Four years later, back in London and waiting to meet a friend in the Ladies’ Drawing-Room of the Army and Navy Club in St James’s Square, I picked up a copy of the Illustrated London News. Turning the pages without much interest, I came across a full-page spread, complete with photographs, headed ‘Wonderful Discovery of Ming Frescoes. Rivals to Ajanta!’ And there was a photograph of Fa-hai-ssu and the Goddery, and that marvel of a fresco! Plus a whole lot of stuff about it being painted in the fifteenth century, during the Ming Dynasty, and that it was almost perfectly preserved and ‘believed to be unknown until now to either Chinese or European art lovers’. I resent that last bit. I really do … Bitterly!
* * *
There were times when I used to have qualms about that little wooden hand, and wonder if I ought not to send it back to Fa-hai-ssu. It was a purely superstitious feeling, since I knew perfectly well that if I did it would merely be thrown away as rubbish, as it had been before. Yet I continued to toy with the idea that one day I might go back to Fa-hai-ssu and hide it on the altar behind the Buddhas and let them look after it. Only when China declared for Communism did I cease to worry; and when, much later, Chairman Mao’s Red Army stampeded across their homeland, smashing and destroying thousands of irreplaceable examples of their country’s art, I felt relieved to think that the little hand was safely wrapped in a piece of Chinese silk at the back of my handkerchief and glove drawer.
Chapter 10
China was in deep trouble in those days, but though I was aware that this was so, I took no interest in the political situation. China had done nothing about Manchuria in 1931. There was a story that the only people to make a fuss about it had been the students in Peking’s university, who had demanded that they be given arms with which to march against the Japanese, who had been besieging the northern border-town of Jehol for some months.
The tale went that after several days of student demonstrations and deafening howls of ‘Give us arms! Give us arms!’ the authorities gave in and doled out hundreds of rifles – many of which were probably relics from the previous century. When every student had received some form of firearm and the ammunition to go with it, the demonstrators made for the railway station in a body, and caught the next train for Shanghai!
That story may have been apocryphal. But since I heard it from so many people who claimed to have ‘been there’, I bet it was true. Particularly since at this time, when China was being sporadically ruled by a variety of self-proclaimed generals and temporary war lords, possession of any form of firearm would have greatly increased its owner’s prestige: no one dared argue with an armed soldier in those days.
A similar tale is one that I really can vouch for, because I saw the final act of the incident myself, and though I can’t, at this date, remember the year, it has to be in the autumn of either 1932 or 1933. Japan had laid siege to Jehol, a fortified autumn residence and imperial hunting lodge, north-east of Peking among the mountains beyond the Great Wall, which was held by a garrison numbering several thousand troops under the command of a top-ranking general. The siege had been dragging on for some time, and casualties among the Chinese soldiery mounted steadily. Report said that many were dying daily, not from enemy action but from cold, for they had been hurried up to the defence of Jehol in the late spring or early summer, when they would be wearing light, ‘warm-weather’ clothing. The bitter cold of the North China winter, with its icy winds that swept in from the freezing plateau of Central Asia, was, literally, killing off the inadequately clad garrison like flies, by lowering their resistance so drastically that the least touch of ill-health became impossible to fight off, and they crawled into their draughty, unheated barracks and died there.1
A call went out for fur-lined coats for the shivering army: 40,000 was the figure spoken of. Sufficient money to buy 40,000 fur coats, and the cost of their transport to Jehol, was raised in next to no time, and the Committee responsible for collecting them and sending them off by train from Peking for as far as the railway line went (and from there presumably in carts along the winding mountain roads) advertised their departure with a good many patriotic speeches and headlines in the press. A large crowd of citizens, pressmen and high-ranking officials turned up to see the show, and Tacklow, who read the Chinese papers as well as the Peking and Tientsin Times, took me along to the station to witness the send-off.
