Ponder the past or face the future?

("Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" These epic questions, which famous Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) raised a century ago in one of his masterpieces, revisited me last week after a long absence. )

What led me to think about such weighty subjects was not Gauguin's painting. Neither was it an emotional or moral crisis.

Instead it was the Mayans - an ancient group of people who created a magnificent culture, the beginnings of which no one knows and the remains of which are beautiful but few.

No matter how jaded the observer, it is difficult not to confront the grander questions about human history when shown "The Mystery of the Maya: Ancient Civilization of Mexico," an exhibition that runs through August 31 at the China Millennium Monument in Beijing.

Applauded by local critics as one of the few "premier exhibitions" in town this summer, "The Mystery of the Maya" features more than 180 priceless original relics selected from the collections of the world-famous National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City and other Mexican museums.

All arranged in the best possible way, the exhibits help visitors lift a small corner of the huge curtain of history to peer into the mysterious civilization that was created then lost by the Mayans and rediscovered by outsiders in the 16th century.

Above all, the exhibition gives a rare opportunity for interested Chinese viewers to probe with their own eyes into a disputatious topic: what are the relations between the two greatest ancient civilizations on both sides of the Pacific Ocean?

What's inside?

Chen Jie, 24, and her boyfriend Zeng Zhicheng were among the early crowds of enthusiastic visitors who braved the hot journey to western Beijing and the 60 yuan (US$7.2) admission fee to see the new exhibition.

"I had a terrific experience walking around the exhibits," Chen said later. "It's a great time for us to learn about the legendary civilization, which we only knew of from history books in middle school."

Probably the best known of the classical civilizations of Mesoamerica, the Mayan kingdom originated in the Yucatan Peninsula around 1800 BC and rose to prominence from AD 300-900 in present-day southern Mexico, Guatemala, northern Belize and western Honduras.

The culture started to decline around AD 900 when, for unknown reasons, the southern Mayans abandoned their cities. The Maya dynasty came to a close around AD 1200 when the northern Mayans were integrated into the Toltec society.

Building on inventions and ideas inherited from earlier civilizations like the Olmec, the Mayans developed astronomy, calendar and a hieroglyphic writing system. The Maya people were noted as well for their outstanding skills and creativity in architecture, sculpture and pottery-making.

The brilliance of their culture is best represented in the striking stone sculptures, pottery, and jade and gold adornments displayed in the exhibition, according to Shi Jingsheng, one of the exhibition's organizers.

Besides the more traditional exhibits, the show features a number of digital films and a 259-page Chinese catalogue that explain the history, art and life of the Maya.

The 1 million yuan (US$120,500) replicas of a Mayan pyramid and a temple gate at the entrance to the exhibition drew criticism from some visitors, including Chen and Zeng, who thought it was tacky.

But another replica - the recreation of a jungle environment inside the exhibition hall - drew praise.

Under the jungle's canopy, displays are arranged to illustrate the contradictions and developments embodied in Mayan culture from their relations with nature to their lives in large cities; from their religious obsession to their tendency towards rational thinking; from speculations on the origin of Mayan culture to thoughts on its future.

Are we the same?

For the past two centuries, scholars have been looking for parallels between Mayan and ancient Chinese civilizations.

There is currently still debate raging about whether Mayans, or American Indians in general, originally came from China.

In 1992, when the United Nations commemorated Columbus' "discovery" of the New Continent, a number of researchers argued that paleolithic Asians living in northern China were actually the first people to step on the American continent by crossing the frozen Bering Strait over 20,000 years ago.

In November 1996, US News and World Report published an attention-getting article entitled "A Tale of Two Cultures," which quoted Chinese scholar Chen Hanping and US-resident scholar Mike Xu as saying the roots of Mayan culture may have reached across the Pacific Ocean.

A Chinese professor at the University of Central Oklahoma, Xu had developed a hypothesis that Olmec culture, the Mayans' "mother culture," may have come into existence with the help of a group of Chinese who fled across the Pacific as refugees at the end of the Shang Dynasty (1600-1100 BC).

Xu said he had found more than 150 glyphs on photographs and real specimen of Olmec pottery, jade artefacts and sculptures that closely resemble the characters used in Chinese oracle bone writings and bronze inscriptions of the pre-Qin-Dynasty period (before 221 BC).

Xu's confidence was boosted by Chen Hanping, whom he met at a major exhibition on the Olmec Civilization in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC the same year he made the writing discovery.

Chen Hanping, a former history researcher from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, recognized faint writings on some Mayan jade celts (polished, chisel-shaped implements) were actually oracle scripts from the Shang Dynasty. They read "the ruler and his chieftains establish the foundation for a kingdom."

The Beijing Youth Daily recently reported that Wang Dayou and Song Baozhong, two Chinese researchers who visited the Beijing exhibition, had claimed the writings etched in the celts on display made reference to Chinese people before the Shang Dynasty.

The evidence linking the two cultures is not limited to writing.

Not only do the Chinese and Mayans both belong to the Mongoloid races (characterized by black hair and yellow skin), the two civilizations also shared a number of customs and images.

For example, the structure of temples found on top of Mayan pyramids resembles Chinese ancestral temples, and the feathered serpent spirit worshipped in Mesoamerica is similar to the Chinese dragon.

People on both sides of the Pacific also shared a love of jade and a tradition of building stone steles to record historic events. The breast-like feet found on ancient Mayan pottery containers are also similar to shapes found on examples of Chinese pre-historic pottery.

More thoughts

"In spite of the similarities, it seems too early and reckless to conclude that Mayan Civilization originated in ancient China," warned Chen Ziming, a professor from the Central Conservatory of Music who is also a researcher of Latin-American culture. "It still takes time to prove all the hypotheses," he told China Daily.

Opposing voices have also come from some leading figures in Mesoamerican research who maintain that the artefacts are the products of the American people's own ingenuity.

Professor Michael Coe of the anthropology department at Yale University took the view that to link the marks on the jade celts with Chinese oracle bone writings was "insulting to the indigenous people of Mexico."

Jiang Zudi, who conducted a comparative study on ancient Chinese and Mayan cultures 11 years ago at both Peking University and Harvard University for his PhD thesis, concluded in his research paper that ancient Chinese and Mayan civilizations developed along completely different trails.

In 1990 he told China Daily, "If there had been any exchange between the two ancient cultures or if ancient Chinese had ever sailed to Mexico where ancient Mayans lived, the Chinese would have brought their most advanced bronze-making technology with them.

"However, there was no trace indicating that ancient Mayans ever learned bronze-making," he said.

The opinion of Chang Kuang-chih, an archaeology professor at Harvard University who died recently, seems more balanced. Chang conjectured that the Chinese and Mesoamerican civilizations may well have been "the products of the descendants of common ancestors at different times and in different locations."

It seems that disputes will continue and the mystery of the Mayans will remain a mystery for quite some time.

With more than 5,000 years of continuous history, Chinese civilization has been luckier than the Mayan, surviving and prospering in the present.

Given this, it seems more practical and necessary for the Chinese to ponder what we are and where we are going than to indulge in the nostalgia of our glorious past and ponder whether our culture was the origin of the Mayan civilization.

"The hundreds of Mayan pyramids scattered in Central American jungles are towering monuments reminding modern man of the bitterness and limitation of human civilization by providing a striking contrast between past glory and present silence," the epilogue of the exhibition catalogue reads.

As history marches forward, perhaps it is better to enjoy the past for what it is and get busy working on the future.