Once on a Moonless Night

by Dai Sijie

  “Early in April 1925, thirteen years after the fall of the empire, Puyi was released from his gilded prison, the Forbidden City, guarded by the newly formed Republican Army, following a sort of epileptic fit which plunged him into a profound state of lethargy and left him more dead than alive. He was moved to the Japanese concession of Tianjin, south of Peking, where he stayed in bed for weeks on end, and only smiled again when a procession of porters some two kilometres long arrived, their shoulders chafing under great swaying trunks. There were three thousand of them, all filled with precious objects collected by his ancestors, but in his eyes the most beautiful of these trunks full of national treasures, of streaming pearls, rivers of diamonds, cascades of jade, gold, porcelain, copper, sculptures, paintings, calligraphy, etc., was the one set aside for the works of Emperor Huizong. As soon as his convalescence was under way, he threw himself back into his masters works in order, this time, to copy the paintings, a field in which Huizong excelled perhaps even more than in calligraphy, occupying a position comparable to that of Modigliani or Degas in Western painting.

  “No one could be absolutely sure what his recovery could be attributed to: Was it Huizong’s painting or the Japanese sumo wrestler by the name of Yamata whose body was so huge his tiny head seemed to be tucked inside his sloping shoulders, and who played an indispensable part in the emperors day-to-day life? Towards noon Puyi would indicate he was awake by ringing a bell and the sumo wrestler, naked as the day he was born, would approach him, moving like a silent mountain, and carry him to the bathroom in his warm arms that were as soft as any woman’s. He would lay him in a marble bath where the temperature of the water had been regulated and was scrupulously monitored—using a German thermometer—by the sumo himself, who knew that the least discrepancy in heat would provoke a fresh outburst from his obsessive master. And so, still half asleep, as Puyi once described to his cousin with whom, as with everyone, he referred to himself as the emperor and in the third person,” the professor explained, “the emperor listened to the creaking and groaning of his frame as it swelled in the warm water, lulled by the voice of a young virgin who sat beside the bath reading a novel he had chosen the day before. It was usually an extract from Jin Ping Mei, read by a succession of Chinese girls each more beautiful than the last. Sometimes, on the advice of his sumo, the emperor might also ask for erotic Japanese works; then the reading would be done by a Japanese girl and, although the emperor didn’t understand a single word of the language, the girl’s voice mingling with the misty steam bewitched him so that, when he found the strength to open his eyes for a fraction of a second, he thought he saw a mermaid, for the young girl’s pearly grey skirt shimmered in the steam room like a fish tail, whose scales (according to legend) would come away in handfuls if a man so much as looked at them, scales that the emperor thought he could see floating on the surface of the water like slivers of silver all around his body beached in the bath. He rang again to signal the conclusion of his bath, the sumo came in, lifted him from the tub, carried him at arm’s length into his bedroom, laid him on his bed and wrapped him in large, soft, thick towels impregnated with a heady perfume. The emperor lay in complete darkness for a long time, hearing and seeing nothing, inhaling the exquisite scent of flowers, plants and musk, until he dissolved into it. Time, which flashes past elsewhere, drew itself out so slowly for him that every minute seemed an eternity.

