Reporter/Ni Wei
Published in China News Weekly, No. 1033 on February 28, 2022
Wu Meilin rummaged around her home in Suzhou, and when she reached the second cardboard box, she found a heavy kraft paper bag. She untied the winding coils, pulled out nearly five centimeters of thick yellowed manuscript paper, and saw that the cover was handwritten "Loulan Archaeological Survey and Excavation Report", which was paid in March 1987. She happily called Professor Zhang Li in Xi'an and Meng Xianshi in Beijing: "Found it!" ”
The archaeological report, which has been in the dust for more than 30 years, was written by her lover, Hou Can, a famous expert in western history, and every word was transcribed by her own hand.
After the two retired, the bag of manuscripts moved with them from Urumqi to Chengdu and then to Suzhou, and finally the two settled in Shanghai, and the manuscripts and other academic materials were stored in three or four large cardboard boxes in the home of their son in Suzhou. No one had mentioned the report for nearly 20 years, and she herself had forgotten it. The day of the re-emergence is the winter of 2019, and Hou Can has died in the summer of 2016.
In March 2022, this report will finally be published. Because of all kinds of yin and yang mistakes and even unbelievable reasons, this archive about the ancient country of Loulan has been "missing" for 35 years, becoming a forgotten unsolved case in the archaeological community.
This is the only detailed report of the archaeological survey of the ancient country of Loulan in New China so far, and it is still the latest archaeological report of Loulan. The late arrival of this batch of materials is not only a regret for Loulan archaeology, but also a regret for the study of Silk Road civilization.
Vista view of the Ruins of Loulan. This article is provided by the figure/interviewee
A nation's regret
After Hou Can's death in 2016, Meng Xianshi, a professor at the School of History at Chinese Min University, suddenly remembered that Hou Can and an important Loulan archaeological report had never been published. Hou Can was the academic guide of his youth, and this report was completed when they first met in 1987. He contacted Hou Can's wife, Wu Meilin, hoping to find a manuscript to help publish it, but Wu Meilin told him very affirmatively on the phone that there was no such manuscript at home. Meng Xianshi was shocked: Could it be that Hou Can was too sad and destroyed the manuscript in one breath?
After three years, Meng Xianshi mentioned this matter again in an article commemorating Hou Can, expressing regret and incomprehension. After Wu Meilin saw the article, "her brain was woken up", and the next day she took a car to Suzhou, opened all the cardboard boxes that had been encapsulated for more than ten years, and finally found the kraft paper bag after one by one.
The report documents an archaeological operation more than 40 years ago.
In 1980, China and Japan co-produced the "Silk Road" TV series, in which the Dunhuang passage from Loulan to Yanqi was filmed by the Chinese side. CCTV invited the Institute of Archaeology of the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences to form an archaeological task force and enter the Loulan site to carry out archaeology. After two surveys in the previous year, the archaeological team was divided into two roads, and Hou Can of the Archaeological Institute was the person in charge of the West Road. This archaeological mission of just twenty days has changed the academic direction and even life situation of Hou Can's life.
After the end of field archaeology, it entered a long process of data collation and report writing, and Hou Can was responsible for the writing of the report. In March 1987, he completed a detailed archaeological report, and at the same time sorted out three briefings and articles, "Briefing on the Investigation and Trial Excavation of the Ancient City Site of Loulan", "Briefing on the Excavation of the Ancient Tombs on the Outskirts of Loulan", and "Examination of the Newly Discovered Wooden Paper Documents in Loulan". In July of the following year, three articles were quickly published in the monthly magazine "Cultural Relics", but the full version of the "Loulan Archaeological Survey and Excavation Report" was sunk into the sea and only remained in the legend.
Manuscript of the Archaeological Survey and Excavation Report of Loulan.
