Abstract
This essay challenges the French poet, naval doctor, archaeologist and sinologist Victor Segalen’s established image as a literary modernist who broke with colonial exoticism. I use a set of previously understudied primary sources, including Segalen’s own travel journals, archaeological accounts, letters and photo albums, as well as Chinese gazetteers and a stele inscription documenting his excavation of a tomb associated with Bao San Niang 鮑三娘 – the supposed daughter-in-law of the famous Chinese general Guan Yu 關羽. Through a study combining both textual and field investigations, this article not only points out the disjuncture between Segalen’s progressive theory and his actual practice, but also questions the tendency among critics – both Western and Chinese – to overstate Segalen’s contribution to East–West cross-cultural representation, while intentionally omitting his exploitative deeds.
Few would deny that Victor Segalen (1878–1919) has today become a flagship figure of East–West cultural encounters. The French doctor, explorer, archaeologist and poet is widely revered as a modernist writer whose aesthetics of diversity stands in sharp contrast to the colonial exoticism of such nineteenth-century writer–travellers as Pierre Loti and Rudyard Kipling (see, for example, Moyer, 2010). More specifically, his famous collection of prose poems, Stèles, is often compared to Ezra Pound’s Cathay, insofar as both works offer prime examples of how Western modernists borrowed elements from ancient China to enrich their own poetic traditions at home (see Taylor, 2006, among other examples). But although critics sometimes highlight the fact that, unlike Pound, Segalen spent years living in China and was familiar with the Chinese language (Klein, 2007), they have thus far paid little attention to how Segalen, as a military doctor and archaeologist, dealt with Chinese realities. My article sets out to fill this lacuna by shifting focus away from Segalen’s literary reconstruction of China to his physical contact with living Chinese. In particular, I seek to show how Segalen’s progressive theory of cross-cultural dialogue could depart significantly from his actual behaviour on Chinese soil.
Indeed, despite the ongoing critical frenzy over Segalen’s China-inspired works in both France and North America, most commentators are likely unaware that on the outskirts of Zhaohua 昭化District in northern Sichuan Province there still stands a stone tablet erected in 1914 commemorating the illustrious woman warrior of the Three Kingdoms period, Bao San Niang 鮑三娘, which bears Segalen’s Chinese name Xie Gelan 謝閣蘭, calling him a ‘Special Envoy from the French Hanlin Academy’. What does Segalen have to do with a Three Kingdoms woman warrior buried in a desolate Chinese hamlet? How did Segalen, a modernist advocate of Chinese steles as a new medium for poetic expression, wind up having his own name engraved on a real Chinese stele? My essay sets out to solve this puzzle, using a combination of both textual and field investigations.
The 1914 archaeological mission
The 1914 archaeological mission undertaken by Victor Segalen, Auguste Gilbert de Voisins and Jean Lartigue was officially financed by the French government. In fact, the beginning of the twentieth century saw a surge in French ‘missions’ in China’s relatively unknown south-west, as hydrographic surveys, archaeological excavations and new Catholic parishes all vied for Paris’s attention. When planning his 1914 expedition, Segalen explicitly saw his programme as a continuation of three previous French undertakings, namely, Édouard Chavannes’s fieldwork in northern China, Louis Audemard’s survey of the upper Yangtze River, and Jacques Bacot’s voyages in eastern Tibet.
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Most notably, Segalen acknowledged the mission’s funders as follows: Organisée sous les auspices du Ministère de l’Instruction publique et de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres – qui lui attribua les arrérages du fonds Garnier – la mission bénéficiait en outre d’une contribution importante de la Bibliothèque d’art et d’archéologie. Elle avait trouvé dans sa préparation le meilleur appui auprès de la légation de France à Péking.
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(Segalen, 1915: 469)
Concurrently and anecdotally, Segalen served in October 1912 as the private doctor of Yuan Keding, whose father, Yuan Shikai, had just been sworn in as Provisional President of the newly founded Republic of China in March of that year (Segalen, 1995, 1: lxviii). It is, however, hard to ascertain whether and to what extent Segalen relied on his personal connections with Yuan Shikai – still in office in 1914 – to secure official support from the Chinese government.
My interest here is not in tracing this strenuous trek diagonally across China from A to Z, but rather to focus on Segalen and Voisins’s excavation of the tomb attributed to Bao San Niang – the presumed daughter-in-law of the famous Chinese general Guan Yu 關羽 – from 1 to 4 April 1914. According to Segalen (2004, 2: 370), the digs in Zhaohua were ‘les premières faites par des Européens dans une sépulture chinoise’ (italics in original). For Anne McLaren (1998: 251), no positive evidence associates the tomb dug by Segalen with Bao San Niang, who ‘remains a legendary figure’. Yet, quoting Tan Liangxiao, curator of the Wuhou Museum in Chengdu, McLaren admits that the exploits of Bao San Niang and her husband Guan Suo 關索, the supposed youngest son of Guan Yu, are widely celebrated in China through vernacular chantefables. To some extent, owing to the scanty references to Guan Suo and Bao San Niang in both the Records of the Three Kingdoms 三國誌 and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms 三國演義, one may indeed question the couple’s verifiability, and thereby their status as real historical figures. But the authenticity of her exploits aside, there is little doubt Bao San Niang has long been, and still is, the object of a popular cult in Zhaohua. In fact, both the Chinese chronicles I have so far consulted and the stele inscription in front of the burial mound ascribed to her in Zhaohua hold her to be Guan Suo’s spouse. Regardless of the tomb’s ownership, however, there is ample evidence that on 2 April 1914, Segalen unwittingly forced his way into, if not outright ‘looted’, a site of worship for Zhaohua locals. 3
