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Regarding the Donation of 285 Stone Rubbings to Wofford College by the Balser Family Archive, owned by Jutta Bauman of Arlington, VA and Sabine von Dryander of Bochum Germany
According to our grandmother Marie Balser, the stone rubbings were purchased by our grandfather Karl-August Balser in 1911 in Xian, China, where he was visiting the Stele Forest and the Nestorian Stele. He was a life-long scholar of Mandarin Chinese and Chinese arts, culture and religion, and he considered the rubbings his prize possessions. They accompanied him and his family on their many moves during what he referred to as their “gypsy life” (Zigeunerleben) in the Far East in the foreign service of three German governments, Imperial Germany (1909-1919), the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), and the Nazi Dictatorship (or Third Reich) 1933-1945. At the end of World War II, in 1945, he was the German consul general in Kobe, Japan, where he remained under house arrest by the American occupation army until 1948, at which time he was repatriated to Germany. Instead of joining the group set up to create the foreign service department for the newly established Federal Republic of Germany, our grandfather chose to devote the rest of his life to his studies. He lectured widely on Asian culture, religion and politics and taught courses at the Technical University of Darmstadt in his native Hessen, Germany until his untimely death in 1956.
He was, by all accounts, an exceptionally kind and spiritual man. The last time we visited him, I was only eight years old, and I have only vague memories of him, but I have the honor and pleasure of being allowed to archive and study his papers. There is much to learn from them.
Karl-August was born in 1887 in the provincial town of Assenheim in Hessen, Germany, the son of the local doctor, August Balser. Dr. Balser was later called to join the Hessian Ducal Medical Service in the city of Mainz and became a prominent doctor there. Young Karl-August graduated from the gymnasium (academic high school) in early 1905 and planned to study law. He spent the summer in Leipzig working as a clerk for his uncle, who was in the salt business. In those days, Leipzig was a center of international trade, and Karl-August became fascinated by stories about the Far East. He began his legal studies in Leipzig and spent a semester in Edinburgh, Scotland. For two years, he studied Chinese at the Seminar for Oriental Studies in Berlin, where he concentrated on learning the language and passed the Chinese Language Exam in 1907 to prepare for his posting as interpreter trainee (“Dolmetscher Aspirant”) at the Imperial German Legation in Peking (Beijing), China. In 1909 he completed his first law exams at the university of Giessen in Hessen. His plan was to eventually complete his law degree and qualify for the Imperial Consular Service.
In 1909, when he was 22 years old, Karl-August set off towards China on the first of many trips on the Transsiberian Railroad. [1] The next two years were spent studying Chinese and learning the ins and outs of diplomacy and, especially, international protocol. One of his first impressions was the burial of the dowager empress Cixi, whom he characterized as
“a superstitious, cynically violent woman from the Manchurian clan of the Yehenara. She masterfully pitted the various powers surrounding the throne against each other in order to stay in power. In January of 1898 she took on the role of regent and had the young western-oriented reformist emperor Guangxu declared mentally ill. She kept him locked up on an island in the palace park and ruled in his name with the help of her reactionary Manchu relatives. As she felt her death approaching in 1908, a few hours before her death, the Emperor Guangxu died in captivity. A 3-year-old nephew of the emperor was placed on the throne and his father ruled for him.
By 1909 the imperial tombs had been readied so that first the emperor, and soon thereafter the dowager empress could be buried there. Peking had been specially cleaned up, which was urgently needed, because signs of decay were visible everywhere in the city. The procession accompanying the huge catafalque (164 bearers) was about a kilometer long. In spite of the fact that the train was made up of the imperial princes and princesses and the highest dignitaries in the land, it seemed unorganized and somehow revolting. Thousands of badly dressed and dirty coolies carrying ceremonial shields and spears and various emblems created so much noise that there was no feeling of solemnity possible.
On a newcomer such as myself, these signs of decay had a depressing effect.”[2]
Karl-August accompanied the head of the German legation to many long and tedious official events in the Forbidden City, dressed in his traditional uniform: tails with golden braids and a two-cornered hat (see photo). The young man was struck by the general shabbiness at court, as well, and by the threadbare silks, which reflected a once prosperous society in obvious decline.
