World. All these things attracted the attention of geologists like Ding and others in China who were keen on developing their own country’s natural resources as a basis for its industrialization and modernization. Andersson’s readiness to accept the invitation to go to China in 1914 was of course related to his love of adventure and scientific exploration, which also was inseparable from a social pathos grounded in particular forms of Christian religious beliefs. Andersson was raised deeply religious (in the Lutheran Church, then Sweden’s state church), and his Christian 248  Magnus Fiskesjö

faith is often evident in his writings. He appreciated the personal efforts of many China missionaries (including their role as fossil scouts), even as he came to doubt their project. Andersson arrived in China with a humble attitude and developed a profound respect for Chinese culture and traditions.12 It was founded on his overall sense of pathos for social justice on a global scale, divinely inspired, but certainly including a respect for the diversity of cultures and belief in God’s earth.13 This is evident in many of his writings: from his sympathetic appreciation of the figure of Peking Man and his indignation at Western arrogance in China, to the condemnation of the colonialist exploitation that occurred around the world alongside scientific exploration.14 Prominent in this regard is the Swedish-language magnum opus that he composed late in his life, in two large volumes, How We Conquered the Earth: The Geographical Discoveries through the Ages (Andersson 1953). The “we” of the title refers ambiguously both to humanity as a whole and to the European explorers who conquered the world, often misusing science and technology for evil ends. The excitement over the discoveries of the earth’s terrae incognitae and of new worlds is here coupled with Andersson’s indignation over the many crimes that accompanied these discoveries. He describes both the Spanish and the British as greedy conquistadors chasing gold and slaves, with no more than a fossilized faith, and dwells at length on crimes perpetrated against Native American populations since Columbus. On China and its history, he wrote of unequal treaties and scandalous Western exploits such as Britain’s opium peddling, all the while China found itself in temporary decline (Anderson 1953). All this surely enhanced the mutual appreciation between Andersson and Ding, beyond the common ground of shared beliefs in the universal goodness and potency of Science for bettering the world. Andersson certainly shared Ding’s passion for contemporary politics, even if, unlike Ding, he sought no office in his own country and engaged in politics mainly by writing, as a self-described “natural scientist,” for Western audiences on China and world issues. Andersson’s sympathy for China was, however, rooted above all in a Herderian understanding of the world’s nations as flowers in God’s garden that ought to be permitted to grow and flourish each in its own divinely guided way. This was different from Ding’s Chinese-styled social Darwinist tendencies, which pushed him to embrace eugenics as well as authoritarian government (which Andersson did not),15 and his appreciation of the benign effects of the Chinese empire, which led him to take a much more positive view of imperialism and colonialScience across Borders  249

ism as positive forces in history (Ding 1931a, 20–21). Andersson’s view of his geology as a science of (God’s) nature, as part of human discovery of that nature, was also, as a consequence of his respect for the Chinese as a separate nation, conceived as help to Chinese self-help, as is evident in his frequent insistence that Chinese geologists and archaeologists would soon take over his work. Andersson’s discovery of China’s prehistory got under way in 1920 and was made in the course of the geological and paleontological explorations of his official mining-advisor career. This meant that he had official support in terms of staff, internal passports, armed protection against bandits, and so on; Ding, who enthusiastically embraced the efforts, quite naturally saw Andersson’s excavations—the first application of modern scientific archaeology in China—as “our excavations” (i.e., distinct from various previous explorations of mostly above-ground antiquities that had been made by other foreigners acting on their own initiative). Ding even claimed the additional role for the ngs as “a research center for Chinese archaeology” (Hu 1998, 436–37).16 This fit seamlessly into his vision of “geology,” taking into account “all forms of matter, both land and marine, which have existed since time immemorial; all degrees of the evolution of life-forms . . . are considered to be within the realm of geological study” (a view that coincided with Andersson’s, if only by way of convergent evolution).17 Until this time, the ngs in practice was concerned mainly with geology in a narrower sense, but also paleontology—as basic science and as support for applied geology and its key industrial goals. Like Ding, Andersson served both purposes. He was the founding curator of the ngs geology and paleontology museum in Beijing, and apart from his official task of laying the groundwork for China’s mining industry (for which funding became increasingly erratic), he himself also focused on “stratigraphic geology and fossils” (Andersson 1929). These he collected with supplemental Swedish funding, while crisscrossing north China, observing stratigraphy and reconstructing the geological history of the landscape.18 Such work included the training and use of Chinese “scouts” dispatched beyond Andersson’s own route to look for potential indicator (“trace”) fossils. This effort not only helped identify the locations of buried ores that might be exploited commercially but also enabled Andersson’s famous pinpointing of Zhoukoudian near Beijing as a geologically plausible site for paleoanthropological discoveries, as well as the discovery of prehistoric ceramic shards from the eroding gullies at the village of Yangshao in Henan Province.19 250  Magnus Fiskesjö

Fig. 8.5  Swedish missionary orphanage in Henan Province, 1919, a key source of paleontological information. Photo by Johan Gunnar Andersson; courtesy Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, archive no. F3337.

Unlike the remains of the very distant hominid cousins of modern people that were soon unearthed at Zhoukoudian (e.g., Peking Man, a specimen of the genus Homo erectus, several hundred thousand years old), the stone tools and ceramic shards at the Henan village of Yangshao were clearly lodged in quite recent strata, from the late Neolithic. This discovery meant that these were the previously unknown remains of prehistoric people who had lived only three to five thousand years b.c.e., in the middle of what is today China, before any notion of “China” had yet come into being, and were never mentioned in the classical record. And this finding immediately posed the question of their relationship to contemporary people and to the history of China’s long-revered civilization. The Anderssonian itineraries had first touched on Yangshao in 1918, while “mining” the Western missionaries in Henan for tips on “dragon bones” (see fig. 8.5). In 1920, one of his assistants brought stone tools that appeared to be of late prehistoric date. Andersson walked to the village in the spring of 1921 and found more of them in situ, along with painted Science across Borders  251

Fig. 8.6  “Comparison between painted pottery of Honan, Anau & Tripolje.” From Andersson, “An Early Chinese Culture,” pl. 13.

ceramics, which the stratigraphy clearly confirmed as Neolithic. Anders­ son actually already had previous inklings from Sweden’s most famous archaeologist, Oscar Montelius, that something like this discovery might be possible (Chen and Fiskesjö 2003). But it was only after reading up in the ngs library in Beijing on the latest in world archaeology, that he realized the striking parallels found in Neolithic ceramics recently described from Russia and Central Asia (see fig. 8.6) and the sensational quality of these finds (Andersson 1923). A whole series of new questions now had to be asked, about the origins of Chinese civilization and, given the Central Asian parallels, about possible prehistoric contacts across Eurasia. In the fall of 1921, Andersson returned with ngs staff geologist Yuan Fuli and the Austrian paleontologist Otto Zdansky, for serious excavations. 252  Magnus Fiskesjö

Andersson’s career shifted to archaeology, and the Yangshao breakthrough became the basis for the formulation of a more ambitious, westward expedition, which would continue to pursue this “early Chinese culture” (a phrase taken as the tentative title of Andersson’s first publication in 1923). Tracing the Yangshao discoveries westward, it also aimed to find material evidence for possible prehistoric connections or transmissions between north-central China and Central Asia / Ukraine, between Europe and Asia, whether as “movements of people” or “cultural exchange” (Andersson 1923; 1932, esp. 270–336; 1943).20 Much later, in an ever more nationalistic atmosphere, Andersson was to be lumped together with other Westerners supporting the widespread assumptions that Chinese culture must have originated in some kind of transmission from Western or European sources. Andersson was, inescapably, aware of such prevailing theories, but his emphasis as a natural scientist was empirical investigation and verification using the tools of archaeology and geological stratigraphy (Andersson 1923, 37–41; 1943, 255, esp. 283, 291).21 (All this was, incidentally, very much in tune with Ding Wenjiang’s scientific credo—more on this below.) The new archaeological research plan took Andersson on his longest expedition ever in China. He set out on May 11, 1923, and had intended to return by the fall, but did not make it back until the summer of the next year. The trip was to Gansu and to adjacent parts of Mongolia and Tibet (in today’s Inner Mongolia and Qinghai). With Chinese official approval and Swedish financial support, Andersson largely left paleontological collecting and applied geology behind and concentrated on archaeological inquiry. He brought along his previous Chinese collaborators, who by this time had developed advanced and very useful skills in geological work, fossil preparation, and so on, and who were clearly on good terms with Andersson on a personal level and were entrusted with independent work, including excavations. With this arrangement, the expedition proceeded to Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu, and its region. This was a major target, since it was the imagined crossroads of ancient central Asians and Yangshao “Chinese,” but they began at Koko Nor, the large lake in the Amdo region of Qinghai (eastern Tibet), which Andersson was interested in both as a geologist and an archaeologist. Yangshao-style ceramics were indeed found there. Eventually, in all, about fifty archaeological sites were identified on the route returning southward into Gansu. A number of them were excavated with Science across Borders  253

Fig. 8.7  Painted prehistoric ceramics brought to Sweden from Gansu Province. Photo by Karl Zetterström, 2004; courtesy Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities.