As far as the Chinese officials went it was very impressive. But when it came to the consignment of goods to ‘our heroic defenders’, it soon became apparent that no allowances had been made for the Chinese addiction to kumshaw – ‘squeeze’ – levied on any sum that passes through successive hands. China had subscribed more than enough money to provide all the help that was so sorely needed by its shivering, half-frozen troops, but had forgotten that the money must, of necessity, pass through the hands of a great many officials before it was converted into the necessary fur coats, boxed and ready for dispatch from Peking.
Corruption had always been rife at all levels in the Imperial Kingdom, particularly in royal circles – as witness the appropriation by the Empress of funds set aside for China’s navy. (She spent them on building a marble boat, and a variety of pavilions at the Summer Palace.) It became worse under an unstable Republic, and since every single individual through whose hands that fur coat money passed kept a proportion of it, it is not surprising that the help that was sent off to Jehol consisted of eighteen2 fur coats and a few dozen boxes of crackers …
The men who were garrisoning Jehol were their fellow-countrymen, dying for something as easily avoidable as lack of warmth. And all because a line of greedy and corrupt officials could not keep their thievish paws out of the till.
A garden party was to provide me with another example of a Chinese vanishing-trick. The party was given by the Chinese members of Peking’s Town Council, in honour of the Crown Prince of one of the Scandinavian countries. Because of the Japanese siege of Jehol it had been thought prudent to send the treasures of the Forbidden City for safe keeping in Shanghai, but the entire collection would be put on display for the benefit of the royal visitor before being packed and sent off under a strong guard to the south.
The foreign ministers and the senior members of their staffs, together with most of the foreign residents in Peking, were invited, among them Tacklow and Mother. When the day came round, however, Mother went down with a migraine and retired to bed with aspirins and an ice-pack in a darkened room, and Tacklow, who didn’t like the idea of going alone, suggested that I substitute for her. After all, the invitation was for Sir Cecil and Lady Kaye, and none of the hosts was in the least likely to realize that I wasn’t Mother, for there were a lot of young wives among the Consular staffs. So, thrilled to bits, I hastily scrambled into my garden-party outfit and went off with Tacklow to the Forbidden City.
The party was held in the garden of one of the palaces, and everyone who was anyone, Chinese or foreign, was there in their best. The Crown Prince was everything one thinks a Crown Prince should be, and we all sat around under the shade of ornamental pine trees at little tables. Everyone there looked forward to seeing the treasures because it was well known that only a very few, and those of a size that made them impossible to steal – such as the ‘Empress’s Jade Flower Bowl’ – were on show to tourists. The prospect of seeing all the treasures was enthralling.
But when the time came, our hosts selected a mere handful of people: the Prince and one or two of his suite, some, but by no means all, of the ministers and secretaries, a wife or two – and Sir Cecil and Lady Kaye! I couldn’t believe my luck. I still can’t. This small party of people was taken through the Forbidden City into palaces that were shut to tourists, and shown such treasures as had survived the looting and anarchy of the years that had followed the fall of the Empire, all laid out on display in cabinets and tables and on shelves.
Carved jade and ivory and rose-quartz; lacquer and porcelain and wonderful embroidered wallhangings; Kossu scrolls and celadon vases; and case a
fter case of curious objects such as the curved sceptres which were presented to the Emperor once a year by various nobles or delegates from different states, and were supposed to bring good fortune. No two of these beautiful, useless objects were quite alike, except in general outline, and all were works of art. I could have spent hours with my nose flattened against the glass of the cases in which they were displayed, and I still remember them with awe.
That evening, when the party was over and the guests had gone, the gates of the Forbidden City were locked and barred, and all approaches were sealed off for some considerable time while behind those closed doors skilled packers stowed away the fabulous, fragile treasures in the many wooden crates that had been recently made ready for them. They were taken under a strong guard to the railway station and dispatched, with every possible precaution, to Shanghai, where they arrived safely. Or rather the crates did. No one would admit to knowing what happened to the treasures: when the crates were opened they were found to contain nothing but bricks.
