Five stars over China: Central Kingdom in Central Asia
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新时代祥瑞层出不穷 pic.twitter.com/bVm5Vn4XC4
— 方舟子 (@fangshimin) April 9, 2023
"Five stars out of the east to benefit the Central Kingdom"
Here is the original Weibo post:
“Wǔxīng chū dōngfāng lì zhōngguó” Hàndài zhījǐn hù bì, fājué yú Xīnjiāng Tǎkèlāmǎgàn shāmò fùdì de Níyǎ yízhǐ, bèi yù wèi 20 shìjì Zhōngguó kǎogǔ zuì wěidà de fǎxiàn zhī yī. Qí sècǎi xuànlì, shàng zhuì fènghuáng, luánniǎo, qílín, báihǔ děng xiángruì yuánsù, wényàng jiàn 8 gè zhuàntǐ hànzì yuèrán ér chū. “Wǔxīng”, “dōngfāng”, “zhōngguó” zài Hàndài shì hé yì? Zhōngyuán dìqū dànshēng de zhījǐn, wèihé xiànshēn Níyǎ yízhǐ？
“五星出东方利中国”汉代织锦护臂，发掘于新疆塔克拉玛干沙漠腹地的尼雅遗址，被誉为20世纪中国考古最伟大的发现之一。其色彩绚丽，上缀凤凰、鸾鸟、麒麟、白虎等祥瑞元素，纹样间8个篆体汉字跃然而出↓↓“五星”“东方”“中国”在汉代是何意？中原地区诞生的织锦，为何现身尼雅遗址？
"Five stars appearing in the east will benefit the Central Kingdom", Han Dynasty (202 BC–9 AD, 25–220 AD) brocade archery armguard, excavated at the Niya site in the hinterland of the Taklamakan Desert in Xinjiang, is known as one of the greatest discoveries of Chinese archaeology in the 20th century. It is gorgeously colorful and adorned with phoenix, firebird, unicorn, white tiger, and other auspicious symbols. Eight Chinese characters in seal script emerge from the patterns. What do "five stars", "the east", and "central kingdom" mean in the Han Dynasty? Why did brocade produced in the Central Plains appear at the Niya site?
"Weibo" (lit., "microblog") is a social media platform similar to Facebook and Twitter (a sort of combination of the two, but perhaps more like Twitter because of the character limits). It is heavily censored, but so massive — over 582 million monthly active users (252 million daily active users) as of 2022 — and the users are so clever and daring that they somehow manage to post camouflaged social and political critiques, which, as soon as the government figures them out, are removed from the internet.
The Tweet above was made by the famous popular science writer and muckraker, Fang Zhouzi / Fang Shimin. The Weibo post looks innocuous, as though it were just a recycling of some once-sensational archeological news. Moreover, the content derives from Yāngshì xīnwén 央視新聞 CCTV (China Central Television), so it should be sanitized, official propaganda, but since the Tweet comes from the account of Fang Zhouzi, you can be sure he smells a rat. Many of the commenters to his Tweet pick up on that too, as you can be sure super sensitive netizens are wont to do (I'm obviously not talking about fifty centers here).
I was present in Xinjiang around the time in 1995 when the fabled "Five stars out of the east to benefit the Central Kingdom" funerary archery armguard was discovered and, since I was working with archeologists at the time, I can assure you that the excitement was tremendous and palpable. The armguard has its own Wikipedia page and is forbidden to travel overseas, which always makes one wonder precisely what the objection may be.
In ancient times, the five stars that were said to appear in auspicious conjunction over the Central Kingdom were identified with Chénxīng 辰星, Tàibái 太白), Yínghuò 熒惑, Suìxīng 歲星, and Zhènxīng 鎭星. In modern times these are Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The finding of this armguard at this particular time was thought by CCP enthusiasts to be a particularly good omen for the People's Republic of China, especially in light of the fact that a similar piece of cloth was found not long after that bore these characters: "tǎo Nán Qiāng 討南羌" ("conquer the Southern Qiang [often identified as Tibeto-Burmans and the ancestors of the modern Tibetans]; there are other theories as to who exactly they were, though generally they were held to live in the west and southwest).
The archeological, astronomical, art historical, and textile aspects of the armguard have been studied by Lillian Tseng:
TSENG, Lillian Lan-ying. “Decoration, Astrology and Empire: Inscribed Silk from Niya in the Taklamakan Desert.” In HILDEBRANDT, Berit, ed., with Carole Gillis. Silk: Trade and Exchange along the Silk Roads between Rome and China in Antiquity, 132-51. Ancient Textiles Series 29. Oxford and Philadelphia: Oxbow, 2017.