sometimes tentative methods, borrowing heavily from geological surveying and paleontological collecting and preservation, and the vast, almost overwhelming, array of painted ceramics and other artifacts collected (see fig. 8.7) amply testified to connections with the previously discovered Yangshao materials, but also underlined the complexity of the issues. Several of these pioneer Neolithic sites, including Banshan, Machang, Majiayao, Xindian, and Shajing, gave their names to specific archaeological cultures, as had Yangshao.22 Only a few dwelling sites were excavated (at Zhujiazhai in Qinghai, at Huizui in Gansu, etc.); most other sites were cemeteries in which were found the most striking large painted vessels that prehistoric people had used as grave goods buried with their deceased. On the model of the geological-paleontological canvassing, the expedition had initiated purchases of archaeological materials in Lanzhou and then proceeded to try to trace the materials to their source. This proved difficult, because local 254  Magnus Fiskesjö

Fig. 8.8  Local villagers attempting to sell prehistoric ceramics to Andersson, Gansu Province, 1924. Photo by Johan Gunnar Andersson; courtesy Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, archive no. F2150.

people came to realize that the painted prehistoric ceramics were a scarce resource that would be more profitable if one could control the source (there were even clashes between groups of such locals in the know) (see fig. 8.8). It turned out, in the late spring of 1924, that a number of the sites of origin were located on the plateaus lining the Tao River, a tributary to the Yellow River not far from Lanzhou. There, large tracts of the Banshan hilltop cemeteries were destroyed by looters before Andersson’s team was able to locate them. Andersson realized the negative impact of purchasing antiquities and abandoned the practice. He and his collaborators instead shifted toward archaeological excavation, including of one remaining untouched grave at Bianjiagou, near Banshan (see fig. 8.9). This site held the remains of a person buried with eight painted and four unpainted ceramic vessels, and the grave’s contents have been on display in their entirety since 1929 at the institution Andersson founded in Stockholm with these objects, the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (Andersson Science across Borders  255

Fig. 8.9  Excavation of the Bianjiagou grave, Gansu Province, 1924. Photo by Johan Gunnar Andersson; courtesy of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, archive no. F2153.

1932, 321–36; 1943, 104–16; Fiskesjö and Chen 2004, 126–35; on the museum’s recent fate, see Fiskesjö 2007). Andersson’s expedition produced vastly more material evidence to address the original hypothesis than had been expected, and the responsibility for the rich materials almost seemed to overwhelm the scientific question. In 1924, after having two large yak-skin rafts constructed in the local riverine tradition, which Andersson had been observing on the sidelines, the team returned downstream on the Yellow River (see fig. 8.10), finally unloading at the ngs in Beijing. Then Andersson’s Swedish sponsors (including Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf, himself a passionate world archaeologist coached by Montelius) and his Chinese employers concluded an agreement in which the thousands of prehistoric objects, including notably the hundreds of several-thousand-year-old beautifully painted ceramic vessels, would all be shipped to Sweden for description and research and half of them subsequently returned to China and the ngs. 256  Magnus Fiskesjö

Fig. 8.10  The harvest from prehistory during the transport down the Yellow River, on two rafts, 1924. Photo by Johan Gunnar Andersson; courtesy Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, archive no. F2253.

Once at home, starting in 1925, Andersson became engulfed in the work of organizing the collections, writing up his reflections as well as popularized accounts, preparing a public museum display, and making return shipments (seven in all were made, from 1927 to 1936, most of which seem to have vanished in China later, perhaps as a result of the Japanese war).23 His museum, moreover, became increasingly entangled in the local Swedish society’s appropriation of these exotic Asian collections, soon augmented by the more usual kind of auctioned antiquities and art objects lacking scientific provenience, increasingly sidelining his dream of the institution as an East Asian archaeology research center (Fiskesjö 2004b, 2005a).24 Exasperated, and longing to revive his Chinese career, he wrote Ding’s successor Wong Wen-hao and asked if he could instead return to the ngs and continue his Chinese researches. Instead, he was able to make just one last trip to China, in 1936–38. Not least for reasons of instability in north China, the closest he came to the Yangshao region was an expedition to Science across Borders  257

the Kham (Xikang) borderlands of Sichuan and Tibet, which turned out to be less pertinent in terms of the larger themes of the Neolithic origins of Chinese civilization and its possible Eurasian connections.25 On this last Chinese expedition, in Andersson was seconded a staff member (Chi Yen-pei, not from the ngs but from the Academia Sinica in Nanjing, the new capital of the Republic [where Ding had served as a top administrator in the last years before his premature death]). This new government-sponsored central research institute had been created while Andersson was away in Stockholm, and archaeology was now pursued as part of a coordinated national research program under its leadership, with historians like Fu Sinian as well as Li Ji and other members of the first generation of Chinese archaeologists. The ngs had also moved into new quarters, to which Andersson had sent his last crates of returned objects, and when Andersson visited, the newly built ngs museum in Nanjing still displayed his Yangshao collections as well as the Peking Man remains. However, plans were being made, with Ding’s active involvement (Wong 1947, xviii), to create a new central museum, which would supersede in national importance the former Imperial Palace collection (with its highly ambiguous connotations to elite luxuries).26 If the Japanese invasion had not occurred, the Neolithic materials, which by this time were already firmly viewed as forming part of a Chinese national narrative, might have been moved there as well (as might have even Peking Man).

Conclusions: Chinese Nationalism and the Fate of Archaeology Although the earliest Academia Sinica excavations had involved prehistoric materials,27 and some such excavations continued, the top priority since 1928 had been the excavations at the late Shang dynasty center at Anyang, farther east in Henan. At Anyang, the new science of archaeology was brought to bear on the long-recognized but never excavated site of the Bronze Age capital of the Shang dynasty, thus confirming the historicity of the Shang, which had been intensely debated and doubted. Now, not just material evidence in the shape of artifacts in royal tombs but also documentary evidence in authenticated early inscriptions (on oracle bones) could be successfully compared with the king lists of received history. Such triumphs, largely reconfirming the accounts found in the classics, brought about a realignment of archaeology with history in its classical formulations.28 This was 258  Magnus Fiskesjö

bittersweet and deeply ironical for iconoclasts like the historian Gu Jiegang, a disciple of Hu Shi who had led an influential project critically and scientifically reexamining the classics and rejecting old, revered accounts for which there was no proof.29 But at Anyang, archaeology now provided such proof, and the glory of the early Bronze Age Shang now added to the glory of the modern Chinese nation-state. This opened the road for formulating the tasks of archaeology in the terms of a search for historical affiliations leading up to the foundation of the China already known previously—a service to the state that would now also become the main justification for government funding even for prehistoric materials. With the arguable exception of the use of archaeology to confirm a Marxist interpretation of class struggle through history (i.e., during parts of the Mao era), this sort of historical reconstruction has actually become the mainstay of Chinese archaeology to this day—not just in the search for confirmation of the Xia, the dynasty that the traditional histories state preceded the Shang in the early Bronze Age, but also for aligning prehistoric finds so that they converge in a new narrative of the foundation of China, the nation, which would now trace its origins directly to the pre-state, non-“Chinese” Yangshao-era cultures and even further back, to Peking Man and beyond.30 Ding, too, despite his scientific skepticism, described Yangshao culture as “ancestral” to the Chinese Bronze Age and even argued at length with Andersson over whether Yangshao might in fact be the Xia, that elusive “first dynasty” mentioned in the classics.31 The difference was that he welcomed scientific archaeology unreservedly and had no fear of empirical dismantling or complications of any myths of autochthony. In one of Ding’s strongest statements in support of Andersson’s efforts, he emphasized archaeology’s usefulness for undoing both conservative Chinese beliefs in a mythical past and the arrogant Westerners’ preference for thinking that “the Chinaman delights in decay” (Ding 1931a, 265). Ding stood out among Chinese intellectuals for his openness in acknowledging the possibility of foreign elements. Against native primordialists, who preferred to insist, even a priori and without evidence, on autochthonous Chinese origins, Ding brazenly pointed out that geology demonstrated that there had been vast periods of time when what is now China was completely uninhabitable, thus returning the question of origins to empirical study (Ding 1931a).32 Without denying the accomplishments of recorded Chinese history, he fearlessly noted that “Chinese civilization owes much to foreign influence” and listed common Eurasian Science across Borders  259

origins of cultural phenomena across the continent, including multiple “Western” borrowings or origins of Chinese cultural elements (Ding 1931a, 2–3, 10–19).33 He also noted matter-of-factly that the beginnings of the Bronze Age were two thousand years later than either Sumeria or Egypt (Ding 1931a, 3); because this would leave open the possibility of diffusion as opposed to pure autochthony, such observations on the comparative lateness of features of civilization have often been deemphasized in later Chinese writings on archaeology.34 When archaeology was assimilated as a supporting tool of history, the open-ended questions posed by Andersson and others at the time of the first Yangshao finds were obscured. The most radical aspects were actually not just an issue of Chinese autochthony versus cultural exchange, as is often believed. The original suggestion that finds of Yangshao-style pottery along a prehistoric Silk Road might help prove that China’s civilization had Western origins was actually more or less abandoned by Andersson in the face of mounting evidence for a complex web of local connections (and also because of some rather striking dissimilarities between the ceramics of Russian Central Asia and those found in China, seemingly overriding the superficial similarities; Andersson furthermore cautioned that the investigations of East-Central Asian cultural connections had barely begun) (Andersson 1943, 280–91; see also Chen 1997b; Creel 1949). The more interesting issue was, rather, identifying the people who had produced the Yangshao ceramics. Andersson’s discoveries showed that prehistoric peoples had existed in the area that was to become China, “barbarian”-like people without the use of bronze, the pride of the ancient Chinese, in what was today’s Chinese heartland, for thousands of years, but they are never mentioned or considered in the written Chinese histories. Who were these people, the creators of this painted pottery? This hitherto unknown prehistory challenged orthodox Chinese history writing: had the Chinese, whose identity had been tied up for centuries with the characteristic of being civilized, once been barbarians? If so, how did they acquire civilized characteristics; when did civilized “China” begin?35 One key part of the answer must be that these people, living long before modern nation-states and also long before imperial China (the “Middle Kingdom” or “Kingdoms,” as the case may be), did not live in China and were not Chinese, that Chinese identity is inseparable from the formation of the Chinese state, which came later. The makers of the Yangshao pots instead represented examples of myriad communities across a pre-state 260  Magnus Fiskesjö

