Lost in Translation

Historical Note

This is a work of fiction. All the characters who actually appear in the story are imagined. The historical aspects that form its backdrop, however, are based on real people and events.

The life and thought of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) are well documented through his many books as well as biographies and editions of his letters. All the quotes herein attributed to Father Teilhard and Lucile Swan (1890-1965) are from published sources.

Teilhard de Chardin did live in semiexile in China for twenty-three years, did write many of his major works there including The Phenomenon of Man, did journey to northwest China in the early 1920s with Emile Licent, and did discover the site at Shuidonggou. He made important contributions in his era to Western understanding of the geology and archaeology of China. He worked closely over a long period with the multinational group excavating the Peking Man site at Zhoukoudian. During his China years he formulated and refined many of the ideas that were later to inform his works of Christian mysticism and philosophy.

Teilhard’s profound and enduring relationship with Lucile Swan is mentioned in the memoirs of other foreigners who lived in Peking during those decades but is best described in The Letters of Teilhard de Chardin and Lucile Swan, published in 1993.

All the settings and places in this book do exist, and are presented as accurately as possible. The monkey sun god petroglyphs are real (and remain unexplained). Only one place name has been changed-that of Eren Obo, the Inner Mongolian town.

Liberties have been taken with the sequence of events surrounding Peking Man itself. Teilhard did not get Peking Man back from the Japanese at the end of the war. And although Teilhard made multiple journeys to northwest China and Mongolia, he is not known to have ever actually visited the town called Eren Obo in the book. Certainly after the war broke out he is not thought to have returned to the Northwest. He remained mostly in Peking until he was able to leave China in March 1946. And by that time Lucile was already gone, for she’d managed to get out and return to America in August 1941.

As for Peking Man, it really did vanish in 1941 as described in these pages; it vanished utterly and completely. It has never been found.