  “Late in the afternoon, if we are to believe what his cousin remembers,” the professor went on, “the emperor would shut himself in his study where the windows were permanently covered with wine-coloured blinds that let in no sunlight, and sit at a desk lit by a lamp with a green shade. There, like a studious pupil, he copied a bird perched on a bare branch painted on silk by Huizong, who initiated this sort of Court painting, the height of Chinese refinement and studied elegance, dominated by a singular kind of purity, unadorned, ghostly, always light but laden with meaning. No one could say whether the bird was in a heavenly sky, an underwater world or a dark aquarium, so utterly devoid was the work of coarse earthly realities. Needless to say, the emperor displayed a particular predilection for this kind of painting. The sumo prepared his ink, spread out a length of silk specially manufactured for him by a workshop in Suzhou to replicate exactly the silk used by Huizong eight hundred years earlier: with thick, closely woven threads on a double weft, not like these modern silks, vulgar satins with fine threads doubled up in the warp. His craftsmen used a technique dating back to the era of the Song dynasty, steeping the raw silk in a mixture of glue and alum, firstly with a brush, then by pressing, beating and rubbing it to ensure it was better adapted to take the successive applications of colour washes, a technique invented by Huizong and of which he was master. The emperor sat motionless for hours on end, contemplating the bird he intended to copy, trying to penetrate the secret of its ashen plumage made up of juxtaposed lines that, on closer inspection, disguised infinite precision beneath a continuous quivering; the secret of those clouds of red, sort of shapeless unidentifiable leaves that metamorphosed into petals, stamens, pistils … around the bird’s crimson tail; and that black beak with a single very fine line describing its contour, crystallising it in a fluid shape shot through with invisible vibration; and above all the miracle of its eye, which, even more disturbingly, constituted an enigma that neither the emperor nor anyone else would ever be able to resolve: how had the painter succeeded in giving it such brilliance and power that you felt—although this was manifestly impossible—that the creature was watching you, crossing over an invisible boundary? The emperor sometimes imagined Huizong had not used a brush, but just his fingernail, applying a drop of ink to it and projecting the droplet a metre’s distance so that—either by chance or thanks to a minutely planned gesture—it landed on the painting just where it needed to. The bird’s head was painted in transparent colours with delicately deepening shadows, a detailed and natural anatomical depiction, a fragile, vibrant head infused with profound solitude, portraying for the emperor the image of himself as a small boy of three, perched on a throne of filigreed gold, borne by four intertwined dragons, raised to a height that a child’s eye could barely reach, the throne on which he had felt his weightless body transformed into that of a little bird huddled in its nest way up high in the audience hall, which was filled with both an icy cold and, paradoxical though this may seem, deathly silence, where the deafening cries of the tens of thousands of courtiers prostrating themselves before him rang round as they would in a vast abyss, merging into a series of long, dark and terrifying echoes.

  “What Puyi did not reveal to his cousin,” the professor pointed out, “was that, despite the endless time he spent in contemplation, he never succeeded in putting down a single brushstroke, the least spot of ink, the tiniest scribble on the silk. In the end all that Huizong’s works inspired in him was profound self-loathing. At the end of each session, the sumo put away the paintbrushes—brushes that had never been dipped into the ink, which slowly thickened, gradually coagulating and clouding irremediably—then he would gather the scraps of virgin silk torn up and thrown away by Puyi, and bury them in the courtyard beneath a layer of earth and rotting leaves. This period of ‘meditation on painting,’ as Puyi called it, ended in a spectacular episode, not devoid of an element of comedy: late in November 1926, towards the end of a snowy night, some courtiers were horrified to spot Puyi, who was twenty at the time, in the feeble morning light, his frail naked body wrapped in a long boa of black and white feathers as he perched, shivering, on the branch of an elm tree just like the bird painted by Huizong eight hundred years earlier. Not one of his servants dared approach him, except for the sumo, the only person allowed to enter his study (strictly out of bounds to anyone else) so that he could put more wood on the fire in winter and stand behind him mutely waving a fan in summer. No one will ever know what degree of intimacy there was between the young fallen emperor and his Japanese sumo but, if the recollections of one of the last eunuchs in Tianjin are to be b
elieved, every time Puyi descended into unshakeable lethargy after a hysterical outburst, the sumo would lie down beside him in his bed and hold him in his arms, day and night. But on the morning in question when the sumo reached out to his master to take him in his arms, the elm branch—which had already bowed considerably under Puyi’s weight—snapped with a deafening crack and both men fell, in each others arms, though neither was injured thanks to the snow on the ground in the courtyard.

