#according to china daily the inscription reads:

[cherryfleischer]

Wang Shishen (汪士慎, 1686—1759)

[mandarinclass101]

Cool Chinese characters and Americans’ mysterious relationship

 According to the British “Daily Mail” report, a writer and researcher named John Ruskamp in Illinois, the United States recently claimed that he discovered ancient cool Chinese characters(hieroglyphs)carved on rocks in the United States and speculated that China Humans explored North America earlier than Europeans.

 For centuries, the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus was believed to have discovered the Americas, but ancient rock-engraved markers around the United States could rewrite history. Ancient texts that have been discovered by researchers suggest that Chinese explorers may have reached the American continent earlier than Europeans. Researchers have identified ancient cool Chinese characters(hieroglyphs)inscribed on rocks across the country that may belong to ancient Chinese writing. And these cool Chinese characters may have been carved by Chinese explorers thousands of years ago, and they are engraved with Native American carvings.

 John, a retired chemist and amateur inscription researcher from Illinois, USA, discovered the distinctive markings while walking through the Petrified Forest National Monument in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He claimed that these marks suggested that ancient people from Asia had appeared on the American continent around 1300 BC, nearly 2800 years before Columbus’ ships discovered the New World in the Caribbean in 1492. He also said that the ancient cool Chinese characters found in North America could not be fake, because the marks are as old as the ancient script fonts.

 According to John, these scientific studies confirm that the ancient Chinese began expeditions and actively communicated with Native Americans more than 2,500 years ago. But his views have been questioned by several experts. Experts point out that there is a lack of archaeological evidence that Chinese ancients once appeared in the Americas. John was not the first to point out that the Chinese first discovered the American continent. Retired Admiral Gavin Menzies once said that a Chinese fleet sailed to North America in 1421, 70 years before Columbus’ expedition.

 But John thinks the connection between the Chinese and Native Americans may be even longer. He claims that 84 hieroglyphs that have been identified in locations across the United States, including New Mexico, California, Oklahoma, Utah, Arizona and Nevada, match unique ancient Chinese ancient sites. And many cool Chinese characters(pictographs) that have been tested by experts were no longer in use thousands of years ago. The hieroglyphs found on the rocks in the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, seem to be the writing used by the Chinese after the Shang Dynasty.

 John said that although only some of the symbols were found on the boulders in Albuquerque, the cool Chinese characters that have been identified and confirmed in New Mexico are indeed read from right to left in traditional Chinese reading. In particular, the order in which these symbols are written conforms to the syntax used to record ancient Chinese rituals during the Shang and Zhou dynasties, and the use of dogs in sacrifices was prevalent in the second part of the second millennium BC in China.

 In addition, he also discovered many kinds of ancient cool Chinese characters. In addition, John wrote a book and an academic paper based on his findings, in which he noted that the carvings had undergone varying degrees of weathering and insisted that the rock carvings were real. He also points out that DNA proves that Native Americans and Asian populations share many genetic traits, and thus support his own discoveries and inferences

[araibalibaigsblog]

Gilgit-Baltistan is one of the regions in High Asia that has historically attracted travellers, preachers, soldiers, traders and writers for more than two millennia. The accounts of these travellers are recorded in the shape of travelogues, folk tales, literature, and more than 40000 rock carvings found in the region.

In modern times, the increased connectivity of the region with the outside world has attracted different writers who have explored various facets of history, culture and society of Gilgit-Baltistan. Among the diverse milieu of writers, modern travel writers have played an important role in the representation of Gilgit-Baltistan, creation of perception and formation of discourse about it. However, most of these writings are bereft of academic rigour, scholarly depth and anthropological empathy. As a result, the region has become victim of discourses that spring from subjectivity or created to serve the colonial power and postcolonial interests.

It results in depriving Gilgit-Baltistan of its historical connections with neighbouring regions and events in High Asia and makes the history of region subservient to the subjective definition of others.

The Silk Road was a network that encompassed diverse cultures, regions, ethnicities and religions. There was not only trade of goods, but also exchange of ideas, skills, cuisine, lifestyle and religions.

One of the examples of subjective pronouncements about the status of the region is the reiteration of the claim by some writers that historically the Silk Road did not exit in Gilgit-Baltistan.

