In Destroying Heritage, the Non-Cultural Revolution Era and the Cultural Revolution Are Just the Pot Calling the Kettle Black!

2006-02-26 15:38:03

Some people list the historical relics destroyed during the Cultural Revolution to prove its original sin. In truth, such proof doesn't carry much weight. In terms of destroying historical heritage, the non-Cultural Revolution era and the Cultural Revolution era are just the pot calling the kettle black! The May Fourth Movement's vernacular Chinese essentially severed classical Chinese learning -- a destruction that was fundamentally lethal. As for the destruction of cultural relics today, just look at Beijing's old city walls.

The original sin of the Cultural Revolution can even be traced back to Darwin. The social extrapolation of evolution theory produced the nonsense of pan-evolutionism. And this nonsense is absolutely not just a problem of the Cultural Revolution itself -- the Cultural Revolution is merely the extreme real-world extrapolation of this problem. Evolution theory was originally just a scientific-level hypothesis. Analogical reasoning beyond its scope is either motivated by ulterior purposes or the result of too much water in the brain.

The seeds of the Cultural Revolution were actually sown in the non-Cultural Revolution era. With these seeds, the Cultural Revolution naturally wanted to return every seven or eight years, just as seeds always want to sprout. To eliminate something, the best approach is to destroy its seeds -- even uprooting sometimes doesn't work.

Appendix: A Partial List of Cultural Relics Destroyed During the Cultural Revolution (compiled by Arabella115)

1. The main hall of the Mausoleum of Emperor Yan was burned down, the tomb excavated, the bones burned and ashes scattered.

2. The memorial garden of Cangjie, the legendary inventor of Chinese characters, was destroyed and converted into a "Martyrs' Cemetery."

3. The Mausoleum of Emperor Shun in Shanxi was destroyed, and a loudspeaker was hung on the burial mound.

4. The Temple of Great Yu on Mount Kuaiji in Shaoxing, Zhejiang was demolished. The towering statue of Great Yu was smashed to pieces, its head severed at the neck, placed on a flatbed cart, and paraded through the streets.

5. One of the three most sacred Buddhist images in the world -- the life-size statue of the eight-year-old Buddha, personally consecrated by Shakyamuni himself -- had its face destroyed.

6. The tomb of Confucius was leveled and excavated. The great stele reading "Supreme Sage, Grand Teacher, King of Literary Propagation" was smashed to pieces! Temple steles were shattered, and the clay statues in the Confucius Temple were demolished. The tomb of Kong Lingyi, the 76th-generation descendant of Confucius, was dug open.

7. The Overlord's Temple of Xiang Yu, the Temple of Lady Yu, and Lady Yu's Tomb on the banks of the Wujiang River in He County -- where incense had burned continuously for two thousand years -- were all smashed into a field of ruins after the "sweeping." Visitors to the Overlord's Temple after the Cultural Revolution found only stone lions half-buried in the ground.

8. In the storm of "sweeping away everything," the Mausoleum of Huo Qubing also suffered. Beyond the smashing of incense holders and divination tubes, the statue of Huo Qubing was destroyed.

9. The Buddha Fragrance Pavilion at the Summer Palace was smashed, and the great Buddha was destroyed.

10. The Wang Yangming Literary Temple and the Wang Wencheng Duke's Ancestral Hall -- two architectural complexes including Wang Yangming's statue -- were entirely leveled during the Cultural Revolution, leaving nothing.

11. The new party secretary of the ancient city of Taiyuan lit three fires, the first of which was to smash temples. Of 190 temples and historic sites throughout the city, all but about a dozen deemed preservable were to be destroyed. At his command, over 100 historic sites were demolished in a single day. When the director of the Shanxi Provincial Museum rushed to Fanglin Temple, he managed to salvage only one bag of clay sculpture heads.

12. The statue of Zhang Zhongjing, the sage of medicine, was demolished. The memorial pavilion and stone steles were smashed, and the exhibits in the "Zhang Zhongjing Memorial Hall" were looted. The "Hall of the Medical Sage" ceased to exist.