In fact, Hou Can sent the manuscript to the Cultural Relics Publishing House at that time, and in November 1987, the publishing house replied to the letter, praising the report for correcting some of the mistakes of the predecessors and providing valuable new information and arguments, "We have been included in next year's publication plan." However, in March of the following year, Hou Can received a rejection letter from the publisher, explaining that one of the reasons for the rejection was that the three articles to be published that year covered the main contents of the report, and the second reason was that "our company is currently short of paper"
But Hou Can told Meng Xianshi the real reason: "Some people have written letters against publication. Meng Xianshi told China News Weekly: "Some people in the unit look unhappy. This should have been the first archaeological report in Xinjiang since the founding of New China, but this first name was taken by Hou Can, and some people were not angry. ”
Hou Can later traveled everywhere, constantly writing letters to strive for the publication of the report, but there was no progress. Meng Xianshi remembered that Hou Can had angrily told him: "This book is not out, is it just my loss?" ”
Meng Xianshi said that the failure of this book to come out is a personal tragedy, and in fact it has become a regret of a country. The new data has not been fully released for decades, and loulan research can only be stalled somewhere. Before the official publication of this year's report, he published the afterword he wrote first, and publicized this publishing experience, "It is also us as bystanders who are uneven for Mr. Hou Can and Lou Lanming." ”
Before that archaeology, foreign countries "monopolized" the study of Loulan for 80 years. With the expansion of capitalism after the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, the West set off a "fever of exploration" for the purpose of treasure hunting, and Central Asia and Xinjiang, which are full of remains, became a competition field. In 1900, the Swede Sven Hedin first arrived in Loulan and collected a large number of cultural relics, including precious Jian Mu documents, followed by the Englishman Stein and the Japanese Orange Ruichao. In 1931, the Northwest Scientific Expedition jointly formed by China and Sweden conducted an expedition around the Loulan site, but unfortunately missed Loulan.
Both Sven Hedin and Stein boasted of thorough excavations of the Loulan site, but the Chinese archaeological team collected a large number of artifacts, including 65 numbered documents, which was the fifth batch of documents excavated at the Loulan site in the 20th century. In 1999, Hou Can compiled the "Integration of Loulan Hanwen Simple Paper Documents" that synthesized five batches of documents, which became the culmination of Loulan's collection of documents. Whoever possesses the exclusive information will get the opportunity to produce results and become famous, which is the law of the academic world. But Hou Can did not want to monopolize the data, and he hoped to publish the archaeological results for global scholars to study together. The publication of the report was repeatedly blocked, but it was difficult for him to change.
In 1988, Japan launched a vigorous "Loulan Year" campaign, and China's latest global Loulan archaeological report began to sleep that year. China's Loulan research has once again lost a perfect opportunity.
Dream back to Loulan
On March 26, 1980, a group of men and horses trekked through the desert one foot deep and one foot shallow, and the fine sand flowed into the shoes. More than 20 warriors carried submachine guns to open the way, four archaeologists walked in the procession, and a herder led two camels, with buckets hanging on their hunchbacks. They set off from the south bank of the Peacock River, where the jeep was trapped in the sand, and the destination was the Ruins of Loulan, 24 kilometers away, and could only travel on foot. When it was dark, the ten-meter-high pagoda in the ancient city of Loulan had not yet been seen, and they lay on the sand dunes for the night.
The next day, just after dawn, they simply ate some dry food and got up and set off. At three o'clock in the afternoon, the shadow of the pagoda was still not visible, and the tired brigade was a little panicked. This stretch of road was planned to arrive in a day, and the difficulties and unknowns of the desert march exceeded expectations. It wasn't until it was dark that the stupa finally appeared in view. For the first time in history, a Chinese archaeological team officially entered Loulan City.
This team is the Loulan Archaeological West Road Team, which is responsible for the archaeology of the ancient city of Loulan and the surrounding ruins. The eldest Hou Can was the actual person in charge, and the team members also included Tursun, Lü Enguo, and Xing Kaiding, and 24 troop personnel provided logistical support. They set up a tent under the stupa, and four archaeologists huddled in a tent. At night, the temperature drops to freezing, and it still feels cold wrapped tightly in a quilt and coat. The spring wind whistled outside the tent all night, sand came in, and 30-year-old Lu Enguo woke up and touched his nose, and his nostrils were full of sand.
In 1980, the ruins of the Loulan residential building.
Lu Enguo found several tomb groups three or five kilometers away, accompanied by five or six warriors on foot every day, and the road he had just stepped out was quickly smoothed by quicksand. They got lost in the sea-like desert several times, couldn't open their eyes, and circled around the sand, "I encountered them several times, but fortunately, there were many people at that time, and I didn't panic too much." He recalled that he is now over seventy years old and a researcher at the Xinjiang Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology.
At that time, no one knew about Loulan, the excavators had not yet arrived, and the archaeological team had a lot of harvest from their daily excavations, and even walked on the road to pick up prehistoric stone cores. Traces of modern people, only Stein and other foreign "explorers" left in the tomb matchbox.
