The Happiest Man in 1901-1904

Item file

It's often incredibly rare to find photographs of people smiling pre-20th century. In fact, you can be forgiven for thinking the smile was an invention of the 20th century, after seeing the seemingly solemn and emotionless expressions of people in Victorian-era photographs. The reasoning behind this was that photographs were costly investments and were rarely taken in the lifetime of a Victorian gentleman. Considering the fact that this photo would likely serve as their identification for decades and for life, could you blame them for not wanting to look silly?

Regardless, that isn't the topic of this post. This post is an elaborate excuse to post this uplifting photo of a photogenic man eating a bowl of rice in China, sometime between 1901-1904. The photo was shot by the Jacob H. Schiff Chinese Expedition (an expedition led by the German scholar aforementioned) and kept in the records of the American Museum of Natural History. What's puzzling to us is the near stock-photo-like appearance, the over-the-top expression, the seemingly flawless dental hygiene. I think it's worth spending a few moments taking in this image.

I mean, when was the last time you've seen an old photo with a guy as cheerful as this?

Chairman Mao: History Figure of the Month (August 2012)

Mao's official portrait, dated 1967

Ask an old-timer to think of a famous Chinese guy, chances are that he'd recall Mao Zedong, 'popularly' known as Chairman Mao. Who is this Mao person, you may be wondering ? In essence (and fact), he was the founding father of the People's Republic of China, a guerrilla warfare genius, philosopher and a die-hard Communist revolutionary. And he is this month's history figure of the month.

Early Life:

Mao Zedong (1893-1976) was born in a rural village in the Hunan province of central China in 1893. Mao was brought up under a Confucian way of life; at school, he was taught classical Chinese stories that preached Confucianism. He later admitted that he disliked Confucian upbringing to the extent that he ran away from home at age 10 (though later found by his father).

After training as a teacher, he traveled to Beijing where he worked in the University Library. He became a Marxist while working as a library assistant (reading Marxist literature) at Peking University and served in the revolutionary army during the 1911 Chinese Revolution.

Chinese Civil War and the Sino-Japanese War:

Inspired by the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was established in 1921, with Mao being a founding member and had also set up a branch in Hunan. In 1923, the Kuomintang (KMT) nationalist party had allied with the CCP to defeat the warlords who controlled much of northern China. Then in 1927, the KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek launched an anti-communist purge.

Irony. Mao and Chiang Kai-shek raise a toast in 1946

The nationalists now imposed a blockade and Mao Zedong decided to evacuate the area and establish a new stronghold in the north-west of China.

In October 1934 Mao, Lin Biao, Zhu De, and some 100,000 men and their dependents headed west through mountainous areas.

The marchers experienced terrible hardships. The most notable passages included the crossing of the suspension bridge over a deep gorge at Luting (May, 1935), travelling over the Tahsueh Shan mountains (August, 1935) and the swampland of Sikang (September, 1935). 

The marchers covered about fifty miles a day and reached Shensi on 20th October 1935. It is estimated that only around 30,000 survived the 8,000-mile Long March.

The Long March

When the Japanese Army invaded the heartland of China in 1937, Chiang Kai-Shek was forced to move his capital from Nanking to Chungking. He lost control of the coastal regions and most of the major cities to Japan. In an effort to beat the Japanese he agreed to collaborate with Mao Zedong and his communist army.

During the Second World War Mao's well-organized guerrilla forces were well led by Zhu De and Lin Biao. As soon as the Japanese surrendered, Communist forces began a war against the Nationalists led by Chaing Kai-Shek. The communists gradually gained control of the country and on 1st October, 1949, Mao announced the establishment of People's Republic of China. Chiang Kai-shek fled to the island of Taiwan.

 Communist China:

Mao and other Communist leaders set out to reshape Chinese society. Industry came under state ownership and China's farmers began to be organised into collectives. All opposition was ruthlessly suppressed. The Chinese initially received significant help from the Soviet Union, but relations soon began to cool.

In 1958, in an attempt to introduce a more 'Chinese' form of communism, Mao launched the 'Great Leap Forward'. This aimed at mass mobilisation of labour to improve agricultural and industrial production. The result, instead, was a massive decline in agricultural output, which, together with poor harvests, led to famine and the deaths of millions. The policy was abandoned and Mao's position weakened.

Mao meets US president Nixon in 1972, a defining moment of the Cold War

In an attempt to re-assert his authority, Mao launched the 'Cultural Revolution' in 1966, aiming to purge the country of 'impure' elements and revive the revolutionary spirit. One-and-a-half million people died and much of the country's cultural heritage was destroyed.

