Chapter 91: All Under Heaven (1)

In 1922, Sir Kanaphon, a British archaeologist, excavated the tomb of King Tutankhamun of Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty, and the trove of treasures unearthed there, so vast in number and so immense in value, shook the whole world. During my years studying in Britain, I was fortunate enough to see some of those relics from thousands of years ago in the major museums, including pharaohs’ mummies. Each object was priceless, no less extraordinary than what is preserved in the National Museum of China.

After hearing Cha Wenbin’s talk of a curse, Old Gu continued:
“Yet something even more sensational happened fifty-one months later: every single worker and archaeologist from the first entry into Tutankhamun’s tomb fell ill with a mysterious disease and died in pain, with no exceptions. Even Sir Kanaphon, who organized the excavation, was not spared.
For the sixty years that followed, archaeologists and medical experts tried every means imaginable to solve the mystery of those initial deaths, but to no avail. So many people could only attribute this inexplicable mass death to the Pharaoh’s curse: that an ancient Egyptian king, fearing his tombs might be violated after death, cast a spell to curse all who dared intrude upon his forbidden burial chambers, and that Kanaphon and his men had been cursed and killed.”

“By principle, I am a believer in science. Though I have personally seen things science cannot explain, I truly could not accept such a story, absurd as it sounds.”

“Is there really a curse?”

“Concerning the Tutankhamun curse, in 1974 I at Cambridge University attempted to put forward the idea that this ancient curse came from the far East—from China. At that time I quoted a passage from the Classic of the Great Wilderness, Western Canon: ‘To the south of the Western Sea, on the edge of moving sand, beyond the Red Water and before the Black Water, stands a great mountain called the Kunlun Mound. A divinity dwells there, with a human face and a tiger’s body, marked, with a tail, all white.’
As everyone knows, Egypt’s sphinx-like creature has long remained an unsolved mystery, yet in our Classic of the Great Wilderness it clearly says there is a deity with a tiger body.”

Cha Wenbin interrupted Old Gu’s account: “That passage refers to the Kunlun lineage, from today’s Bashu all the way to the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau.”

Gu smiled and asked, “Then tell me, does the Xia dynasty truly exist? Are the ages of Yao, Shun, and Yu legend or merely myth?”

Cha Wenbin was still thinking when Old Gu went on:
“Not a single text or excavated artifact can prove that history. It is like the time when we could not prove the existence of the Yin-Shang dynasty. Archaeology is a science; it relies on demonstration. Only in 1928, after the Yin-Shang ruins were excavated at Anyang in Henan, was that dynasty officially established. I understand that Master Cha is a man of native Chinese religion in the Daoist tradition. So let me ask you, is Jiang Ziya’s Investiture Register true or false?”

Cha smiled wryly: “In my heart, it is true; but if the teacher asks me for proof, I cannot prove it, just as one cannot, by the same token, prove whether the Xia dynasty existed.”

Old Gu waved it away. “It does not matter. Science can begin with hypotheses: first propose, then prove or refute. Suppose those dynasties truly existed, and suppose all those legends are true as well. Then let us suppose that from Yandi through Yu, the emperors in early Chinese history actually ruled over all of Asia and North Africa. In that case, the first dynasty of ancient Egypt was in fact a dynasty founded by Yandi’s line of descendants.
And what you call Sumerian civilization in the Mesopotamian valley was really what I call the Shouma civilization. Shouma, Sanmiao, and Sumer were one and the same people. The so-called Akkad of the two rivers is, in fact, the Cantonese rendering of ‘Xia-kai-emperor.’ The Xia-kai empire ruled all of Asia and Egypt, and Emperor Yao of China was in fact an Egyptian. I know you will not accept this lightly. But do not hurry—science has long maintained that human origin lies in Africa, and world civilization spread from Africa to every corner of the globe.”

“In Chinese ancient studies, it has long been believed that Chinese civilization originated in the Yellow River basin and was dominated by the Central Plain. I hold a conservative view to the contrary. Not only does the Xia dynasty exist; it was an enormous, unprecedented empire. The name ‘Xia,’ in fact, is not to be read as ‘Xia’ in the usual way but as the Cantonese sound ‘Ha.’ What we call Xiahou should also be read as Hau-hoi. The dynasty of Xia-hou was established by the Xia-hou clan itself. The Xia-hou dynasty was, in essence, the Aha dynasty around 3000 BCE. Its capital was not in Egypt, but in the Yungui-Chuan region of China, and very likely in western Sichuan.
At that time Yungui-Chuan was the center of the world, the region of the dynastic capital of Yandi in Chinese antiquity. By 3000 BCE the Xia-hou, that is, the Aha dynasty, was already a vast empire covering all of Asia and North Africa.
What is called ‘the loss of the Tai-kang realm’ was in truth the fall of the Aha-descended Xia-hou realm’s Bo-ling, who squandered rule because of his lust for a woman. Bo-ling of the Xia-hou is the same figure as the much-talked-of Enmei Baragasi found on Mesopotamian clay tablets. Enmei Baragasi comes from a Western transliteration of cuneiform texts, and in fact it is the Cantonese rendering of Gao-mi Bo-ling Gao Xin.

