On a visit to see her aunt on the Finnish side of the border, Eliisa Raaska (Irma Seikkula) falls for local boy Mikko Vanhala (the decidedly unboyish Joel Rinne). She would very much like to marry him, but her father (director Wilho Ilmari, sneaking into his own film) refuses to leave his home on the Soviet side, where he is clinging to the memory of his late Ingrian wife. Mikko is unaware that his mother (Emma Väänänen) has promised his hand in marriage to Helka (Senja Lehti), the daughter of the local landowner Meller (Eino Jurkka), in settlement of a debt. But Mikko has already crossed to the Soviet side to ask for Eliisa’s hand, and when she accepts, brings her to his Finnish home.
In Finland, Eliisa meets with a frosty reception, since her presence puts Mikko’s mother back into financial straits. She stomps off to her aunt’s house, while Mikko arranges a loan to pay off the debt. Her father, meanwhile, was lying when he said he would follow her to Finland. Instead, he sets fire to his house and shoots himself. Mikko finds a distraught Eliisa and persuades her to return to Finland with him before the border-crossing loophole is permanently shut down by Soviet soldiers. Their friend, the border guard Gregor (Santeri Karilo), helps them escape by shooting Ivan (Vilho Siivola), the dastardly Soviet officer who covets Eliisa for himself. As Eliisa and Mikko reach safety on the Finnish side, they hear another gunshot, as Gregor takes his own life.
Suomi-Filmi’s big release for autumn 1942 was a film that tapped right into the zeitgeist, an adaptation of Urho Karhumäki’s 1938 novel about life on the Karelian isthmus, where the locals have repeatedly found themselves branded Russian or Finnish, Finnish or Russian, depending on where politicians in distant capitals are drawing lines on a map. With a mordant, contemporary topic and a score by Uuno Klami, Over the Border was Finland’s entry in that year’s “Venice Film Olympics”, where it won a minor medal, which the press regarded as something of a consolation prize.
“Over the Border was a deep, vivid and psychologically believable portrayal of humanity,” said the film critic of Uusi Suomi. “There was a real sense of the border in the air.” Meanwhile, Olavi Vesterdahl in Aamulehti thought it was a bit slow and lacking in action, but conceded that it did artfully demonstrate the way in which geopolitical concerns far above the heads of two people on either side of a humble barbed wire fence might suddenly render them unable to cross it – a matter of pregnant meaning to Finns in 1942, who were busily re-taking Karelia from the Russians who had stolen it, and would shortly have to hand it all back again. Deep down in Martti Larni’s script is a repeat of the idea that also surfaced in The Activists (1939), that people were people, and that there were surely good Russians like Gregor, too, although it was heavily implied that the bad ones like Ivan were hounding them to their deaths.
It was, perhaps, too tied to the zeitgeist. Delayed from its original release in April 1942, it enjoyed a brief moment in the sun and on theatre re-runs. When the Continuation War came to an end in 1944 and everybody started tiptoeing around the Russians like they were, well, a thin-skinned super-power with a penchant for false-flag attacks and land-grabs, it was very suddenly whipped out of cinemas, and was not seen again in Finland until the post-perestroika 1990s – compare to similar fates for The Activists and The Great Wrath (1939).
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films so that you don’t have to.
Liang Taihe is showing me a big copper pot. We don’t quite understand what it was for, he says. They must have performed some ritual purpose. This one has carbon-scoring at the bottom, so it was previously used for cooking something, but the thing about the ancient Yelang people was that when they buried someone of great importance, they would stick one of these on their heads.
Right then, so they were nutters.
I think, he says, that they put them on their heads in the ceremonies as well. Like magic hats.
I have my own theory, which is that since many scholars have argued that these pots served some sort of ritual purpose in life, possibly the leaders of the Yelang were shamans, and that in life they would boil up some sort of trance-inducing concoction and stick their heads in to breath up the steam.
Professor Liang looks at me as if I am mad.
And then, I say, they see the spirits. And when they die, they put the pot on their heads because they will be with the spirits always.
Okay, he says gingerly, let’s put that one on the back burner, shall we?
Like the Dian people of Yunnan, with whom they shared a border, the Yelang people left no written records, and much of what we have to go on about them is only divinable from the metalware in their graves. The archaeological record shows a bunch of pot-headed burials, particularly in a village called Kele two hours outside Hezhang. It also shows bronzeware with multiple influences from outside, including a ge dagger-axe with a taotie design clearly from the Central Plains of China, and a short sword with a hilt made in Yelang, but a blade shipped in from Sichuan.
