The next day, when my long-distance shuttle bus crossed Mount Wumei in the thick fog, I was still thinking about the Henan boy who was heading to Cangyuan. I've been regretting it since I declined his offer. But years later, I understood the symbolic meaning of this miss: I always missed one window after another of extensive experience and insight.
Luo Xin
In the summer of 1986, a young man named Luo Xin traveled alone for the first time. In the years that followed, Luo Xin, who became a historian, had the opportunity to go to more places: Uzbekistan, Iran, the United States, Easter Island... His expeditions and travels around the world are rich in emotional detail with fresh and sharp academic reflections. They bear witness to the overlap and intermingling of the identities of traveler and historian, and are assembled into his new collection of essays, The Moon Shines on the Amu Darya River. The Amu Darya River is a river near the city of Termez, Uzbekistan, and it is also a journey on the journey of Luoxin. With the humility of the traveler, he confirms the ancient vicissitudes and distant desolation, and those small past stories and strange sightings constantly flash in the old dreams of flowers and grasses, mountains and rivers, and become a personal scale written for civilization in his writing.
From Iran in 2009 to Samarkand in 2019, we can see through this book the influence of historian status on Luo Xin's travel writing. Where exactly is the iron gate? What is the connection between the Rubais, the Samarkand paper and the prisoners of war of Tyros? Why are dates called "millennium dates"? Why did the forests of Easter Island disappear? ...... These questions are both historical and geographic, and narratives about them connect the present and the past, here and there, us and others.
Watch the sunrise on Easter Island
Excerpt from "The Moon Shines on the Amu Darya River"
When it started raining yesterday evening, we were in a restaurant called Moai Sunset, northwest of the town of Angaroa. Moai is the kind of megalithic figure that has long been a symbol of Easter Island. The hotel is located above a gentle slope overlooking the bay to the west, and a short distance to the northeast is the Museum of Anthropology, which is flanked by a small volcanic cone. A great place to watch the sunset indeed. The Pacific Ocean stretches out in front of us to the west, into the distance, and the sea turns from dark green to deep blue from near and far, and seems to rise slowly until it touches the long sky. By the sea is a stone platform with five moai statues. There are many more such platforms on Easter Island, and we have visited four or five this afternoon, and the huge moai statues on the platforms with their backs to the sea will leave anyone with a heavy wow. If the sky is clear in the west, the sunset casts the long figure of the Moai stone statue on the grass below the slope, which must be gorgeous.
This is a Polynesian restaurant with traditional flavors. For those flying in from Santiago and knowing that Easter Island is still within Chilean borders, it is not easy to understand that you are already in a region with a very different history and cultural traditions from South America, to the easternmost point of the Polynesian Islands Cultural District in the South Pacific. Although it has been suggested that a small percentage of the ancient inhabitants of Easter Island may have come from the South American continent, almost all researchers are convinced that the culture and language of the island's societies can only be traced back to Polynesian traditions before the Dutch Jacob Roggeveen (1659-1729) "discovered" and landed on the island on Easter Day in 1722. The vast majority of international scholars on Easter Island have a background in Pacific Islands studies or Polynesian cultural studies. In fact, Easter Island became part of Chile's territory until 1888.
We come to the restaurant "Moai Sunset" not only to watch the sunset while having dinner, but also not only to taste the traditional Polynesian cuisine. Here we have an important appointment: Sergio Rapu will meet us, meet and have dinner here. Sergio Rapp is a celebrity of Easter Island: the first employee of the island's Museum of Anthropology, the first director of the museum, the first archaeologist of international influence among the natives, and the first native of the successive governors of the Easter Island. He received his bachelor's degree in anthropology from the University of Wyoming and his master's degree in Pacific culture and archaeology from the University of Hawaii. Nearly 70 years old and now retired, he is still active in the fields of heritage conservation and Polynesian cultural studies.
