• Tag Archives China
  • Du Fu, Li Bai and Wang Wei

    79  bar steep drop 29.95  0mph S dew-point 54  sunrise 6:06 sunset 8:30  Lughnasa

    First Quarter of the Corn Moon   moonrise 1326 moonset 2226

    Each day of the Olympics I will post a poem from a famous Chinese poet.  Du Fu, Li Bai and Wang Wei are the three most admired T’ang dynasty poets.  It is so easy to forget that this last century is only a tiny portion in the sweep of Chinese civilization.  In all the sturm und drang about the rise of China the fact that China has risen and fallen many times over the last 5,000 plus years often remains buried.  That’s right, 5,000 years of a continuous culture, sometimes dominant, sometimes ruled by foreigners, many of whom embraced Chinese civilization.

    It is arrogant of us to judge China by our standards, standards that have stood nowhere near the test of time.  In China the collective always comes before the individual, at least that has  been true historically.  This is not to say that there have not been individualists in Chinese history.  Taoism tends to produce them, as does the famous literati system of rule by intellectuals.  Many painters and poets also walked their own distinctive paths.

    Well, anyhow, China doesn’t need my defense.  I just want to add a bit from the depth of Chinese culture as we go through Olympics which often seem more about air pollution and human rights than sport.

    Yes, I know.  This seems like a conservative position, but in reality it is a position informed more by anthropology and history, a position not too different from walk a mile in the other person’s moccasin.

    I spent an hour or so this morning admiring the work of the Irishmen who dug ditches.  Put the shovel in the earth, push it down, lift it up, heave.  Repeat.  Not back breaking, but a workout.  I had a good nap.  The fire pit has begun to appear.  It will be deep enough for a fire when the Woollies come, though whether the area around it will be is another matter.


  • Qin Shi Huang Di

    67  bar steady 29.97  0mph NNW dew-point 58  sunrise 6:04  sunset 8:34  Lughnasa

    Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

    Last night I stood outside for a while and listened to the wind rustle the leaves of the poplars and oaks, an invisible hand caressing these giants.  Tonight stars dot the sky and the air is quiet, the temperature a cool 66 (dropped a temp since I added the info. bar above.)  These nights, summer nights, have stories that reach back in time, memories of cars pulling into neon lit drive-ins, dances in school gymnasiums and midnight rides through the countryside seeking bliss.  A special place, the summer night.

    Heresy Moves West will have two parts, I see no other way unless I perform drastic surgery on the introductory material, now seven and a half pages.  My plan is to finish the second half, the stories and threads of thought that directly result in the building of liberal congregations in Minnesota.  This is, of course, the assignment I originally gave myself, but I did not know then the complex of political, theological, institutional and intellectual lines necessary to make the story comprehensible at anything more than a superficial, potted history level.  After I finish part II, then I’ll see what can be done with the whole.

    The last piece of the whole considers the future, projecting a possible trajectory for the liberal faith tradition in a time of what I perceive as thinness and altogether too disparate a theological base.  Here I will begin to answer the problem I addressed in my late night post August 3rd.  Ideas have come to me of late and I have a way to go forward, at least one that makes sense to me.

    In the build up to the Olympic Games the History Channel and National Geographic have run programs on Qin Shi Huang Di, the unifier and first emperor of China (Qina).  His story makes for conflicted reading or watching since he brought the dreadful warring states period to an end by subduing the seven larger states that had survived.  He also standardized weights and measures, the width of axels, coinage, language and law.  As Chinese history developed after him, both the unification and these measures of standardization contributed to China’s long continuity in culture.  In these ways he is the father of China.

    He was, however, a cruel man who killed millions to achieve peace.  He killed at least a million more building the Great Wall and at least hundreds of thousands building his mausoleum. The legal system he instituted was draconian and ran against the grain of the Confucian thought world that preceded him.  His dynasty lasted only one generation beyond his and even that, from his perspective was a failure since he spent the last years of his life in a desperate search for an elixir of immortality.