Photos, letters, and notebooks: a French narrative
Segalen kept meticulous track of his second expedition in China, spanning 1 February to 23 August 1914, which gave birth to a series of reports, letters, travelogues and photo albums. Among this large corpus, the most relevant record is a chronological set of notebooks, or ‘cahiers’ in Segalen’s words, that he drafted daily during his journey. Here I rely heavily on these valuable yet previously understudied notebooks, which are featured under the rubric Feuilles de route in Segalen’s Œuvres complètes (1995, 1: 961–1249). The second, and equally informative, material under scrutiny is Segalen’s Premier exposé des résultats archéologiques obtenus dans la Chine occidentale par la mission Gilbert de Voisins, Jean Lartigue et Victor Segalen, originally published in three successive issues of the Journal Asiatique in 1915 and 1916. 4 As has often been noted, this scholarly report was translated into Chinese by Feng Chengjun (1932) as early as the 1930s under the title 中國西部考古記 (Account of the Archaeological Missions in Western China), which immediately made Segalen a household name in Chinese archaeological circles. Parallel to the composition of archaeological records, Segalen also kept up a regular and timely correspondence with a number of people, notably his wife Yvonne and the expedition’s two main scientific supervisors, Henri Cordier and Édouard Chavannes (both renowned sinologists and members of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres at the Institut de France). 5 In addition, Segalen frequently indulged in flights of poetic fantasy while conducting fieldwork along the journey. This constant shifting between imagination and reality not only culminated in a collection of semi-fictional travel journals dubbed Équipée: Voyage au pays du réel (Segalen, 1995, 2: 261–320), but also provided the bedrock for his aesthetic musings on Chinese statuary in Chine, la grande statuaire (Segalen, 1995, 2: 745–891). 6
On top of Segalen’s textual legacy, I will also probe a few particularly evocative photographic negatives bearing the memory of the excavation activities in Zhaohua. The first is a card with Segalen’s own handwriting (Figure 1), the second a group photo featuring him and Voisins surrounded by Chinese peasants (Figure 2). 7 Now in the public domain, 8 these images allow us to relive a riveting episode of Sino–French cultural encounters.
Card showing Segalen’s handwriting (source: gallica.bnf.fr / BnF).
Segalen and Voisins pose in a group photo at the entrance to Bao San Niang’s tomb; Segalen is on the left, Voisins on the right (source: gallica.bnf.fr / BnF). When first released in 1923, this image bore the title ‘Tombe de PAO SAN-NIANG: Pendant les travaux de déblaiement: Victor Segalen, Gilbert de Voisins et le sous-préfet de Tchao-houa hien’ (Segalen et al., 1923: planche LVII).
On the card, Segalen writes, ‘Entrée à demi déblayée du caveau de Pao San Niang 鮑三娘, des Trois Royaumes (220–265) ap J.C. à 10 li N de Tchao Houa hien 昭化縣’. 9 This brief note casts much light on the following group photo, in which Segalen, dressed in a dark uniform, emaciated and grave faced, stands alongside Voisins next to the newly unblocked entrance of Bao San Niang’s tomb. Handpicks, hoes and shovels are randomly posed. Except for Voisins, who appears to chuckle slyly at the cameraman, nobody looks particularly enthusiastic. That said, most Chinese bystanders in the backdrop, especially the children, are barely hiding their curiosity upon seeing, perhaps for the first time in their life, a foreign camera.
Like any first impression, my interpretation here barely scratches the surface of a gripping moment of Sino-French cultural encounters. There is indeed much to say about Segalen’s digs in Zhaohua, especially the frictions between the two Frenchmen, the Chinese officials to their side, and the doubtful, if not totally xenophobic, locals. Luckily in this respect, Segalen’s notebooks and letters provide many vital clues.
Specifically, on the heels of Sinologists such as Paul Pelliot and Édouard Chavannes, 10 Segalen relied heavily throughout his 1914 mission on the inventories of burial sites he found in various Chinese chronicles and gazetteers, in particular the Sichuan Tongzhi 四川通誌 (General History of Sichuan Province), 11 which he used as a handy means of identifying potential places of interest. These Chinese primary sources, if not yet guidebooks per se, considerably facilitated his probes, occasionally leading him to lesser-known locations. This was exactly the case with Bao San Niang’s tomb in Zhaohua.
As has often been noted, Segalen, a vocal detractor of Buddhist iconography, was obsessed with what he called ‘la plus pure origine sinique’ (Segalen, 1995, 2: 962) of Chinese art prior to the propagation of Buddhism in China during the third century CE. 12 In Segalen’s eyes, this pristine and consummate form of ancient Chinese art, uncontaminated by all foreign influence, is encountered primarily in funerary artefacts, such as statues, steles and stone pillars, of the Han dynasty. 13 Admittedly, Segalen’s penchant for Han relics helps explain his interest in Bao San Niang’s tomb. Yet this legendary woman warrior did not exactly live in either of the two Han dynasties (206 BCE–220 CE), but rather in the Shu Han 蜀漢 state (221–263 CE), founded by Liu Bei 劉備 during the Three Kingdoms period, which claimed to be a legitimate continuation of the Eastern Han court (25–220 CE).
Mentioned only passingly in the Sichuan Tongzhi, Bao San Niang’s tomb nonetheless turned out to be a real treasure trove for Segalen, as he writes in his Premier exposé: ‘Il restait à pénétrer dans un tombeau. C’est ce que nous avons pu faire, pour la première fois en Chine, dans la sous-préfecture Tchao-houa 昭化, au tombeau de la dame Pao 鮑’ (Segalen, 1995, 2: 923).
