For Yang Gancai and his wife Wang Yi, seven years of efforts to
chronicle the "disappearing worlds" of Chinese ethnic minorities in
a remote village on the country's border with Myanmar have produced
more than an award-winning documentary.
The couple is known for their 2006 success with
"Transformation", a 140-minute documentary shot over five years.
The film depicted the slash-and-burn agricultural methods of the
Akha ethnic group who lived in complete isolation in Manbang
village of Yunnan Province until a border patrol road was built in
2001. Afterwards radical changes followed as traditional houses
were demolished and electricity was installed.
"Transformation" has won several awards at international
documentary film festivals in Europe and was among China's top 10
documentaries last year.
Yang, 51, and Wang, 43, have also found in the Akha people a
live version of the pre-historical Sanxingdui civilization that has remained a
mystery for historians ever since it was discovered in 1986.
According to Yang, legends told in Akha epics could well explain
the cultural meaning behind the strange-looking bronze images of
humans and birds, and the part-human, part-animal masks with
oversized eyes and eyebrows, unearthed from the ruins of Sanxingdui
in southwestern Sichuan Province.
"The Akha villagers believe a deity in ancient times had given
his own eyeballs to a huge blind bird that had the magic power of
annihilating every evil it saw," said Yang. "The villagers
therefore worship the bird, or rather its eyes, as their
ancestor."
Until today, he said every Akha family has at least one wooden
bird nailed on the roof. "Some families have as many as nine."
Yang and his wife said that the heritage items unearthed from
two sacrificial pits at the Sanxingdui site seemed to bear the same
cultural connotation. "For example, not a single human image had
eyeballs. Only the birds did."
Historians have found the Sanxingdui culture, which blossomed from
5000 to 3000 B.C., to be enigmatic and resembles no other
pre-historic culture known to modern men.
The "mystery of the masks", strange figures and jade produced by
this civilization has even spread as far as UFO and paranormal
websites who picked up on a People's Daily article mentioning
speculation that aliens might be the answer and quoting locals in
the area as having said they spotted UFOs in the area some 20 years
ago.
But when Yang and his wife visited the Sanxingdui Museum earlier
this year, they found evidence of what a shaman had told them back
in the Akha village of Yunnan.
"The shaman told us that people would worship the sacred tree
every spring and autumn, and the number of its fallen leaves would
represent the number of babies to be born that year."
Among the sacrificial items unearthed from Sanxingdui's pits
were several bronze sacred trees.
Some jadeware pieces were inscribed with a boat between two
mountains, a token which researchers say was meant to carry the
soul of the dead back to their ancestral home.
"Until today, the Akha coffins are in the shape of a boat even
though their village is locked in the mountains and I doubt that
anyone has ever seen a real boat," said Yang.
The two freelance journalists sold off their private
advertisement company in Kunming and tried to settle down in the
Akha village of Xishuangbanna in 2001, but were considered "aliens"
by the 316 villagers and were denied entry into their
community.
The villagers had relocated to Manbang in 1996 to flee bad luck
brought on by the inauspicious birth of twins in the tribe.
The Yang couple spent the first nine months in a cabin several
kilometers from the primitive village, and tried to follow the
villagers whenever they worked in the fields, wove cloth or
performed tribal rituals.
Back in 2001 the couple could never take out their camera in
public. "When we did, everyone panicked: the men would threaten to
fight with us, the women would scream and the children would
cry."
In the 10th month, the couple detected signs of a fire, cried
out for help and saved the village. They have since won the
villagers' trust, been allowed to attend some of their rituals, and
have learned their dialect.
With the medicine they brought from Kunming and their limited
knowledge of infectious diseases, they saved at least seven
villagers who had been declared hopeless cases by the village
shaman.
At the end of their fourth year, the couple had shot more than
200 hours of video and 20,000 photos. They witnessed the villagers'
first ever use of a light bulb and transcribed nearly every
surviving epic in the village.
These epics, handed down orally from generation to generation,
are a vivid record of the group's migration, said Yang.
The Akha, whose population is around 500,000 on both sides of
the border between Yunnan and Myanmar, is one of more than 20
branches of the Hani nationals in Yunnan. "But their ancestors used
to live in nomad tribes in today's Qinghai and Gansu provinces and
Tibet."
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A noted scholar on Sanxingdui studies has found Yang's Akha
interpretation of the Sanxingdui "exciting".
"The seashells unearthed from the site were found only in the
deep water of the Indian Ocean, but were later found at several
other heritage sites in Yunnan and Sichuan," said Prof. Duan Yu
with Sichuan Normal University. "All these sites are along an
ancient trade route to Myanmar and southeast Asia, with the
Sanxingdui at the starting point."
"If Yang's hypothesis proves true, we can probably assume the
Sanxingdui civilization used to dominate southwestern China and
even South and Southeast Asia," said Duan.
It would mean the forefathers of today's Akha people had trekked
far to spread the civilization to where it is today, said Prof.
Yang Hui, an anthropologist with Yunnan University.
"In 1938, an American scholar spent more than 20 days traveling
in caravan from the China-Myanmar border in Xishuangbanna to
Yunnan's provincial capital Kunming alone," said the professor.
With modern highways and a superb cross-country vehicle, Yang
and his wife need only 15 hours.
Yang has brought a full set of miniatures of the Sanxingdui
ruins, which he plans to show the Akha villagers in two weeks.
"Hopefully we'll find out more mysteries about the Sanxingdui
culture."
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(Xinhua News Agency December 14, 2007)