13. The "Zhuge Thatched Cottage" (also known as the Marquis Wu Shrine) of Zhuge Liang in Nanyang, Henan: the three stone archways reading "Dragon Among Men Through the Ages," "The Place Where Emperor Zhao Lie of Han Visited Three Times," and "Civil and Military Strategy," along with all the figure sculptures and eighteen glazed Arhat statues from the Ming Chenghua period, were completely destroyed. Decorative elements of the halls were smashed, and the cherished Qing Kangxi-era "Longgang Annals" and "Zhongwu Annals" woodblock printing plates were burned.

14. The "Ancient Dingjun Mountain" stone stele in Mianxian, Hanzhong was also smashed because Zhuge Liang was classified as a "landlord element."

15. The tomb of Wang Xizhi, the sage of calligraphy, and the Jinting Daoist Temple occupying twenty mu of land were almost entirely leveled. Only a few ancient cypress trees standing for a thousand years before the Right Army Shrine remained to accompany the sage's displaced spirit.

16. The statues of Songtsen Gampo and Princess Wencheng, which Princess Wencheng personally supervised the creation of and placed in Jokhang Temple, were destroyed.

17. In Hefei, the tomb of "Lord Bao" (Bao Zheng), protected and annually honored by generations, was also destroyed overnight.

18. Middle school students from Tangyin County, Henan smashed all the statues and bronze figures of Yue Fei and others, the kneeling iron statues of Qin Hui and the other "five treacherous officials," along with steles passed down through the ages, "sweeping" them away completely.

19. Revolutionary youth in Hangzhou smashed Yue Temple, and even dug up Yue Fei's grave to the very bottom. The martial hero Yue Fei's bones were burned and ashes scattered.

20. The mausoleum complex of Genghis Khan on the Altan Gandri Grassland was smashed to smithereens.

21. Zhu Yuanzhang's massive imperial tomb stele was toppled; the stone figures and horses were blown apart by dynamite, losing arms and legs; the imperial city was dismantled completely.

22. At Tianya Haijiao on Hainan Island, the tomb of the famous Ming minister Hai Rui was smashed, and the remains of this incorruptible official were dug up and paraded through the streets.

23. In Jiangling, Hubei, the tomb of the great Ming prime minister Zhang Juzheng was smashed by Red Guards. His bones were burned.

24. Yuan Chonghuan's tomb within Beijing was razed to the ground.

25. In Liping, the burial site of the famous late-Ming minister He Tengjiao was located. The Buddhist statues in his ancestral hall were swept clean, and the tomb that the people of Liping were most proud of -- He Tengjiao's grave -- was dug up.

26. Wu Cheng'en's former residence was in Datongxiang, Hexia Town, Huai'an County, Jiangsu. It was modest -- three courtyards, with the guest hall to the south, the study in the center, and the bedroom to the north. For hundreds of years, countless admirers had come to pay their respects at this residence and his tomb. But now "Journey to the West" was classified as "feudal" in the trinity of "feudalism, capitalism, revisionism," and Wu's former residence was "destroyed into a field of ruins."

27. Red Guards dug open the grave of Pu Songling. The impoverished schoolteacher Pu Songling was truly poor -- his tomb contained only a long pipe in his hand and a stack of books under his head, plus four personal seals. They disdained Pu's seals and cast them into the wild. His remains were destroyed.

28. The Wu Jingzi Memorial Hall, built in 1959, was razed to the ground during the Cultural Revolution.

29. Middle school Red Guards from Guanxian, Shandong, led by their teachers, smashed open the tomb of Wu Xun -- the legendary beggar who championed education through the ages -- dug out his remains, paraded them through the streets, publicly denounced them, and then burned them to ash.

30. The tomb of Zhang Zhidong was dug open. Zhang was an upright official, and there were no treasures in his tomb. The Red Guards hung the still-undecomposed bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Zhang from a tree. The Zhang descendants dared not claim the remains, and the bodies hung from the tree for over a month until they were eaten by dogs.

31. At Enjizhuang in the Beijing suburbs lay the tomb of Li Lianying, the grand eunuch of the Tongzhi and Guangxu courts. When the tomb was cracked open, only a skull was found -- no body. The robe was filled with jewels and pearls, whose whereabouts are unknown.

32. In Anyang County, Henan, the tomb of Prince Zhao Jian of the Ming, Zhu Gaosui, was excavated and destroyed.

33. In Heihe County, Heilongjiang, there was a "General's Tomb," which was "severely damaged" because it belonged to "emperors, generals, and ministers."

34. The tomb of Song dynasty poet Lin Hejing (967-1028) was also among those destroyed.

35. The graves of late-Qing figures Zhang Taiyan, Xu Xilin, Qiu Jin, and even Yang Naiwu from the famous "Yang Naiwu and Little Cabbage" miscarriage of justice were all sacrificed in the cries of "sweep away all cow ghosts and snake spirits."

36. A young middle school teacher, leading a group of middle school students, dug open the tomb of Kang Youwei under the pretext of "bringing the chief royalist out for public display." They tied a rope to his bones and dragged them through the streets, flogging the bones as they went as if Kang's spirit were attached to them. After the street parade, Kang's skull was sent to the "Qingdao Revolutionary Righteousness Exhibition," labeled: "The dog head of China's greatest royalist, Kang Youwei."

37. At Chiang Kai-shek's former residence in Xikou Town, Fenghua County, Zhejiang, university students from Shanghai leading middle school students from Ningbo dug open the tomb of Chiang's birth mother, discarding her remains and tombstone into the woods.

38. In Nanzhang County, the Zhang Gong Memorial Hall, the cenotaph, and three memorial pavilions built for the anti-Japanese hero General Zhang Zizhong were all destroyed.

39. General Yang Hucheng, though executed by the Nationalists, was still labeled a "Nationalist reactionary" in the eyes of the Red Guards, and his tomb and tombstone were all smashed.

40. The murals in the Thousand Buddha Caves on Flaming Mountain near Turpan, Xinjiang had previously been cut and stolen by greedy merchants from Russia, England, Germany, and others, then sold to the West. But those murals transported abroad were at least preserved in museums and not destroyed. What the Chinese did to themselves in "Destroy the Four Olds" emphasized the word "destroy": they gouged out the eyes of the figures in the remaining murals, or simply smeared them over with yellow mud, deliberately rendering those murals worthless.

41. The Shanxi Yuncheng Museum was originally the Temple of Lord Guan. Because Yuncheng was Guan Yu's birthplace, it had been especially well-maintained through the dynasties. The pair of stone lions at the gate, possibly the largest in the entire country, stood six meters tall. Now those lions were smashed until their limbs were broken and their faces unrecognizable; the five lion cubs on the mother lion were all smashed into rubble.

42. The Confucius Temple of Huoqiu County, Anhui, with its carved beams, painted ridgepoles, upturned eaves, and fine painted relief sculptures of dragons, tigers, lions, elephants, sea turtles, and other figures -- all exquisite works of decorative art -- "the relief sculptures on the buildings were all smashed during the Cultural Revolution." After the Cultural Revolution, provincial and county funds of tens of thousands were allocated for repairs, yet "full restoration has not been achieved." The Confucius Temple of Laiyang, Shandong: "The Hall of Great Accomplishment, with its carved beams, painted ridgepoles, upturned eaves and interlocking brackets, magnificent in bearing... was demolished during the Cultural Revolution." The Confucius Temple of Jilin City, one of the four great Confucius Temples nationwide, suffered severe damage during "Destroy the Four Olds" and lay in ruin for many years; after the Cultural Revolution, it took five years of restoration.