eastern Asia, in which the kings, armies, and boundaries of later times did not exist. Even if it can be shown that stylistic traditions and genetic material have been passed on in the region, as indeed is the case, to call them proto-Chinese is to incorrectly assume a unilinear progression that is in reality motivated by concerns in the present. One reason this simple truth is difficult to grasp is, of course, that modern Chinese archaeology, ever since the 1920s backlash against the “doubting antiquity” movement, has largely worked from the teleological premise that whatever remains are unearthed within the modern borders of China must somehow have been predestined to a role in the formation of China, the modern nation. One of the most striking examples of this assumption is the frequently repeated formula of “five thousand years of Chinese history,” which serves to obscure altogether this issue of China’s not always having been China. It must be admitted that the main challenge (my phrase) inherent in Andersson’s discoveries—the problematic “Chineseness” of Yangshao—was a challenge only to certain elite free-thinking intellectuals like Ding Wenjiang and Hu Shi. For many others, the question simply never registered. For example, in the widely disseminated (and recently reprinted) volume A History of Chinese Archaeology (Wei 1937), produced as part of a large 1930s set of books on myriad aspects of China, author Wei Juxian writes as if the Yangshao discoveries had never happened, or at least were so unimportant that they hardly merited any mention. For Wei and many people like him, everything still hinges on the historically documented dynasties that make up the framework for the Chinese narrative, and the prehistoric world would at most merit a footnote about struggling forebears. In the end, scientific exploration and gathering of evidence were not enough; indeed, as if to prove the limits of Ding’s somewhat naive empiricism, scientific observation in itself was not enough. The unknown people emerging from the shadows in the finds at Yangshao, remains of people living well before anyone had formed a state or a “Chinese” culture, could not and would not be recognized as before or outside that framework but had to be incorporated into it, for the sake of present-day claims. They had to be measured against the known framework of Chinese historical imagination, with its hallmark distinctions of civilization and the primitive. Today, the Yangshao people are therefore still predominantly cast as a sort of vanguard of Chinese civilization in a sea of primitives with an important role in the new origin myth, which serves to obscure the very artifice of China and of the Chinese state.36 Science across Borders  261

Granted, even Andersson, with his profound, religiously motivated sympathies for the contemporary Chinese nation he came to see as his “second homeland,” himself largely deferred to this tendency by favoring the assumption of a genealogical connection (as in a Herderian anthropology), so that for him the discoveries became “an early Chinese culture” (Andersson 1923; the hypothesis this theory embodied remained valid even in his subsequent summing-up of his research, twenty years later, in 1943). Andersson’s wavering on this issue (between his science and his sympathy for modern China) can be seen in the title of his most famous popular book, Children of the Yellow Earth (1932), which in more typical “geological” (but also religious) fashion points to the earth and the environment as the ultimate source and precondition of these human beings (and not their role as torchbearers for current state projects, as in “children of the Yellow Emperor”).

262  Magnus Fiskesjö

Notes Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 1

2

3

4

5 6

7 8 9

Epigraph: Ding 1931a, 20–21. I use capital S when referring to Science as a faith (thus capitalized, like Islam, etc.), and lowercase to refer to the more secular or mundane practice of scientific work or to its practitioners. Here Furth is citing a 1927 account by the French priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who recalled “the cordiality of these gatherings in Peking . . . [a] feeling of achievement in meeting on the level of common humanity, man to man, transcending all national, racial and even ‘confessional’ barriers” (Furth 1970, 53). For more on Ding’s family background, life, and career, see Hu 1956; Zhu 1979; Lei 1997; Ding 2001; Zhang 2005; Furth 1970. Furth 1970 remains the best general biography in English (but is almost entirely silent on his intimate connection to the archaeological discoveries, which is discussed in several of the Chinese biographies and by Fiskesjö and Chen 2004). Ding Wenjiang, Man you san ji, quoted in Wang 1989, 13; see also Furth 1970, 42. For reasons of space, I leave out many other foreign experts from the discussion. With some exceptions, such as Emile Licent and Teilhard de Chardin, few were involved in any archaeological efforts, and none were as important as Andersson. On foreign contributions to geology and paleontology in China, see Ding, Wong, and Chang 1922; National Geological Survey of China 1931; Wong 1931; Cheng 2004; Zhang 2005. On paleontology, see also Mateer and Lucas 1985; as well as Andersson’s own books. For geological writings, see Ding 1947; also see the Chinese atlas by Ding, Weng, and Zeng 1934. Note the preface of Cuanwen congke, which illuminates Ding’s motives and offers lengthy assessments of the classifications of southwestern aboriginal peoples. Ding reports in his Man you san ji on “the aboriginal races of Yunnan” (1998a, 66–81), offering averages of his collected bodily measurements along with a wealth of observations on economic, political, and other aspects and on “the aboriginal races of Sichuan” (1998a, 82–100), mainly on the Yi, or Lolo. On these debates, and Ding’s role, see Kwok 1965; and Furth 1970. Here Kwok is citing Ding’s 1911 Textbook on Biology. Pace Furth 1970, 6–7 (inexplicably describing Ding’s ideal as “entirely novel”). Science across Borders  263

10 This is very likely related to the following 1935–36 investigations by Ling Chun­ sheng and other ethnologists on the Wa and other people on China’s frontier with Burma. 11 Strangely, there is, as yet, no full biography of Andersson. On his early life, see Andersson 1956. Among his own many writings on his life and career in China, I recommend Andersson 1926, 1932 (the most pertinent of his popular books), and 1943 (his most comprehensive scientific account of the archaeological discoveries; he reminds the reader [1943, 256] that it should be read alongside his earlier summaries, Andersson 1923 and 1932). A draft for a complete Andersson bibliography (Fiskesjö 2009b) is available on request. See also the select bibliographies in Fiskesjö and Chen 2004; Fiskesjö 2004a, 2004b; Wahlquist 2001. 12 Andersson (1926, 261–86) mentions the atrocities of World War I and the arrogance of Western powers in China as contributing to the difficulty of the missionary project, but he points to indigenous Chinese intellectual traditions as the most formidable obstacle (Erik Folke and a few other Swedish missionaries shifted to the study of Chinese philosophy, as if to help prove Andersson’s point). 13 His scientist’s belief in a God is evident when he writes, four years before his death, about telepathy as possible evidence for the reality of prayer as communication with this God (Andersson 1956). 14 For example, in the confrontation at the British-run natural history museum in Shanghai, two of his Chinese fossil assistants were at first denied entry because the museum was open for “whites only” and for local Chinese only on Saturdays (Andersson 1926, 310–13; see also Fiskesjö and Chen 2004, 36). 15 For example, Andersson 1938 describes China’s war with Japan as a part of a contemporary worldwide struggle against dictators such as Germany’s Hitler (on which Andersson wrote at length in the same work). 16 From Hu’s records of conversations with Ding; see also discussion in Chen and Fiskesjö 2005. That these excavations were actually Chinese is a point that, for political reasons, was ignored in China until the 1980s (see Fiskesjö and Chen 2004, chap. 3, “The Chinese Fate of Johan Gunnar Andersson: From Scholar to Scholar”). 17 Paleontologist Amadeus Grabau, quoted in Hu 1956, 28; translated in Kwok 1965, 110–11. Grabau was also invited by Ding. 18 Starting in 1917, fossils were divided between Sweden and the ngs. Such arrangements were not uncommon in this era; in this case it was also to serve as a model for the archaeological collections. 19 Fiskesjö 2005b discusses Andersson’s Chinese trajectory from geology to archaeology in more detail, as an illustration of the emergence of archaeology as a discipline and in relation to Chinese geological inquiry in earlier periods. 20 Chen also discusses Andersson’s activities and usefully tabulates them (Chen 1997b, 94). As Andersson himself would discover, and indeed carefully noted (1943, 291), the problem of ancient Eurasian interconnections is complex. It should rather be seen as a field of inquiry, which, incidentally, has been revived in recent years along with the opening of central Asian borders (see, e.g., “New Perspectives 264  Magnus Fiskesjö

