A Writer's World

by Jan Morris

  Beneath that great green sky, treading those interminable concrete pavements, I felt awfully far from home: and when I followed the immemorial tourist route, and took a car to the Great Wall at Badaling, there on the sun-blazed masonry, looking out across those vast northern plains and purpled mountains, I felt I was breaking some strange and lifelong dream. The Wall has been reconstructed around Badaling Gate, and is over-run there by tourists of all nationalities, milling among the cars and buses below, having their pictures taken, riding the resident camel, eating little peaches and drinking Kekou Kele, ‘Tasty and Happy’ – Coke, that is. It is easy to escape them, though. You make the fearfully steep ascent away from the gate towards the watchtower to the west (‘We certainly are thankful to you, Mr Kung,’ I heard a sweating American businessman unconvincingly gasp, as he dragged himself, temples pulsing, up these formidable steps, ‘for making this trip possible – isn’t this a great trip, you guys?’).

  Once at the tower, you find that beyond it the wall is reconstructed no further, but degenerates instantly into crumbled stone and brickwork, rambling away over the undulating ridges with nobody there at all. I walked a long way along it, out into the empty countryside, all silent but for the wind, all lifeless but for the hairy caterpillars which crossed and re-crossed the uneven stonework beneath my feet. But lo, when in the middle of nowhere I sat down upon the parapet to think about my rather lonely situation, out of that wilderness four or five wispy figures emerged, and opening paper bags and wrappings of sackcloth, asked if I wished to buy some antique bells or back-scratchers. Yet again, China had topsyturvied me. I had fallen among old acquaintances, and when one by one they took turns to look through my binoculars, well, said I to myself, what’s so strange about the Great Wall of China, anyway?

  Looked at from the east, Beijing is not remote at all – only 100 miles from the sea, only three hours or so by air from Tokyo. It is when you come to it out of the west, or more pertinently out of the Western sensibility, that it remains so romantically distant. On a Monday afternoon I went down to the gigantic railway station, twin-towered and green-roofed (escalator out of order) to see the arrival of the Trans-Siberian Express from Moscow. This was a dramatic occasion. Hundreds of us had come to meet the train. For hours beforehand we waited in the cavernous International Travellers’ Waiting Room, and when the bell rang, the great doors were opened and we burst on to the platform, an air of headiest expectancy prevailed. We stood on one leg, so to speak, we stood on the other – we looked at our watches again, we sat down, we got up – we gave the children another bottle of Kekou Kele to keep them quiet – and there, slowly round the curve into the station, very, very grandly appeared the Trans-Siberian.

  With a triumphant blast of its whistle it came majestically to Beijing, the three engineers in their cab sitting there like a trio of admirals on a flagship bridge, and the waiting people clapped, and cheered, and waved newspapers, as the doors opened and from Mongolia or Siberia, Omsk or Moscow itself, their travel-worn loved ones fell home into China. One coach was full of a Western travel group; and these voyagers, as they emerged glazed and haggard on the platform, looking wonderingly around them, suggested to me astronauts returning to earth out of a long-lost space-ship.

  * * *

  There is not much left of Old Peking, except for Protected Treasures. The city walls have been torn down, most of the fortress gates have vanished, the clutter of medievalism which so entranced the old travellers has been swept away as though it never were. Across the face of the central city has been laid the cruel thoroughfare called Changan, down which the trolleybuses trundle and the bikes chaotically swarm. Here and there, though, all the same, I felt a powerful tug of organic continuity, in this city of 2,000 years.

  I felt it for instance at the Summer Palace of the last of the Manchu empresses, which is now a public park, but is still everyone’s idea of a Chinese imperial retreat, with its pagodas and its towering temples, its ornamental bridges among the water-lilies, its myriad boats upon the limpid lake, its covered way, decorated with a thousand scenes of Chinese legend, from which it is said no pair of lovers can emerge unbetrothed, and its ridiculous Marble Paddle-Steamer for ever moored beside the quay (the Empress built the place with money intended for the reconstruction of the Chinese navy, and commissioned this nautical folly, they say, as a slap in the face of the outraged Fleet).

