Free In Manchuria by Michael Meyer Page B

coquettishly. “You’ll want to eat it.”
    He guessed a name that is a homophone for rice, then one for vegetables.
    “Wrong again!” the actress crowed.
    “I give up. What’s your name that I’ll want to eat?”
    “Poo!”
    Clap clap clap went the recorded audience.
    “I’ve seen this one before,” Frances said. The actress gyrated comically to a hip-hop beat, exhorting the audience to yaoqilai, yaoqilai, yaoqilai : “Shake it!” The bus pulsed with high treble.
    The driver pulled to the side of a narrow road lined with birch trees. “Here you are,” he yelled above the video’s din. He pointed to a small green sign that looked like it had just been clipped by a passing truck. One side was bent back, and we leaned to read, in Chinese and, instead of Manchu script, English that said: JIN DYNASTY CAPITAL SITE .
    The arrow pointed at a fallow cornfield. At its edge, Frances knelt before a calf-high stone house. It was a replica of the single-story homes in the distance. Carved above its small front door were characters that read SHRINE TO THE EMPEROR OF THE SOIL . “I’ve never seen one of these,” she said. “I thought they had all been smashed during the Cultural Revolution.”
    I hadn’t seen any around Wasteland, either. The shrine was a relic that would have been targeted by Red Guards bent on destroying “old customs, culture, habits, and ideas.”
    Frances looked around at the empty plain and said, “Maybe the Red Guards never made it out here.”
    Who had? We walked on, toward the village, expecting a fence or a ticket taker, or at least an auntie selling postcards and socks. The only sound was a barking German shepherd chained in a courtyard. Its owner emerged from his house, asking to whose family we belonged.
    “We’re looking for the Jin dynasty ruins.”
    He pointed across the dirt lane at a chest-high gate standing alone, unattached to a wall or fence. It swung open in the wind. We stepped through, and tried to imagine the palaces of a people who, one thousand years before, ruled much of China.
    The Jin (Gold) dynasty was founded in 1115 by a clan of the Jurchen, an equestrian Northeastern tribe skilled in archery and related to the Tungus, a Mongolian race. After pushing their dominion into southern China, the Jurchen moved their capital to present-day Beijing, naming it Zhongdu (Central Capital), and constructing its central chain of lakes. The city’s population grew to one million. The Jin emperor ordered these Northeastern palaces razed in 1157 to show the permanence of the Jurchen migration. Six decades later the Jin fell under a barrage of flaming arrows launched by Mongolian horsemen. Their leader, Genghis Khan, marked every citizen for death; the streets of Zhongdu ran slippery with melted flesh. It would be five centuries before the Jurchen, renamed the Manchu, returned to take the throne.
    All that remained of the original palaces were stones marking where building foundations once stood, and—flanked by cottonwoods standing straight as sentries—a carved tablet perched atop a stone tortoise. Facing an empty field, the inscription announced the capital’s name.
    At the rear of the site we found a cement slab painted with characters that said the ruins were excavated in 2000 . After nearly nine centuries under the soil, all that remained were stones and the palace footprints, built at a time when Europe was emerging from the Middle Ages, developing the Gothic style, building the Arsenal of Venice, and forming the Knights Templar. The wind and light were strong on the Manchurian plain, and chips of the painted description of the Jurchen court flaked off the slab like sunburned skin.
    The last legible sentence said a Jin emperor was entombed a half mile away. The grave was a three-story trapezoidal dirt mound flecked with spindly elms growing aslant from the wind. We descended into a clammy low-ceilinged room to find offerings of plastic pears and apples before a stone crypt: