under sand, where their fate was definitively sealed. Paul d’Ampère depicted the horrific death throes of these cultures, the desert, the Apocalypse, Hell—as suffered by the Tumchooq kingdom, that place shaped like a bird’s beak which touched me deep in my soul. Those waves of pebbles glittering deceptively, lulling me half to sleep, were eventually swallowed up by shadow. Death. Nothing left, except time immemorial.
I had other literary encounters with Paul d’Ampère at the library in Peking beside the Northern Lake, in an encyclopaedia of linguistics published in Taiwan in 1975, which I eventually managed to lay my hands on. Even though he was not a pure linguist, part of the article on “Tumchooqology” was devoted to him under the title:
THE PRECURSOR
An exemplary career
Born in France, at Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet in the western Pyrenees, Paul d’Ampère left at a young age to live in Paris, where he studied Chinese at the Paris Institute of Oriental Languages. He then learned Sanskrit and other oriental languages at the University of Cologne under professor Thomas Müller. He arrived in China in 1945 and began travelling on foot, faithfully following Marco Polo’s itinerary. Two years later, so that he could have access to various places recorded in the Italian adventurers memoirs and closed to foreigners, he relinquished his French nationality and was naturalised as Chinese. This journey, a genuine single-handed desert crossing, took seven and a half years of his life. He was just thirty-five when he finished his Notes on Marco Polo’s Book of the Wonders of the World, but was already ranked among the most respected scholars of his time. The kingdom of Tumchooq proved decisive for d’Ampère, who crowned his university career by deciphering the Tumchooq language, surpassing all previous attempts in the field.
The discovery of a mutilated text
In his colossal work, the kingdom of Tumchooq appears only in two footnotes and a scale map of the capital showing public squares, city walls, several temples (one of which was cupola-shaped and illuminated at night), as well as unidentified symbols apparently representing signs for small shops, the latter drawn by himself at the time that he exhumed and inspected the site.
In 1952, during a trip to the Manchurian border, he met an exiled aristocrat more than one hundred years old who went by the nickname of Seventy-one, and at the old man’s home d’Ampère found a length of silk some forty centimetres by thirty, yellowed by time and, for reasons still unknown to this day, torn either by hand or with teeth, judging by the marks on the fabric. As for the story of its provenance, it smacks of a senile old man’s fanciful fabrication: it fell from the sky as an aeroplane flew overhead.
The piece, which has been authenticated beyond question, was once the property of successive imperial dynasties, as confirmed by the constellation of red seals applied by its owners, all of whom were emperors. Among them was the seal of Huizong of the Song dynasty, himself a great painter and calligrapher, and that of the Hall of an Old Man’s Five Supreme Pleasures, the name of a collection belonging to Qianlong, known for his passion for antiquities and works of art. These imperial seals cover the upper part; beneath them is a six-line text written in black ink, noteworthy for the horizontal sequence of the writing, breaking away from the verticality of Chinese ideograms. The text is dotted with strange signs never before seen; they are slight, closely spaced, seeming to flow from the sure hand of some scribe, not deviating by one millimetre from such rigorous straight lines that they appear to have been traced along a ruler.
D’Ampère knew intuitively that this was a lost ancient language, from the family of Indo-European alphabetical languages. A few months later he published the conclusions of his in-depth studies: these six lines were written in the official language of the kingdom buried beneath the sands towards the middle of the third century, the Tumchooq language.
Its grammar invites parallels with Pali, an Indian dialect in which Buddha taught, dating back to before the era of common languages. This length of silk, which fell from the sky and was picked up by Seventy-one, was, evidently, a mutilated fragment of a sacred text. According to d’Ampère it was an allegory preached by Buddha himself. After long and arduous efforts of trial and error, he managed to decipher the six lines, but the allegory in its entirety remains a complete mystery since it does not feature in