The oracle bones in Peter Hessler’s book were discovered in the 19th century, near Anyang in the North China Plain. They were the shoulder blades of oxen and deer and the carapaces of turtles. Archaeologists dated them to about 1300 BC in the Bronze Age. The bones had been used for divination. Questions in ancient Chinese were inscribed on them; they were then heated with a live coal, and the replies of the gods were indicated by the shape of the cracks produced. The replies were brief; ‘disaster’ was a favourite word.
Peter Hessler’s account of his fascin- ation with archaeological finds is inter- woven with his writings as a journalist in Beijing between 1999 and 2004. The total effect is that of a brilliant tapestry of ancient and modern China.
An American graduate of Princeton and Oxford, Hessler first went to China in 1996 and spent two years teaching English at Fuling, a small town on the Yangtze River. His pupils were rural Chinese training to become English teachers at Chinese schools. He wrote a delightful book about those years, called River Town. He found his pupils bright and individualistic. They chose English names for themselves; among them was an Emily, named after Emily Brontë. The soulful Emily reappears in Oracle Bones.
Mao Zedong had been dead for 20 years, but Hessler, who had evidently read the case for the prosecution, seemed to sense his ghostly presence. ‘I disliked Mao intensely,’ he writes. To his dismay, his pupils approached history from a different perspective. Asked to write about their heroes, most of his class chose Mao Zedong. They saw him as a hero of China’s liberation from the era of foreign occupation and its humiliating treaties (1840- 1949).

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