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NOVA FILM
From: TudiH@aol.com
It is unfortunate that Uyghurs are not in
position to claim their own history
today. Since the Chinese invasion of East Turkistan, Uyghur culture and
civilization have steadily regressed. The result of this destruction seems
to make it hard for people to link those ancient civilizations with a people who
even did not have a single Ph.D. until a decade ago among its 9 million
population.
The modern Uyghurs may not be as pleasant as those mummies to look at, but if
someone really wants to learn the true history of the region and people,
he/she does not need to go that far back. East Turkistan is one of the
regions where "time does not fly." Just as those mummies, the
history is
very well preserved among the living.
I watched the NOVA film on the mummies. It showed Caucasian and Mongoloid
mummies buried side by side. Everybody seem to be very curious, and yet
they do not seem to notice that Caucasian and Mongoloid Uyghurs live side by
side today. In today's East Turkistan, there are plenty of fair skin, blue
eye and brown hair Uyghurs, they are also plenty of Mongoloid Uyghurs. Some of
these people may be mummified. I wonder if their mummified body buried
side by side will prompt the future scholars to search Europe for their origin
if they be found 2000 years later. If the current situation continues,
they
might have enough reason to look far. But, today, scholars can save the
trip.
The NOVA film showed that a piece of bread found in one of the mummy tombs is
exactly the same as the bread Uyghurs make today. Many people in Central
Asia, Mideast and Europe eat bread, but none of them makes that kind of bread
found in the tomb. Even the co-buried wood pan used in making dough
for the bread is same as the ones used today by Uyghurs in the surrounding
areas. There are many other links between those mummies and today's
Uyghurs. It is understandable that the Chinese wants to hide it, but it
should not be ignored by other scholars. Those mummies were
definitely the ancestors of modern Uyghurs. We inherited their looks,
their tools, most importantly, their land, so, we are the descendants of them,
even though we inherited our name from the ancient Uyghurs who were our partial
ancestors as well. The name "Uyghur" has not always been applied to
the people in East Turkistan. America has become a melting pot today
because of its strong attraction as the most advanced civilization. The
ancient East Turkistan must have been a melting pot for a long period of time in
the past. As evidenced by those artifacts found in the tombs, our
ancestors settled down as agriculturalists and artists more than 4000
thousand years ago, but most of our neighbors lived in a nomadic society until
the early 20th century, some are still living as nomads. The gravity
of Uyghur culture must have pulled some of our neighbors into Uyghur society and
gradually assimilated them. Even the Genghis Khan was attracted to Uyghur
culture and hired Uyghur councils in his
court and adopted Uyghur script for his Mongolian language which is still in
use today. Uyghur society is very tolerant to different people as long they
are not aggravated. I remember when I was little old people used to stop
us
if we curse the Chinese. They used to say: "Do not say that, they are
Allah's children too". This tolerant attitude might have served as a
tool in
assimilating different people into Uyghur society. Few people look a
diverse as Uyghurs today. While nobody knows for sure where those
Caucasian mummy people came from, it is certain where they went: nowhere.
They lived on in Uyghurs. Even though the Chinese government claims that
"Xinjiang has been a part of China since ancient times," they are not
so stupid to actually believe it. They know as we do that we have nothing in
common with them. We have different looks, different language, different
food, different religion, different art, different music (while Uyghur music has
all the 7 tones, traditional Chinese music has only 5 tones), different musical
instrument (Uyghurs have much more intruments than the Chinese), different
dancing (Chinese do not have folk dance, Uyghurs do), different agricultural
tools and method (Uyghurs use Ketmen as the main farming tool, Chinese use
Tishang), different cities, different history, different culture, different land
and different temper. If we had been with China since ancient times, where
this differences came from? If East Turkistan had been an inseparable
part of China since ancient times, where or which city in East Turkistan the
Chinese lived before they renamed the land "Xinjiang--the new
territory"?
Why they call it "new territory"? Assume they were assimilated
into Uyghurs as the others, then why did not they left any trace of Chinese
culture?
The truth is East Turkistan belongs to China no more than Vienna belongs to
Mongolia (Genghis Khan conquered Vienna for a short period). China and
East Turkistan is separated by a huge stretch of formidable dessert and
mountain. Until railroad was built, travel between two countries was not
possible for o rdinary citizens, therefore, it was limited to government
emissaries and army incursions. As you can imagine, Chinese lived in
China, Uyghurs lived in East Turkistan.
No matter how strong the propaganda machine of the Chinese government is,
they cannot make truth disappear. They might be able to cheat the gullible
outsiders for a while, but, they cannot cheat real scholars. Truth will
prevail at the end. /
Turdi
In a message dated 9/25/00 8:55:02 PM, TudiH@aol.com writes:
Ancient Mystery - Jeannine Davis-kimball
investigate the secret of central Asia's mummy people
Ed Frauenheim This article was originally published at The East Bay
Monthly, VOL. XXIX, NO. 3, December 1998 Issue The archaeology
is slow, dirthy work. It proceeds a grain of dust at at a time and typically
involves a spoon and a brush, not the bullwhip and six- shooter Indiana Jones
used to pre treasures from the tomb. Once in a while, however, there truly is a
dash of Hollywood-style adventure, as Berkeley archaeologist Jeannine
Davis-Kimball discovered during the summer of 1997. On a research expedition to
western China, Davis-Kimball and two colleagues found themselves wrapped up in a
remarkable ancient mystery spiked with modernday political intrigue. They
were investigating the mummies of the Takla Makan Desert, corpses so well
preserved under the arid sands that the trace of a tear still can be
seen streaking the face of a child buried 4,000 years ago. The condition of
the mummies, excavated at various sites since the early 1900s, surprised the
scientists who first found them. But far more startling was the realization
that these bodies, buried millennia ago in western China, are Caucasian.
