Barbarian Caves or Han Tombs?: Republican-Era Archaeology and the Reassertion of Han Presence in Ancient Sichuan

When Zhang Zongxiang was appointed magistrate of Lushan County () in Xikang Province in 1941, he likely despaired at his misfortune of being sent to govern such a remote and ethnically troubled spot.¹ Shortly after his appointment, however, an archaeological discovery near Lushan buoyed his spirit, arousing simultaneously his national and local pride. Anthropologist of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands Ren Naiqiang ( 1894-1989) excavated a Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.) cliff-side tomb and several stelae there in the spring of 1942.² An enthused Magistrate Zhang sent rubbings of the tomb bricks and stelae to China's Minister of Education, Chen Lifu ( 1900-2001), to Xikang's Han Chinese warlord governor Liu Wenhui ( 1895-1976), to the Central Political College in Chongqing , and to the National Central Museum, then in Lizhuang , Sichuan. In his letter to Chen Lifu, Zhang delighted that the archaeological evidence proved that the region, though in the early 1940s appearing so desolate and removed from Chinese civilization, "once had such prosperous culture." Further, Zhang proudly informed Chen that, in light of the discovery, he had "called upon the elder gentlemen of the county to search the ancient classics, in hopes of a better understanding of the preservation and spread of our nation's quintessence (guocui)."³

For Magistrate Zhang, the archaeological discovery of a Han-era cliff-side tomb, especially once matched up with evidence from Chinese classical texts, seemed to prove both the antiquity of and the geographical spread of the Chinese nation into what appeared, in his own day, to be a very un-Chinese place. Zhang may or may not have been aware that it was only very recently that archaeologists had begun to call the cliff-side caves that dotted the landscape in Sichuan "Han Dynasty tombs ( Han mu)" rather than "barbarian caves (Manzidong)," as centuries of previous Chinese antiquary tradition had named them. Foreign and Chinese archaeologists, beginning in the first decades of the twentieth century, had determined that the caves had nothing to do with the lifeways of barbarians, but everything to do with a respectful Han burial. A few of the more circumspect archaeologists were careful to differentiate between Han as an era and Han as a people group, but many others either obscured the distinction or, in Han-nationalist fervor, outright conflated the two.⁴ This paper traces the changing discourse about these caves and shows the way the new discipline of archaeology was used to situate a Han Chinese presence in ancient Sichuan, and consequently squeeze non-Han inhabitants into ever-smaller spaces. Chinese nationalist archaeologists (both state-sponsored professionals and independent amateurs), and even some foreign explorers in Sichuan, operated under a set of colonialist assumptions that theorists of archaeology call "disassociation" and "appropriation." Based on a social evolutionary perspective, archaeologists beholden to such assumptions first disavow that certain archaeological remains could possibly have been made by indigenes near at hand, and then suggest, instead, that the site or artifact must have been constructed by the evolutionarily more advanced culture, which, as it happens, is just then seeking to solidify its claims to the surrounding territory.⁵

Archaeology emerged in China (as in most places on the globe) concurrent with the rise of the idea of the nation-state, and as a handmaid to the work of nation-building elites.⁶ One component of this new nationalist project was the re-writing of history to downplay dynastic history and emphasize instead the Han Chinese people, who were assumed to have long lived throughout the Chinese national geo-body. Initially, efforts towards the creation of such a national history were bedeviled by the apparent conflict between the much-beloved "science," with its radical skepticism so evident in Gu Jiegang ( 1893-1980) and the "doubting antiquity school (yigupai)," and the absolute need to find "China" and the "Chinese" in the remote past, no matter what problems were exposed in traditional texts. Archaeology appeared to offer a solution to this conundrum, as it could corroborate texts and...