I am driving He Yuling to the dig site, because it gives us the chance to put the car in shot for a few seconds.
“Any problems with grave robbers?” I ask, idly using my term of the week, daomu.
“Oh yes, lots,” he says. “And they’re usually local. Sometimes I wonder with this lot if we’re paying them to dig up something they’ve already worked over on their own time, if you know what I mean.”
The dig site is a pit in a field somewhere on the edge of town. Dr He’s team have been digging it up in sections each year, working through the spring and summer when the earth is soft, and packing up each winter when it hardens. Each year, they pick an area the size of a couple of tennis courts, dig it down ten feet or so to the Shang era, and see what they can find.
In section T0442, where they are working today, they have found a Song-era grave, which they are obliged to carefully tag, catalogue and investigate before they can poke any deeper in search of anything from the previous three thousand years.
“Archaeology was so much easier thirty years ago,” sighs Dr He. “These days, there’s so much diversification – forensic archaeology, environmental archaeology, social archaeology, animal archaeology… but the one that’s become such a growth area is rescue archaeology. China today has so many new roads, new railway lines, new shopping centres, so of course they are going to run into a grave or a temple or something underground. It’s not like the Terracotta Army site, where they build a museum over it. Most of the time you just have a set amount of time to sift what you can, and then it’s a Starbuck’s.”
T0442 is in the middle of farmland, so the soil will be backfilled once they’re done, and the following year it will be growing cabbages again. The farmers don’t mind because there’s digging work for them on the site.
Dr He is such an easy interviewee. We just rattle through the questions, and his answers usually turn into five-minute rants, usually with a chance for me to interject something so it all seems natural and conversational. We joke about the likelihood of Tang dynasty archaeologists complaining that the Shang dynasty archaeologists are ruining their patch by digging right through it to the earlier strata. He talks about soil colours and Luoyang shovels, and we are done before lunch.
“You can see the level of topsoil,” he says. “The first half metre or so is modern. You find iPhones, computer chips, lots of shihui.”
“Shihui?” I look over at Michelle, the assistant producer from Singapore.
“Semen,” she declares.
“I don’t think that’s likely…” I begin gingerly.
“CEMENT!” shouts the director. “Speak properly, Michelle!”
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening S05E02 (2019).
Twenty years after leaving for America to seek his fortune, Sami Nenonen (Joel Rinne) returns to Finland to brag about his good luck. Now exotically calling himself “Sam Nelson”, he looks up his old buddy Väinö Suominen (Yrjö Tuominen) and persuades him that the shares he has to offer are a licence to print money. Although Väinö has a change of heart, Sami has already invested 100,000 marks, and after a tense interval, the Suominen family starts to earn dividends.
Daughter Elina (Sirkka Sipilä) graduates from high school and starts courting a young suitor, much to her father’s annoyance. As the money continues to roll in, the household gains disruptive modern conveniences and distractions, and the maid, Hilda (Siiri Angerkoski) struggles to cope with having a maid of her own – Angerkoski, incidentally, steals the opening scene for me by making pancakes like a boss. The traditional Thursday night austerity dinner of pea soup and pancakes is replaced with newfangled consommé, leading some family members to question what they are really gaining. It is Väinö’s wife Aino (Elsa Turakainen) who really puts her finger on it, when she is poured into an uncomfortably expensive dress and subjected to a night out with Sami and his wife, whom she finds to be cynical and brittle.
This leads to a subtle dig at haters of Finnish cinema. At the Nelsons’ snooty soiree, Aino innocently asks a guest if he has seen “the last [latest] Finnish film.”
“I haven’t seen the first one!” he scoffs. “Smart people don’t bother with them.” Such metatextual japes extend to a scene in which a film director tries to persuade Elina to become an actress, in which Arvo Kuusla, in the innest of in-jokes, impersonates the director Nyrki Tapiovaara, whom members of the film community alone would recognise as the director of the previous year’s One Man’s Fate (Miehen tie) for the rival studio Eloseppa.
One of the film’s most strikingly self-aware moments is where Aino persuades Elina to stick to her previous career choice of becoming a nurse, rather than giving it all up to become a singer-actress. It strikes an oddly discordant note, in which a bunch of actors earnestly hector their audience about how careers in the arts are for the privileged few, and it is far more noble to have a useful job. But Aino is fighting a one-woman front against Mammon, sternly informing her family that “money isn’t everything”, and for once, not winking at the audience that it still really helps – see for example, the grasping money-mindedness of Rich Girl (1939) or The Vagabond’s Waltz (1941). Instead, she is practically overjoyed at the news that Väinö’s investments have failed, and that henceforth the family is back to normal, scrimping and saving and meeting every Thursday for a hearty, happy dinner – compare, here, to the similar make-do-and-mend austerity of the same season’s If Only I Had the Power (1941).
