Enchanted Evening (8 page)

The house, like all Chinese houses, consisted of a series of courtyards, the sides of which were rooms that faced into the open courtyards. The first courtyard, where the Spirit Gate stood, was a small one, and led by way of three or four stone steps to a door that gave on to a open corridor surrounded by blank walls, in one of which was the entrance to the first courtyard proper. Here again a small pair of stone lion-dogs stood guard on either side of the top of the steps that led through the ornamental gateway. The rooms on each side of this courtyard were guest-rooms, and the one that faced you as you came through the second gate was a single long room that filled the whole side of the open courtyard.

This was the dining-room, the most beautiful room in the house. The furniture in it was blackwood and black lacquer, and set in one of the two end walls was a huge clock which, we were told, was the oldest clock in China. It was of European manufacture, supposed to have been brought to Peking by a Jesuit priest as a gift to some bygone Emperor from a King of France. It was not a particularly beautiful object, though it was in its way a work of art. Its roman numerals were black, each on a separate small shield of white enamel, inlaid on a larger shield of elaborately worked bronze in a circular frame of black lacquer. The bronze shield was almost certainly a Chinese addition, because it was covered with a beautifully worked design of chrysanthemum flowers in the Chinese manner, and I imagine that the white enamel shields, the hands and all the mechanism were brought into the country separately, and set on the bronze background at a later date. What was astonishing was that it still worked!

The dining-table was a marvel of lacquerwork; so mirror-smooth that at first sight I would have sworn it was just that – a long slab of black looking-glass that was reflecting the few pieces of silver placed on it and the gold and red of the Chinese lanterns hanging above. The walls, both here and in the drawing-room, were covered with ordinary close-woven sacking which provided a marvellous background for the decorative openwork panels of carved blackwood that overlaid it, and complemented the spidery elegance of the lacquerwork chairs, the gorgeous jewel colours of the enormous
cloisonné
vases that stood one at each end of the sideboard, and a thin, worn carpet on which a pair of dragons writhed in fiery gold against a background of faded yellow. Whenever I look at the photographs that Mother took of that fabulous house, I think, ‘Oh, if
only
colour photography had been invented by then!'

The rooms surrounding the next courtyard were, on either side, our bedrooms (Bets's and mine to the left, Mother's and Tacklow's to the right), while the far side of the courtyard was taken up by the reception room, where the original occupant had received visitors, and the drawing-room. There was one more courtyard: the garden courtyard, which may once have lived up to its name, but which had been sadly neglected. It consisted of a square of overgrown grass that showed signs of being hastily and very roughly chopped down, probably with a kitchen knife, and a single almond tree, now yellow-leaved in autumn, but a delight in spring. This courtyard was reached by way of a small passage in the extreme corner of the bedroom-and-reception courtyard, and included a gardener's shed and a tiny greenhouse in which our Chinese gardener performed miracles of horticulture, right through the coldest of cold weather and despite the terrible Peking dust-storms and the scorching summers.

The
en suite
master bedroom boasted a large nineteen-twenties European-style double bed, draped in dull gold satin. But the beds in both Bets's bedroom and mine were proper Chinese
kangs
: hollow oblongs, roughly four feet high and five across, built of mud bricks plastered over, and with a small hole in one side through which sticks and live charcoal could be thrust in to make a fire during the winter months. A thick mattress would be laid on top, and this, together with several padded quilts (plus pillows in place of the wooden neck-rests that the original owners would have used), made warm and wonderfully comfortable beds.

The most spectacular room was the reception room, which like the dining-room was panelled and decorated in lacquer. Red lacquer this time, the proper, classic red. It may sound gaudy but was in fact beautiful. Here once again (as throughout the entire house) the windows were covered by a delicate fretwork of carved red lacquer, and against the far wall, directly opposite the french windows by which one entered the Hall of Welcome, was a wonderful lacquer screen, against which stood a magnificent red lacquer throne on which, I presume, the master of the house used to sit in state to receive his guests.

