The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet
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The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet
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| ISBN-13: | 9780520950498 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 11/02/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 376 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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The Paper Road
Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet
By Erik Mueggler
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95049-8
CHAPTER 1
The Eyes of Others
A man is suspended over the river. Leather straps bind him to a half cylinder of bamboo that slides on a rope of twisted bamboo strands greased with yak butter. Having plummeted to a point over the river's center, he will haul himself to the opposite bank, hand over hand. The edges of the strands are sharp, so the crossing is painful as well as physically demanding. The photograph was included in Acting Consul G. Litton's secret report to the British Foreign Office on his journey to the Upper Salween River. It is filed in the archives of the Royal Geographical Society with many other images of suspension bridges over the great rivers that run in parallel gorges through northwest Yunnan: bridges of cane, ropes and planks, timbers and iron chains. The back is stamped with the photographer's name, George Forrest, and the date, 1905. At that time, in the confident opinion of the Royal Geographical Society president, the Salween remained the last great riverine puzzle on earth, its northern reaches yet unexplored by any European.
The drawing looks almost like a cartoon-strip version of the photograph. The rope is stretched between two trees; the bamboo runner and inverted human figure are clearly depicted; a simple tree stands to the right; the whole is surrounded by a square frame. The drawing is from the title page of a handwritten manuscript called Lònv. The composition within the frame is this word in what is now known as dongba script. The left side is the word lò, meaning "to cross over," the first syllable of lòk'ö, to cross a rope bridge. The tree on the right is the word nv, which designates a ritual effigy. The manuscript titled Lònv was written to be read at a funeral for a child. Joseph Rock bought it in the early 1930s in the Lijiang valley. It now resides with 1,114 other dongba manuscripts in the Staatsbibliothek in Marburgh, Germany.
G. Litton walked up the Salween, or Nu, intending to draw a line between two empires. He had recently been appointed the British representative to a joint boundary commission charged with fixing the northern border between China and Burma. His Chinese counterpart was Shi Hongshao, the new trade commissioner (daotai) for west Yunnan. An 1897 treaty, in which the Qing court granted the British a trading post in the border city of Tengyue, had left this issue unresolved, specifying only that a fixed boundary would be surveyed in the future. Over the next two years, cartographers for both sides proposed five different boundaries, synthesized in a "five-coloured map" for the south, in the Wa states, and another "five coloured map" for the north, west of the Salween. The British Foreign Office had declared that it would be "for the advantage of both countries and of their mutual commerce that British jurisdiction should be established over the whole of the upper basin of the Irrawaddy." This in mind, Litton argued that the huge, unsurveyed mountain range rising from the west bank of the Salween, the Gaoligong range, was a "natural and ethnological divide" between the two empires. In response, Shi Hongshao restated the Qing court's position that the local rulers of the peoples Chinese ethnologists called Nu, Lisu, and Qiu, who occupied that range and many territories west of it within the Irrawaddy basin, were tusi, native hereditary officials enfeoffed by Ming and Qing emperors, or fuyi, hereditary officials granted titles by the Ministry of War. Formally, these rulers were under the jurisdiction of the district government in Weixi, a town on the Mekong, and their polities were Chinese territories. Litton believed to the contrary that no actual relationships existed between the district government and the Nu, Lisu, and Qiu chiefs in the region. It was to prove this that, in October 1905, accompanied by two soldiers from the Indian Army and tens of Lisu porters, each carrying sixty to seventy pounds of rice, he walked up the gorge of the Salween.
His other companion was George Forrest, on an expedition to Yunnan for the British seed firm Bees Ltd. Forrest had already been inYunnan nearly a year. He had made two extensive tours of Yunnan's northwest, the first with Litton, the second on his own—with a cook, a groom, three servants, and two muleteers ("I cannot travel with less," he wrote his fiancée.) His second journey had been particularly eventful: he had barely survived a Tibetan attack on the French mission at Cigu on the Upper Mekong River, losing all his possessions, including an extensive collection of specimens. Two months later, though barely recovered, he happily accepted Litton's offer to make him the naturalist and photographer of this expedition to a new and promising territory.