Suomisen perhe began life in 1938 as a radio show, and would go on to chronicle Finnish middle-class life for the next twenty years. Only a handful of the 400 broadcast episodes survive today, along with half a dozen movie adaptations, of which this is the first – four more were made before the end of 1945, and a finale arrived in 1959 after the radio show came to an end. With a peak audience share of 52%, it functions today as a fascinating barometer into the way that Finns saw, or hoped to see themselves in the good old days: Dad with a safe job as a civil servant, mum and three kids in the family home, and a merry housemaid performing all the tasks that would be taken over by machines in the post-war era. One can still find Finnish homes from the 1940s that have a small bedroom oddly en-suite to the kitchen – such architecture is a hold-over from the days when a live-in housemaid was common.
The series moved with the times, often in step with government policy – during the war, the family gained two evacuated children in order to normalise such issues with the general population. This first movie adaptation introduces “Sam Nelson” as a handy catalyst to suddenly transform the lives of the family, only to bring them crashing back to normality by the end in a handy reset. The combination of an American visitor and good Finnish people was also catnip to expat audiences – at least one print of the film would surface in America among the cinema screenings of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and other areas with strong Finnish emigrant populations.
The Finnish press enjoyed the movie’s celebration of normal life, particularly its look back to the simple days of the pre-war era, with Uusi Suomi praising its appeal to “Finnish hearts both young and old”, and enjoying its “gentle jibes at human frailties.” Olli Ohtomies in the Ilta Sanomat was similarly touched by its celebration of the little highs and little lows of everyday life, and “a silent hymn of praise to a peaceful and warm home, happy parents and their healthy children.” Paula Talaskivi in the Helsingin Sanomat also loved it, but offered insightful comments about the degree to which it owed its look, feel and presentation to the Hardy family movies beginning with A Family Affair (1937), which made a star of Mickey Rooney. She was bang on the money – in fact, director Toivo Särkkä at Suomen Filmiteollisuus had made the young Lasse Pöysti watch a number of the Hardy films, of which ten were already in existence by 1941, and to imitate Rooney as best he could in his own performance as Olli, the young son of the family. He did so in the expectation that as the years went on, if the Suominen films became a series of their own, Olli would age into the role of the young lead, as indeed he did with Olli Suominen’s Stunt (1942).
Pöysti and his fellow child-actor were new for the movie – their radio originals were played by actors in their thirties, who could never have got away with it on camera. Among the Suominen children, Maire Suvanto’s career struggled to escape from being identified as Pipsa – her sole role as an adult actress was as the older Pipsa in The Suominen Family is Here Again (1959). In adulthood, she found a new career as a teacher, firstly of drama, and latterly of deportment to the sales-clerks at the Stockmann department store in Helsinki. Lasse Pöysti, on the other hand, stayed in the limelight, becoming an accomplished actor on stage and screen, and the manager of several well-known theatres.
The Suominen films themselves did not age well, written off by Tapani Maskula in the Turun Sanomat as little more than “stiff theatre” when they were rebroadcast on television in the 1990s. Still, he conceded, “the merits of the work are more historical than artistic. It offers an excellent sample of the lifestyle of the Finnish middle class in exactly the decent and innocent form in which it wanted to be marketed at the time.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films, so you don’t have to.
Somewhat to my surprise, the eBook edition of Anime: A History (Second Edition) has sneaked out into stores two weeks ahead of the paper version’s 7th September street date.
For all those of you who were disappointed that my Gunbuster commentary track was not included on the recent Blu-ray collectors’ edition, Justin Sevakis has uploaded the whole thing up onto YouTube. So you can sync it up at your leisure and hear me wittering for nearly three hours about my favourite anime.
Sancai is the spinach-and-egg colouring to be found in a lot of Tang dynasty pottery. Or at least, it is today. In fact, although sancai as a technique spread as far as Italy in the late Middle Ages, it was over-written in China by later porcelain firing methods with higher temperatures and different glazes. It was practically forgotten in modern China until 1905, when workmen digging railway cuttings near Luoyang started uncovering buckets of the stuff in old tombs.
