Last Stands at Luding

Part VII

The bridge at Luding in Sichuan is perhaps most remembered as the site of a “decisive” conflict between China’s rival Communist and Nationalist forces in 1935 during the famous ‘Long March’. For many years the political rhetoric of the Chinese Communist Party has memorialised this battle in heroic terms which border on the almost mythical, yet in recent years the veracity of some of the finer details of this historic event have been brought into question. One writer (Jung Chang) has even gone so far as to suggest the battle never even took place.[1] Another commentator (Zbigniew Brzezinski) has quoted Chinese Premier, Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997) as saying of the battle: “Well, that’s the way it’s presented in our propaganda. We needed that to express the fighting spirit of our forces. In fact, it was a very easy military operation. There wasn’t really much to it. The other side were just some troops of the warlord who were armed with old muskets and it really wasn’t that much of a feat, but we felt we had to dramatize it.”[2] 

I have to admit, the ‘Long March’ and the history of the Communist rise and defeat of the Nationalist Government are a little later than (and so is not really) my direct area of study, but from what I know of the rag-tag political rivalries between the various Republican era Warlords in Sichuan (of which I have read quite a bit) I think there is perhaps more than a grain of truth in this official CCP account when describing the Red Army’s presence at Luding in 1935, it states: “Probably never before had the Sichuanese seen fighters like these – men for whom soldiering was not just a rice bowl, and youths ready to commit suicide to win.” 

And I am sure most of today’s visitors to this chain link bridge, which is said to have originally been built in 1706, will certainly have the heroic story of the Red Army’s exploits in mind as they stand and pose to have their photographs taken on its gently swaying span – with the tumultuous noise of the Dadu River still roaring unceasing and timeless beneath it. Yet, when I visited the bridge in 2010 and posed for my own picture, I had a very different historical episode in mind. A far less well known stand off which happened almost exactly twenty years before the ‘Long March’ reached Luding. 

In 1915, during the constantly shifting turmoil of the Warlord era, Kangding 康定, or Tachienlu as it was then better known (དར་རྩེ་མདོ། Dartsendo, in Tibetan), was endangered by rebel Chinese soldiers. Discontent at harsh conditions and a lack of pay had driven this group of soldiers to mutiny, and, having killed their Commanding Officer, they were now a band of outlaws marauding the countryside, robbing and looting as they went. Eventually they arrived at Tachienlu and laid siege to the unfortunate town.

At the request of General Ch’en Hsia-ling, who was then the appointed Chinese Border Commissioner of the region, Louis King, along with two missionaries, Theo Sørensen and Père Francis Goré, and five delegates of the local Chamber of Commerce, set out as a peacemaking deputation. They were met by the mutinous soldiers and in a heated interview with the rebel leader, Ch’en Pu-san and his men, they established that the rebels would surrender under terms of an unconditional pardon, re-instatement, and the full payment of arrears of pay. The peacemaking delegation thus returned to the town only to be fired upon by the understandably skittish soldiers who were very vigilantly on guard at its gates. Fortunately no one was hurt.

The Commissioner was surprisingly amenable to the rebel’s terms, but, he said, the final decision was ultimately beyond his local power. The matter would have to be referred to a higher authority in Chengdu. Louis King and the two missionaries set out the following morning to meet the rebels once more. Hearing of the Commissioner’s positive response Ch’en Pu-san decided to act immediately and told the peace delegation that he intended to enter the town with his men. Louis cautioned the rebel leader that this would be taken as an act of open hostility and warned that they would be fired upon by the Commissioner’s soldiers as soon as they were in sight of the town. Not – if they were in the company of the British Consul, Ch’en replied! And so, Louis and the two missionaries were taken hostage by the rebels.

A fierce battle duly ensued and eventually under the cover of nightfall the Commissioner and his soldiers withdrew from the town. Tachienlu fell to the rebels, who commenced upon looting the town. Seeing that the rebels were moving further away from their real aim of a pardon, King attempted to reason with Ch’en Pu-san. He proposed that if Ch’en were to maintain order in the town so that it could be handed back to the Chinese authorities intact it would go some way towards vindicating them, demonstrating their repentance and good intentions towards their re-instatement. Ch’en apparently saw the sense in this suggestion and immediately ordered his men to cease looting. He then released Louis and asked him to go to the Commissioner once more to renew the rebels’ petition for pardon and re-instatement. King rode out of Tachienlu and caught up with the Commissioner at the town of Luding, where he found the General and his soldiers consolidating their position. Reinforcements having just arrived from Chengdu. 