 In September 1967, with many cities on the verge of anarchy, Mao sent in the army to restore order.

1966 also saw the publishing of Quotations from Chairman Mao , popularly known as Mao's Little Red Book. The book later became one of the most printed books in history.

Mao appeared victorious, but his health was deteriorating. His later years saw attempts to build bridges with the United States, Japan and Europe. In 1972, US President Richard Nixon visited China and met Mao. He died on 9 September 1976.

Primary Source:

• The Red Book of Guerrilla Warfare by Mao Zedong

Further Reading:

•  Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History by Rebecca E. Karl
• Mao Zedong by Jonathan Clements
• A Critical Introduction to Mao  by Timothy Cheek
• Mao: A Biography: Revised and Expanded Edition  by Ross Terrill

Freshen Up With Archaeology Friday (Post IX)

Tonnes of news over the past week, here are the highlights.

Three Kingdoms' Tomb Holding Warrior Discovered:

About 1,800 years ago, at a time when China was breaking apart into three warring kingdoms, a warrior was laid to rest.

The tomb (photo from Chinese Archaeology)

Buried in a tomb with domed roofs, along with his wife, he was about 45 years old when he died. Their skeletal remains were found inside two wooden coffins that had rotted away. Archaeologists don't know their names but, based on the tomb design and grave goods, they believe he was a general who had served one or more of the country's warring lords, perhaps Cao Cao and his son Cao Pi.

His tomb was discovered in Xiangyang, a city that, in the time of the Three Kingdoms, was of great strategic importance. Rescue excavations started in October 2008 and now the discovery is detailed in the most recent edition of the journal Chinese Archaeology. (The report had appeared earlier, in Chinese, in the journal Wenwu.)

Live-Science covers the issue well, here.

 Largest Ancient Dam Built by Maya in Central America:
 (Source)

The dam (photo from the University of Cincinnati researchers)

Recent excavations, sediment coring and mapping by a multi-university team led by the University of Cincinnati at the pre-Columbian city of Tikal, a paramount urban center of the ancient Maya, have identified new landscaping and engineering feats, including the largest ancient dam built by the Maya of Central America.

That dam -- constructed from cut stone, rubble and earth -- stretched more than 260 feet in length, stood about 33 feet high and held about 20 million gallons of water in a human-made reservoir.

These findings on ancient Maya water and land-use systems at Tikal, located in northern Guatemala, are scheduled to appear this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in an article titled "Water and Sustainable Land Use at the Ancient Tropical City of Tikal, Guatemala." The research sheds new light on how the Maya conserved and used their natural resources to support a populous, highly complex society for over 1,500 years despite environmental challenges, including periodic drought.

The paper is authored by Vernon Scarborough, UC professor of anthropology; Nicholas Dunning, UC professor of geography; archaeologist Kenneth Tankersley, UC assistant professor of anthropology; Christopher Carr, UC doctoral student in geography; Eric Weaver, UC doctoral student in geography; Liwy Grazioso of the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala; Brian Lane, former UC master's student in anthropology now pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Hawaii; John Jones, associate professor of anthropology, Washington State University; Palma Buttles, technical staff senior member, SEI Carnegie Mellon University; Fred Valdez, professor of anthropology, University of Texas-Austin; and David Lentz, UC professor of biology.

Starting in 2009, the UC team was the first North American group permitted to work at the Tikal site core in more than 40 years.
Detailed in the latest findings by the UC-led efforts are

• The largest ancient dam built by the ancient Maya of Central America

• Discussion on how reservoir waters were likely released

• Details on the construction of a cofferdam needed by the Maya to dredge one of the largest reservoirs at Tikal

• The presence of ancient springs linked to the initial colonization of Tikal

• Use of sand filtration to cleanse water entering reservoirs

• A "switching station" that accommodated seasonal filling and release of water

• Finding of the deepest, rock-cut canal segment in the Maya lowlands

 Alexander the not-so Great: History through Persian eyes:
The BBC radio launched a three-part podcast of Persian history presented by Professor Ali Ansari of the Institute of Iranian Studies, St Andrews University. I recommend it. 


And this is Professor Ansari's article of Alexander the Great:

Faces of Egyptian mummies on show in Manchester:

The portraits painted on to panels that covered the heads of mummies form part of an exhibition at the city's John Rylands Library. The panels, which have rarely been shown in public, were bequeathed to Manchester Museum by cotton magnate Jesse Haworth in 1921.

The museum's Egyptology curator Campbell Price said they depicted people who looked "strikingly modern". The paintings, known as Fayum portraits after the region near Cairo where they were found, were discovered on archaeological digs in 1888 and 1911 by William Flinders Petrie.

They date back to about AD 150, when Egypt was part of the Roman Empire.

Petrie's excavations were funded by Haworth and many of his finds went on to form part of Haworth's private Egyptology collection. Mr Price said the institution was "incredibly excited" to be showing the portraits.

"What is particularly fascinating about them is that the people portrayed by the artists often look as if they are Greek and Roman, rather than traditionally Egyptian, indicating just how much of a melting pot Egypt was 2,000 years ago," he said.

The panels were found by Victorian archaeologist William Flinders Petrie

"The portraits can often be dated by their hairstyles or jewellery - showing how quickly fashions changed almost two millennia ago. They appear strikingly modern and grab your attention in ways traditional Egyptian mummy masks do not."

The University of Manchester's Dr Roberta Mazza, who has helped curate the exhibition, said the artefacts offered "a rare window into people's lives at a key point in Egyptian history, when Egypt was part of a wider Mediterranean world dominated by the Roman Empire".

Papyri containing extracts of the apocryphal Gospel of Mary, the original of which has been credited by some to Mary Magdalene, and census documents are also on show.
The papyri were collected by John Rylands Library founder Enriqueta Rylands in the early years of the 20th Century.
Exhibition co-curator Professor Kate Cooper said the papers showed "a forgotten side of history".
"For example, the Gospel of Mary fragment argues that women should have a leadership role in the Christian church, a view which the medieval Church tried to suppress," she said.

 Golden medallions from Romen era found in Bulgaria:

Some positive news coming out of Bulgaria this week, in light of the recent attack.

Photo of the medallions

Golden medallions featuring inscriptions and images found in a gravesite dating to the Roman era in Debelt, a village in the region of Bourgas on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast, have been identified by archaeologists as being from the second century CE.

According to archaeologists, the graves are those of veterans of the eighth legion of Augustus. They are in the western part of the ancient Roman colony of Deultum, according to a report on July 17 2012 by public broadcaster Bulgarian National Television.

Today the gravesite is next to a street in the latter-day village of Debelt. Deultum, in its time, was known as “Little Rome in Thrace”, the report said.

The find was made by accident while people were pouring concrete for construction. The vibration of the concrete mixer caused the surface to crack and a tomb was found.

 

Krasimira Kostova, director of the Archaeological Museum in Debelt, said that the find was of extremely high value. The valuable gifts were evidence that the people who lived there were of high status.

The finds included golden jewellery and a needle, beads and scrapers used by the ancient Romans for bathing and massage and in medicine as a means of inserting medication in the ears and throat, the report said. All of these were signs of urban life in what was then an important place in the Roman empire.

An inter-ministerial committee will decide what will become of the site. According to the report, Debelt archaeological reserve is the only one in Bulgaria to have “European archaeological heritage” status.

Mona Lisa's remains found in Florence ?

Archaeologists are pretty convinced they have found the remains of Mona Lisa (AFP Photo/Claudio Giovannini)

Scientists claim that they might have found the skeleton of the woman who posed for Leonardo Da Vinci’s most famous painting. Most art historians agree that Lisa del Giocondo was the woman who inspired Da Vinci to create his iconic work.

Now the archaeologists working in Florence are pretty convinced they have found the remains of the lady, merchant Francesco del Giocondo’s wife Lisa Gherardini.

The skeleton was unearthed beneath the medieval Convent of Saint Ursula in Florence. Knowing she became a nun after her husband died and lived in the convent until her death in 1542, a team of archaeologists began excavation works at the abandoned convent last year.

A female skull along with other fragments of human bones will undergo DNA analysis and compared with the DNA data in the bones of the Lisa Gherardini’s children to establish the truth. If the scientists confirm the DNA belongs to Lisa Gherardini, then specialists will try to reconstruct her face and try to solve the mystery of her smile.

“We don't know yet if the bones belong to one single skeleton or more than one,” archaeologist in charge of the excavation works Silvano Vinceti explains. Yet in his opinion the find confirms, “that in St.Ursula convent there are still human bones and we cannot exclude that among them there are bones belonging to Lisa Gherardini

Great Wall of China Longer Than Previously Thought:
 (Source)
The Great Wall of China is already the longest man-made structure in the world but we may have to start calling it the Greater Wall of China.

