Chinese Whispers by Nicholas Jose

Author:Nicholas Jose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book, BG, BIO000000
ISBN: 9781743051528
Publisher: Wakefield Press
Published: 2012-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

‘The web that has no weaver’

Notes on cultural exchange

Sang Ye went on a journey to a village in the mountains beyond Kunming in south-west China, in an impoverished area populated predominantly by the non-Han Chinese Yi people. A foreigner had come to the village in 1904 and spent the rest of his life, until his death in 1944, working with the village people. He introduced Christianity to the village, bringing to an end the practice of human sacrifice that had been a characteristic of the ­traditional tree-worshipping folk religion. He established a health clinic. He built a college, run on modern educational principles, to teach theology as well as other subjects. There was no script for the Yi language and he devised a romanised script that is used to this day. When the Red Army came through in 1935, he negotiated with the then commissar Yang Shangkun (later President of China) to give the communists safe passage through the area on condition that not so much as a blade of grass would be taken from the people, a promise that was honoured. On his death, the people cut down the totem tree at the centre of their village to make a coffin for this man they believed had come to them from heaven. Ten thousand people attended the funeral and his grave became a shrine.

After the communist victory in 1949, the Party took on the trappings of local Christianity to win over the people: ‘The Party Central Committee is the shepherd and the Yi people are the sheep of its pasture.’ Later, all traces of Christianity were suppressed. In the village the Party won the two-line struggle against the foreigner’s legacy, and human sacrifice was revived until, following the disasters of the Cultural Revolution, the people realised that the socialist heaven was unattainable and returned to a grass-roots form of Christianity. By 1992, a local variation of Christianity had become the predominant faith among the Yi people in the area. The foreigner’s shrine has been rebuilt. Even when he was alive they did not know his real name. The stone reads:

The man who carried the new sun. Born 1876, arrived in China in 1904, returned to God in 1944. This gravestone does not hold his remains. The makers of this stone have lost his name but we have kept his religion.

This man has become a local spirit. His name, unknown to the people who worship his memory, is John Williams and he came from Ipswich in Queensland – possibly the first person from Ipswich to be deified. Tracking down this story, Sang Ye encountered difficulties from suspicious local officials. One old witness seemed to remember that the foreigner had come from a place called Australia, but one of the officials, hearing that Sang Ye was interested in the story because of his Australian links, said it was really Austria.

In this enduringly effective case of cultural exchange, the Australian connection has all but disappeared, suppressed or forgotten. The man who has

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