Relics of the grasslands and forest

For months, Hing Chao has traveled across northern China, following the footprints of the past.

His route has led to museums in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, Shanxi, Hebei, Shaanxi, and Gansu provinces, where he examined weapons, horse gear, bronze ornaments, and other artifacts scattered across collections hundreds of kilometers apart.

Some of those historical objects are associated with warfare. Others were used in everyday life. Together, Chao, executive director of the International Guoshu Association, and a leading advocate for Chinese martial studies in Hong Kong, hopes that they tell a broader story about the people who moved across China's northern grasslands, forests and frontier regions, and the exchanges that shaped them over centuries.

The ongoing exhibition, Bows Singing in the Wind: Martial Heritage of Northern China, at the Liaoning Provincial Museum in Shenyang, Liaoning province, displays Chao's curation.

The exhibition uses artifacts related to mounted archery to explore the cultures and arts of ancient northern peoples, as well as the history of exchange among different ethnic groups.

According to Chao, the exhibition has brought together 451 artifacts from 15 museums and archaeological institutes.

For the Liaoning Provincial Museum, choosing a Hong Kong-based independent curator to help lead a major exhibition on northern China's ancient mounted cultures was not simply about bringing in an outside perspective.

Liu Ning, deputy director of the Liaoning Provincial Museum and a co-curator of the exhibition, notes that Chao brought together an unusual combination of long-term field experience, research into northern nomadic and hunting cultures, martial arts studies, and contemporary exhibition practice.

His work has also crossed different artistic forms, including visual arts, performing arts, new media, and intangible cultural heritage.

A previous exhibition he organized in Hong Kong, Hunters, Warriors and Spirits: Nomadic Art of North China, held in 2022, demonstrated both his knowledge and his ability to translate it into a museum setting, Liu says.

That combination became the basis for the collaboration.

Chao's search for the stories behind those objects began long before he started knocking on museum doors.

He first traveled to the grasslands and forests in North China more than two decades ago.

"I went there and had an inexplicable sense of belonging, almost as if I had come home," Chao recalls of his first journeys to Inner Mongolia and the forests of Heilongjiang in 2001.

The feeling led him back to the north again and again and changed the course of his life.

Hunter's education

Chao recalls most vividly an experience from the summer of 2002. He spent three weeks in the forests of Inner Mongolia with a local hunter from the region's Oroqen autonomous banner, traveling by a small metal boat and living largely on what they caught along the way.

For a young man accustomed to big cities, the experience was humbling.

"I practiced martial arts for years and thought I was physically strong," Chao says. "But in the forest, I realized how helpless I was."

The hunter showed him a side of nature he had never seen before and changed his understanding of both nature and himself.

He could read traces left by animals, recognize where wild boar had moved during the night, and navigate a landscape that seemed unreadable to an outsider, Chao says.

The trip prompted him to return to northern China over the following years, documenting what he encountered and gradually deepening his understanding of the cultures that had first drawn him there.

One encounter in particular helped define the direction of his work.

In the Greater Hinggan Mountains, Chao met an elderly woman who recalled growing up in a traditional dwelling and looking through an opening in its roof at the moon and stars. As she spoke, her stories gradually gave way to songs.

Chao learned that many of the songs and oral traditions familiar to the older generation had not been systematically documented. He began recording them.

Two selected recordings later found their way to Hong Kong where, with the help of a studio, they were edited in post-production and then used for a fashion show. But Chao says what mattered more was bringing the songs back to the community where they originated.

"When older residents heard the songs again, they smiled," he says, adding that younger people also began listening to traditions that had been taken for granted.

The experience convinced him that cultural documentation could do more than preserve the past; it could also inspire future generations. He continues traveling through northern China, conducting fieldwork and studying the cultures of communities living in the forests and grasslands.

Those experiences, in turn, have shaped how he approaches the artifacts now on display in Shenyang.

Beyond objects

The exhibition brings together artifacts from different regions and historical periods, tracing the development of mounted cultures across a vast geographical area. Chao's task was not simply to identify important individual pieces, but to find connections among objects long kept in different collections.

When looking at a pair of bronze plaques depicting a yak, Chao drew on his own experiences in northern pastoral regions to consider the relationship between people, animals and the environment in which they lived.

For Chao, such connections make it possible to place ancient artifacts within a longer continuum of life and cultural practice.

"I tried to bring my experiences of northern life into the exhibition," he says.

Chao's understanding of mounted culture also draws on his decades-long martial arts practice, which he says has influenced how he views ancient weapons and equipment.

Those questions are central to the Liaoning exhibition, which explores mounted archery and cavalry as part of a broader cultural world.

Preserving traditions

For all his years in the field, Chao has also grappled with a question at the heart of museum work: What happens when a culture enters a museum?

During his travels, older members of certain communities told him that they worried younger generations were losing contact with languages, songs and skills once central to their lives. Some hoped their traditions could at least be preserved in museums.

Chao understands the urgency behind that wish, but sees the dilemma.

A museum can preserve the memory of a culture, yet the need to preserve something can also signal that it is disappearing from everyday life, he explains.

It helps explain why he is interested in both presenting ancient weapons and horse gear, and the worlds in which they existed, such as the landscapes they moved through and the ways they lived.

The exhibition, Liu Ning says, differs from many previous presentations on individual grassland cultures because of its broad historical and geographical scope.

Rather than focusing on one archaeological culture or region, it brings together material from across northern China and places the development of mounted culture within a broader history of interaction and exchange, she adds.

Back to business

When Chao eventually returned to his family's shipping business, he found that years in forests and grasslands had changed how he understood both business and the wider world.

A hunter reads the forest through relationships between animals and terrain, seasons and rivers, people and their environment. Chao has brought that same lens back to shipping.

He stopped seeing it as a collection of separate vessels, routes and contracts, and began to see it as a system where everything moves together.

"It's not a business philosophy. It's a worldview," he says.

The Liaoning exhibition is one of the major events of the Liaoning-Hong Kong Culture Week, bringing together resources and expertise from the two places.

The collaboration between the Liaoning Provincial Museum and Chao also points to possible future exchanges between cultural institutions in the two places, Liu Ning says.

Now, as visitors move through the exhibition galleries, Chao hopes they will see something beyond the artifacts.

Behind every object, he says, was a way of life.

Contact the writer at yangfeiyue@chinadaily.com.cn