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November 17, 2008
Is Liangzhu China's First City? response
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From: Thomas Bartlett <tcbartlett@optusnet.com.au>
A "cheng", or "walled city", was a seat of local government during the 2,000
years of Chinese imperial history (as contrasted to an unwalled "town", for
which the word is "zhen"), so the claim made for Liangzhu as a "gucheng"
("ancient city") implies, I believe, a reading back of historically familiar
Chinese conceptions of state administration into that very early period.
Such, I think, is an implied dynamic in the request for UNESCO to
acknowledge that China has a "city" of an age with Ur. Both modern Chinese
republics have promoted such a seamless, linear, historicist view as part of
the nationalist project.
When the high Chinese official Song Jian visited the Middle East (in the
1990s, as I remember), he was said by local observers to have been visibly
impressed by the evidently much greater antiquity of early constructed and
inscribed remains in that region, as compared to China. The earliest
narrative texts found in China are the oracle-bone inscriptions dating from
around the mid-Shang dynasty, ca. 1200 BCE, which is approximately a
millennium later than narrative inscriptions found in early Egyptian and
Mesopotamian remains. One local scholar who met Song at that time even used
the phrase "antiquity envy" in an informal email to describe Song Jian's
attitude, although he avoided repeating that phrase in written
correspondence some years later.
It is common knowledge among specialists that one outcome of Song Jian's
experience was the semi-official impetus generated in China in recent years
for an academic project directed at defining, more exactly than had ever
been done, the dates of the legendary Chinese dynasties Xia, Shang, and
Zhou. These have traditionally been called the "Three Dynasties", i.e. the
only recognized historical eras preceding the first unified empire,
established in 221 BCE by the Qin state, from which the name "China" is
derived. One result of that scholarly effort, as I learned in personal
conversation with one of the leading figures involved, is that final
determination of the Xia dynasty's dates awaits future availability of
further evidence. That is what I think many people would recognize as a
conscientious scholarly attitude.
The present proposal concerning Liangzhu effectively asks the world's
premier "official" cultural agency to reconfirm China's prior reputation as
the world's oldest civilization, which some Chinese have begun to doubt in
recent years. Many people outside China, in my observation, resist
recognizing how seriously Chinese officialdom and some people in
semi-official cultural (as distinct from specialist scholarly) circles are
prone to view such matters. As an antidote to such denial, I recommend
viewing the extraordinary historical and pre-historical pretensions to
unique antiquity among world civilizations, exhibited at the site in Beijing
whose official English name is the globally recognizable phrase "Millennium
Shrine", whereas its official Chinese name is "Zhongguo shiji tan", which
means "China Century Shrine".
Further, this new celebration of Liangzhu, located in the Jiangnan region,
evidently reflects the recent ascendancy of Shanghai as a global commercial
centre. It is intended to create a tourist site much more easily accessed
by foreign visitors than anything in Egypt or Mesopotamia. Will the next
step will be to revive Zhou Enlai's earlier proposal that the United Nations
headquarters be moved to Suzhou?
Thanks to assiduous propaganda efforts since the nationalist reconstruction
of Chinese history and culture promoted in the 1920s and '30s, most Chinese
and many people around the world are familiar with the notion that China has
a "history" of 5,000 years. Presumably this figure was generated in the
late 19th or early 20th centuries, in accord with the fundamentalist
conception of national histories current then.
In this regard, see the interesting section on "Creation" at the website
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ussher. The word "fundamentalist"
originated as a name for a new and scientifically valid attitude toward
comprehending the Biblical record, by confirmation with external evidence,
and it reflected the aspirations of modern minds such as Usher's
contemporary, Isaac Newton, among others. Two centuries later, in 19th
century Europe, Usher's findings provoked formulation of alternative
interpretations based on newly available geological evidence. Thus the name
"fundamentalism" has fallen into disrepute, so probably very few people
today recall Bishop Ussher's date for Creation: 21 September 4004 BCE.
On the contrary, in China a strong current of influential opinion still
seeks to harness archaeology and palaeo-anthropological studies to the
service of nationalist aspirations defined both by the received textual
tradition and by new globalized awareness of rival claims.
Thomas Bartlett
Melbourne
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