Tradition says that Huangdi was born in Xinzheng about 4700 years ago. This is contemporary with the 4^th Dynasty of the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the dynasty which built the great pyramids at Giza. Huangdi had a younger brother (cousin, relative, or whatever) named Yandi, or Emperor Yan. One story says Huangdi and Yandi fought a series of bloody battles for control of the North China Plain. Some say Yandi was the ancestor of the Korean people. Some versions of the story say the two reconciled and, presumably, lived happily ever after.

                Huangdi is credited with the invention of boats, wagons, the bow and arrow, clothing, silk, ceramics, writing, the calendar, and possibly the Internet. An ugly (but wise) wife of Huangdi is honored as the inventor of weaving, while another wife allegedly started sericulture, the raising of silkworms. And it wasn’t Huangdi himself, but rather a minister commissioned by Huangdi who actually invented writing. Likewise, Yandi is honored as the originator of farming, Chinese medicine, and irrigation. Huangdi was also the first of five great Sage Emperors who ruled before the first historic dynasty.

                What, if any, of this can be believed?

                Most scholars, especially in the West, are inclined to dismiss the stories as mere legend. After all, the first written records which have survived didn’t appear until some 2500 years after he lived. That’s a long time to transmit an oral tradition with any accuracy, although, I suppose, one could argue that perhaps the stories were once written down long ago and later lost.

                We do believe that sericulture was invented at about this time period, and that writing could have been invented about this same time. The oracle bones found at the Shang capital of Yin (modern Anyang) date to around 1300 BC and contain some 5000 characters. A language of this complexity would have taken hundreds of years to evolve, which puts its origins at least in the same millennium as Huangdi. However, there are some elements of the legends which do not seem to fit the facts.

                For example, Huangdi is credited with inventing chariots, or wagons. I suppose anything is possible. But the first archaeological evidence for chariots appears at Yinxu (Anyang) at about 1200 BC, some 1500 years after Huangdi lived. Most scholars believe the technology was learned from the peoples of the steppes.

                Then there is the famous South Pointing Cart which Huangdi allegedly invented and used to defeat an enemy during a fog. It is a mechanical wagon with a standing figure whose outstretched arm always points south. This is done through a series of gears connected to the wheels, so that no matter which way the wagon turns, the arm still points in the same direction. It is ingenious, and we actually do have such a machine in Chinese history. But it is attributed to an inventor during the Northern Song, about 3700 years after Huangdi. At any rate this is the first verifiable record of this invention.

                While I have seen nothing in the legends which state that Huangdi carried a massive William Wallace-type sword, nevertheless, he is usually depicted carrying one. It looks impressive, but the fact remains that the jian – the Chinese double-edged bronze sword - does not appear in the literary or the archaeological record until around 600 BC, some 2000 years after Huangdi.

                The portrait of Huangdi from which all the heroic images and statues of today derive comes from a Ming encyclopedia published in 1607. Interestingly, kings and emperors depicted there ranging over a 2500-year period are all shown wearing the same headdress, which looks something like a Western graduation mortarboard. I realize that China is a very conservative culture, but 2500 years of following the same style does seem a bit unlikely. I don’t really think anyone has a clue as to what Huangdi actually looked like.

                Now here I am going make a statement which I cannot defend, namely, that I believe Huangdi really existed. The more I study ancient cultures, the more respect I have for the essential validity of oral tradition. I don’t agree with many of the details, but I do think there is an historical person behind all the legends. Let me propose the following scenario:

                Huangdi was probably a tribal leader who lived and ruled for a long time. During his lifetime people began to make the transition from a hunting and gathering culture to an agricultural culture. Many of the inventions which helped make up civilization came into being around this time. Probably he was remembered as a wise leader. People tended to attribute to him personally events and inventions which began during his reign. During the following centuries people embellished the story by attributing everything invented in the remote past to him.

                The title “emperor,” however, only adds to the confusion. We must not think of emperor here as someone like Caesar or Napoleon. A better analogy would be a tribal chieftain like Geronimo. I actually used this analogy with a visiting delegation from the Apache Nation in Arizona, and they understood and appreciated it. A week later I again used it with another group of visitors from the Northern Flyover Zone, and someone in that group took such offense to my analogy that I was fired from giving the rest of my history lectures. Having thought about it since, I now realize my Geronimo analogy was misguided. I think Sequoyah would be a much better example. Sequoyah, like Huangdi, presided over the development of a written language. Likewise, Sequoyah represents a settled, agricultural culture rather than a nomadic hunting and gathering one. Nevertheless, I stand by my tribal analogy. Huangdi did not live at Versailles, nor did he control a mighty empire. At best he was head man over a village or a developing town and its surrounding agricultural zone. Even the words “capital” and “city” are too anachronistic at this early stage of Chinese civilization.

                The problem of Huangdi goes to the very heart of the problem of the uses and abuses of history. The Huangdi stories are not perpetuated by serious historians who seek an accurate understanding of the past. Huangdi is more important as a symbol than as an actual person. As a symbol, he serves a contemporary cultural and political agenda.

 A brief history of the Huangdi Temple in Xinzheng is in order. The temple itself was first built during the Han Dynasty, at the site where people had honored the birth of Huangdi for over 2500 years. Like most temples in China, it was renovated many times over the centuries. It suffered destruction during the Cultural Revolution in the campaign to eliminate Old Thinking. In the 1980s it was rebuilt and greatly enlarged. At that time many other temples throughout China were also rebuilt. I suspect that part of the reason may have been a sincere desire to atone for the excesses of the past. But also, part of the reason may have been to send a message to the Chinese outside the mainland. The message, in my opinion, was something like, “your ancestral faith is now safe in China.” This message was aimed particularly at Chinese living in Hong Kong and Taiwan. At that time it was not yet certain that Hong Kong would be returned to China following its 150-year occupation by the British. Having viewed the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese population of Hong Kong was pretty apprehensive about the possibility of rejoining the mainland.

                Hong Kong, of course, returned to China peacefully in 1997. Today, some eleven years later, the threat of oppression from the mainland has been put to rest. The people’s worst fears proved unfounded. The city is fabulously prosperous, while individual liberties have not diminished one bit. But in 1980, one could have hardly predicted it. In my opinion, the decision to rebuild the temples was part of a plan to peacefully win over the people of those two regions, to demonstrate to them that religion was now safe to practice in China. The Huangdi story assumed even greater significance, in that the majority of the Chinese people consider him their First Ancestor. The appeal then became, “come back to China, the land of your ancestors.”

                Xinzheng now hosts an annual Huangdi celebration every spring. Thousands of Chinese visitors come to hear speeches and offer incense at the shrine of their ancestor. Thousands of townspeople and students from Sias University line the main highway, drumming and lion-dancing, as busses of visitors pass by on their way to the temple. Just a few years ago an entire city block was torn down to make room for the temple’s expansion, which includes a wall listing some 3000 family names of all the Chinese people.

                Nearby in Zhengzhou a giant statue of Huangdi and Yandi, complete with a large altar, was recently erected overlooking the Huang He or Yellow River. One Internet source states that it is the fourth tallest statue in the world. Of course, the revival of Huangdi worship is not in isolation. The government is stressing the virtues taught by Kongzi (Confucius), has rebuilt many Daoist and Buddhist temples, and created a new Buddhist theme park on Hainan Island. (See my photo album for “Sanya & Hainan Island,” posted at my website under “Chinese Scenic Places.” The 108-meter tall statue of Bodhisattva Guanyin is reputedly the second-tallest statue in the world.) Moreover, the official Three Self Protestant Church has constructed many new church buildings, including a large, cathedral-sized one across the street from my own campus. While the Communist Party is still officially atheist, and the government publicly discourages superstition, religion is making a major comeback in China and religious liberty appears very much a reality today.

                The link at the end will take you to a photo album of the Huangdi Temple and celebration in Xinzheng, along with other photos illustrating points made in this essay.

November 19, 2008

Gary L. Todd, Ph.D.

Professor of History

Sias International University

Xinzheng, Henan, China

http://picasaweb.google.com/GaryLeeTodd/HuangdiWorshipOtherReligiousCenters#

                I’m sure abuses exist. I’ve lived in China almost four years and have never actually seen any abuses, nor have I ever heard any first-hand accounts of any. But I know something about human nature, so I believe they must exist. People are probably shaken down by crooked cops, and people with little power are probably beaten without good cause. However, if this were a widespread phenomenon, I think it would be reflected on the faces of the people. I would expect to see fear in the eyes of citizens of a police state. Instead I mostly see people living out normal, uneventful lives. The ambitious ones are mostly busy trying to get into a good university. If they have graduated, they are mostly busy trying to get into graduate school or get a good job. Some are busy trying to get rich. The peasants are busy doing the boring sorts of things that peasants normally do. I’ve never seen anyone look like they feared anyone in uniform here. Rather, I see people constantly cutting in front of cop cars on the streets and mostly ignoring the police.

                What makes me look at this issue differently from most people is that I have lived with a plate in my forehead for nearly four decades. You see, around 1971 I was in a city park in Rockford, Illinois, when the cops busted a friend of mine for no other reason than that his hair was too long. I protested this illegal arrest and promptly got handcuffed. All the way to the police station a patrolman with the nametag R BAST kept taunting me about my own hair, accusing me of being a queer. This to me suggested that the officer had struggles with his own sexual orientation, and was trying to hide it with an excessive display of macho. Anyway, at the police station he started beating up my friend. I peered around the corner to witness it, and promptly got thrown to the floor and kicked around.

                Now the next episode is probably the stupidest thing I have ever done in my life, but a good cop should have never reacted the way he did. Assuming that R BAST was in fact a latent homosexual, I blew him a kiss right in front of his fellow officers. I had great fun with that – for about three seconds. Then he started pounding my head repeatedly onto the concrete floor of the police station. Right above me was a sign prominently advising me of my rights, one of which was my alleged right not to be abused. All during this time about a dozen of Rockford’s Finest were laughing. This included a guy wearing sergeant’s stripes. So I guess you can tell me people get tortured in China, but I would have to reply, “So what? How is that any different from what happened to me in democratic America?”

                The next day they put me in a holding cell with a black guy who had been badly worked over the night before. The cops had covered his body with welts, probably with a rubber hose. I suspect it was partly intended as an object lesson for me. They also added a bunch of extra charges to my initial disorderly conduct, none of which had any legal merit. When they brought me before a judge, the judge simply handed me a paper to sign. In exchange for my immediate release, I agreed to never press charges against the city or police force of Rockford. I had little choice. I suspect if I hadn’t signed, I would have ended up like that black guy. So I signed and they released me. In 1973 I had to have part of my skull replaced with plastic and steel because the fracture had created a situation where the spinal fluid was seeping through and filling up my forehead. This led to a whole series of other problems, but that is a different story.

                Epilog:  R BAST became one of the elite SWAT team some time later. One day he was suspended for a week for beating up some Mexican fellow he caught sleeping at the Colonial Bakery, where, surprisingly, the Mexican was employed. A few years later my dad sent me a news article about Richard Bast, Junior, who was arrested for armed robbery. I guess people really do reap what they sow.

                None of this actually proves that the Chinese population is not being systematically abused, but whenever I hear those accusations, I have to think back on my own experience. My opinion is that we should clean up our own house first before we presume to clean up our neighbor’s. Or, to borrow someone else’s metaphor, perhaps we should remove the log from our own eye before we try to remove the speck from the other guy’s eye.

October 22, 2008

Gary L. Todd, Ph.D.

Professor of History

Sias International University

Xinzheng, Henan, China

My guiding principle for teaching is that the teacher is first and foremost a servant. I am in the classroom to help the student learn, not to inflict my personal prejudices on my students or feed my own ego. I will never consciously violate the trust placed in me by my school or my students, and when I am uncertain about a student’s conduct or achievement, I will always give the student the benefit of the doubt. I always set a much higher standard for myself than I do for my students. However, I also try to push them a little, and generally try to make my first examinations slightly intimidating. A little hard work and sweat rarely hurt anyone.

Grading is not an exact science. It is as much an art as it is a science, and any teacher who thinks he can tell exactly what a student has earned, probably doesn’t know what he is talking about. My favorite evidence for this is a study done some years ago in which hundreds of experienced teachers were given thousands of student papers to grade. They were told each student’s grade level, and asked to evaluate each student’s performance. Every student in the study received every grade from A to F! At the very least, this should remind us of the extremely subjective nature of grading. Even teachers who use “objective examinations” must subjectively choose which facts to emphasize and which to ignore. Knowing this, the teacher should make allowance for his limitations and should evaluate his pupils with a certain amount of humility and uncertainty.