The two British men began the expedition with a sense of excitement tempered by sober purpose. They were performing a vital task for the empire—even if in this rather unimportant periphery. To them, their collaboration was perfectly natural: naturalists had taken part in the military and administrative surveys of each new territory acquired by the empire in India. They investigated the gorge's climate, botany, zoology, and geography, and they made ethnological observations of its human inhabitants. The latter, crucially for Litton, were "wild Lisoos with poisoned arrows" under "no control of any sort ... by any Chinese or other chief." At the bamboo rope bridge, Forrest took a photograph, and they discharged their firearms, subduing into "awestruck silence" the crowds of Lisu villagers who seemed to be vying to control their crossing. They then climbed up the east bank of the gorge to the summit of the Mekong-Salween divide, where they accomplished their journey's main objective. "Here a surprise awaited us," Litton wrote the Foreign Office," for the view to the west was perfectly clear, and the whole of the great Salwin-Irawadi divide was spread out before us. From a little below the pass, the range could be followed to the north as far as the eye could reach, until at a distance of about 100 miles from where we stood, and in approximate lat. 28° 30' N., it was merged into a huge range of dazzling snow peaks trending westwards." "Not the least doubt remained in my mind that here was the true frontier between India and China," he added: it was a "vast wall." Litton did not live to press his case, dying of malaria only weeks after his return, but his description was repeatedly quoted in insistent British proposals that the range dividing the Salween and Irrawaddy watersheds be the border. Though Qing negotiators vigorously opposed these proposals, the British treated the divide as a "provisional border." It became the de facto border in 1913, when British troops occupied the village of Pianma (Hpimaw), west of the divide, despite furious nationalist protests in China. The border was not finally established until long after Burmese independence in 1960.
As for George Forrest, exhausted by the journey he let Litton's words take the place of his own in letters home and in a paper to the Royal Geographical Society. He was accustomed to being struck silent by views of glistening snow covered peaks, "beyond conception" or "beyond description." They signaled to him the limits of thought and language. He would forget about that distant, shining range for many years as he explored other parts of Yunnan. But eventually, inspired by his indigenous collaborators, he would remember it: as the sign of something always beyond his grasp; as a solution to the great phytogeographical puzzle of the genus Rhodo-dendron; as a transcendent Eden, where the difficulties of engagement and representation that this landscape presented might finally melt away.
When a child died in a Naxi home in the Lijiang valley, her parents sent for a ritualist, a dongba, who helped wash the corpse, dress it in new clothing, and place it in the coffin. A little later, the parents held a funeral in their courtyard, attended by a few kin and friends. The dongba read several manuscripts. Only Lònv was written specifically to send a child off on her final journey. It seems to have been rare: many funerals for children probably did without it. It described the child's soul, unable to eat, unable to see and hear, unable to use hands or feet, unable to clothe itself. It spoke of the child's journey across a rope bridge separating the world of the living from the world of the dead. It told of how a dongba cut the bridge with a knife, severing the link between the two worlds in order to prevent parents or siblings from following. The manuscript specified the materials to be used: sacrificial animals, black clothing, a strip of blackened hemp for the rope bridge, a fir branch to which the rope was tied. Other texts described the soul's journey, guiding it north through the mountains of northwest Yunnan, toward the lands from which the ancestors had come, and eventually to the great mountain Ngyùná Shílo Ngyù, origin of all things, where the worlds of mountains and forests met the worlds of the gods.
In the early twentieth century the upper Nu (Salween) was about two months travel from the Lijiang valley. There were many rope bridges in closer places, along the Lancang (Mekong) and Yalong rivers. But all these had two ropes, each with one end higher, so the traveler could slide all the way across without resorting to the painful inverted crawl depicted in the Lònv manuscript. The distant upper Nu, with its single-rope bridges, lived in the ritual imagination of Naxi farmers and traders. Many Naxi from the Lijiang valley traveled long distances for trade: a late Qing gazetteer mentions that Naxi came over one thousand li to sell items to the Nu, who inhabited the far upper reaches of the river that bears their name. The Nu, whom Naxi called Nun, their land on the far upper Nu (Nundu), and the Lisu (Lissuu), who lived in the part of the gorge Litton and Forrest investigated, were all represented in the written lexicon of Naxi ritualists. In particular, a small ceremony to perform rain was performed frequently around Lijiang in the early twentieth century. In this rite, held by a spring, dongba invited the spirits who brought rain to descend from all the great rivers and lakes in four directions. In the west, they came from the lands of Nundu descended to the town of Weixi on the Mekong, circled the mountains to the north and east, and then entered the Lijiang valley. The origin of this journey, and its highest point, was the great snow mountain Nundu Gkyinvlv, the center of that "huge range of dazzling snow peaks" that Litton and Forrest spotted at the apogee of their expedition, shining from a hundred miles further north.
