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Comment by k_sze | Hacker News Reader

> Then during the Cultural Revolution he was targeted by the Anti-Right movement and his original Nushu documents were burned. Hu had by this time also passed away.

Every time I read this kind of stuff, it makes me feel really mad and sad at the same time. Some people would blame Mao, some would blame the Gang of Four, some would blame the CCP as a whole. I personally don't know who to blame. Yes they were all pretty awful, but it also took a whole bunch (we're talking about millions) of other gullible people to enact that madness. As a Chinese, I feel really sad that we lost so much of our heritage and intellectual progress for essentially a power grab of four people. Nüshu is just a tiny example. The fact that we had such a big number of gullible and arrogant people who were willing to turn on their compatriots in some of the most inhumane ways possible, it makes me really sad.

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I share the same feeling with you, but I gradually grow out of it. Why? it happens all the time. Information will decay (and it's probably a Poisson process).

Let's start from events happened in the ancient past

1. 尚书，the Book of Documents

It has been largely lost. The "New Text" version is only a portion left. The "Recovered Old Text" version was made up by someone. It was said the there used to be 3240 articles and Confucius reduced it to 120 articles. Where did the rest go?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Documents

2. Also it was mentioned in the Book of Documents that "唯殷先人，有典有冊"(my translation: your Yin ancestors have scrolls and books).

Yin is another name of Shang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shang_dynasty

So where did those books go?

Where did the Xia and earlier documents go?

3. Needless to say: the First Emperor burned a lot of books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_o...

Interestingly, the Tsinghua Bamboo Slips are documents preserved prior to the First Emperor burning of the books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsinghua_Bamboo_Slips

Also I think it's "lucky" that Qin reunified China. Qin uses Small Seal Scripts which is closer to the Large Seal Scripts that Zhou uses. The other states? Their font changed too much. Chinese would have been different had one of the other states won.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_seal_script

BTW the Zhongshan state's scripts are very artistic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhongshan_(state)

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E5%9B%BD

http://www.9610.com/xianqin/zhongshan.htm

https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E7%8E%8B%E4%...

https://baike.baidu.com/pic/%E4%B8%AD%E5%B1%B1%E7%8E%8B%E4%B...

4. The Nine Cauldrons

Where did they go? Lost in the river? When the Zhou king left the capital, he probably brought a lot of documents with him. Where did they go?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Tripod_Cauldrons

5. 石鼓文， The Stone Drum Writings

I call it China's Rosetta Stone.

They were still intact by Song dynasty. People cherished them so much and even embedded gold to the strokes. What happened next? When the northern invaders came, they cut out the gold pieces and in the process destroyed the writings. Sigh....

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%9F%B3%E9%BC%93%E6%96%87

I will stop here. There are so many of these events in more recent history. It's the nature I guess....

We can think that this loss is inevitable, but still find it sad.

There was a Greek playwright called Aristophanes who wrote comedies in about 400 BC. Eleven survive to the present day, but we know he wrote at least forty. The eleven we have are really funny! I feel a mixture of annoyance and sadness that i will never get to read or see the other twenty-nine.

Think of all the comedies you'll never read because even knowledge of their author's existence is lost to time. This is just how the universe works and the real marvel is that we can preserve anything at all over these time spans.

Thanks for all of those examples.

The Zhongshan scripts are beautiful indeed.

However, the major difference that I perceive between the Cultural Revolution (CR) and most of your examples is that in the case of the CR, we're talking about millions of people deliberately destroying stuff out of a mix of spite, arrogance, and folly. Whereas, bar the presence of evidence to the contrary, I would assume some of the artifacts you mentioned were simply lost to entropy. The ancient Chinese lacked the technology/know-how/capability to preserve those things. Circumstances may have forced them to abandon some of those artifacts. They probably did their best, in carving those things in relatively durable material like bronze and marble.

The only comparable example among those that you listed would be the burning of books and burying of scholars. (I know the burying of scholars is disputed.) But even then, it was mostly an idea that probably only very few people believed was good. The other people who cooperated (by turning in hiding scholars and hidden scrolls to the authority) probably did it out of fear for punishment.

> we're talking about millions of people deliberately destroying stuff out of a mix of spite, arrogance, and folly.

> ......But even then, it was mostly an idea that probably only very few people believed was good.

Very good points.

I agree the Culture Revolution has caused great damage. I don't think it shifted the core of "Chinese culture". It was "rectified" quickly and today people understand how bad it was. OTOH, The New Culture Movement had probably caused more impact. I'm not saying the NCM is bad but its effects are significant and long lasting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Culture_Movement

Please let me know your view on it.

So a few select works lost by accident justify the mass destruction of thousands and thousands of works?

This comment reads like propaganda. Very weak propaganda.

Out of a population of people there will always be some who are as you say gullible and arrogant that will turn on their compatriots. As a data point, it is probably whatever percentage of American that still support the current POTUS.

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