The Mengshan Giant Buddha & China's Artificial History

My friend and I visited the Mengshan Giant Buddha (蒙山大佛) while traveling through Shanxi, China. I was unable to find much information about it online, but the little that did exist claimed it was among the world's oldest and largest Buddha statues. Despite the statue's alleged pedigree, however, its Wikipedia article was a mere stub.

We arrived at a large historical site hosting suspiciously few tourists. The buildings, monuments, and landscape features looked as though they'd been constructed mere months before our arrival, and we encountered several construction crews still working on major sections of the park.

The most shocking part of our visit was the actual Buddha. After traversing ancient cemeteries and climbing several steep staircases, we finally encountered the supposedly 1,500 year old statue. It was clearly some kind of hybrid. The colossal head looked new and showed very little weather damage, but the rest of the body was so badly eroded that one could imagine its shape was a naturally occurring accident. I searched for clues around the park that might clarify the reason why the statue looked so strange. There were numerous plaques scattered around, but they all said basically the same things in mutilated English. They claimed it was the oldest and largest giant Buddha in the world and that it was built during the Northern Qi dynasty. Some of the plaques said the park had been "renovated" in 2009, but there was no explanation of what that entailed. Wikipedia's stub article claimed the Buddha was "discovered" in a 1980 census. That wasn't very helpful. How exactly does one lose a colossal Buddha adorning the top of a mountain? The lack of clarity frustrated me. We were allegedly visiting an extremely important ancient statue and monastic site, yet neither the internet nor the park itself could explain basic details about it.

After we left the park, while sitting on the roadside waiting for a bus that would never come, I scoured the internet for more clues. I finally discovered some obscure posts that had clearly been translated out of Mandarin by an automated service. The information was sketchy. Apparenlty, there is some dispute about whether the Buddha was "discovered" in 1980 or 2005. Whatever the date, the statue had to be rediscovered because the body was so eroded it was indistinguishable from the rest of the cliff. Furthermore, the statue's enormous head disappeared at some point in history and was never recovered. The current head was carved in 2008 and just fastened on top of the statue. No one knows what the original head looked like, so the renovators modeled their replacement after a random museum artifact. My conclusion was that the Mengshan Giant Buddha is a kind of fraud. The statue now presented to the public is barely related to anything ancient. After seeing pictures of what the Buddha looked like after its "rediscovery," I became suspicious of whether the statue had ever really existed. This was not my first experience with semi-fraudulent Chinese historical sites.

Numerous people told me that Wuhan's Yellow Crane Tower dated back thousands of years, but while touring it I was shocked to see that they had installed numerous electrical outlets and elevators into the allegedly ancient structure. I later learned that the current tower is not much older than me and was not built in the same location as the original tower upon which it is supposedly modeled (the architecture is totally different). The Chinese government labeled the tower one of the "Four Great Towers of China" and a AAAAA tourist site despite it being younger than the average house in an American subdivision. 

Similarly, Beijing's Forbidden City has undergone significant reconstruction within the last few decades and some of it is very modern. Even the commonly photographed sections of the Great Wall were largely rebuilt during the Cold War. I remember kicking up a piece of the Wall during a winter visit and realizing it was partly made of poured concrete. My friend and I also visited the Pingyao UNESCO World Heritage Site while traveling in Shanxi; to my disappointment, I learned the city wall's fortress towers were all younger than I am. Many Millennials are older than half of everything labeled "ancient" in China.

Why does it often feel like China lies about its history? The country's president is older than the majority of its historical sites, and yet the Chinese insist these sites represent China's deep past. Part of the deception has to do with China's claim to having a 5,000 year history. Nearly every Chinese person begins his or her conversations about history with the words: "China has a long history of over 5,000 years." This phrase is repeated ad nauseum as if it were branded into every Chinese person's brain from birth. In reality, China's oldest written records only date back 3,800 years at the earliest, and even their legendary kings were rumored to have lived only 4,000 years ago.

Why are the Chinese obsessed with the idea of having a long history? It's partly about inspiring national confidence. The government wants its subjects to re-believe in China after the nation's massive loss of self confidence during the so-called "century of humiliation."