“By roughly 2800 BCE, ancient times were no longer what textbooks call a primitive age. The people were prosperous, but it was a world run by unbridled desire, with morals deeply corrupt. Bo-ling, descendant of Yandi, and Han-liu of the Yellow Emperor’s line fought an ancient world war over a woman; eventually the Yandi branch led by Bo-ling lost imperial rule.
After that, Xia-hou Qi marched west into Western Asia and restored Asia, but the empire soon fragmented. Afterward the Yelang dynasty shut itself off and closed its borders for 471 years, until the Yin invasion in 1598 BCE, when the Xia-hou dynasty established by Yelang formally ended. That Yelang people persisted for two thousand years, and by the time of the Western Han they had disappeared.
That, then, is the main historical thread from around 3000 BCE to 1598 BCE. In Chinese old records, especially after the Qin Fire, most accounts of early Chinese history are based on folk legend and contain enormous error. What is recorded as Xia history is, in truth, history from the time of Yandi onward.”

By then I was lost in a cloud of confusion. I cared only about the curse that Cha Wenbin had raised, so I asked, “How does this relate to the curse?”

“Listen first to the rest,” he said. “In the ancient world, power belonged to religion. It is said that in former times, when the Xia lineage assumed imperial rule, distant kingdoms offered tribute maps of all things. The rulers of the Nine Regions brought inexhaustible tribute of gold. Yu of Xia cast the tripods and engraved all things upon them so that everything was recorded and the people could distinguish gods and spirits.
The phrase ‘governor of the Nine Regions,’ when speaking of Yu, is important. The character rendered as mu (牧) is in fact a shaman’s character. In antiquity, the true rulers of each region were great shamans, not, as later, the Yuzhou governor Liu Bei was in the age of the Three Kingdoms. At Yu’s time, the nine shamans—that is, the Nine Regions’ governors—submitted maps. This shows that Yu in fact ruled the Nine Regions. His domain, in the old accounts, included all of Asia, eastern North Africa, and even Alaska in America. From this you can see how terrifyingly he dominated the world.

“How can I state this with such confidence? Records of Yu’s flood control appear in the civilizations of the whole world.
In the Book of Genesis, the Bible says that because humanity had grown corrupt, God resolved to destroy the world’s civilization and commanded Noah to build a colossal ark, placing at least one pair of every living species inside. The great waters came and swept away every creature on earth, while only those aboard Noah’s ark were preserved. When the waters withdrew, Noah and his family lived on new land, becoming ancestors of the peoples of the Middle East.
In the Mesopotamian plain’s legend, the wind god and king of the gods, Enlil, found humans too noisy and riotous, so he sent flood, drought, and plague to exterminate them. Yet benevolent Enki taught Atrahasis irrigation, grain storage, and medicine, and thus humanity survived.

“And among the Maya Indians there is a sacred text they cherish as life-giving—The Wujing—which also records this same flood sent in divine wrath. It says that at the beginning of heaven and earth’s creation, the god fashioned humans as a sort of trial, but it was not a clean experiment. First the divine being carved human figures from wood and made them speak. In time these wooden men lost favor, for they forgot their creator. So the god resolved to unleash a flood to destroy mankind.
Do not these wooden men resemble the Yandi-era tale of Nüwa creating humanity?”

“I will continue,” he said. “The Classic of Mountains and Seas, the Inner Domain chapter, says: ‘The waters rose in overwhelming flood; Gun stole Xirang soil to submerge them.’ In Mencius, the Teng Wengong chapter records: ‘When Yao’s time had passed, all beneath heaven was not yet at peace. Floodwaters streamed in every direction, inundating all the realm; the water even ran backward and overflowed China.’
And in the 1979 joint survey by UNESCO and Chinese scholars, excavations along China’s East Sea coast all pointed to the same thing: there was once a time when the shoreline lay far farther out than it is now. That period is roughly dated between 3000 and 2000 BCE.

“What does this mean? It means that the so-called flood in the center of all civilization’s origins occurred in ancient China, and that in that age Yu the Great was the ruler of the world.
After Yu cast the Nine Tripods, they were enshrined in ancestral temples, and no outsider could see their true forms.
From then on, the Nine Tripods became symbols of sovereignty and objects for the whole realm to struggle over. If they were only nine bronze vessels—however precious, even if made of gold, their material value was limited—why would heroes of all ranks fight for them?”

Cha replied, “A symbol of imperial authority, like the Heirloom Seal of the Realm. The ancients prized legitimacy above all.”

“No. What they fought for was not the brass tripods themselves, but the world maps and inventories of the world’s resources engraved upon them. Their value surpassed the metal itself. The witchcraft formulas, maps, transport routes, guides to minerals, charts of desert water resources, and distributions of animals and plants carved there were, at the time, an encyclopedic treasure beyond measure. Whoever held them had the basis for asking to hold and then rule the whole world.
It was just like the Dragon-Slaying Saber in Master Jin Yong’s novels—once the Divine-Sword appeared, who could contend with it? The treasured blade gave commands the whole realm dared not ignore; only later did Zhang Wuji understand how a single sword could command the world, when he realized it was the military compendium hidden within, the Wumu Legacy, that gave it its power.

He then addressed the reader directly:
Dear readers, in this chapter, read carefully. The amount of information is enormous.