21

22

23

24

25 26 27

28

in Eurasian Archaeology,” special issue, Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities [Fiskesjö 2003]). For a review of the “Western origins” theory and its acceptance by a number of Chinese intellectuals eager to align themselves with the West, see Fan 2008; see also Chen 1997b, chaps. 1.1, 2.3. This system has been vastly expanded and redefined by Chinese archaeologists, whom Andersson fully expected to take up this challenge (see, e.g., Andersson 1923, 42); what he did not expect was that in undertaking this work they would be almost wholly insulated from his publications, which, because of the ensuing Chinese political history, have not been widely read and only fragmentarily translated. See Chen 1997b; Fiskesjö and Chen 2004, chap. 3. An Zhimin (1950) is one of several exceptions; he suggests that Chinese scientists had been disappointed by seeing only Andersson’s popular works. Tong Enzheng suggests the “aborted dialogue” with Andersson as “the most salient example” of the harm done to science by the dogmatic nationalism of the Peoples’ Republic (Tong 1996, 186–87). Tong’s article is cited by Philip L. Kohl (1998) as evidence of Chinese resentment of foreign archaeologists working in China. Although such resentments did arise, Tong’s article is actually the opposite: a sharp critique of politically motivated Chinese distortions of Andersson’s positions. Research on Andersson’s sites and materials (e.g., Palmgren 1934; Bylin-Althin 1946; Sommarström 1956) has never been completed as he envisioned (Andersson 1943 and 1947 are themselves in part resurrections from a manuscript that was ready for printing in Nanjing when the Japanese attacked, in 1937); the archaeological collections preserved in Sweden remain available for research. On the agreement, the return shipments, and Andersson’s last view of the collections on display at the new ngs building in Nanjing, in 1937, see Fiskesjö and Chen 2004 and Fiskesjö 2010. Also, on the subsequent efforts to copy the Andersson arrangements for Sven Hedin’s Sino-Swedish expedition of 1927–35, which on Andersson’s suggestion included the archaeologist Folke Bergman (1902–46), see Maringer 1950; Hedin 1943; Bergman 1939; Li Xuetong 2005, 41–43; Wahlquist 2001; Chen 1997a. Johansson 2009 discusses archival materials showing that Andersson himself began to buy such antiquities from dealers and even sought to hide this from his former Chinese colleagues. On the transformations, in the Swedish social context, of Andersson and his museum, see Fiskesjö 2009a. For his original vision for the museum, see Andersson 1929. He was then diverted to Hong Kong and Vietnam, undertaking his final Asian excavations in both those places (Andersson 1938, 1939). I discuss this more fully in Fiskesjö 2010. An example of such materials would be those found at Chengziya, in eastern China. In his 1943 report, Andersson compares his Yangshao findings to the very different ceramics found at such sites (the legacy of which is readily seen in the ceramics associated with the later Anyang Bronze Age finds). On Anyang excavations, see Li 1977; see also the summary in Chen 1997b, 190–93. Science across Borders  265

29

30

31

32

33 34 35

36

For further discussion, see also Chang 1986, esp. 16–18; Falkenhausen 1993; Lai 1999. This project was the multivolume Gu shi bian (Disputing ancient history). On Gu, see Schneider 1971; Richter 1992; Hon 1996; Chen 1997b; Fan 2008. On the delight of Hu himself in Andersson’s dramatic discovery, and the exchanges with Ding over their impact on the prestige of formerly unquestioned classics, including Ding’s beloved ancient geographical treatise Yugong, see Fiskesjö and Chen 2004, 50–54. For an intriguing investigation of how China’s mass media favor even the autochthonous development in China of humans as such, see Sautman 2001. Chinese rejections of non-autochthonous origins, of course, go back much further. On the drastic Qing Manchu reaction to the translation of Jesuit Christian notions of Chinese descent from Noah, see Elman 2005. This subject is discussed in an exchange of letters between Andersson and Ding (Andersson to Ding Wenjiang, July 23, 1931; Ding to Andersson, October 23, 1931) archived at the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. See excerpts in Fiskesjö and Chen 2004, 70–72. This forceful article, written in Ding’s own formidable English, was originally intended to form part of a projected “systematic history of China beginning from the prehistoric periods,” which would separate myth from reality (see Wong 1947, xv–xvi). This source contains long lists of “imported” aspects. On the Chinese understanding of such comparative lateness as a matter of “national shame,” see Harrell and Li 2003. In Andersson’s lecture for the anatomical-anthropological section of the Chinese National Medical Association, in Beijing, February 1920, he discussed the very first Chinese stone axes he had found, dismissing the popular reaction that crude stone tools like those he had discovered were the remains of barbarian nonChinese: “When we turn to the large collection made by us in Honan, a region considered as the cradle of the Chinese race, we have to face only two alternatives, namely that the stone objects originate from a pre-Chinese unknown people, or from a primitive Chinese culture” (Andersson 1920, 42). This is, I think, the real significance of what Chang Kwang-chih much too diplomatically describes as the alignment of archaeology “as a branch of a renewed traditional Chinese historiography” (Chang 1986, 18).

266  Magnus Fiskesjö

Gazetteer Entries are arranged alphabetically by the name that appears in the text. Names that differ by only an umlaut or a hyphen are not included (i.e., Yülong/Yulong, Yun-nan/Yunnan). Name in text

Current Chinese name

Current Chinese name

Tibetan Name

parentheses if

Hanyu Pinyin

(Chinese

ings are noted

not Chinese)

(if different)

characters)

in parentheses)

Beijing

北京

(language in

Chinese Characters

Hanyu Pinyin

Beiping Chengtu Chiarung

北平 成都 嘉绒

Chengdu Jiarong

Hanzhou Hoching Honan Hpimaw (Burmese) Jinsha R Kangding Lunan Ma Pian Ting Mekhong (Thai) R. Mt. Omei Mu Shang Chai

汉洲 鹤庆 河南

Heqing Henan

金沙江 康定 路南 马边厅

峨眉山

Mabian Ting

Emei Shan Mushang Zhai

Gyalrong (Gyarong)

Guanghan

广汉

Pianma

片马 Dri Chu Dartsedo

Shilin Mabian

石林 马边

Lancang­ jiang

澜沧江

267

(alternate spell-

Namsa Ningyuanfu Nvlvk’ö / Nguluko (Naxi) Nyorophu O Pien Ting Pa-chou Paoning Fu Peking Salween R (Burmese) San Hou Kou Shantung Shih-chuan Hsien Songpan St. Paul de Tremblaye (French) Suifu Sze-chwan Szechwan Ta-liang Shan Ta-tsien-lu / Tachienlu Taining Monastery Tengyue Tsao Po Xufu Yachow Yangtze R. Yuhu Zheduo Pass Zhongdian

宁远府 Erluge

峨边厅 巴州 保宁府 北京

Niluopu Ebian Ting Bazhou Baoning Fu Beijing

三河口

Sanhekou

山东 石船县

Shandong Shichuan Xian

Nanzha 西昌 Xichang Xuesongcun 雪嵩村

Dabao Ba Xian Langzhong

大堡 巴县 阆中

Nu Jiang

怒江

Qingshankou

青山口

Yibin

宜宾

Kangding

康定

Zungchu

松潘

敘府 四川 四川 大凉山 打箭炉

腾越 草坡 敘府 雅州 扬子江 玉湖 折多山口 中甸

Xufu Sichuan Sichuan Da Liangshan Dajianlu

Gathar (Garthar) Gompa

Yazhou Yangzi

Tengchong Weizhou Yibin Ya’an Changjiang

腾冲 威州 宜宾 雅安 长江

Zhongdian

Xiangelila

香格里拉

Caopo

268 Gazetteer

Dartsedo

Chedo la Gyalthang (Rgyalthang)

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286 References

Contributors Magnus Fiskesjö teaches anthropology and Asian studies at Cornell University. He is coauthor, with Chen Xingcan, of China before China: Johan Gunnar Andersson, Ding Wenjiang, and the Discovery of China’s Prehistory. He has conducted research on Western museums of Asia, as well as ethnographic and historical research on ethnic relations in China and Southeast Asia, especially regarding the Wa people in Burma and China, and on China’s so-called Southern Great Wall. Geng Jing is a member of the Qiang ethnic group of China and the author of The Nostalgia of My Qiang Hometown (Qiang xiangqing). She is an associate research fellow at the Sichuan Institute of Nationality Studies. Her research focuses on the historical and cultural studies on the Qiang ethnic group. Denise M. Glover teaches anthropology at the University of Puget Sound. She is the author of several chapters and articles on Tibetan medicine and coauthor of “Ethnobiology and Natural Resources,” in Environmental Anthropology: Methodologies and Research Design. She conducts research on medicinal plant classifications in Tibetan medicine and local environmental knowledge in southwest China. Stevan Harrell is an anthropologist at the University of Washington and has been conducting research in Taiwan and in southwest China since 1970; his current interest is the role of humans in local and largerscale ecosystems. His latest book is Fieldwork Connections, with Bamo Ayi and Ma Lunzy. He is now working on “An Ecohistory of People’s China.”

