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By the early decades of the twelfth century, when Wu Kaiqin wrote his letters, I wrote in my introduction, China had been the conscious center of its own universe for nearly two thousand years. Educated people knew, in theory, that beyond the Tibetan plateau and on the far side of the tribute kingdoms of Central Asia and Vietnam there existed other civilizations, most notably India, where the Buddha was born. A few government officials, geographers and mapmakers, who had contact with merchants from the Middle East, knew that the caliph of Baghdad ruled over a vast kingdom that included red- and blond-haired men with large noses and white skin. But outside of Kaifeng and the other large cities, then as today, most Chinese people had never seen anyone of another ethnicity. Even citizens of the major tribute states, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan, resembled Chinese people very closely. To be human was to look Chinese.
Wu Kaiqin and his family had the almost-unheard-of experience, among Chinese people of their era, of living surrounded entirely by foreigners for fifteen years. At the time of their capture the family numbered eleven — Wu, his three wives, and their seven children, ranging from infancy to thirteen years old. The youngest child (name unknown) died of a diarrheal illness in Turfan soon after they arrived there. The other ten all survived the experience, but all of them, apart from Wu Kaiqin, his first wife, Tian Mei, and their eldest son, Wu Fengguang, chose to stay in Turfan rather than be returned to China when the period of captivity ended and Prince Jilan allowed them to go. In his letters to Meng Faru, Wu Kaiqin never explains the circumstances that ruptured his family, or even alludes to the two wives and six children he left behind in the desert. But the Family Record of the Wu Clan cites other sources that claim that Wu’s younger wives deserted him for Jurchen husbands, and that his two younger sons both married Jurchen wives. It also says that when given free passage by the Prince, Wu “allowed everyone in his family to choose freely whether to stay in Turfan or return to the land of the black-haired people, the land of the One Hundred Names.”
What allowed Wu this extraordinary equanimity, this attitude that we would think of as extremely broad-minded even in our own time? One obvious interpretation would be that Wu was simply responding to the wishes of the younger members of his family, who had grown up in captivity with no memory of their home in China. Another interpretation would be that even if Wu was ostensibly free to leave, he was forced to leave members of his family behind as a diplomatic gesture. There is no evidence to sustain or disprove these theories. The only surviving evidence that comes directly from Wu’s own hand is his letters, which point to a remarkable transformation of his attitude toward the Jurchen. As Tan Zhiqiang put it in his entry on Wu in the New Encyclopedia of Traditional Chinese Literature, “This was a change almost unheard of — as his experience was almost unheard of — in the whole three thousand year span of classical Chinese poetry.” In his letters and particularly his poems, Wu evolved what we might call the only indigenous Chinese concept of racial equality or unity, through the interceding of a mysterious concept or substance called miao.
Miao is a hapax legomenon — a word which, as the Oxford Encyclopedia of Linguistics puts it, “occurs only once in a written corpus, either narrowly or broadly defined.” In this case the “corpus” is the entire known body of traditional (pre-1911) Chinese literature. Barring the discovery of antecedent texts that have not yet seen the light of day, it appears that Wu himself coined miao, combining the characters 
(that is, “people,” “fire,” “water,” and the term ren, which means equality, justice, or humane action). The idea that a scholar would invent a new word is considered something of a scandal in Chinese philology, and during the Ming and Qing Dynasties there were lengthy debates among imperial orthographers over whether miao should be included in dictionaries of variant or rare characters, and whether a character invented and used by one person (if indeed that was the case) could be said to constitute a word at all.
The hypothesis that Wu himself coined the term miao is borne out by the letters and poems themselves, which hint at a discovery or revelation that Wu is reluctant to put into words. Consider the following poem, dated April — May 1121:
What is it that separates friends and strangers?
What is it that separates foreign and intimate?
Strange, indeed, are its transmutations,
This miao that swallows up five colors.
Some speak of ancestral emptiness,
A nothing that is yet an infinity.
But when miao is mentioned,
No one can say anything at all.
In a passage in a letter to Meng Faru sent nearly five years later, Wu offers his most explicit summation of miao:
Have you ever heard a young student playing the lute strike a wrong note that causes your ears to shrink back in displeasure? Listen closely to the sound [zhi yin] of the wrong note and you will hear the harmonic principle [li] of the universe. Miao is the wrong note that harmonizes all human appearances and allows us to forget “near” and “far,” “dark” and “light,” “Chinese” and “barbarian.”
The late Ming commentator Zhu Bing dismissed Wu’s miao poems as “pseudo-mysticism” and “quackery disguised as immortality”; those phrases were used to marginalize Wu for nearly three centuries. And of course it is easy to understand why the concept of miao would seem unacceptable in late imperial China, where, to quote Edmund Chang, “Chinese identity was constituted more and more as a fortress mentality, a preservation of a static order, and a resistance to outside influence other than the strict hierarchy of tribute.” This attitude about the continuity and essential unity of the Chinese tradition has defined Western scholarship and popular impressions of China up to the present. Indeed, many contemporary commentators on China treat Chinese nationalism as a monolithic, xenophobic, chauvinistic, and at least tacitly racist assumption that China is, as Pamela Taylor put it on Fox News recently, “ethnically superior… a natural center for world domination.”
While miao does not constitute anything like a dissident tradition in Chinese culture — since the term begins and ends in the work of one poet who lived and worked mostly outside the borders of the empire — it does represent the imaginative capacity of the Chinese tradition as it existed in a more cosmopolitan, more unstable world. A situation not unlike the world China finds itself in today.
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Two years later, when my dissertation was all but finished, Pearl Chen, my senior adviser, took me to lunch at the Faculty Club. She was an imposing woman who’d always reminded me a little of Julia Child, with a broad, doughy face and a booming voice. Her grandfather was Chinese ambassador to Washington under the Kuomintang; her father married into the Boston Bradfords and worked at the Federal Reserve; she’d started her own career in the Fifties as a CIA operative at New Asia College in Hong Kong. Talking to her was like touring a vast, eccentrically arranged museum, half full of Tang funerary ceramics, half full of old copies of Foreign Affairs.