In the library of the Anyang Archeological Work Station, the title of a book caught my eye: “Our Country’s Shang and Zhou Bronzes Looted by American Imperialists.” I had travelled to Anyang, a small city in the northern Chinese province of Henan, to study the local antiquities. According to conventional history, this region was the capital of the Shang dynasty, which flourished for nearly six centuries before being conquered by the Zhou, around 1045 B.C. Traditionally, the Shang’s downfall has been attributed to dissolute behavior—legends depict the last emperor as a drunk who filled swimming pools with wine. But this was the first hint I’d seen of any American involvement, and I took a closer look.
No author’s name was listed. The book, published in 1962, contained more than eight hundred photographs of Shang and Zhou bronze vessels (the Shang is one of the most distinctive periods of ancient Chinese metallurgy). For each vessel, the book listed an imperialist collector. The catalogue included Doris Duke (she had apparently looted nine bronzes), Avery C. Brundage (thirty vessels), and Alfred F. Pillsbury (fifty-eight).
A young Chinese archeologist was working in the library, and I asked if he knew who had written the book. “Chen Mengjia,” the archeologist said. “His specialty was oracle bones. He was quite a famous poet, too.”
Oracle bones are inscribed with the earliest known writing in East Asia. The bones—cattle scapulae and turtle plastrons—were used in divination ceremonies at the Shang royal court. I asked the archeologist if Chen Mengjia was still in China.
“He’s dead,” the young man said. “He killed himself during the Cultural Revolution.”
I closed the book and asked if there was anybody left at Anyang who had known Chen.
“Talk to Old Yang,” the archeologist said. “He was in Beijing with Chen when he killed himself. You can find Old Yang just across the courtyard.”
There were only a few people working full time at the Anyang station, which consisted of nearly a dozen concrete buildings surrounded by cornfields. Many of the structures had been built solely to house artifacts. Wind rustled through the parasol trees, and occasionally a train moaned in the distance as it rolled toward Beijing, six hours away. Otherwise, the complex was silent. It had high concrete walls topped by barbed wire.
I met Old Yang—Yang Xizhang—in a dusty conference room. He was sixty-six years old, and his teeth had been extravagantly silvered; they startled me every time he smiled, like the glint of an unexpected relic. Old Yang told me that Chen Mengjia had catalogued the bronzes in the nineteen-forties. Chen was living in the United States then, with his wife, Zhao Luorui, who was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. She had grown up in a Western-influenced Chinese family; her father, an Anglican minister, was the dean of the school of religion at Yenching University, in Beijing.
“That’s one reason Chen had trouble,” Old Yang said. “Her family was closely connected to foreign things. When the Cultural Revolution started, Chen Mengjia was labelled a Capitalist Intellectual. But he was especially criticized because of his Male-Female-Relationship Life Style.”
The phrase was new to me, and I asked what it meant. Old Yang glanced away with an uncomfortable smile—a flash of silver. “It means this,” he said finally. “You have a relationship with a woman who’s not your wife.”
“So Chen did this?”
“I don’t know for certain,” Old Yang said. For a moment, he gazed silently out the window behind me. I asked about Chen’s suicide, and Old Yang continued, “It happened in 1966, just as the Cultural Revolution started. When Chen first tried to kill himself, people saved him. After that, the Institute of Archeology sent me and some other young archeologists to watch him. But we couldn’t be with him twenty-four hours a day.”
To illustrate, Old Yang pointed to the window. It was a sunny afternoon; light streaked unevenly through the trees that stood outside. “Imagine that you’re in Chen’s Beijing home, looking out to the courtyard,” Old Yang said. “One day, Chen walked outside, past the window.” Old Yang made a sweeping gesture, as if following the trail of an imaginary figure moving beyond the range of our vision. “After a few minutes, we realized he was gone. We rushed outside, but it was too late—he had hanged himself.”
Old Yang said that Chen’s wife wasn’t there, because Red Guards had been holding her across town, at Peking University. I asked why the book about American imperialists didn’t bear Chen’s name.
“In 1957, Chen had criticized some of the leaders’ ideas,” Old Yang said, “and for that he was labelled a Rightist. Rightists weren’t allowed to publish. But that book was very important, so they published it without his name.” In his office, Old Yang found a faded Institute of Archeology yearbook and opened to a page of photographs, including one of Chen as a middle-aged man. He had dimples and bright eyes and a shock of jet-black hair, and wore a traditional high-collared shirt. He had the biggest smile of anybody on the page.
Months later, in Beijing, I tracked down another scholar, in his eighties, who told me that there was much more to the story. In the nineteen-fifties, Mao Zedong had proposed replacing the Chinese writing system with an alphabet, and Chen Mengjia opposed the plan. His first major political mistake was a defense of Chinese characters.