287

Paul Harris is a visual anthropologist and documentary filmmaker based in Cologne, Germany. His films include Dongba: China’s Forgotten Priests, on the religion and ritual of the Naxi ethnic minority in Yunnan Province, and A King in China, on the life and work of the botanistexplorer Joseph Rock. He lectures on documentary film and is director of “People on Earth,” Cologne’s premier film festival for anthropology, ecology, and documentary films. He Jiangyu is a Naxi scholar and researcher in China. He graduated from Kunming Engineering University and has been a visiting scholar at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. His work includes Lonely Journey (Gu du zhi lü), about Joseph Rock, and an edited Naxi-Chinese-English version of Rock’s Na-khi-English Encyclopedic Dictionary (volume 1). Jeff Kyong-McClain is assistant professor of history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His current research focuses on the intersections of the social sciences (especially archaeology) and nation building in modern China and on the spread of an urban-based modernity outside of the well-known metropolises. Charles F. McKhann is professor of anthropology at Whitman College. He is the author of “Taming the Dragon: The Search for Sustainable Tourism in Southwest China,” in the International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability (2005–6). He has conducted research on religion, ethnicity, art, kinship, social history, and tourism in southwest China and is currently writing on the relationship between tourism and religious revival among the Naxi. Erik Mueggler is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Age of Wild Ghosts, a history of a Yi minority community in socialist China, as well as a forthcoming book, The Paper Road, a history of botanical exploration in west China and Tibet. Margaret B. Swain teaches women and gender studies at the University of California, Davis, and is director of the Women’s Resources and Research Center. She has authored or edited numerous articles and collections, focusing on ethnic minorities in southwest China, feminist 288 Contributors

analysis, and critical tourism studies. Her research on Sani Yi in historical and contemporary perspectives continues her fascination with global missionary and tourism dynamics and with local cosmopolitanism. Alan Waxman earned his B.A. in anthropology (minor in Japanese) at Whitman College in 2008. He is currently teaching English at Kinse Ryokan English School in Kyoto, Japan. His interests include Japanese aesthetics, cultural ecology, and the languages and cultures of the Yakama and Umatilla peoples of eastern Washington and Oregon. He and Charles F. McKhann were recipients of a 2006–7 Whitman College Abshire Award, which initiated their contribution to this volume. Paul Weissich is a licensed landscape architect and was director of Honolulu Botanical Gardens from 1957 to 1989. He has authored numerous books, particularly on tropical flora, including Majesty II: The Exceptional Tress of Hawaii, Na Lei Makamei: The Treasured Lei (with Marie McDonald), and Small Trees for the Tropical Landscapes: A Gardener’s Guide (with Fred Rauch). Since his retirement, he has been active as a consultant and volunteer on landscaping projects. He worked with Joseph Rock from 1957 until Rock’s death in 1962. Tamara Wyss is a filmmaker who since the 1970s has explored subjects in anthropology. She spent a number of years on the Cape Verde Islands working on a rural media project and ten years researching in Sichuan, China. Her films include The Chinese Shoes, a feature-length documentary, and Sammeln, Erinnern, a feature-length documentary about the anthropological museum in Leipzig. She is currently working on a film about Victor Segalen and is planning a film about the Yi people of the Liangshan region. Alvin Yoshinaga is a restoration ecologist at the University of Hawai‘i Center for Conservation Research and Training. He operates the center’s Seed Conservation Laboratory at the university’s Lyon Arboretum, where he conducts research on the germination, longevity, and storage of seeds of native Hawaiian plants and manages a conservation seed bank.

Contributors  289

Index Page numbers in italics refer to figures or tables. A. Bee and Company, 35–36, 48 A King in China (documentary), 116, 136–37, 142, 145 A Na-khi-English Encyclopedic Dictionary (vols. 1 & 2) (Rock), 123, 125, 138, 142 A Yunshan, 129, 139–40 Academia Sinica, 226, 233–35, 239n15, 248, 258 Académie des Inscriptions et BellesLettres, 152 agriculture: introduction of modern, 23; in Nvlvk’ö, 48, production of insect white wax, 64; silk production, 64; tea production, 64, 94, 211. See also Paul Vial: as agronomist American Baptist Foreign Mission Society (ABFMS), 181, 184, 192, 213 American Museum of Natural History, 15, 191 Andersson, Johan Gunnar, 4, 232, 248, 264n11; as anti-imperialist, 6, 14, 21, 249, 264n14, 264n15; as archeologist, 10, 22, 234, 241, 243, 248, 250–58 passim, 263n4; and fieldwork, 244; as geologist, 10, 19, 234, 240, 243, 248, 250; as museum curator, 8, 15, 250, 257, 265n23, 265n24; and National Geological Survey (China), 19, 240,

244, 250, 257; northwest expedition of, 253–56, 255, 257, 265n23; and Peking Man, 249–50; perception of the Chinese, 21, 249–50, 262; and politics, 249; relationship with Ding Wenjiang, 19–21, 243–44, 248–49; relationship with other collaborators, 250, 252–53; relationship with other foreigners, 241, 249, 264n12; Science and humanism of, 240, 249; as secular Lutheran, 14, 248–50, 262, 264n13; works of, 243, 248–49, 252, 257, 262; and Yangshao excavations, 20, 250– 54, 257, 259–60; and the Zhoukoudian excavation, 250 Ang Zhiling, 172–73 anthropology: Boasian style of, 199, 217, 223; “salvage,” 189, 193–94, 218. See also ethnology Anyang excavation, 230, 258–59, 265n27, 265n28. See also archaeology: and nationalism archaeology, 10, 18–20, 22; in China, 212–13, 225, 259, 264n19, 265n22; of Chinese origins, 251–53, 256, 259–61, 265n21, 266n30, 266n35; diffusionist, 229–30, 238n12; and nationalism, 212–13, 225–26, 229–31, 237, 241–42, 253, 259–61, 266n36 290

Arnold Arboretum, Harvard University, 59, 61, 76–77, 89n13, 89n14, 89n15, 136, 143 Ascherberg, Ludmilla, 93 Axi, 155 Baber, Colonel Edward Colburne, 32 Balfour, Isaac Bailey, 26, 35–36, 51 Banshan site, 254–55 Baolu Weiyani Wenji (Huang), 172 Baylor University, 117, 120 Beech, Joseph, 192 Berlin Anthropological Museum, 112n1 Berlin Ethnographic Museum, 99, 112n1 Bianjiagou, 255, 256. See also Banshan site Bielu, 101–5 passim, 102, 110–11 Bielu, son of, 101, 110–11 Bielu, wife of, 103 Bishop Museum (Honolulu), 121, 144 Black, Davidson, 233 Boas, Franz, 189, 217, 238n4 Bolozu, 193 Border Research Institute, West China Union University, 224 Border Service Department of the Church of Christ in China, 223–24. See also nationalism: Chinese botany, 10, 15, 18, 47–50, 62, 70, 85, 88n6, 116, 119, 143; and botanical gardens, 8, 119; collections for foreign gardens, 26, 34–36, 48, 133; general, collections, 8; herbariums, 8, 35, 61, 119, 121, 125, 133; popular, 88n3; Wardian case, 61, 88n7; the “Wilson Era” of, 61 botany, species: Adenophorus pinnatifidus var. rockii, 124; alpine flowers, 26, 28, 34, 41; azaleas, 42; bellflowers, 122, 133, 148n3; Brighamia rockii, 124; Cercidiphyllum japonicum, 72; Chamaesyce rockii, 119, 124; Chinese Monthly (see Rosa chinesis); chaulmoogra (see Hydnocarpus kurzii); clematis, 30; Clermontia clermontioides ssp. rockiana, 124; Coprosma rhyncho-

carpa; 132; Crimson Rambler (see rose); Cyanea pohaku, 124; Cyperus rockii, 124; cypress, 80, 81; dahlia, 74; Davidia involucrata, 61; dove tree, 61; euphorbia, 42; Euphorbia rockii (see Cahmaesyce rockii); gentian, 41–42; gladiolus, 74; Hydnocarpus kurzii, 121; Katsura tree (see Cercidiphyllum japonicum); Kokia drynarioides, 132; Lilium regale, 57; lily, 57, 65–66, 74, 78; Lipochaeta rockii, 124; Lobelia (lobeliods), 122, 133, 148n3; Meconopsis integrifolia, 61; Meconopsis punicea, 61; Metrosideros, 122; Nomocharis, 30; oak, 82; Peperomia rockii, 124; Phyllostachys mites, 63; Phyllostegia rockii, 124; Pittosporum gayanum, 132; primula, 28, 30, 36, 41, 47, 52; Pritchardia, 133; rhododendron, 28, 30, 36, 42, 49, 52, 133; Rosa chinesis, 75, 90n18; rose, 74–75; saxifrages, 41; Scaevola, 119; Tetramolopium rockii, 124; yellow Chinese poppy, 61 Boxer Uprising/Rebellion, 39, 156 Bright, Calvin, 235 Bronx Zoo, 191 Brooke, John Weston, 95, 104, 113n8 Bruty, Herbert John, 133 Bulley, Arthur, 35–36 Burroughs, John, 65, 67 Central Nationalities University, 171 Central Plains culture, 230, 237. See also archaeology: of Chinese origins Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de, 263n2, 263n4 Chelsea Flower Show, 133–34 Chengdu Baptist Church, 189 Chiang Kai-shek, 191, 206 Children of the Yellow Earth (Andersson), 262 China Central Museum, 233 China Inland Mission: in Chengdu, 201; in Dali, 47; in Kangding, 234