Recently, a writer has published an article in an English daily where he claims to debunk the myth of the Silk Road. This article is in continuation of his articles published in English dailies since 2011, in which he rejected the idea that the classical Silk Road went through the region that is now Gilgit-Baltistan including Hunza. Since then the esteemed travel writer of Pakistan is hell bent upon proving existence of the Silk Road in Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral as a myth. One can respect his opinion while disagreeing, but the derogatory tone of the writer using words and phrases like ‘pygmy’ ‘patent rubbish’, ‘ignorant tour operators’, calling doings of his distractors ‘the barking of dogs’, and condescending statement that he does not read anything written on the Silk Road by the average Pakistani’ smacks of imperial arrogance than the attitude of an earnest academician.

This article is an ordinary attempt to debunk this subjective history that manifests orientalist mindset, which takes upon itself to define and represent “Others”, and rejects indigenous knowledge as oral rubbish.

The writer’s attributing the claim of non-existence of the Silk Road in Gilgit to Dr Herald Hauptmann in an earlier article is totally false as it goes against the very research of Hauptman on Gilgit. Hauptmann in his paper ‘Pre-Islamic Heritage in the Northern Areas of Pakistan’ shows different streams of movement along different arteries of the Silk Route. Basing his historical research on rock carvings and inscriptions he states, “Gilgit, the ‘gate to India’, served as the main hub interconnecting the north-south routes from China to the Punjab with the west-east routes between Iran and Kashmir and Ladakh, via Chitral.” He further claims, “The new Karakoram Highway (KKH), opened in 1978, more or less follows one of the main old north-south connections along part of the Indus and Hunza rivers.”

Also, epigraphic evidence from different parts of Gilgit-Baltistan testifies to the existence of Silk Route in the region. Historically, the Silk Road comprised different arteries connecting to main routes. Hunza, Chitral and Gilgit were one of the routes of the Silk Route. Jason Neeli’s paper ‘Hunza-Haldeikish Revisited: Epigraphical Evidence for Trans-regional History’ claims that “such networks of capillary routes connected the main arteries of the northwestern Indian subcontinent (sometimes called the Uttarapatha: ‘northern route’) with the silk routes of eastern Central Asia.”

There are thousands of names of ancient travellers and dates of travel inscribed on the thousands of rocks scattered from Haldikish in Hunza to Thalpan Das in Chilas. Irmtraud Stellrecht identifies primary and secondary routes nets between Central and South Asia in Gilgit, Hunza and Chitral. Among the secondary route-nets one was the easternmost link-route that connected Hunza and Gilgit to Pamirs in Kashgar.

Though the terrain of High Asia is harsh, it did not deter streams of caravans to traverse across Central and South Asia. The writings of travellers who travelled in the region almost one and half millennium ago bear testimony to connections of Gilgit, Hunza and Chitral with the Silk Road. Famous among these are descriptions of the region by Chinese travellers Fa Hsien, Songyun and Hiuen Tsang.

It is an established fact that Gilgit became the fulcrum of fight between Chinese and Tibetan states to control the Silk Road in the eighth century AD. Gilgit was called little Balur at that time. The queen of Gilgit was a Tibetan princess who got married to the king in 740. There are reports that many people from Balur were part of Tibetan army. Susan Whitfield in her book Life Along the Silk Road claims, “Tibetan had established their rule over the small valley kingdoms that controlled the route between the Silk Road and the Gilgit river valley which led to northern India.” She brilliantly shows the altercation between China and Tibet in 747 with special reference to the tale of a Tibetan soldier Seg Lhaton who was defeated by Chinese in Gilgit.

The Silk Road was a network that encompassed diverse cultures, regions, ethnicities and religions. There was not only trade of goods like silk, gems, brass, leather, opium, slaves, perfumery, spices etc., but also exchange of ideas, skills, cuisine, lifestyle and religions. Among the variety of exchanges, the state of Hunza was notorious for selling slaves in the markets of the Silk Road in Central Asia.

German geographer, Ferdinand von Richthofen termed the whole gamut of activities and networks of trade routes the ‘Silk Road’. Perhaps it is because of the heterogeneity of activities and exchanges at the level of trade and culture that Peter Frankopan divides chapters of his recent book The Silk Roads: A New History of the World into roads of faiths, a Christian East, revolution, concord, furs, slave road, heaven, hell, death and destruction, gold, silver, Northern Europe, empire, crisis, war, black gold, compromise, wheat road, genocide, cold warfare, etc.

Among the array of goods and exchanges on the Silk Road, the writer cherrypicks only silk to reject the entire history spanning over more than 1700 years.

There are Chinese annals, which show a relative of Mir of Hunza delivering gold dust to the Chinese as a tribute. According to Irmtraud Stellrecht, “in reciprocity the number and quality of Chinese gifts were fixed.” According to Susan Whitfield the numbers of Chinese and Tibetan soldiers who fought the famous war of mid eighth century in Gilgit were 10000 and 9000 respectively. She provides details of how logistic arrangements were made for the armies. Given the large number of soldiers traversing the then principalities in Gilgit-Baltistan, it is wrong to assume that they did not bring silk or other merchandise of the Silk Road with them.

Even the assertion of silk not being traded in Gilgit and Hunza does not hold true, if we analyse the folk tales, poetry, indigenous knowledge, culture, and more important agriculture, horticulture and livestock. In Brushashki and Shina languages raw silk is called chusi. The popular chusheay chapos (silk quilt) is made of raw silk. Silk cloth is called sikim. It was considered a precious gift, and used in royal ceremonies, public events and weddings. For silk yarn, silk worms are reared on mulberry trees.

Historically, mulberry tree played a crucial role in the settlement of new villages on barren lands in Gilgit-Baltistan. When the king of a principality wanted to irrigate a barren land and settle people there, the first thing people would do is to plant a sapling of mulberry tree for three reasons. First, it provides shade from the scorching sun during summer, secondly it provides mulberry as food and, lastly, and it provides fuel wood in winters.

It is probable that mulberry tree was imported from Eastern Turkistan. Old people in Hunza, Nagar and Gilgit still narrate how women used to tend silk worms to prepare silk yarn. Even if we surmise that those women from Kashgar settled in Gilgit and Hunza as brides, it still supports the claim that the region of Gilgit-Baltistan had cultural connections with major trade centres located along the Silk Route. When the cultural exchange was so extensive, it is improbable that people were not engaged in trade, however miniscule. It is possible that the practice of rearing silkworm in Gilgit disappeared with the decline of trade over the land routes of the Silk Road when the maritime trade increased phenomenally after the sixteenth century.

To this day, the old routes of the trade are surviving in the border areas of Brughal and Garam Chashma in Chitral, and Chipurson in Hunza. Until now, Muslims of Xinjiang use Gilgit route for haj pilgrimage. Indeed when the Chinese started the construction of Karakoram Highway, they had clear idea that it was like rejuvenating the old Silk Road. That is why the then Chinese Premier China Zhou Enlai in 1960s discussed with Pakistan to use the port city of Karachi as a trade conduit for China and agreed with the proposal that it would help rediscover “an ancient trade route but lost to modern times, not only for trade but for strategic purposes as well.”

According to historical documents, this was the genesis of Karakoram Highway (KKH). If Aga Khan Cultural Services Pakistan has erected the signboards of the old Silk Road along KKH, it did so because it can feel the pulse of history.

There are rich sources in the cultural domain to substantiate the arguments in favour of existence of the old Silk Road in Gilgit. The oral folk literature is studded with exquisite poetry, which profusely uses silk (sikim) as a metaphor for refined beauty and delicacy of the beloved. Ustad Abbas Hassanabadi in his Brushashki lyric goes lyrical about the beauty of silky hair of the coquette who spread her hair like a net to captivate his heart. Jan Ali, a populist poet of Shina language, in one of his songs wishes to be hanged on the refined silky hair of his beloved for whom he has abandoned all his kith and kin. A poet from Chilas sings of his yearnings for his beloved in these verses: “Arranging silky adoration for you as bride, You will leave your abode, Jingling the silver-made necklace over thine neck, I will surrender under your doorstep, When you would have been carried as bride.”

In olden times, silver and iron were meager in the region. Scarcity of these metals compelled the people to rely on raw material and sometimes skills imported from Kashgar and other areas of Xinjiang the erstwhile Eastern Turkistan and Central Asia. Even today the utensils of households include old samawars from Eastern Turkistan. Kashgar, being the hub of Silk Road, had close commercial and cultural connections with Hunza and Gilgit. These connections facilitated exchange of goods and skills typical of the Silk Route trade.

For example, the first consignment of guns in Hunza was delivered from Central Asia. When the king of Hunza faced threats from British and Dogras, he hired the services of Adina Baig from Yarkand to make a cannon. Owing to scarcity of iron, the then Mir of Hunza ordered to collect every item made of iron from all over Hunza. In response, every household contributed iron in the shape of utensils and other iron items. With the help of his handyman, Adina Baig made the famous canon of Hunza in 1862, which was later used in the Anglo Hunza-Nagar war in 1891.