Unfortunately, Segalen overlooked the importance of this tomb for the locals, which has been a major popular cult site in Zhaohua up to the present day. We cannot, however, put all the blame on him for ignoring the backstory ascribed to Bao San Niang, since her affiliation with her presumed father-in-law, Guan Yu – widely worshipped as the god of war in China – was not fully spelled out in Segalen’s Chinese sources. In this respect, he notes, ‘les textes disent peu de chose sur cette femme d’une célébrité peut-être toute locale. Les chroniques provinciales la font mourir sous les Chou-Han 蜀漢, 221–265’ (Segalen, 1995, 2: 923). Indeed, the relevant entry in the Sichuan Tongzhi simply states, ‘舊誌鮑氏者關索之妻也’ (Madam Bao was Guan Suo’s wife according to old chronicles) (Yang et al., 1984, 2: 1740), without, however, specifying the kinship between Guan Suo and his illustrious father Guan Yu. In his notebook dated 2 April 1914, Segalen meticulously quotes, very literally, the relevant passage in the Sichuan Tongzhi, reading as follows: ‘白水西岸巨墓嶷然昔時土坼見墓門石砌堅致如城闉之狀內室幽黑屈曲人無敢入今已封閉矣’ (On the western bank of the Bai Shui River [stands] an enormous towering tomb. In earlier times, the earth cracked, exposing the tomb’s solid stone door, which resembled a city rampart. The inner chamber was dark and sinuous. People dared not enter. Currently, it is sealed) (Yang et al., 1984, 2: 1740). As Segalen (1995, 1: 1050) writes: Un noble vieillard nous conduit, à 1 li du cheval au [Han Pao San-niang mou] (tombeau de Pao San-niang des Han) ‘sur la berge ouest du [Pai-chouei]’, dit le T’ong-tche qui ajoute: ‘Grand tertre. Autrefois, la terre du tertre étant démolie, on vit la porte du tumulus, faite en pierre, très solide comme la porte d’un [tch’eng] (muraille). Dedans, une sorte de chambre très noire. Les gens n’osaient pas entrer. Maintenant, cette porte est close. » Suivent quelques mots anecdotiques sur cette femme dont la biographie se trouve sans doute dans le Lie niu tch’ouan, qui nous en fixera l’époque. Provisoirement, je l’appelle ‘femme belliqueuse et fidèle’.
Having flippantly downgraded Bao San Niang to a woman ‘having merely a local reputation’ in the passage occurring earlier, here Segalen further dubs her a lie nü 烈女 (virtuous/dutiful woman), or in his own words, ‘a belligerent and faithful woman’. 14 Given that such lie nü inundate Chinese gazetteers as paragons of Confucian chastity, this ‘provisional’ epithet conferred by Segalen on the tomb owner ends up reducing her to near-anonymity. To be sure, in some radical yet typical cases, a lie nü, often a widowed martyr, would go so far as to ‘bravely’ commit suicide to show her fidelity to her deceased husband. This emphasis on the unconditional subordination of women to their husbands is thus a poor fit for Bao San Niang, who is memorialised above all for her allegiance to the state. To reiterate, Segalen did not fully understand Bao San Niang’s stature in the minds of Zhaohua locals, as he writes in such vague and belittling terms as ‘cette femme’, ‘sans doute’, ‘provisoirement, je l’appelle’. In fact, locals revered Bao San Niang not merely as the daughter-in-law of the famous Chinese general Guan Yu serving the Shu Han court, but as a protective deity of their native land, namely modern Sichuan Province, whose territory roughly overlaps that of the Shu Han state during the Three Kingdoms period. 15
Segalen’s knowledge of Three Kingdoms history in general appears perfunctory. For example, just a few days earlier, on 19 March 1914, the expedition team had arrived at an iron chain suspension bridge north of Hanzhong prefecture 漢中府. Noticing two steles next to the bridge, Segalen (1995, 1: 1031) commented: ‘stèle à propos de ce T’ie-so Ts’iao [pont de la Chaîne de Fer]. Stèle allusion aux Trois Royaumes: lieu où Hiao Ho, grand ministre d’État des Han rattrapa Han Sin’. 16 But neither Xiao He 蕭何 nor Han Xin 韓信 belonged to the Three Kingdoms period: in fact, both statesmen, active in the second century BCE, were co-founders of the early Western Han dynasty. Segalen’s bogus erudition notwithstanding, the anecdote of ‘蕭何月下追韓信’ (Xiao He chased Han Xin under the moonlight) is indeed a well-known story in China. But a learned Chinese would certainly be amused when a seasoned French sinologist, carelessly jumbling the Western Han dynasty with the Shu Han state of the Three Kingdoms, wound up mistaking Xiao He for a minister of the Three Kingdoms.
As one might expect, Segalen’s ignorance of Three Kingdoms history, or, more precisely, Bao San Niang’s biography, was not without consequence. In this respect, Segalen repeatedly complained about the hostility of furious Chinese peasants hindering his digs in Zhaohua, though digging an ancient tomb in China can hardly be inoffensive to local communities given the pre-eminent position of ancestor worship in the Chinese belief system. In Segalen’s case, he went so far as to boldly open the tomb of a divinised historical hero.
This is roughly what happened: upon locating the tomb on 2 April, Segalen and Voisin immediately took action. To be fair, the burial mound was not entirely intact. There was a small ‘orifice’ on the tumulus’s north-west angle, through which Segalen managed to ‘s’y glisser’ without notifying the yamen, where he marvelled at the ‘briques historiées’ covering the vault’s inner chamber (Segalen, 2004, 2: 379). Following some cursory measurements of the tomb’s size and disposition, Segalen returned to the county administrative office and asked for permission to ‘agrandir l’orifice pour faire dans le caveau des reproductions photographiques’ (Segalen, 2004, 2: 379). There he was received by a ‘chubby, lively, and friendly’ mandarin who ‘roughly understood’ him. Here is Segalen’s own account: Retour au [hien], visite au yamen, où le rond, vif et aimable sous-préfet comprend à peu près, s’agite, nous rend visite, et nous suit au tombeau, en chaise, muni de quatre soldats. Tout d’abord, il réunit la foule des paysans, venue on ne sait d’où, et lui explique nos intentions. Et l’on se met au travail. (Segalen, 1995, 1: 1050)
Arguably, the county magistrate, although not at ease with Segalen’s scheme, had no choice but to comply. He probably worried about how locals would react to Segalen’s activities in a place of piety; otherwise, he would have had no reason to fuss around and follow up the event with armed escorts. Although the excavation started off more or less smoothly, an accident occurred when Segalen’s men, in an effort to unblock the passageway to the vault, demolished the tomb’s ‘north wall’, the bricks of which then ‘crumbled into rotten mud’. This mishandling apparently triggered a heated confrontation between Segalen’s team and the locals: Le déblayage se fait en démolissant le mur nord, dont les briques, décorées sur la tranche intérieure, s’écrasent comme de la boue, pourries . . . on en sauve deux: cheval et sapèques
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. . . Les paysans surgissent de toutes part. Le Vieux du village pérore et d’un air beaucoup plus important que le sous-préfet qui continue à expliquer nos intentions. (Segalen, 1995, 1: 1051)
Here, it seems clear that the ‘sous-préfet’ was on Segalen’s side as he strained to appease the furious ‘Vieux du village’ by ‘explaining’ to him Segalen’s ‘true motive’ for dismantling the tomb wall, which was, allegedly, ‘de la photographie’ (Segalen, 2004, 2: 370).
