From the National Geographic

[Randy W]

Why Does This Man Have Horns on His Back?

Cupping has been practiced for over 3,000 years—though traditionally it's with glass cups.

from the NatGeo on Facebook 
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[Randy W]

Last year marked the 150th anniversary of one of the largest mass lynchings in American history. In Los Angeles in 1871, the victims were Chinese immigrants.

from the National Geographic on Facebook
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The bloody history of anti-Asian violence in the West
One of the largest mass lynchings in the United States targeted Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles.

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Chinese immigrants became the targets of abuse almost as soon as they set foot on American soil, beginning in 1850 with the California Gold Rush. White prospectors routinely drove Chinese miners from their claims, while state lawmakers slapped them with an onerous foreign miners’ tax. Along with Black Americans and Native Americans, they were barred from testifying against whites in California’s courts. As a result, assaults on Chinese people in California generally went unpunished.

A perceived labor threat lay at the root of this Sinophobia. By 1870, Chinese immigrants accounted for roughly 10 percent of California’s population and a full quarter of the workforce in the state. Wherever Chinese immigrants congregated in large numbers, white workers saw a risk to their livelihoods. The threat posed by Chinese immigration never represented the existential threat to white employment that some agitators claimed. Nevertheless, they mobilized against employers, including railroad corporations and wealthy ranchers, who had Chinese immigrants on their payrolls.

The campaigns against Chinese immigrants were well organized. In the immediate post-Civil War years, so-called anti-coolie clubs arose. The Central Pacific Anti-Coolie Association, among others, advocated for a ban on Chinese immigration and even defended white vigilantes. In 1867, a mob of white laborers drove Chinese laborers from their San Francisco worksite, injuring 12 and killing one. The Anti-Coolie Association rallied to the mob’s defense and won the release of all 10 perpetrators. This would become a recurring theme: injury and death for Chinese immigrants, exoneration for their assailants.

 . . .

Newspapers amplified anti-Chinese sentiment and normalized hooliganism. The editor of the Los Angeles News, Andrew Jackson King, filled his columns with vitriolic abuse of the small local Chinese population. They were, he wrote, “an alien, an inferior and idolatrous race;” “hideous and repulsive;” “a curse to our country, and a foul blot upon our civilization.” (While he publicly thundered against these immigrants and the threat they posed to white workers, King employed a Chinese cook in his own home.) A spike in assaults on Chinese workers followed from his editorials.

The assault that took place in Los Angeles on October 24, 1871, was the largest and deadliest of the attacks. Roughly 500 rioters—Anglo-Americans and Hispanic residents alike—charged into the city’s Chinese district after a shootout between suspected Chinese gang members and local authorities resulted in the death of a white former saloonkeeper and the wounding of a policeman. As the mob closed in, petrified Chinese residents took shelter in a long adobe building at the heart of Chinatown.

Two hours of indiscriminate killing followed. The mob smashed through the doors of the building and seized Chinese men and boys hiding inside—only one of whom had participated in the earlier gunfight. Rioters mutilated and murdered virtually any Chinese person they could find. When the mob ran out of hanging ropes, they used clotheslines to string up their victims.

The mob ultimately claimed 19 lives, including a respected doctor and an adolescent boy. All but two of the bodies were moved to the city’s jail yard, where frantic friends and family members searched for their loved ones among the rows of dead. The death toll represented 10 percent of the city’s Chinese population.

Although eight rioters were convicted of manslaughter, they all walked free a year later on a technicality.

This October, Los Angeles will commemorate the 150th anniversary of the massacre amid a national uptick in anti-Asian violence. Leaders in the Chinese American community are planning a weeklong series of events to reflect on the tragedy and its resonance today. That programming accompanies a campaign to erect a permanent memorial to the 19 victims. Together, these commemorations will be a somber remembrance of the atrocity and the enduring challenges that Chinese Americans face.  

But they will also be a celebration of survival. Within a year of the massacre, Chinese immigrants moved back into some of the same quarters that had been ravaged by the mob. They rebuilt much of what had been lost and resisted repeated calls for their removal. Their very presence sent an indelible message: The mob had failed, and they would remain.

That’s a key message for Gay Yuen, president of the Friends of the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles, as she prepares for this year’s anniversary commemorations. “Chinese American history is U.S. history; it’s California history; it’s Los Angeles history,” she told me. “We are Americans and we helped build this country. We’re not others and we’re not foreigners.”

 

 

[Randy W]

This Chinese monk's epic, east-to-west travels rival Marco Polo's

In the 13th century, a Mongolian khan sent Rabban Bar Sauma west to forge diplomatic ties with powerful leaders from Persia to Paris.

The murals from the Nestorian temple at Qocho (German: Wandbilder aus einem christlichen Tempel, Chotscho) are three Nestorian Christian mural fragments—Palm Sunday, Repentance and Entry into Jerusalem—discovered by the German Turpan expedition team, which was led by two German archaeologists Albert Grünwedel and Albert von Le Coq, in the early 20th century.

These murals were painted in the 7th to 9th centuries (Tang dynasty), belonging to a ruined Nestorian church at Qocho, an ancient oasis city located in present-day Xinjiang, the westernmost region of China. The original Entry into Jerusalem is lost, there is only a copy of line drawing made by Grünwedel. The murals are preserved in the Museum of Asian Art in Dahlem, Berlin.

• HISTORY MAGAZINE

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Two travelers from the 13th century made remarkable journeys. The man who headed east, from Europe to Asia, became a household name, thanks to his travelogue, The Travels of Marco Polo. The name of the other man is less well known, but his accomplishments are just as remarkable. Rabban Bar Sauma left China in 1275, followed the Silk Road, and made his way to Baghdad, Constantinople, and France, meeting khans, kings, and a pope.

The remarkable Bar Sauma was born in Zhongdu, China, in 1220. His ancestors were descendants of the Uighurs, a Turkic ethnic group from Central Asia. Bar Sauma was brought up in the Nestorian faith, a Christian denomination that originated in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) when it broke away from the church in the fifth century. Nestorianism took root in Persia and then spread east to China.

“Rabban” is an honorific: In the Semitic Syriac language in which the Nestorian liturgy is written, it means “master.” At age 23 Bar Sauma became a monk, and he spent most of his adult life as a teacher.

Unlike Marco Polo, who embarked on his famous journey when he was just 17, Bar Sauma did not begin his traveling until middle age. At age 55, he decided to visit the holy sites where his religion was founded. In the course of his extraordinary travels, Bar Sauma would later form an unlikely Mongol-Christian alliance to seek Europe’s help against Muslim armies.

Silk Road trip 

Bar Sauma’s initial objective, however, was simply to walk in the Holy Land lying in the far west. His pupil Rabban Marcos would travel with him. Before leaving their homeland, the two sold all of their belongings and set out.

Like Polo, they benefited from Genghis Khan’s unification of the territories surrounding the Silk Road. They traveled during a period of stability historians call Pax Mongolica, but it did not mean the journey was without perils: The two pilgrims often went through deserts to avoid unsavory encounters on the standard route. At one stage, they crossed the Taklimakan Desert, where they had to scale 60-foot dunes and find shelter from turbulent sandstorms. 

From there, the pair reached the oasis of Hotan in western China, after which lay Afghanistan’s mountains, and then a long slog west through the Iranian desert. After two years they reached Baghdad, seat of the catholicos, or patriarch, of the Nestorian Church. Bar Sauma and Marcos were intent on reaching Jerusalem, but conflict in the Holy Land made that impossible. Instead, the two traveled to Armenia and stayed in monasteries there before being recalled to Baghdad by the Nestorian catholicos, Denha I.

 . . .

Rabban Bar Sauma’s long journey had come to an end. He headed back east and would die in Baghdad in 1294, a guest of the patriarch Mar Yahballaha III, his former novice who had left China with him 20 years earlier. As the first known traveler from China to Europe, Bar Sauma must have appreciated the momentousness of what he had seen. To the eternal gratitude of historians, he spent his last days in Baghdad recording his impressions, and a copy of this extraordinary account was discovered centuries later.

 

 

Edited January 27, 2022 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

Spade-shaped coins, unearthed at the site of an ancient bronze foundry in China’s Henan Province, are the oldest known Chinese metal currency and possibly the first in the world.

from the NatGeo on Facebook 
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'World's oldest' coin factory discovered in China
If confirmed, the 2,600-year-old mint could rewrite the history of money.

Spade-shaped coins, unearthed at the site of an ancient bronze foundry in China’s Henan Province, are the oldest known Chinese metal currency and possibly the first in the world.
 

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Archaeologists excavating the remains of Guanzhuang—an ancient city in China’s eastern Henan Province—have discovered what they believe is the oldest-known coin mint, where miniature, shovel-shaped bronze coins were mass produced some 2,600 years ago.

Their research, published today in the journal Antiquity, gives weight to the idea that the first coins were minted not in Turkey or Greece, as long thought, but in China.

The walled and moated city of Guanzhuang was established about 800 B.C., and its foundry— where bronze was cast and beaten into ritual vessels, weapons, and tools—opened in 770 B.C., according to Hao Zhao, an archaeologist at Zhengzhou University and the paper’s lead author. But it wasn’t for another 150 years that workers began minting coins outside the southern gate of the inner city.

Using radiocarbon dating, the team determined the mint began operating sometime between 640 B.C. and no later than 550 B.C. While other research has dated coins from the Lydian Empire in what is now Turkey to as early as 630 B.C., Zhao notes that the earliest mint known to have produced Lydian coins dates to sometime between 575 B.C. and 550 B.C.

 

 

 

 

[Randy W]

from National Geographic: Photography and Photos of the Day on Facebook
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[Randy W]

The National Geographic covers the Forbidden City

The Forbidden City served as the symbolic and political center of imperial China between 1420 and 1912. Its moniker reflected how most subjects of the realm were never allowed to enter its walls.

from the NatGeo on Facebook
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Go inside China's Forbidden City—domain of the emperor and his court for nearly 500 years
Access to this vast complex of grand palaces, abundant gardens, and sacred pavilions was off limits to most of imperial China's people, who could only imagine the grandeur beyond the gates.

 

The complex could hold 150 Buckingham Palaces. Its key landmarks form a shape that aligns with the ideal cosmic order in Confucian ideology. For nearly five centuries, it was the nerve center of the most populous land on Earth—and most Chinese citizens were not permitted to enter.

It was the Forbidden City, after all.

“Whenever the emperor left the Forbidden City to go to the sacrificial Altar of Heaven, bells would ring,” Nat Geo History magazine writes. Only a drum sounded when the last emperor was expelled in 1924. But today, as a museum, all can enter.

 

 

[Randy W]

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Edited September 26, 2022 by Randy W (see edit history)