The concept of culture not only encompasses humans but also covers animals as well. The kind of animals used in Gilgit and Hunza for travel and trade shows the nature of trade routes and commonalities with the Silk Road. Before the advent of road, packhorses, ponies, yak, camel and donkeys were used for trade on the Silk Road networks crisscrossing High Asia including Gilgit-Baltistan. Among all the animals the double humped Bactrian camel became the symbol of caravans on the Silk Road. It was the best-suited animal to navigate through rugged mountain terrain and harsh cold weather, and it can carry more than 450 kilos of load. Because of this it is called the workhorse of the Silk Roads.

This animal has become part of culture and agriculture of Gilgit. As a child I still remember caravans of Bactrian camels entering Gilgit city on Karakoram Highway in the early 1980s. With the increase in traffic on KKH, the Bactrian camel disappeared from the region. The former governor of Gilgit-Baltistan, Pir Karam Ali Shah, owned the last remaining Bactrian camel, the last of which was slaughtered in 2014.

The purpose of highlighting examples from the domains of culture and livestock is to show that Gilgit-Baltistan was part of the historical Silk Road. Like other spheres of life, the Silk Road has also undergone many changes. Today, the KKH has been transformed into a corridor, but it is not the end of the Silk Road; rather it’s an expansion and continuum of historical process in which regions of Inner and High Asia are experiencing expansion of local horizons into regional and global one.

It is high time to critically evaluate the knowledge about Gilgit-Baltistan that is produced either to serve the powers during colonial times or by impressionist ramblers who have assumed the charge of authority about the history of the region in the postcolonial period.

We are what we think. The collective cultural and historical memory testifies to the fact that the Silk Road did go through Gilgit-Baltistan.

#AzizAliDad

[checkkerface-blog]

People were always interested in the existence or non- existence of chimeras and other mythical and religious creatures. These beings are known mainly from the ancient Egyptian and Greek mythology, but in ancient times they appeared in almost all ancient cultures and civilizations. Statues, frescoes, writings, and other artworks from chimeras suggest that these creatures had an essential role in the religion, culture and people’s lives in ancient times.

One thing, however, was common in them: people were afraid of them and respected them highly. Up To this day, there is a dispute that these creatures are merely imaginary or really existed.

Well, let’s see the the might hidden truth behind them throughout some examples.

What are the chimeras actually?

Chimera creatures are generated by a genetic modification and show two or more organism”s pheonotipic freatures equally or variedly.  Chimeras are considered to be hybrids that are made from two parent gametes (reproductive cells). In fact, this is not true. Chimeras are genetically mosaic creatures can only be generated by directed genetic manipulation when two donor animal cells are interchanged in embryonic phase. It is important to note that this cannot happen naturally, it needs to apply external intervention, manipulation of the genetic material. To sum it up, chimeras are not hybrid creatures. At the current level of science, researchers use cell manipulation to create chimeras such as chimera mice, but currently its not possivle to create different creatures phenotipically (two or more creatures in the same body). This process demands extremely good knowledge of histology, physiology, genetic engineering and very good design skills for perfect execution of these experiments. I wonder whether people were able to do this in the an ancient times :). In mythology, chimera creatures were immortals or demigods.

Combining a created chimera with a normal, wild-type species, heterozygous (mixed) living beings can be created and will present the genetic features of both living organisms. Also many questions arise how these creatures behaved, but according to the old scripts and rumours, most of them were blood thirsty beasts and threatened and ate humans.

Chimera in ancient mythology

I.-Mezopotamia: Assyrians, Akkadians and Sumerians

II.-ancient Egypt

III.-Greek mythology

IV.-Southeast Asian Civilizations

Conspiracy regarding chimeras: the question arises whether the chimeras were existed or not, and what was the purpose of their existence and who were they created by. The history of ancient myths, especially in the case of Greeks, reports in detail that the chimeras were themselves gods, or were immortals and demigods procreated by ancient gods.

They were the gods of the old world and civilizations, and they created the world, and through the religions, they were guided by myths to form humanity

In fact, these beings later evolved from certain species eg from Mushussu to eagle and snake

People who arrived from the future world have created them by genetic modifications for manipulating and religious issues

Extraterrestrials created them exclusively to satisfy creation curiosity or for religious purposes

Let’s see some examples of chimeras

I.Ancient Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia was the first civilization in ancient times where the written history had begun. The territory between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers was populated by three groups of people, Sumerians, Akkadians and Assyrians. Chimera gods appear in all three group of civilizations, and also in architecture and in cuneiform inscriptions. The gate of the former Babylon, Isthar gate also contains chimeric motifs.