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But the peasants, led by their elder, refused to believe this explanation, as ‘photography’ would have required neither digs nor demolition of the tomb wall. Understandably, the mandarin’s effort was met with little enthusiasm by the village elder, whose ‘endless speech’ seemingly sparked a commotion. A few lines further, Segalen once again veers away from his digs to observe the protracted quarrel: Tout en faisant aller les houes, j’observais et entendais le dialogue du sous-préfet et de l’Ancien du village; le premier, vif, rond, le melon républicain sur la tête, plein de bonne volonté pour nous, et expliquant au Vieux ce que nous voulions faire, et pas autre chose. L’Ancien du village, beaucoup plus grand et noble, bien planté sur ses pieds dans sa terre – le capuchon haut aux oreilles, l’écoutant avec gravité – L’avantage n’était pas au sous-préfet républicain, malgré sa bonne volonté. (Segalen, 1995, 1: 1052)
Clearly, Segalen paid close attention to the disputes between the county magistrate and the village elder. Despite the Sichuanese dialect, he managed to get at least some clues about what was going on in his surroundings. Interestingly enough, notwithstanding their unhappiness, the locals of Zhaohua took no concrete measures to disturb the digs themselves. But the following day, on 3 April, this standoff, so to speak, took a melodramatic turn: 3 avril. Arrivés ‘au travail’ vers 11h. Photographié les briques intérieures. Foule grossissante et fort gênante dehors et dessus. Vers 1h, au moment où les travaux photographiques étaient terminés, nous allions demander à enlever quelques briques de la paroi, quand l’Ancien du Village nous a montré, à l’est du tumulus une stèle à demi préparée, mais non taillée ni gravée, faute d’argent, et a dit qu’il espérait pouvoir la faire achever pour illustrer ce ‘vestige de l’Antiquité’, cette mémoire locale de femme illustre. Nous nous sommes aussitôt proposés comme souscripteurs. Dix taëls. – Nous aurons nos noms gravés sur cette inscription restauratrice. Loin de détruire, nous avons consolidé. (Segalen, 1995, 1: 1052)
Admittedly, on 3 April, the crowd milling around him was for Segalen an eyesore but no longer a real obstacle. My own guess here is that the village elder, however intransigent at the beginning, finally agreed to play down the tension through a deal: namely, that Segalen could proceed with his excavation work provided that he pay some ‘reparations’ for the recovery of the site. This compromise is not totally unthinkable, given that incensed peasants were not really in a position to use force on Segalen, who was under official protection from the Chinese authorities. This support is evidenced by the presence of an escort soldier who, along with the county magistrate wearing a republican skullcap, flanks Segalen and Voisins in Figure 2.
There is a hint of smug complacency in Segalen calling himself a ‘consolidator’ rather than a ‘destroyer’ of Bao San Niang’s tomb. For a sum of ten taels of silver (not a large fortune but certainly a meaningful bribe), 19 he and Voisins ‘whitewashed’ the scandal they had stirred up in Zhaohua. More precisely, they not only mollified the protesters, but even purchased themselves ‘official acknowledgement’ by having their names etched on Bao San Niang’s restored tombstone. At any rate, it was the height of irony for the Chinese – no matter how forgiving they were – to enlist Segalen and Voisins as ‘underwriters’ of their restoration programme, since the two Frenchmen were by and large instigators of the damage there. 20 As one may expect, being offered such a wonderful bargain, the French explorers hastily embraced a ‘win-win’ solution: the deal was ‘dûment fait et enregistré au Yamen’, according to which, ‘l’ancien du village, surveillé par le sous-préfet, doit relever et faire graver la stèle, et consolider les murs’ (Segalen, 2004, 2: 375, 379). Most importantly, in Segalen’s eyes, this new stele carved with his money would not just ‘mont[rer] aux villageois ce que nous leur avons appris’, but also ‘fixera aux indigènes l’importance de ce que nous leur avons montré’ (Segalen, 2004, 2: 372).
Retrospectively examining the incident, the group photo (Figure 2) – now an iconic image of Segalen – must have been taken at the moment of reconciliation. Without enduring the slightest loss, Segalen defused the crisis through a donation and thereupon removed, as he wished, relics from the tomb before the sceptical eyes of the locals. He was, however, unable to extract so much as one brick from the vault’s inner wall, not because the Chinese forbade him to do so, but owing to a technical issue, namely, that the brick fragments ‘tombaient en poussière dès que nous les touchions’ (Segalen, 2004, 2: 375). Despite this minor setback, Segalen reportedly dug out Bao San Niang’s skull and might even have brought it back to France. In this regard, he must once again be wholeheartedly thanked for providing a catalogue of his trophy. In his Premier exposé, he writes, ‘Le caveau était vide. Aucune trace de sarcophage. Des excavations dans le sol nous livrèrent seulement un os frontal’ (Segalen, 1995, 2: 923). This exciting find is confirmed by his letter to Chavannes dated April 3: ‘J’ai trouvé l’os frontal de la ‘femme célèbre’ qui fut inhumée là’ (Segalen, 2004, 2: 375).
