The Story of a Sweet Potato Man

K. C. Chang in Taiwan in 1948, shortly before his arrest.

I have checked the Amazon historical record: On November 8, 2015, just three days after a friend emailed me to suggest I commence some kind of Sichuan-food-focused literary project, I purchased Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives.

First published in 1977, and edited by K. C. Chang, who is identified on the back cover as a “professor of anthropology at Harvard University,” Food in Chinese Culture is the English-language starting point for anyone intending to engage in the serious study of Chinese food. I read it, I absorbed it, and I eventually made ritual acknowledgment of its seniority by plucking the name of this newsletter from an anecdote recounted in the anthology’s chapter on the Tang dynasty.

But, to my embarrassment, I didn’t do any further research on K. C. Chang, thus rendering me ignorant as to the extraordinary contributions he made to the study of ancient China.

I am now rectifying that error. The catalyst for this adjustment in course was my recent introduction to Social Memory and State Formation in Early China, a synthesis of up-to-date research on Neolithic and Bronze Age China published by the UCLA archaeologist Li Min in 2018. As I dug into Li Min’s explorations of cultural continuities between China’s prehistoric Neolithic societies and the emergence of the dynastic era, I kept noticing citations to a “K.C. Chang.”

The anthropologist I knew only as an editor of a book about Chinese food turned out to be possibly the most important Chinese archaeologist of the second half of the 20th century.

Serving consecutively as the chair of the departments of anthropology at Yale and Harvard, K. C. Chang cemented a reputation, during his career, as one of the greatest experts in the world on Bronze Age China, and in particular, the Shang dynasty. He was a two-way conduit: instrumental in introducing the findings of Chinese archaeology to the West, and a crucial transmitter of advanced Western archaeological practices back to China and Taiwan. His students adored him. His list of publications is staggering. He died in 2001, after an 11-year struggle with Parkinson’s.

As I familiarized myself with Chang’s career, I learned that he was born in Beijing in 1931, but that his father’s family was from Taiwan -- and that he considered himself Taiwanese, which is not normally a characteristic one associates with birth in mainland China. Even more startling: A biographical essay by one of his students revealed that after his family’s return to Taiwan in 1946, he was imprisoned for a year as an 18-year-old when he got caught up in a brutal KMT crackdown on “Communist bandit” spies in Taiwan’s academic circles.

Huh. Born in Beijing and lived through the Japanese conquest of Beijing. Then goes to Taiwan and is a victim of the Chiang Kai-shek’s “White Terror.” Has an older brother who stayed behind in China and joined the Communist Red Army. Spoke perfectly accented Beijing Mandarin and the dominant Minnanyu dialect of Taiwan. Ends up getting a Ph.D. at Harvard. That’s quite a start to a fascinating life!

An obituary by another of his students reported that he wrote an account of his boyhood in Beijing, ensuing move to Taiwan, and year in prison in an untranslated-into-English memoir titled 番薯人的故事 (The Story of a Sweet Potato Man.) I located a copy of it at Berkeley’s East Asian Library and read it over the last three weeks. (The term “sweet potato man” was used, sometimes derogatorily, to distinguish “native” Taiwanese from the mainlanders who arrived in Taiwan after the end of World War II.)

I was moved by the memoir’s ending, in which Chang explains his decision to pursue anthropology and archaeology as a career.

As translated by Lothar von Falkenhausen, a student of Chang’s who is now a professor of art history at UCLA:

“As to myself at that time, having served a year in prison, and having encountered all sorts of people there, I developed a very strong interest in how people conduct themselves as human beings. I had seen two groups of people -- one might say, two groups of people that each comprised good people -- representing two different systems, who had encountered one another in a great time period, each considering itself as supreme and exhausting its forces to the utmost in their struggle against the other; but what did they die for in the end? They did not know themselves. Why are people so easily led astray? Why are they willing to exert themselves to such an extent in internecine struggle? Such questions made me very curious... The basic reason why I opted to take the entrance exam for the Department [of Archaeology and Anthropology at National Taiwan University] was, as I said, because I wanted to know why people conduct themselves as human beings.”

Answering that question required a lifetime of assiduous study. From a memorial written by the Chinese historian David Keightley:

“He wrote, for example, on such topics as the origins of Chinese culture (both Neolithic and Bronze Age), early man, carbon-14 dating and chronology, ceramic horizons, Neolithic jades, the origins of agriculture, settlement archaeology (a field he helped establish, starting with the 1968 volume he edited), the circum-Pacific culture area, trade, bronze inscriptions and motifs, food and food vessels, state formation, urbanism and capitals, the nature of early Chinese kingship, shamanism, myth and ritual, temple names, lineage systems, the archaeology of Chu, the comparative study of ancient civilizations, and archaeological theory. Little in the study of early China was alien to him, and there is probably no topic he addressed that he did not endow with wider cultural significance as he placed the archaeological evidence in fuller anthropological perspective.”

Let’s take a closer look at that passing reference to “food and food vessels.” Because the path that led to Food and Chinese Culture starts in the Neolithic.

One of the most distinguishing characteristics of Chinese burial remains throughout the millennia is their profusion of food and drink containers. For Chang, their sheer variety posed an intellectual challenge.

As Chang explained to one interviewer:

“I started the study of ancient China's food purely out of frustration. When you study prehistoric China, you are confronted with an enormous variety of vessels. We know from later periods that some were used for ritual purposes, and texts give us the specific names that these vessels were known by. It was Charles Frake [1961] who said that the more complicated the nomenclature of something is, the more important that area is in the culture. It seemed to me that food and drink had a very central place in ancient Chinese culture, because ancient Chinese food and drink nomenclature was very large. ... Because of the great complexity of the vessel typology, I felt that unless I knew how food and drink were prepared and what the serving customs were I would not understand the typology.... This is how I suddenly found myself regarded as a food expert.”

One of Chang’s signal contributions to the understanding of early Chinese civilization was his identification of the extraordinary bronze ding cauldrons (鼎) frequently found with the burial remains of elite members of Shang society as crucial symbols of state power and authority. These ding were originally used to cook meat and fish, but eventually became central components in elaborate rituals involving ancestor worship and divination of the future by the Shang kings.

The mandate of heaven, as cast in bronze: In ancient China, the most expensively produced and extravagantly artistic culinary ware was deployed to legitimize the right to rule.

Food is Chinese culture.

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NEXT UP:

1) An exploration of how K. C. Chang’s “sweet potato man” identity, fractured between China, Taiwan and the West, illuminates and complicates present-day polarized relations between Taiwan and China.

2) An investigation of the hypothesis that the emergence of “competitive feasting” in Neolithic China, as documented by the changing distribution of food vessels in burial remains, was a major catalyst for increasing social inequality and the rise of an exploitative State. (Food causes class struggle!)

But for now, I will leave you with another quote from K. C. Chang:

“I find doing archaeology one of the greatest enjoyments in life! The greatest moments are always when you scratch the earth's surface with a trowel, and you don't know what you will find, and when something comes out of the earth you are looking at it for the first time since it was buried many thousands of years ago. It might be a potsherd, or even something that gives you a clue to the entire era of an ancient people, their religious concepts, their society. You never know what you will find.”