  • Something Famous, That They Might See in Books

    57  bar steep fall 29.82 3mph SSW Dewpoint 31 Spring

               Waning Crescent Moon of Winds

    A highlights tour today with kids from Hudson.  We saw Frank, the Chuck Close portrait, then the Promenade of Euclid by Magritte.  After that the teacher wanted to see “something famous, that they might see in books.”  That’s ok, so I took them to see Van Gogh’s Olive Trees, Goya’s Dr. Arrieta and Rembrandt’s Lucretia.  They had a theme of westward expansion underway in class so I then took them over to the Minnesota gallery and we looked at first, the long rifles, then the painting of Ft. Snelling with the Lakota camped on the opposite shore of the Minnesota River.  The kids were there, engaged.  Fun.

    On the way down and back I’ve continued listening to From Yao to Mao, the history of China.  I’m now on disc 17 of 18 and this is my second time through the series.  Mao has just begun to push for the peasant community in China as the vanguard of the revolution, replacing the urban worker, the industrial proletariat, whose communist members had been ousted in raids by the Nationalist Party and the tongs.  This will result in the long march and the eventual attrition of Mao’s forces by the thousands.  In this campaign Mao will create the modern guerilla war, sometimes called 4th generation warfare.


  • Plants and a Particular Location + Gardener = Dialogue

    40  bar falls 30.27  6mph  SSE  dewpoint 24  Spring

              Last Quarter Moon of Winds

    Ah.  Can you feel the sigh?  A weekend with no outside obligations at all.  I plan to do clean up, plant some more seeds, read, maybe watch a bit more of the NCAA.  How about that Davidson, huh?  Took out Wisconsin.  That’s a student body of 1,700 versus one of what, 30,000?  I will read chapter 3 in the Permaculture design book for sure, perhaps polish off a novel or two, maybe start writing one of my own.  I have an idea that’s been bouncing around for some time now.

    Tonight at 5PM I get to celebrate Chinese New Year again with the CIF guides.  I look forward to this each year, this one especially because I’ve done my homework on China and Japan over the last few months.  Saw MingJen, who organizes this event, on Wednesday at the Naomi Kawase film, The Mourning Forest.

    If you can, would you write Hillary and tell her to get out now?  We need a chance to even up with McCain and a bitter end to the Democratic primary race just lets him have the field to himself.  I don’t have anything against Hillary, in fact she and Obama are about a horse apiece politically, but Obama has won the field, has the delegates and deserves his chance.  Hillary will have another shot.  She’s established that a woman can run as a serious candidate, a remarkable and historic achievement in itself.  Nothing in the feminist revolution demands that women win all contests or get all the jobs. 

    Snow continues to retreat in our yard, but slowly.  As in years past, the Perlick’s grass is almost fully visible, while ours remains under 6-8 inches of snow.  They face south, we face north and that makes all the difference.  Spring comes to our property about a week later than theirs, weird as that is. 

    On Thursday I followed the dog tracks in the snow and went out to check on my trees planted last spring.  Some animal, either rabbits or deer, have eaten the tops of them down to the garden hose I put around them as protection from mice.  I didn’t think tall enough up the food chain.   These were the trees I planted nearest the area we call the park.  Further north, also on the eastern edge of our westernmost woods, another group of oaks, white pines and Norway pines look like they’ve done well over the winter. 

    This is the nature of gardening.  Try this and it works.  Try that and it doesn’t.  Listen.  Repeat what worked, change what didn’t.  Plants and a particular location engage the attentive gardener or horticulturist (as I’m beginning to think of myself) in a constant dialogue as shade patterns change, seasonal sun shifts become more understood, rain falls or does not fall and various cultivars and seeds prove well suited to the site or not.  This dialogue is multi-lingual as one party communicates in one language and the other has to translate, but it is true discourse as each can alter the others ideas.      


  • It Is a Privilege and an Honor

    32  bar steady 30.37 0mph WNW dewpoint 28  Spring

                         Full Moon of Winds

    I got all didactic on the study of ancient bronzes post and it wasn’t where I wanted to go.  Let me try again.