Luding Bridge, photo by Ernest Henry Wilson, 1908

Luding Bridge, 2010

The Commissioner was apparently still willing to seek a pardon for the rebels and he telegraphed his superiors in Chengdu to this effect, but, unbeknownst to either side of this stand-off, a second garrison under the command of another General, who was unaware of these negotiations, was at that moment descending on the rebels from the opposite flank. In an early morning attack this force routed the band of rebels completely and those rebels who did not fall in the fight fled. The rebels disbursed as best they could, some even continued in their lawlessness, but there was nowhere for them to hide. One by one they were eventually picked off or rounded up, and those who had tried to go incognito and disappear were eventually caught too and were later brought to justice. Ch’en Pu-san was executed along with his men. “The last I saw of him,” Louis recounts, “was his head only, brought back and paraded in the town he had taken, and spared.”[3]

To be continued ... Part VIII

---

[1] See, Jung Chang & Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (Jonathan Cape, 2005)

[2] Zbigniew Brzezinski, America and the New Asia (Transcription of the Michel Oksenberg Lecture, March 9^th 2005, Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford Institute for International Studies), p. 3

[3] Louis Magrath King, China in Turmoil (Heath Cranton, 1927), Chapter 3, ‘The Brigand’, p. 44

A recent BBC Radio documentary on 'The Battle of Luding Bridge' can be heard here.

A very early photo of Luding Qiao (c.1886-1904) by Auguste François (1857-1935) can be seen here.

Butter Lamps & Modern Thangka

Part VI & Souvenir Series #6

Just a stroll along the main shopping streets and the market area is enough to confirm for the curious that Kangding 康定 (དར་རྩེ་མདོ། Dartsendo) is still very much a frontier town. It seems like you can buy almost anything here: Electronic goods, clothes, food, pharmaceuticals, hardware and building supplies. Souvenirs are not hard to come by either. There are several shops dealing in Tibetan antiques and curios, everything from cheap tourist trinkets to genuine works of art. I perused a few of these shops and bought several strings of prayer beads before I came across the shop that really grabbed my interest.

 

The shop was run by two Nyingma nuns and was filled with all sorts of religious paraphernalia. Evidently this was a kind of outfitter’s store for everything a Nyingma monk or nun might need. It seemed to sell everything from robes and headgear to butter lamps and prayer beads. I’d wanted to buy some presents for my family back home, but I was keen to buy them something which seemed relevant to my trip rather than something which might risk becoming confused with family heirlooms already acquired from this particular place almost a hundred years ago. Consequently I found myself, rather appropriately, looking through a set of modern thangka. These small scrolls were a far cry from the wonderful hand painted thangkas you will find in the temples of Central Asian Buddhist countries or in a number of museums around the world (Incidentally, at the end of my trip I saw a particularly fine display of thangkas at the Sichuan University Museum in Chengdu). But, nevertheless, even though these modern printed thangkas aren’t of quite the same exquisite hand-crafted quality of those paintings now extant in many museum collections, they still rather appealed to me in their roughly glued and wonky nylon kind of way as everyday objects of the here and now. The little prints mounted on them are actually very detailed and well made. And no doubt, setting the everyday simplicity of their materials and manufacture aside, they are still very much objects of religious significance and undoubtedly just as precious as objects for genuine devotion and veneration for believers of the faith. As I leafed through them one of the nuns came over and helped me sort out the various types of deities depicted, and all the while she was devoutly mumbling prayers under her breath. These are three which I finally selected for myself:

Now, to be sure, I am no expert on Tibetan Buddhism or Buddhist iconography in general, but I suspect that some of this blog’s regular readers might be – so I’d very much appreciate any comments, corrections, or clarifications which my speculations here might merit! … My best guesses are that these thangka might depict: a) Red Tara, b) Hayagriva, and, c) Green Tara (?). Each scroll measures roughly 35cms / 13¾ inches height, 27cms / 10½ inches max. width, with the image being similar in size to a postcard, roughly 15cms / 6 inches height, 10cms / 4 inches width.

