Chinese archaeologists are striking out along the Silk Road

[faragon]

https://archive.is/PJ18y

[ramblenode]

Unlike many commenters here, I actually read the article, and this quote seems to be the basis for the tenuous link between archeaology and geopolitics suggested by the title:

> The extent to which present-day politics hovers over China’s archaeological ambitions became clear during a Wall Street Journal reporter’s encounter with an Uzbek researcher at the ruins of an ancient Kushan city near Chinor. “Tell the Chinese that they will not find any traces of the Chinese here,” he said.

Kind of an interesting story if you can look past the attempt by WSJ to shoehorn in a geopolitcal angle.

> Asked whether Beijing could use the Yuezhi to make territorial claims, Wang said the notion was absurd because the nomads are a historical people and no one serious would put forth that argument.

"We're just asking questions", etc.

[beloch]

Archaeology does not take place in a vacuum. It has always been a product of political human beings. Archaeologists are keenly aware of this. Mussolini excavated Pompeii with bulldozers to reveal the past greatness of Italy on a schedule compatible with his ambitions. British archaeologists conducted digs around the globe through the lens of empire. Natives in the Americas, to this day, hesitate to trust archaeologists because they have, far too often, ignored the culture and concerns of descendants while digging up their ancestors. Most archaeologists strive to tell the truth, but truth is often a matter of perspective.

It's not being anti-Chinese to observe that China is currently an expansionist totalitarian state, and that Chinese archaeologists will be under pressure to support a state-approved narrative. Their research should be viewed with their cultural context firmly in mind.

[Leary]

Exactly, the Yuezhi is about as Chinese as the Japanese are, both first entering into the historical records in official Chinese dynastic history during the Han Dynasty.

[nuc1e0n]

Travellers from Asia journeyed to the Greco-Bactrian kingdom of Ghandara (whose name is a corruption of Alexandria) and took Buddhism back with them to the east. This is fictionalised in the story 'Journey to the West'. Nippon TV in Japan did a cool TV series adaption of this story that was dubbed into English and shown on kids TV in the UK as 'Monkey', which was quite popular back in the day. If you spend enough time wandering around the British Museum you learn all this stuff.

[Keysh]

Gandhara (not "Ghandara") is mentioned in the Behistun inscription of the Persian emperor Darius, from about two hundred years before Alexander, so it's clearly not "a corruption of Alexandria".

[Onavo]

> Nippon TV in Japan did a cool TV series adaption of this story that was dubbed into English and shown on kids TV in the UK as 'Monkey', which was quite popular back in the day.

Nah, HN readers might be more familiar with its anime adaptation, "Dragon Ball".

[__rito__]

> whose name is a corruption of Alexandria

No.

Gandhara finds its name in way older documents such as Mahabharata. The people of Gandhara were called Gandharva. According to Mahabharata, these were people skilled in archery, wars, and also fine arts.

I am not sure about the history, but I am sure the name doesn’t come from Alexandria.

[gumby]

Scouring trade route history is a two-edged sword: which way did influence run?

I’m sure ideological archeology can solve that though. That path also has a lot of history.

[singularity2001]

I read a book with a collection of papers about the history of bronze in China and it was eye-opening how aggressively Chinese scientists fight the idea of bronze technology being introduced together with horses and chariots from the west.

[coldtea]

>which way did influence run?

Usually the way of the site of higher riches and more advanced technically, organizationally, etc, to the less one?

[cs702]

> ideological archeology

A short, memorable, oxymoronic, and yet accurate description of these efforts.

I like the term so much that I'm going to start using "ideological [scientific field]" to refer to similar pseudo-scientific efforts in other fields.

[skybrian]

Yes, sometimes research is funded due to political motivations. The researchers could discover and publish interesting historical facts anyway. Hopefully they will still be able to do good work? It’s good that someone funds it, even if their motives aren’t pure.

It’s unlikely that this is really going to move the needle as far as rivalry between China and other countries goes; it’s more of a side effect of that rivalry, like national museums, the Olympics, and moon landings.