Archaeologists took it to the nearby village of Nanshishan, where they asked local tilers to come up with ways to restore it, leading to a transformation of their lifestyle. Nanshishan is now a centre for modern sancai production, practically an entire village of over a thousand people, devoted to making pottery.
I’ve never liked sancai. Five years coming and going to Xi’an and I have never once been tempted to buy any of it. Horses are a speciality, but I have never thought of getting a sancai horse for my horse-crazy mother. Nor have I ever been all that tempted by a sancai camel or a sancai fat girl (the ideal body shape in the Tang dynasty). Eric the director of photography is not a fan, either.
“I hate it,” he says. “It’s evil. It’s all for dead people. I would NEVER have it in my house.”
Gao Shuiwang, a relative of the original Gao who became the first restorer, has a swish workshop where they make the sancai. He has a sonorous 40-cigarettes-a-day voice, and is witty and chatty when discussing the question in advance. When he asks what the questions will be, the director jabs me in the ribs, and I say: “The first one, I guess, is what kind of relationship the people of Nanshishan have to the discovery of sancai.” (Wo renwei diyige shi Nanshishan cunmin dui sancai de faxian you shenme guanxi?) He’s ignored me until this point, assuming I am some kind of puppet, and his eyes pop out on stalks when he hears Mandarin coming out of my mouth. After that, things speed up a whole lot, and we are all laughing and joking about the story of sancai since 1905, the problems the villagers had experimenting with glazes and firing temperatures, the health and safety restrictions on wood-burning furnaces, and the difference made by cobalt, newly arrived in the Tang dynasty from Persian merchants along the Silk Road, and vital in the composition of new blues and blacks.
Gŭ – cobalt. A word I learned at six this morning while revising the vocabulary that was likely to come up, lest anyone think this is easy.
Filming time comes, and suddenly Mr Gao clams up. He assumes a rigid, upright position and starts declaiming at me as if addressing an assembly hall. He thinks that interviews have to be staid and staged, and the director pleads with him to go back to the chatty, smiling, witty man he was only minutes earlier. It takes a while to drag him back out of his shell, and convincing that, yes, it’s okay to have fun. Eventually, we drag it back out of him, I signal for Clarissa the fixer to stand behind me so he has a prettier face to look at while he answers, and before long we are back to normal.
As soon as the interview is declared over, he is back to his previous, bounding self, and the director keeps the camera running in secret while I get him to show me around his favourite exhibits in the gallery, all the better to hear his enthusiasm come through. He then takes me down to his lab, where we see the plain white horses painted with three different kinds of red – all the glazes are oxides, and only change from reddish colours when they are fired in the kiln. Until that point, they all look almost the same.
“It’s a right bugger telling them apart,” says Mr Gao. “You wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve had a brush for red-which-turns-into-green and gone and put it into the red-which-turns-into-white bowl by mistake.”
Mr Gao is effusive with praise for us for giving him such a good time and a good laugh, and is dismayed we can’t come to dinner. He stops us at the door to announce that he wants to give us a little present. A real sancai horse, like something you’d want in your tomb.
“Eric!” I shout. “Mr Gao has a present for you.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening S05E01 (2019).
It was at the Reform Club in London, from which Phileas Fogg once legendarily set out on a journey around the world. That night, I was addressing a tuxedo’d audience, discussing the many sights and sounds of Xinjiang province, that vital link in international trade routes that, to me, was the essence of the so-called “Silk Road”. I spoke about the ruined cities to be found in the Sea of Death; the bright-eyed angel paintings in desert shrines; the whirling storms of black sand that wreathed the jade mines in the foothills.
Ilse Gertrud Ingeborg Schwepcke (née Haus) insisted on sitting next to me at dinner. She wanted to hear more about the breakaway Muslim realm of Kashgaria (oddly celebrated in street names in East London), the red-haired, mummified “Beauty of Loulan”, the secrets of silk and the fate of the Nestorian Christians. I revealed that I would shortly be heading off with a National Geographic film crew to see it all up close, in season two of Route Awakening.
Ilse seized my hand.
“I wish,” she said. “I wish I could go with you.”
I often bore that in mind as I struggled to eat a newly slaughtered goat in a dusty barnyard, or as I was showered with ordure in the middle of a tribal mud-fight. I imagined her charming the local villagers with a joke delivered half in French, or suggesting that Chicken Kiev might make a better dinner than a cow’s grass-filled intestines.
