Free In Manchuria by Michael Meyer

and net weights and crops such as soybeans and millet. The finds evinced that the people who resided here five to seven thousand years ago lived a sedentary farming life, shattering the popular conception that the Northeast was long a vacant backwater before nomadic horsemen swept in to civilize it. Some archaeological sites even suggested habitation dating back two hundred thousand years.
    Aboveground in Wasteland, we could not see any evidence of past settlements, of graves, of history that went back any further than the painted political slogans fading on redbrick walls under the bright Manchurian sun. History here was personal, and living, stretching back only as far as each resident could remember.
     
    Scattered across the region’s far north, center, and south, however, three sets of ruins explain Manchuria’s deeper past.
    On the train to Tonghua, a small city two hundred miles southeast of Wasteland, I sat beside a woman my age and her twenty-month-old son. The child, plump and happy, grabbed at my glasses, fingered my beard, and drooled as he pounded on the window at the passing cows. We sat in hard-seat class, on unpadded, straight-backed benches, and for stretches she asked me to hold him. The baby cooed; the voices of Wasteland’s aunties rang in my ears: You’re not getting any younger .
    Tonghua was where Chinese brainwashers conditioned Sergeant Raymond Shaw for murder in the 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate . His handlers brought Shaw to a room where “all of the furniture was made of blond wood in mutated, modern Scandinavian design . . . Each cubicle contained a cot, a chair, a closet, and a mirror for reassurance that the soul had not fled.”
    It was a perfect description of my Tonghua hotel room. The county seat, neither large nor small, was one of those places where it wasn’t clear if the half-standing buildings, sprouting rebar, were being demolished or constructed.
    Seventy miles further southeast down the tracks, in the border town of Ji’an, I saw both. Workers poured cement for foundations of what would become an international duty-free market. It would be sealed so North Koreans could enter via a new bridge spanning the Yalu River but not pass into greater China.
    “The entire village is being torn down,” a man pulling tiles off his home’s roof told me. “We’re being relocated so the Koreans can learn how to do business.” Across the river, Koreans languidly pedaled old bicycles. Others crouched, washing clothes in the frigid water.
    Two thousand years ago, this land was the seat of a kingdom named Koguryo. Koreans and Chinese debate its provenance: the former claims it as its ancient culture, while the latter—calling it Gaogeli in Chinese—holds it was “a regime established by ethnic groups in northern China, representing an important part of Chinese culture.” So read the sign posted outside a royal tomb dated 37 B.C.
    All museums tell stories; China’s tell political ones. Often, as at these ruins, the museum or historic site is posted as a “patriotic education base.” Such shrines—interpreted by the local propaganda department—present historical events as leading, inexorably, to the Communist Party’s victory in the Chinese civil war. In Beijing’s National Museum of China, the display concerning the nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion against the Manchu dynasty depicts it as a pre-Marxist version of a peasant uprising without mentioning that its murderous leader believed he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. In Tibet, museums seem to exist only to assert to visitors that the territory “had long been a part of China.”
    Like most frontiers, the Northeast pushed back against that neat narrative. These ziggurat-shaped tombs looked more Mayan than Manchurian: seven levels of huge stone blocks rose in receding steps. The tombs dotted the fields around the town, strung together by former castle pediments and low rock walls. The remains spilled across