I was convinced that the treasures were gone for ever, scattered all over the globe in bits and pieces. But there was a TV film not so long ago that said flatly that the treasure was safe and sound in a strongly fortified and most elaborate museum in Taiwan, that breakaway island to which those Chinese who did not choose to follow Chairman Mao and his Communists retreated. What is more, the film showed us many of the Imperial Treasures, beautifully displayed. They can’t all be there, but at least a good many of them obviously are. Well done to whoever did it!
According to the China-side grapevine, the only treasure to escape being sent south was the more than life-size effigy that gave its name to the Temple of the White Jade Buddha. And that was only because when the packers came to remove it, it was discovered that at some time during its career, some opportunistic Emperor, eunuch, or abbot (with the agreement of some or all of the monks) had had a copy of the effigy made in alabaster and substituted it for the original jade which, cut up and sold by the piece, would have been worth a fortune.
There are so many things I remember about the Peking days which make me think: ‘I must put that in!’ There was the Cat’s Christmas party given by a girl called Nancy Caccia, whose husband was at the British Consulate. The Christmas tree was decked with bits of fish and other snacks popular with cats, and the floor strewn with saucers of milk. I hadn’t laughed so much in years.
There were dinner parties given by Tacklow’s Chinese friends. And a ghastly afternoon in the Peking Hotel, when Bets and I had been dragooned by some senior consulate lady into collecting money from an influx of tourists off an American tour ship. The tourists, to a man – and woman! – had had enough of being badgered for money, and treated us as though we were begging for ourselves: they couldn’t have been ruder. Or nastier. After an hour of this, our collecting boxes were empty, Bets was in tears, and I was almost sick with rage. I’d no idea human beings could be so beastly and, in memory of that ghastly afternoon, I have never passed someone with a collecting box without putting a coin in it.
Then there was a fascinating four hours at a Chinese theatre, where the heroine, and all the female characters, were played by men. There was having my portrait painted by an excitable Russian with an unpronounceable name, who half-way through the sitting suddenly flung his brush to the floor and shouted at me: ‘There is nozzings in your face. But, nozzing! It is only a pink and white egg!’ and stormed out of the room.
John commissioned a portrait of me from another painter, Nancy Caccia (she of the Cat’s Christmas party), and when it was finished he gave a dinner party in his rooms, with the only light a few candles on the dining-table and a single brilliant electric bulb trained on the portrait: most embarrassing. Years later, when I happened to be in Washington, I called at the British Embassy and asked to see Nancy (whose husband was the then British Ambassador). She couldn’t have been nicer; but alas, she hadn’t the remotest idea who I was, or that she had ever painted my portrait or asked me to her Cat’s Christmas party (to which I certainly did not contribute a cat).
Chapter 11
Considering that I was born among the foothills of the Himalayas and spent the largest part of my formative years within sight of what was then – and one could almost say still is – the Edge of Nowhere, since only a single unmade track led out of my hometown of Simla towards Tibet, I can’t explain why living in China should have given me such a strong feeling of being stranded on the edge of the civilized world. After all, we were merely living on a different section of the same huge expanse of nowhere, with Tibet to the south-west instead of due west of us.
But there was something about North China that made me feel, from the day I arrived there to the day I left, as though I had come to the world’s end, and that there was nothing at my back except hundreds and hundreds of miles of uninhabited desert and tundra, shale and snow and glaciers, with an icy wind from outer space forever blowing across it. Thinking about it, I imagine that this may have had something to do with the fact that in those days, when the Air Age had barely begun and letters and parcels came by sea – and took an unconscionably long time about it – I found myself losing touch with Neil. Although he wrote frequently and faithfully, I tended to forget what he or I had said in a previous letter, and often failed to reply to some question that had been put in a letter written a month previously.