Marduk, patron deity of Babylon                   2. Mushussu, Babylon gate

3. Mesopotanian sphinx                                                  4. Ninurta, deity of Genesis

II. Ancient Egypt

In Egypt, most commonly the sphinx appears as a chimera, but there is no doubt about chimeras also were among pharaos. After revealing many sarcophagi, it turned out some of them was not designed for human size. In fact, many gods in Egypt can be considered chimeras, such as Goddess Isis, Horus, Seth, Bastet, etc. Most of them have a human body form with animal head or other animalistic features.

 5. Ram headed sphinx

5. and 6. Ammit, from Book of Dead

A good example for the chimeras is the Apis deity depicted as a large bull. It is very similar to the Greek bull cult where the bull was a sacred animal of Zeus. There are a number of notes proove Apis was a supernatural bull that was much larger than the average, who usually raved with fury and terrorized the egyptians. Apis is usually relating to the ram headed god, Khnum. The historical scripts rarely mention Ammit (Ahameit) goddess, who was the devourer of souls in the underworld. Souls of People who had not allowed to reincarnate and did not pass into afterlife were eaten by demon Ammit. Some source from papyruses also mention that Ammit actually existed and Egyptian priests themselves executes the funerary practices on sinners with the help of Ammit beast who ate human flesh. Notes also mention execution rooms for feeding Ammit.

III. Greek mythology

Chimeras are most knowed from Greek mythology, for instance centaurs, the Minotaur, griff, Cerberus, sirens, Medusa, Khimaira.

Centaur: half horse and half human body

Minotaur: human body with bull head and tail

Griff: lion body with eagle head and wings

Sirens: human body with wings

Cerberus: three headed large dog

Medusa: human body with venomous snake hair and tongue

Khimaira: mixed lion and goat with snake tail, first chimera7. Minotaur                       8. Odysseus offensive method against Sirens

9. Khimaira

The legend of the minotaur

According to the legend, Poseidon sent a pure white bull to Minos king for sacryfing purposes. Minos kept the bull and in spite of Poseidon’s remonstrance refused to sacrify tha animal for the God. For revenge, Poseidon anathematheized Minos wife, Pasiphae who fell in love with the bull.

After that, the Minotaur was born, whose mother had been caring for a while, but soon it became too aggressive so he was isolated in the labyrinth underneath the palace.

Conspiracy

The minotaur was in fact the Egyptian Apis, and since Egyptians visited the island of Crete, they had founded the bull cult and built temples and altars for the god.

A mentally disabled, distorted son of Minos was born, but the king was ashamed of having a distorted descendand so he hidden him from the world. There was no Minotaur, Minos only frightened the population with this creature, because they were in war with the city of Athens.

The minotaur was a chimeric and existed, but the Greek government annihilated all source materials and proof. Catacombs were found on the island of Crete, but the labyrinth of the Minotaur has not been found this day. If they revealed the catacombs under the palace, archeologists could find the tomb and bones, so they would admit the minotaur’s existence

Minos had a very beautiful bull that the Athenians gave him in return for peace. The Bull was the winner of bullfighting series and an exceptional specimen, so Minos was proud and named him the bull of Minos, the Minotaurus.

Parallelism in chimera world

The ancient cultures came into contact and met, and as a result of this the same chimera was worshiped in different cultures

– The Sphinx also appears in a similar form in Egypt, Greece and Mesopotamia. In all three cases, they were known as Sphinx

– in the Greek mythology the centaur was the sumerian verson of Lamassu, a winged protector of Mesopotamia

-egyptian Horus is identified as a god Ninurta in land of Sumerians, an eagle-headed, man-made fowl god

-Babylonian Mushussu was a complex chimera with eagle, snake and lion body parts, in ancient Indians also worshipped this creature

Some supernatural creatures are also known in the modern world such as Pegasus, mermaids and Griff

In acient civilizations there is mostly polyteist. In these days there are 5 world religions, and only Hinduism is polytheist.

IV. Ancient Asian civilizations

In ancient India and China, the wide ranges of theese creatures were worshiped as a god or feared as a demon. A good example for this is the elephant headed Ganesha or the god of destruction, the multi-handed Siva. In China, part of the chimera body is almost  always a dragon, while in India the most common feature is the multiple handed limbs. Chimera creatures appear in the peaceful tibetian land as well: example Naga is half human and half serpent goddess in buddhism and hinduism religions. In ancient asian cultures, snakes were always the symbol of afterlife and eternity.

