But if it was difficult to decide at which season Peking looked its best, there was never any doubt as to which was the worst. Summer was plain horrid. India had accustomed me to the drawbacks of hot weather, but at least her people knew how to deal with soaring temperatures. Here there were no high-ceilinged rooms, thick walls and wide verandahs, and the courtyard system ensured that there was no question of a draught. Chinese houses were designed to keep one warm in winter, and to heck with summer: you can’t have both.
The only attempt at keeping the place cool was to shade the entire courtyard with an outsize pang. These sunscreens certainly prevented the courtyards from turning into furnace-hot sun-traps. But they also helped to keep air out of the place, and anyone who could afford to do so made for the coast or the Western Hills. There the period between ‘Welcome Spring’ and ‘Great Heat’ was one of the pleasantest times of year, and we were lucky enough to spend several weekends as guests in Fa-hai-ssu, a temple in the Western Hills, part of which had for years been rented for the summer months by members of the British Embassy.
Fa-hai-ssu was only a small temple, and not important enough to be listed in the official booklet on ‘The Temples and Monasteries of the Western Hills’. I can’t think why, since to my mind it was one of the most attractive. We would drive out along a tortuous and very bumpy unmade road for miles, and on reaching the foothills, leave our cars in a small village and walk for the last part of the trip up a stony track through the trees until we reached the temple.
The hillside on which it stood was clothed with stunted fir and pine and small oak trees. One entered the temple up a flight of stone steps flanked by four ancient pine trees, leading to a gate-house which housed a pair of ferocious ‘Guardians of the Gate’, one on each side of the entrance hall. These glaring-eyed, threatening and more than life-size figures were wonderfully modelled in clay and a mixture of mud and straw, and were works of peasant art. Brilliantly coloured and gilded, wearing elaborate clothes and brandishing daggers or thunderbolts, their faces contorted into expressions of furious rage, they defy evil spirits to enter the temple.
The larger temples – the monasteries – have several courtyards, each one reached by an entrance hall and a flight of steps. But Fa-hai-ssu had only two. The first was very small, leading up to the main one where, raised on a brick platform and reached by a few shallow stone steps, stands the sanctuary in which three great golden figures of Buddha, barely visible in the incense-scented gloom, sit enthroned on tattered red silk cushions behind the altar. We were to find that there were nearly always a few joss-sticks burning there, for the rules that permit the temples to be used as hostelries by all and sundry ensure that they are always open to anyone who wishes to enter them in order to pray or make offerings, consult the resident priest, or burn incense-sticks to the gods. There were nearly always worshippers from the village, as well as the occasional traveller, to be seen entering or leaving the sanctuary.
I was not particularly interested in the sanctuary and its gods, having seen a good many of them. But the trees made Fa-hai-ssu special: a pair of spectacular white pines that grew out of the flagged courtyard on either side of the steps that led up to the ‘Goddery’, and that together with an ancient and decorative pine tree shaded the courtyard and added the clean fragrance of pine needles to the musky scent of the smouldering joss-sticks burning day and night before the gods.
If you have never seen a white pine you cannot have any idea of how spectacular they are, and your instant reaction to them is that someone must have painted the trunks and branches with whitewash. They are not white as some varieties of poplar and silver birch are white. For one thing, their bark is much smoother. Mother painted endless pictures of Fa-hai-ssu, but unfortunately (though we did not think so at the time) they were always sold at once. Only two unfinished sketches of the temple survive: a charming one of the entrance, and one of the upper courtyard that might have turned out well when finished, but in its present state is too harshly coloured – as though she had slapped the paint on in a hurry, or else painted it from a photograph rather than from life. But I am deeply grateful to it, because this was before the age of colour photography, and without Mother’s sketches I’m not too sure that I would have remembered how colourful Fa-hai-ssu was.
