Ashes: The Sixteenth Year of Chongzhen

When I woke up, the beacon fires at Tongguan had been out for three hundred and eighty years.

As a Ming history scholar, I knew the stories that might lie beneath every inch of its rammed-earth walls. In the autumn of the sixteenth year of the Chongzhen reign, Commander-in-Chief Sun Chuanting died here defending the country, Tongguan fell, and the last backbone of the Ming broke. I had read those lines in history books thousands of times. I could even recite the famous verdict in the History of Ming: “Chuanting died, and the Ming fell.”

But knowing and seeing are two different things.

Then, on an autumn evening, beside an archaeological excavation trench at the Tongguan ruins, I touched a brick from the city wall, its surface pitted with honeycomb-like erosion. The chill beneath my fingertips suddenly grew vivid and surging, as if three hundred and eighty years had collapsed into a single moment. I heard horns in the wind, smelled gunpowder and blood, and saw the blurred figures on the wall, fading away.

Then I “went” there.

Or perhaps I “returned” there