Late in the Han dynasty, the Yelang rebelled. The access to silk that they were promised turned out to be the thin end of an imperialist wedge, and when they tried to fight back against the Han, they finally discovered just how much bigger and better prepared the Chinese were. The last king of Dian was beheaded, and many of his people fled south. Archaeologists in the hills of Laos and Cambodia have found graves occupied by lone figures with pots on their heads.
There’s a lot of argument about where Yelang actually was. It’s widely believed that it was in Guizhou, and the fact that the pot-headed burials show that there was a culture of some sort here seems to suggest that it was the Yelang heartland. “Heartland,” however, isn’t good enough for the tourist authorities, who ten years ago tried to bribe Professor Liang to proclaim that Hezhang was the “capital” of Yelang. He took their money, went onstage, and told them all that the notion of a capital in those times was a free-floating concept. People moved around, populations were lower, and frankly, “capital” is a modern term and with that in mind, they could have their bribe money back. Then he walked off the stage.
I associate Guizhou with discomfort. Two years ago, I spent a miserable week up a mountain here, washing in cold water and eating unmentionables. The food is much the same – since arriving here I have been assailed by pig’s ears and chicken foot soup. You should try our bowl-covering pork, says the Propaganda man. It’s a slab of pork so large that it covers the whole rim of your rice bowl.
Which sounds nice, except that half the slab is pure fat.
Have a pig’s trotter, he says, shoving one in my face.
The new Guizhou Provincial Museum is supposed to look like something famous, but none of us can work out what it is. Possibly a pile of Lego. We’ll be filming here tomorrow with Professor Liang, when it’s closed to the public, but the museum is oddly under-attended, even on a Sunday, so we get pick-up shots of all the things he is liable to be pointing at.
He is aghast at the displays, and claims to have sent the curators a list of 200 points of contention.
“These bracelets are wrong,” he says. “I found them all on the arm of one skeleton. They need to be put together in a series to understand them, but they’ve just stuck them under glass separately, like we’re in some kind of shop. And this sign says that pot is bronze, whereas it’s clearly copper. Who are these idiots?”
Professor Liang is kvetching about the inaccuracy of the signage, which mixes up the chronological order of the artefacts, and can’t tell bronze from copper or stone from clay. But he is having a whale of a time, getting to summarise his career for a film crew, and talk through impact and outreach, two of his favourite topics.
“Archaeology is impenetrable to the lay reader,” he says, “and Chinese archaeology is often impenetrable to other archaeologists. I’ve done everything I can to get our stuff translated into English so it actually gets cited outside China, but also to write in clear, simple language so that people don’t want to kill themselves when they are reading it.”
We’ve been shut out of the archives by his successors, who bluntly proclaim that if it’s not in the gallery, it’s not in the vaults.
“That’s not true,” he says. “I know we’ve sent some pieces off to an exhibition in Chongqing, but I dug these bronzes out of the earth with my own hands, and I know there are hundreds of them back there.” But the authorities have spoken, and he’s called in all the favours that he can, so our last few questions need to be moved to an empty coffee shop.
We put on a brief comedy routine of two men with five degrees between them, unsuccessfully attempting to get two lattes out of a coffee machine, and I get him on the record about what happened to the Yelang people, who either fled across the border to the south, or were swiftly assimilated within the Han population.
I ask him about the Chinese proverb “Yelang zi da” (Yelang thinks too highly of itself), and he relates it to the Han dynasty, when the shutting off of the Silk Road by barbarian incursions led the emperors to suddenly start pushing into the south-west in search of a trade route to India. This brings us back to where we started, with the Han ambassadors demanding the submission of the local peoples, the Dian king musing whether the Han realm is all that bigger than his own, and the Yelang king fatally refusing to let trade through his kingdom without a toll.
Lunch is at a Hmong restaurant where the waitresses proudly show us a plate of writhing, bloody catfish, deep wounds hacked in their sides, still in their death throes. The TV on the wall is showing a video loop of Guizhou tourism, including many sites we have visited, including the village where I once accidentally married a local girl for a couple of hours. I think there is supposed to be a romantic narrative, suggesting a foreign back-packer who runs into a Eurasian supermodel on the bullet train, and that they fall in love among the terraced rice fields and dancing girls in pewter head-dresses. Except, because it’s a loop, it’s entirely possible to walk in halfway and assume it’s a video about a couple who somehow fall out on their trip, drifting apart among the waterfalls and forests, until they return home sitting far apart on the bullet train, with her displaying a greater interest in her guidebook than in him.