On April 22, the day the archaeology ended, they took away 1,004 artifacts. "Actually, there are no major discoveries, but that was the first time we Chinese, and we didn't even translate the inspection report written by foreigners before that." Lu Enguo said. After returning to Urumqi, they sorted out the things they had excavated separately, "The survey data, the drawing materials, and the excavation records were all very complete, packed in a bag and handed over to Mr. Hou Can, and we went to do something else, Lou Lan was doing it alone." ”
Now, people can finally more accurately understand this overly mystified and romanticized ancient country in the Western Regions. In fact, the four walls of Loulan Ancient City are only about 330 meters long, with a total area of only 100,000 square meters, less than the size of a residential community, and now only the remains of broken pagodas, city walls, houses and three rooms are left, which are blown into an asymmetrical Yadan landform by the wind and sand of thousands of years. For the first time, the Chinese archaeological team measured accurate data for Loulan, including latitude and longitude, waterways, and architectural sites, correcting rough records more than half a century ago.
Unlike the "explorers" whose sole interest in treasure is more concerned with the complete history of Loulan, such as prehistoric human activities and the economy of livelihood. For example, wheat specimens in the city provide new information for studying the origin of wheat in China. There is still a complete wheat flower preserved on a wheat ear shaft, and experts can't help but exclaim in a rigorous appraisal report: "This wheat flower is currently the oldest wheat flower in the world."
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"Although it is not as large as gaochang, the western domain city, nor as steep as the military town of Jiaohe, it shows its majesty with solemnity." Hou Can rarely revealed some sensibility in the article. The excavated artifacts reflect the prosperity of Loulan as an early relay city of the Silk Road: there are a large number of glass, sea shells, sea mussels and corals, and copper coins are concentrated in the Western Han Dynasty five baht, eastern Han five baht, Wang Mang Daquan, Cargo Spring, and Guishan Dynasty coins in Afghanistan.
In 1980, Hou Can was at the archaeological site of the Loulan site.
Beauty, wine, "Pompeii of the East", for a century, people have used unrealistic imagination to construct the charm of Loulan, making it the king of traffic in the western region. And in real history, its charm comes from elsewhere.
The famous Loulan documents are written on both wooden and paper, and the historical moments of the transition of Chinese writing materials from simple to paper are frozen here. "Paper and Jane coexist in a space, and Lou Lan just provides the most complete specimen, how big is this significance." Meng Xianshi said. In addition, Loulan has two great significance, in the environmental history, the existence of Loulan provides a specimen of environmental changes in the southern Xinjiang and Tarim River basins; geographically, Loulan is the gateway to the southern route of the Western Regions, and a key comma on the continuous passage between the Central Plains and the Western Regions.
After the Eastern Han Dynasty, Loulan almost disappeared from the history books, and the sudden disappearance gave Loulan a mysterious temperament. Hou Can explained the abandonment of Loulan through this archaeology, believing that the main reason was the depletion of water resources caused by the change of the Peacock River system. Unearthed wooden janes and documents record that Lou Lan had to repeatedly reduce the supply standards of the officials' rations. In the end, this oasis country, like Márquez's small town of Macondo, was completely erased by the wind and sand.
In 1984, Hou Can published his first Loulan research paper, "On the Development and Decay of Loulan City", which was published in English in 1985, using the latest archaeological data, and an article established his international status in the field of Loulan studies. He not only possessed new archaeological materials from 1980, but also accumulated hundreds of thousands of translations of foreign language materials, and actually became the most complete scholar who mastered Loulan materials.
Loneliness and desperation
Hou Can's personality is not fierce, in Wu Meilin's memory, even in the years when the publication of the Loulan archaeological report was frustrated, he did not show strong emotions, "He did not stop other things, and the study of Turpan and Hotan continued." In fact, he did not have much energy to be indignant, and like almost all scholars of his generation, what he lacked most was time.
Born in Hechuan County, Sichuan in 1936, he was admitted to the Archaeology Department of the History Department of Sichuan University in 1956 from the Labor Reform Bureau of the Sichuan Provincial Public Security Department, and after graduation, he entered the Political Propaganda Department of the Xinjiang First Agricultural Division of the People's Liberation Army. It was not until 1973 that he was transferred to the archaeological team of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region Museum (and then transferred to the Institute of Archaeology of the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences in 1978), and he returned to his profession at the age of 37. Now there are only a few words about his experience, only the figure desperately striving for research opportunities.