    In one gallery at the Minneapolis Art Institute we have several high quality representatives of an art form that dominated Chinese material culture for 1,500 years.   Imagine if, say marble sculpture or fresco painting or mosaic had been the primary, to the exclusion of most other art forms, art of the West since 500 ACE.  That’s the length of time we’re discussing.  Or the period of time between the birth of Jesus and the colonization of the New World.  That’s a long time in people years.

    To see these objects is not only to see the aesthetic and technical prowess of  Shang and Zhou dynasty artisans; it is to see the actual object that they produced.  These very ku, kuei, jueh, ting, lei, tsun and fang i came into the existence through a complex network of Chinese people who lived over 3,500 years.   There were miners, transporters, smelters, mold makers, mold designers, foundry workers who cast the objects and broke them from their ceramic molds.  Other people sold and transported them after they were made and for years, centuries, even millennia in some cases these objects were either used in public ritual or stood by in a tomb ready to provide service in the afterlife.  Think of that. 

    Think of the journey that graceful jueh had to take both as a created work of art, then, after that, as an artifact of a long dead culture now thousands of miles from its point of origin.  That it survived all that is amazing, even if it is bronze.

    The conceptual world that brought this work into existence, a system of public cults around unseen gods and dead ancestors, a conceptual world had such a profound grip on the Chinese mentality that it stayed pretty much intact for the entire Shang dynasty, then only gradually lost its force in the later Western Zhou.  Those are powerful ideas.  Ideas can be more fragile than any ceramic; yet, these objects testify to the energizing and creative force these ideas carried, not just for a while but for hundreds of years.

    To put myself back in those times, to feel the ebb and flow of both the material culture and the beliefs that animated it, is to come alive to the human experience in a way I can’t in any other way.  It is a privilege and an honor to represent these objects and their world to the public. 


  • High-Tech, High-Touch

    32  bar steady 30.37  4mph NNW dewpoint 27

                        Full Moon of Winds

    Out of the bronze age.  This was a splendid tour and a testimony to the high tech-high touch maxim of Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock.  This was 7 people, four Chinese and three Caucasian, who met through the Meet-Up website.  They had all indicated an interest in things Chinese.  Thus, this was a random group save for their convergence on Meet-Up through their interest in a far-off land.  Amazing.  There we were, more or less strangers, together to study the bronze tradition of ancient China.   So we did.

    We moved from the ceramic cases where we discussed the influence of Neolithic ceramic shapes on bronze vessels and the transition from ceramics to bronze as the primary artistic medium, then trekked over the bronze gallery.  There we started with the oldest object in our bronze collection, the jueh wine warmer.  After we identified some of the shapes from the ceramic cases:  hu, lei and ku for example, we dove into piece-mold casting.  This led to a conversation about design and the convergence here between technology and design.    

    We followed the t’ao t’ieh mask until it faded in the mid-Zhou dynasty and noticed the birds and more abstract designs that followed.  As the Eastern Zhou began we noticed the change in inscriptions and the shift from public ritual to private artifact until in the Warring States period the bronze vessels no longer had a sacred connotation primarily but had become objects of status. 

    To end we noticed the more modest bronze work of the Han and finished in the Sung dynasty ceramics with a celadon ting in miniature.  Bronze vessels had become a treasured objet d’art.   


  • On the Study of Ancient Chinese Bronzes

    28  bar rises 30.35 2mph N dewpoint 25   Spring

                        Full Moon of Winds

    “Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.” – Germaine Greer

    This quote names the feeling I get when I study, not only in libraries.  It identifies the peculiar thrill I got while investigating Chinese bronzes of the Shang and Zhou dynasties.