But we both knew it was impossible. At the time, she was already in her late eighties, a director at Haus Publishing, the company set up by her daughter Barbara, with her mother’s maiden name in the title and Ilse herself as a director. Not long after the company started operating, Ilse became the curator of a quirky list of travel books, in the course of which she would sign me up to write about Finland, Tokyo, Beijing and, of course, the Silk Road.
In an age when so many travel books seem like checklists for pointless selfies, Ilse’s commissions resolutely reflected a love of travel itself, a fascination with the remote and the strange, a refusal to pander to the mainstream. So few modern tourists “travel” at all, but Ilse’s books invited us all to voyage far beyond the sunset, even if we never leave our armchairs.
She shepherded and curated much work of enduring quality, although I am sure she would agree, her best production was probably her daughter Barbara. Or possibly that book about Istanbul. No. Definitely Barbara.
“If a background is really good, it’s taken for granted —viewers can ignore it and just immerse themselves in the world of the movie,” he said. “If it’s bad, they can’t help noticing it, and lose their concentration. When we remember the good times in our lives, we always remember the background as beautiful, even if we didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. That is the kind of realistic beauty that I want to depict.”
Over at All the Anime, my obituary for the scenic artist Nizo Yamamoto.
“Mannerheim!… He rode as if in a snowstorm, the air flickering from flowers thrown down from windows, balconies and rooftops. Around him clamored the street with its black banks of tightly packed humanity… Their arms gesticulated, hats and handkerchiefs waved in the wind, from thousands of throats rolled an avalanche of cries.”
In describing the triumphant march of Gustaf Mannerheim into a newly liberated Helsinki in 1918, Henrik Meinander’s Mannerheim, Marshal of Finland: A Life in Geopoliticschooses to quote from Jarl Hemmer’s 1931 novel A Fool of Faith. His choice of perspective reminded me of something I found myself doing in my own Mannerheim book – discarding the approved images of the official record and picking through the offcuts and supposed duds, in search of images that brought with them striking moments of unexpected context. For Mannerheim’s triumph, I deliberately chose an unused image from the archives, “ruined” in officialdom’s eyes by some guy jamming his hat in the air, whereas for me the sight helped convey the excitement with which the victorious general was welcomed into Finland’s capital.
Meinander’s account of Mannerheim’s triumph is one of the highlights of his new book, not for the depiction of the homecoming war hero, but for the nuanced appraisal of the language being used around him. Mannerheim, like many of the politicians in the Finnish parliament, was deeply reluctant to accept unbridled democracy, sure that Communists would try to game the system and drag the newly freed nation back into a Russian orbit.
Much modern writing on Mannerheim is put through a breathlessly teleological focus, as if he is the hero of his own HBO mini-series, propelled inexorably towards military achievement and the leadership of his nation. Meinander zooms in on tiny details that shunted Mannerheim, sometimes randomly, towards his fate, such as his failure to pass the Russian language exam in 1892, which closed off many promotional routes to him within the Tsar’s military, and forced him to concentrate on his existing, equestrian specialty, increasingly outdated in the age of the internal combustion engine. He also picks out some illuminating asides in history that run counter to the official narrative, such as a German report of Mannerheim’s 1918 headquarters that finds the whole thing “rather Russian.” Mannerheim is remembered today as a founder and defender of a free Finland, but Meinander digs up contemporary accounts that frame him instead as the last loyalist to a “White” Russia, failing to turn Finland into the first step of a White counter-offensive against the Reds.
Meinander served for some years as the curator of the Mannerheim Museum, and has plenty to say about the contradictions of a gentleman who is obliged to buy his own furniture. As a member of Finland’s landed gentry, Mannerheim should have been able to fling together his Helsinki residence with a jumble of antiques and heirlooms. Instead, his father’s bankruptcy in his childhood had lost the family much of his possessions, and Mannerheim was obliged to assemble his home from scratch, the manner of the nouveau riche. It is an oddly telling observation from Meinander, and helps explain the very modern way that so much of the house draws upon Mannerheim’s personal acquisitions in his mission across the Far East. It also leads to a lovely glimpse, depending on your point of view, as Mannerheim as an insufferable fusspot or cast-iron planner, travelling Europe with a detailed set of measurements for every room in his house, just in case he ran into a chest of drawers that might look nice on the landing.