  I sensed the constancy of things ominously when, lifting my head unawares as I walked up Qianmen Street, I saw the vast glowering shape of the Qianmen Gate blocking the thoroughfare in front, for all the world as though it were still the portentous gateway, as it used to be, into the Inner City beyond. I sensed it delectably beside the lonely neglected pagoda of Balizhuang, twittered about by martins out on the western outskirts, at whose feet the women of the local commune worked crouching in their straw hats among the beanpoles, chitter-chattering half-hidden like so many swallows themselves. I felt it pungently in the traditional pharmacy called The Shared Benevolence Hall, founded in 1669, which is a treasure-house of arcane specifics, stack upon stack of mysterious powders, brown bottles of roots and seeds, phials of restorative nuts, sea-horses, antlers, extract of deer-tail, heart of monkey …

  In the early mornings I used to go wandering through the hutongs, the crooked quarters of small courtyard houses which survive here and there off the huge new highways. A curious hush pervades these parts. No motor-traffic goes along the alleyways, high walls conceal the jumbled yards. Only by peering through half-open gates can you glimpse the tangled, crowded life within, meshed in laundry and potted plants, here a man in no shirt eating porridge from a tin bowl, there an old woman smoking her first cigarette of the day, or a girl in a spotless white blouse extracting her bicycle from the rubble. A faint haze of smoke hangs in the air, and from the public lavatory, smelling violently of mingled excrement and disinfectant, heavy breathing and a vigorous swishing of brooms show that some unprivileged comrade is fulfilling early-morning labour norms. Nobody ever took much notice of me, wandering these quiet lanes as the sun came up: only a fairly hooded eye focused on me now and then, when a woman emerged to empty her slops down a drain, or a bicycle bell chivvied me out of the way.

  And once very early I strayed over a ridge to a leafy path beside a moat. I was led there by a curious cacophony of shouts, singing and twanged instruments, and it turned out to be the most hauntingly timeless place of all. It was a place of self-fulfilment. Resolutely facing a high stone rampart above the moat, like Jews at the Wailing Wall, all along the path men and women were rehearsing their own particular accomplishments privately in the dawn. As we sing in the evening tub, so the people of Beijing go to that wall. Here was a man, his face a few inches from the masonry, declaiming some heroic soliloquy. Here a woman was practising an astonishing range of arpeggios, soprano to resonant baritone. A splendid bass was singing a romantic ballad, a poet seemed to be trying out a lyric, an old man with a bicycle was plucking the strings of an antique lute. I thought of joining in, so universal did these impulses seem, sending To Be or Not To Be reverberating down that wall, or perhaps reciting some of my own purpler passages: but I restrained myself, as a Foreign Guest, and just whistled my way home to breakfast.

  *

  I must have walked a hundred miles! And gropingly I circled towards the centre of things – to what the old Chinese would have called the centre of all things. The measured and muffled restraint of this city was like a fog in the sunshine. Gentle, un-pushing, polite, its people kept me always wondering, and I missed the flash of underlife that gives most great cities their clarity. I missed scamps, drunks, whores, hagglers, ticket touts offering me seats (which Heaven forfend) for the Chinese opera. I saw no Dostoievsky brooding over his minced shrimps, no tragic rebel sticking up wall posters. All seemed in bland order. I had been told to look out, in the dizzily Westernized new Jianguo Hotel, for Party officials in expensive suits taking luncheon with their mistresses: but all I saw were security guards from the
American embassy, eating Weight-Watchers’ Salad.

  How bored this quarter of the earth must be! Even the procreation of the urban Chinese is limited, if not by law, at least by powerful persuasion. They must not gamble, there is nowhere to dance, it is miles on a bike to a cinema, and if they turn the TV on, what do they get but improving documentaries, English lessons, historical dramas of suitable import or Chinese opera? Their one emotional release seems to be eating, which they do with a gusto in which all their passions are surely sublimated. The grander restaurants of Beijing generally have two sections, one for bigwigs and foreigners, the other for the masses: but though the downstairs rooms are usually rough and ready, with linoleum tablecloths and creaky old electric fans, an equal riotous festivity attends them all.

  No wonder the Chinese are such hypochondriacs. They live so strangely, I was coming to feel, in a condition of such crossed uncertainty and brainwash, that psychotic illness must be rampant. I went to one restaurant devoted to the cult of Dinetotherapy, sponsored by another 300-year-old herb store, and was not surprised to find it prospering mightily. When I told the waiter I was suffering from headaches and general debility, he prescribed Sautéed Chicken with Fruit of Chinese Wolfberry, followed by Giant Prawns Steamed in Ginger. They worked a treat: I walked out feeling terrific.

  But not all the prawns in China can cure the stresses of history, and the real malaise of Beijing, I came to think, was its domination by an ideology so all-pervading, so arbitrary, in many ways so honourable, but apparently so inconstant, which can change the very way the nation thinks from one year to another. Today it is liberal and welcoming, Chinese tradition is honoured, people are free to wear what they like, consort with foreigners if they will, sell their ducks in a free market and even build themselves houses with the profits. Yesterday it was puritanically narrow, the revolutionary condition was permanent, aliens were devils, Mao caps and floppy trousers were de rigueur, angry activists with stepladders and paint-brushes went all down that covered way at the Summer Palace, expunging pictures of un-progressive myth. And tomorrow, when another generation succeeds to domination, everything may be different again, and all the values so painstakingly absorbed into the public consciousness may have to be ripped out of mind once more.

  There is a blankness to this despotism. What is it? Who is it? Is it the people we see on the TV news, smiling benevolently at visiting delegates, or is it scoundrels out of sight? Is it noble at heart, or rotten? Is it genial Deng Xiaoping, or some up-and-coming tyrant we have never heard of? If you climb to the top of Jingshan, Coal Hill, the ornamental mount on which the last of the Ming emperors hanged himself from a locust tree, you may look down upon a string of pleasure-lakes. Their northern waters, within the Behai Park, are alive with pleasure-craft, and their lakeside walks are always crowded. The southern lakes look dead and sterile. No rowing-boats skim their surfaces. No lovers take each other’s photographs. The buildings on their banks, contained within high walls, look rich but tightly shuttered, and only occasionally do you glimpse a big black car snaking its way down to Changan.

  This is where that despotism resides. Behind those walls, beside those silent lakes, the condition of the Chinese is decided, whether by cynical opportunists shacked up with girls and Japanese electronics, or by sombre philosophers bent over their calligraphy. The compound is called Zhongnanhai, and if it all looks numb from Jingshan, it must really be full of gigantic thrust and calculation. Its main entrance is to the south, with tilted eaves and two great guardian lions. The red flag flies bravely on a mast outside, and within the gate an inner wall – the ‘spirit wall’ of old China – is inscribed with the cabalistic text ‘Serve The People’. You cannot see past it, though. Two armed sentries stand there, with two more watchful over their shoulders. They look distinctly unwelcoming, even to Foreign Guests, as they stare motionless and expressionless into the street: and sure enough, when I asked them if I could take a stroll inside Zhongnanhai, they seemed to think not.

  *

  Dazzled, bewildered, profoundly affected, all at once, I retreated from the Chinese presence. Some of those caterpillars on the Great Wall, I had noticed, never make it to the other side, but settle in crannies among the paving: and from there if all goes well, I suppose, they turn themselves into butterflies, and flutter away into the empyrean from the very substance of China. I felt rather like them when the time came for me to leave, for I took the advice the Bureaucrat had given me, and floated my way out through those humped green mountains of Guangxi, away in the humid south.

  My cities of China had left me hazed with conflicting emotions and contradictory conclusions, and like a sleep-walker I wandered back towards the coast. I bicycled down dusty lanes through fecund communes, where labouring girls waved and laughed beneath their comical hats, as in propaganda posters. I clambered precipitous hillocks to take jasmine tea in faery huts. I joined the great daily migration of the tourists down the Li River, stretched out flat in the front of the boat, eating lychees all the way, drifting through a fantasy of bulbous mountains, and green, green paddy-fields, and dragon-flies, and ferry-men, and riverside villages clouded in the song of crickets, and cormorant fishermen squatting on bamboo rafts, and junks punted upstream by women bent agonizingly double at their poles, and geese in the shallows, and peasants high on rock tracks, and water-buffaloes snuffling, and old river steamers panting and thumping, while the lychees got steadily squashier in the sun, and the sad man beside me, erect in the prow, bared his chest in the breeze and sailed through those legendary landscapes singing the proud songs of his revolutionary youth.