Index  291

Chinese Catholic Church, 162. See also Communist Revolution: and religion Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, 162–65. See also Communist Revolution: and religion Chinese Recorder, 181, 205 Chuan Miao. See Miao (Hmong) Cole, Fay-Cooper, 189, 217–18, 227–28, 238n4 College of Hawai‘i, 119–21, 124–25, 144; botanical garden of, 119, 121; and Joseph F. Rock Herbarium, 125 colonialism, 6, 16, 19, 21, 174, 214, 223. See also imperialism Colquhoun, Archibald, 154 Communist Revolution, 5, 140, 180; impact on explorers and their legacy, 23, 122, 129–30, 150–51, 161–63, 165, 224, 235, 238n8; and relationship with periphery, 163, 224; and religion, 162 Cooper, James Fennimore, 106. See also Völkerschauen Cornell-Vicos Peru project, 178n8 Cox, Euan Hillhouse Methven: as compiler of Farrer expedition, 30; and Reginald Farrer, 26; works of, 28–29, 30 Crouch, Arnie, 223 Cuanwen congke, 246, 263n6 Cultural Revolution, 115n25, 130, 138, 162–63, 165, 169, 172 Cunningham, Reverend Robert, 234 Darwin, Charles, 66; Voyage of the Beagle, 89n11. See also under ocular proof Davies, Henry Rodolph, 32; and ethnic classification, 34, 47. See also railroad: Burma-Yangtze rail line Degener, Otto, 124 de la Salle, Viscountess Marie, 19; as benefactor of Paul Vial, 153, 155–56, 158, 161, 167–68, 172, 175, 178n5 Delavay, Pierre Jean Marie, 36, 47, 152

Deng Xihou, 229 Deng Yaozong, 239n14 Die chinesischen Schuhe (documentary), 114n15 Ding Wenjiang (V. K. Ting), 4, 240, 242, 244, 263n3; as archaeologist, 10, 22, 243, 245, 263n3; death of, 248; as ethnographer, 20, 243, 246, 248, 263n6; and fieldwork, 244; as geologist, 10, 19–20, 240, 243–46, 248; interest in Southwest China, 245–46, 248; and modernization, 244, 246–48; and National Geological Survey (China), 19, 240, 242, 243–44; as poet, 20, 245; political career of, 244, 247–48, 258; relationship with foreign scholars, 241, 244, 247, 259, 263n4, 264n17; Science and humanism of, 240, 246–47; support for authoritarian rule, 6, 247, 249; works of, 240, 246, 263n6, 263n8, 266n29, 266n32; Yangshao excavations, 20, 259, 261. See also Johan Gunnar Andersson Donnithorne, Reverend V. H., 229 Drepung Monastery, 139 Dye, Daniel Sheets, 205, 227, 229, 231 Edgar, James Houston, 227 Edinburgh Botanic Garden, 133 Elisseeff, Serge, 121, 192 epistemologies, 5; Charles Percy Snow and, 9, 58, 88n1; classificatory science, 7–9, 64–65; constructivist and scientific, 9–11, 58, 60; and natural history, 14–15, 58; science and religion, 12–14 Essays on Yi Studies by Foreign Scholars (Huang), 172 ethnicity: Chinese constructions of, 213, 224–25, 231; foreign constructions of, 32, 34, 39–40, 43–44, 47, 50–52, 101–2, 150, 215–16, 218–19 ethnology: and British cartography in Burma, 31; Broca scale, 192; in China, 212–13; and ethnobotany, 64, 122; and

292 Index

gazetteers, 32, 144; and imperialism, 31, 53; and nationalism, 212–13, 218, 237; and photography, 11–12, 31, 53, 192 explorers, 4; and age, 124; assumptions of progress, 6, 74–75; as collectors and classifiers, 7–9, 30, 47–50, 64–65, 67, 133, 143, 210n19 (see also under epistemologies); disillusionment with European industrial life, 76; and European or Euro-American privilege, 16–18, 38–40; as generalists, 9–10; and mimetic technology, 46–47; as missionaries, 13–14, 152, 177n2, 211–12, 214; and objectification, 22–24; and popular literature, 124, 130, 151; relationship with collaborators, 18–20; as social and political activists, 15–22, 76; understanding of science and faith, 5 Fairchild, David, 121 Fang Shuxuan, 236 Far East and Russian Institute, University of Washington, 121–22 Farrer’s Last Journey (Cox), 28–29, 30 Farrer, Reginald, 3–4, 13, 26; as botanist, 7, 26, 89n12; collecting outside of China, 26; and George Forrest, 27; perception of Lisu, 27, 29–30; perception of tribes in Pianma, 27 Fei Xiaotong, 225 Feng Hanji, 228, 236, 239n14 Field Museum, The (Chicago), 112n3, 189 firearms, 43–45, 55n12, 101, 104, 185; Lee-Enfield, 55n12; and photography 44–45; Winchester, 44–45, 54. See also explorers: mimetic technology Folk Religion in Southwest China (Graham), 189, 194–96, 208n6 Forbes, Charles Noyes, 119 Forrest, George, 4, 17; and A. Bee and Company, 36; as botanist, 7, 34, 41–42, 47–50, 89n12; and Chinese

elite, 38; and class identity, 36; and class in India, 36–37, 53; death in the field, 34, 50; and George Litton, 39–42, 45, 152; and hunting, 43–44, 45, 50; and masculinity, 37; and Naxi collaborators, 18, 35, 47–52, 54; and Old Chao 50, 51; perception of Han Chinese, 21, 39–40, 43, 51–52; perception of Lisu, 21; perception of Naxi, 47, 50–52; perception of Tibetans, 43–44, 51–52; race and sexuality, 37, 40–41; and Xiao Zhongdian huotou, 43–44. See also ocular comportment Foster Garden (Honolulu), 121, 131, 133 Franklin, James, 192 Fu Sinian, 234, 258 Ge Weihan, 221. See also Graham, David Crockett (D.C. Graham) Goullart, Peter, 129, 134 Grabau, Amadeus, 242, 264n17 Graham, David Crockett (D. C. Graham): as American Baptist missionary, 4, 180–81, 183–84, 188–89, 192, 213–15, 226–27; as anti-communist, 23, 206, 225; as anthropologist, 19, 180, 185, 189–93 passim, 196, 198–99, 204–5, 207, 212–25 passim, 238n3; as archaeologist, 10, 19, 22, 193, 212–13, 226–29, 233–35; archives of, 23, 208n4; and Chinese folk religion, 181, 189–91, 194–200 passim; and Chinese nationalism, 21–22, 206, 213, 222–23, 232, 237; as collector, 187, 190–91, 193, 201, 209n10, 215; in Denver, 10; as educator, 180, 192, 201, 217–18, 227, 238n10; as entomologist, 7, 10, 187, 209n11; and evolutionism, 196–98, 200–201; and excavations in Illinois, 228; and Hanzhou excavation, 19, 229–30, 236–37; and functionalism, 196–98; hunting, 185, 186; modern legacy of, 23, 224, 235–37, 238n8; as museum curator, 8, 15, 180, 192–93, 227, 231–34; as Pastor

Index  293

Ge, 221–22; relationship with collaborators, 19, 216, 220–22, 225, 230; relationship with other foreigners, 181, 192, 201–2, 208n1, 218; and relationship between science and religion, 180–81, 183–84, 189–90, 192–94, 198, 200–201, 207, 228; and recreation, 182, 185, 188; summer expeditions of, 185, 187, 190–92, 191, 215–16; and West China Border Research Society, 19, 217; works of, 181, 189, 194–96, 203, 208n6, 209n16, 209n19, 215–16, 232. See also religion, “great tradition”; religion, “little tradition” Graham, Elizabeth Atchley, 182 Graham, William, 182 gramophone, 46. See also explorers: mimetic technology Granet, Marcel, 246 Great Leap Forward, 111, 115n25 Gu Jiegang, 225, 230, 259. See also archaeology: and nationalism Guo Moruo, 230 Gustave, Henri Marie, Vicomte d’Ollone, 95; and d’Ollone mission, 95 Han Chinese, 39–40, 43, 51–52, 99–100, 113n13, 192; and conflict with minority groups, 94, 96–97, 104–5, 113n7, 138, 152–53, 223; and conscription of minorities, 94, 97 Han Chinese, folk religion, 181, 189, 191, 194–99 passim, 205, 207, 209n18; feng shui, 75, 111, 195, 200; ling, 200; qi, 200; shen, 200; tai yi, 200; yin-yang, 195, 200 Hanzhou (Guanghan) excavation, 19, 229–30, 236–37, 239n13. See also West China Union University Museum Harvard University, 228, 238n11 Harvard-Yenching Institute, 121, 136, 192, 231 Hawaiian Botanical Society, 122

Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association, 120–21 Haydon, Albert Eustace, 189 He Yaohua, 173–74 Hillebrand, Wilhelm, 124 History of Chinese Archaeology, A (Wei), 261 Honolulu Botanical Gardens, 131 Hooten, Ernest Albert, 228 Howard, Randolph, 192, 209n14 Hrdlička, Aleš, 191, 209n13 Hu Shi, 247, 259, 261, 266n29. See also nationalism: New Culture movement Huang Jianming, 171–72 Hui, Zhi, 127 Hui, Zhi, son of, 130 Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University, 134, 136, 143 huotou, 42; of Xiao Zhongdian, 42–44 imperialism, 20–22, 108, 129, 150, 152; and the gaze, 52–53; big, 6, 20, 163, 184; little, 6, 20, 153, 198, 213–14, 245–46; and photography 30–31; and race 31. See also explorers: as social and political activists; nationalism Indigenous Trees of the Hawaiian Islands, The (Rock), 122, 144 Institute of History and Philology (Taiwan), 233–34 “In the Footsteps of Joseph Rock” (photoblog), 118. See also photography: and the internet James Veitch and Sons, 61, 89n13 Jardin des Plants (Paris), 36 Jia Lanpo, 233 Jiarong, 10, 64, 193 Joseph F. Rock Herbarium, University of Hawai‘i, 125 Journal of the West China Border Research Society, 181, 194, 205, 216, 232