A five-year archaeological survey done by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH) found that the total length of the Great Wall was 13,170 miles long and reached across 15 provinces.
This is more than twice the length previously thought. In 2009, SACH reported that the wall was 5,500 miles and stretched across 10 provinces.

“The previous estimation particularly refers to Great Walls built in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), but this new measure includes Great Walls built in all dynasties,” Yan Jianmin, the office director of the China Great Wall Society, told the China Daily.

Archaeologists and mapping experts conducted field surveys in 15 provinces and found 43,721 sites related to the Great Wall, according to the report.

“As thousands years pass, some ground structures disappear, and we do not know where the walls used to be. When some local governments or companies develop the land, like coal mining or building new roads, they destroy the remaining parts under the ground,” Jianmin told the China Daily.

The survey, which began in 2007, is part of the Great Wall protection project, which aims to preserve and protect the wall.

“Now we are clear about the location of the Great Wall, so the government can take steps to protect the walls, and local governments are clear about their responsibility to protect the walls,” Jianmin told the China Daily.

Construction of the Great Wall began more than 2,000 years ago to ward off invasions, but only 8 percent of the wall is still standing today. The Great Wall is one of the Seven Wonders of the World and was declared a UNESCO World heritage site in 1987.

Article of the Week: How did Persian and Other Western Medical Knowledge Move East, and Chinese West?  A Look at the Role of Rashīd al-Dīn and Others:

Written by  Paul D. Buell, a professor at the Western Washington University.

The name of Rashīd al-Dīn (1247-1317) is associated with the transmission of considerable medical lore from China to Mongol Iran and the Islamic World. In fact, Rashīd al-Dīn was only at one end of the exchange, and while Chinese medical knowledge, including lore about pulsing and the Chinese view of anatomy, went west, Islamic medical knowledge went east, where Islamic medicine became the preferred medicine of the Mongol elite in China. The paper traces this process and considers who may have been involved and what specific traditions in an ongoing process of medical globalisation

The History of Ice cream

Perhaps one of the most iconic cold snacks of all times, popularized in the 20th century due to the availability of refrigerators. The ice cream has been a sign of a simple way to have a cheap but ever-so-sweet snack during the blistering heat. But the history of ice cream goes back millenniums! In this post, we shall examine and find out who invented (or rather, discovered) the ice cream, when did it go mainstream and stuff.

When Did It First Appear:

Records show that the Persian Empire is credited to have invented the ice cream. According to historians, sometime prior to 400 BC, people would pour concentrated grape juice over snow and eat it whenever the weather used to be hot (apparently, underground chambers were used to storage rooms for this treat).Cities such as Hamedan had seen this occur.

During later periods, modifications and additions were made to the ice cream, such as adding rose water and herbs. By around 200 BC, ice cream appeared in ancient China which was in the form of frozen milk and rice! The Romans soon followed, using snow covered with fruit toppings.

Perhaps the first real mainstream version of ice cream was created by the Arabs in the 10th century, who (for the first time ever) used milk as a main ingredient (heavily sweetened with sugar) instead of the traditional fruit juices.
By this time, it had been widespread throughout the Arab World.

During the 1500s and 1600s, Ice-cream finally appeared in Europe, it was so tasty that legends say that :

Charles I of England was supposedly so impressed by the "frozen snow", that he offered his own ice cream maker a lifetime pension in return for keeping the formula secret, so that ice cream could be a royal prerogative.

Though, it is fair to say that it was largely restricted to aristocrats and the upper class.

Real Ice cream:

Real Ice cream, otherwise known as the ice cream we consume today, was thought to have been invented in 18th England and America. It even appeared in a cookbook [Mrs. Mary Eales's Receipts]:

To ice cream.

Take Tin Ice-Pots, fill them with any Sort of Cream you like, either plain or sweeten’d, or Fruit in it; shut your Pots very close; to six Pots you must allow eighteen or twenty Pound of Ice, breaking the Ice very small; there will be some great Pieces, which lay at the Bottom and Top: You must have a Pail, and lay some Straw at the Bottom; then lay in your Ice, and put in amongst it a Pound of Bay-Salt; set in your Pots of Cream, and 93 lay Ice and Salt between every Pot, that they may not touch; but the Ice must lie round them on every Side; lay a good deal of Ice on the Top, cover the Pail with Straw, set it in a Cellar where no Sun or Light comes, it will be froze in four Hours, but it may stand longer; then take it out just as you use it; hold it in your Hand and it will slip out. When you wou’d freeze any Sort of Fruit, either Cherries, Rasberries, Currants, or Strawberries, fill your Tin-Pots with the Fruit, but as hollow as you can; put to them Lemmonade, made with Spring-Water and Lemmon-Juice sweeten’d; put enough in the Pots to make the Fruit hang together, and put them in Ice as you do Cream.

