were excavated by a Chinese archaeological team and became part of the cultural collections of China. There are no peoples claiming descent from the Xigoupan, or even the Xiongnu, who might argue that these objects belong to their cultural patrimony. Across the border, Russian archaeologists similarly excavate and take ownership of steppe objects that are found in modern-day Russia.
The earrings became part of the collections of the Ordos Museum, although on display in the Inner Mongolian Provincial Museum, established in Hohhot in 1957. They became part of the growing number of objects sent by China to exhibitions abroad from the 1980s. As Chinese museums were reopened following the Cultural Revolution, foreign curators were able to gain access to many objects excavated since the 1950s but previously not very accessible. They took full advantage. The earrings were first loaned abroad to an exhibition on objects from Inner Mongolia that opened in Los Angeles in March 1994.94 They traveled with the exhibition to New York, Nashville, and Victoria until September 1995 and then to Alberta in 1997.95 The exhibition was headlined as “Genghis Khan,” presumably as a means of attracting visitors by a familiar name. Although the authors were clear about the very varied provenance and dating of the objects included, it is inevitable that the complexities of the many cultures represented by these objects and their tenuous links to Genghis Khan would not be noticed by many visitors. But the exhibition provided an opportunity for scholars to see a range of objects, previously unexhibited in North America, that reflected this complexity and, most especially, the influence of steppe cultures on China.
The art of the steppe, which had been richly represented in museums and in scholarship under the USSR, started to receive more attention in North America around this time.96 New York’s Asia Society Gallery 1970 exhibition displayed material that came from Siberia but was held in US collections. This was followed by a loan exhibition from USSR museums in 1975 held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.97 Two more exhibitions concentrating on these collections were held in 1999–2000. The first, Scythian Gold: Treasures from Ancient Ukraine, toured North America and then went to Paris. The second, The Golden Deer of Eurasia: Scythian and Sarmatian Treasures from the Russian Steppes, opened at the Metropolitan Museum in 2000.98 By this time the USSR had broken up, and many of the museums it had previously represented were no longer under Russian control. The former exhibition concentrated on items from one former Soviet state, Ukraine, independent since 1990. The latter, organized with the Russians, showcased items in Russian museums.99
While these exhibitions concentrated on the western Eurasian steppe, attention also turned to the eastern lands with a major catalog and an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, both showcasing private collections in North America rather than collections held in China.100 However, while Scythian culture was the focus of the earlier exhibitions, the cultures of the Xiongnu have yet to be the named focus of a major exhibition in North America.101
Between 2002 and 2012 all of the provincial museums in China were rebuilt, with vast modern buildings replacing the old sites.102 The new Inner Mongolian Provincial Museum, opened in 2007, is ten times the size of the original. The earrings are on display. By this time the cultures of the steppe from the late first millennium BC were starting to be incorporated into the “Silk Road” label.103 The earrings duly traveled to Brussels in 2008 for an exhibition on the Silk Road, which included this steppe element.104
Excavations and scholarship on the Xiongnu continue to reveal new evidence and findings about the complexity of cultures under their empire, but it remains to be seen whether these earrings will be displayed as part of any future exhibitions showcasing this complexity or whether they will continue to occupy a cultural hinterland.
1. I am greatly indebted to Sergey Miniaev for his detailed comments on this chapter and for so generously sharing his extensive knowledge. Thanks are also owing to Karen Rubinson, whose perceptive suggestions have helped me greatly. All mistakes, misunderstandings, and omissions are my own.
2. For sake of brevity I will use Xiongnu hereafter, but to designate the political alliance rather than a homogeneous culture. I use the term Chinese in the same way; see discussion and references below.
3. A boundary that David Christian describes as “the dynamo of Inner Eurasian history” (1998: xxi).
4. I use these terms advisedly—there was no simple dichotomy between the settled and the nomadic (peoples sometimes characterized as the civilized and the barbaric). The range of lifestyles, very much dictated by ecology for much of history, was on a continuum, with pastoralist cultures practicing agriculture to a greater or lesser degree. For an example, see Chang et al. (2003).
5. As Paul Goldin points out on the Chinese view of the Xiongnu, “The Chinese conceived of their northern neighbours as mutatis mutandis, identical to themselves . . . greedy and primitive only because they had not benefitted from the transformative influence of sage teachers” (2011: 220).
6. Although individuals may have attempted it.
7. Frachetti (2011). On the spread of millet, see N. Miller, Spengler, and Frachetti (2016); Frachetti et al. (2010).
8. Rawson (2010).
9. Shelach-Lavi (2014: 23–26). The point that both the transmitters and the receivers of culture and technology played a role is discussed further below. The receivers have to be receptive to the new culture and technology, but their receptiveness can be encouraged in various ways by the transmitters. This also has parallels with the point in chapter 7 about Western collectors of Islamic manuscripts in the twentieth century and the roles played by the booksellers of the Muslim world.
10. Di Cosmo (2002). For dating, see notes below.
11. Shelach–Lavi (2014). See also Chang (2008).
12. To quote Sima Qian, discussed in Goldin (2011: 228–29).
13. Goldin (2011: 235). As he and others (Pines 2012a: 34) also point out, this characterization of the other is exemplified more concretely with the attempts to build walls to demarcate the boundary between the two, the so-called “Great Wall.”
14. Vasil’ev (1961); Miniaev (2015: 323).
15. Chin (2010: 320).
16. See chapter 10 on the Chinese labeling of peoples on their southwestern borders as “other” and their exploitation of these peoples as slaves.
17. For an early and influential discussion identifying the Xiongnu with the Huns, see Bernshtam (1951), and see Frumkin (1970) for a summary of scholarship based on archaeology in the Soviet period. For a more recent summary, see La Vaissière (2014), who, like Bernshtam, argues for an identification of the Xiongnu with the Huns—as well as with the Hephthalites (see chapter 5). For a recent history of the “Huns” that concurs with this view, see Kim (2016). But some scholars strongly disagree with the identification of the Xiongnu as Huns: Miniaev, for example, argues that “written sources and archaeological data contradict this” (pers. comm., October 8, 2017; see also his 2015 article).
18. Goldin (2011: 227) and Di Cosmo (1994). The same can be said for the Huns.
19. Ordos is a later Mongolian name. The area now lies within the provinces of Ningxia, Gansu, and Shaanxi and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Regions in China.
20. Di Cosmo (2002: 134–37) discusses the 307 BC debate at the Zhao court and argues against this view.
21. For references to early programs of breeding in China, see Erkes (1940). The dependency on the steppe for the supply of military ponies continued; see chapter 6. India had similar issues; see chapter 3.
22.
