by fulltimestudent 23 Replies latest social current
Searching for information regarding the north side of Tibet province in China, I found this image of this woman:
"The Beauty of Xiaohe," female mummy, ca 1800-1500 BC. Excavated from Xiaohe (Little River) Cemetery 5, Charqilik (Ruoqiang) County, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China. © Wang Da-Gang
And this child from the 8th C BCE
Side view of infant mummy, ca 8th century BC. Excavated from Zaghunluq, Charchan, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China. © Wang Da-Gang
Just wanted to share:
Thank you, full timer. It really is a sobering thing to consider the billions of people and the cultures and civilizations that have passed on this planet. Right there under our feet, others have also walked, laughing, crying, loving, warring.
Thanks again.
She is very beautiful FTS and looks more Caucasian than Chinese.
Stillin, I often think about that too, sobering and also it puts our worries into perspective. In a hundred years will it really matter?
Quote:
The Beauty of Xiaohe mummy is a bit of a problem for the Chinese. The 4,000 year old almost perfectly preserved mummy is Caucasian, indicating European settlers might have been in China’s Tarim Basin before Asians. That doesn’t fit the official Chinese history and so Chinese officials have pulled the mummy from the museum exhibition in the United States.
The Chinese government has put an official travel ban on a mummy as well as some other artifacts that were scheduled to be shown as part of the ‘Secrets of the Silk Road’ exhibition in museums in the United States. The problem seems to be the the artifacts, and the mummy in particular, have secrets of their own. The Beauty of Xiaohe, pictured above, has been dead for over 4,000 years and yet she tells a story that conflicts with the official Chinese history of migrations into China.
As you can see from the picture, The Beauty of Xiaohe is a near-perfectly preserved mummy. She has long eyelashes and hair that still falls across her shoulders. She also has Caucasian features. That’s the problem. Her very existence, and that of others that have been found in China’s Tarim Basin, in Xinjiang province suggest that the area was settle by Europeans rather than Asians initially. That flies in the face of the accepted history of China.
According to the Chinese government, the Chinese first made contact with the west around 200BC when the then emperor Wu Di tried to establish an alliance with the West against the Huns who were then based in Mongolia. The mummy suggest that Westerners were in China long before then.
This isn’t just a problem with having to alter the government-approved version of contact between East and West. It has to do with a separatist movement by the current inhabitants of the oil rich China’s Tarim Basin, in Xinjiang province. The Uighurs who have had violent clashes with what they view as intrusion from the Han Chinese in recent years.
It is thought that perhaps The Beauty of Xiaohe mummy will give the muslim Uighurs fuel for their fight with the ruling Han Chinese. And so, for now, the mummy has been pulled from exhibitions in the United States by the Chinese.
Thanks for sharing -- very interesting. I read The Mummies of Urumchi a long time ago, about similar Caucasian-looking mummies found in Asia. It's interesting that the Chinese government has to rewrite history rather than just look a fact in the face and adjust their ideas. A lot like a religion, eh?
But still, the mummies are quite interesting. I read, but can't remember where, that some DNA research was done on the mummies at Urumchi, and they aren't Caucasian after all. Could be the same for your beautiful mummy.
Also, thanks for sharing all the different things you are learning. I seldom actually post on the threads, but I always enjoy them.
It IS a beautiful mummy ! I think even Frankenstein would be turned on ! But seriously it really does give one pause to think of all the billions of people who have lived , then died, come and gone over history in our civilization. Thanks for sharing this- very interesting
This group of mummies has fascinated me for years. They were underneath boatlike things with a large pole driven into the ground at the end. Their DNA isn't Chinese. They had little hats like the Tyrol hats of Germanic europe.
Dis-member:
The Chinese government has put an official travel ban on a mummy as well as some other artifacts that were scheduled to be shown as part of the ‘Secrets of the Silk Road’ exhibition in museums in the United States. The problem seems to be the the artifacts, and the mummy in particular, have secrets of their own. The Beauty of Xiaohe, pictured above, has been dead for over 4,000 years and yet she tells a story that conflicts with the official Chinese history of migrations into China.
As you can see from the picture, The Beauty of Xiaohe is a near-perfectly preserved mummy. She has long eyelashes and hair that still falls across her shoulders. She also has Caucasian features. That’s the problem. Her very existence, and that of others that have been found in China’s Tarim Basin, in Xinjiang province suggest that the area was settle by Europeans rather than Asians initially. That flies in the face of the accepted history of China.
According to the Chinese government, the Chinese first made contact with the west around 200BC when the then emperor Wu Di tried to establish an alliance with the West against the Huns who were then based in Mongolia. The mummy suggest that Westerners were in China long before then.
This isn’t just a problem with having to alter the government-approved version of contact between East and West. It has to do with a separatist movement by the current inhabitants of the oil rich China’s Tarim Basin, in Xinjiang province. The Uighurs who have had violent clashes with what they view as intrusion from the Han Chinese in recent years.
It is thought that perhaps The Beauty of Xiaohe mummy will give the muslim Uighurs fuel for their fight with the ruling Han Chinese. And so, for now, the mummy has been pulled from exhibitions in the United States by the Chinese.
Its rather regrettable that you chose to cut and paste, without any analysis, this sloppy example of western journalism at its most biased. The journalist chooses to jump between past and present and to use terminology that is quite anachronistic.
May I demonstrate why I say that?
FTS, thanks for the pics. I wonderd straight away at the Caucasian looks of the lady. Could you expand upon what is the official reaction to this evidence of early Caucasian settlers ?
There is nothing wrong with pasting text when it's not your own. People do it all the time. It's called 'quoting'.
So..
How about the Washington Post?
Whether or not the contretemps at the university had anything to do with politics, it underscores the deeper, politically subversive nature of this material, which spans thousands of years of ethnic and commercial communication between East and West. It's not just the material found in graves and excavations, the perfectly preserved woolen robe carefully stitched together sometime around the age of Aeschylus, or the spring roll and won-ton appetizers from the time of Charlemagne, that overwhelms the visitor. Rather, it is the sense of possibilities - historically, politically and morally - that these objects offer. They challenge the viewer to think beyond, or think without, the categories of identity and politics that are reflexively built into the modern mind.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/02/AR2011030206371.html
Or the Archaeological Institute of America:
No sooner did these mummies surface than Chinese authorities had them swiftly reburied—this time in the back rooms of a museum in Ürümchi, the capital of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, as the Chinese government calls it. It was a politically convenient place to stow the evidence and stonewall all the inconvenient questions they posed. But in the late 1980s, as China was starting to open Xinjiang to foreign tourists, the government decided to put a few of these stunning finds on display.
http://archive.archaeology.org/1007/abstracts/xinjiang.html
Or maybe National Geographic is more up your street?
The Chinese government attributes early revocation to the mummies fragile condition and the fact that they and other artifacts should not be outside of China for more than a year, which they would be if they stayed at Penn for the show’s duration. In China’s change of heart, some speculate cultural sensitivities– the mummies were excavated in the primarily Muslim Uyghur region– could have been a contributing a factor in the early return.
The announcement is a huge disappointment due the uniqueness of these artifacts. The mummies, excavated in the arid Tarim Basin, are remarkably well preserved. Visitors will be surprised by their mysterious non-Chinese appearance, hinting at a more complex history of ethnic communication across the Silk Road than has been previously understood. In the exhibit’s catalog, anthropologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Spencer Wells comments that the mummies make it seem “as though Celts or Vikings had been mysteriously transported into the middle of the Chinese desert.”
http://intelligenttravel.nationalgeographic.com/2011/03/07/4000yearold_chinese_mummies_pr/
The independent
But the opportunity for new audiences in the United States to view the "Beauty of Xiaohe" – a near perfectly preserved mummy from an inhospitable part of western China – has been dealt a blow after it was pulled from an exhibition following a sudden call from the Chinese authorities on the eve of opening. The reason for pulling the mummy and other artefacts from the show remained unclear yesterday (Chinese officials were on New Year holiday) but there were suggestions that the realities of modern Chinese politics may have had a part to play.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/mystery-of-the-mummys-chinese-travel-ban-2205033.html
Need I continue?
Perhaps you need to take up your argument with the sources above.