Bets and WHP managed to keep up an uninterrupted flow of correspondence, and Bets said it was my own fault for settling for an ‘understanding’ instead of getting properly engaged. She admitted that if she hadn’t been engaged she might well have begun to waver under the strain of a long separation. I replied that this was exactly why I had refused to tie myself down – because if Neil really was the right man for me, no amount of separation would make the slightest difference. But if it didn’t stand the strain, well, too bad. It had been fun while it lasted, and now it had better fade quietly away – ‘No tears, no fuss. Hooray for us!’
Our letters had become fewer, and at longer and longer intervals, until one day they just stopped, and I didn’t even notice for several months. But I think now that it was probably the length of time it took to get a letter during those early days that was the main reason for that uncomfortable feeling that I had come to the end of the known world and that anything could happen here – anything!
No; I didn’t trust China. It frightened me stiff, and I used to remember that famous pronouncement of Napoleon’s, ‘Let China sleep. He who awakens her will be sorry!’ and to realize that it was my countrymen who were largely responsible for awakening her. All the same, I am grateful that I had the chance to see the last flicker of Imperial China, the Celestial Kingdom whose rulers had believed their country to be the centre of the world, and had done their best down the centuries to keep the Outer Barbarians from entering it, believing (rightly when one comes to think of it) that we were all no better than foreign devils who would do our best to plunder and destroy if the door was once opened to us. The Empire had fallen more than twenty years before I set foot in China, but the echoes of its past greatness were still there: the scent and the smell, the same customs and the same dress that had been worn down the centuries, almost unchanged. And, despite the Republic, a respect for the Blood Royal and the ceremonies of the past.
You could sense all that, and still see much of a world that would have been familiar to the Old Buddha, who had died in 1908, the year in which I was born, and been buried with extravagant honours in the Imperial tombs. The list of the treasures that were buried with her in her coffin reads like something out of a fairy tale. There were ropes of pearls about her neck and a chaplet of pearls on her head, a mattress embroidered with pearls and a coverlet strewn with loose pearls; a rope of pearls encircled her body eight times, and by her side were laid 108 gold, jade and carved gem Buddhas, and any number of jade carvings. The gaps were filled with scattered pearls and jewels, and above all that lay a network of pearls. Finally, as the lid of the coffin was about to be c
losed, one of the princesses added ‘a fine jade ornament of eighteen Buddhas and another of eight galloping horses’. And that, and a lot more, was only in the coffin. Endless other treasures of lesser value were placed in the vault. It sounds like the burial of one of the great Pharoahs of Egypt, doesn’t it? Yet it happened in this century. In my own lifetime – just!
Needless to say, when the Empire fell a few years later and the country began to disintegrate under alternate blows from opposing war lords, floods and famine, it was only a matter of time before a gang of unpaid and masterless troops raided the Imperial Tombs and tore open the coffin. Having looted everything of value they flung out the corpse of the Great Empress and scattered her bones in the park. I hope she haunted them!
* * *
With the end of spring the weather became unpleasantly hot, and all over Peking the pangs went up to protect the courtyards of Chinese-style houses from the glare of the summer sun. The shade they provided was very welcome, since without it we would have been driven indoors from sunrise to sunset, as we had been in Tonk. But it made the rooms very dark, and effectively reduced the flow of air – which may have been an advantage, for as the temperature rose, so did the malodorous fumes from the Jade Canal.
Considering how often this could hit us in the face when we stepped outside our To-and-from-the-World-Gate, I was frankly staggered by how effectively our high walls and curved, tent-shaped roofs protected us from it. Perhaps the depths of the overhang beneath the upward curve of those tiled roofs siphoned away the air above the canal at a certain level. I can only say that if it was due to some ancient Chinese trick of construction, it worked astonishingly well – and that all the same I was deeply grateful to exchange Peking for the cool, salty sea air of Pei-tai-ho.