Great Wall in 50 Objects by William Lindesay

Author:William Lindesay [Lindesay, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760142469
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2015-10-26T04:00:00+00:00

32.

Sixteenth Century Typos

Bluestone stele bearing construction records

When I worked as an editor at the Xinhua News Agency in central Beijing in the late 1990s, my role as a ‘foreign expert’ was to improve the standard of reporters’ writing; the most important thing was to avoid printing any errors. Senior Chinese editors would often recall the dark years of the Cultural Revolution, when any mistake – factual, grammatical or typographical – was considered a serious political error, especially in any writing relating to Chairman Mao.

Things were clearly different 450 years earlier, in the Ming, when this small tablet was inscribed. The writer made two cuobie zi or faulted characters among the stone’s total of fifty-eight, rather like our own spelling mistakes or incorrect usage of a homonym or homophone. Surprisingly, one of them is a botched version of His Imperial Majesty’s reign name. The proverb ‘Heaven is high and the Emperor is far away’ might partly explain the reason for the sloppy writing, for this stone was made in Jiayuguan, almost the whole length of the Great Wall away from Beijing.

While the highlights of history always attract the most interest, it is sometimes the more utilitarian artefacts – or, in the case of this inscription, something hastily done in the lower ranks – that survive and challenge our understanding. Measuring just nineteen by eleven centimetres, this thin bluestone slab is roughly the size of a page from a standard paperback, and is inscribed on both sides. Seeing it for the first time, I was struck by four things: its small size; the quite varied size of its characters; the freehand style of the writing; and the very odd ‘layout’. It’s more like a hastily written news brief than a carefully composed and designed official document. Yet this does not detract from its value; on the contrary. Its provenance and errors take us far away from the Middle Kingdom’s centre, the capital region where all was standardised, checked and perfect, to the far-flung western reaches of the Ming frontier. It allows us to see how things were done on the empire’s rough edge.

What we have here at Jiayuguan is an apparently impromptu record of a bunch of workers who built a section of rammed-earth Wall. It’s poorly written on a scrap of stone, cramped in layout, and contains either language mistakes due to low literacy or perhaps a form of shorthand, depending on whose opinion you prefer.

The fifty-eight-character text reads from right to left, top to bottom (I’ll use capitals to denote the larger characters):

[Front] THE FIRST WORK GROUP . . . [In the] nineteenth year of Jiajing [during the] seventh month [from the] first day [to the] tenth day . . .

[Back] MEI STARTS CAI FINISHES . . . first section Li Qing’s team starts [comma] second section Mei Xi’s team [comma] third section Wang Yuan’s team [comma] fourth section Hou Xun’s team [comma] fifth section Wei Zong’s section [comma] sixth section finishes.

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