    The Chinese have had advanced material culture for over 3,500 years.  In the Neolithic they developed a potter’s wheel (not the first, that was Egypt 4000bce) and an updraft, underground kiln capable of 1250 degrees.  Hot enough for stoneware (holds water) and almost hot enough for porcelain.  In the MIA’s collection is an early hand-built bowl from Pan-po that captures the viewer with its shape, a gentle half-sphere, and its color, a delicate tawny clay.  This is a work both ordinary in appearance and extraordinary in its execution.  Nearby are three thin walled ceremonial cups, so thin that none of them weighs more than an ounce.  These were wheel thrown in sections, then joined and fired and burnished.  The Neolithic case also contains ceramic ancestors to the bronze hu, the tripod vessels like the tings and the ku which resembles the ceremonial stem cups.

    The Xia dynasty, a matter of conjecture since there is no archaeological evidence for it, but a dynasty most scholars do think existed, saw the transition between pottery and bronze because the Shang dynasty has a functional metallurgical industry from the beginning.  The Shang dynasty ushers in the age of bronze for China, a reign that will last almost fifteen-hundred years from the Shang through the Warring States Period of the late Eastern Zhou. 

    Shang bronze vessels have three primary functions:  to hold wine, food, or water.   The wine, often warmed on tripod lifted beakers, played a key role in Shang devotion to the Shang-ti, a god of all power.   The various food containers from the giant ting to the delicate tou held sacrificial grains, millet at first, later rice and meats.  Humans died as sacrifice to the Shang gods though there is no mention of cannibalism.  Flat vessels and vessels shaped like gravy boats facilitated ablutions in preparation for sacrifice.  The bronze used in these ceremonial vessels had lead as an alloy with copper.  This made the metal softer, easier to cast.

    Weapons, also made from bronze, had tin alloyed with copper, a harder metal, better for cutting and slicing.

    The Zhou dynasty, borne from a clan rival to the Tzu, the clan of the Shang kings, continued much of Shang culture.  The emphasis on  ritual continued and with it the need for the bronze ritual vessels.  There was an important difference, however.  Where the Shang worshiped a supreme god and their ancestors as divine, the Zhou had a heaven with many gods and their ancestor worship revered ancestors as mediators with the realm of heaven, not divine in themselves.  The Zhou also believed that their conquest of the Shang occurred for moral reasons.  They thought the Shang had become corrupt and that they were drunkards.  The mandate of heaven, a Zhou concept, presented the long lasting notion that rulers did not rule by right, but by the will of heaven.  This meant that rule could be lost if the king let his realm fall into disorder or the peasantry did not flourish.

    Over time this meant that the characteristic Shang decorative symbol, the T’ao T’ieh, began to disappear.  Birds began to fill the same, main spots on Zhou bronze.  Also, where Shang inscriptions were usually terse, often only one or two characters indicating ownership or clan names, the Zhou began to create longer and longer inscriptions, commemorating military victories, political events, seal power transfers. 

    During the Western Zhou, because of the continued centrality of ritual, the need for bronze vessels continued and their assocation with the conservative realm of ritual meant that the changes from the Shang vessels tended to disperse over the whole Zhou realm consistently.  Many of the wine vessels used by the Shang did drop away, possibly because of the moral concerns.  In 711 bce the Zhou dynasty suffered a military defeat.  They closed their western capital and moved east where they served, for the 450 or so years as titulary kings, but had no actual political power. 

    The time of the Eastern Zhou, 711-256 bce, saw China splinter first into many small states during the Spring and Autmn period, then consolidate into a few states, more like contemporary Europe, during the Warring States Period.  Bronze continued to be important throughout the Eastern Zhou, but it took on a different cultural role.  The violence and public disorder of the Eastern Zhou called into question the mandate of heaven and the ritual practices associated with it.  Bronze vessels began to move out into the public sphere where they celebrated weddings, became opulent gifts and sometimes came as gifts to children or relatives with the intention of inheritance. This meant they were no longer exclusively grave objects, and, in fact, in the Eastern Zhou ceramic imitations of the bronze vessels become more and more common in graves.

    More on this after my tour.  I gotta get ready and go check out my route.