  And so I came out of the heart of China back to the sea once more. I had found no absolutes after all. I had found nothing immutable. I had met a people as confused as any other. I had seen marvellous things and miserable, I had eaten pickled turnip with Mrs Wang and been sent packing by the sentries of Zhongnanhai. I had been cured of headache by Chinese Wolfberry. I had successfully evaded the Chinese opera. I had bought a bamboo goat, and beaten Mr Lu at checkers in the park. I had visited the grand simplicities of my imagination, and found them grand indeed, but muddled. I had reached that mighty presence at last, and it was smiling nervously.

  Out on the Pearl River, surrounded by black sampans, the ship lay waiting.

  China has vastly changed since then. The Chinese have come to terms with contemporary technology, Shanghai has been transformed into a metropolis of unrelenting modernity, Beijing is rather less ideologically enigmatic and Tiananmen Square has acquired a different symbolical meaning. The bamboo goat I bought now stands in our house in Wales: it smells evocatively of Chinese adhesive, and I used to encourage children to take a sniff of it, until I heard that glue-sniffing was becoming addictive in Welsh schools.

  26

  Vienna 1983

  I first knew Vienna at the end of the Second World War, but for nearly forty years I never wrote about it. When at last I did, although I gratefully recognized its pleasures, I could not bring myself to like it. It was no place for a Welsh republican.

  Nothing so becomes a city as a street-car (or a tram, as we Europeans prefer it), especially if it has a single cyclopean headlamp on its front, and a couple of flags fluttering on its roof, and is connected by sundry pipes and couplings with a trailer-car behind. What weight! What responsibility! What reassurance!

  And nowhere does the tram fulfil its municipal functions more staunchly than in the city of Vienna, for here it must trundle its way, day in day out, come war come peace, through a state of affairs utterly alien to the instincts of any self-respecting trolley: fantasy is piled upon fantasy in Wien, Österreich, pretence is compounded by delusion, introspection repeatedly degenerates into complex, and the whole adds up to a baleful parable of the urban condition. In some ways Vienna is the most intensely civic of great cities, the most complete and compact, the most preoccupied with its own civicness – a fifth of the entire Austrian population, after all, lives within this peculiar capital. In other w
ays it transcends mere city status altogether, and is more a temperament or a sensibility, embodying as it does an inexpungable repertoire of doubts, regrets and ambiguous prides – was it not within living memory the seat of the Habsburgs, the Imperial Capital of Austria-Hungary, the root of all that the word ‘Empire’ came to mean to the world before the wars?

  Steadily notwithstanding, small flags flying, the trams clank their way around town: they are painted in strong and sensible colours, and look rather barge-like, as though they ought to be stirring up bow-waves along the track in front of them.

  * * *

  Down upon their diligent passings stare the structures of the Ringstrasse, the boulevard which, in the nineteenth century, replaced the ancient ramparts around the inner city of Vienna. Now as then, the Ringstrasse unforgettably dramatizes the false and footling values of this city, and it has given its name to a whole genre of Viennese art and thought – the Ringstrasse genre. Like some mad architect’s dream fulfilled, its buildings rise one after another preposterously into view, Gothic or Grecian or baroque, plastered in kitsch or writhing with classical allusion, capped by spires, monstrous domes and silhouetted effigies, clumped with goddesses, chariots, gross escutcheons, caryatids, piles of sculpted trophies – here a titanic opera house, here a refulgently Attic Parliament, a university more utterly academic than Princeton, Padua, Cambridge and the Sorbonne put together, museums as overwhelmingly museumy as museums possibly could be, and dominating the whole ensemble, half-way round the ring, the immense pillared sprawl of the Hofburg, the palace of the Habsburgs until their removal after the First World War, which seems to lie there all but exhausted, as well it might, by the weight of so much consequence.