43. The Tang dynasty eminent monk Baoshan established his hermitage on Flower Mountain in Hanshan County, Anhui. After his death, his disciples renamed the mountain Baoshan Mountain. When the Song dynasty's Wang Anshi visited and wrote "Record of a Visit to Baoshan Mountain," the mountain became famous worldwide. Because it was "Four Olds," both the large and small pagodas on Baoshan Mountain were blown up.

44. The largest Daoist holy site in the country, the Platform Where Laozi Lectured on Scripture, and nearly one hundred surrounding Daoist temples, were destroyed.

45. The great Song dynasty literatus Ouyang Xiu's "Record of the Old Drunkard's Pavilion" was hand-copied by another Song master, Su Dongpo, and inscribed on a stone stele at the foot of Langya Mountain in Chuzhou, Anhui, at the very Drunkard's Pavilion where Ouyang Xiu had composed the essay -- it had stood for nearly a thousand years. The arriving revolutionary youngsters not only toppled the stele but painstakingly chiseled away nearly half of Su's calligraphy from the stone. The historical calligraphy and paintings treasured in the hall beside the Drunkard's Pavilion were all seized, and their whereabouts have been unknown ever since.

Besides the planned destruction of historic sites, even more cultural relics and antiques were destroyed:

The home of the renowned Beijing scholar Liang Shuming was ransacked and burned clean. Recalling the Red Guards' actions during the ransacking, Liang Shuming later said: "They tore up calligraphy and paintings, smashed stone ornaments, all the while ripping and cursing them as 'feudalist stuff.' Finally, at a command, all the books, calligraphy, and paintings that my great-grandfather, grandfather, and father -- three generations of officials in the Qing dynasty -- had acquired, plus everything I had preserved myself, were all piled in the courtyard and set ablaze... The Red Guards carried everything out themselves and burned it, chanting slogans around the bonfire..."

The renowned calligrapher Lin Sanzhi of Nanjing had his entire collection of calligraphy and paintings, along with his own works accumulated over many years, burned to ashes. He was driven back to his hometown in Anhui. The painter Lin Fengmian, then residing in Shanghai, had his home ransacked and his paintings burned. In the ensuing panic, he himself soaked his remaining works in the bathtub, flushed them down the toilet, and sank them into the cesspit.

Ma Yifu, the eighty-four-year-old famous scholar from Hangzhou who served as vice-director of the Central Research Institute of Culture and History, had his home ransacked clean. Before the ransackers swept out, he pleaded: "Could you leave me one inkstone so I can write a few characters?" What he received in return was a slap across the face. Overcome with grief and indignation, he died not long after.

Shen Yinmo, the calligrapher famous throughout the land and vice-director of the Central Research Institute of Culture and History, was also eighty-four. Fearing that "reactionary calligraphy and paintings" would implicate his family, the old man tearfully tore up his lifelong accumulation of his own works as well as authentic masterpieces by great calligraphers of the Ming and Qing dynasties, piece by piece, soaked them into pulp in a foot-washing basin, squeezed them into paper balls, placed them in a vegetable basket, and had his son carry them out deep in the night to dump into Suzhou Creek. The writer Shen Congwen worked at the Chinese History Museum. The military representative from the Military Control Commission pointed at the books and research materials in his office and said: "I'll help you disinfect -- burn them. Do you submit?" "Nothing to object to," Shen Congwen replied. "If you want to burn them, burn them." And so, several bookshelves of precious books including a Ming dynasty edition of "Stories Old and New" were carried into the courtyard and burned to ash in a single fire.

The old master calligraphy mounter Hong Qiusheng, known as the "miracle doctor" of ancient calligraphy and paintings, had mounted countless masterworks including Song Huizong's landscapes, Su Dongpo's bamboo paintings, and works by Wen Zhengming and Tang Bohu. Over decades, the hundreds of ancient calligraphy and paintings he had rescued mostly belonged to the national first-class collection. The masterpieces he had painstakingly collected now earned only the two characters "Four Olds" and were consigned to the flames. Afterward, old Master Hong said with tears: "Over a hundred jin of calligraphy and paintings -- they burned for a very long time!" Even in far-off Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, the entire inventory of the Xinhua Bookstore was burned to ash.

In Jiangyong County, Hunan, there existed a script understood only by women, called "Nushu" (Women's Script). Though it had been transmitted for nearly a thousand years, because it remained outside the male social sphere, its circulation was limited. Many poems written in Nushu were treasured by women and passed down generation after generation, never seen by the outside world. Though Jiangyong County was remote, "Destroy the Four Olds" was inescapable, and many Nushu manuscripts that should have become research materials for sociology, philology, and even ethnology were burned.

Burning books pollutes the air -- sending them to paper mills to be turned into pulp is the better method. The Jiangsu-Zhejiang region was a cradle of culture, and the majority of famous calligraphers and painters of the five hundred years spanning the Ming and Qing dynasties came from there. Consequently, the ancient books surviving to the present day were especially numerous. In the Ningbo area alone, eighty tons of thread-bound ancient books from the Ming and Qing dynasties were pulped!

The Redology scholar Yu Pingbo had been a state-designated "bourgeois reactionary scholar" since his denunciation in the 1950s. The ransackers carried away the Yu family's multi-generational collection of books in filthy burlap sacks, and burned Yu's research materials on "Dream of the Red Chamber" in a single fire. At the time, the only remaining Chinese porcelain-carving artist in all of China was Zhu Youlin of Beijing. Zhou Enlai had decreed that Zhu's works were national treasures that could not be exported. Yet the Red Guards who ransacked his home smashed his works to smithereens. Shortly after, Zhu died in misery, and the national treasure can never be reproduced.

Ling Xu, a painter at the Suzhou Taohuawu Woodblock New Year Print Workshop, had in the 1950s hand-painted a fifty-foot-long "Album of Fish Pleasures," which the Chinese government presented as a national treasure to Indonesian President Sukarno. Over decades of effort, he had collected over a thousand ancient woodblock prints from around the country. Now they were burned to nothing.

Chen Banding, vice-director of the Chinese Painting Academy, was ninety years old. After being struggled against, his works were burned. Liu Haisu, a Shanghai painter, had his collection of calligraphy and paintings seized and piled in the street to be burned. Fortunately, a passerby invoking the authority of a "worker" stopped the revolutionary youngsters and called the Shanghai Municipal Committee, which dispatched people to put a stop to it. But the fire had already burned for over five hours, and the calligraphy, paintings, and artifacts destroyed were beyond count.

The Shaanxi painter Shi Lu was dragged to the street outside the Bell Tower on Bell Tower Avenue in Xi'an, hung up in public, and subjected to denunciation before the crowds. His "black paintings" were brought out one by one: each one denounced, then torn up or marked with a red "X."

Because Jiang Qing had cursed the famous painter Qi Baishi by name, Red Guards in Beijing smashed his tomb and his "Baishi Painting Studio." They also forced Qi's son Qi Liangchi to scrape off the characters Qi Baishi had written on his own studio plaque. In Shanghai, the seventy-five-year-old painter Zhu Qizhan of the Shanghai Painting Academy had his collection of masterworks swept clean. The seventy-odd seals that Qi Baishi had carved for him -- not a single one remained.

In 1952, the great Chinese painting master Zhang Daqian's ex-wife Yang Wanjun donated all 260 of Zhang's on-site copies of Tang dynasty murals from the Dunhuang Caves in Gansu to the state, keeping only fourteen paintings Zhang had made for her. Now the ransackers visited the Yang residence, and those fourteen paintings were seized. Their whereabouts have been unknown ever since.

The renowned woodcut artist Liu Xian (director of the Central Art Museum) was ordered to surrender all "Four Olds." Silently, he stacked his lifetime of woodcut printing blocks beside the fireplace. Then, he lit the fire and, one by one, fed them all into the flames until nothing remained.