In determining final grades, I have a rule. When a student is very close to the border between two grades, I will give him the higher grade, unless the student has repeatedly missed classes. Over the years I have given many students one letter grade higher than their total scores indicated they actually earned. But I have never given any student two letter grades higher. I am willing to give the student the benefit of the doubt up to a point, but I do insist in maintaining reasonable standards. I have never in my life given a student a lower grade than what I honestly believed that student earned. Never. I do not penalize students who disagree with me or who hold different religious or political views. I have known many teachers who do this, but I consider this the height of arrogance and unprofessional conduct. I encourage my students to disagree with me, so long as they have intelligent reasons for doing so.

                During the Vietnam War when male students who flunked out of college could be drafted into the military, there was an anti-war professor at my university who claimed he gave “A” grades to all male students to help them keep out of the war. To balance the class average he gave “F” grades to female students who allegedly had nothing to lose. There was another professor who claimed he threw student papers down the stairs and assigned them grades based upon which step each paper landed. Longer research papers are heavier and thus travelled farther, so they deserved the higher grades. Pure physics, according to the professor. And I have a good friend who never went to college because her English teacher gave her a “B” grade on a paper which the teacher never actually read. This caused my friend to miss earning a scholarship by a fraction of a point, and without the scholarship, she could not afford college. A couple of years later the teacher actually looked at the paper and remarked that it was a truly excellent paper. Of course it was then too late to help her student, but it does provide a negative example of the consequences of lazy and dishonest teaching practices.

October 21, 2008

Gary L. Todd, Ph.D.

Professor of History

Sias International University

Xinzheng, Henan, China

                Chinese students cheat. Apparently they have been doing this for quite some time, because in the Capital Museum in Beijing is a student’s “cheat sheet” from the old Imperial Examination. But American students cheat, too. The difference seems to be that the Chinese students are more likely to get caught. All this really tells me is that Chinese students are not as effective at cheating as are their American counterparts.

                I’ve been in the teaching business for some thirty years, and, quite frankly, the cheating I’ve seen in China doesn’t come close in either quantity or sophistication to the cheating I’ve seen in America. Let’s start with one hard fact. Studies have been done asking American students whether or not they have ever cheated. Since these surveys preserve the student’s anonymity, there is a pretty good chance they are a fairly accurate reflection of reality. Basically, the studies tell us that nearly all American students admit to having cheated at some time in their academic career, and some do so quite regularly.

                Back when I was a graduate student the campus bulletin boards were full of notepads advertising papers “for research only.” Despite this disclaimer, it was obvious that the student was purchasing someone else’s term paper to submit as his own work. I experienced some of this personally because I always assigned a 10-page research paper for students in my Ancient Near East & Greece and my Ancient Rome history classes. Imagine my surprise when a student whose classroom performance indicated he was about as intelligent as a houseplant submitted a paper worthy of a Pulitzer! Of course today the Internet has replaced those notepads stapled to bulletin boards. However, today there also exists technology making it possible for a teacher to determine whether or not a student paper was obtained from an online databank or plagiarized from some published source.

                Plagiarized term papers, stolen examinations, and students peeking at their neighbor’s answer sheet are but the tip of the iceberg. I was once a professor at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. I had a friend there who had never attended college, but who made a decent living writing master’s theses and doctoral dissertations for other people. All they had to do was submit the topic, a few sources, and a one-page sample of their writing style, and my friend did the rest. So I know for a fact that there are people with SIUC doctorates and masters degrees who never actually earned them. I rather doubt that my friend was the only person in America with such a lucrative business, nor that Carbondale was the only school in America producing unearned graduate degrees. It seems that every year we are treated to yet another example of some big-name academic who got his/her job on the basis of phony credentials. I believe the former president of no less an institution than Yale University recently resigned when it was discovered that her resume had been a fraud.

                So when you put it into global perspective, the fact that one Chinese student at Sias University wrote the answers to his exam on the back of his girlfriend’s neck and then sat directly in back of her during the exam should not be too shocking. What is more shocking is the extent of corruption rampant throughout our society, or rather, throughout the entire world. I have often said that for every example of corruption or dishonesty I have ever experienced or heard about in China, I have personally witnessed something at least as bad in America. The fact is that people are pretty much the same wherever you go in the world.

