Chen Lulan’s Abacus Museum
Posted by: valeriehector | Filed Under ChinaChen Lulan’s Abacus Museum
When I look at an abacus, I see a framework containing rods that hold moveable beads. But are they really beads? Or are they just small objects that happen to have holes in them to make counting easier?
As someone whose assumptions are influenced by an intense interest in beads and beadwork, I would suggest that the answer is “both.”
But I’m not so sure that Madame Chen Lulan of Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, would agree. And she is by far the greater authority on abacus history, theory, and practice, especially as it relates to China. In fact, she’s become a revered person in China. in the last few years. She’s been interviewed by quite a few television, radio, magazine, newspaper and internet reporters, and several dozen articles about her expertise have been published.
It was thanks to one of these articles that I came to know of Madame Chen.
My colleague and fluent Chinese speaker Jeff Keller came across her name in late 2007 or early 2008 on the Chinese internet, in an article that told of her wish to build an abacus museum to house her substantial personal collection. At my request Jeff contacted Mrs. Chen to ask if I could come to meet her later that year. Her granddaughter wrote back to us, saying yes.
In May of 2008 a catastrophic earthquake devastated parts of Sichuan Province not far from Chengdu. For a few weeks Jeff could not get through to Madame Chen by email or cell phone, and we wondered how she and her family had fared. Eventually we found out that Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, had been largely spared, and that everyone in the Chen family was fine. 
So in September of 2008, I flew from Beijing to Chengdu to meet Madame Chen and interview her about her life’s work. My Chinese is too limited to allow me to carry on an in-depth conversation, so I brought a translator.
We took a taxi to Madame Chen’s home on the ground floor of an apartment complex in central Chengdu. The largest room in the home has been converted to a schoolroom, where Madame Chen conducts several classes a week for children of various ages. At the front of the room hangs an enormous abacus, which Madame Chen uses for demonstration.
A modest and reticent woman, Madame Chen was reluctant to talk about her past or her accomplishments. Instead she gave us her resume, which Jeff later translated for me.
Resumes the world over give just the bare facts of a life and typically contain huge gaps, sometimes spanning decades. So it is with Madame Chen’s resume. For example, she mentioned in our interview that she had worked for the Communist Party in Tibet on a road-building squad in the 1950s, but this is not mentioned in her resume. I would have liked to hear more about that time in her life, but she did not seem to want to discuss it. One quickly learns that certain topics are highly sensitive to Chinese people, and it would have been inconsiderate of me to press the issue.
But plenty of other facts are mentioned in Madame Chen’s resume. Born in 1930, she graduated from the Lixin School of Accounting in the 1950s. In 1986, she helped cofound the Chengdu Lixin School of Accounting. In 1994, she published her own textbook, Practical Abacus Calculation, which is widely used in schools.
In 1988, she began collecting abacuses and abacus-related material. Her resume lists her collection as containing :
“…over 1,200 abacuses from the Ming, Qing, and Republican periods made of gold, silver, jade, ivory, blue porcelain, agate, olive wood, red sandalwood, redwood, copper, and elephant tusks. Includes over 600 volumes from the Qing and Republican periods including over 100 volumes and 500 chapters bound in string, over 2,000 abacus magazines, and Three Calculations Textbook and Abacus Methods for Middle and Elementary School Students from the Cultural Revolution period. Collection also includes over 16,000 post cards, over 7,000 lottery tickets, over 4,000 souvenir cards, and over 400 money counters. ”
I asked Madame Chen how she had built her collection. The answer was simple: hundreds of visits to local flea markets and antique shops over many years. This surprised me. The day before I had visited Chengdu’s main flea/antique market, which seemed strangely impoverished and run-down, with weary-looking vendors and absolutely nothing of interest to a beadwork or textile researcher. But it was not so for Madame Chen. Somehow she had managed to assemble a world-class collection, drawing solely upon sources in her hometown.
There was no mistaking the need for a museum to house Madame Chen’s collection. I hope that a benefactor, of any nationality, will step forward and make it happen.
All too soon, another class was about to begin, and Madame Chen needed to tidy up the classroom. We were out of time.
As the translator and I walked away, my mind returned to one of the questions we had asked Madame Chen: is an abacus a piece of beadwork? She fell silent and seemed to have a hard time answering. Probably she did not want to offend me.
When she did answer, she said no, it’s really more of a counting tool. But you could see it as a piece of beadwork if you want to.
And I have to confess, rightly or wrongly, I want to.
Below, two images of incense sticks alight at the Green Ram Temple, a Taoist temple in western Chengdu that I visited the next day. In Chinese belief, the wafting smoke carries visitors’ prayers skyward.
(Text and images copyright Valerie Hector 2008-9. All rights reserved.)
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