China continued for thousands years believing itself to be the "middle kingdom." It imagined it was superior to other nations and demanded that every country it traded with should pay a kind of fake tribute acknowledging itself as a vassal of the Chinese emperor. This tributary system came to a rapid end after the Chinese attempted to force the British Empire to recognize itself as a vassal of China. The British Empire crushed China in the Opium Wars after the Qing Dynasty killed several British ambassadors and disrupted the opium trade. China's defeat set off a series of events that clearly demonstrated to her people that they did not belong to the world's middle kingdom. China had treated outsiders like barbarians for over a thousand years, and they felt justified in doing so because foreign races like the Mongols and Manchus who conquered China had somewhat adopted the Chinese worldview and language. Even China's conquerors had supposedly acknowledged her superiority. White Christian Westerners, however, were the first outsiders to both humiliate China in war and treat the Chinese and their customs as uncivilized. The wealth, knowledge, and technological supremacy of the West shattered Chinese people's confidence in their civilization. The West's philosophy, religion, technology, wealth, medicine, form of government, legal system, and customs both clashed with and discredited their Chinese counterparts.

The Chinese people have, for the last 150 years, looked up to Westerners as superior to themselves. Given the chance, many Chinese choose to abandon their country and move to the West. They've adopted Western clothing, culture, institutions, technology, learning, and religion. Becoming like the West has been the Chinese dream. However, the Chinese government does not view this situation as sustainable, if its people continue idolizing the West then the ruling Party's legitimacy depends on how Western it is able to become, and if it fails to develop China into a developed Western style democracy then the people may come to view the Party as having failed. One strategy the government has chosen in their attempt to break away from the West is to lay claim to a legacy that's older than the West. If China is older than the West, and history is revised in a certain way, the Chinese think they can once again rewrite history with themselves at the center. If China is older then perhaps it somehow gave rise to the modern world; a world which was, in fact, created entirely for and around Western Civilization. China thinks it might be able to claim a role in the creation of all human history if it is able to stretch its history back far enough.

One particularly absurd example of this attempt to rewrite history is China's claim to have invented soccer. The fact that the modern sport has clear and indisputable roots in Britain, and was popularized by the spread of the British Empire is supposedly irrelevant next to the claim that a thousand years ago some Chinese eunuchs played a game that involved kicking a sack with their feet. That random historical coincidence now supposedly entitles China to claim a kind of ownership over the world's most popular sport. Ironically, China is claiming ownership of a sport codified and exported by the same British imperialism that initiated their so-called "century of humiliation." The Chinese national soccer team does not play ancient Chinese kickball, it plays British Association Football, but because Chinese history has been made to stretch back into the mists of time everything will eventually become owned by China because it was allegedly inspired by a vague ancient thing that resembled its modern equivalent in some primitive way.

Among the problems with China's claim to being older is that almost nothing in China is old. My parent's house in America was built before almost any structure one can find in a Chinese city. The average Victorian era storefront in a Midwestern American town is older than the vast majority of China's "historical sites." Part of this is because traditional Chinese structures were made of wood, and wood does not last very long. However, Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 destroyed most of what was left of ancient China. Mao ordered the Chinese people to purge the "four olds:" old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Naturally, destroying these olds also involved destroying ancient temples, looting tombs, burning books, and vandalizing the remnants of ancient China. Mao believed that only when these "Olds" had been destroyed could China develop into a modern power like Europe, Russia, and America. Mao also wanted to abolish the written Chinese characters and replace them with a Western alphabet. Josef Stalin eventually convinced him not to, but Mao did simplify the writing system in a way that rendered Classical Chinese unreadable to younger generations. A native English speaker can read documents written in English five hundred years ago, but a native Chinese speaker is often incapable of reading anything written before the 1950s. Unfortunately for the modern Chinese government, it now finds itself in the awkward position of trying to rebuild a unique sense of Chinese identity after its founder was responsible for destroying most of it.

China is trying to exploit an ambiguity in the concept of history in order to rebuild its self confidence. How much continuity is necessary for a nation to say "this is ancient?" The thought experiment involving Lincoln's ax is helpful. Can a modern person claim to own Lincoln's ax if both the ax's handle and head were replaced in the 150 years since Lincoln used it? Most Westerners would answer in the negative, Lincoln's ax is only Lincoln's if it's made of the same materials that Lincoln himself touched and used. Old houses and churches in America are actually the same as the originals because they largely contain the same materials manipulated by the original builders. The average Chinese person, however, would say that just because something has been totally rebuilt by different people with different materials in a different style does not mean that continuity with the past has been lost. Saint Peter's Basilica is a masterpiece of Baroque architecture, and everyone acknowledges its origin in the 1500s Renaissance. If Saint Peter's was in China, however, the Chinese would claim it dates back to AD 400 when the original Old Saint Peter's was built in the same location.

One might be tempted to dismiss this disagreement as tiny and irrelevant, but this question about ancient buildings is a shallow representation of something deeper. Practically speaking, America is far older than China both in its physical buildings and historical memory. The modern Chinese worldview, government, and culture date back to the founding of "modern China" in 1912. Almost nothing of ancient China remains within the spirit of the Chinese people, and whatever has been preserved is an accident of the rural population's lack of exposure to modernization campaigns. The word "ancient" to Western ears conjures up the biblical past: the Roman Empire, the Egyptian Pharaohs, and the Israelites wondering in the wilderness. Why? Because Western history possesses a long continuity of development that makes sense as a steady trajectory. In China, however, the word "ancient" means everything before the founding of the Republic of China in 1912. Why? Because before 1912, and especially before China's embarrassing encounter with the West, everything occurred within a totally different historical trajectory. China's historical development since 1912 has little relation to what came before it. Americans still appeal to a 230 year old piece of paper as a binding representation of their law and government. This is an unthinkably long historical memory when compared to modern China. Mao Zedong, the now worshiped founder of the Chinese Communist Party, died only a year before Jimmy Carter became president, and yet his face is carved in mountains. The Chinese have no broadly practiced historical religion like Christianity to help build continuity with the past, and that's because ancient Chinese religion has been systematically erased since the end of World War II and the Chinese Civil War.

When China tells us it has a 5,000 year history it is asking us to ignore the fact that the Mengshan Buddha's head was built ten years ago at the same time that Justin Bieber's 'Baby' was wildly popular on Youtube. China is asking us to pretend that somehow modern China's synthesis of Western Marxist political philosophy, Soviet artistic taste, radically consumerist lifestyle, and dialectical materialist scientism somehow resembles Buddhist-Taoist imperial China. It's asking us to see a continuity between crumbling neglected pagodas and modernist steel skyscrapers and Louis Vuitton retail stores of Shanghai. It's asking us to believe that the FIFA World Cup started with royal eunuchs kicking a sack while dressed in hanfu. Sorry, but I personally cannot stretch my imagination that far. Reclaiming the "middle kingdom" title should involve more than LARPing and making impassioned but historically baseless claims about an ancient past that likely never existed.

My friend and I also toured a Qing dynasty family compound while we traveled Shanxi. The longer we wandered around inside the more disturbed I felt. The compound felt like ancient China, but I told my friend I just couldn't "feel the spirit of ancient China" anywhere outside of that compound. It felt like the place we were touring belonged to a lost extinct world. There's no longer any spiritual representation of that ancient world in contemporary China. We later passed a street vendor selling old Cold War antiques and I noticed that it was in that man's Mao photographs, propaganda art, and Soviet realist figures that I felt something that actually reminded me of China's relevant past; a past that represented something I was actually experiencing on a daily basis in Chinese cities. Sadly, ancient China is gone. The spiritual core of that civilization and worldview is now as lost as the Mengshan Buddha's original head.

Technically, every country has "more than 5,000 years of history." Every human alive today traces their ancestors back to Adam and Eve, and each generation has inherited a piece of the past despite migration, religious conversion, and great upheaval.

Unfortunately, the study and interpretation of history will probably soon fracture into competing narratives serving various identity groups seeking to utilize it for the development of their self confidence. For the average Chinese person, the Mengshan Giant Buddha is the biggest and oldest in the world, and that fact somehow proves to them that China is great. I've talked about the issues I've written about here with numerous Chinese friends, and our conversations usually devolve towards the same final conclusion: "The point is to boost our national self confidence and make our people feel good about themselves again." 

In this conflict of historical perception lay one of the fundamental differences between the West and China. In traditional Christian thought, the truth matters. The truth will "set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law." Truth will cause deep introspection and self correction, and it is through writhing with self humiliation that true greatness becomes obtainable. For more than a century, the Chinese have been asking "Why is the West great?" The answer is that the West humiliated itself before God, brought itself into conformity with the truth, and therefore obtained greatness. China now has a choice. It can choose to embrace the truth that the West has sadly begun hiding from itself (God's truth), or it can continue to build its national confidence on lies. If it chooses lies, than greatness will simply pass from the West into oblivion while China sinks back into mediocrity.