October 20, 2008

Gary L. Todd, Ph.D.

Professor of History

Sias International University

Xinzheng, Henan, China

I simply attached the photos to my emails until Yahoo abandoned this option several years ago. I had to look elsewhere to send my photos. Someone suggested Facebook, so I joined and created several albums. Then someone said Picasaweb could host far more photos, so I created several dozen photo albums of Chinese historic and scenic places. By this time I was using PowerPoints for all my history lectures, creating outlines so students could more easily follow my lectures. Since I had quite a few photos I’ve taken over the years, I naturally added them to my PowerPoint presentations. Students wanted copies of the photos, so I added albums of historic places around the world. I also started to photograph Chinese museums to illustrate my lectures on Chinese history. Since my recent photos are all high-resolution, people interested in Chinese artifacts began to write and thank me for making these available. So by the spring of 2008 I decided to attempt to photograph every displayed artifact in every museum in China and make the photos available to anyone in the world. This is probably an impossible goal. But as my database grows, its usefulness to scholars and other interested people will increase.

                At present I have created categories for photos of Chinese Historic Sites, Chinese Museums, and Chinese Scenic Places. I also created the same three categories for the United States, and finally, the same three for the rest of the world.  Unfortunately, my earlier photos were all slides and prints which I copied with a digital camera, so the viewer will probably notice a difference in quality between my earlier and more recent albums. One of my photo albums is in a category by itself. It is part I, section D, entitled Sias International University. This is where I work. It is a pretty amazing place. I will write more about it later.

                The second part of this website will consist of 28 lectures on Chinese history. These were commissioned in 2007 and completed in the fall of that year. The college which commissioned them never followed through, so I decided to make them available for free to people who want the knowledge but don’t care about the academic credit. The more I think about them, the more unhappy I am with my performance. The PowerPoint text is generally good, and the photos also, but all of us found the presence of a camera to be intimidating. I normally thrive on classroom interaction with students, but everyone sat in back of the camera and generally remained silent as long as the camera was running. All the good discussions occurred after the camera was turned off, so you won’t see these. I guess I tend to view those lectures as a sort of rough draft or dress rehearsal. I will improve the PowerPoints for future classes and hope my actual performance in person will prove somewhat more exciting. Since doing these lectures, I have learned some new things, or been exposed to new interpretations. These will not be reflected on the website lectures, but will be incorporated into future live classes. I will probably add essays to my website to correct or update my lectures. On a technical note, these lectures require a massive amount of computer memory, so it will take some time before they are fully uploaded. Because my technological skills are limited, someone else will be doing the actual work of uploading them. I will be mainly doing the photo albums and the essays.

                The third part of this website will consist of essays, or blogs. I’ve taught for over thirty years and am currently in my fourth year as professor of history at Sias International University in Xinzheng, China. We have over 100 foreigners on our faculty. Many of them are recent graduates with little teaching experience. Others have taught before, but not in China. I’m hoping to share my insights and experiences with them, although what I write will be posted for anyone in the world to read. Some of the essays will be aimed at our own community of foreign teachers or others new to life in China. Others will discuss history, historiography, education, and social commentary. One project I hope to undertake is to write a history of my own city of Xinzheng, which is quite literally the birthplace of Chinese civilization. So far as I know, almost nothing in English has been published on that topic. Just looking at my Xinzheng photo album (under Chinese Historic Places) should tell you something about its fascinating past. Finally, I hope to write about some “life lessons,” those things which I have learned through some 59 years of living and making mistakes. I believe I have learned at least a couple of things which people might find useful.

                A note about my photography: I started taking photos with a Brownie Bullseye camera using 620 film with 8 shots to a roll. I was 8 years old then, the same age at which I first experienced the symptoms of Tourette’s Syndrome. By the time I was 11 I had sold my first photo (of an experimental airplane) to the Register Republic newspaper of Rockford, Illinois. It was used to accompany an article written by my father, who was aviation and business editor of the newspaper. I’ll write more about my dad in the future, because he was a World War II P-47 fighter pilot, and I grew up around airplanes. Some years later dad got me a Fujica half-frame 35mm camera, and some of the earliest photos on this website were taken with that. I graduated to a Nikon SLR around 1978 while living in Duluth, Minnesota. I generally took slides because they were cheaper, but I later got a second Nikon, and when I went to China in 1991 carried two cameras with me, one for slides and one for prints. I generally used the print camera for “people photos,” and the slide camera for photos of historic interest. For really important shots I often took both a slide and a print. By that time I had a Ph.D. in history and was on the lookout for pictures I could project onto a screen to illustrate my history classes. I seem to have been one of the few professional historians who was also a serious amateur photographer, but I thought the combination of interests was ideal. Not everyone agreed with me. Professional historians frequently couldn’t look beyond written documents as sources of history, while family and friends thought I was wasting my time photographing all sorts of inanimate things that might someday be of limited historical value. Nevertheless, I plodded along taking my photos, oblivious to the fact that people thought I was wasting my time.

                The terror events of 9-11 2001 started a chain reaction which led ultimately to my losing my teaching jobs and all of my plans for my future. But I recovered and moved to the Philippine island of Mindanao where I lived for a year with my wife Amy. I still used the old Nikon film cameras. It took nearly a year before my government would let me return with my wife, but we finally got back to Georgia where I could find no meaningful employment. I’ll probably tell about the American education system in a future essay, but finally, I answered a magazine ad and went to China to teach. China became the land of opportunity for me. I know that after teaching there one summer in 1991 I was never quite as happy living in America. So I returned to China and ended up right in the birthplace of Chinese civilization, and within short driving distance of many ancient capitals and other historic sites. Time to get back into photography!

                I’m somewhat of a technophobe, so I had resisted digital photography for quite some time. But when I lived in America, I had to survive by selling off my family heirlooms and assorted junk on eBay. This required a digital camera, so I started with a 4 megapixel Minolta. It worked fine for shooting stuff I was selling, as I could plug the camera into a wall socket and shoot forever. But when I took it to China, it turned out to be a battery-eater. Besides, I had been using single lens reflex cameras for years, and this little rangefinder was just too limited for the opportunities which were beginning to present themselves. I got Amy an 8 megapixel Sony, and this inspired me to upgrade to something that was nearly professional quality. I then invested in a 10 megapixel Canon SLR, which is what I am currently using. While it doesn’t totally solve the problem of bad lighting, museum prohibitions against using tripods and flash, and shooting through glass which is at the same time reflecting multiple light sources, it does give me some pretty good images most of the time. The high resolution is especially helpful to people who want to study the images in detail, so this is pretty much where I am at today in my photography.

                Many beautiful books of Chinese artifacts have been printed, but most of them are in Chinese and are not readily available to most people in the world. Moreover, the photos published in books tend to be mostly of the state treasure variety. I think the more common artifacts sometimes tell us more about the past than do the artistic masterpieces created for the elites. I know museums around the world are beginning to put their collections online. So far this has not happened in China, which has probably the largest number of ancient artifacts of any country in the world, and one of the longest and most fascinating histories. So until the professionals get the world’s museums photographed, labeled, and made freely available to everyone in the world, I intend to do my best to photograph everything I can find of historic or aesthetic value. Since my home is now in China, this means mostly artifacts of Chinese history. I am, however, going through all my old photographs as I am able to locate them, and putting online everything which is even remotely related to history. Sometimes I have only poor-quality digital photos of print pictures, or photos of slides projected onto a wall, which means that many of my earlier photos are not so good. But some of the things I have in my collection are unique, so I figure that a poor photo may be better than no photo at all. I really don’t expect to profit personally from this website, but only want to give back to the world some of the things I have been privileged to see and photograph, or some of the lessons I have learned.

                While part of this website is intended as a resource for scholars and educated laymen, it is, in fact, my personal website. It deals with the things which are of interest to me. I take full responsibility for any ideas which I will express here. I will try to get my facts correct and my opinions well-founded, but I am only human. I have made many mistakes before, and I do not believe that I have yet attained perfection. Hopefully the benefits of this website will outweigh the liabilities.

October 19, 2008

Gary L. Todd, Ph.D.

Professor of History

Sias International University

Xinzheng, Henan, China