10. ancient God, unknown                 11. chimera with bird body and dragon head,

12. Naga

To sum it up, I would like to clarify my final opinion: -many evidences exist for chimeras in ancient cultures (hidden papyruses,, fresco, tunnels, catacombs, unrevealed archeological digs) -theese creatures are in many different cultures -people from ancient era had no enough fantasy (no internet, TV video games) so they only drew, painted and written what they really could see-in ancient arts there was no significant fiction -nature WILL NEVER EVER create chimera: making chimera is only possible artifically: this molecular biology procedure demands very good knowledge of genetics, nucleinacid biochemistry, sequencing and cell culture laboratory experience. TRUST ME I am a biologist as well 🙂  Chimera creatures will never be born accidentally -hidden truth is chimeras have a role in not only in religion and in after life, but also in the daily ancient life: sphinx, griffins and ammit beasts were protecturs of the egyptian dynasthy and empire ( I will write about buried tombs under the sphinx later)

So this post about Chimeras ends here now. Thank you for reading my post! 🙂

Chimera People were always interested in the existence or non- existence of chimeras and other mythical and religious creatures.

[goldpeninsula]

Myanmar is one of the richest countries of Asia in lithic inscriptions that have been used as great facility of historical research. In his 2005 book, The Mists of Rāmañña: The Legend That Was Lower Burma, historian Michael Aung-Thwin devoted one chapter, “The Pyū Millennium,” to a description of the Pyu group of the first millennium. It is from this group that the Burmese speaker borrowed Indic culture for subsequent rise of the Pagan kingdom. Aung-Thwin pointed out (emphasis added):

“Indeed, several Pyū-language inscriptions were discovered centuries after the Nanchao raid of 832: one at Pagán in the reliquary of Aniruddha’s Shwéhsandaw Pagoda and therefore thought to be mid-eleventh century, another near the front (east) gate of Pagán with an unknown date, the third, of course, the famous four face of the so called Myazedi Inscriptions of 1112 AD, and the fourth in Lower Burma. ”

Currently held in Pagan Archaeological Museum, the illegible Pyu inscription of an “unknown date” was found near the Tharaba gate which, located to the east of Pagan, is the only surviving gate of the old city. Sino-Burmese historians Taw Sein Ko (1916) and Chen Yi-sein (1960) argued, based on their pioneer studies of the much defaced Chinese epigraphy on the reverse side of the Pyu scripts, that the bilingual stone dates back to the late 13th century when the Mongol campaigns of the Pagan Kingdom were launched by ambitious Kublai Khan (r. 1271-1294) and a subsequent fragile tributary relationship was established. Strikingly different from the traditional way of writing vertically from top to bottom, the Chinese texts at Pagan run horizontally from left to right, in a Burmanized way. The classic characters that have been identified so far read as follows:

Text

Huang Fa 皇法

Yun Nan Sheng Dao Bie Sheng 雲南省到別省

[Bu] Yin Dao Zei 隱盜賊

Bu Can Mian Guo 不殘緬國

Huang Ding Pu Gan 皇定蒲甘

Translation

Imperial Orders

From Yunnan to other provinces

Shall not hide the Rebels

Shall not destroy the Myanmar Kingdom

The Emperor conquers the city of Pagan

In terms of the clear words “shall not destroy the Myanmar Kingdom,” similar content had been recorded in a historical source from Vietnam. In 1292, a Chinese courtier arrogantly told the Crown Prince of Dai Viet (author’s translation):

Several years ago, the Emperor ordered Yesun Temur, the Prince of Yunnan, to launch a Myanmar campaign. The Emperor also ruled an order to ban the burning of temples and palaces, and ban the demolition of tombs as well. The Prince of Yunnan obeyed the order. After the great troops marched into Myanmar, the king of Mian (Myanmar) fled for fear. The Prince of Yunnan had neither slaughtered the Myanmar people , nor destroyed the temples and tombs.

Certainly, the Pagan city had never “perished amid the blood and flame” as a result of the Mongols. On the contrary, it was protected well and left almost intact by Kublai Khan’s edict. Indeed, the physical evidence gathered by UNESCO’s team shows that the damage or destruction of the religious monuments of Pagan was inflicted by natural forces rather than wars. Even the picture of a Mongol archer on the walls of Bagan’s Kyanzitta Umin does not support the “Mongol carnage” hypothesis. The archer is actually aiming at a duck, while a Mongol officer in the same bucolic picture lounges under a tree with a bird of prey perched on his wrist. Instead of a portrait of war, it should really be viewed as a genre-painting of nomadic people.