I joined a study tour in South America organized by the "Study Tour" organization to Peru, Bolivia and Chile, and after Machu Picchu and Lake Titicaca, the last stop was Easter Island. When I was doing my homework before coming, many books and articles mentioned Sergio Rapp, which aroused my curiosity. I suggested to Pan Jun, the leader of the study tour, to arrange a meeting and discussion with Rapp. First contact Rapp's secretary and reply that generally Rapp does not meet with tourists, but if we are willing to donate a certain amount of money to the Easter Island government to protect the island's cultural heritage, then we can arrange a meeting. The donation is in the form of a cheque, stating that the donation is to the relevant government department, and has nothing to do with Rapp personally. It seems that the Easter Island government is very good at using Rapp's celebrity effect to get money for the island, of course, provided that Rapp himself is willing to cooperate. We immediately agreed.
One of Rapp's best-known archaeological contributions was the discovery of the eyes of the Moai statues. The more than 800 Moai statues previously found on Easter Island have deep eye sockets, which researchers thought were supposed to be, and did not know that the eye sockets would be filled with other appendages to express the eyes. All the stone statues are carved from a single stone, and even if early European visitors saw all the fallen stone statues, they could speculate that the stone statues were originally facing the island with their backs to the sea based on the downtrous posture of the stone statues, and based on the brown-red cylindrical volcanic lava carvings scattered nearby, it was speculated that the stone statues had an attached hat superimposed on the head, but they had no understanding of the stone statue's eyes.
A chart of Easter Island by the 18th century by the expedition of Don Philippe González (the map goes north and south)
In 1978, Rapp led a small archaeological team to excavate at Anakena Beach (the largest beach on the island, we visited this afternoon, and the silver sand sparkled in the sun). Annagena Beach has a very special significance for the history of Easter Island, because the legendary ancestor chief Hotu Matua landed here, many legends and stories took place on this beach, which seems to be the historical starting point of Easter Island. The first stone statue to be re-erected on Easter Island was also on the stone statue platform of Annagena Beach, and the re-erection of the statue was carried out by Lapp's mentor, William Mulloy, an anthropologist at the University of Wyoming. During the year, the Rapp archaeological team continued Mulloy's work, excavating and cleaning up the Moai statue site near the ancient stone statue platform when previously unknown stone statue eyes were discovered in a 20-foot underground layer.
The Rapp archaeological team found eyes, one intact and one half-crippled. The complete eye consists of two parts, the exterior is an oval "white" carved out of white coral, and a groove is carved in the center to place a hemispherical eyeball carved from red volcanic lava. When Rapp inserted this complete eye into the deep socket of a moai, he and the rest of the archaeology team were stunned: it turned out that the stone statues had eyes and looked alive, and the old people once said that the stone statues were "the faces of living ancestors". An important circumstantial evidence is that the eyes of ancient woodcarved figures collected on the island also use inlays, either white animal bones or obsidian that can be found everywhere on the island.
This discovery identified the fragmented eyes found in previous archaeological investigations, and provided a model for later restoration of some Moai statues. Some of the seaside statues we see today have been supplemented with eyes, which is very different from the original stone statues in the volcanic quarry. The discovery was first published in the American journal Archaeology (Issue 5, 1978), and the accompanying photograph shows Rapp and his assistants showing their work. At that time, Rapp was not yet thirty years old, wearing glasses, long flowing hair, and a Hawaiian-style short-sleeved floral shirt that was very conspicuous.
What we saw in the restaurant was Sergio Rapp forty years later, with short hair and missing glasses, but still the same Hawaiian-style blue plaid short-sleeved shirt, a strong body that was not appropriate for his age, and shining eyes that could not be seen in the photo. The whole island knows this big celebrity, and when he walks into the restaurant, the owner and waiter greet him warmly. His first words when he met us were: "Welcome to Rapa Nui." "At this time, black clouds rolled in the sky and rained outside.
Rapa Nui is the local name for Easter Island.
Excerpt from
"The Moon Shines on the Amu Darya River"
Luo Xin/author
Century Culture
Shanghai People's Publishing House
New Media Editor: Zhang Yingying
Pictured: Infographic, Pixabay
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