N
ima Jiangcai, the curator of the
Yushu Museum, isn’t interested in
exotic treasures or rare antiques.
He wants the museum, and Yushu, in Qin-
ghai Province, to be famous for the region’s
own sake – because, he says, the area, the
southeastern part of the Tibetan plateau, is
one of the cradles of Tibetan civilisation. The
signs of this are in the very rocks themselves –
or rather, the art painted on them.
Early rock art means human carvings on
stone, found all over the world, and often
characteristic of early civilisation. Among
the most famous examples are the prehistoric
cave paintings in Spain and France, and the
rock art of the Australian aboriginals. But
Nima says there are examples – largely un-
known to the outside world – all over Yushu.
His first findings came in 2007, when,
with the help of a local, he spotted three
carvings of deer on a rock by the bank of the
upper reaches of the Yangtze River, known
as the Tongtian River basin. However, three
years later when he went back to the site, the
original carvings have been replaced by new
carvings of popular Tibetan Buddhist man-
tras. That discovery, and loss, started his own
quest for rock art along the course of the river.
In the winter of 2012, in a secluded val-
ley locals called Jorse on the southern bank
of Tongtian River, he was thrilled to spot a
total of 50 figures on a single piece of rock.
They include humans, dogs, horses, leopards,
yaks, deer, fish, foxes, wild cats and stacks of
barley – and according to Nima, are clearly
prehistoric. He named the style the “Jorse
petroglyph.”
“The rock art in Jorse is mostly themed
around hunting and farming, and the histori-
cal records indicate there was an abundance
of wildlife and ample edible plants in the
region. As an ideal environment with plenti-
ful food, it’s not surprising we’ve discovered
a whole range of rock art up there, varying
in style, content, and scale,” Nima explained,
noting that this indicated a long human his-
tory there. The wildlife depicted alongsidehuman images suggests, according to him,
the relatively harmonious coexistence of hu-
mans and nature.
Over the past five years, Nima and col-
leagues from the museum have recorded over
1,700 rock paintings along the upper stream
of the Yangtze. In the next few years, he plans
to focus on the upper stream regions of the
Lancang (the Mekong).
Nima says that the style of the rock art
conveys something of the time and place it
came from. “The horns and rounded bot-
toms of the yak that we spotted on certain
rocks are in a particular style, and quite simi-
lar to a lot of rock art from other civilisations
such as prehistoric Central Asia. That could
show that different cultural groups in larger
regions were communicating with each oth-
er. Nima admitted that he hoped Yushu rock
art could be an important element in con-
necting neighbouring regions.
Professor Zhang Yasha, who works at the
Rock Art Research Association of China at
Minzu University, has researched the rock art
in the Tibetan Autonomous Region for years,
but is now shifting to study the art of Yushu
as well. In an interview in Beijing, she men-
tioned that geographically, Yushu links Tibet
and the rest of China, and its rock art is also a
bridge between cultures. She believes that the
cultural origins of the entire Tibetan-Qinghai
Plateau may lie in the Zongri culture, dating
to about 500 BC, found in archaeological ex-
cavations in eastern Qinghai.
“Many researchers have started to shift
their focus from the Ali region in western
Tibet to Yushu recently, and the role of rock
art there is seeing a revival of study,” Zhang
added.Marginalisation
Chinese rock art isn’t limited to Yushu. In
northern China’s ethnic regions, for example,
including Inner Mongolia, Ningxia and Xin-
jiang, tens of thousands of pieces of rock art,
or traces of lost pieces, have been discovered.
Study of rock art inside China boomed inthe 1970s, the same time as a rush of global
interest in the topic. The remarkable rock art
of Inner Mongolia was studied at that time
by archaeologist Gai Shanlin. But after the
1990s, when archaeologists became frus-
trated by the impossibility of dating rock art,
most Chinese researchers shifted their atten-
tion elsewhere, and the field became margin-
alised.
“Inside China, rock art is mostly found
in ethnic minority regions, rather than the
central China plain where the mainstream
Han ethnic cultures dominate and the ma-
jority of the country’s cultural heritage origi-
nates,” Zhang Yasha told ChinaReport: “As a
result, rock art doesn’t get the attention other
archaeological fields do.” In Central Asian
countries such as Mongolia, Kazakhstan or
Kyrgyzstan, Zhang says, the situation is very
different, since what are minority cultures in
China are the mainstream there.
It was in around 2010 that rock art be-
gan to experience a revival within Chinese
academic circles. One of the biggest factors
was the Guangxi government’s eventually
successful pitch for securing the first World
Heritage Site for rock art in China by 2016.
About 1,800 images, believed to be cre-
ated between the 5th century BC and the
2nd century AD, have been discovered on
cliffs along more than 100 kilometres of the
Zuojiang River in Guangxi Province. Cov-
ering an overall area of some 8,000 square
metres, the Huashan rock art is the second
largest area of rock art in the world, after the
Nazca Lines in Peru. The World Heritage ap-
plication gave a significant boost to govern-
ment backing of rock art and its study. More
and more young archeologists were drawn
into the field, and now there are about 30
professional researchers focusing on the topic
across China.Mission
Nima Jiangcai plans to devote the rest of
his life to rock art. He hopes to make Yushu
Museum a digital museum for regional rockPhoto courtesy of zhang yasha