Meinander’s Mannerheim is, above all, a creature out of time, a Swedish-speaking aristocrat, trained in the Tsar’s army, catapulted into the highest echelons of a modern, republican state. He rumbles with resentment at what he sees as the Swedes’ failure to come to Finland’s aid, although Meinander is on hand, with a somewhat hurt tone, to point out how quickly history forgets: “no other European country stood up for Finland anywhere near as much as Sweden, a fact that was often disregarded both during and straight after the war….” When Mannerheim issued an order of the day to announce the end of the Winter War, it was only those acculturated to Swedish literature who would have seen the message hidden in his comment that Finland had defended “the West” against the Soviet aggressor, and “we have paid every last penny of the debt we owed.” It was a reference to Originala skuldsedeln (1872), a poem by Zacharias Topelius that chided the Finns for not being grateful to Sweden for its cultural heritage.
Meinander’s Swedish-speaking perspective is the most valuable element of his book, cutting through posterity’s fog to focus on the man who only reluctantly addressed crowds in Finnish after careful rehearsal; who carried crib cards with him in case he needed to reach for unfamiliar vocabulary, and whose interactions with most of his confidantes remained in Swedish, the secret cant of Finland’s wealthy elite. Much of this context has been erased by posterity, particularly in the light of the “Real Finns” (aitosuomalaiset) movement of the 1930s, which tried to purge the Swedish language from public discourse. These days, it’s become something of a running gag that although Finland has two official languages, everything happens in Finnish, and some wag might append to the end of a text “och samma på svenska” (“and the same in Swedish”), as a little afterthought that someone ought to sort that out for the 5% of the country that still claim Swedish as their mother tongue.
Meinander regards Mannerheim as an incredibly lucky figure, afforded the luxury of communicating with the public through ghost-written military orders of the day, while his political bosses are put through the wringer of media attention. In fact, Meinander goes so far as to say that if the Finnish people had been exposed more directly to Marshal Mannerheim on a regular basis, they would have found him snooty, diffident and undemocratic, a very reluctant servant of parliamentary democracy. I have heard much the same from many a modern-day Finn, some of whom are happy to accept Mannerheim as their national demigod, but gingerly opine that if they had ever met him, they probably wouldn’t have got along.
Meinander does not shy away from the upper-class clique of industrialists and magnates with whom Mannerheim hobnobs, and the personal connections that buoyed him up in lean times. Mannerheim’s friendship with his sometime brother-in-law, the millionaire Hjalmar Linder, survived the latter’s divorce from Mannerheim’s sister after he proved infamously uninterested in sex with a lady. Later on, Linder tried to set Mannerheim up with his half-sister, although Meinander takes evident glee in pointing out that while Mannerheim’s published correspondence is fulsome in praise and flirtation with the young Kitty Linder, Kitty herself described her suitor as a frightful “old bore.”
Age is indeed a factor, not only in Mannerheim’s love life, but in his interactions with many of the movers and shakers of the Finnish republic. Meinander observes that at the outbreak of the Winter War in 1939, Mannerheim was 72, literally old enough to be the father of most of the generals serving under him, with an attitude towards strategic planning that was arguably a generation behind the times. Meinander stops short of knocking off Mannerheim’s crown as the Greatest of Finns, but is unafraid to point to conflicts between Mannerheim and his officers, and numerous moments where he dodged becoming one of history’s also-rans by sheer luck.
If Meinander’s book seems to have a personal touch to it, that is all to the better. It is not merely the author’s intimate experience of the Mannerheim Museum and the Swedishness that is often lost to modern readers, but the experience of teaching a younger generation that lacks much of the habitus for understanding the recent past. When discussing Mannerheim and his officers retiring for coffee and cigars, Meinander feels obliged to explain that “the large majority of the male population of Europe smoked regularly,” as if already considering the next elements of the Mannerheim story likely to soon be twisted, confused or forgotten by the next generation of historians.
“These terrible defeats showed up increasingly in the military dispatches as ‘shattered jewels’. It became media shorthand for a battle in which everybody dies, and the enemy is left with nothing but ruins and ashes.”
Over at All the Anime, I discuss some of the wartime allusions in Hideaki Anno’s Gunbuster.
“Jonathan,” said Mamoru Hosoda, “I wonder if you have ever heard of an anime called Gunbuster? Because there’s this scene in Gunbuster where the mecha comes out and stands with its arms folded on the prow of the ship, and that’s such a fantastic moment in anime, and that’s what I was trying to evoke with Belle on the back of that whale.”
Over at All the Anime, I fold my arms and wait for the alien hordes.
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 