  • Shang, Zhou and Kam Wong’s

    30  bar steady 30.13 6mph NE dewpoint 28  Spring

                            Full Moon of Winds

    After a morning among the bronze vessels of the Shang and their piece-mold casting technique, Kate and I went out to Kam Wong’s.  Kam Wong’s is a local Chinese restaurant.  It was here when we moved to Andover fifteen years ago this July and has survived the arrival of more Oriental restaurants and chain restaurants.  I like to eat there to support local, non-chain food.  The food is the usual Americanized version with lots of chop suey, chow mein and egg foo young.  It is interesting, though, that one of the serving dishes, the one with the foot and a bowl on top with a cover, is a direct descendant of one of the Shang dynasty ritual bronze vessels.

    Up stairs for a nap, then into the Zhou dynasty bronzes.


  • Back to the Shang Dynasty

    31  bar rises 30.24 4mph ENE dewpoint 13

                 Full Moon of Winds

    A visit to the dermatologist.  Oh, boy.  Talk about quick.  He looked at my elbows, looked at my knees, looked at my face.  He said don’t use the steriods too much–I never do–and give yourself a week vacation from them every three weeks–new information–and come back in a year.  Good-bye.  Wish all medicine was as clear and effecient.

    I’ve begun my reading on Chinese bronzes.  I’d forgotten that the early bronzes imitated ceramic shapes and decoration and were then superceded by painted lacquer and, eventually, stimulated ceramic imitations. 

    Received an invitation to the Chinese New Years dinner that the Chinese CIF folks put on each year.  I love to go because it gives me a chance to reconnect with my CIF friends.  This year I hope to get a tutor in Chinese pronounciation from among them.

    This event will be in the Lauderdale City Hall.  Lauderdale is a blip on the geography of the Twin Cities located between 280 and the UofM golf-course on Larpenter.  And it has city hall.  Imagine.

    Well, back to the Shang dynasty.


  • Tea Master for a Day

    46  bar falls 29.96 3mph NNW dewpoint 25

              Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

    Last night the moon of winds cast shadows on our yard, elongated dogwoods, thick oak trunks and thin lines of multiple raspberry canes.  This point in the seasonal change is delicate.  Thin ice forms a lattice over the snow while tiny drops of water gather along the roof line ready to plummet the final distance to the earth.  Snow and grass play encirclement with grass spreading outward from trees and shrubs while the snow holds its own over the lawn, the hills and prairie grass.  Here there daubs of photosynthetic green have begun to appear.  Rosemary beneath the steps.  Tufts of grass up close to the house.  It is a gradual change for the moment, but soon the earth will leap and shout, fly flags of bright colors and clothe itself again in verdant splendor.

    Tour today with students, 6th graders, from a Muslim school in Fridley.  As near as I could tell, the kids were mostly Somalia, all born here, but there parents emigrated.  I had the boys, David Fortney had the girls.  We circled each other for half an hour in the Islamic gallery as these children drank in the physical objects of their cultures, linking themselves to the Seljuk Turks, the Safavid Persians and the Mughals of India.  After half an hour we went into the Weber Collection (Japanese traveling exhibition).  I asked them to become tea masters selecting objects for a tea ceremony for persons unfamiliar with Japanese art.

    We saw Hotei reach for the moon and a Zen monk’s ordination festival.  We learned wabi from the Negoro ware with its faded red lacquer, worn and used; we learned sabi from the tea wares, especially the lumpy and imperfect mizusashi.  I read them a Daoist poem and its conversion into a Buddhist poem by the extraction of only one line, spun downward in a flowing cursive script.  Time went fast and at the end they picked objects for their tea ceremony:  8 Views of Xiao and Xiang, the delicate miniature Song dynasty-like landscape, the Negoro spoon, the tea caddy with a silk cover, Oribe teaware and a few dishes for tea food.  Then we were done.

    Afterward I copied and copied and copied, even to the end of the toner cartridge, material on Chinese bronzes.  I have a tour on Saturday that will focus only on our Chinese bronzes.  I chose them because I wanted to go deeper into the world of early Chinese dynasties like the Shang and the Chou and the Han.