Includes HonorRoll ofDonors - Concordia College

Concordia In China
Professor Christopher J. Nagel led
a student tour of China to see firsthand
its rapid changes and learn
more about its people’s culture,
history, and traditions.
This summer, an intrepid Clipper Crew headed to the
great country of 1.4 billion people to build an understanding
of the broad sweep of its 3,000-year-old culture.
Students spent time in Xi’an (pronounced ‘SHE-un’),
the ancient northern capital and wealthy trading terminus
of the fabled Silk Road—a caravan trek of 7,000 miles to
Samarkand, Damascus, and Antioch. The Clipper Crew
walked the 600-year-old city wall, visited the leaning Wild
Goose Pagoda, and saw thousands of 2,000-year-old lifesize
terra cotta soldiers. Xi’an benefited from civilization’s
oldest and longest trade route until the 15th century—
when China’s Ming Dynasty looked inward, closed itself
off from the world, unrigged its extensive merchant fleet,
and abandoned all trade. The weight of the world then
shifted, and Spain and Portugal built their empires. The
world developed while China lay dormant.
In Beijing, students saw how this isolationist theme was
continued by the infamous Dowager Empress in the late
1800s. She spent China’s resources on her Summer Palace
and cared little for the outside world. She did not move
to rebuff the expansionist Western and Japanese powers,
which then created independent zones (known as
Concessions) within China’s great cities and controlled
much of her commerce and trade.
Also in Beijing, the Concordia Crew toured the Temple
of Heaven, Ming Emperor Tombs, and Forbidden City,
home to dynasties for five centuries. After PuYi, the Last
Emperor, was deposed in 1911, China plunged into
further chaos and civil war. Warlords controlled much of
12 CONCORDIA NEW YORKER | 2007
the interior. The Japanese military overran China in the
’30s. In the ’40s, Mao finally secured both Chinese
independence and his ruthless control over China. Like
The world developed while
China lay dormant.
emperors before him, Mao closed its borders and looked
inward. Much of his legacy remains. The crew saw
Mao’s mausoleum, the sterile socialist architecture of the
Great Hall of the People, and walked Tiananmen
Square—the political heart of China where a million can
assemble. The crew was fortunate to visit a typical
“hutong”, an enclosed family compound with an entrance
off a narrow street that opens to a central courtyard faced
by family rooms. This was in one of the few remaining
historic sections of Beijing (generic apartment buildings
are displacing much of the old city). Under Mao, all
private ownership ended. But for party loyalists and
those who had been with Mao on the famous Long
March, special privileges were given. While most lived in
deep poverty under Mao, the patriarch of this hutong had
been a soldier on the Long March and was given the
hutong for his family—thus also able to survive political
purges and the devastating Cultural Revolution of 1966-
1976 (the year of Mao’s death).