【Text/Observer Network Columnist Paul】
Chinese civilization has a long history, starting from the "Xia" recorded in the history books, and has a history of more than 4,000 years. In fact, the length of Chinese civilization is far more than this, before entering the kingdom era, there must be a long "state era", but because the written record is too limited, it is difficult for us to know more and longer stories.
In modern times, archaeology has provided new materials to help people understand prehistoric civilizations. In the past hundred years, many important civilization sites have been found on the land of China, and Yangshao in Henan is one of the most important.
The Yangshao site has at least two major significances, first, modern Chinese archaeology was born here, which has the reputation of "the holy land of modern Chinese archaeology"; second, it proves for the first time that there is a developed prehistoric culture in China.
What many people can't imagine is that the birthplace of modern Chinese archaeology was actually dug up by foreigners, and at the beginning of its discovery, Yangshao almost subverted the source of Chinese civilization. The reasons and stories are exactly what this article wants to share with the readers.
Anderson and Yangshao culture west
The first to excavate and study the Yangshao site was the Swede Anderson. According to the transliteration, his name should be John Gunnar Anderson, and Anderson is the name of the Chinese. Although this person is well known in archaeology, his job is that of a geologist, and he was able to come to China for geological reasons.
After Yuan Shikai came to power, the Beiyang government intended to develop industry, but at that time, domestic iron ore and coal resources were relatively limited, and it was urgent to explore mineral deposits. Since the late Qing Dynasty, China has suffered losses from the Western powers, and this time it is particularly cautious to seek out exploration experts.
Among the Western countries at that time, Sweden was one of the few countries that had not bullied China much, and the level of science and technology was still good, so at the suggestion of Ding Wenjiang, the Beiyang government sent a letter of appointment to Anderson, who was then the director of the Swedish National Geological Survey, inviting him to explore in China.
Anderson (infographic)
Anderson gladly accepted the invitation, not only out of generous treatment, but also out of his personal hobby: archaeology. After Anderson came to China, while working, he collected antiquities and excavated ruins, but there was no delay. In just a few years, he found several iron mines and received commendations from the Beiyang government, and Yuan Shikai personally received him. In addition, he also collected fossils in Beijing, Shanxi and other places, and tried to excavate, including the zhoukoudian site in Beijing, which became famous in the world.
Due to his outstanding work achievements, Anderson received the attention of the Beiyang government, which provided him with more convenience in collecting antiquities. At the end of 1920, Anderson's assistant returned to Beijing from Henan and brought back a batch of stone axes, stone knives, and various stone tools. Anderson saw that these things were not ordinary things, and then followed the vine to touch the melon, and locked the source of the stone tool: Yangshao Village, Shichi County, Henan.
The following year, Anderson came to Yangshao Village, becoming more convinced that important prehistoric sites were buried here. In the autumn of that year, under the protection of the Beiyang government, Anderson began his excavations in Yangshao. Modern Chinese archaeology has officially begun, and it has been a full hundred years since then, and the Yangshao culture has also been unveiled since then.
Anderson used the method of trenching to carry out excavations in Yangshao Village for two months. He is not a professional archaeologist, and the excavation can hardly be called comprehensive and meticulous, or even unscientific. But even so, the wealth of archaeological discoveries has proven that this is a ruin of civilization that never appeared in written records and predates the Xia Dynasty in time.
How to explain this site that has not been seen in the history books? Where does this culture come from? Where will it go? Anderson focused on the faience pottery he found in Yangshao, comparing it with the faience pottery found in West asia and Central Asia, and considered it similar.
Yangshao culture faience geometric pot, pictured from the Palace Museum.
Based on this, Anderson speculated that the Yangshao faience pottery culture may have spread from West Asia. In 1923, Anderson published a report entitled "Ancient Chinese Culture", proposing the idea of "speaking in the West".
In order to prove his proposal of "speaking in the west", Anderson set off from Henan to the west to explore the spread of faience pottery. He carried out investigations, studies and archaeological excavations in Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinghai and other places, and indeed found a prehistoric civilization with faience pottery.
