They come for the camel rides, the chance to dress up like a conquering Qing Dynasty soldier or to take “selfies” in front of one of the most historic Islamic shrines in Xinjiang, the sprawling region in China’s far northwest.
However, the busloads of Chinese tourists who converge on the Afaq Khoja Mausoleum each day are mostly interested in a single raised crypt amid the dozens of tombs ensconced under the shrine’s soaring 17th-century dome. It is the one said to belong to Iparhan, a Uighur imperial consort, who, according to legend, was so sweetly fragrant that she caught the attention of a Chinese emperor 4,300km away in Beijing — and was either invited to live with him or dragooned into the palace as a trophy of war.
“The love between her and the Qianlong emperor was so strong that after she died he sent 120 men to escort her body back here for burial,” one guide explained, eliciting nods and knowing smiles from the crowd. “It was a journey that took three years.”
Illustration: Yusha
Yet with the group out of earshot, a local resident offered up a starkly different version, describing Iparhan as a tragic figure, little more than a sex slave who was murdered by the emperor’s mother after she repeatedly rejected Qianlong’s advances.
“The story that most Chinese know is completely made up,” said the man, an ethnic Uighur, who asked that his name be withheld for fear of angering the authorities. “The truth is she is not even buried here.”
In the six decades since coming to power, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has devoted enormous resources to crafting historical narratives that seek to legitimize its rule and obfuscate its failures. The disastrous famine that claimed millions of lives last century is said to have been caused by bad weather, not former leader Chinese Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) misguided policies. Chinese history books often blame the US for starting the Korean War, not the Communist troops from North Korea who, most historians agree, first invaded the South.
When it comes to China’s ethnic minorities, the party-run history machine is especially single-minded in its effort to promote storylines that portray Uighurs, Mongolians, Tibetans and other groups as contented members of an extended family whose traditional homelands have long been part of the Chinese nation.
Alternate narratives are far less cheery. They include tales of subjugation and repression amid government-backed efforts to dilute ethnic identity through the migration of members of China’s dominant group, the Han.
Chinese historians rarely veer from the officially sanctioned scripts; Uighur and Tibetan academics who have insisted on writing about the disagreeable aspects of Communist rule have seen their books banned and their careers destroyed.
James Millward, a professor at Georgetown University who studies China’s ethnically diverse borderlands, said the drive to shape history, while not unique to China, was zealously practiced by each succeeding dynasty in an effort to malign an emperor’s predecessors and glorify his own rule.
However, the Communists have also sought to use history as a tool against separatist aspirations and to legitimize their efforts to govern potentially restive populations.
“The ability to control historical narratives and airbrush out problematic truths is a powerful tool but it also reveals the party’s insecurity over certain aspects of the past it would rather the world forget,” Millward said.
In Xinjiang, as Uighur resentment over Chinese rule boils over into increasing bloodshed, this propagandistic approach to history has taken on greater urgency. Over the past year, at least 200 people have been killed here, some of them Han murdered by what the government calls “terrorists,” but many of them Uighurs shot by security forces under murky circumstances.
At times like these, it would seem that Iparhan is just the salve China needs. Although the story of Iparhan, known to the Chinese as “Hsiang Fei” (香妃, “Fragrant Concubine”), was first popularized in the early 20th century, party-backed historians have made significant alterations. Most seek to turn her into a vehicle for conveying enduring amity between Han and Uighurs, whose Central Asian culture, Muslim faith and Turkic language set them apart from the Han.
Earlier versions of the story cast Hsiang Fei as a defiant beauty, captured by the Qing during battle, who kept daggers in her sleeve and remained chaste to the end, when she was either killed by palace eunuchs or forced to commit suicide.
However, that narrative has been supplanted by a happy-ending tale of romance that celebrates the emperor’s efforts to win her affections by building a miniature Kashgari village outside her window in Beijing and showering her with the sweet melons and oleaster of her homeland.
These days, Hsiang Fei is the subject of poems, plays and television shows as well as the namesake of a chain of roast-chicken restaurants, a brand of sun-dried raisins and, not surprisingly, a line of perfumes.
Rian Thum, professor of Uighur history at Loyola University New Orleans, said that in addition to suggesting longstanding affections between Han and Uighur, the mythicized Hsiang Fei served to reinforce the image of Uighur women as exotic, strong-willed and slightly dangerous.
“The fact that Uighurs are sexualized and exoticized by so many Han Chinese makes the Hsiang Fei story very appealing,” he said.
Party propagandists have been especially drawn to female protagonists, often royal consorts, who were bit players in grand power struggles involving warring states on the fringes of the ancient Chinese empire.
In Inner Mongolia, the vast grasslands that form a buffer between China and Mongolia, it is Wang Zhaojun (王昭君), a lovelorn Han Dynasty consort who supposedly offered herself to a “barbarian” Mongolian prince to cement an alliance between the two peoples. In Tibet, it is Wencheng (文成公主), a seventh-century Chinese princess who, according to popular lore, was a matrimonial peace gift to a bellicose Tibetan king.
To the consternation of many Tibetans, Princess Wencheng is frequently portrayed as having pacified Tibet and introduced from China advanced farming practices, weaving and even Buddhism and the Tibetan alphabet. Some historians question whether she even existed.
The story of Princess Wencheng is a familiar one to Chinese youngsters, and her persona has come to dominate Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, in the form of an operatic extravaganza that, according to promotional materials, “celebrates the enduring friendship between the two peoples.”
A Tibetan writer who saw the show soon after it opened last year, Tsering Woeser, said she was troubled by the overriding message that painted the Tibetan people as savages who needed civilizing.
“We used to think the story of Princess Wencheng was cute, but she has become such an over-the-top work of propaganda that we cannot help but be offended,” Woeser said.
Many Uighurs find the popularized story of Hsiang Fei galling, although their ire is often focused on the Afaq Khoja Mausoleum — a hallowed Sufi shrine and burial place for a clan that once ruled the Kashgar region — and its transformation into a prop for a Chinese fable.
Archeologists, they note, long ago identified the grave of a concubine named Hsiang Fei outside Beijing.
Some of the resentment also stems from the government’s decision to turn what was an important site for pilgrimages into a tourist attraction devoid of religious meaning. These days the site is managed by a Chinese company that charges an entry fee.
Thum said the government had largely succeeded in shaping both Han and Uighur understandings of the shrine, especially its association with the rebellious Khojas, who fought off the Qing occupiers and established a short-lived independent state in the mid-19th century.
“To their credit, the government took a symbol of Uighur resistance to Chinese rule and turned it into a vehicle for a message they want to get out,” he said.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs