Ze Yu looked like one of those smiley, big-bellied Buddhist statues found in restaurants all over China—benevolent, round face, shaved head, rotund, and triple chinned. He’s a monk and knows all the jokes. And when I suggested he could be the Maitreya, the Buddha yet to come, he responded with a good-humored laugh and said that we, that is, my mother and I, were just in time for lunch and led us into the old part of Dali City in the southwestern province of Yunnan. My watch showed just past noon. It was August 3, 2009, and we had traveled two days and a night from Chengdu in neighboring Sichuan province to stay at a courtyard house lent to us by my friend, the avant-garde poet Ye Fu, in a rural village at the foot of Cangshan Mountain.
We ate in a Muslim halal restaurant. A painting of pilgrims in Mecca hung in the main serving hall. We ordered beef and lamb while Monk Ze extolled its range of vegetarian dishes. As we chatted, we talked about “Charter 08,” the manifesto to promote political reforms and human rights in China, of which he is a signatory. I saluted his courage but wondered whether a monk shouldn’t stay out of politics. His happy face became earnest: “Without democracy, Buddhism won’t survive here.”
As we walked off lunch in the old city, Ze pointed out little details, missed by the average tourist, that brought to life Dali’s thousand years of history. The old city was small by Chinese standards—only three or four kilometers from one end to the other, with a permanent population of thirty to forty thousand. But concentrated here were worshippers of many gods and deities. The indigenous Bai people venerated thousands of them in their temples, from the legendary Dragon King of the Eastern China Sea and the Queen Mother of Heaven to ancient emperors and warriors. He showed us Muslim mosques and Buddhist temples and Christian churches, both Catholic and Protestant. Less conspicuous, he said, were the practitioners of Bahá’í and Falun Gong, who used their homes, as did those Christians who refused to recognize government-sanctioned churches.
Since it was the Christians who had stirred my curiosity, Ze wanted to show me a well-known cemetery for Western missionaries who had journeyed into China more than a century before. He believed I might learn something. And so, a few days later, after much walking along mountain paths and several bus rides, Ze and I reached Wuliqiao Village. After more walking, mostly uphill, we stood under a blazing sun at the edge of a cemetery. “Here?” I asked, but Ze shook his head. This, he said, was for Muslims, primarily ethnic Hui. I knew about the Muslim rebellion against Chinese rule in the mid-nineteenth century and the violence that swept Dali. Many Han and Bai were slaughtered. The Qing emperor sent troops and brutally suppressed the Muslim uprising with thousands of casualties. The cemetery was bounded by a stone wall. “Only Muslim ghosts are allowed in here,” Ze said. With suppression of the Muslim rebellion came a period of calm, and it was during the lull that missionaries from, among others, the China Inland Mission, poured into the area.
“We are close,” Ze said and kept walking. After about three hundred more meters the road dead-ended in thick waist-deep cannabis plants and fragrant herbs. We found a side path that led to a tall ridge, and from that vantage point Ze swept his arm to take in five plots of corn in the middle of which stood an excavator, its metallic arm convulsing like the leg of a giant cockroach. “There,” he said, “is the missionary cemetery.”
We zigzagged our way down on a steep path, arms outstretched like birds to keep our balance, but I could yet see no sign of a cemetery. The excavator lifted its arm and struck the earth, lift and strike, lift, strike. “Are they renovating the cemetery?” I asked. Ze gave me a cynical laugh. “You may wish. They are extracting the headstones. High quality rock, much sought after by property developers.” As I looked down at the uneven ground beneath my feet, I could see broken and jagged pieces of stone and, as I focused on the pieces, groups of letters from the Roman alphabet and then whole words, in English, and crosses.
We found the foundations of the cemetery wall and managed to pace out two equal squares, each of about half an acre. Space enough for the bodies of many foreign or Chinese Christians, but no complete records have survived to say just how many.
My research told me this: British missionary George Clarke purchased the land and built the cemetery. Clarke’s Chinese name was Hua Guoxiang, which means fragrance of blossom and fruits. An active member of the London-based China Inland Mission since 1865, Clarke left England in 1881 with his Swiss wife, Fanny, and reached the ancient city of Dali via Myanmar and Guizhou province.
George and Fanny Clarke were almost certainly the earliest missionaries in the region. Initially, they printed Christian pamphlets and gave them out at markets and along the roadside. They also distributed candies to children. But they soon realized that their pamphlets were largely useless because most Bai villagers were illiterate, and their own Mandarin Chinese was of little use in communicating with people who spoke only Bai. So they set about learning Bai while initiating literacy programs in the villages and teaching people to sing hymns in Chinese. They also learned how to imitate the Bai ancestor-worshipping dances and incorporated some of that culture into their Christian teachings. Soon, the Clarkes dressed up in Bai costumes and danced to the rhythms of gongs and drums on the street to attract people and spread the gospel. They wrote up hymns using a popular form of local ditty. I heard stories about how the Clarkes would visit the Bai villages to spend time with musicians and were seen dancing on moonlit nights near Erhai Lake.
The Clarkes lived in Dali for two years but had limited success. They set up a boarding school but attracted only three students. Fanny became pregnant and gave birth to a son. They named him Samuel Dali Clarke.
Two months after giving birth, Fanny became seriously ill. News of her illness spread quickly among her Chinese neighbors, who came to console her. They were deeply touched by her beautiful voice and by the optimism she showed during her illness. She had left instructions with her husband that she be buried in Dali so she could be part of Cangshan Mountain and Erhai Lake. Her devotion inspired people around her and after her death, many of their Chinese friends and neighbors flocked to the church and were baptized.
So began the Christian cemetery at the foot of Cangshan Mountain. On the walls that fenced the cemetery, craftsmen engraved crosses and biblical verses in both Chinese and English. George Clarke buried his wife on the morning of October 30, 1883. It was the first such funeral the indigenous people had ever seen—to them, sending off the dead involved incense burning, sutra chanting, and shaman dancing. They were now being asked to understand that Fanny’s soul was ascending to heaven, where she would be with God.
In the ensuing years, at least fifty foreign Christians served the communities in Dali. According to The History of Christianity in Dali, written and self-published in 2005 by Wu Yongsheng, between 1881 and 1949 the city became an important Christian base in southwest China. In the beautiful land dotted with lakes and hemmed in by mountains, churches sprung up across the countryside, attracting more than a hundred thousand followers. Missionaries built hospitals, orphanages, and schools.
I was struck by the dedication of the missionaries. One such story relates to a Canadian missionary doctor, Jessie McDonald. She came to China in 1913 and worked at a hospital in China’s central city of Kaifeng, Henan province. In 1940, when Kaifeng fell to Japanese forces, she moved the hospital southwest to Dali, where she established the Gospel Hospital. Her work came to an abrupt end on May 4, 1951, when Communist officials seized the hospital and its equipment and ordered McDonald out of China. A big Red Cross symbol on the front wall of the hospital was painted over with a slogan: “Kicking imperialists out of China.” Many Christian followers became scared; they either quit the church or publicly renounced their faith. McDonald is said to have been the last foreign missionary to leave China, and on her last day she ignored the threats of soldiers and went to pray at what is now the Old City Protestant Church, built by missionaries in 1905. She was alone in the church, surrounded by empty pews.
At the top of the church’s dome was a clock weighing 150 kilograms and modeled on London’s Big Ben. Its bell was commissioned by Richard Williams and William J. Embery, who personally delivered the bell via sea to Saigon, Vietnam, from where it was taken along the Mekong River to Yunnan and on to Dali. The entire journey took three months.
McDonald made for the bell and struck it for the last time. The sound rippled through the city. Three old men drinking tea in the old city remember it. “The chiming came in waves, resounding waves, one after another; people in Xiaguan could feel the vibration,” said one.
On the afternoon of January 28, 1998, a couple from France, descendants of George and Fanny Clarke, were met in Dali by Wu Yongsheng. The couple had been inspired after reading Alvyn Austin’s history of the China Inland Mission, China’s Millions, and wanted to visit where their great-grandparents were buried.
That story reminds me of lines from a poem by Paul Valery, “The Graveyard by the Sea”:
But in their heavy night, cumbered with marble,
Under the roots of trees a shadow people
Has slowly now come over to your side.
The poet returns in his imagination to the cemetery of Sète, his hometown on the Mediterranean. He is sitting on a tombstone at noon, staring out on a calm sea, contemplating life and death. But things are rarely as we imagine them to be, and though the French couple may have been expecting a slice of China’s natural beauty, the scene they came across in 1998 was much the same as the one I encountered a decade later. No cemetery, no garden, just an empty, albeit rocky, field plowed for planting. Wu told me the villagers gathered around the French visitors and attempted to recount what had happened to the graves. One said that during the Cultural Revolution the Red Guards often used the cemetery as a target in their fight against foreign imperialists, waving red flags, shouting slogans, and singing revolutionary songs. They ransacked the cemetery, again and again, claiming that they would wipe out the ancestral graves of imperialists. Another villager recalled that the Red Guards had used explosives on the gravestones and blown them into pieces. Another said destruction of the cemetery started way back in the 1950s; with each political campaign, the cemetery became a target of hatred toward foreign imperialists. That didn’t take into account local pillaging; headstones and markers were recycled as pigsties, courtyard walls, and the footings for numerous houses. Even before the Cultural Revolution started, half of the graves had been leveled. The missionaries’ cemetery was one more desecration in the name of Communism that trashed China’s treasure troves of history.
The French couple didn’t find the grave of Fanny Clarke. But they had to have been heartened that she survived in the stories the local villagers told from one generation to the next. I’m moved to quote Paul Valery again:
The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!
The huge air opens and shuts my book: the wave
Dares to explode out of the rocks in reeking
Spray. Fly away, my sun-bewildered pages!
Wu says the couple picked wildflowers and wove them into a wreath, which they placed in the middle of the cornfield. They had with them a small accordion, and the woman began to sing a song she said was Fanny Clarke’s favorite. When Wu told me about the song, I recognized it right away. It was from an 1805 poem by Thomas Moore that has remained popular with singers and composers and even Hollywood:
’Tis the last rose of summer
Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone;
No flower of her kindred,
No rosebud is nigh.
To reflect back her blushes,
To give sigh for sigh.
Here I was at the same place eleven years later. It was approaching dusk. The song was in my head, and I swayed to the rhythm of an unseen accordion. “It’s time to go,” Ze said. We retraced our steps, back aboard buses, back through cannabis bushes, back to the highway. I could see the steeple of a church, and a new crescent moon had risen with the stars. I could hear hymn singing off in the distance.