In this way, Anderson was more convinced of his judgment of the origin of Yangshao culture. In 1925, he published the "Archaeological Record of Gansu", summarizing his own archaeological findings, dividing the prehistoric cultures found in Gansu into six phases, believing that these prehistoric cultures advanced layer by layer, spreading to the east, and eventually giving birth to the Yangshao culture.
Anderson and his assistants excavated the Site of Qijiaping in June 1924 (data map), from the "National Daily".
Since Yangshao is located in the core area of Chinese civilization and the time is earlier than the Xia Shang Zhou, and the "Yangshao Culture West" proposed by Anderson is further expanded, it constitutes "Chinese Culture in the West".
The end of the West
Long before Anderson, Western scholars such as Richthofen proposed that Chinese migrated from Central Asia. Anderson's research, using archaeological materials to demonstrate the "Chinese civilization in the West", so once thrown out, it has attracted the great attention of Chinese and foreign scholars.
Richthofen (infographic)
A German sinologist named Frank Was inspired to believe that Anderson's discovery had completely ended the dogmatic errors native to Chinese civilization. He also asserted that this was just the beginning and that there would be more evidence of "West Talk" in the future.
However, not all scholars support Anderson's views. As early as the beginning of Anderson's discovery of Yangshao faience pottery, the German archaeologist Schmidt who communicated with him believed that although Yangshao pottery and West Asian pottery looked similar, there were differences in careful comparison of craftsmanship, color, and polishing, and whether the two were related was debatable.
Under the technical conditions of the time, deeper analysis was difficult to carry out, and weak skeptical voices were quickly overshadowed by supporters. In the first ten years of the "Yangshao West" proposal, the mainstream views of Western academic circles were very supportive of Anderson.
But for Chinese scholars, the situation is completely different. In that turbulent era, the "West Talk" dealt a heavy blow to the already fragile national self-confidence. Although the strict sense of "Western" is only for Yangshao faience pottery, it has nothing to do with culture, race, etc., and Anderson himself said that this is only a hypothesis. But as soon as his claim was put forward, it caused an uproar in Chinese academic circles.
For Anderson's hypothesis to hold, there need to be two important support points. First, since Chinese civilization is foreign, if you want to trace the timeline of civilization, you must look outward, and there will be no local prehistoric civilization. Second, because civilization came from the west, the further west you go, the earlier the era of prehistoric civilization, and the farther east you go, the later the age of prehistoric civilization will be. This hypothesis comes from archaeology, and both those who want to support and oppose it need archaeological evidence.
In the winter of 1926, Li Ji and Yuan Fuli carried out archaeological excavations in Xiyin Village, Xia County, Shanxi Province, and began the archaeological career of Chinese. In 1931, Liang Siyong, who returned from studying at Harvard University, presided over the excavation of Hougang in Anyang, where he found the famous "Hougang Triassic Layer", that is, the Yangshao Cultural Layer, the Longshan Cultural Layer, and the Shang Cultural Layer from the bottom up. These three layers of culture are stacked back and forth, irrefutably proving that from prehistory to historical period, Chinese history is in the same vein, and there is no situation of foreign imports. The first support point of The Anderson hypothesis was broken.
Li Ji obtained the only piece of faience pottery at the site of the third excavation of Yin Ruins in Anyang (data map)
In 1945, archaeologist Xia Nai conducted an in-depth study of the Qi family cultural sites found in Gansu, and he found that there were serious errors in the staging of Anderson. Anderson was not a professional archaeologist, and he made a serious mistake in stratigraphic analysis and dating, mistakenly believing that the Qijia culture was earlier than the Yangshao culture, and in fact the Qijia culture was later than the Yangshao culture. Since the culture of the east predates the culture of the west, civilization can only spread from east to west, and the second support of The Anderson hypothesis has been broken.
By the 1940s, in the face of more and more powerful archaeological materials, Yangshao culture was self-defeating, and Anderson himself admitted that the previous hypothesis was wrong, and he revised his understanding of the source of faience culture. This hypothesis, born of archaeology, also ended with archaeology.
