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The Curse of the Red-Headed Mummy |
From the Mummy Congress by Heather Pringle
Until he first encountered the mummies of Xinjiang, Victor Mair was known
mainly as a brilliant, if eccentric, translator of obscure Chinese texts, a fine
sinologist with a few controversial ideas about the origins of Chinese culture,
and a scathing critic prone to penning stern reviews of sloppy scholarship.
Mair's pronouncements on the striking resemblance between some characters
inscribed on the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Chinese symbols were intensely
debated by researchers. His magnum opus on the origins of Chinese writing, a
work he had been toiling away at for years in his office at the University of
Pennsylvania, was eagerly anticipated. But in 1988, something profound happened
to Mair, something that would touch a nerve in both the East and the West,
raising troubling questions about race, racism, and the nature of history
itself.
That year, Mair had led a group of American travellers through a small museum
in �r�mchi, the capital of China's remote northwesternmost province, Xinjiang.
Mair had visited the museum several times before, but on this occasion a new
sign pointed to a back room. "It said something like 'Mummy Exhibition,'
" recalled Mair, "and I had the strangest kind of weird feeling
because it was very dark. There were curtains, I think. Going in, you felt like
you were entering another world."
In a glass display case so poorly lit that visitors needed to use flashlights
to look at its contents, Mair spied a bizarre sight. It was the outstretched
body of a man just under six feet tall, dressed in an elegantly tailored wool
tunic and matching pants, the colour of red wine. Covering the man's legs were
striped leggings in riotous shades of yellow, red, and blue, attire so
outrageous it could have come straight from the pages of Dr. Seuss. But it was
not so much the man's clothing that first riveted Mair's attention. It was the
face. It was narrow and pale ivory in colour, with high cheekbones, full lips,
and a long nose. Locks of ginger-coloured hair and a greying beard framed the
parchment-like skin. He looked very Caucasian: indeed he resembled someone Mair
knew intimately. "He looked like my brother Dave sleeping there, and that's
what really got me. I just kept looking at him, looking at his closed eyes. I
couldn't tear myself away, and I went around his glass case again and again and
again. I stayed in there for several hours. I was supposed to be leading our
group. I just forgot about them for two or three hours."
Local archaeologists had come across the body a few years earlier while
excavating in the Tarim Basin, an immense barren of sand and rock in southern
Xinjiang. The region was not the kind of place that generally attracted
well-dressed strangers. At the height of summer, temperatures in the basin
soared to a scorching 125 degrees Fahrenheit, without so much as a whisper of
humidity, and in winter, they frequently plunged far below freezing. The desert
at the basin's heart was one of the most parched places on Earth, and its very
name, the Taklamakhan, was popularly said to mean "go in and you won't come
out." Over the years, the Chinese government had found various uses for all
this bleakness. It had set aside part of it as a nuclear testing range,
conducting its blasts far from prying eyes. It had also built labour camps
there, certain that no prisoner in his right mind would try to escape.
The Taklamakhan's merciless climate had one advantage, however. It tended to
preserve human bodies. The archaeologists who discovered the stranger in the
striped leggings marvelled at the state of his cadaver. He looked almost alive.
They named him Cherchen Man, after the county in which he was found, and when
they set about carbon dating his body, they discovered that he was very, very
old. Indeed, the tests showed that he had probably roamed the Tarim Basin as
early as the eleventh century bc. When Mair learned this, he was astonished. If
the mummy was indeed European in origin, this would undermine one of the
keystones of Chinese history.
Scholars had long believed that the first contacts between China and Europe
occurred relatively late in world history -- sometime shortly after the
mid-second century bc, when the Chinese emperor Wudi sent an emissary west.
According to contemporary texts, Wudi had grown tired of the marauding Huns, a
nomadic people whose homeland lay in what is now southwest Mongolia. The Huns
were continually raiding the richest villages of his empire, stealing its grain
and making off with its women. So Wudi decided to propose a military alliance
with a kingdom far to the west, beyond Mongolia, in order to crush a common foe.
In 139 bc, the emperor sent one of his attendants, Zhang Qian, on the long trek
across Asia. Zhang Qian failed to obtain the alliance his master coveted, but
the route he took became part of the legendary Silk Road to Europe. In the years
that followed, hundreds of trading caravans and Caucasians plied this route,
carrying bundles of ivory, gold, pomegranates, safflowers, jade, furs,
porcelain, and silk between Rome and the ancient Chinese capital of Xi'an.