[feedforward]

You see this in cross-Atlantic history education too. In US and European history, everything seems to flow out of Europe, or at least the Mediterranean. Menes becomes king of Egypt around 3150 BC. Then we fastforward to Honer and the Olympic games in 7th century Greece. Then there are the Punic wars and Rome wins the Battle of Cornith in 146 BC. Then the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and so on. With some things like the revolts in Judaea against Rome as a kind of dialectic counter-narrative.

If we look at what was happening in India, in Mali, in Japan and China, in Tenochtitlan or Caracol or Cusco, we see a different history happening.

From the failure of the siege of Vienna in 1683, to the end of World War II, Europe and the US did dominate the world. That has been fading, and the narrative is facing too.

[ahazred8ta]

There was a cartoon of a high school history teacher asking "So how should we cover this - dialectical materialism, or Kings and Battles?"

[mannyv]

The CPP repudiated Old China back in the day. Now they want to embrace Old China because it gives the CPP legitimacy.

So the world turns.

[zzzbra]

CCP*

[meiraleal]

It makes sense because Old China was guilty of putting them in that situation. Even Older China was the richest country in the world for many centuries tho.

[SubiculumCode]

The myth of China being China for millenia is such a propagandist rewrite of history in that region; I hate to see NYT headlines fall for it.

[SubiculumCode]

It would be akin to Italy claiming that they are Romans...sure Romans lived there, but there is a whole lot of history between then and modern day state that would make this claim at best tenuous.

[SubiculumCode]

https://www.camphorpress.com/5000-years-of-history/

[meiraleal]

Every place has millenias of history. The countries in the American continent start to count from when they were invaded by Europeans, that's their (our) loss.

[nsonha]

> myth of China being China for millenia

Pardon my ignorance but why is a culture's existence for millennia such an extraordinary fact that it has to be seen as a myth or popaganda? Did humans just pop out of nowhere?

[mensetmanusman]

If your goal in research is to p-hack your way to a conclusion, you will always succeed.

[skybrian]

I’m wondering how often p-values are even used in papers about archeological digs? It seems like historical arguments are often made without doing statistics at all?

[wheelerwj]

P-hack?

[pjmorris]

FTA: “We are studying the past to understand and shape the present and future,” said Wang.

I was of the persuasion that "History is written to say it wasn't our fault" - Sam Phillips, but it may play a more active role than that.

I recently read and enjoyed 'The Silk Roads', Frankopan, which, to oversimplify, takes as its thesis the idea that "...for millennia, it was the region lying between east and west, linking Europe with the Pacific Ocean, that was the axis on which the globe spun." I was persuaded that he has a point.

I'm currently reading 'The New China Playbook', Jin, together with an ideologically-varying friend as a way to base our discussions more on knowledge than opinion.

So I'm particularly interested in what others have found helpful in understanding China's past and present. Any recommendations?

[dang]

Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here, regardless of which nation you have a problem with. Please don't post this sort of thing again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: your account has unfortunately been posting quite a few political/ideological battle-style comments. Examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41093814

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40976211

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40948947

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40168983

Can you please not do that? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We have to ban accounts that keep doing it and I don't want to ban you, so if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using HN in the intended spirit, that would be good.

[transcriptase]

In the world of plant genomics there’s a somewhat interesting trend where teams of Chinese researchers eventually, owing to newly collected specimens in China unavailable to other groups, conclude that that whatever their group works on just so happens to have originated from China.

[auc]

Sad to see blatant racism on HN

[amriksohata]

The british re-wrote history from the east, revisionism is part of any major empire, China is just doing it back

[77pt77]

The next step is to start taking "1421: The Year China Discovered the World" seriously.

Vide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Menzies

[slater]

I read that book when it came out. Really liked it, but, from that link:

"The reasoning of 1421 is inexorably circular, its evidence spurious, its research derisory, its borrowings unacknowledged, its citations slipshod, and its assertions preposterous ... Examination of the book's central claims reveals they are uniformly without substance."

Whelp!