In short, these not-so-sophisticated digs causing so much damage to a site of worship quite paradoxically offered Segalen a prime opportunity to splash out his silver ingots triumphantly on ‘the consolidation’ of Bao San Niang’s tomb. In the end, Segalen did not forget to take a picture of the village elders (Figure 3), even though one of them had been grumbling the loudest to thwart his bid.
Village elders (source: gallica.bnf.fr / BnF).
The stele: a Chinese narrative 21
Segalen donated the money to the yamen, brought the trophy with him, and left Zhaohua on 4 April 1914, without having time to supervise the completion of the stele doing him honour (Segalen, 1995, 1: 1054). More than a hundred years later, curious about the incident in general and the stele mentioned by Segalen in particular, I made a trip to Bao San Niang’s tomb in Zhaohua on 4 November 2018. At first, I just wanted to find out how the burial site looked today and whether the stele carved with Segalen’s funds still stood there. To my great excitement, I came up with some real findings. First, the stele is indeed still there, almost intact. Second, the Chinese kept their promise by inscribing on it both Segalen’s and Voisins’s names, calling them ‘Special Envoys from the French Hanlin Academy for the examination of ancient sites’. Third, and not without a hint of irony, the stele inscription emphatically warns against those who dare to ‘damage’ the tomb, stipulating that their ‘crime shall not be pardoned’.
Presently, the tomb of Bao San Niang (105.696348, 32.366563) 22 lies only a few hundred metres from the newly built Chengdu-Xi’an high-speed railway. The deafening noise from frequently passing bullet trains surrealistically diminishes the seclusion of this dormant burial mound. Moreover, the tumulus, now covered by dense thickets, lies obscurely on the roadside of a highway connecting the region’s transportation hub Guangyuan City with Zhaohua Ancient Town, currently a bustling destination for Chinese tourists, especially those fond of Three Kingdoms history. The tomb itself, enclosed by a brick wall, is well maintained. Visitors are scarce, and entrance is free of charge. An unprepossessing sign reminds us that Bao San Niang’s tomb was classified in 1994 as a ‘historical site protected at the provincial level’. While I was there, an old lady from the nearby grocery store kindly showed me around. She told me at one point that some ‘disrespectful people’ once attempted to herd free-range chickens in the ‘unused space of the graveyard’ but ‘eventually gave up their bid, due to government objection’. ‘Mysteries haunt this mound’, she added, claiming to have seen apparitions of Bao San Niang showing up at midnight, feasting on the dishes offered by devotees. Figure 4 is a snapshot of the tomb’s front gate.
Front gate to Bao San Niang’s tomb (photograph by the author).
The inscription on the main stele (Figure 5), which unambiguously bears Segalen’s Chinese name Xie Gelan 謝閣蘭, remains intact. In fact, one may even wonder how it miraculously survived the vandalism that wiped out so many historical relics in this part of Sichuan during the Cultural Revolution. Specifically, the epitaph was written in inflated classical Chinese prose and carved on brittle, and therefore slightly weathered, sandstone. It imparts, which is more to the point, much previously unknown information on how Zhaohua residents made sense of Segalen’s visit in April 1914. Most intriguingly, the inscription not only corroborates Segalen’s own account of the incident’s ‘happy ending’, or in his words, ‘dénouement inattendu et curieux’ (Segalen, 2004, 2: 372), but also reveals the fundamental ambivalence of Chinese provincial elites in the 1910s toward Western explorers.
Stele at Bao San Niang’s tomb (photograph by the author).
Deciphering the inscription, however, has turned out to be a real ordeal. Despite sustained perusal, I have thus far failed to recognise three characters out of a sum total of 175 or so. As an expedient, I have replaced them with question marks in the following transcription. Meanwhile, I have faithfully reproduced the text following its unpunctuated, right-to-left and top-to-bottom format as originally found on the stele (Figure 6). 23
Chinese transcription of Bao San Niang’s stele. As filled in with grey colour, the portion of the text bearing both Segalen and Voisins’s Chinese titles – reading ‘Special Envoys from the French Hanlin Academy 法國翰林院特派員’ ‘Xie Gelan’ 謝閣蘭 ‘Hua Sen’ 華森 – can still be seen in Figure 7.
The names ‘Segalen’ and ‘Voisins’ on Bao San Niang’s stele (photograph by the author).
The following is a literal English translation of the epitaph: Tomb of Han General Suo’s Wife Bao The third daughter of the Bao clan, or Bao San Niang, of the Third Han [Shu Han] state, whose family had dwelled in the hamlet of the Bao clan in Kui Prefecture 夔州 for many generations. [Her] valiance and strength were matchless. Once, the bandit Lian Kang 廉康 sought to capture [her]. Refusing to surrender, she fought against and defeated him. At that time, Guan Zhuangmiu’s third son Suo 關壯謬三子索marched through the area. The clan, considering the loyalty and righteousness of this courageous and handsome offspring of [Guan Yu], gave [Bao San Niang] in marriage to him. The couple then jointly served the [Shu] Han state in subduing bandits 同爲漢室討賊. Thereafter, [Bao San Niang] stationed troops in Jia Meng 葭萌.