I also bought two brass butter lamps (roughly 7cms / 2¾ inches max. diameter; 10cms / 4 inches height, each very simply turned on a metalworking lathe). Such butter lamps are an important part of day-to-day Tibetan Buddhism as well as its various festivals, and they can be found in all Buddhist temples. The light of these lamps is akin to the spiritually transformative process sought by Buddhists seeking enlightenment, symbolised by the physical illumination of a flame arising out of an otherwise ordinary ‘everyday’ substance such as yak butter. In Louis King’s time there would have been many of these devotional butter lamps burning inside the temples, indeed there is a sublime but very small and difficult to make-out photograph taken by Louis himself inside what I suspect might be Dorje Drak (Jingang Si) which seems to show banks of butter lamps burning beneath a large thangka painting which is partly obscured by a shaft of strong sunlight entering the temple, with what looks like a row of seated statues high in the roof beams overhead. Nowadays these butter lamps are more commonly found inside special cabinets standing outside in the temple courtyards, this is presumably done as a safety precaution against fire – although as a recent fire at Lithang late last year has heartbreakingly demonstrated ordinary electrical accidents can be just as devastating. These photographs are of the butter lamp cabinet found in the courtyard of Lhamotse Gompa (Nanwu Si).

During his first stay at Tachienlu (Kangding / Dartsendo) Louis Magrath King collected a number of religious objects, including some thangka paintings, prayer wheels, a dagger, and a number of vajra, as well as several small statues – such as this wonderful 17^th century Hevajra with his consort. He donated these objects to the British Museum, presumably when he passed through London on his way to or from serving in France as a Captain assigned to the Chinese Labour Corps around 1918-1919. I’ve not been able to trace any archived correspondence at the British Museum relating to Louis’s donation, but amongst Louis’s own papers he did keep hold of an official letter of thanks from the then Director and Principal Librarian, Sir Frederic Kenyon (1863-1952), whom it’s not clear (but perhaps unlikely) that Louis met; as well as a ‘Deposit Receipt’ for the five thangka paintings he donated which was signed by Laurence Binyon (1869-1943), who was then Deputy Keeper of Oriental Prints and Drawings and a well-known poet, now best remembered for his poems on the Great War. Given Louis’s own literary ambitions it's interesting to think of these two men meeting in this way. Several of the statues which Louis gave to the British Museum are of such quality that they remain on permanent display in the British Museum’s Asia Gallery (Room 33). 

During his second stay at Tachienlu after the First World War Louis was given a remarkable object by the Kalon Lama, Champa or Jamba Tendar (c.1870-1922), who was a senior state official and Governor-General of the Tibetan province of Kham (note: the link above is to a French Wikipedia entry for Champa Tendar; there is a biographical entry for Champa Tendar in English here on The Tibet Album, but be aware all the photos this entry currently links to are actually of the subsequent Kalon Lama who succeeded Champa Tendar after he passed away in 1922). Louis and Champa Tendar seem to have got along very well with one another, and Louis gives his own account of the Kalon Lama’s life in his book, China in Turmoil (1927). The object which was given as a personal gift from the Kalon Lama to Louis as a mark of their personal friendship was a silver teapot which was said ‘to have been in use by the 11^th Dalai Lama.’ Louis duly reported the gift to his superiors in the Consular Service and the Foreign Office and was subsequently given permission to retain the gift for himself. I don’t know where the teapot is now, but I know for certain that Louis did not donate it to the British Museum even though there are similar teapots in the BM’s collection donated by some of Louis’s contemporaries, notably Sir Charles Bell (1870-1945).

Many such objects acquired during traveller’s journeys have found their way into various museum collections throughout the world. It was Louis’s small but significant collection which started me off on this long and continuing journey of research when I was first asked to write about him for the British Museum Magazine. I’ve always been fascinated by these often rather anecdotal stories connected to objects. We can learn a lot about cultures and technologies in different time periods from such artefacts, but it’s also these side stories which can tell us as much about how such objects have been perceived and used in later eras. Sometimes these stories in themselves can make what might otherwise be relatively ordinary or mundane ‘everyday objects’ uniquely special in their own right. I recall once whilst noseying around in a museum store room I came across one such extraordinary-ordinary object. It was a small prehistoric flint arrowhead, much like any other prehistoric flint arrowhead – there are hundreds upon thousands of these in museum collections everywhere – but this one was accompanied in its drawer by a neat little handwritten note which said that this particular arrowhead had apparently been discovered by woodman whilst he was felling a tree, the arrowhead presumably having embedded itself in the tree trunk which (if true) had continued to grow around it. Such anecdotal side stories are often as (or even more) fragile than the actual objects they accompany - for instance, how might we perceive that little arrowhead without its accompanying note? ... This is one of the key reasons why museums as repositories of such folk knowledge, as much as the actual artefacts themselves, are such important cornerstones upon which our human history sits, in which our history can be preserved and shared across time. Every object, whether it is old or new, whether it is a priceless work of art or an ordinary, common everyday utensil, has its own significance and its own unique story to tell.

To be continued … Part VII