Chinese characters in gold leaf decorated the walls, and about the only thing that wasn't red or gold was the polished wooden floor, on which, when our heavy luggage had been unpacked, we laid Tacklow's tiger-skin, an object that greatly impressed the servants.

At one end of the reception hall, partitioned from the rest by carved and lacquered archways, was a small reading room furnished with a couple of bookcases and a round table and four chairs, also of carved lacquer. And it was here on the wall that Tacklow hung the
Kossu
scroll that he had bought for a modest sum from a corporal who had served in the French contingent of the International Brigade that had marched to the relief of the Europeans besieged in the British Residency in Peking during the grim days of the Boxer Rising.

Having lifted the siege and restored order in the city and the countryside around it, the International Brigade had got down to some serious looting, and there was no doubt that the
Kossu
scroll had been filched from the home of some local mandarin – not, I would have said, a very high-ranking one, for the scroll is not by any means a ‘showpiece'.

Kossu,
one of the great works of art of China, is a very fine tapestry and in the best examples of the work every single colour that appears on it, however small, is woven into it. But in this scroll, though each of the main pieces is woven, the detail, such as the pattern of the flowers, stars and bats-of-happiness on the dress, are only painted and not woven. Still, it is a very attractive example of Chinese art, and never before had it shown to such advantage as it did here. The lacquerwork provided a perfect setting for it. I knew that in bringing it back to Peking we had brought it back to the city it had been stolen from and I used to wonder sometimes if, by some curious quirk of fate, this could be the same house?

Yet even if our scroll had not returned to the same house from which it had been snatched well over a quarter of a century earlier, it had certainly returned to a place where it was appreciated, for a few weeks after we had settled in, when we were beginning to feel at home, Tacklow, awakening early one morning and remembering that he had left something he needed in the reading room, went in search of it; to discover our entire Chinese staff down on their knees, knocking their foreheads on the floor in the deepest of
kowtows
before the scroll.

Becoming aware of ‘the Master's' presence, they shuffled backwards a pace or two, still kneeling, before rising unhurriedly to murmur a polite greeting and back out of the room, leaving the Number-One-Boy, who had ushered them out, apologizing for having disturbed the Master. The Master assured him that he had not been in the least disturbed, and had only come into that room by chance, but he would be interested to know what the servants had been doing. At which the Number-One-Boy looked faintly surprised and replied that they had only been paying their respects to the Old Buddha. Did the Master not
know
that the scroll was a portrait of her, posing in the dress and character of a Goddess?

No: Tacklow had not known; though he later admitted that he ought to have done, for just as the Dragon is the sign of the Emperor, so is the Phoenix that of the Empress. And the lady depicted on the scroll is not only attended by a young acolyte, but also by an admiring phoenix.

The scroll was one of possibly dozens of contemporary
Kossu
portraits of Tzu Hsi, Dowager Empress of China, who in her old age had become known to her admiring subjects by the honorary title of
Lao Fo Yeh,
‘the Old Buddha', and whose extraordinary life story I have already touched on in the first volume of my autobiography. She was the last of the Old Guard, in that she represented a tradition and an Imperial Empire in the same way that Queen Victoria had done. However, I doubt if you could have found a handful of the latter's subjects genuflecting before a picture of her, a quarter of a century after her death.

Chapter 6

More than half a century has scurried past since the morning on which Bets and I set out on foot for our first conducted tour of the streets and
hutungs
1
of Peking. So I hope I can be forgiven for having only the sketchiest recollections of the two men who did the conducting. All I can remember is that both our escorts were connected with the British Legation, one of them middle-aged and the other young, and both were tall and thin and wore spectacles. But I still have a clear picture of what we saw. And an even clearer one of what we smelt that morning. Perhaps Mao and his Little Red Books managed later to clean up the Tartar City, but in those days the smells were truly horrific and like nothing I had ever come across before. India could come up with some startling odours, as could parts of the Middle East and some of the slums in Naples. But they fade into insignificance in comparison with the stink here. We learned early the exact location of the really fierce ones, and kept a large folded handkerchief, soaked in eau-de-Cologne, handy (or in winter, a fur muff) so that we could bury our noses in them as we approached or passed. The gesture became automatic.

