by Bill Porter
It was a big place. There were ponds and waterways and bridges and exhibition halls and, of course, gardens. We spent half an hour strolling through the grounds and finally ended up at an exhibition hall at the rear of the park. One of the display cases contained several bricks from the original grave, and the walls were covered with paintings recounting the events of Li Pai’s final years, when he was banished from the capital of Ch’ang-an and forced to drink his last cup of wine on the Yangtze.
Li Pai lived in the eighth century during an age when even peasants recited poems, and everyone who was anyone recited his. The rear of the exhibition hall opened up into an enclosed garden that surrounded his tomb—the same as Tu Fu’s. We walked into the garden and sat down on one of the stone benches. I took out my copy of Li Pai’s poems and read one to Finn and Steve. We were the only people there, so I didn’t mind reading it out loud in Chinese then trying to translate it on the spot. While I was still working on the translation, two dozen Japanese filed in and lined up in front of Li Pai’s grass-covered tomb. We didn’t know what to think. It was like a military formation. Then one of them walked over to the tombstone and lit candles and incense. Once he rejoined his colleagues, they all began singing one of Li Pai’s poems in unison. We found out later that they were members of a club in Japan that devoted itself to the study of T’ang poetry. But what was remarkable was that they sang his poems in the ancient T’ang dynasty dialect.
Li Pai’s grave
While the candles and incense were still burning, their leader ended their performance with a solo effort. He sang Li Pai’s last poem titled “Song at the End of Life,” in which Li Pai referred to himself as the mythical bird called the P’eng, which Chuang-tzu used at the beginning of his self-titled book to embody the spirit set free. In his poem, Li Pai also referred to the Chinese belief that the sun rose behind a huge tree and to the story that Confucius burst into tears when he heard that a unicorn had been captured.
Soaring above the world’s horizon
halfway to Heaven the P’eng’s strength failed
I had enough wind for ten thousand generations
but my robe caught on the sunrise tree
I leave it behind for whoever finds it
Confucius is dead who’ll cry for me
As the singer reached that last line, his voiced cracked, and the strangest thing happened. The sky began to cry.
After everyone bowed in front of Li Pai’s grave and filed out, we sat down on the grass in front of the grave in the rain. We had a beer, so we opened it, shared a swig, then poured the rest over Li Pai’s tombstone. If there was one poet who liked to drink, it was Li Pai. Half the poems he left behind mention drinking. Here’s one titled “Drinking with a Recluse in the Mountains”:
Japanese pilgrims at Li Pai’s grave
Tomb containing Li Pai’s hat and robe
We fill each other’s cups where the wildflowers bloom
one cup another cup and still one more
I’m drunk and half-asleep when you get up to leave
tomorrow if you come again don’t forget your zither
Too bad all we had was beer, and only one bottle. The rain didn’t last long. About the time it stopped, we said good-bye to Li Pai and flagged down a bus going back to Tangtu. We got off at the same spot we got on and boarded the next bus heading north. Twenty kilometers later, we got off at the town of Tsaishih and walked to the nearby cliff of the same name. That was where the story was set that started circulating soon after Li Pai died. It went like this: one night when the moon was especially round, Li Pai rowed out into the Yangtze and dropped anchor below Tsaishih Cliff. As usual, he had a jug of wine with him, and before long he was drunk. Gazing at the moon’s reflection in the water, he bent over and tried to embrace it. When he did, he fell into the river. Some say he drowned, while others say he was carried to Heaven on the back of a whale. Actually, the whale’s appearance in this version isn’t as farfetched as it sounds. The region just south of Tsaishih Cliff is now a nature sanctuary for the Yangtze freshwater dolphin.
