I caught a taxi downtown. Drivers generally liked to engage me as a foreigner. This one seemed less talkative. Even so, I tried. Our conversation didn’t begin well. In fact, it didn’t go anywhere.
“This city’s history is amazing,” I said.
“You can’t eat history,” she shot back, leaving us in awkward silence.
She had a point. To a point. It was the mid-90s and the city’s treasure trove of historic sites was only beginning to pay dividends. Xi’an, with its 5,000 years of continuous history, is most famous for the Terra Cotta Soldiers, but it has enough other significant sites to put several cities on the map if you spread them around.
The 2,200-year-old Bing Ma Yong (Terra Cotta Warriors) was only discovered in 1976, late enough to avoid the ravages of the Cultural Revolution. Already the site was attracting tourists from all over the world. But this attraction had yet to fully impact the city itself, still asleep in dust and darkness, hardly changed in 50 years.
Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong on the east coast were thriving – shaking off the dust, turning on the lights, and booming with construction. But Xi’an, geographically in the heart of a nation the size of the U.S., had yet to feel any of that. Good paying jobs remained hard to come by.
In the Mid-90s, this young woman was a rare female taxi driver. While taxis were starting to compete with the ubiquitous bicycles for road space, the onslaught of private cars was still a handful of years off.
Some days I could catch a cab close to my house. Other days I’d wind up walking 3 or 4 miles to get to my destination. Or I’d take a bus so crowded there was no fear of falling over from its frequent lurchings.
But I sensed that someday Xi’an’s history would reap benefits. And in short order, it began to do just that. While the initial changes seemed fast, looking back they were nothing compared with what was to come. When we returned for a brief visit just a year after we left in ‘07, we didn’t recognize our own neighborhood.
The joke was that the national bird of China was the tower construction crane. One day while we were still living there, I walked out into the countryside a short distance from my home and looked back at the city. I counted more than 100 cranes alongside buildings going up 30 floors or more.
This development explosion had more than one cause. The national government, concerned about severe economic disparities between the coastal provinces and the interior, was pumping significant investment into the latter. With Xi’an the gateway to the remote west and China’s 10th largest city, it was a major target.
But it wasn’t only about geography. The national and provincial leadership saw much potential in the Xi’an that had been. China’s ancient capital had lost its imperial status more than a thousand years before due to climate change and the onslaught of rebel forces.
The nation’s capital slowly migrated eastward, eventually landing in Beijing with the Ming Dynasty. Over time, Xi’an shrank to a far smaller footprint than it had had during China’s golden age – the Tang Dynasty of the 700s – when Xi’an was the greatest city on earth.
There were other things that made Xi’an attractive in the ‘90s. For one, it had one of the largest concentrations of universities in the nation. For another, it was the gateway to the vast Northwest, symbolized by camel statues marking the beginning of the Silk Road on Xi’an’s west side.
But no matter which way you turned, you couldn’t get away from Xi’an’s history. 2,000-year-old Han dynasty coins were worthless, found as they frequently were in the ubiquitous dust. But with so many sites of great historic interest besides the Terra Cotta Soldiers – the massive City Wall, the imposing Big Goose Pagoda, the despoiled Banpo Village, to name a few – tourism was bound to follow.
Bill Clinton brought the city to a standstill for 3 days on his ‘98 visit as masses lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the U.S. President, the First Lady, and Chelsea. I know; I was standing there, gawking along with everyone else. The Clinton visit highlighted the city’s past that was its future.
Not all taxi drivers were as nearsighted as that young woman. My friend, Clarence Guo, got his story written up in Time Magazine’s Asia edition. He’d had a government job as a gardener along the city wall until, having saved up to buy a taxi, he began approaching foreigners at the airport with his excellent self-taught English, offering to be their tour guide. With his impressive knowledge of local history, he built a strong international following.
Clarence proved that you can eat history. It put more than just food on the table of his young family. As we were leaving China, he was opening a unique historically-themed hotel down close to the Bell Tower and Drum Tower in the heart of the city.
We live in a generation where history has become suspect. We prefer our myths about the merits of American slavery and the Southern Confederacy and are quick to cast aside tradition as easily as did the roving gangs of China’s Cultural Revolution. We read our Bibles as if they were written yesterday or treat them as useless ancient scribblings, even as we cast off yesterday’s worship choruses as so last century. On the educational side, history and its related subjects are losing fandom, degrees in those fields seen as tickets to nowhere.
But everything we stand on, both good and bad, is the stuff of history. We ignore it to our own peril. We have become what we are – out of what we were.