Mother’s sketch confirms that the roofs of Fa-hai-ssu were tiled throughout in the golden yellow of royalty, and that its walls and doors and latticed window-frames must once have been scarlet, though the suns and rains of close on six centuries had turned them to the deep rose-red of dried rose petals. The legends illustrated under the eaves of those tilted Tartar roofs were as bright as ever, having escaped the sun, and, with the brilliant china-white of the pines and the contrasting darkness of the pine tree, the little temple was a treat to the eye, one of those places where one simply wants to ‘stand and stare’. Or, if you are an artist, reach for a paintbrush.
To add to its charms, the tree-covered hillsides that rose steeply up behind it were the haunt of that most English of birds, the cuckoo. Bets and I liked to climb the hill behind the temple and, subsiding on to the warm, pine-needle-strewn grass where we could glimpse the glimmering golden roofs between the tree trunks below, listen to the cuckoos calling, as they call each spring in the woods and meadows of Shakespeare’s Warwickshire and Kipling’s Sussex.
There was only one serious drawback to staying in Fa-hai-ssu. We discovered it on our first visit there. It was Bobbie Aldington who alerted us, by yelling the roof off. That particular weekend party consisted of the Aldingtons – Bobbie and her husband Jeffrey – three student interpreters:1 John, ‘Mac’ (Ian MacKenzie), Gordon Creighton (always known as ‘Teddy Bear’), and us Kayes. Tacklow, Mother, Bets and I were guests, and the others our joint hosts from the Embassy. The resident priest – a gentle old monk who took to Tacklow on sight – occupied, together with one or two of his fellow monks, the rooms on the left-hand side of the courtyard, the remaining accommodation being divided by flimsy partitions into as many rooms as were needed for guests.
Mother and Tacklow had a room with a double kang, nearest to the monks; then came Bets and myself, next door to the Aldingtons, and beyond them the dining-room, the end wall of which was one side of the entrance to the courtyard. On the other side of that, a dormitory for the student interpreters and rooms for such servants as the party had brought with them. Temples hired out accommodation and basic furniture only. Everything else had to be provided by the guests.
On our first night at Fa-hai-ssu, after we had eaten supper in the sketchily furnished dining-room by the light of a Petromax lamp, we retired to bed early, for it had been a long and tiring day. But barely ten or fifteen minutes after the last lamps had been put out and darkness had descended on the temple and its inmates, a torch flashed on in the next room – the partitions between room and room were of the flimsiest – and Bobbie started yelling at the top of her voice.
Instantly, candles, lanterns and torches flared, and chaps in assorted nightwear shot out of bed and into the courtyard, demanding vociferously to know what on earth was happening and who was being attacked and by what.
‘It’s only a scorpion!’ shouted Jeffrey as the rescuers converged on his room. At this point I noticed that Bets, who had also leapt out of bed, was staring down in pop-eyed horror at something that was advancing in a purposeful manner across the carpetless floor. We too, it seemed, had acquired a scorpion, and a large one at that.
Bets’s yell was at least as piercing as Bobbie’s had been, and she was back on her bed in considerably less time than it had taken her to leave it. After which I don’t think anyone got much sleep that night, for the place was crawling with scorpions. I hadn’t realized before that these creatures, like cockroaches, like to rest by day and swan about in gangs by night. Or is it only Chinese scorpions that prefer the dark? If only the wretched creatures hadn’t made such a noise about it, I don’t expect we would ever have realized that there was so much as a solitary scorpion in the place, let al
one whole families of them. But those flimsy partitions gave them away. The partitions were hardly more than screens made of lath and plaster, covered by stretched hessian which was then papered over, and if you tapped them with your fingernails they made a faintly hollow sound, like a drum. The scorpions, as they climbed up those papered surfaces, had made Bobbie reach for her torch and switch it on to see what was scraping away on the wall behind her bed, and the spotlight had fallen on not one, but two scorpions, squaring up either for a fight or for a bit of love-play, and making far too much noise about it. Her subsequent shrieks had put an end to a peaceful night for everybody.