Sculpture of Li Pa by Ch’ien Shao-wu
After watching the river traffic in the Yangtze for a while, we walked back via the hill that rose behind the cliff. Along the trail, we passed a huge stainless steel statue of Li Pai by the sculptor Ch’ien Shao-wu. It was a wonderful interpretation. Li Pai looked like a bird about to take off. In fact, an inscription by the sculptor noted that his interpretation was inspired by Li Pai’s vision of himself as the mythic bird that began the Taoist work known as the Chuang-tzu: “In the North Sea there is a fish called K’un thousands of miles long. It rises out of the sea and turns into a bird called P’eng thousands of miles wide. Its wings are like clouds, and it soars 3,000 miles high before heading south toward the Lake of Heaven.” The metaphor was apt. It was clearly on Li Pai’s mind when he was dying. Just past the statue, we also stopped to visit another Li Pai grave. This one contained the poet’s robe and hat. We bowed, just in case it contained more than that.
On our way back to the road, we also stopped to look inside the Li Pai Memorial Hall. The place was packed. A girl at the door said it was opening day of the First International Li Pai Conference. We looked around. Something was wrong. Everyone was sober. In Li Pai’s honor, we bought a beer at a store outside the memorial hall and toasted him one more time, then caught the next bus heading north to Ma-anshan. Except for its steel mill, there wasn’t much to see in Ma-anshan. Besides, it was already five o’clock. We stayed just long enough to eat a bowl of beef noodles at a restaurant near the train station, then we boarded the next train to Nanking. Nanking was as far north as we planned to go. After Nanking, it was all going to be downhill.
13. Nanking
As our train pulled into Nanking, the sun was going down. It seemed like it was always going down when we arrived somewhere. Our days were so full. Since the next day was going to be full too, we decided to treat ourselves to something beyond our normal range of accommodations and checked into the Nanking Hotel, where a triple cost 250RMB. At least we saved on dinner. We had noodles in Ma-anshan before we boarded the train. At the convenience store next to the hotel, we grabbed a few beers and a couple bags of peanuts and took them up to our room where we engaged in our favorite end-of-the-day pastimes: taking baths, washing our clothes, writing in our journals, and sleeping late the next morning. It was nine o’clock before we ventured forth to see the sights.
Spirit way to Ming emperor’s tomb
Nanking was the provincial capital of Kiangsu. But it wasn’t like the other provincial capitals we had visited. Over the previous two thousand years, it had been the capital of a number of dynasties whose primary area of control was the southern half of China. In fact, the Chinese name for the city means Southern Capital. So there was a lot to see, and we only had a day. Our plan was to begin in the south and work our way north, back to our hotel before the sun went down again.
We began with a taxi ride all the way to Chuhuatai, or Chrysanthemum Terrace. It was a large park at the southernmost edge of the city, but we weren’t there for the park. We told the driver to drop us off at the southeast corner. From the roadside, we followed a path into the park then turned off on a side trail where a sign pointed us toward our destination. Given the weeds along the trail, our destination didn’t see many visitors. It felt strange. It was like discovering something the citizens of Nanking had forgotten. The trail soon led past a series of life-sized stone statues of animals and officials that constituted what the Chinese call a “spirit way.” They, too, were knee-deep in weeds. We followed them until they ended at a small tomb. We walked over to make sure we had the right one (not that there were any other tombs that we could see). Sure enough, the tomb belonged to the King of Borneo.
When I first read about this tomb, I found it hard to believe that it was real. Yet there it was. The title and name of the country, however, were a bit misleading, if not mistaken. Nowadays we would call the man buried here the
Sultan of Brunei. But King of Borneo was close enough, and it sounded much more exotic, which was, of course, why we made the effort to visit his tomb.
As for how the King got here, he arrived aboard Admiral Cheng Ho’s fleet. The Chinese emperor sent Cheng on what remains the greatest diplomatic expedition in the history of the world—ancient or modern. Cheng sailed from Nanking all the way to Africa and back several times with a fleet of over 300 ships and a complement of 30,000 sailors and soldiers. One of the dignitaries he brought back was the King of Borneo, who died in Nanking before he had a chance to return home. That was why he was here. And that was why we were here. But once we found his tomb, we didn’t linger. Our curiosity was easily satisfied.