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She built up a stone citadel seven li north of the administrative seat and lived there. For that reason, [her] tomb is located in Zhaohua county 故墓在昭邑. Men of letters should often visit [here] to pay homage. The crime of those damaging [the site] shall not be pardoned 有犯者罪不赦. Xianghe restored the tomb for the sake of worship. Jiang Xianghe, a graduate from the Pan-Provincial Autonomous [Institute],
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drafted the epitaph in the presence of [his] eldest son Taiyi, a graduate from Senior Primary School. [By]: Appointed Magistrate of Zhaohua county: Zhou Guobin 周國濱 Headmaster of the Senior School: Lu Gongbing Most Sagacious Gentlemen 大聖員紳: Zhang Tiesheng and Huang Xiu[?] Special Envoys from the French Hanlin Academy: Segalen and Voisins for the examination of ancient sites 考求古跡 Third Year of the Republic of China [1914]
A few titles, idioms, and turns of phrase are particularly worthy of note. First, throughout his 1914 mission in China, Segalen relied on his affiliation with a specious ‘French Hanlin Academy’ to negotiate his passage and solicit assistance from the Chinese authorities. For example, on 2 March, when stranded in Xianyang county, Segalen (1995, 1: 1007) reminded the local Chinese Bureau for Foreign Affairs that he had ‘télégraphié au Han-lin à Paris, au ministre de France à Péking’ about his delay. This emphasis on his official background was, according to Segalen, a stratagem to expedite the issuance of his laissez-passer. Arguably, the ‘French Hanlin Academy’ proved a very smart and intelligible rendering of L’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, which co-sponsored the 1914 Segalen–Gilbert de Voisins–Lartigue mission in China. Specifically, although most Chinese literati in the 1910s may never have heard of any French learned society, they must have been familiar with the prestigious Imperial Academy of China known as the Hanlin Yuan 翰林院, which vanished with the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911. So when a ‘Special Envoy from the French Hanlin Academy’ showed up before them, local officials, such as the county magistrate Zhou Guobin, very likely accorded Segalen – an old China hand – a heavy dose of credibility. Hence, it is no exaggeration to say that Segalen knew exactly how to pass himself off as a trustworthy Westerner with genuine intentions of promoting archaeology in China.
Second, a careful reader may wonder why Lartigue’s name does not appear on the epitaph. Certainly not a scribal oversight, this omission attests to the Segalen–Gilbert de Voisins–Lartigue mission’s bifurcating itineraries. Lartigue in fact followed a different route to Bazhong from Hanzhong on 20 March (Segalen, 1915: 468), and joined Segalen and Voisins in Baoning Prefecture only on 6 April (Segalen, 1995, 1: 1054). Hence, Lartigue did not take part in the excavation in Zhaohua, as evidenced by the void in the inscription.
Third, despite a minor typo, ‘關壯謬三子索’ 26 (Guan Zhuangmiu’s third son Suo) makes clear that, at least for the Zhaohua gentry in 1914, Bao San Niang was unquestionably Guan Yu’s daughter-in-law. To be precise, here the legendary general Guan Yu 關羽 is referred to as Guan Zhuangmou 關壯繆, as per his posthumous title. 27 Evidently, for Zhaohua residents, Bao San Niang was by no means a fictitious woman warrior, but a heroine with traceable roots. Furthermore, ‘故墓在昭邑’ (For that reason, [her] tomb is located in Zhaohua county) explicitly associates the tomb with Bao San Niang. This assertion echoes the sententious phrase ‘同為漢室討賊’ (jointly served the [Shu] Han state in subduing bandits). Undoubtedly for the authors(s) of this panegyric of Bao San Niang, she and her husband Guan Suo, both of impeccable pedigree, epitomised a brand of Han Chinese orthodoxy, and this legitimacy warranted her latter-day consecration as a symbol of Zhaohua. In brief, there is little doubt that the fact that Bao San Niang and Guan Suo ‘jointly served the [Shu] Han state in subduing bandits’ conjured up a whiff of national pride for Zhaohua residents. This sentiment justifies the high-profile caveat that follows immediately, namely, ‘有犯者罪不赦’ (the crime of those damaging [the site] shall not be pardoned).
Nonetheless, all this exuberant utterance by the Chinese seemed to shoot itself in the foot insofar as Segalen and Voisins were not only ‘pardoned’ but also commended. Instead of treating their excavations as neatly fitting into an act of profanation, this pompous officialese paid tribute to Segalen and Voisins, alongside a host of county magistrates, college graduates, school headmasters and ‘most sagacious’ gentlemen, as ‘underwriters’ of Bao San Niang’s new memorial. In other words, unable to hold the two Frenchmen accountable for their misdeeds, the Chinese elites opted to break the rules for them while puffing themselves up by warning Segalen’s potential imitators that their ‘crime will not be pardoned’.
Segalen’s Orientalism
Many critics have hailed Segalen’s idiosyncratic Orientalism. This is the case, for instance, with Timothy Billings and Christopher Bush (2007), for whom Segalen’s China-inspired works continually thwart ‘the expectations of the typical critiques of Orientalism’. In addition to Segalen’s advocacy of ‘le divers’, another overstated positive feature of his Orientalism might be his idea of exoticism as prioritising an Eastern reaction to a Western intruder over the latter’s superficial accounts of an Eastern locale. Indeed, a theoretician of the so-called exotisme à rebours,
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Segalen is unsparingly critical of his peers such as Pierre Loti and Paul Claudel for fabricating – invariably from a French perspective – puerile impressions of the Far East. In an oft-cited passage of Essai sur l’exotisme, dated 9 June 1908, he writes: Ni Loti, ni Saint-Pol Roux, ni Claudel. Autre chose! . . . Ils ont dit ce qu’ils ont vu, ce qu’ils ont senti en présence des choses et des gens inattendus dont ils allaient chercher le choc. Ont-ils révélé ce que ces choses et ces gens pensaient en eux-mêmes et d’eux? (Segalen, 1995, 1: 746)
In the preface to Briques et tuiles – a personal travelogue in which Segalen kept track of his 1909 expedition in China – Henry Bouillier, editor of his Œuvres complètes, lavishes Segalen with praise, applauding his ‘refus de se mettre en scène et de faire intervenir sa propre culture, même pour exalter celle de l’autre’. In Bouillier’s eyes, ‘Segalen allait même dans ses Notes sur l’exotisme, par réaction contre Loti et Claudel, jusqu’à envisager, conformément à ses théories, de traduire la réaction des choses devant l’irruption de l’étranger inconnu’ (Segalen, 1995, 1: 840). More concretely, Yvonne Hsieh (1988) traces how Segalen, in a crucial chapter of Équipée, reworked the famous tale ‘Peach Blossom Spring’ by Jin dynasty poet Tao Yuanming. Underscoring Segalen’s crafting of a dialogue between the Chinese residents of a long-lost village and an uninvited foreign visitor, Hsieh concludes that Segalen was self-consciously playing with the idea of inverted perspectives.
Certainly, a politically-very-correct veneer of Segalen’s Orientalism is in the air. But critics like Bouillier have so far ignored the huge gulf between Segalen’s progressive theory and his actual practice. In fact, what Segalen did could depart significantly from what he said, and his much-cherished attention to non-Western otherness appears only on paper. As a compelling example, while in Zhaohua, did Segalen ever take the trouble to ferret out the reason behind the locals’ discomfiture? It seems quite clear that the answer is no. In all his non-fiction writings pertaining to the 1914 mission under scrutiny, there is no substantial evidence that Segalen was mindful of the feelings of the Chinese, as if their attitude were a trivial and therefore dismissible factor. To be fair, however, I did find in a brief note sent to Lartigue on 3 April 1914, an inconspicuous word choice by Segalen indicating a rare exception to his overarching indifference: À Jean Lartigue, 昭化縣 3 Avril [1914]: . . . et tombes profanes et profanées, ici. Nous avons eu l’honneur d’entrer pour la première fois dans une tombe Han, et nous y habitons depuis deux jours. (Segalen, 2004, 2: 372)
Since Bao San Niang’s tomb is a pre-Buddhist and therefore non-Buddhist site, there might be no problem for Segalen – oblivious of the heroine’s apotheosis – to call it a ‘profane’ tomb. Here, however, the French past participle ‘profanées’– despite the gravity of the offence it conjures up – alliterates with the preceding qualifier ‘profanes’, giving an air of playfulness. It may even come as a surprise, for some readers, that such an abusive diction could possibly have been tossed in so flippantly by Segalen when recounting his archaeological interventions in China. Not coincidentally, a similar word choice pops up in the Premier exposé: Il est délicat et parfois dangereux de pénétrer en Chine dans un tombeau tenu pour chinois. La descente dans le caveau de la dame Pao n’a pas été sans quelque discussion, et, dès le second jour, le village entier, conduit par son ‘ancien’, n’aurait point permis une plus longue profanation. (Segalen, 1995, 2: 941–2)
The word ‘profanation’ attests to Segalen’s ability to realise how insulting his actions could be to the Chinese. Despite this fleeting sensibility, however, Segalen never truly deduced the origin of the Zhaohua residents’ lack of hospitality, since throughout his account of the event he continued treating Bao San Niang as a mediocre peasant woman remembered for her banal chastity, or, according to his own formulation, a ‘belligerent and faithful woman’ with some dubious ‘local reputation’. It is striking that, despite Segalen’s shallow knowledge of Three Kingdoms history, nobody – neither the county magistrate Zhou Guobin nor the village elder(s) – seems to have reminded him of Bao San Niang’s prestige as not merely an illustrious woman warrior married to the third son of the famous Chinese general Guan Yu, but also a quasi-divine emblem of the people of Zhaohua’s glorious past and allegiance to their Han Chinese roots. But then after all, should it not have been Segalen’s responsibility to double-check about Bao San Niang’s background before ‘profaning’ her tomb? In this light, what indeed prevented him from asking around for clarifications, even when faced with such persistent resistance? More bluntly, what was it that prevented him from being considerate of the indigenous people’s feelings on this specific occasion?
Less likely, the Chinese, while trying to dissuade Segalen from entering the tomb, might indeed have expounded on Bao San Niang’s divine nature (even though this hypothesis is not well supported by Segalen’s own accounts of the event). But assuming this was the case, Segalen might well have found more than one reason to disregard their plea, since he surely did not want to let go of a hard-won opportunity to gain first-hand experience with a real Han tomb. Convinced of the scientific and artistic urgency warranting his excavations in Zhaohua, he might have dismissed outright such popular beliefs as either puerile tricks or unfounded superstitions. 29
Regardless of any contingencies that may have come into play, the Zhaohua incident is not inconsequential insofar as it debunks Segalen’s putatively anodyne Orientalism based on the sinologist’s ‘accurate’ knowledge of his subject matter and his willingness to embrace ‘inverted perspectives’. In short, this fancy brand of Orientalism à la Segalen remains either a personal mythology or a poetic conceit with little relevance to realities. Deconstructing Eurocentrism in theory, Segalen had succumbed to it in practice.
Segalen’s ‘love’ for China
Reading Segalen’s account of the incident in Zhaohua against Bao San Niang’s Chinese epitaph reveals a discomfiting yet recurrent pattern of Sino-French cultural encounters. Broadly speaking, China-inspired authors such as Segalen may not have been as sinophile as literary critics have assumed them to be. Concurrently, Chinese official discourse, as in the case of the stele inscription, has tended to highlight these authors’ merits while disregarding their exploitative behaviour.
Was Segalen a benevolent ‘consolidator’ of Chinese historical sites, as he touted himself, or a condescending cultural imperialist? When faced with such radical questions that critics of Orientalism so much enjoy asking, we are often baffled (especially given that Segalen never thought of trading his findings in the antiquities market as André Malraux did in Cambodia). In this regard, Charles Forsdick (2000: 60) insightfully observes, ‘a purely aesthetic version of Segalen is at best a hagiographic distortion, at worst a total misrepresentation’. For Forsdick, setting up Segalen’s aesthetics of diversity as the antithesis of Loti’s colonial exoticism is an oversimplification, and it is indisputable that Segalen’s ‘biography alone places him firmly within the context’ of the French Empire (Forsdick, 2000: 60).