Foreign diplomats lived in the Legation Quarter (west of today’s Tiananmen Square), played tennis and went ice skating in the winter and rode out daily on the grounds of the Temple of Heaven. Even a trainee such as Karl-August owned three Mongolian ponies, each with its own “mafu,” or horse handler. Horse racing was the primary focus of the social season of this inward looking and apparently rather shallow expatriate community.
In spite of these distractions, my grandfather and his colleagues, three other trainees, spent many months studying with their Chinese tutor Mr. Mu, and by the summer of 1910, my grandfather had managed to learn enough Chinese that he felt ready to venture into the interior of the country. He received a leave of absence and permission to move into a house on the grounds of a Buddhist monastery in the picturesque mountains west of Peking for several months of study and learning. One of the texts he used for language practice was an ancient Chinese children’s primer from the 14th century, which, according to him, was still used even during his lifetime. This led to a chance encounter that was to influence the rest of his life. The following is Karl-August Balser’s story of how he met the viceroy Duanfang[3]:
“One day, as I was just reciting a few verses out loud on our veranda, an elderly distinguished looking Chinese passed by, accompanied by several younger Chinese, who were obviously his students. From the sound of my pronunciation he immediately recognized that the reciter had to be a foreigner. He stopped by and corrected my pronunciation, then invited me to visit him. I gladly accepted his invitation and discovered that the distinguished gentleman was a former reformist viceroy who was had fallen out of favor with the emperor. Later I was invited to visit him in Peking in the fall to see his art collection. There I saw totally astonishing works of art. I was most taken by Buddhist paintings of (what looked like Christian) madonnas with haloes and of priests carrying rosaries and incense vessels. I also discovered other similarities between Buddhism and Christianity, so I asked myself: Could the Christian Church have adopted these things from Buddhism? … Today I know (after years of study) that Buddhism and Christianity simultaneously drew their iconography from the great cauldron of Iran during the first centuries of the common era.”
The excitement of discovery led to plans to visit the interior of China and the ancient capitol of Xian with its recently famous Nestorian Stele.[4] Back in Germany, Karl-August’s heroes had been the European explorers who went roaming the Chinese and Inner Asian hinterlands looking for art objects to buy or steal for their museums back home but also to find out how Chinese culture and religion have interacted with Europe since ancient times. My grandfather was very critical of the art collectors, however, and in his many years in the region, he refused to acquire objects of art to take home to Germany. Instead, he took photographs and collected stone rubbings, and after he retired in 1949, he shared them with his German countrymen in countless lectures about Chinese art, religion and culture until his untimely death in 1956. His lifelong interest was in the blending of East Asian, Central Asian and European art, culture and religion throughout history, and he embarked on a fervent quest for a eucumenical path to understanding the common roots and threads of the values and beliefs of all of the earth’s inhabitants. In the first blush of these ideas, he undertook his voyage to Xian, where he acquired the stone rubbings that are now at Wofford College.
In the following text, his wife Marie Balser describes this journey:
In 1911 K.A. Balser took a trip into the interior of China with a”boy” (hired servant), a field cot and a petroleum stove. After leaving the Peking-Hankow (today Beijing- Wuhan) train, he proceeded slowly by donkey cart via Kaiseng to the Longmen Grottoes (about 560 km). There all the hardships of travelling were forgotten when he saw the huge system of temple caverns and their hundreds of sculptures that had been hewn out of the rock walls, all grouped around a giant statue of the Buddha. The young sinologist began to understand the extent of Asian culture. The photographs he took during this visit form the basis of his collection of slides that he used in his lectures later in life.
The final destination of his journey was Xian, (another 380 km by donkey cart) where he visited the Stele Forest and the Nestorian Stele. The latter tells of early Christian communities in the Chinese interior. K.A.’s interest in the eastward spread of Christianity and comparative religion became a part of his lifework.
I am sure that he and my grandmother would be delighted to know that the stone rubbings from the Stele Forest that he purchased so long ago have found a new home and will be used to instruct and inform students and visitors at Wofford College.