There followed a tremendous scorpion-hunt, to the dismay of the resident priest who, aroused by the uproar, came pottering out clutching a lantern expecting, at the very least, to find a band of brigands attacking his temple. Discovering what all the fuss was about, he came out strongly on the side of his fellow residents (who as members of the ‘Excited Insects’ rate a special festival in China’s list of celebrations of the seasons) pointing out that all we had to do was ignore the little creatures and they would do us no harm. Had any of us been hurt? No…! (‘Yes!’ put in Bets, convinced that she would have been if she hadn’t taken evasive action.) The priest was not impressed. In all his years in this temple, he insisted, he had never once been attacked by a scorpion, and that was because he had never threatened the poor insects. ‘Ignore them and they will ignore you.’ On which he retired happily to bed.
I don’t remember how we coped with the situation after that. The quicker-footed and more aggressive members of the party had already managed to slay several of the Excited Insects with the aid of bedroom slippers, and corpses were thrown outside the courtyard in the hope that their relatives would not connect their passing with us, and avenge themselves. I can’t believe that any of us got much sleep that night, for I well remember that as soon as the lights were put out the scratching of little claws on Chinese wallpaper started up again. But by then we had all made sure that our mosquito nets were well tucked in, and put our trust in that.
We certainly had no more alarms and excursions on that same score again, and apart from the Great Scorpion Scare I remember Fa-hai-ssu as a place that was little short of Paradise. It was also possessed of a hidden treasure that was not officially discovered for some years after our stay there, so Bets and I can confidently lay claim to being the first foreigners to lay eyes on it. It happened this way, during a subsequent visit there …
Finding myself disinclined to sleep on a hot and drowsy afternoon when everyone else, including the monks, was enjoying a siesta, I decided to take a closer look at the Sanctuary. Having provided myself with a few small coins for an offering, I set off to explore. There were seldom any worshippers at that hour of day, since those who were not at work were taking a nap, and I had the Goddery to myself. It seemed very dark and cold after the glare and heat of the courtyard. I left my offering in one of the bowls on the altar and, lighting a joss-stick from the stump of the only one still smouldering, I pushed it into the awesome pile of grey ash that filled the incense urn to the brim and gave evidence of the thousands upon thousands of joss-sticks burnt there for years past, probably as far back as the beginning of that century.
I had not realized before that there were so many gods in the sanctuary. But, as my eyes became used to the gloom, the place seemed to be full of them, for the three large figures behind the altar were flanked on either side of the room by a line of seated lohans,2 some sitting cross-legged and others with their feet resting on the narrow lacquered table of offerings. Behind them, as behind the seated Buddhas – almost invisible under layers of dust and smoke from votive candles and smouldering incense-sticks – it was just possible to see that the walls were frescoed with Buddhist saints floating among stylized clouds, and to make out that the reredos behind the central altar ended a few feet short of the outside walls. Behind it must lie a narrow passage, presumably a repository of broken and discarded temple bric-à-brac.
Walking round to the far end, I found myself looking down a dark tunnel that would have been pitch-black but for the faint gleam of light from the far end, which was just enough to give me the impression that it had been used for years as a lumber-room – though not recently, for here the dust lay so thick underfoot that it felt like walking on an expensive pile carpet. The darkness, and the thought of those scorpions, made me beat a hasty retreat, and I returned at speed to the bedroom in order to collect reinforcements in the shape of Bets, a torch and a walking-stick. Thus armed, I went back to explore.
That passage cannot have been more than six or seven feet wide at most, and now that I had a torch we could see that there was a small door in the back wall – which was also the outer wall of the temple, a way of escape in a crisis perhaps. It did not look as though it had been opened for years – if ever – and I had been right in thinking that the passage had been used as a lumber-room, for the dust lay thick on an assortment of broken bric-à-brac that had been thrown down there. A long rickety table, no more than a narrow plank of wood supported by straight wooden legs, stood against the inner wall, and on it were several small, battered and broken house-altars, each with its image of a Buddha and, judging from the thickness of the dust that coated them, presumably put to one side to be mended before the fall of the Empire and forgotten in the subsequent Republican years.