Historical background suggests that the “Tharaba gate” Chinese inscription, which reads like spoken language with an unfamiliar grammatical structure, is probably the edict issued in 1287 by Kublai Khan aiming to protect the Pagan city. Inscriptions of imperial decrees by Mongol emperors of Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) have also been found in many Buddhist and Taoist temples across China. The decrees mostly included orders on the exemption of tax and fee imposed on these temples by local authorities. The special-designed, fixed format letters of the emperors in Beijing were sent to civil and military officials who were responsible for daily management of local affairs. The original texts of decrees were Uighur-style or Hpags-pa Mongolian scripts, which were then officially translated, based on certain rigid rules, word-by-word into contemporary vernacular Chinese-language. Thus, the Chinese language grammatical structures were mixed with Mongolian components.

Historian G. H. Luce felt puzzled by the seemly anachronic Pyu text. He wondered: “Did [the author of the inscription] ‘encourage the nationalists’ by seeking to revive the Pyu language?” However, considering that in China’s Yuan dynasty, a tablet with edict inscriptions is usually a ban order (as the Chinese text at Pagan indicates), and assuming that the Pyu text is but a translation of the Chinese or Mongolian text (just like the case of Myazedi inscriptions), the following scenario is highly possible: the Chinese-Pyu bilingual inscriptions were aimed at the Chinese and Pyu speaking soldiers, forbidding them to destroy the Pagan city. These non-Mongolian soldiers accounted for a majority of the expeditionary army sent to inland Pagan kingdom by Kublai Khan.

Even though Chinese records stated that Pyu kingdom was looted and plundered by the year of 832, but nothing suggests that the Pyu polity as a whole was destroyed. In fact, the Pyu as a people continued to be mentioned in old Burmese inscriptions as late as the second half of the 14th century, i.e. referencing “a Pyu concubine, ” “a Pyu carpenter,” “a Pyu firewood dealer, ” and so on. More interestingly, according to the Chinese sources that recorded the Yuan dynasty’s Burma campaign, there was a strategic location “Piao Dian”(Pyu Kingdom) commanding one of the three routes from China’s Yunnan province into Burma territory. Particularly during the 1287 campaign, 3000 invading soldiers encamped and guarded the “Pyu Kingdom. ”

Thus, the Chinese-Pyu bilingual inscriptions at Pagan present a narrative that during the late 13thcentury, the Pyu soldiers allied with the Chinese army to fight against the Pagan kingdom. Since then the areas where China met Pyu have become the China-Myanmar borderlands. Still, nowadays, fatal conflicts break out in this same terrain frequently, with peace and stability urgently desired by people across the border.

Image credit: Liu Yun

[rabbitmovers-blog1]

The History of the Cardboard Box

The cardboard box goes largely unappreciated. Yet, it is indispensable to our daily living. It holds all of our knick-knacks and personal mementos when we move or have things shipped. It holds our breakfast cereal. It has been used for countless children’s art projects; fashioned into a robot head or a horse’s body. Heck, it is even in the International Toy Hall of Fame in Rochester, New York. As with a lot of things that have become commonplace, hardly any thought has been put into how and why it is was invented and by whom. In fact, the history of the cardboard box, besides rarely being talked about, isn’t particularly well documented either. However, cobbled together through several sources,  patents, and old forgotten texts, we can start to piece together the story of the ubiquitous cardboard box.

It seems the beginnings of cardboard dates back to China, about three or four thousand years ago. During the first and second century B.C., the Chinese of the Han Dynasty would use sheets of treated Mulberry tree bark (the name used for many trees in the genus Moras) to wrap and preserve foods. This fact is unsurprising considering the Chinese are credited with the invention of paper during the Han Dynasty, perhaps even around the same time (the earliest paper ever discovered was an inscription of a map found at Fangmatan in the Gansu province).

Paper, printing, and cardboard slowly made its way west thanks to the silk road and trade among the empires of Europe and China. While cardboard likely ended up in Europe much earlier than the 17th century, the first mention of it comes from a printing manual entitled Mechanick Exercises, which was written by Theodore Low De Vinne (well-known scholarly author of typography) and Joseph Mixon (a printer of math books and maps, while also believing, rather bizarrely, that the Arctic was devoid of ice because there was sunlight there 24 hours a day). In the manual, it reads:

Scabbord is an old spelling of scabbard or scale-board, which was once a thin strip or scale of sawed wood…. The scabbards mentioned in printers’ grammars of the last century were of cardboard or millboard.