I don’t usually recommend R-rated movies, but “The Holdovers” has kept me thinking ever since I watched it. In one scene, Paul Hunham, a classics teacher played by Paul Giamatti, says:
“There’s nothing new in human experience, Mr. Tully…. So, before you dismiss something as boring or irrelevant, remember, if you truly want to understand the present or yourself, you must begin in the past. You see, history is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present.”
History explains the present.
Or for another movie quote, this one from “Sight” (also from 2023), “The present is made possible by the past.”
You may not be able to eat history – at least not in its raw form perhaps – but history is in your bones. I’ve found the recent wave of identity politics somewhat disconcerting, just as I find other’s mythologizing of history deeply troubling. We, who are people of the Book, must know the value of authentic history.
That phrase, “People of the Book,” refers to people whose faith is based on sacred scriptures, particularly people who claim Abraham as their spiritual father. Father Abraham may have lived 4,000 years ago and had only two sons, but his descendants became, as God promised, as numerous as the sands of the sea.1
An Imam in Northwest China referred to me as a person of the Book. I still vividly remember my visit to his mosque and the religious school he ran for the boys in his remote village. His Mandarin Chinese was limited, and I had no grasp of his local dialect. Our only communication link was a Han Chinese taxi driver, a man with no interest in religion.
Somehow, we managed to carry on a conversation in spite of the taxi driver’s irritations. I was serving as guide to an American friend, Dr. Jim Bennett, who had much experience with the Muslim world outside of China. Jim was keenly knowledgeable as to the Koran and other facets of the Islamic faith.
Oddly enough, Jim could read the Koran better than the Imam could because for years the Chinese government had made Arabic study nearly impossible. Even though local imams were able to read the Koran, their comprehension was limited. This man understood more than most I had met.
Poorly informed on international affairs of the time, he was vaguely familiar with the U.S, but understood our nation needed to do something about the Palestinians. But he also knew of the Christian faith. And he knew we, my friend and I, were both, as Christians, sons of Abraham. Thus, he recognized that we were people of the Book, something that brought him great joy.
I remember him saying as best as he could, without the help of the taxi driver, that we and he, the Imam, had much in common, much more than with this atheist Han Chinese guy for whom ancient sacred texts were meaningless. There were times in our conversation where the taxi driver grew impatient with our discussion. At those times, the Imam so wanted to speak with us directly without our ad hoc translator. As did we.
To be people of the Book meant that we each had our holy scriptures. The Imam, knowing the value of these ancient texts, was curious about ours. He also knew our faith derived from the monotheism of Abraham, as did his. We might disagree on specifics about Jesus or Mohammed, but we had common roots.
He was a Hui Muslim, meaning his DNA was rooted in the dominant Han Chinese, but somewhere back a millennium or so ago, his ancestors had converted to Islam from the traditional Chinese religions. Those traditional religions have given way to secular atheism. Oddly enough, though, there were – when I was there, at least – about as many Muslims in China as there were members of the Chinese Communist Party.
China’s Muslims date back to within a couple generations of Mohammed. So, they can claim to be one of the nation’s indigenous religions. But as is true of Christians in China, the Chinese Muslims have suffered dearly for their faith.
The Imam may not have been very informed about modern international affairs, but I found him quite learned about Abrahamic religions. As his young students crowded around us, we found ourselves happily engaged in conversations about faith, all while aided by a most disinterested translator who knew enough Mandarin and local dialect to keep us going.
Often the driver had no idea what we were talking about. Somehow, we found a way to work through and around him. The Imam would share something in the local dialect, the driver would translate into Mandarin, and I would translate that into English for Jim, my friend from the U.S. And back we’d go in reverse.
It was a conversation at once both tedious and delightful. Only the driver was restless. We could have spent days there if the government authorities had allowed it. But we had to move on, praying that the Spirit would continue to bring the light of Abraham’s God to the Imam and his students as well as to the disinterested taxi driver who had heard it all, like it or not.
Nations may change – sometimes, like Xi’an, overnight. But the truth doesn’t change. At least that is my take. And my take is rooted in my faith, all the way back to Abraham.
People of the Book are people who understand the value of history – for history teaches us that our roots go deep in time and that we are universally connected, both to each other and to our Maker. Some readers may disagree that history teaches us that we have a Creator. I encourage both believers and nonbelievers alike to study history, our place in this world, and our relationship with our Maker.
Maybe you can’t eat history after all. But you can certainly feed on it.
I frequently write on intercultural understandings. You can find past intercultural posts here. To keep up with new posts as they come out, subscribe at this link for free.
Photo: Dr. Jim Bennett reviewing ancient sacred texts with local Imams in China
- Genesis 32:12 ↩︎
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