Today’s People’s Daily reports that archaeologist working in Sichuan province have uncovered a 4200-year old grave at the Sanxingdui site in which the remains appear to be a man and a woman embracing each other. It might be in keeping with my habits to wax poetic on the permanence of love (or the horrors of live burial) but then my train of thought was derailed by a patch of teleology and bad history.
Archaeologists believe that the Sanxingcun site was once a large ancient settlement in the Chengdu Plain in China’s ancient Shang and Zhou dynasties. There have always been settlers on this land over the past 4,000-plus years.
Apparently the idea of contemporaneous but independent civilizations existing in the space that is now the PRC is a little too wacky and wild for the journalists at the People’s Daily. Repeat after me reporters from The People’s Daily and dentists from Texas: History is messy and full of contradictions, it doesn’t need to be a set of neat compartmentalized facts bundled and packaged to justify the present.
No, really…it’s not.
Since the discovery was in the current boundaries of China, they were obviously members of the Zhonghua Minzu.
The PRC has a difficult enough time admitting that ethnic Hans haven’t been the dominant population in East Asia since time began; trying to get them to admit that some of those ethnic groups actually built things (and maybe even wrote stuff down) is liable to make their heads explode (look at how annoyed they get when you point out that the mainland only began exercising influence in Taiwan at about the same time England colonized North America)!
As to Texas, at least I can be happy knowing that my district finally got around to kicking McElroy to the curb. Now to convince the lege to make the school-board an appointed committee.