  “Another singular detail is that Huizong, himself a painter and calligrapher, was also a great collector or even the greatest ever, an area that no doubt requires vast wealth but also a knowledge of art, in a word: taste. Even I, who am no artist,” the professor confided, “have read and reread once a year the catalogues of Huizong’s collection, which list six thousand and three hundred works with their titles, descriptions, painters’ biographies and, most importantly, the emperors own comments, piecing together the genesis of each creation. Almost all of these works have now disappeared, but reading the catalogues affords the same pleasure as looking at an old map of a town or neighbourhood, where the observer can wander through imaginary remains, recognising crossroads, losing his way in a market, following the course of a moat, looking out for its ripples along the sinuous outline of city walls, although it will vanish the moment he feels he has grasped it. Can you understand why a great wave of happiness washed over me when, looking at an enlarged photograph, I spotted the titles of two works from this mythical catalogue on the label of a chest that was handed down to Huizong and later belonged to our last emperor?

  “The first was a piece of calligraphy by Li Bo, the great poet of the Tang dynasty, an autograph transcription of his poem ‘The Terrace of the Sun’ on hemp paper. Three centuries lie between Li Bo and Huizong, but in his day, as in ours, men of letters were divided into two camps, those who loved Li Bo and those who admired Du Fu, another great poet of the Tang dynasty and an intimate friend of Li Bo. Huizong clearly belonged to the first camp, since, according to the catalogue of his collection, he owned six autograph works of calligraphy by Li Bo (six poems he had written), two in semi-cursive script and executed at the palace before his emperor, who had commissioned them, the other four in full-blown cursive script, and all of them, judging by their titles, eulogies to alcohol improvised in a drunken state and which Huizong—with a flourish that went beyond his role as an expert—annotated with these words: ‘Li Bo and alcohol, ever running to meet each other, became so interchangeable that eventually, like a vanishing apparition, they formed just one creature, compact yet ill-defined, and quite unique.’

  “I couldn’t help doing some research on the poem called ‘The Terrace of the Sun,’” said the professor. “What a journey it must have had, through all the political upheavals, the founding and floundering of dynasties! After Huizong was exiled, the work disappeared, then re-emerged in the Yuan dynasty, at first in the hands of Yan Qin, then Ou Yangxuan (1274-1358), the famous master of the Imperial Archives, then it disappeared again, only to reappear three centuries later in the Ming dynasty in the catalogue of Xiang Zijing, the famous collector, before becoming the property, some time in the late sixteenth century, of the Qing emperors, Puyi’s ancestors. Calligraphy may well be simply an artistic version of another form, that is the ideograms which make up the poem, but then not only does it reflect the character and temperament of the artist but (you can believe me on this) it also betrays his heart rate, his breathing and the alcohol on his breath, and all this affords the enthusiast a feeling of euphoria comparable to that of a music lover discovering or, better still, acquiring a two-hundred-year-old recording of a Beethoven piano concerto played by Beethoven himself.

  “The hypnotic psychological effect of a piece of calligraphy or a painting (which, according to doctors, was in itself nothing short of miraculous in Puyi’s case) is, like all other artistic responses, only ever short-lived and was not enough to affect his pathological condition or to maintain a mental equilibrium, however fragile. And yet, unless I am mistaken, that is exactly what he did experience with the second treasure from Huizong’s collection—a manuscript on a roll of silk in a language that was not known at the time—an object that meant more to him than anything else in the world. The hypnotic power it exerted over him was such that, while Puyi had had the calligraphy by Li Bo hung beside his bed, he hardly ever looked at it, for he was quite incapable of tearing his eyes away from this scroll of manuscript.

