Museum offers a glimpse of archeological paradise
In the middle of the third-floor foyer of the Henan Museum, there is a giant crystal ball. If you dip your finger in from above, you'll see it thrusting into the ball.
This is an optical illusion, helped by a floor pattern in the ground-floor rotunda. Although the ball is purely for entertainment, it may be symbolic of a typical visitor's experience in the museum. You feel you are traveling through a time tunnel back thousands of years, but once you step outside this pyramid-shaped building, erected in the 1990s, you'd probably be gripped with pangs of both pride and embarrassment: Henan, or the Central Plains, was such a marvel of civilization that we seem to be overshadowed by its ancient achievements.
If you go to Henan and have time to see only one place, it should be this province-level museum. It is a microcosm of the richness and length of history that pretty much represents the early flourishing of Han Chinese culture.
Coincidentally, the museum itself has been through a tortuous and adventurous history.
It all started on an August day in 1923. During that scorching summer, Li Rui, a landlord in Xinzheng, a county south of Zhengzhou, desperately needed water for farming. It had not rained for a long time. He hired someone to dig a well. The digger stumbled upon four pieces of bronze ware. Li was elated. The next day, they unearthed two dozens more. Li sold three of the pieces to a collector.
Word got out to a county official, who asked him to stop digging. A week later, a local military officer got wind of the discovery and said the relics should "belong to the state". You'd be amazed that none of them coveted the treasure for themselves. The sold items were retrieved. Experts were called in. A total of 100-plus relics were excavated. Some fought for the pieces to be stored in Beijing, but the locals would not budge.
These bronze wares date from an era before China was unified and there were 50-some city-states in the Central Plains. These were buried with an aristocrat during the Spring and Autumn (770-476BC) or the Warring States (475-221BC) periods when the Zheng Kingdom existed for 375 years and the Han Kingdom for 145 years. The city fell into oblivion after that.
A special museum was later built to house the artifacts. In the summer of 1927, it opened to an enthusiastic crowd. Annual visitors numbered three-quarters of a million. It was the first time an excavation site had yielded a complete collection. Before that, whoever dug up anything would "keep the good pieces and give the unrefined ones to the state".
Other excavation projects enriched the museum's collection, such as the 1929 massive project in Anyang, one of the four "ancient capitals" in the province. By 1935 when it sent a selection of artifacts to London for exhibition, it was hailed as "China's second best museum", right after the Forbidden City.
With the imminent invasion of the Japanese army, the Nationalist government had to devise a plan to keep the treasures from harm's way. It selected thousands of objects and sealed them in 68 crates. They were stored in a French concession in Central China's Wuhan, and in 1938, had to be relocated to Chongqing. Along the way, Japanese bombers missed them by just an inch, so to speak.
When the war ended, they did not have a chance to return to Henan, as civil war quickly ensued. When the Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan, it took some of the boxes with them, but most were halted when the People's Liberation Army seized Chongqing airport.
By 1950, the treasures were returned north, but some went to Beijing instead. Take the 1923 Xinzheng collection. Henan Museum now has 56 pieces, the National Museum of History in Taipei, 21, Beijing's Palace Museum (Forbidden City) 18, the Museum of Chinese History in Beijing, five, and Shenzhen City Museum got two, a result of pleading from the relic-rich province after the new city was born in the 1980s and needed something hefty to establish its cultural identity. Many of those remaining in the province during the Japanese occupation were lost for good.
Henan is an archeological paradise. As the saying goes, if you dig beneath your floor, you may come face to face with an ancient tomb or even an ancient city. Many of the 100,000 items in the museum's collection were discovered by chance. Fortunately, farmers have gained a new awareness of the importance of this "old and broken bric-a-brac", said Li Jianhe, curator of the Dahe Village Museum, a prehistoric site where 47 house foundations, 297 cellars and 354 graves were unearthed, along with 3,500 objects. They were traced to the Yangshao era some 5,000 years ago.
"Farmers used to smash pottery and other remnants because they thought these things from old graves would bring them bad luck. Now they are aware of the potential value, commercial if not archeological," explains Li, who graduated from Wuhan Univeristy in 1986 with a degree in archeology and has been guarding and researching the site ever since.
The original of the most famous item from the site - two pottery jugs joined in the middle like a pair of conjoined twins - is on display in the higher-level Henan Museum.
This museum - together with all other museums in the province - are not just shrines to the heyday of the Central Plains culture, but also a link between the glorious past and the reawakened present.
(China Daily 10/19/2007 page25)