In 1987, he was transferred to Xinjiang Normal University, which had been established for 8 years, and became the director of the Dunhuang Turpan Studies Research Office. Meng Xianshi, a young teacher who is confused about his studies, seems to have seen the lighthouse and went to Hou Can's house almost every day to ask for advice, and they lived in two adjacent residential buildings. The most unique advantage of Xinjiang's historical research is the first-hand materials in the western region, the most abundant of which are the excavated materials in Turpan, because most of them were discovered Chinese. In Hou Can's academic research, Lou Lan is not the only one, and his most influential academic field is the first to promote Turpan research, that is, Gaochang research, followed by Lou Lan, and the third is Hotan. Hou Can "opened a small stove" for Meng Xianshi every day, and Meng Xianshi stepped into the door of Turpan's literature research step by step.
In 1980, the ruins of the three rooms in Loulan.
Hou Can's books and materials are a rare private library in the era of scarcity. At that time, academic exchanges at home and abroad were not smooth, but Hou Can was the first to obtain private gifts from internationally renowned scholars. Shortly after the publication of the Dunhuang Turpan Literature Research Classic, "Collection of Ancient Chinese Writings and Sayings", Zhu Yuqi, a young teacher of the Department of Chinese, met with Meng Xianshi, and the title page was stamped with the name of "Hou Can". The two young men excitedly took a copy and asked the printer to make a gilded cover.
Eager young people became Hou Can's confidant in the sea of learning, and comfort in loneliness. At that time, Xinjiang Normal University was not long established on the basis of a teacher's college, and it did not have graduate school admissions qualifications. Meng Xianshi remembers that among the teachers who read the subject according to the script and the students who mixed up the days, Hou Can, as the most famous scholar in the school, carefully prepared lessons, attended classes, and did learning, "which seemed very special and a little lonely." Among those undergraduates, he mentored several scholars of western history who would later become very influential.
However, Hou Can's lifelong publishing experience was not smooth, and in 1990, his important monograph "Gaochang Loulan Research Collection" was also painstakingly published under extremely difficult conditions. It was a difficult period for publishing in China, but the Japanese academic community was more enthusiastic, and Kyushu University professor Nishitani Masashi initially proposed a publishing initiative and provided publishing funding, and eventually only 1200 copies were printed.
Zhu Yuqi, a professor at the Department of History and The Research Center for Ancient Chinese History at Peking University, felt that the late arrival of the Loulan archaeological report reflected the backward state of China's academic and cultural undertakings. Since the reform and opening up, scholars' strong sense of professionalism has been stimulated, but it is the norm to publish books without a door. This situation, he felt, did not change until 2005. Hou Can's three monographs, "Gaochang Loulan Research Collection", were sponsored by Japanese scholars, and "Loulan Hanwen Simple Paper Collection" and "Notes on the Collection of Excavated Bricks in Turpan" were also published because of private assistance and rural friendship. "But if you look at the quality of the publication of the Treatise and the Commentary, it seems today that the roughness of the paper and the inferior quality of the plates are really unbearable to read. If archaeological reports had been published at that time, it is estimated that (the quality of publication) would not have been as good as Stein's "Hinterland of Asia" nearly a hundred years ago. Zhu Yuqi told China News Weekly.
As for the archaeological report of "difficult childbirth", it is not uncommon and often criticized in China. The State Administration of Cultural Heritage has issued a special notice to clean up the backlog of archaeological reports throughout the country as soon as possible to avoid a long-term backlog of data, which is still reiterated from time to time. Archaeologist Zhang Zhongpei once said: "Archaeology does not write a report, which is equivalent to spending money to buy destruction, which is worse than tomb robbers." ”
Historical research often requires the help of newly excavated archaeological data, according to Meng Xianshi's personal experience, only the briefing can be seen instead of the archaeological report, at least half of the information is obscured. In Xinjiang, turpan's 13 archaeologies have not yet released detailed reports, which has a considerable impact on the research of Turpan, an international academic hotspot. Meng Xianshi has studied Turpan documents for more than 30 years, and for example, he said that he would like to study a paper painting unearthed in Turpan, which may be the earliest paper painting in China, but there is only one photo, where it was unearthed, which tomb was unearthed, and what cultural relics were in the same batch. As far as he knows, the two leaders of the Turpan archaeological report have died, and the road ahead for such a major archaeological report is uncertain.
And 35 years ago, Hou Can finished the report while doing the Loulan archaeological briefing, and Meng Xianshi believes that it is exemplary. "The reason for such desperate motivation is that whether it is in Loulan or the Western Regions, it has always been dominated by Western voices, and he hopes that scholars will make China's voices heard through these materials." He said. Zhu Yuqi believes that the emergence of a new kind of data may be able to overturn the previous hypothesis or prove the missing link of a period of history.