“Your work is very hard,” notes Professor Liang. “I never had any idea. About all the sound interference, and the background noise, the lighting issues and the equipment required.” But I think today has been one of the best days of his life, and he regrets that it won’t go on forever.
The director films the pair of us getting into the car, ready for the journey to Kele that we have already shot, and after I rev past the camera and into the sunset, she pronounces that we are done.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events appeared in Route Awakening S05E05 (2019).
ABC Radio in Australia takes the chance to repeat my October 2024 interview about Taiwan, “one of our favourites from last year,” on the grounds that I said a lot about semiconductor chips that has become more relevant today in these tariff-obsessed times.
Yes, because the Old Summer Palace is a thousand miles away in Beijing, so it is unlikely that I would want to be driven there, although presumably he could just buy a new car with the proceeds if I did.
I am in Zhuhai, a city on the Pearl River Estuary that, if foreigners have heard of it at all, is known largely for being one of the factory satellites of Hong Kong in the late twentieth century. But the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences once proclaimed it to be the Most Liveable City in China, it shares a border with Macao that you can literally walk across, and its relentlessly modern focus conceals some fascinating historical stories, such as the time that the locals fought off British opium smugglers, not to mention a floating seafood restaurant the size of an aircraft carrier.
Many readers of this parish will already be aware of the Old Summer Palace (the Yuanming Yuan, or the Garden of Perfect Brightness), which lies in carefully curated ruins in north Beijing. It was infamously the site of a mass looting and burning by the British and French during the Second Opium War. The Chinese keep it in pieces as a reminder, although I am by far not the only person to point out that much of the damage done to the site was done to it by the Chinese themselves over the ensuing century, when it was raided for building materials, converted into market gardens, and used to herd pigs. Sixteen areas of it, in fact, were left untouched by the foreigners, and later destroyed at leisure by the Chinese, who cut down the ancient trees for lumber and sold off the brickwork.
The ruins of the original in Beijing (Wikimedia Commons)
Ever in search of something to lure in visitors the city of Zhuhai has built a replica of the Old Summer Palace in its glory days, piling up the hillside of a local mountain that conveniently resembles the feng shui of the original location. It’s probably the nicest park I have ever been to, full of little pop-up exhibits and installations and the usual tat sellers and snackeries. It was a lovely place to spend an afternoon, marred only by a few ill-judged frills, such as ghastly rubber-duck themed pedalos in the lake.
Visitors are also encouraged to dress up by costume rental stalls, which in one sense adds to the ambience when one runs into a Ming princess or a Manchu cavalryman, but also clogs the byways with the usual cosplayer entitlement. Now that they have put on a posh frock, they expect the world around them to stop while their boyfriend takes an ill-framed picture into the sun with a camera he doesn’t know how to use, which is something of an imposition on everybody else who has just as much a right to walk along the path and among the temples.
I’ve less come to see the Chinese architecture than the recreation of one of the sites from the original that has most caught my imagination. Annihilated during the looting, one sector of the original comprised an ornate baroque folly intended to recreate the look and feel of Versailles. The Xiyang Lou (“Mansions of the Western Ocean”) were an occidentalist dream – an imagined imperial Europe designed in the 1740s by the Italian Giuseppe Castiglione, with fountains and water features created by French Michel Benoist, both of them Jesuits trying to amaze the Qianlong Emperor with visions of the Far West.
The Zhuhai park recreates the mansions and their most famous feature, Benoist’s “water clock” comprising a fountain edged with bronze effigies of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, designed so that each would vomit water from its mouth for each doubled hour of the Chinese day. I was there in the early afternoon, so really ought to have seen the change-over from the Hour of the Goat to the Hour of the Monkey, but none of the fountains were operating on the day I was there.
You’ll notice here the perennial problems of the travelling author in search of pictures. Ever since acquiring the photographs for the first edition of my Confucius biography cost me more than I was paid to write it, I have tried my best to secure my own images. Sometimes, however, what you are paying professionals for is not merely framing, but also opportunity. You can see here my bad luck with the lack of a blue sky on the one day in my life that I am present to take a picture, and the annoyance of a modern building poking out behind the baroque architecture — the replica Mansions of the Western Ocean are in the south-west of the park, close to the entrance and the modern streets outside.
