The flood and the monkey

Where should I begin this sprawling story, with its hundreds of tiny swarming figures? Perhaps at the most tangible place, the royal palace of Lijiang.

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.

Nevertheless, the royal palace built in the Ming era still stands prominently on the hill in the middle of the city. Its tower is clearly visible from any point in the old town.

The illuminated royal palace on the hilltop, seen from our hotel terrace

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:

In the beginning, heaven and earth were one. A pair of divine birds laid a nest of eggs, from which nine strong brothers and nine wise sisters hatched. Together they separated heaven from earth, built a house, plowed with white deer, and rode on tigers.

Since people had mindlessly destroyed the mountains, forests and waters, the gods sent a flood upon earth. Only one exceptionally pure-hearted man, Coqssei-leel’ee, survived the flood by sewing himself in a yak skin. After the flood passed, he sought a mate, and a beautiful forest spirit seduced him, with whom he fathered animals, until the spirit eventually abandoned him.

Coqssei-leel’ee set out to find a new mate, and met the goddess Cheilheeq-bbvbeeq, who was also coming down to earth in search of a mate. They fall in love at first sight, and the goddess’ cranes fly them into the sky.

The heavenly father Zzee’laq-epv does not want to give his daughter to a man, and sets the man a series of impossible tests, which he solves by listening to the goddess’ advice. In this picture, he must clear the forsts of ninety-nine mountains, replant the mountains, and deliver the fruits of the new trees to the heavenly father, all in a single day.

He must then hunt a mountain goat on dangerous rocks, catch fish from a dangerous lake, and finally bring three drops of tiger’s milk to the heavenly father, who then has no choice but to give his daughter to him.

Coqssei-leel’ee and Cheilheeq-bbvbeeq return to earth with the abundant dowry received from the heavenly father.

The man and the goddess settle on earth, but they forget to offer a sacrifice to the heavenly father and perform a purification ceremony, and thus various troubles befall them. According to the manuscript, they have no children, and according to some oral versions, although they have three sons, all three remain mute. Finally, they figure out the reason and perform the purification ceremony. This ceremony is the actual subject of the Dongba manuscript, the whole story was just an introduction to it.

After the purification ceremony, the three boys start to speak, but in three different languages: Tibetan, Naxi and Bai, which are indeed linguistically related, but more importantly, the languages of three peoples of common nomadic Qiang origin living side by side.

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)

Traveling in Mosuo land and visiting the Mosuo Museum in Daluoshuo, built in a former matriarchal large house on the shores of Lake Lugu, I am shocked to see that in the main hall of the house, where idols of ancestors are usually erected, the statue of a monkey stands on a small column. Could this people have gone so far as to acknowledge their descent from a monkey, ahead of Darwin, and pay homage to their male ancestor?

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.