They have blond, brown and red hair, prominent noses and deep- set eyes.
Some are nearly six feet tall. Buried along with them were textiles woven in
plaid patterns strikingly similar to those of ancient European fabrics.
Tests on one mummy linked it to a European genetic group. This
caused a clamor in scientific circles. Conventional wisdom has long been
that Western people didn't arrive in China until the establishment of the Silk
Road, about 2,000 years ago. Chinese scholars have claimed, and Western scholars
have agreed, that Chinese culture evolved in isolation, apart from the influence
of Europe. The Caucasian mummies of the Takla Makan proved otherwise, indicating
that Europeans forged eastward thousands of years before anyone thought and
built a thriving agricultural society in what's now China's Xinjiang
Province. Davis-Kimball and her team, with support from the PBS program
"Nova," went to Xinjiang to find out just who the mummy people were,
and what became of them. But they soon discovered that not everyone wants that
information made known. Proof that Caucasians were living in the region 4,000
years ago clearly refutes China's claim of historical sovereignty there -- and,
more important, challenges its hold on the oil-rich province of Xinjiang.
"There's oil down there," Davis-Kimball says. "That's the
reason it has to be part of China." The people native to this area of
central Asia are a Turkic ethnic group trace their ties to the region back to
around 800 A.D., when their Turkic ancestors moved there and, anthropologists
believe, mixed with a people known as the Tocharians. The Tocharians, who
were Buddhists, are thought to have built and ruled a string of cities along
the central Asian stretch of the Silk Road. Study of Tocharian manuscripts
has revealed that they used a language closely related to Celtic and Germanic
tongues; their paintings reveal them to have been a fair-haired, blue-eyed
people. These distinctive characteristics have caused many scholars to link them
with the mummy people, who predated them. Here's where the
story gets political. The Uighur majority in Xinjiang now chafes under
Chinese rule. There were Uighur uprisings in 1990 and '97, which were summarily
crushed by the Chinese Army. To strengthen its hand in the region, the
Chinese government has flooded Xinjiang with some 6 million ethnic Han Chinese.
Though the region contains one-third of China's oil
reserves, 95 percent of the Uighur population lives in poverty. The Uighurs
protest that China has polluted their homeland with industrial toxics and
radiation (this is where China couducts its nuclear tests). China has responded
harshly to the dissent. Amnesty International reports that "a pattern of
human rights violations has emerged in Xinjiang since 1989." China supports
it claim to Xinjiang with a myth promulgated since Mao took control of the
region in the '40s: that China developed in isolation and that this area has
always been part of China -- even though the name Xinjiang means "new
territory." Uighurs have seized upon the mummy pople as proof
that their homeland is historically distinct from China. When Davis-Kimball went
to Xinjiang she stepped into what is lterally a battle over the area's history,
with a mummies at the center. "They were
Caucasoid," David-Kimball says. "This is a no-no for
Beijing." Such a "no-no" that the
government has long been loath to allow foreign researchers into the region.
Though the mummies were discovered at the beginning of this century, it has been
hard to get access to them for the past few decades. More than 30 camera crews
had applied to document the story of the mummies and were rejeted before the
Chinese government gave the go-ahead to a joint project of "Nova" and
England's Channel 4. Throughout their stay, the team of
Davis-Kimball, China historian Victor Mair and forensic anthropologist Charlotte
Roberts were closely monitored by Chinese officials. The officials
even went so far as to plan an elaborate hoax to mislead them, Davis-Kimball
says. On a grave dig supervised by government
chaperones, the team was led to an obviously disturbed tomb that comtained a
mummy that had been neatly decapitated. Davis-Kimball and the others concluded
that the government had cut the mummy's head off to prevent the team from
capturing a Caucasian face on film. "They had taken the head off so that we
would not photograph the Indo- European head, "Davis-Kimball
says. The team had seen the same mummy, intact, along
with several others in the back room of a small local museum a short time before
the sham excavation. Inn the Nova program -- entitled "Mysterious
Mummies of China" -- Mair says
he noticed fungal growth on the corpse that indicated the body had been
recently moved. (The office of the Chineses Consulate did not respond to
requests for a response to these charges.) The team also had
trouble getting into some of the regional museums, where many of the hundreds of
mummies that have been unearthed are stored. Often, Chinese officials would give
them permission to visit, only to change their minds soon after. "We
were on this yo-yo all the time," Davis-Kimball says. "We never knew
what was going to happen next."
So Davis-Kimball and colleagues resorted to a little Indiana Jones-style
subterfuge of their own. With the help of a sympathetic local scholar, they
snuck into one key museum at midnight, avoiding the scrutiny of wary Chinese
officials.