A photograph and a drawing. Each might be said to participate in a separate archival regime. They are archival in the most obvious sense. They are both fragments of large collections that came together in focused historical periods, in projects that followed quite precisely defined rules. I find the word "regime" appropriate because of its use in physical geography to connote all the factors that create the quality of a river's flow: the amount of rainfall, the type of bedrock, the shape of the channel—everything that makes the river meander, braid, flood, disperse into deltas or join with other streams. In an analogous way, an archival regime includes all the rules, habits, and ideologies that decide how perceptions are transferred to paper, collected, and stored. It includes habits and ideologies of seeing and walking, of inscribing and photographing, of collecting, shipping, storing, organizing, and reading.
The British expedition up the Salween was guided by what Bernard Cohn called a "survey modality" of investigation. This mode of summing up a landscape and its inhabitants in a series of comprehensive reports had been central to the colonization and administration of India. Litton's report was added to the heaps of documents written by colonial explorers and administrators in India that had been piling up in the archives of the British Museum, the Royal Geographical Society and related institutions for over two centuries. The British consul who replaced Litton sent all Forrest's photographs from the expedition to the Royal Geographical Society. His images of bridges were filed in drawers marked "bridges," of people in drawers labeled "types," of crossbows in drawers stamped "weapons." Thomas Richards has argued that this kind of archival activity, more than any process of administration or governance, was the central project of the British Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After the mid-nineteenth century, British imperial power found unity and coherence in an archival myth: the idea that institutions of knowledge production could forge the millions of facts flowing In from all corners of the world into a coherent whole. In an empire where administrative institutions were thinly spread, this myth of archive took the place of actual civil governance in many places. Litton and Forrest participated wholeheartedly in this myth as they walked up the Salween. Despite the complete absence of any British civil authority in the region, the failure of numerous plans for a railway linking Burma to the Yangtze, and the Foreign Office's stated abhorrence for any further expansionist adventures, they both looked forward to the immanent British annexation of Yunnan. Even so, this would be the last time Forrest would imagine himself directly involved in the project of imperial administration. After Litton's death, his activity would be guided by a more limited regime within the survey modality of investigation.
The Lònv text was a fragment of another archival regime. Naxi ritualists probably began writing manuscripts in pictographic script sometime during the Ming dynasty, as armies from Lijiang swept through the province's western regions. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they wrote and copied these books with great assiduity. In the early twentieth century, tens of thousands of manuscripts were stored in the attic libraries of dongba in and around the Lijiang valley. Most were written to be recited during ritual performances; some were for divination and astrology. Many rituals took the form of driving or guiding inhuman entities over the landscapes of northwest Yunnan, and many texts contained long lists of places, some extant, some once extant, some belonging to other worlds. As a whole, the archive of dongba texts contained an extensive geography of northwest Yunnan, far more detailed, at the opening of the century, than any other representation in maps, reports, or herbaria. This archive too was underlain by rules, habits, and ideologies of seeing and walking, writing and collecting, storing, organizing, and reading. Dongba did not create and organize knowledge for purposes of rule, though perhaps they once might have. They wrote and copied texts to regulate the social well-being of people and communities by manipulating relations between human and nonhuman social entities. Their mode of investigation did not survey the landscape. It auscultated its depths, threw out lines of communication to its hidden presences, and divined traces of a past that had vanished from its surfaces.
One might think that each of these two regimes would be incomprehensible from the point of view of the other. And indeed, there is no evidence that either directly incorporated knowledge from the other. Forrest did not find routes, place names, or plant names in dongba texts: he was barely aware of their existence. And no dongba altered any text to include botanical or geographical knowledge created by Zhao Chengzhang and the twenty-five to thirty others from Nvlvk'ö who worked with Forrest. Nevertheless, the two regimes came into close contact for nearly three decades, and at some points of friction they very likely shaped or deformed each other.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Paper Road by Erik Mueggler. Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introduction
Part I
1. The Eyes of Others
2. Farmers and Kings
3. The Paper Road
4. The Golden Mountain Gate
Part II
5. Bodies Real and Virtual
6. Lost Worlds
7. The Mountain
8. Adventurers
9. The Book of the Earth
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
"First things first: this is an outstanding book. . . . Mueggler weaves together . . . a lyrically-written story."—New Bks
In East Asian Stds
"This work provides the reader with a remarkable look into another place and culture in a time gone by."—Chicago Botanic Garden