294 Index

Kachin ethnic group, 31 Kaowiik (Weiss-Sonnenburg), 106, 114n20 Karen ethnic group, 31 Kew. See Royal Botanic Gardens Ki (Qi), Father, 169–70, 173. See also religious revival Kilmarnock Academy, 34 Kingdon-Ward, Frank, 45–46, 89n12, 129 Kublai Khan, 139, 144 Lashi, 30 Lattimore, Owen, 232 Laufer, Berthold, 93, 112n3, 189 Leaf and Tendril (Burroughs), 65 Li Anzhai, 223–24 Li Ji, 228, 258 Li Jiwu, 131 Li Shichen, 126–27 Liang Qichao, 247. See also nationalism: New Culture movement Liang Siyong, 228 Lietard, Père Alfred, 159 Lin Mingjun, 230, 232 Ling Chunsheng, 264n10 Lissu. See Lisu Lisu, 21, 27, 29–30, 35, 45; and photography, 30 Litton, George 35, 38 Liu Enlan, 223 Liu Wenhui, 211, 233 Liu Zongyue, 130 Lolo, 17, 32, 91, 95–97, 100, 104, 106, 152–53, 155, 161, 215, 245; and alcohol, 97; and “Black Lolo”/”Black Bones,” 100, 104–5; as “Cooked Barbarians,” 97; and “White Lolo,” 100–101; writing system of, 152, 246. See also Nuosu; Sani; Yi Lyon Arboretum (Honolulu), 121, 148n2 Machang site, 254 Majiayao site, 254

mana, 200. See also Han Chinese, folk religion Manoa Arboretum. See Lyon Arboretum Marks, Lester, 122, 125, 131 Maru, 30 May, Karl, 114n18 McCandless (Marks), Loy, 122 Memory: collective, 151–52, 165, 169–70, 173, 175–76; personal, 151–52, 166–67, 170, 175–76; and the state, 151, 175–76 Miao (Hmong), 184, 191, 201, 215–16, 238n3; folk religion of, 181, 194, 196, 199; folk tales, 7, 8, 194, 209n16; and Paul Vial, 156, 158, 161, 167, 178n8 microscope, 85–86 Mid-Pacific Institute, Mills School, 118–19 Missions Étrangères de Paris, 153, 155–56, 177n2, 178n5 Montelius, Oscar, 252 Moody, Dwight Lyman, 182. See also religion: Protestant revival Morrey (Graham), Alicia, 183–84, 185, 214 Moso (old term for Naxi). See Naxi Mosuo, 139, 141; daba, 139 Mount Emei (Omei), 185, 195, 200 Muli, king of, 128–29 Munich Anthropological Museum, 112n1 museums: and material culture collections, 8, 164, 174, 189; and nationalism, 231; natural history and Naturvölker, 14–15, 190 Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (Stockholm), 15, 255. See also National Geological Survey: and collaboration with Swedish government Nanjing Incident, 192, 205–6, 209n9. See also nationalism: anti-foreign Nasu, 155 National Geological Survey (China), 19, 242, 245, 252, 256, 258, 265n23; and collaboration with Swedish government, 250, 254, 255–56, 264n18

Index  295

National Geographic. See National Geographic Society; Joseph Rock: and National Geographic National Geographic Society, 126, 136, 143, 211 National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, 15, 190–92, 209n11, 209n13 National Tropical Botanical Garden (Hawai‘i), 144 Nationalism, 231; anti-foreign, 40, 129, 156, 162, 180, 192, 205; Chinese, 16, 39, 99–100, 206, 214, 218–19, 222–23, 225, 230, 247, 258; and European privilege, 20; May Fourth movement, 212, 247; New Culture movement, 226, 247; and science, 241. See also archaeology: and nationalism; ethnology: and nationalism Nationalists, 99–100, 113n13. See also nationalism: Chinese; Republican period Native American Makah Cultural and Research Center Museum (Neah Bay, WA), 239n14 natural history, 62, 65, 86, 118; and field work, 87; and imagination, 67; and literary aesthetics 58, 74–76; and photography, 59; popular, 58; and visual aesthetics, 58–59; See also epistemologies: natural history; museums: natural history and Naturvölker; ocular proof: and natural history Naturalist in Western China (Wilson), 61, 64, 82, 83, 88n8 Nature Conservancy, 117–18. See also Naxi: and tourism Naxi, 47–48, 125–26, 141, 144, 218; and aural-centered traditional ecological knowledge, 50–51; and dongba, 125, 128, 131, 138; “love suicide” rituals, 138; perception of Joseph Rock, 22, 117–18, 128, 137; and tourism, 117–18, 130–31, 138

Needham, Joseph, 232 Nuosu, 20–21, 91, 95–97, 102–3, 105, 108, 112n1, 115n25, 184; bimo, 181, 194, 196; Black , 101, 109, 111, 114n17, 115n25; caste system, 100–101, 105, 114n17; and foreigners, 92, 95, 101, 104; and the Han, 96; and photography, 103–4; prisoners, 104–5; White, 114n17; Wu Po tribe, 101. See also Yi Nuosu Yi, 164. See also Nuosu; Yi ocular comportment, 33, 41, 45, 47, 52–54; and Chinese gapers, 38, 40–41, 43, 51–53; and ethnic classification, 34; and imperialism, 32–34; and Naxi, 51, 54; sociality of vision, 56n17; and Tibetans 43, 51, 54. See also explorers: and objectification; ocular proof ocular proof, 58, 64, 66–67; and Charles Darwin, 66, 89n11; and collecting, 65, 73, 89n10; and natural history, 65, 67; and photography, 73–74 Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction, U.S. Department of Agriculture, 121, 126 Opium Wars, 4, 152 Östasiatiska Museet. See Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (Stockholm) Parker, Edward Harper, 152 Peabody Museum, Harvard University, 232 Peking Man, 233, 251, 258–59 photographic equipment, 67, 99, 101, 129, 142; Kodak camera, 89n13, 129, 190; Sanderson camera, 89n13 photography, 11–12, 59; as analogous to painting, 12, 84; aesthetic of, 78, 82, 84; calotype, 71, 90n 17; composition, 68, 78–82; and history, 30–31, 53, 136; and the Internet, 118; as scientific method, 7, 11, 67–73 passim, 84, 123, 144. See also ethnology: and photography

296 Index

Pianma Incident, 26, 55n1 Pierre, Father, 159, 162 Plant Hunting (Wilson), 57, 74, 77, 87 Potocki, Count, 117, 142 Qi Jiawen, 165, 166, 168. See also religious revival Qi Rubai, 165–66, 175. See also religious revival Qi Yanpei (Chi Yen-pei), 234, 258. Qiang, 21, 201–5, 218–19, 219, 224; folk tales, 7; and “lost tribe of Israel,” 202–3, 218; perception of D. C. Graham, 22–23, 221–22; shibi, 181, 194, 196, 203–5, 204, 207, 219–22, 220–21 Qilu University, 223 Qing dynasty, 4, 99–100, 113n13, 162, 180, 184, 212, 214; ethnographic survey, 31, 238n1; relations with European powers, 4–5, 150; and the Manchu, 100, 113n13; relations with periphery, 5, 20, 153, 214, 236. See also imperialism railroad: Burma-Yangtze rail line, 32, 39; construction, 5, 245; Hanoi-Kunming rail line, 10, 156, 158 Rauschenbusch, Walter, 183–84, 189 Ravenel, William, 190–91 Rawlinson, Frank Joseph, 205–7 Reform and Opening period: ethnic revival during, 8–9; impact to legacy of explorers, 23–24, 164, 236–37; religious revival in, 162, 165 religion: freedom of, 141, 165; and Stephen Jay Gould, 13. See also under explorers: understanding of science and faith religion, “great tradition,” 195–97; Chinese Buddhism, 194–97, 205, 210n20; Confucianism, 194, 196, 198, 205, 210n20; Gelugpa Buddhist sect, 139– 41, 194, 196; Protestant revival, 182; Taoism, 194–97, 205, 209n17, 210n20.