We retraced our steps back to the road and flagged down another taxi and headed for another park. This one was called Yuhuatai, or Rain Flower Terrace. It was just south of the city’s South Gate, better known as Chunghuamen. The terrace was actually a small hill in the middle of the park. This time we weren’t looking for a tomb but for pebbles. The terrace was famous for the pebbles that lined a stream that flowed from a spring. The pebbles, so the story went, were once flowers that rained down on the hill when a monk preached here 1,500 years ago. They were, in fact, agates, and they came in all colors and sizes. On our way in, we passed several shops outside the park selling these crystallized flowers. They also sold them in bulk. A friend of mine in Hong Kong once bought one hundred kilos. When he got them home, he spread them underneath a coffee table in his living room and rubbed his feet in them for a daily foot massage.
We weren’t looking to buy any, just look at them in their natural setting along the stream. Once again, our ignorance of the recent history of China surprised us. Before we reached the stream, we came to a memorial hall to the city’s martyrs. We poked our heads inside. We thought we would just have a look then continue on to the pebbles. But once we started viewing the photographs and began reading about the two decades during which the Nationalists used Nanking as their capital, we lost interest in rain-flowers. The Nationalists executed more than 100,000 Communist sympathizers, right here at the base of Rain Flower Terrace. The enormity of such savagery was hard to comprehend. Why, we had to ask ourselves, do human beings do such things to each other? The answer, of course, is our infatuation with exercising power over each other, our insecurity and our mistrust—in a word, delusion. As we walked out of the memorial hall, we wondered if someone in the future might explain the pebbles of Rain Flower Terrace as the tears of Heaven. It would make more sense.
We walked back out of the park and continued north across the city’s old moat, which was formed by a branch of the Chinhuai River, then past the imposing edifice of Chunghuamen Gate. This section of the river was said to be where the city began. And the gate was said to be the biggest city gate in all of China. But we kept going. We had something else in mind. A few blocks to the north, we turned off on a side street. A block later, we entered the Museum of the Taiping Rebellion.
The man who started the rebellion was Hung Hsiu-ch’uan. After reading several books about Christianity, Hung experienced a series of visions in which he was told that he was the brother of Jesus Christ. This was around 1830. On the basis of these visions, Hung founded a new religious sect and said that he had been ordained by Heaven to rid China of its Manchu overlords and to bring peace to all mankind: hence, the name of his movement: Taiping Tienkuo, the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace. The movement was welcomed by many Chinese who were tired of serving the Manchus, and within two decades the Taipings controlled large parts of South and Southwest China. In 1852, they established their capital in Nanking, and Hung became emperor of a new Taiping dynasty.
It was one of China’s most interesting rebellions, coming as it did on the heels of the Opium War. And it probably would have succeeded, if it hadn’t threatened the opium trade of the British. With the help of British and other foreign mercenaries, the Manchus were finally able to defeat the Taipings in 1864, and their Kingdom of Heaven came to an end.
The museum was located in the former residence of Yang Hsiu-ch’ing, the commander-in-chief of Taiping forces. It also included his gardens and even a teahouse. If we had more than a day to spend in Nanking, we would have stayed longer. But we didn’t have more than a day, and there was more to see. On our way out, I bought a souvenir. It was an imprint of the seal affixed to all the Taiping decrees issued by the King of Heaven, as Hung styled himself. I thought maybe I would give it to one of my Christian friends and tell them it was from Jesus Christ’s brother, and watch their reaction.
By the time we left, the day was half over, and we were just getting started. Since we were pressed for time, we took another taxi. Our next destination was a kilometer or two to the west. It was the Memorial Hall of the Nanking Massacre. We had already visited the memorial hall at Yuhuatai that commemorated the execution of 100,000 citizens of Nanking by the Nationalists. This one recounted in unforgettable detail an even greater atrocity. When the Japanese captured Nanking in 1937, they massacred over 300,000 people, including women and children. One of the exhibits included a series of articles printed in Japanese newspapers about a contest between two Japanese lieutenants to see who could kill one hundred Chinese fastest, using only their swords.
Reading about these acts and seeing the actual photographs taken by Japanese soldiers left us feeling numb. It’s always hard to understand why human beings are capable of such indifference to the suffering of their own kind. The Nanking Massacre, though, was not simply indifference. It was the glorification of murder. When we thought about all the people massacred in Nanking in the 1930s and 1940s by the Japanese and also by their fellow Chinese, we had to wonder why anyone wanted to live here. I suppose because that was where the jobs were. It was the capital.