Chinese houses were, in general, spectacularly clean. But their ideas of sanitation remained archaic, and there appeared to be no such thing as main drainage. One merely dug a large pit outside the walls of one's domain and threw everything into that, presumably scooping it out from time to time when the garden – if any – needed a dressing of manure. The network of narrow
hutungs
was the worst, for here the inhabitants merely cut a long communal open drain down the centre of the lane, and let it go at that. The main roads were a good deal more salubrious, being straight and wide and spanned at intervals by graceful wooden
P'ai Lous
– Memorial Arches that, all over China, are erected to the memory of men or women of note, but which in Peking are more likely to be put up because they are decorative. Every
P'ai Lou
had its own name, and one learned to find one's way, or pinpoint a particular shop or district, by asking to be directed to (or if in a rickshaw taken to), let's say, the Tung Tan P'ai Lou – the East Single Arch. Some of the
P'ai Lous
boasted as many as four arches, but I'm afraid all memory of their names has vanished; together with the little – the
very
little – Chinese I managed to acquire in the course of the two years we spent in that country. No one could forget the Tung Tan P'ai Lou, could they? Or the Ing-guo-fu, which means the British Legation.

Peking turned out to be a repeat of the Kashmir experience; my early impressions of both having been deeply disappointing, largely because I saw them for the first time when they were not looking their best. But just as Kashmir had grown on me until I ended up thinking it was the most beautiful place in the world, Peking grew on me – though never to the same extent. Yet now, looking back on those days, I remember the charm of that strange, incredibly ancient city that was in fact several cities, one within the other, each one surrounded by its own massive wall, topped with gate-towers and crammed with temples and palaces, lakes, gardens and pagodas and a rabbit-warren of houses. In the outer, southern one, ‘the Chinese city', lay the ‘Altar of Heaven' and its attendant temples of Heaven and Rain, while on the north the adjoining Tartar City contained at its centre the walled and moated Forbidden City, further protected by the walls of the surrounding Imperial City. The whole thing reminded me strongly of those intricately carved ivory globes that turn out to be nests of them, one within the other.

On that first exploratory walk, however, I don't remember seeing anything in the way of temples or palaces, only streets and smelly
hutungs,
and the tiled roofs of innumerable houses, few of them more than a single storey high and all of them packed together like anchovies in a tin. The people, as everywhere, wore the dress of their country. I don't remember seeing a single Chinese person wearing European clothes, though I did notice, and deplored, a regrettable tendency among the citizens towards topping the loose, high-collared jacket and pantaloons of China with European headgear – a peaked golfing cap or, more often, a Homburg hat. It seemed a pity.

There was little traffic, and what there was consisted of rickshaws and carts, some of the latter drawn by ponies, but more often than not by coolies. There were hardly any cars, and very few tall buildings. So few, in fact, that when I think of Peking I always see it as an ancient parchment map of a neat, low-lying gold-brown city, blotched with lakes and densely criss-crossed with lines, some thick but most of them spider-web-thin, with the only tall things the graceful bell-towers and gate-towers and the great white Buddhist
Dagoba
which tops the little hill that dominates the Pei-hai – the North Sea, which is the largest of Peking's lakes.

From the top of the massive Tartar Wall you can see the Imperial City spread out like a
Kossu
carpet at your feet; a carpet laid down on a plain that stretches away for some twenty-five miles, to end at the foot of the beautiful, tree-clad Western Hills. In my day the circumference of the ‘City of Northern Peace' was said to be just under fifteen English miles, for it still ended at the outer walls, whose gates were closed and barred at night, and though there were farmhouses, temples and a few small villages scattered around it on the plain, the land was mostly under cultivation and if you could have seen Peking from the air – as many people do nowadays – you would understand why I think of it as being a map.