word had become immortal, and dead. The tortoises groaned under their loads.
Once, where the Book of Odes moved in a curtain of interlocked slabs, I heard a subdued noise. The stones seemed to be mewing. Round the corner was a young woman tracing a passage with her finger, and trying to sing.
I go through open lands,
The trees are flowering,
Married, I lived with you,
Uncherished, I returned.
‘I can’t sing it, I was just experimenting.’ She covered her mouth. ‘Even by the twelfth century they couldn’t remember how to sing the songs of the Tang. They pronounced the words differently too, and we can’t tell how. Every poem was written to be sung. But now we have the words only.’ She was copying the ode from the stone into a notebook. ‘I love these. But everybody seems to have forgotten them. People don’t know what our ancestors left us. I feel sorry for them.’
Sorry for her ancestors or contemporaries, I did not know. But the words were beautiful, weren’t they? She did not have a husband (she was only twenty-two) and nor had she returned. But the words were already potent, although even the meaning of many was controversial, I knew. One translator went so far as to say: ‘ There is not one single word in these ancient poems whose precise significance we understand .’ You could wander their interpretations for ever. I left her alone with her notebook, thinking, and soon afterwards the stones were mewing again.
The stele I was hunting was quite another. The dragons that crested it writhed around a flaming pearl and a vivid superscription. Along its base and sides, running like light cavalry round the Chinese columns, was a cursive script which turned out to be Syriac. The carved inscription read: ‘Record of the Transmission of the Western Religion of Pure Light through China’. And it was crowned by a Christian cross.
Raised in AD 781, the stone recorded the arrival of the priest Aloban from the West a century and a half earlier. He ‘came on azure clouds bearing the true scriptures’, and the emperor Taizong received him, indulging the translation of his books in the imperial library, and even founding a monastery. ‘If we carefully examine the meaning of the teaching it is mysterious, wonderful, full of repose,’ the emperor decreed astonishingly. ‘It is right that it should have free course under the sky.’ The stone goes on–drenched in Buddhist and Taoist imagery–to celebrate the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth and Christ’s Ascension. But theCrucifixion is only cryptically remembered, and the Resurrection not at all.
I scrutinised the Syriac as if I might decipher it. Who on earth were these Christians?
It happened like this. In AD 431 the patriarch of Constantinople, Nestorius, maintained with half the eastern Church that the nature of Christ was not indissolubly divine, but dual–that he was a man sometimes visited by divinity–so that Mary could not rightly be called the Mother of God. ‘I cannot imagine God as a little boy,’ he said. The heresy split Christendom. Within a few years the Nestorians were taking refuge in the Persian empire, and spreading east along the Silk Road, and perhaps it was for this that their great stele describes how at the Nativity the light-dazzled Magi came with their gifts from Persia.
But in the Chinese heartland the Nestorians dwindled as suddenly as they had arrived, persecuted as the Tang dynasty declined, their monasteries in ruins. No authenticated trace of their churches has ever been detected here. If the Xian stele did not exist, you could imagine their coming a myth.
Yet five years ago, fifty miles south of the city, a British Sinologist rediscovered an obscure site named Da Qin, ‘Roman empire’ or ‘the West’, the name by which Nestorian communities were known. It was located eerily in the Taoist precincts most sacred to the emperors, the forgotten Vatican of the Tang, where the Qinling mountains open
Once, where the Book of Odes moved in a curtain of interlocked slabs, I heard a subdued noise. The stones seemed to be mewing. Round the corner was a young woman tracing a passage with her finger, and trying to sing.
I go through open lands,
The trees are flowering,
Married, I lived with you,
Uncherished, I returned.
‘I can’t sing it, I was just experimenting.’ She covered her mouth. ‘Even by the twelfth century they couldn’t remember how to sing the songs of the Tang. They pronounced the words differently too, and we can’t tell how. Every poem was written to be sung. But now we have the words only.’ She was copying the ode from the stone into a notebook. ‘I love these. But everybody seems to have forgotten them. People don’t know what our ancestors left us. I feel sorry for them.’
Sorry for her ancestors or contemporaries, I did not know. But the words were beautiful, weren’t they? She did not have a husband (she was only twenty-two) and nor had she returned. But the words were already potent, although even the meaning of many was controversial, I knew. One translator went so far as to say: ‘ There is not one single word in these ancient poems whose precise significance we understand .’ You could wander their interpretations for ever. I left her alone with her notebook, thinking, and soon afterwards the stones were mewing again.
The stele I was hunting was quite another. The dragons that crested it writhed around a flaming pearl and a vivid superscription. Along its base and sides, running like light cavalry round the Chinese columns, was a cursive script which turned out to be Syriac. The carved inscription read: ‘Record of the Transmission of the Western Religion of Pure Light through China’. And it was crowned by a Christian cross.
Raised in AD 781, the stone recorded the arrival of the priest Aloban from the West a century and a half earlier. He ‘came on azure clouds bearing the true scriptures’, and the emperor Taizong received him, indulging the translation of his books in the imperial library, and even founding a monastery. ‘If we carefully examine the meaning of the teaching it is mysterious, wonderful, full of repose,’ the emperor decreed astonishingly. ‘It is right that it should have free course under the sky.’ The stone goes on–drenched in Buddhist and Taoist imagery–to celebrate the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth and Christ’s Ascension. But theCrucifixion is only cryptically remembered, and the Resurrection not at all.
I scrutinised the Syriac as if I might decipher it. Who on earth were these Christians?
It happened like this. In AD 431 the patriarch of Constantinople, Nestorius, maintained with half the eastern Church that the nature of Christ was not indissolubly divine, but dual–that he was a man sometimes visited by divinity–so that Mary could not rightly be called the Mother of God. ‘I cannot imagine God as a little boy,’ he said. The heresy split Christendom. Within a few years the Nestorians were taking refuge in the Persian empire, and spreading east along the Silk Road, and perhaps it was for this that their great stele describes how at the Nativity the light-dazzled Magi came with their gifts from Persia.
But in the Chinese heartland the Nestorians dwindled as suddenly as they had arrived, persecuted as the Tang dynasty declined, their monasteries in ruins. No authenticated trace of their churches has ever been detected here. If the Xian stele did not exist, you could imagine their coming a myth.
Yet five years ago, fifty miles south of the city, a British Sinologist rediscovered an obscure site named Da Qin, ‘Roman empire’ or ‘the West’, the name by which Nestorian communities were known. It was located eerily in the Taoist precincts most sacred to the emperors, the forgotten Vatican of the Tang, where the Qinling mountains open
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