Jutta Balser Bauman
Arlington, August, 20016
Here is a short timeline of Karl-August Balser’s “gypsy life:”
1905-1909 Legal education in Leipzig, Edinburgh and Gießen; Chinese studies in Berlin; secret engagement to Marie Theobald
1909-1911 Interpreter Trainee at the German Legation in Peking (Beijing)
1911 Several months filling in as German commissar in Mukden (Shenyang); Chinese revolution
1911-1912 Military service in Germany (6th Hessian Dragoon Regiment)
1913 Tsinanfu (Jinan), the capital of the German province of Shantung (Shandong); administrative duties
Sept 1913 Marriage to Marie Theobald in the German Garrison Chapel in Tsingtau (Qingdao), then a thriving German colony
1913-1917 German Consulate in Tientsin (Tianjin), an international harbor with an active German presence (newpapers, school, etc) until the Chinese declared war on Germany on March 14, 1917. K.A.’s sons Karli and Helmut were born in 1914 and 1916 respectively;
He served for nine months as mayor of a village with a population of 10 000 Chinese farmers which was part of the German Concession. In this capacity he helped administer and organize a land reclamation project along the river bottom of one of the several rivers there;
Karl-August received his Chinese name, Lau Bao (=”the old Balser,” aka, depending on the transcription, “dried fish” or “old treasure”)
1917 After China declared war on Germany, repatriation to Germany via the United States; en route he and the family visited San Francisco, the Grand Canyon, Chicago, New York, Bergen(Norway), Copenhagen (Denmark) and landed in Stettin(then Germany, now Szczecin, Poland)
1917-1918 Reserve Lieutenant in World War I, liaison officer on the Western Front for 6 months
1918 German Legation in Stockholm, Sweden, for 5 months
1919-1921 Head of the German Consulate in the harbor city Åbo (Turku), Finland during the heady aftermath of the Russian defeat in Finland; Marie teaches children’s gymnastics; Balsers have close ties to the university as K.A. returns to his studies of comparing cultures and religions; third son Christian is born in 1920
1921 Official promotion to consul; stationed in the formerly German, newly Polish, city of Posen (Posna) and involved in the transfer of German to Polish administration there
1922-1926 Second Secretary at the German Legation in Peking (Beijing), birth of his fourth son, Johannes (our father), in 1922; lively intellectual contact with Richard Wilhelm during his “Pekinger Abende;” budding friendship with the explorer Sven Hedin during his lectures to the German colony in Peking; a house fire destroys many of the family possessions and they move from the Legation Quarter to officers’ quarters on the former German Military Base; family trips to climb Maio feng Mountain, visit the Ming Tombs, and the Jade Pagoda in the old Summer Palace grounds; tours of the Yungang Grottoes (Marie 1922; Karl-August 1923); Summers in Pao ma chang (site of the race course) and at the beach in Pei tai ho; 1925 the imperial family is expelled from the Forbidden city and Princess Yulang and her entourage seek refuge in the German School and store their possessions with the Balsers. Johannes is given his childhood name Bo Li (=the shining one) by Princess Yulang; Balsers, as benefactors of the Imperial household, attend the marriage reception of Emperor Pu Yi (as portrayed in the movie “The Last Emperor”) at the Japanese Legation; favorite memories of Beijing: the steps of the Temple of Heaven and the bright yellow tile roofs of the Forbidden City
1926-1928 Berlin Home Office, Dept IV (Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and East Asia), served in the Chinese Department of the Seminar for Oriental Languages in Berlin
1928-1933 Consul in the harbor city Vladivostok (Golden Horn, Salatoirog) in the Soviet Union; Consulate and apartment were in the building of the Hamburg Company Kunst und Albers and there was a country house (“dacha”) in Okeanskaya; family excursions by horse cart (“teluga”) to the Bay of Usiri; many illustrious visitors; sea trade via Vladivostok between Manchuria and Germany; increasingly repressive actions by the Soviet authorities which included arrest and internment of many of Balsers’ friends and associates; since 1931 also consul to Harbin, Manchuria; during the Russian-Chinese conflict, K.A. served to officially represent the interests of Chinese nationals living in the Russian Far East, who were cruelly mistreated by the Soviets and interned in concentration camps under inhuman conditions; death of son Christian