Nationalists in China were very fond of this version of history. It strongly
suggested that Chinese civilization, which had flowered long before Zhang Qian
headed west, must have blossomed in isolation, free of European influence, and
it cast early Chinese achievements in a particularly glorious light. In one
popular book, The Cradle of the East, Chinese historian Ping-ti Ho proudly
claimed that the hallmarks of early Chinese civilization -- including the
chariot, bronze metallurgy, and a system of writing -- were all products of
Chinese genius alone. According to Ping-ti Ho, those living in the ancient
Celestial Kingdom had never stooped to borrowing the ideas of others and their
inventive genius surpassed that of the West.
Mair, a professor of Chinese in the department of Asian and Middle Eastern
Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, had long doubted this version of
history. He suspected that the Chinese had encountered Westerners from Europe
long before the emperor Wudi dreamed up his military alliance. Several early
Chinese books, for example, described tall men with green eyes and red hair that
resembled the fur of rhesus monkeys. Most scholars dismissed these accounts as
legendary, but Mair wasn't so sure. He thought they were descriptions of
Caucasian men. During his studies of Chinese mythology, he had found stories
strikingly similar to those in early Greek and Roman tales. The parallels were
too frequent to be mere coincidences. And he kept stumbling across words in
early Chinese texts that seemed to have been borrowed from ancient languages far
to the west. Among these were the words for dog, cow, goose, grape, and wheel.
But though Mair repeatedly argued the case for early trade and contact between
China and the West, he had no hard archaeological evidence of contact, and no
one took him very seriously. "People would laugh at me. I said that East
and West were communicating back in the Bronze Age and people just said, 'Oh
yeah? Interesting, but prove it.' "
Never for a moment did Mair expect to find the kind of flesh-and-blood
vindication that Cherchen Man promised. Still, he was wary of a hoax. The man's
tailored woollen clothing, with all the complex textile technology it implied,
was unlike anything Mair had ever seen from ancient Asia, let alone a remote
outpost like Xinjiang. The mummy itself seemed almost too perfectly preserved to
be true. "I thought it was part of a wax museum or something, a ploy to get
more tourists. How could they have such advanced textile technology three
thousand years ago? I couldn't put it into any historical context. It didn't
make any sense whatsoever."
Mair began asking his Chinese colleagues about Cherchen Man. He learned that
European scholars had unearthed several similar bodies in the Tarim Basin almost
a century before but had regarded them as little more than oddities. In 1895,
for example, the British-Hungarian scholar Marc Aurel Stein exhumed a few
Caucasian bodies while searching for antiquities and old Central Asian texts in
the Tarim Basin. "It was a strange sensation," noted Stein in his
later writings, "to look down on figures which but for the parched skin
seemed like those of men asleep." However, Stein and the Europeans who
followed him were far more interested in classical-era ruins than in mummified
bodies, and failed to investigate further.
Early Chinese archaeologists in the region also came across some of the
bodies, but they were no more interested than the Europeans. They thought it
likely that a few ancient foreigners had strayed into this outlying territory of
ancient China by chance. But in the 1970s, while surveying along proposed routes
for pipelines and rail lines in Xinjiang, Chinese archaeologists happened upon
scores of the parched cadavers, so many that they couldn't excavate them all.
Most of the bodies were very Caucasian-looking -- a major discovery that went
unreported outside a small circle of archaeologists in China. The mummies had
blond, red, or auburn hair. They had deep-set eyes, long noses, thick beards,
and tall, often gangly, frames. Some wore woollens of what looked like Celtic
plaid and sported strangely familiar forms of Western haberdashery: conical
black witches' hats, tam-o'-shanters, and Robin Hood caps. Others were dressed
only in fur moccasins, woollen wraps, and feathered caps, and buried with small
baskets of grain. This last group, it transpired, contained the oldest of the
Caucasians. According to radiocarbon-dating tests, they roamed the northwestern
corner of China in the twenty-first century bc, the height of the Bronze Age,
just as Mair had long been suggesting.
Not only had they wandered the Tarim Basin, they had also settled there for a
very long time. Cherchen Man had walked the Tarim deserts in the eleventh
century bc, a millennium after the earliest Caucasians. Moreover, murals from
the region depict people with fair hair and long noses in the seventh century
ad, while some local texts of the same era are inscribed in a lost European
language known as Tocharian. If the writers were descendants of the
Caucasian-looking people who arrived in Xinjiang nearly 2,800 years earlier, one
can only conclude that this was a very successful colony.
Convinced now of the authenticity of the mummies, Mair began puzzling over
their meaning. Who were these ancient invaders, he wondered, and where exactly
had they come from?
Victor Mair is a big, rugged- looking man in his mid-fifties, a shade over
six foot one, with size-fourteen feet and the clean-cut good looks that one
often sees in former pro-football players. The American-born son of an Austrian
immigrant, he stands nearly a head taller than most of his colleagues in China,
a physical advantage that |