But the park in Zhuhai is also unexpectedly educational, packed with recreations of court life in the Qing dynasty, and, for some reason, scattered with statues of dozens of obscure figures from Chinese medical history. For the visitor who can read the plaques, these include Mi Huangfu (215-282 AD), the inventor of acupuncture, the Ming dynasty gynecologist Tan Yunxian (1462-1556), and Hua Tuo (145-208), the Han dynasty pioneer of anaesthesia. I have no idea why the replica Old Summer Palace also serves as an open-air museum of Chinese medical pioneers, but I was intensely interested in the implied narratives not of “Traditional Chinese Medicine”, but of medicine medicine, with characters such as Bian Que (407-310 BC), the “father of pulse theory.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. The New Yuangmingyuan in Zhuhai is free to enter duing the day, and 120 yuan in the evenings.
It costs £4.50 to take the metro from Mongkok in Hong Kong to the end of the line at Lo Wu (Shell Lake). There, I exit the platform and go through passport control. There is a walkway across a viscous, khaki-coloured stream, no wider than the Thames at Kew. That is the Sham Chun (the Deep Drainage) river. When I reach the other side, Cantonese converts to Mandarin and I am back in China. Lo Wu is now Luo Hu. Shamchun is now Shenzhen.
The area has been repeatedly buffeted by history. In the 17th century, when the Manchus took extreme action to thwart the piratic raids of the Ming restorationist Koxinga, they forced two thirds of the population to move off their land. Twenty years later, the empty land was resettled by Hakka, the “guest people” of China, always scrambling to eke an existence from the worst bits of real estate. Far along the Shenzhen metro line at Nanlian, I drop in on a surviving Hakka “village” – a fortress the size of a city block, with musket slits, crenellations and watchtowers to repel marauders. Inside is a warren of tiny alleyways and residences, an entire community piled on top of each other, sacrificing privacy for protection.
The fort’s sole guardian is a bored teenage girl. The local Hakka really don’t seem to give much of a toss about preserving their heritage, and many of the exhibits in the fort are dusty and forlorn. Matters are not helped by the earnest decision to use the location as the site for an open-air exhibition of international poster design, which means that my attempt to get an authentic photograph of Qing dynasty architecture is thwarted by brightly-coloured adverts for the Berlinale film festival and an exhibition of Dutch pottery.
In 1898 the Sham Chun river became the arbitrary border between China and the “New Territories” ceded to Britain on a 99-year lease. The little river suddenly became a gulf between different worlds, splitting families and sundering contacts. It also, of course, didn’t. Those personal contacts across the water continued to endure, in smuggling and unofficial endeavours. In the war against Japan, the Shenzhen side became a bastion for the East River column, a guerrilla group devoted to exterminating the Japanese.
And then, in the 1980s, the border moved again. Shenzhen was rebranded a Special Economic Zone – a factory city to bring in foreign currency from Hong Kong. This meant that it was also walled off from the rest of China by the “Second Line” – a border fence to keep out would be economic migrants. All this was the brainchild of Deng Xiaoping, whose statue is on the top of Lotus Flower Hill, gazing proudly down at the towers of its Central Business District. It ballooned from fishing village to a city of 17.8 million people in 25 years. It’s a long climb to the top of the hill, but the Deng Xiaoping statue is one of the likely pictures I need to make today’s travel worthwhile. As I line up to get him in the viewfinder, a young Chinese woman bows three times before him, as if she is praying.
I am spending the night at Xiaomeisha, a supposed beach resort at the far eastern end of the metro line, as if someone tried to knock up Southend from scratch. The entire place is still a building site, and my hotel is entertainingly terrible. I can’t turn on the TV; I don’t know where the bathroom light switch is; the toilet and the shower are the same thing, and the “view” is of the 24-hour building site of a nearby tower block, with a constant cement mixer churning.
Luckily, my room has an Exciting Life Activity Zone pod – a bedside repository that threatens to pop open to reveal condoms, “Indian Spirit Oil”, a “Female Jumping Egg”, a dildo, a can of Coke, and, apparently, an entire Chinese woman in lingerie and cat ears. It conjures up fantastic visions of some of the fun nights to be had here to the sound of the cement mixer outside, but sadly, I only have myself for company.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 