Through this description, it is inferred that cardboard was used as printing material and to be written on, rather than in box form and for storage.

The first documented instance a cardboard box being used was in 1817 for a German board game called “The Game of Besieging,” a popular war strategy game. Some point to an English industrialist named Malcolm Thornhill being the first to make a single-sheet cardboard box, but there is scant evidence of who he was or what he stored in the cardboard box. It would be another forty years before another innovation rocked the cardboard world.

In 1856, Edward Allen and Edward Healey were in the business of selling tall hats. They wanted a material that could act as a linear and keep the shape of the hat, while providing warmth and give. So, they invented corrugated (or pleated) paper. Corrugated paper is a material typically made with unbleached wood fibers with a fluted sheet attached to one or two linear boards. They apparently patented it in England that same year, though English patents from prior 1890 are notoriously difficult to find and most have yet to be digitized, so we weren’t able to read over the patent as we normally would while researching.

Who knows if Albert Jones of New York ever encountered an Allen/Healey tall English hat, but the next fold in the cardboard story belongs to Mr. Jones. In December of 1871, Albert Jones was awarded a patent in the United States for “improvement in paper for packing.” In the patent, he describes a new way of packing that provides easier transportation and prevents breakage of bottles and vials. Says the patent,

The object of this invention is to provide means for securely packing vials and bottles with a single thickness of the packing material between the surface of the article packed; and it consists in paper, card-board, or other suitable material, which is corrugated, crimped, or bossed, so as to present an elastic surface… a protection to the vial, and more effective to prevent breaking than many thicknesses of the same material would be if in a smooth state like ordinary packing-paper.

The patent goes on to make clear that this new packing method isn’t just relegated to vials and bottles, pointing out it could be used for other items, as well as not limited “to any particular material or substance, as there are many substances besides paper or pasteboard which can be corrugated for this purpose.”

A few years after this, the cardboard box that we know and love finally, quite literally, took shape. The Scottish-born Robert Gair owned a paper bag factory in Brooklyn. In 1879, a pressman at his factory didn’t see that the press rule was too high and it reportedly cut through thousands of small seed bags, instead of creasing them, ruining them all before production was stopped and the problem fixed.

Gair looked at this and realized if sharp cutting blades were set a tad higher than creasing blades, they could crease and cut in the same step on the press. While this may seem like an obvious thing, it’s not something any package maker had thought of before. Switching to cardboard, instead of paper, this would revolutionize the making of foldable cardboard boxes. You see, in the old way, to make a single sheet folding box, box makers would first score the sheets using a press, then make the necessary cuts with a guillotine knife by hand.  Needless to say, this made mass producing foldable boxes prohibitively expensive.

In Gair’s new process, he simply made dies for his press such that the cutting and creasing were accomplished all in one step. With this modification, he was able to cut about 750 sheets in an hour on his press, producing about the same amount in two and a half hours on one single press as his entire factory used to be capable of producing in a day.

At first, Gair’s mass-produced foldable boxes were mostly used for small items, like tea, tobacco, toothpaste, and cosmetics. In fact, some of Gair’s first clients were the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, Colgate, Ponds, and tobacco manufacturer P. Lorillard. However, in 1896, Gair got his biggest client yet for his pre-cut, pre-creased cardboard box – the National Biscuit Company, or Nabisco, with a two million unit order. With this leap in product packaging, now customers could purchase pre-portioned crackers in a wax-paper lined box that kept the crackers fresh and unbroken. Before this, when buying these crackers, they’d have a store clerk get them from a less moisture and vermin controlled cracker barrel.

From here, sales of such boxes exploded and by the turn of the century, the cardboard box was here to stay. So next time you are loading your closet with cardboard boxes full of old clothes, buying something off of Amazon, or just opening a box of saltine crackers, you can thank a German board game for first commercially using a cardboard box and one of Robert Gair’s employees slipping up, inspiring a small but momentous tweak that made mass-produced, foldable cardboard boxes possible.

Bonus Fact:

Legend has it that Robert Gair’s son, George, named the biscuits that Nabisco were putting in Gair’s cardboard boxes. According to the book Cartons, Crates and Corrugated Board, by Diana Twede, Susan E.M. Selke, Donatien-Pascal Kamdem, and David Shires, Gair’s son told the executives that the biscuits “need a name.” This, supposedly, inspired them to call them “Uneeda Biscuits.”

This article was originally posted on Today I Found Out.

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