The entire volume in which Tseng's chapter occurs may be accessed online here.
Another chapter in the volume that may be of interest to many readers of Language Log is Adam Hyllested's "Word migration on the Silk Road: the etymology of English silk and its congeners", pp. 27-33:
The exchange of silk along the Silk Road is often examined through archaeological finds and the interpretation of historical texts. This contribution seeks to address the question of exchange along the Silk Road and especially the ways through which the silk reached the West by discussing the etymology of silk in Western and Northern European languages from antiquity to modern times. The chronological scope of this article is vast in order to better understand the different notional concepts through which the material was classified, the different routes the silk trade could take and the ethnic groups who were involved.
When all is said and done, what was the commotion over this fanciful myth and astrology laden piece of cloth all about? It can be summed up by the words on the armguard itself
"Wǔxīng chū dōngfāng lì zhōngguó 五星出東方利中國" ("Five stars appearing in the east will benefit the Central Kingdom")
P.S.: Strange to say, or maybe not, I asked all the same questions as the Weibo post, and more, when the mysterious armguard was first discovered back in 1995.
Selected readings
- "Polyglot Manchu emperor"(4/6/23) — see especially comments #3 and following for the history of the five ethnicities of China
- "The languages on Chinese banknotes" (9/16/13) — n interesting phenomenon across Eurasia in which the Mongol Empire played an important role. See Tom Allsen's chapter in The King's Dictionary. The Rasûlid Hexaglot: Fourteenth Century Vocabularies in Arabic, Persian, Turkic , Greek, Armenian and Mongol, ed. P.B. Golden (Leiden: Brill 2000).
[h.t. Sun Dang; thanks to Jin Xu, Jie Shi, and Zihan Guo]
Urghmudi said,
April 12, 2023 @ 12:50 pm
Seems to be a good idea to have it reproduced i large scale and sold as souvenirs with so much good omen and implications.
Terry Hunt said,
April 12, 2023 @ 4:35 pm
For what it's worth, those five planets have been appearing more closely grouped than average during the last couple of years. Obviously they all rise in the east, but most of the time one or more of them is below the horizon when the others are visible before dawn (or after sunset), and one or more will be above the horizon only during the day. Lately there have been several instances when all five, plus the Moon, were visible in a comparably small arc of the sky.
As an (ex-) astronomer, this carries for me no significance beyond a pretty sight, but I imagine various astrology systems might be making something of it. While I don't 'believe' in objective astrological effects, I certainly accept that others do and that they may act on those beliefs.
Elizabeth Barber said,
April 16, 2023 @ 6:26 pm
CLOSE conjunctions of the 5 visible planets, all visible simultaneously, seem to be quite rare and hence a memorable event for cultures involved with star-watching. Some years ago I realized that a Homeric tale always dismissed as "silly" (or "bawdy") must be encoding just such a conjunction. I even bought a new computer when the program STARRY NIGHT came out purporting to calculate back 5000 years, so I could track down the date. And it turned out that such a conjunction was visible from Greece in Feb. 1953 BCE, just after dawn.
The story? Seems that Helios got up one morning and saw that Aphrodite and Ares had hopped in bed together; so he went and told her husband Hephaistos. Hephaistos forged an unbreakable net and threw it over them so they couldn't move, then went to tell Zeus what his daughter was up to. So Zeus, Hermes, and Poseidon all went off to stand around and laugh at the unfortunate pair. Finally the eldest, Poseidon, said the two should be released, but only after promising never to do it again.
Classicists will tell you that Helios is the Sun; Aphrodite is Roman Venus, Ares is Mars, Zeus is Jupiter, and Hermes is Mercury–but no one thought that "silly tales" were there to make information memorable for millennia, so they didn't look deeper. (For the planet represented by Poseidon, the Romans would say Saturn; but Poseidon, as the elder brother of Zeus, is the one to give the measurement of time, since that orbit is the longest. Hence, when the tale was concocted, our planet Saturn was clearly called Poseidon.)
My point is: even non-literate people observed and "recorded" many unusual natural phenomena, turning them into "tales" to make them memorable for the ages. Homer is recording something that happened well over a millennium before his time, yet people ask if he could have really known anything of the Trojan War 450 years earlier! So I keep wondering what OTHER tales are associated with your 5-star conjunction(s).
(You can see what that Aegean conjunction looked like in Fig. 29, p.191, of When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth, by Barber & Barber; Princeton U.P., 2004).