Living fossil: A tale of Émile Licent and his legacy museum

On a scorching June afternoon, Clarisse Le Guernic, 28, climbed a steep hill at Nihewan as her guide, Professor Wei Qi, 83, explained how her French compatriot Émile Licent would have taken the same route exactly 100 years earlier.

Nihewan Basin, literally "muddy water bay," is a remote and rich source of early Pleistocene Paleolithic sites in northern China's Hebei Province.

Paleoanthropologist Wei has been digging here for 53 years, hoping for a landmark discovery of a human fossil, which could rewrite history.

"It all started with Émile Licent," Wei told Le Guernic, who visited Nihewan to learn about Licent. "In our field, he is the grandmaster."

In 1924, Licent and fellow scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin were returning from Salawusu in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, where they discovered the first Chinese ancient hominid "ordos tooth" fossil. On their return voyage, the two made the first scientific expedition to Nihewan, and Licent would come back to this basin five more times, in conditions hard to imagine for Le Guernic today.

Flying from Shanghai, Le Guernic had to drive an hour from Datong Yungang Airport at nearby Shanxi Province to a small hostel in Yangyuan County, and then another hour into the village to meet Wei.

"With modern technology and good roads, it isn't so hard for me today, but I just kept thinking, 'How could Émile reach that place 100 years ago?' It must have been a very hard journey," she recalled.

"I just have so much respect for him. How did he get it done? He was someone who had a very clear idea about what to do and how he wanted things to be done."

It was a similar "how did he do it?" fascination that drew Yu Shuxiang to Licent's story nearly 20 years ago.

Yu was working at the municipal government in Tianjin when she first heard of Musee Hoangho Paiho and Émile Licent.

"It was a complete shock when I visited the museum for the first time," Yu said of her first visit to the museum, now part of the Tianjin Natural History Museum.

"When that heavy vault door opened amidst the thick mist in the freezing winter, it felt like a mysterious and fascinating page of history being unveiled in front of me.

"How did this foreigner discover so many fossils and end up building a museum in China all these years ago? I thought to myself, I just have to find out," she added.

Her quest led to Licent's only biography – "French Jinshi Dreaming of the East." The title came from a unique French flag that Licent made and used as an ID within China. His Chinese surname Sang, derived from the pronunciation of Licent, is written on top of the flag, along with the titles of French jinshi and consultant for Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry.

Jinshi was the highest and final degree in the imperial examination in ancient China, and Licent used it as equivalent and easy-to-understand translation for his French doctorate degree.

Licent had set his eyes on northern China when he was still in France pursuing a PhD in zoology. Later in China, he gave himself the Chinese name, Sang Zhihua, which literally translates as "aspire to be cultured" in China.

In March 1914, Licent arrived in the city of Tianjin, near Beijing, as a French Jesuit. Over the next 25 years, he conducted scientific expeditions covering more than 50,000 kilometers around China, making many first discoveries including the first Paleolithic cultural relics within China and the first Chinese ancient hominid fossil.

Almost all the fossils Licent discovered remained in China, with a few exceptions sent to the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. One of those was a fossil femur of a giant ostrich discovered by Licent in Nihewan, which remained unnoticed at the French museum for years until palaeontologist Eric Buffetaut of the National Center for Scientific Research spotted it.

"It illustrates how fossils found by Licent are still of interest today," Buffetaut said. "He made many important discoveries in China and French experts like Teilhard de Chardin became interested in Chinese fossils because of him."

Buffetaut added that Licent is an example of the missionaries sent to China who became interested in the natural history of the country.

"And he is also different because he deeply believed that all the specimens he found should be kept in China for the benefit of the Chinese people, and he built Hoangho Paiho for that purpose."

US archeologist Langdon Warner, for one, led expeditions in China around the same time as Licent. In 1922, he arrived at the Mogao Caves in western China's Gansu Province, equipped with a special chemical solution designed to detach wall-paintings. He removed 26 masterpieces from the caves and took a Buddhist statue when he returned to the United States, which are even now exhibited at the Harvard Art Museums.

In a 1920 untitled article, Licent wrote "Tires du sol chinois, ils resteront en Chine," or "Drawn from Chinese soil, they will remain in China."

The vast majority of Licent's discoveries are still kept at Tianjin Natural History Museum, at their original positions in the original forms as when Licent first curated the collection. He had planned to build a museum to house the Chinese discoveries and for the purpose of education and research long before he arrived in China, and finished the museum's north tower in 1922. He lived next to the museum.

"We call it a 'living fossil' in the history of China's modern museums," said Zhang Caixin, director of the Tianjin Natural History Museum.

"Basically nothing was changed in this museum. You can see how well prepared, meticulous and committed he was from all these details preserved in our museum."