Christmas in Kashan
Gergely Béldi de Uzon was a member of an aristocratic family from Transylvania. He was appointed as vice-consul to Tehran in the summer of 1914 at the age of 26. In the absence of the envoy, Logothetti, he was in charge of the affairs. At first life in Persia seemed to be one of ease – in August 1914 they spent two weeks hunting in Mazandarân –, but things became complicated soon enough.
Though Persia (as Iran was called at that time) officially stayed neutral in the Great War, it was heavily under the influence of Russia and Great Britain, while in domestic politics one political crisis ensued the other for years. Soon after the outbreak of the war the Germans tried to make Persia an ally of the Central Powers which seemed to turn out a success by the end of 1915. To prevent this, Russians – who already occupied the northern parts of the country since 1911 – sent troops (8000 cavalry and 6000 infantry) under the command of General Nikolai Baratov to the south, to Qazvin.
On the news of the advance of the Russians, the diplomats of the Central Powers fled Tehran (the last group of the Austro-Hungarians leaving on the morning of 14 January 1916, disguised as Bakthiyari nomads). Back in early December 1915 Gergely Béldi was south of Tehran in Qom. From there he set out to Isfahan together with a group of Austro-Hungarian officers and soldiers. Then they went on to Abade, where they turned back towards the northeast, to Kermanshah upon the advance of the British troops from the southeast. Finally he arrived via Mesopotamia and Anatolia to Constantinople, then to Vienna on 16 April 1917.
In this period, from 10 December 1915 until April 1917 Béldi wrote a personal diary of his experiences en route, a unique source in which the actual political events are mixed with his personal observations on ornithology and hunting. Later, in 1918 his ornithological notes were published both in Hungarian and German in the Hungarian ornithological journal Aquila. There he gave a brief summary of the hardships of the previous years, illustrating his involuntary Persian voyage with a map.
However, the entire diary was never published. Nowadays one copy is kept in the Archives of Vas County in Szombathely, Western Hungary in the family archives of the Chernel family (presumably a copy of the original, based on its even, clear handwriting). Supposedly it ended up there via Béldi's wife, Erzsébet Mannsberg, a relative to the Chernels. Maybe it is due to the ornithological observations, as a member of the family, István Chernel was a famous ornithologist of his time (and the editor of the Aquila journal), just as later Gergely's son, Miklós too.
His account would not put Baedeker or Lonely Planet to shame, though. He obviously didn't have an eye neither for the Iranian landscape, nor for the milieu in general. He writes about the landscape and Kashan (where they arrived on the evening of 22 December 1915) in such detail and manner:
“We arrived to Kashan in the evening. The road was of no interest. The great, plain Kevir [the desert] to the left and some hills to the right. A large inquisitive crowd was waiting for us outside the city. Kaschan(!) is a city stretching all over and one of no interest, with the usual narrow, arched bazaars.”
However, the wartime circumstances are an excuse for him (how would you enjoy the road if you should take it fleeing from the advancing Russian army on horseback and among uncertain rumors?), as well as the fact that even if he wanted to, he could not visit the nowadays must-see places of Kashan, like the Fin Garden (on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2012) or the historical houses.
According to his account they spent 23 December in Kashan and as they had to marched on the following day, they had an early Christmas Eve there, under rather unconventional circumstances, exactly 109 years ago:
“XII. 23. We rest for a day. Napravil commanded the soldiers that today is Christmas Eve. We had to go on the next day and we could not celebrate it then. We sat together, me, the two officers (Napravil and Daskiewicz) and the two Jewish physicians and we celebrated Christmas Eve as much as we could. We ate raisin and almond and drank red wine at the light of a candle, lying on the carpet.”
There was even time for an occasional bargain earlier that day, though it turned out very soon that it was not a good deal:
“I bought from one of the Swedish officers, who was still there, a fine-looking 6-years old chestnut stallion. I wondered at the low price he asked for it, but the next day I realized why. He went on very well and tame but as soon as I got off of him, as a tiger, he attacked the other horses and kicked them where he reached them. Thus until Isfahan I could not get off and at the lodgings I had to find an empty stable and could only get off there. I cursed the Swedish many times. Otherwise, he endured fatigue better than the other horses we had.”