Nowadays, Nanking is the capital of Kiangsu province. But in the past, it was the capital of a number of dynasties based south of the Yangtze. One such dynasty was the Ming (1368–1644), and its founder also chose Nanking as his capital. It was Nanking’s most glorious era. Although there wasn’t much left of the Ming in the city, the tomb of its founder, Emperor Hung-wu, was nearby and was our next destination.
Once again, we flagged down a taxi. We didn’t have time for buses. We crossed the city from west to east and came out at the base of Tzuchinshan. Tzu-chin was a Buddhist term meaning “purple gold,” and referred to a type of gold that had a purplish hue. Of the four types Indian Buddhists distinguished, purple gold was considered the best because it most closely resembled the hue of Shakyamuni Buddha’s skin.
Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum
From the base of the mountain, we followed a road halfway up to a large parking lot. We told our driver to wait for us, then we paid the admission fee and walked down a long cement path toward Emperor Hung-wu’s grave. The path was another spirit way. But it was far more imperial than the one leading to the tomb of the King of Borneo. The statues were huge, averaging about ten feet high. Once again, they included elephants and camels and mythical beasts as well as officials and generals. When we finally reached the tomb, there was a herd of deer grazing on the grass. They didn’t seem to mind us and kept on grazing as we walked around the mound.
Although the first Ming emperor was buried here in Nanking, the second Ming emperor moved the capital to Beijing, and all subsequent emperors were buried near the Great Wall. This was Tzuchinshan’s sole imperial tomb. But it wasn’t its only tomb. We returned to our taxi and headed farther up the mountain to the tomb of Sun Yat-sen.
Sun was born in South China near Kuangchou and was given the name Chung-shan, or Middle Mountain. Sun, though, preferred his sobriquet, which was pronounced Yi-hsien in Mandarin and Yat-sen in his native Cantonese dialect. Either way, it meant Reclusive Immortal. I don’t know about the “reclusive” part, but in death, he certainly had joined their ranks in the minds of his fellow Chinese.
Although Sun died in Beijing in 1925, before he died he asked to be buried in Nanking, and his body was brou
ght here for entombment two years later. Tombs, of course, are for the living and not for the dead, and his countrymen honored his memory with something even grander than the tomb they built for Emperor Hung-wu. After all, Sun also founded a dynasty of sorts, namely the Republican dynasty. Once again, we asked our driver to wait while we paid the admission fee and walked through the gate.
It was suitably massive and at the same time austere. All the building materials were either white or blue, the colors of the Nationalist Party, of which Sun Yat-sen was the founder and leader. It looked like a combination of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial and consisted of a long series of wide steps divided by a series of archways that ended at a huge mausoleum. The whole place was surrounded by dense groves of dark green pine trees. It was very imposing, and was the one place everyone who came to Nanking tried to visit. Even though it was a weekday, there was a long line of people filing through the mausoleum to view Sun’s casket. We joined them and filed past Sun’s seated statue, which was carved by the French sculptor Paul Landowski. Then we entered the inner chamber behind the statue and filed past Sun’s casket. Unlike Mao’s body in Beijing, which floated in a formaldehyde solution inside a crystal casket, Sun’s remains were not on display. On top of his casket, though, was a reclining marble likeness.
When I was living in Taiwan, I heard the reason the body wasn’t on display was because it was taken to Taiwan by Chiang Kai-shek when he fled there in 1949. But I also heard that the body was returned after his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, became president. Naturally, this wasn’t something people liked to talk about. Another indication that the body had, in fact, been returned was that a few months before we visited, a friend of mine accompanied Sun Yat-sen’s grandaughter here. Her name was Nora Sun, and until recently she represented the commercial interests of the U.S. government in China. Strangely (or perhaps not so strangely), it was her first visit to her grandfather’s tomb. To avoid making a scene, she decided not to notify the authorities she was coming and filed past her grandfather’s casket along with everyone else, just as we did. The line moved fairly quickly. Fifteen minutes after we entered the mausoleum, we were back outside.