  “I can see from your expression,” the professor remarked, “how interested you are in this roll and I feel I must put you on your guard before this interest becomes more passionate, as it has for anyone who has come close to the manuscript. I myself, I have to admit, developed a keen enthusiasm for it when I looked into its history, exhausting all available sources, some of which must be viewed with caution, for they are too closely tied up with legend; but I felt that by reconstituting its peregrinations, however tortuous a course they may have taken, I would be better equipped to talk about the late emperors on whom it had left its mark and to put together lost fragments from the lives of fallen nobility, such as Seventy-one, whom I mention in the book you have read. Time and again I regret the fact that, when it was published, your compatriot Paul d’Ampère had not yet come to China, that the paths of that noble madman and this manuscript had not yet crossed, depriving my book of a chapter that would have been more disturbing than all the others.

  “This precious roll is made up of two strips of silk sewn together with tiny stitching; the first of them contains the text in an unknown language and the silk is stained an orangey yellow. There is no indication of a date, but, from a scientific study of the weaving, it has been established that the stain was made using a concoction extracted from the bark of the Huangbo tree, characteristic of the Han dynasty, and analysis of the ink, which is of exceptional quality and has retained all the intensity of its strong dark black, seems to prove that this mysterious work probably dates from the second or third century of our era, which makes it the oldest roll preserved to date.

  “On the second strip, which is in more luxurious silk stained light blue, there is a long colophon of thirty columns of ivory-coloured Chinese ideograms, with calligraphy details by Huizong in gold dust—which still gleams in places—mixed with glue, a technique used in Buddhist temples for copying sacred texts. (Did Huizong have some premonition about the nature of this text written in an unknown language?)

  “The colophon begins with a short biography of An Shih-Kao, the first Chinese translator of Buddhist sutras, a hereditary prince of Parthia in the Middle East, who converted to Buddhism, became a monk and, when his father died, gave up his inheritance in favour of his uncle. Leaving the confines of Indo-Iran, he followed a route through the oases of Central Asia, Khotan, Kucha, Turfan … all the way to Gansu, having travelled through the cosmopolitan cities of Dunhuang, Zangye and Wuwei. He reached the valley of the Yellow River in northern China and his presence there is recorded in the middle of the second century, in the year 148 to be precise, in the capital, Luoyang. Alongside his reputation as a linguistic genius—he spoke some twenty languages—was his vast historic erudition, and not a day passed when he did not devote several hours to his works of translation. He spent ten years in his room translating into Chinese the many sutras brought home from his travels. His translations were usually in verse, honed and restrained, betraying no trace of his previous existence as a Parthian prince or indeed of any personal pretension; they stir the readers very soul, whereas his spoken Chinese was hesitant and tainted by a strong accent and grammatical errors. Once in the middle of the night—as he later told his emperor—during a visit to Xi’an, the former capital of China, where he had come to preach in the outskirts around Fufeng, he saw beams of light springing up from the ground on a stretch of wasteland, lighting up certain areas as in mystic visions depicted in religious paintings. According to the report he made to the Court in the year 480 before our era, once the Buddha Shakyamuni achieved the unfa
thomable peace of Parinirvana, his disciples shared his relics among themselves and set off in several groups, heading in different directions to spread his word all over the world. Those who reached China met with insurmountable problems, for the country was ravaged by war, and they died one after the other. The last of them, a very elderly man, died when he reached the Wei valley along the course of the Yellow River, where he had had to bury the Buddha’s relics, which then revealed themselves to An Shih-Kao with those beams of divine light piercing through the earth. It was the first time the Court had heard the name Buddha, which amused everyone; even so, on the emperors orders, the army carried out excavations and found crystal structures in the shape of teeth and finger bones, but larger than normal size, golden in colour and translucent, gleaming in the bottom of a ditch. That was how An Shih-Kao succeeded in converting the emperor of China, who, in memory of this miracle symbolising the triumph of Buddhism, erected a ravishing stupa on the site (a stupa being a tall edifice made of wood and brick and painted white), in whose crypt the Buddha’s relics were kept. He had a house built beside it for An Shih-Kao to spend the rest of his days praying, meditating, translating and teaching. After An Shih-Kao’s terrible death (he was assassinated during one of his frequent religious pilgrimages), his house became the first Chinese Buddhist temple, the Temple of the Gates of the Law.