On 24 December they went on to Isfahan and in the evening they arrived to a caravanserai. His short description reflects the circumstances very well:
“XII. 24. At noon we departed for Isfahan. We, Napravil and I, got lost again fortunately. We departed later than the soldiers and the people showed us the shorter way because they didn't know that the others go with a wagon and that we would go with them. When we discovered our mistake, we passed through the stony wasteland and after a long fumble and stumble we reached the others in the dark at a half-collapsed caravanserai. which was full of fleeing Cossacks. They did not have a single bit of discipline and would not make place for us. We didn't even try to throw them out as they were many and the air was already rather awful in the rooms. Thus we set up our beds in a half-collapsed stable where seemingly stray dogs used to give rendez-vous to each other. But we cleaned the place and settled in well enough. What a poor Christmas Eve!”
We hope our readers will have a a richer and less adventurous Christmas.
***
I noticed it only after writing this post that the Hungarian Iranist Miklós Sárközy gave a lecture on Gergely Béldi's diary just a few weeks ago. The recording of the lecture is available online (only in Hungarian) since 21 December but I didn't have the time to watch it until the publication of this post. Thus I wrote this post without knowing it and before it became available, waiting only for the anniversary to publish the story of Gergely Béldi’s unconventional Christmas in Kashan.
Nomadic wedding in Tibet (Traveling in Kham 6)
About 30-40% of the population of historical Tibet are nomadic yak herders. In the eastern provinces that have been annexed to China since 1720, that is, in Kham (today part of Sichuan) and Amdo (now Qinghai province), where we are now, this ratio is much higher, partly because the proportion of the nomads has traditionally been higher, and partly because in the “official” Tibetan Autonomous Region the authorities are trying to forcefully settle them in housing estates that are better to control. In Kham, many nomads have city addresses, but from April to October they all live in tents on the plateau.
Then, as if by magic, the horses and cars disappear. We are getting back on the bus, but then a walking crowd appears in front of us, led by huge turbaned figures. A young woman with a tall red lampshade on her head stands out of them. “They are bringing the bride now”, the bus driver points at her. We get off again. This time I start filming, and the photos are taken by Zoli Asztalos, who infiltrates everywhere.
The procession turns into the courtyard. So far I have been filming from behind the line of spectators, but now, amids polite Chinese apologies, I push through them and sneak in. The procession goes around the prayer wheel stand in the middle of the courtyard, led by three shamans wearing sun masks. Then, as they start to climb the stairs into the main hall, confetti rains starts from above. Dancing begins in the main hall, food is offered. We are invited to stay, but we still have a long way to Dergê.
The flood and the monkey
Lijiang is a beautiful little town, the “Venice of China” – at least one of them, because the other is Suzhou on the east coast – at the foot of the Himalayas, the capital of the former Naxi kingdom. The Naxis (the Naxi natives who speak some English, at this point indicate with a small arm swing and a simultaneous shake of the head that the X matters) linguistically belong to the Tibeto-Burman language family, and ethnically to the Qiang stream which arrived from the far northwest here to the “tribal corridor” under the Himalayas sometime during the Tang era (618-907) as I wrote in the previous post. Their independent kingdom became part of China with the Mongol conquest, but even after that they lived in splendid isolation for a long time. According to Peter Goullart, to be quoted below, even in the 1940s there lived no Han Chinese among them, and very few of them knew Chinese. In the Ming era, their chieftain was elevated to the rank of tusi, i.e. a prince or king appointed by the emperor, but this rank was then eroded by the Qing dynasty which in 1723 took direct control of the area, and by the republic, which in 1912 incorporated Lijiang and its region into the Chinese administration.
Here I must release one of my colorful characters, who would fill a whole chapter in his own right. Peter Goullart, né Пётр Гуляр, the Russian-born and American-Chinese-raised adventurer, had a splendid and enjoyable career in interwar China, touring eastern Tibet, spending nine years in Lijiang as a local economic development agent for the national government, learning a host of local languages, interacting with a thousand local figures, and publishing colorful and humorous memoirs about all that, after the Communist government kicked him out of China. Each chapter of his book Forgotten kingdom. Nine years in Yunnan, 1939-48 (1955) saves a day of preparation for the tour guide on the tea-horse-route. In it he writes about the palace:
“An elegant street not far from the Copper Square led to the palace of the Mu kings. A triumphal gate across the street marked the beginning of this aristocratic quarter. The palace itself was a rambling structure in Chinese style and was used as the District Primary School. Adjoining it there was a series of walled houses where the ex-king, his family and other royal relatives lived. A great stone arch, elaborately carved, was in front of the royal compound and bore two Chinese characters, ‘Loyal and Righteous’, bestowed on a king by a Ming emperor in the seventeenth century. The title of king or chief, still used by the people in reference to the head of the Mu family, was really an honorary one. During the Manchu dynasty the feudal status of the king had been abolished and Likiang became a fu magistracy. For a period the Mu kings continued to rule as hereditary fu (senior) magistrates, but even that was taken away from them and a succession of Chinese magistrates began. The Mu dynasty traced its origin as far back as the glorious Tang dynasty and produced many heroic and just rulers, interspersed with a few bad ones. Towards the close of the Manchu dynasty the royal family of Mu was well on the road of degeneration. They had absorbed the then new-fangled fashion of smoking opium and other elegant vices of the Chinese court and their downfall was rapid. Deprived of the revenue from their vast estates, the members of the royal family resorted to selling, one by one, their accumulated art treasures and the precious mementoes of their ancestors, to satisfy their insatiable craving for opium, and it was alleged that some princes had sold even their furniture and wives’ wedding dresses. All the prestige and standing of this illustrious family had gone with the wind.”
The street, the ornamental gate and the aristocratic quarter mentioned in the description all exist still, and I would be only slightly surprised if the salesperson in the back of a shop whispered to me that he is an all-surviving member of the royal dynasty. The royal palace also stands, but its furnishings were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution by the Red Guards, who, for lack of a better idea, tried to prove their loyalty to the Idea by kicking a dead lion. After it was discovered in the 1980s that the Idea had been falsified without Chairman Mao’s knowledge, and the Gang of Four were found to be responsible for this, the country breathed a sight of relief and began to restore at least part of the destroyed cultural heritage.
The palace’s wooden staircase was replaced, but all traces of the probably Qing-era frescoes on the walls of the main hall on the ground floor have disappeared. The curators therefore decided that, in the changed ideological atmosphere of the 2000s, they will put the folklore of the local indigenous population on the walls. Previously, the nationalities were considered a kind of sand in the well-oiled machine of communist China, but by this time they had found their place in the division of labor of advanced Chinese capitalism. They became the exotic element that attract wealthy Chinese tourists from the east coast – managers, entrepreneurs, party cadres, pillars of the new order – to visit the western and southwestern regions of the country, designated for tourism, and while resting here and renewing their productive forces, they also contribute with generous spending to the development of the countryside and strengthen the cohesion of China’s regions. In this approach, the nationalities dance or work like stylized cheerful children under the sun of Red China. Managing their own affairs as adults is not their job.
This approach is visualized on the walls of the ground floor of the Mu Royal Palace, where the flood story of the Naxi mythology is painted in eight panels, in a style combining this naive ethnic version of socialist realism with the figures of Naxi Dongba drawings.
Another unknown in the equation: what are Dongba drawings? The Naxi developed their own pictographic writing system sometime in the first centuries AD, primarily for recording ritual texts to be recited. In this script, funny little animals and sketchy human figures bustle around, like in a Busy World book. Here is an example of this script, the “Dongba Genesis”, which narrates human history from the flood to the re-foundation, on which the new frescoes of the royal palace were also based:
These photos come from the 2023 Leiden publication of the manuscript, which also includes their transcription and translation. The translation of the very first picture group, the title page, looks for example like this:
Based on the “Dongba Genesis”, the story of the eight images is as follows:
Since the manuscript ends with the text of the purification ceremony, the last image is a modern addition, intended to express the friendship of the country’s peoples. I am surprised that a representative of the Chinese Han nationality was not depicted in it. Perhaps he is the heavenly father himself.
There are many versions of this story, not only among the Naxi, but also among the surrounding peoples. For example, the Mosuo people, who live in a matriarchal society around Lake Lugu, tell a version in the excellent anthropological survey 泸沽湖畔的摩梭人 (The Mosuos of Lake Lugu, 2012) – from which I will quote in a later post –, in which the goddess’ evil sister envies her luck. In the form of a red deer, she lures the hunting man into the forest, then appears to him in the form of a woman, and offers him fresh water. The man drinks the water, which plunges him into a long twenty-year sleep.
Back home, the goddess waits in vain for her husband, and finally asks the monkey to find him. The monkey pretends to search heaven and earth, then returns to the goddess and says he cannot find him anywhere, he may have gone back to heaven. But he, the monkey, is here on earth and is ready to marry the goddess. The latter marries him. When the man wakes up from his twenty-year sleep and returns home, and sees what has happened, he kills the monkey, but spares his wife’s children by the monkey out of love for her. Thus, humanity after the flood originates not from a real man, but half from a goddess and half from a monkey.
A brilliant ending to the story, which in a way anticipates Romanticism by explaining the animal and divine that reside in man at the same time. As Okudzhava sings:
| Красивые и мудрые как боги и грустные, как жители земли | | Beautiful and wise like gods and sad as the inhabitants of earth. |
Bulat Okudzsava: Песня о московском муравье (Song about the ant of Moscow, 1959)
The Chinese description displayed next to the statue, however, tells a different story. According to this, the man who survived the flood did not meet his goddess mate on earth, but in heaven, where he was guided up by the wise old monkey. This is why the Mosuos venerate the monkey according to the local version of the Dongba Genesis, which is obviously different from that of the anthropologists.
The towers of the Himalayas (Traveling in Kham 5)
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Traveling in Kham • Jashideley! • Burial in the sky • Kangding, the gateway of Tibet • The Love Song of Kangding • The monastery of Tagong • The Buddhas of Drakgo • The towers of the Himalayas |
The peoples of the plains, above whom the sky arches at an unreachable height, build domes that imitate it: yurts, mosques, cathedrals. The mountain peoples build towers, as if only those twenty meters were needed, added to their thousand or two-thousand-meter high surface to reach the sky at arm’s length. After the towers of Assisi and San Gimignano, the valley of Theth in Albania, the Moroccan kasbahs and the towers of Svaneti, Tusheti and Ingushetia, the towers of Kham in eastern Tibet provide further evidence of this.These towers stand all along the so-called “tribal corridor” between the Han-speaking area of Sichuan and the present-day Tibetan border, in the mountains of Kham and Amdo provinces, which, in addition to Tibetan nomads, are inhabited by many small ethnic groups who trickled down from the north and northwest, from today’s Mongolia, sometime from the first millennium BC onward. In the ancient Chinese chronicles, these peoples were uniformly called qiang, written with the character 羌, which, according to Shuowen Jiezi, the very first Chinese dictionary, is a combination of the characters for sheep 羊 and man 人, a reference to a shepherd people. But these peoples have been very diverse. In addition to patriarchal shepherd societies, they have also included matriarchal farming groups. The Chinese also classified the ancestors of the Tibetans as qiang, and a large part of them could indeed have arrived in their present territory with this wave, or rather flood. And the Yi, Qiang, Naxi, Moxuo, Bai and other small ethnic groups living in today’s West Sichuan and West Yunnan are also deposits of this flood.
Such small ethnic and linguistic groups inhabit the valley of the Dadu River in eastern Kham, where most of these towers are located. For the sake of simplicity, the Chinese state has put them in the “Tibetan” category among the 56 Chinese ethnic groups officially approved in 1956, and they themselves have accepted this classification. However, in reality almost every village speaks a different language, so much so that, as the locals tell us, if someone marries from across the river, they will speak Chinese at home, because that will be the only language both of them understand. But why would anyone marry from across the river, since those villages, they say with a shudder, are matriarchal, where the house, the land, and even the surname are inherited through the maternal line?
The languages spoken here are usually grouped together as Qiangic. They belong to the larger Gyarong language group, which is a member of the populous Tibeto-Burman language family. However, their speakers are genetically very complex. A recent Chinese study pointed out that the inhabitants of the Dadu Valley are a mixture of farmers coming from the south and nomads from the north.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that in such a complicated ethnic-linguistic-social mosaic world, this large number of towers are built as a defense against the expected attack of the other.
The towers, which number in the hundreds in the Dadu River valley – and there were probably many more before frequent earthquakes decimated them – were not given much attention in Chinese architectural history until the 2000s. Built in a marginal region, fitting in the historical context and building culture of marginalized ethnic groups, they were impossible to place in the mainstream history of architecture. It was Frederique Darragon who noticed them in 1998, and spent seven years researching and documenting them, to the point of having samples of their wooden structures carbon-dated to determine their age. Her bilingual book 喜马拉骓的神秘古碉 – Secret towers of the Himalayas (2005) is the first, and to date the largest, monograph on these strange, mysterious and archaic structures. In it, she points out that the towers were mostly built between 1000 and 1500, in a period when the northern nomads were pushing southward with great intensity. Although they originally stood alone, with the residential buildings that now adjoin them being the additions of several centuries, the carpentry of these latter follows the same solutions as the interior woodwork of the towers, which means that they were built by the same population that still lives around them today. Darragon highlights a specific and common type: those towers with an octagonal star plan, which is not found in any other region. One can only speculate whether this was a trademark of a vanished architectural culture, or they simply wanted to provide the towers with greater stability in this earthquake-prone region.
The literature links these towers to the town of Danba, and calls them Danba towers. But this is misleading. The town of Danba did not exist when the towers were built. This modern town was established in the past century at the confluence of the Dadu River and its four tributaries down in the valley. The towers, on the other hand, are all located in the mountains, in small villages such as Zhonglu or Suopo, the two “most towered” towns. Danba is only the district headquarters to search for if you want to book accommodation in these villages, eventually in a tower house, as some of them have been converted into very comfortable, but still rustic and beautiful family accommodations during the domestic tourism boom of the last decade.
The villages are made up of large white mansions, standing alone as farmhouses, surrounded by wide cornfields. This is a special microclimate, where corn grows in abundance at an altitude of 2,600 meters. It rarely snows in the valley, and there is never frost. The corn fields are covered with plastic sheets, through which the corn stalks grow through holes in a regular square grid. This saves the work of hoeing and keeps the soil moist.
The houses are also adapted to corn production. Their strong, wide, three-story residential tower is connected to a two-story house, the flat roof of which is basically used for drying corn. The top floor of the residential tower has a protruding wooden balcony with a porch, and somewhere hidden from view is an equally protruding small closed wooden toilet, from which waste fall into a digestion pit surrounded by a stone wall at the bottom of the tower. From there, the precious manure is taken out onto the fields.
On the gates or fences of the houses, according to the custom of the villages of nomadic Qiang origin, yak or cow skulls are placed to frighten away evil spirits with their imposing horns. Some large, worn stone inscriptions in the old Tibetan language are also inserted into one or another wall.
Religious woodcuts are pasted onto the gates, partly with Buddhist motifs, partly with the images of the protective spirits of local pre-Buddhist cults. And in small niches in the gateposts, as if materializing the supreme good, there is an ear of corn placed under Tibetan sutras.