Broken spirit-drums, tattered banners and odds and ends of carved wood that looked as though they were parts of temple ornaments lay piled against the wall, and among them the beam of my torch fell on a little wooden hand, severed at the wrist and lying palm upward and almost concealed by dust. I guessed that it was the right hand of Kuan-yin-pusa, the Goddess of Mercy, raised in blessing. The covering of red-gold lacquer was sadly worn and chipped, but what was left of it was still bright enough to shine in the torchlight, and I picked it up and searched among the discarded junk on the floor for its owner. But though there were plenty of broken images, one or two of them minus a thumb and many without any fingers, none was short of an entire hand, and it was only when we gave up rummaging among the broken bits of throw-outs on the floor and I straightened up and flashed my torch across the wall that we saw one of the most enchanting sights that we were to see in China …
The entire wall had been frescoed in minute detail and in a manner that was unlike anything that I had seen before, though it reminded me of something. I did not realize what, until many years later when I saw the original of Botticelli’s Primavera at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and was instantly reminded of Fa-hai-ssu. It was the airiness, and all that detail, I suppose.
Like everything else in that short dark passage, and throughout the sanctuary, the murals were half hidden by a veil of cobwebs and layers of dust from decades of slow-burning incense-sticks, augmented by the dry earth of the hillsides, the sands of the Gobi Desert and the great plain of China. This was why we had not noticed them until I flashed the torch directly at them. And even then I doubt if we would have taken much notice if it had not been for the glint of a thin, raised line of something like gesso that had been covered with gold leaf and formed the outer rim of the halo behind the head of the goddess that I happened to shine my torch on.
Pure gold does not tarnish and, as I moved the light slowly along the wall, it glinted on other touches of gold and showed us that not only the haloes, but the elaborate jewellery, coronets and ornaments worn by the goddesses and their attendants (at least two of whom looked quite as fiercely masculine as the Guardians of the Gate!) were also picked out with gesso, so that they looked almost real and as if we could lift them off the wall.
Only when the battery of my torch began to run out did we tear ourselves away from our enthralling treasure-trove, and discover that we must have spent a lot more time gazing at it than we thought, for by the time we left the Goddery the sun was nearing the tree-tops and the rest of our party were collecting in the courtyard for tea.
Bets and I, incoherent with excitem
ent and convinced that we had stumbled on the Find of the Century, poured out our story in the expectation that everyone else would fall over each other in their eagerness to see the wonders we had been describing. It was a distinct let-down to find that they were far more interested in tea, and that our World-Shaking Discovery was, for the moment, of far less importance than cucumber sandwiches, scones and the best Lapsang Souchong from the tea emporium on the Hatamên. And when that had been disposed of, a few villagers, the day’s work finished, began to drift in to light their joss-sticks and say a prayer, so it was decided that we would have to wait until tomorrow before ‘poking about’ in the back of the sanctuary and go for an evening walk in the woods instead.
Mother was the only one who showed any interest in the murals next morning. The others took their torches and, having stirred up the dust by tramping to and fro in the passage and made everyone sneeze, said: ‘Yes, very pretty, if only you could clean it up a bit’ – which was considered inadvisable, because if one started to brush off the dust, the plaster would probably flake off the wall; it was surprising that it hadn’t flaked off already. And that was that.
Tacklow questioned the old priest about the frescoes, but all he got was a shrug of the shoulders and the information that the pictures were very old – as old as the Temple. However, he did manage to open the door in the back wall and let in a bit of daylight, and this, augmented by two Petromax lamps and several torches, produced just enough light for Mother to take a photograph of part of the mural.
Finding our fellow weekenders so uninterested, we buttonholed everyone we knew as soon as we got back to Peking. But no one, not even Sven Hedin, showed any particular enthusiasm. Everyone knew that there were frescoes at Fa-hai-ssu – well, almost everyone! – and if they were anything special we could be quite sure that someone would have taken notice of it and left a record. We gave up. But I kept the little gold lacquered hand and I have it to this day. It sits on a carved ebony base among a few specially treasured mementoes.