Break the conspiracy and suppress the impulse
The reason why Anderson put forward the wrong "Yangshao culture in the west" is mainly due to two points, one is the limitation of Chinese archaeological excavations at that time, and the other is the influence of the Chinese national culture since the 19th century.
Since the 1940s, the various "Western sayings" related to Yangshao culture should have come to an end once and for all. However, some foreign scholars still insist that at least China's faience pottery is from the west, and the faience pottery found by Yangshao is rooted in the earlier West Asian civilization.
An important reason for them is that in the vast Eurasian continent, many Neolithic faience pottery has been found, forming a chain of faience that vaguely spans tens of thousands of miles. Moreover, in general, the prehistoric civilization at the western end is earlier and has the possibility of spreading eastward.
So the question is, in this chain, how does the culture carried by faience be transmitted? Is it like the water of the Yangtze River, rolling from west to east?
In this long chain, Xinjiang is in the middle. Since the 1980s, archaeologists have conducted extensive research in Xinjiang and obtained conclusive evidence. Chronologically, Xinjiang faience pottery is later than that of Central Plains faience; from the perspective of type, Xinjiang faience pottery is deeply influenced by faience in the Yellow River Basin of the East. With more in-depth archaeological research, we gradually came to the conclusion that:
In the prehistoric period, the Civilization of the Central Plains spread westward, and after influencing the Ganqing region, it crossed the Hexi Corridor and affected Xinjiang. The faience culture from the Central Plains reached as far as Central Asia and then gradually disappeared into the mountains of the Pamir. The so-called faience culture in the West is another unreasonable hypothesis.
At this point in the discussion, there is not much significance in terms of "Chinese culture in the West" or various specific "western aspects". However, until recently, there are still people who still put forward "so-and-so West" from time to time, and it seems that they always have to "help" Chinese find some foreign aid. For such statements, especially for purposes other than academics, it is necessary to be vigilant. However, we must also realize that sometimes the vigilance is too high, and it is not necessarily a good thing to see who is the enemy.
Speaking of Anderson, since the 1950s, mainland scholars have been increasingly critical of Anderson, and until the end of the 1970s, some people called Anderson an "imperialist" and called "Western" a tool for imperialism to annihilate Chinese culture. In fact, As early as the 1940s, Anderson admitted that his hypothesis could not be established, and said that the so-called "superior culture" was forcibly brought to China without basis.
An important reason why the Beiyang government invited Anderson to come to China that year was that Sweden was one of the "not too bad" Western countries at that time. In a sense, the Choice of the Beiyang Government makes sense. Anderson made a major cultural discovery in China, and also invited the Swedish Crown Prince Gustav to visit China, and made an agreement with the Chinese side, Anderson's collection was first shipped to Sweden for research, and then the two were divided equally, and finally all the research results were published in the publishing series of the China Geological Survey.
Today, Anderson undoubtedly plundered China's treasures, but compared with the "explorers" and "archaeologists" of his contemporaries, Anderson can be regarded as a gentleman. Moreover, after he returned to Sweden and prepared for the construction of the Oriental Museum, he did return half of the cultural relics to China. From 1926 to 1936, Sweden returned cultural relics to China seven times.
What is touching is that these cultural relics that have crossed the ocean and returned to China have all been lost, but those left in Sweden are still intact. There are also many cultural relics, which for various reasons were not taken to Sweden from the beginning, remained in the local Christian church, and later mostly destroyed by the movement.
Oriental Museum (infographic)
Anderson's "West Talk" is wrong, but he accepted criticism, recognized his mistake, and made changes in time, which is enough to show that he is a respected scholar. At the entrance of today's Yangshao Cultural Site Museum, there is a statue of Anderson, which is the evaluation he deserves.
We should also note that the outcome of this academic discussion about "coming from the west" triggered by Anderson is not only about China. Archaeological research shows that at the eastern and western ends of Eurasia, there were civilizations in prehistoric times, there were obvious differences, and eventually each formed a splendid culture. It is ridiculous to insist that Chinese culture "came from the west". Similarly, if we have to cross the mountains and seas, it is unreasonable to say that Western culture "goes east".
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