The landscape is generally sprinkled with a multitude of sacred signs, starting with pointed white stones the size of a human head, which might be considered primitive stupas, but local tradition connects them to the ancient religion of the region, and speaks of a war that the conquerors won with weapons painted white, inspired by a dream. Such stones also stand on the corners of the towers, or also alone along the roads.
The Danba municipality working to promote tourism, has found a niche here, and they advertise a certain spot with a nice view of the valley with a sign reading “Best Photo Spot”.
Elsewhere, a colorful tent stands empty in the middle of the field, and from inside you can hear a continuous recording of Buddhist sutras and Tibetan folk songs.
The energies of nature are also used in other ways for the purpose of sustainable eternal worship. The small streams running down the mountainside are very practical for driving prayer wheels, or rather prayer mills.
Here and there among the farms are small Buddhist monasteries, which can only be distinguished from afar by their golden roofs. One of the most popular is
We set off from the river up the mountainside to Suopo on the winding road. The opposite mountainside is crowned by a multitude of towers. On the side of the retaining wall of one of the houses, as if they knew we would not get there, are rock drawings brought down to us from the Tibetan mountains.
This complex consists of a large old house with a stout corner tower, a porched courtyard, and two thousand-year-old towers with square and an octagonal floor plan. Next to it, other towers of a similar age. There is a phone number written in chalk on the gate, which you can use to call the owner, who lives in the house next door.
The furnishings are as if the last old owner had only recently left it, which is how it is. It is minimal, but authentic, it has not been converted into a residential museum. On the ground floor, there is an open tea stove in the middle of the room. Colorful Buddhist frescoes on the walls of the large room. Upstairs, there is a small chapel with a Buddha altar.
Not far from the house stands a strange modern stele with an inscription in Chinese and Tibetan: 东女人家 – The House of the Eastern Woman.
The stele obviously advertises a family guesthouse, but the inscription does not let me rest. Who could this Eastern Woman be? I search for it on the Chinese internet, and soon a magnificent story unfolds, which Jinba Tenzin, who was born here and studied anthropology in the USA, wrote in detail in his PhD thesis In the land of the eastern queendom. The politics of gender and ethnicity on the Sino-Tibetan border (2014).
Chinese chronicles from the Tang era (618-907) mention “the Eastern Queendom” somewhere in eastern Tibet, over which women rule. Based on the vague references, this kingdom could have been in several places, and one possibility is the region of the Danba towers. The local tourism office discovered the quote and its marketing potential in the early 2000s, and they localized the former seat of the Eastern Queendom in Suopo. They even thought of finding the remains of the Queen’s palace. The local population also appreciated the idea. Not only because it is a great tourist attraction, but also because such an identity, to be the descendants of a former mystical female kingdom, would greatly increase the prestige of the region. Ever since China lumped them to the Tibetan nationality as a remainder, they have been doubly marginalized. The Chinese consider them Tibetans, but the Tibetans also consider them outsiders, since neither their language nor their culture is Tibetan. The queen story would finally give a name to their otherness. In Suopo, the Moluo Tourism Association was formed with the participation of local teachers and party cadres, and at its regular meetings they draft petitions to the authorities to certify Suopo as the former seat of the Eastern Queen.
We do not know whether Suopo will receive this title, and if so, whether the onslaught of tourists will begin. In my humble opinion, it is good for the village that it does not receive so much attention and that its authentic heritage is not turned into an open-air museum.
We, however, sneak away form the lookout point and enter the village houses. In front of one of the beautiful traditional houses, an old woman says that we can go in for five yuan per person – about half a euro. On the other side of the river, Jiaju is said to have preserved its matriarchal social structure. After Tenzin’s book, I don’t know if this is really true or just a tourist exploitation of the myth of the Eastern Queen, but the fact is that the landlady does look like a very determined matron. The house is truly beautiful, but there are many like this in Suopo and Zhonglu, without all the tourist hype. Let’s hope they stay that way.
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