Bury memories
In 2002, Hou Can and Wu Meilin returned to Xinjiang, and one day, Hou Can could only walk a dozen steps and a dozen steps, and could hardly walk. Go to the hospital to check, "the heart there is only a point as thin as the tip of the needle can circulate, the doctor said that without surgery, anytime and anywhere will suddenly die." "He immediately had surgery in Xinjiang, and his heart was bridged by four bridges." The operation also almost put a stop to his academic career, after which he did not have much strength, and he would shake the pen in his hand.
In the 90s, he had symptoms of cardiovascular problems, and Wu Meilin felt that it was years of desk work and neglect of exercise that eroded his body.
But Hou Can wanted to continue to do so, and in 2005, he planned to write a book called "Loulan Research and Exploration", a collection of Loulan research monographs that would cover the unpublished archaeological report. The book was promoted by Zhu Yuqi, who was then the head of the Western Regions Literature and History Department of Xinjiang Normal University, and applied for 8,000 yuan in funds. Zhang Li, an associate researcher at Shaanxi Normal University, learned that Hou Can planned to complete about 500,000 words, and the novella was mainly an archaeological report on Loulan. He has extremely high academic requirements for the book, and even has his own ideas for binding and pricing: "The paper should be good, the plates and line drawings should be clear, the design style should be elegant, and the pricing should be economical." ”
In the end, he only completed one-third of the first draft of the first part of "Loulan Research and Exploration". "The topic is so big, I can't complete it myself." Wu Meilin recalled, "I always said Teacher Hou, you should raise your body, and future generations can do research without the things you have written, and you can also be comforted." He just smiled, he was not willing, helpless! The writing plan stopped in 2005, when they moved to Shanghai for medical convenience, and the archaeological report remained in Suzhou ever since.
Loulan Archaeological Survey and Excavation Report. Photo/ Phoenix Press
Meng Xianshi was quite emotional about Hou Can's fate, "When you are young and powerful, you don't give a chance, and when you are old, you don't have the energy, and the opportunity is useless." However, even with regrets, Hou Can's academic works are still the most abundant among Xinjiang archaeologists of that generation, and reflect his consistent academic characteristics: extreme attention to archaeological materials, Meng Xianshi summed up as "dead-hearted materialism.". After his retirement in 1997, he devoted himself to the compilation and publication of the "Integration of Simple Paper Documents in Loulan Hanwen" and the "Notes on the Collected Notes on the Unearthed Bricks of Turpan", all of which were basic work to pave the way for the academic community, rather than diligently becoming a family.
He chose to devote his last efforts to the complete collection of papers on the history and archaeology of the Western Regions, which was his comprehensive summary of the historical and archaeological research of the Western Regions, hoping to see the publication before his death, but failed to do so. And Lou Lan seemed to have been completely buried in the memory, and he had not mentioned it again for many years, so that Wu Meilin had forgotten it.
Wu Meilin was a middle school teacher before retiring, but she is familiar with every academic book of Hou Can. All of Hou Can's articles and writings were transcribed by her word by word, and after she bought a computer at home in 1997, she also learned to type with five strokes, dragging Hou Can into the information age. "Notes on the Collected Bricks Unearthed in Turpan" was the last book published by Hou Can before his death, when the two were old, sitting side by side in front of the computer every day, slowly looking for those rare ancient Chinese characters in the font library, recording and talking. "I do purely auxiliary work, and I don't understand academics." But Teacher Hou may feel that this is his final summary, and he is strangely relieved, so he also wrote my name. This is the only book that the two have co-signed.
On December 17, 2019, on a cold and rainy day in Shanghai, Wu Meilin waited at the subway entrance for the arrival of Meng Xianshi and Zhu Yuqi. Together, they took two more bus stops to Wu Meilin's home, and she held out the Loulan archaeological report and handed it to the two scholars.
Previously, she bought large and small transparent document bags from the stationery store, and packed the manuscripts, photos, and negatives into categories. They flipped through the manuscripts together, and Wu Meilin recalled to them the nights when they had washed the dishes and wiped their hands and copied the manuscripts.
When she came, she turned around and asked Zhu Yuqi one thing: "Teacher Hou accepted the eight-thousand-yuan project funding from Xinjiang Normal University before he died, but the project was not completed, can the money be returned?" ”
That was 14 years ago. Zhu Yuqi had a sour nose for a while, and was delayed for a long time, telling her that the "Historical and Archaeological Research in the Western Regions" and this "Loulan Archaeological Survey and Excavation Report" were included in the Series of Huang Wenbi Center of Xinjiang Normal University, which was the best completion.