In 1744, the word Ice-cream appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Ice cream was brought to America via Quaker colonists, and it was thought to have been a favourite treat to the likes of Ben Franklin, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Also, in 1843, Nancy Johnson of Philadelphia was issued the first U.S. patent for a small-scale handcranked ice cream freezer. The Ice-cream cones, sunday and Banana splits became famous around the turn of the century.

Vanilla flavoured ice cream! You know you want it

Though in the UK, it was still expensive to buy ice-cream and hence, Britain relied on imports of snow from Norway and America.

It was only during the second half of the 20th Century did ice-creams become cheap, due to the widespread availability of refrigerators. During this time, companies such as Baskin Robbins were established with mottos like "31 flavors for each day of the month".

An important feature during this time was the invention of 'Soft Ice-Cream'.It was invented in Britain by a chemistry team (of which, future British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was a part of). Companies such as Dairy Queen pioneered the age of soft ice-cream.

But today, Ice-cream is widely available and is relatively nothing in price, when compared to previous years. Ice-cream is now available in more than a thousand different flavours , modified with every country and culture it meets and it continues to be one of the most iconic symbols of the human diet.

Marco Polo never reached China ?

Recently, archaeologists have claimed that Marco Polo, the famous Venetian traveler who was said to have traveled from Europe to Persia, Central Asia and China, may have been a fraud !

As said in the Sydney Morning Herald:

HIS journeys across mountain ranges and deserts opened the eyes of mediaeval Europe to the exotic wonders of China and the Silk Road, establishing him as one of history's greatest explorers.

But a team of archaeologists believe Marco Polo never even reached the Middle Kingdom, much less introduced pasta to Italy after bringing it back from his travels, as legend has it.

Instead they think it more likely that the Venetian merchant adventurer picked up second-hand stories of China, Japan and the Mongol Empire from Persian merchants he met on the shores of the Black Sea, thousands of kilometres short of the Orient.

He then cobbled them together with other scraps of information for what became a best-selling account, A Description of the World, one of the first travel books.

The archaeologists point in particular to inconsistencies and inaccuracies in his description of Kublai Khan's attempted invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281. ''He confuses the two, mixing up details about the first expedition with those of the second. In his account of the first invasion, he describes the fleet leaving Korea and being hit by a typhoon before it reached the Japanese coast,'' said Daniele Petrella of the University of Naples, the leader of an Italian archaeological project in Japan. ''But that happened in 1281 - is it really possible that a supposed eyewitness could confuse events which were seven years apart?''

Marco Polo's description of the Mongol fleet is sharply at odds with the remains of ships that the team have excavated in Japan. The Venetian wrote of five-masted ships, when they had only three masts, said Professor Petrella.

''It was during our dig that doubts began to emerge about much of what he wrote,'' he told the latest edition of Focus Storia, an Italian history magazine.

''When he describes Kublai Khan's fleet he talks about the pitch that was used to make ships' hulls watertight. He used the word chunam, which in Chinese and Mongol means nothing. In fact it is the Persian word for pitch. It's also odd that instead of using, as he does in most instances, local names to describe places, he used Persian terms for Mongol and Chinese place names.''

The explorer claimed to have worked as an emissary to the court of Kublai Khan, but his name does not crop up in any of the surviving Mongol or Chinese records.

The Italian archaeologists' scepticism over the extent of Marco Polo's travels adds weight to a theory put forward by a British academic. In a book published in 1995, Did Marco Polo Go to China?, Frances Wood, the head of the Chinese section at the British Library, argued that he probably did not make it beyond the Black Sea.

She pointed out that despite being an acute observer of daily life and rituals, there is no mention in Marco Polo's chapters on China of the custom of binding women's feet, chopsticks, tea drinking, or even the Great Wall.

''There's nothing in the Venetian archives to say that the Polo family had direct contact with China at all,'' Dr Wood said yesterday. ''Nothing from China has ever been found in the possessions they left behind.

''One theory is that Marco Polo copied a sort of guide book on China written by a Persian merchant. Only about 18 sentences in the entire manuscript are written in the first person.''

If proven to be true, this is a complete turn-around from what we've been taught in school. And we can simply say that [if true], Marco Polo may have been one of the greatest conman to ever scam the world!

This would , at least how I view it, an embarrassment to Europe (and to Venice too) to realize that one of their greatest explorers was a fraud.