Indeed, a discussion about ethical issues is meaningless when taken out of context. As is the case with many cross-cultural encounters, early twentieth-century Sino-French contacts manifested a relationship of power imbalance. Through a parallel reading of both French and Chinese sources, we see how consciously Segalen availed himself of the political and financial disparities between France and China at that time to get the better of the Chinese administrative apparatus. 30 Marching through a war-torn and hunger-stricken post-Revolution Sichuan in 1914, 31 Segalen needed only to show up at the yamen of the various locales he visited to get his survey requests approved on the spot. Supportive officials, such as the Zhaohua magistrate, were always answerable to him. Unlike political privileges, Segalen’s financial leverage concerned more the way he dealt with the recalcitrant populace. As we have seen, unapologetic about his amateurish digs, Segalen even scored some moral points by donating ten taels for the completion of a ‘half-prepared’ stele. In retrospectively examining this string of events, it seems clear that as an archaeologist on a mission funded by the French government, Segalen’s engagement with China – at least in 1914 – was not on an equal footing.
Despite all this preferential treatment, or perhaps because of this, Segalen was quite dismissive of the living Chinese he came across in China, whom he relegated to the banality of the ‘real’. Luckily, this ill-veiled disdain, standing in sharp contrast to his admiration for Chinese artefacts such as Han dynasty pillars – elevated by him to the superior and timeless realm of the ‘imaginary’ – has not fallen through the cracks in the scholarly world. Even Billings and Bush (2007: 13) have had to concede that while ‘[Segalen’s] peculiar brand of exoticism would refuse cultural appropriation, imperialism, colonial literature, and Western hegemony . . . it is also antifeminist, antirevolutionary, and even, in his accounts of the living Chinese he encountered in his travels, seemingly anti-Chinese’. The evidence is ubiquitous. If Segalen had already, during his first expedition to China in 1909, labelled the Chinese as ‘irrémissiblement un peuple de laids’ (italics in original) who appear ‘hospitaliers parce qu’ils n’osent pas ne pas l’être’ (Segalen, 2004, 1: 1012, 1041), he stuck to this racial profiling in 1914. In a letter to Paul Cassagnac – editor-in-chief of the newspaper L’Autorité – sent out from Chengdu on 7 May 1914, Segalen boasts about how he made do with muddy roads and stupid hosts in China, saying ‘Ni auberges, ni portage à mules possible. Des gens accueillants mais parfois imbéciles’ (Segalen, 2004, 2: 415). In fact, Segalen disparaged not only the Chinese peasantry but also the bureaucracy. Striking a hubristic tone, he noted in the same letter: ‘Partout nous sommes bien accueillis. Les fonctionnaires comprennent, le plus souvent, l’objet exact de notre mission. Parfois, ils ignorent tout de leurs propres districts, et les confusions sont plaisantes’ (Segalen, 2004, 2: 415).
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Segalen then goes on to report, or more precisely repeat, an anecdote of an event that occurred on 31 March 1914, in Guangyuan, just one day prior to his eventful sojourn in Zhaohua. Specifically, drawing on the Jin Shi Suo 金石索, or Index of Metals and Stones by the brothers Feng Yunpeng 馮雲鵬 and Feng Yunyuan 馮雲鵷, Segalen sought to locate the funerary pillars of a certain Taiwei Yin Gong 太尉陰公, or Grand Commandant Yin, on the outskirts of Guangyuan. It so happened that the county magistrate accompanying him had never heard of this ‘Grand Commandant’, who presumably had died some two thousand years earlier. With all the pomp of a French sinologist, Segalen (1995, 1: 1048) flaunted his erudition to his Chinese interlocutors: 7h soir. Résultats de l’enquête sur les Piliers de [Yin gong]. Le sous-préfet, arrivé de la veille, a demandé pourquoi nous tenions à voir ‘l’honorable Yin’. On lui a répondu qu’il était mort depuis 2 000 ans; que nous cherchions des ‘piliers’, un objet et non pas un homme. Quelqu’un de plus lettré a paru comprendre . . . On lui a montré le Kin-che souo, comme exemple des piliers du Chantong. Il a demandé si ce livre était européen ou chinois. N’insistons plus et partons.
When mocking some haplessly disoriented Chinese functionaries in Guangyuan, Segalen would not have known that the next day he would make an exhibition of himself in Zhaohua by mistaking Bao San Niang for a run-of-the-mill dutiful wife. Although at the end Segalen paid only ten taels for his ignorance and thereby saved face quite cheaply, there is still much irony in his self-righteousness. Put another way, while Segalen thought himself to be more knowledgeable than most Chinese literati, his scholarly perspicacity, just like his commitment to ‘inverted perspectives’, turns out to be utterly untenable.
Conclusion
The fallacy of Segalen’s ‘sinophilia’ notwithstanding, his posthumous apologists, both Chinese and Western, have tended to overstate his contribution to the mutual understanding between China/East and France/West. Specifically, contemporary Chinese critics’ appraisals of Segalen appear ideologically minded, as they have paid close attention only to Segalen’s imaginative, scantily bilingual, and theoretical works such as René Leys, Stèles, Équipée and Essai sur l’exotisme, while leaving out his rich legacy of archaeological accounts, travel diaries and letters. Such partial scholarship, compounded by a multitude of ongoing cultural events sponsored by both the Chinese and the French, has in time turned Segalen – though posthumously and ironically – into simultaneously a politically-very-correct literary modernist and a spokesperson par excellence for Sino-French friendship (Bai, 2016). In this light, Segalen’s forgotten writings are particularly worthy of note, for mainly two reasons. First, as evidenced by his unfinished text Chine, la grande statuaire, there might not be such a fine line between Segalen’s empirical, descriptive and scientific writings and his more subjective, poetic and aestheticised works (Postel, 2001). And, second, Segalen’s private, unembellished and shockingly outspoken accounts of his travels in China often reveal contradictions within his authorial self, thereby adding much nuance to his oversimplified ‘respect for diversity’, his assumed ‘love’ for China, and his taken-for-granted advocacy of ‘inverted exoticism’.
Certainly, a few pieces of evidence concerning one passing incident in his life does not enable a judgement to be made about Segalen’s career as a whole. One should, in particular, avoid anachronistically applying today’s codes of conduct to evaluate Segalen’s fieldwork in the 1910s. Still, this preliminary essay surely warrants renewed and more systematic inquiry into his practices – both literary and non-literary.
