The Aztecs in Taiwan!

Stanly, who plans to study archaeology abroad, had never before left China and whose trip was paid for by his dad, is up against a unique set of problems. Quite apart from the paucity of research materials (he has only found one book on the Aztecs available in Taiwan - Richard Townsend’s The Aztecs) there’s a formidable language barrier: Náhuatl is a famously agglutinative language (in which it is common to join extra words to the beginning and end of a root word, thus forming multi-syllabic words), the opposite of Chinese (in Taiwan they speak Mandarin with a Taiwanese accent). In Chinese each syllable is represented by a separate word-sound, and three syllables are usually ‘plenty’. Try to imagine writing Huitzilopochtli in Chinese word symbols!

Some of the notes Stanly took while at Mexicolore. Notice his interest in the Voladores (Flyers) ceremony and in snake-shaped rainsticks...

We showed Stanly notes we had taken during a visit to the Needham Institute Library in Cambridge in 2007: the Institute is the home of the Science and Civilisation in China Project, and houses a unique collection of research materials gathered by Dr. Joseph Needham (1900-1995), ‘probably the British historian best-known on a world scale’. During a two-month visit to Mexico in 1947 Needham was struck by a whole series of ‘echoes and resonances’ between ancient Mexico and China. One of these days we’ll do a serious feature on these...!

Of course the topic of human sacrifice was never far away. Stanly is fascinated by the whole problem of human emotions experienced by those in direct contact with sacrifices in pre-Hispanic times. He struck us as a sensitive, intelligent and committed young man, and it will be most interesting to see how he tackles the issue of emotions in his novel...

Stanly spotted the Chinese symbol for tongue drum (‘mu yü’) in notes made by Joseph Needham on the ‘teponaztli’ in his copy of Herbert J. Spinden’s ‘Ancient Civilisations of Mexico and Central America’