See also explorers: as missionaries; Han Chinese, folk religion religion, “little tradition,” 195, 197. See also Han Chinese, folk religion; Miao (Hmong): folk religion of; Mosuo: daba; Naxi: dongba; Nuosu: bimo; Qiang: shibi; Sani: bimo religious revival, 162, 165 Ren Naiqiang, 21, 211–12 Republican period, 99–100, 113n13, 197, 213, 226, 233; Chinese relations with European powers during, 5, 162; Chinese relations with periphery during, 5, 214, 219, 223; Northern Expedition, 226. See also imperialism; nationalism Research Institute of Sani Folk Culture, 168 Rio de Janeiro Botanic Garden, 133 Rochester Theological Seminary, 183, 205 Rock, Joseph Francis Charles, 4, 116–19, 122, 129, 132–33, 142; as anti-communist, 23; and art, 131–32, 134; and Asian botany, 124, 126, 133; as botanist, 7, 116, 118, 121, 133, 209n11; and chocolate, 10, 17, 128, 134; and conservation, 145; death of, 122, 134; as Dr. Rock, 117, 131; and ethnobotany, 122; as ethnographer, 116, 124, 126, 128–30, 138, 218; as ethnohistorian, 10, 118, 143–44; as Eurocentrist, 17, 116, 126–28, 133, 137; and folding bathtub, 137, 144; and glass-bottomed skiff, 144; and gramophone, 46, 133, 137; and Hawaiian botany, 10, 119–125, 131–32, 144; health of, 117–18, 127, 144; library of, 121–22, 131; as linguist, 8, 117–18, 125, 138, 142, 144; modern legacy of, 24, 118, 130; and National Geographic, 116, 124, 126, 128, 130, 211; and photography, 11, 67, 116, 118, 123, 126, 128–30, 133, 136, 140, 143–44; “Pohaku” (nickname), 124, 131; relationship with Naxi collaborators, 18, 126–28, 130, 137; relationship

Index  297

with other foreigners, 127, 208n1; and religion, 13, 117, 132; sexual orientation of, 128, 131; works of, 123, 122–25, 130, 137–38, 142–44 Rockhill, William Woodville, 152 Roosevelt, Kermit, and Theodore Roosevelt, 56n13 Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew), 26, 35, 60, 133 Royal College of Science, 60 Royal Horticultural Society, 60 Sani (Gni), 150, 153–54, 154, 167, 173; academics, 158, 164, 170–75, 177n2; bimo, 155–56, 172–73, 175, 177n2; and Catholicism, 151, 159, 163–65, 168, 173, 178n9; and gender relations, 153, 159, 165; perception of Paul Vial, 23–24, 165; and sherma, 156; and tourism, 164–65, 174, 178n10; writing system of, 158–59, 161, 164, 168, 170, 172, 175. See also Yi Sani Yi, 150, 152, 164. See also Sani Sanxingdui, 19, 22, 236–37, 239n13. See also Hanzhou excavation Sargent, Charles Sprague, 61, 89n14, 143 sawbwa. See tusi Schottengymnasium (Vienna), 142 Shaguotun excavation, 230 Shajing site, 254 Shan ethnic group, 31, 38 Shan States, 38 Shu, Kingdom of, 230 Sichuan Provincial Education Bureau, 229, 233 Sichuan Provincial Museum, 235 Sichuan University, 234, 239n14. See also West China Union University Sichuan University Museum, 236. See also West China Union University Museum Sifan. See Jiarong; Qiang; Xifan Smiles, Samuel, 66–67. See also ocular proof Smithsonian Institution, 10, 181, 187,

193, 194, 201, 209n10, 215, 232, 236; National Museum of Natural History (U.S. National Museum), 15, 190–92, 209n11, 209n13 Snow, Charles Percy, “The Two Cultures,” 9, 58. See also Two Cultures, The (Snow) Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 35 Soong Mei-ling, 206, 209n12 St. John, Harold, 124 St. Paul la Tremblaye, 156, 161, 167 Student Volunteer Movement, 182–83; and China missions, 183 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 71, 73, 82. See also photography: calotype Tee-Van, John, 191, 209n12 Tiangong kaiwu, 246 Tibetans, 42–43, 141, 184, 191–92, 212, 215; and Han Chinese, 94, 113n7 Torrance, Thomas, 14, 201, 207, 210n25, 218, 222, 227; perception of the Chinese, 203; perception of the Qiang, 201–3. See also Qiang: and “lost tribe of Israel” Tozzer, Alfred Marston, 228 Traill, Clementina, 35–36 Trinity College, 61 Tucci, Guiseppe, 135 tusi, 38, 112n6; Cheilu, 94; So, 95 Two Cultures, The (Snow), 88n1 United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 168, 172 United States Department of Agriculture. See Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction University of Chicago, 189, 192, 218, 224, 227 University of Hawai‘i. See College of Hawai‘i University of Vienna, 117, 120, 142 Uppsala University, 248

298 Index

Vatican, 162–63, 165 Vatican Museum, 25n2 Versailles peace conference, 247 Vial, Père Paul, 4, 153, 155; as agronomist, 10, 14, 23, 156, 162–63, 165; as anticommunist, 23; as anti-evolutionist, 10, 14; attack on, 155, 178n6; Baolu, 163, 172; as cartographer, 10, 154, 156; as Catholic missionary, 14–15, 23, 150, 152, 155, 159, 162, 165, 174; death of, 161, 168; Deng Mingde, 163, 165; as educator, 150, 165, 167; as ethnographer, 150, 156, 163, 165–66, 175, 177n1; grave stone of, 167–68, 170, 174, 178n12; and gender relations, 153, 159, 161, 165, 175, 178n4; and Hanoi-Kunming rail line, 10, 156, 158; as linguist, 8, 149–50, 156, 158–59, 164–65, 170, 172, 175, 177n1; modern legacy, 23–24, 151–53, 161, 164, 169–70, 174; and modernity, 150, 153, 156, 161, 163, 170, 175, 178n8; perception of the Han, 150, 154–55, 163, 170; perception of the Sani, 21, 150, 155; and photography, 149, 156, 159, 174; and politics, 150, 152; as popular writer, 149, 156, 177n1; relationship with Sani converts, 19, 23, 155; reputation of, 152, 156; and schools, 19, 155, 158–59, 161, 168, 174; trip to Burma, 154; works of, 149, 156, 157–58. See also memory Völkerschauen, 106, 114n19 Wa ethnic group, 31, 264n10 Wallis, E. J., 68 Waze, 91, 101, 114n16, 114n17. See also Lolo; Nuosu Wei Juxian, 232, 261 Weiss, Emil, 93 Weiss, Max Friedrich (Fritz), 4, 93; and cartography, 94; comparison with other foreigners, 107; death of, 93; and Edison sound recorder, 91, 99, 101, 105; as ethnographer, 7, 94; as

German Consul, 93, 107, 112n3; Jewish heritage, 108, 115n23; memoirs, 97; perception of Muslims, 94; perception of Nationalists, 100; perception of the Nuosu, 92, 95, 105; perception of Tibetans, 94; as photographer, 11, 91, 94, 99; and tusi, 94–95. See also Weiss-Sonneburg, Hedwig Weiss-Sonnenburg, Hedwig, 4, 98; comparison of Chinese and Nuosu, 103; and Chinese translator, 102; and Chinese women, 100; comparison with other foreigners, 107, 114n22; and David Crockett and Alicia Graham, 114n22; as ethnographer, 7; Jewish heritage, 108, 115n23; perception of Han Chinese, 100, 105; perception of Nuosu, 20–21, 92, 101–3, 105–6, 111; relationship with Fritz Weiss, 98, 113n12; works of, 91, 106, 114n20; as a writer, 98, 100, 106, 113n10, 114n20 Wen You, 236 West China Border Research Society, 19, 217 West China Union University, 181, 194, 212, 217, 218, 224, 227–29, 236 West China Union University Museum, 15, 23, 189, 192–93, 205, 210n25, 224, 227, 229, 231–36 passim West Sichuan Service Center, 224 Wetmore, Alexander, 190 Whitman College, 182 Wilson, Ernest Henry, 4, comparison of published literature, 74, 77–78, 87; death by car accident, 61; as Eurocentrist, 75–76; and forestry, 60, 64, 89n9; and horticulture, 60, 62, 76; and the Jiarong, 10, 64; “lily limp,” 57; as natural historian, 58–59, 62–64, 66, 74–75, 77–85, 87; as naturalist, 66, 76; perception of the Xifan, 21, 75–76; as photographer, 11, 59, 67–70, 78–85, 89n14, 89n15; comparison of published and archived photography,

Index  299

59, 68, 78, 90n19; relationship with Chinese, 19; works of, 57, 61, 64–65, 74, 76–77, 80, 82, 83, 85–87, 88n8. See also ocular proof Wilson, Nellie, 61 Wong Wen-hao, 242, 257 Wood, Chester, 188 Xifan, 64, 75–76 Xikang Geological and Archaeological Team, 234, 258 Xindian site, 254 Xu Hongzu, Xu Xiake youji, 246 Yan Daocheng, 229 Yang, Sister Pauline, 19, 159, 160, 161, 175 Yang Fong Chang, 216 Yangshao excavations, 20, 230, 251–54, 258–61, 265n27; and Xia Dynasty, 259. See also archaeology: of Chinese origins Yeshe, Lobsang, 125, 139–41 Yeshe, Talan Luosang. See Lobsang Yeshe Yi, 96, 154–55, 162, 164, 167, 173, 191, 202, 215, 227; academics, 168, 171–74; “White,” 101 Young Men’s Christian Association, 182, 188 Yuan Fuli, 252 Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences, 117–18, 173

Zdansky, Otto, 252 Zeng Guopin, 165, 166, 168, 172. See also religious revival Zhang, Father Laurent (Zhang Wenchang), 169–70, 172, 177n1. See also religious revival Zhang Bohuai, 223 Zhang Fulian, 221–22 Zhang Huashan, 221–22 Zhao Deguan, 174 Zhao Erfeng, 94, 113n6 Zhao Erxun, 95–96, 113n6 Zhao Fujin, 137 Zheng Dekun, 231, 235 Zhou Shaohe, 234 Zhoukoudian excavation, 233, 251 Zhuang, 246 zoology, 18; general collections, 7 zoology, species: hamadryad, 133; panda, 191, 191, 206, 209n12; Phasianus decollatus, 63; platypus, 65

300 Index