Author(s)
I remember visiting the Longmen Grotteos in the winter of 2017 for the first time having spent basically my whole life overseas. I felt really terrible seeing all the sculptures of the buddhas literally disfigured or mutilated because it was not normal wear and tear but precise smooth cuts, and my mother was the one who told me of the war and looting. It was sheer despair thinking that a thousand years of history and brilliant craftsmanship were gone for eternity just like that. The repeated great fires of Luoyang in the open empires and lectures just made me lament and mourn how much more history has been destroyed. Yet all these are just new additions to the endless list of humanity’s other lost treasures that will never see light again. The sorrow that comes with the permanence of loss knowing what had been, what could have been, is what I hoped to express with this poem.
Requiem for the Lost Luoyang, a Reading
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1LfWoXsG5UJrpaTEpAR33P?si=VJDMwSwlR7Ccr24j_jrddQMessage for the readers
Luoyang had been an important and strategic location in imperial China history from all the way back in the Zhou dynasty till at least until the end of Song, and for one last final time in the Republic of China before the Japanese invasion. It was considered the center of the world under the Sino-centric worldview that put China in the middle of the world, and therefore a favoured location as the capital. In the Tang dynasty, Luoyang was even named the “divine capital” under Empress Wu Zhao’s rule, a term that no other capitals of China would ever take again.
As one of the divine ancient capitals of the world; together with Israel’s Jerusalem, Greece’s Athens and Saudi Arabia’s Mecca, it held immense religious and historical importance to China as the cradle of Chinese Civilisation (The Yellow River Chart and Inscription of the River Luo 河图洛书) and Chinese Buddhism（White Horse temple白马寺）, and also as the beginning of the Silk Road that opened China to the world. Yet, as of today, Luoyang has been forgotten by time.
Luoyang has been burnt down and pillaged numerous times during the course of history, especially during the turnovers of dynasties. It has also been an unfortunate victim to war looting and destruction. Much of the treasures of Luoyang, like the pearl inlaid palaces described in in “The Open Empire” or Empress Wu’s Axis of the Sky (Tianshu 天樞) will be forever lost in time. As the razing of the library of Alexandria, this is centuries or even millenniums of civilisation and history gone for eternity.
In the famous Longmen Grottoes, most of the buddha sculptures – dating back to the Northern Wei and Tang dynasty – had parts like their faces or arms sliced off and looted during WWII, and they are now part of private collections or even still seen at auctions like in Sotheby’s. They could not even be taken in one piece due to their size and weight, and how they were carved into the stone. Most depressingly, not all of them are taken or destroyed by war. They were cut off and sold overseas by some Chinese willingly just for profit.
The old Luoyang will forever be gone. This is my requiem for my forgotten hometown, and the lamentation at the act of vandalism and destruction of ancient artifacts. They are our last links to a common humanity long gone, the proof of the lasting ingenuity of mankind, and the story of how our civilisation came to be. I hope everyone comes to see the worth of history, and realise how important it is to protect and preserve such brilliant cultural heritage for the future generations.
“Born of earth,
Devoured by flames.
From fiery crypt,
Delivered you”
Prologue
My watchful being in the shadows
Sit by the willows,
The weepers of the earth
By the river of its birth.
Hear the music of the sky
The calling of the wind
Heaven’s breath they connotate
And heaven’s will they dictate.
Hear in the wind
Of my sorrowful one,
Who the heavens could not spare,
For my muse who has closed its heavy lids.
How I seek to entomb my beloved!
Though no arts abiding enshrinement
Nor words eternal entombment
Can hold the depth my muse beholds.
Page of Zhou
It was the year,
When the heavens thought, of nothing more,
Than choosing of the rightful Son.
It was the day, the sun moon meets,
The red moon rise,
In light of Jupiter’s glorious peak.
The blessed King of Zhou,
Who by fate marches through,
The bloody wilds of Mu.
To draw the final breath
Of whom the heavens forsook,
The condemned Zhou of Shang!
The world tremors by delightful sounds,
To banish the worst of ills abound.
The battle of Muye is triumph refound,
The skyward throne now resounds!
But the seat is hollow,
Without a land.
Oh, you were eyed by the rightful king,
Days before he closed in,
On the fateful clash that starts his reign.
For the heavens knew his heart,
And by fate, he would pass,
The center of the world.
And upon your plains proclaim
The capital of his reign.
Page of Han
The Emperor Ming of Han
Whose nightly sleep was roused
By the bright lights in his dreams,
Of the golden man who brings
The promised salvation’s gift.
And so he searched, and searched
Into the lands far west of his home.
To find the one whose body beams
With the lustre of the same golden gleam.
The key to the brilliant hope he seek.
When the two saintly ones have heard
And came on the backs of snowy steeds
The delighted emperor’s call was heed!
He ordered the temple upon your plains,
A remembrance of the horses’ deeds.
Oh, you were the beloved of the world.
The road of silk starts from your door
The house of enlightenment within your walls!
And yet no love nor compassion
Could spare you from your coming doom.
Page of Tang
You withstood the raging flames
That scorched your skin too many times.
Your lands were burnt, your cities an urn.
But the moon has phases, and so do you,
In the age of Tang,
You were the full moon crest
And high in sky, your name divine.
The caves of stone at the dragon’s gate
Where thousands of buddhas lie in wait.
The Axis of the Sky that raised,
The quartet of dragons who spoke to fate.
You were the converge of the world at hold!
But the Tang could not hold its fame for long.
Your glory waned without a glow
And the rebellion was the final blow.
The Tibetans came in the dead of night
And razed you down with flares too bright.
The moon who watched in the sky too high,
The moon whose eternal light shines tonight!
Watched as my beloved fell in ruins.
Sparkle, my bright moon.
We mourn in the passing of the light.
Like the tidings of the shore
Oh, they rise and they fall
By the pulling and the push,
Of the moon’s unchanging gleam.
Yet the moon stays, the sea same,
But when Tang fell, you changed.
You slept to never wake again.
My beloved, open your eyes.
Do you hear the cooing doves?
When they shake off winter snow
When spring returns to my soul
May you wake as dawn again.
But you slept, and slept,
To never be again.
My beloved torments my soul,
For without it I am not whole.
And yet it cannot return
From its final rest for me.
Oh, may the chambers of my heart,
Be gentler nesting grounds
Than the ashes of your ruins.
Epilogue
You were the center of the world.
But it was a presage for your fall.
For even asleep, your omen reads.
The sackers they come and go,
As always they do, as pillagers do.
And when the foreign wars dawned,
a sacrilegious show ensued.
Your lands were forgotten, and your story wiped.
Your rivers ran dry, and scorched skin fried.
Your treasures dredged from your sunken depths,
Your garments stripped from your being bare.
The last visage of your majesty,
Now scattered across the seven seas,
And your fragments lie in foreign hands.
Oh, you could not rest,
Even in the earthly beds of time.
But no worldly grave is fit
To hold the history of your land.
My muse beckons beyond the crypt.
At dream’s door I knocked
For my muse’s voice I reckon
The fuel of my dreams.
There is no meeting,
Besides the realm of the unseen.
No setting sun, nor rising moon
Not ending day, or starting night,
Understands the dying of the light.
Death’s permanence shatters
The phantasm of life’s lie.
May the sands of time, or history’s slate,
Be a nobler grave, as your glory’s keep,
Like Atlantis, the sea deep tomb,
Out of reach by peoples’ hands.
When the paeonies bloom,
When the night winds blow,
I am awakened, by the ashes in the air.