He was right. I loved them, too, especially the ones by Emilio Salgari.
“But what if he says something he shouldn't about the First Emperor's tomb?”
Lao Jiang narrowed his eyes and smiled mysteriously. “We still don't have the third piece of the jiance, and no one really knows where the mausoleum is. Besides, our friend Paddy has many months of painful recovery before he can even begin to think about writing,” he added. “Are you ready, madame? We've a long journey ahead of us overland to the Qin Ling Mountains and the ancient Taoist monastery of Wudang. I estimate it'll take about a month and a half to cover the eight hundred li between here and there.”
A month and a half? How long was a li? I wondered. A mile? Half a mile?
“It's about two hundred and fifty miles from Hankow to Wudang, heading westnorth,”27 the antiquarian clarified, reading my thoughts. “But it's not an easy route, madame. We'll cross a valley for several days and then have to climb to the top of Wudang Shan.28 That's where the Prince of Gui sent his third friend, the master geomancer Yue Ling, with the last piece of the jiance, remember?”
Unexpectedly then, the antiquarian wrapped the fist of one hand in his other, held it at face height, and bowed low before me.
“However, madame, I must apologize before we leave,” he declared, remaining in that humble pose. “You were right in Nanking when you said I was using you to achieve my goals. Please forgive me. Nevertheless, I would also like to take this opportunity to ask your forgiveness in advance, since this is something I will continue to do. I appreciate your company, your Western point of view, and the things you are trying to teach me.”
Despite my doubts about his sincerity, “I accept your apology,” I replied, imitating both hands and bow, “and I thank you for all that you are teaching me. However, I would also like to take this opportunity to ask you to rise above your disdain for women and treat my niece with the same consideration you give our young servant. This is very important to us and would place you in a position more befitting the world we live in today.”
Lao Jiang gave no indication of being upset by this—just the contrary, perhaps. We thus left Hankow in good spirits, with a new understanding that ultimately made the long, grueling trip a little less disagreeable.
Our convoy consisted of ten horses and mules loaded with boxes and bags, five soldiers dressed as peasants, and the four of us who walked alongside. Neither Fernanda, Biao, nor I knew how to ride, and Lao Jiang did but preferred to walk. Walking, he said, increased your energy, blood flow, and resistance to illness. It also allowed you to study the elegant, internal architecture of nature up close, and therefore study the Tao. While they were not the same, one was a reflection of the other. We had just left Hankow through Ta-tche Men Gate when I realized that my niece was no longer the chubby, unattractive girl in a prissy black bonnet who'd shown up at my house in Paris that day. She was swimming in her blue servant's outfit and now wore a Chinese hat. Fernanda had lost several pounds, and her figure, though hard to discern under the cotton clothing, seemed much more girlish. Just like her mother's and grandmother's, Fernanda's weight was a result of gluttony, a sin she was completely safe from on the trip, because our Chinese meals were quite frugal. The sun had also darkened her face, giving it a healthy glow and making her disguise that much more believable.
Not wanting to draw attention to ourselves, we took everything we needed in the boxes loaded onto the horses and mules: dried food, bricks of pressed tea, barley for the animals, fur hats, heavy coats for the mountains, woven soft bamboo mats for sleeping, blankets, rice wine, something called “tiger liquor” for the cold, and spare canvas sandals. There was also a first-aid kit—a Chinese first-aid kit! It of course contained nothing known in the West, but instead things like ginseng, reed tisanes, roots, leaves, dried begonias for the lungs and respiratory problems, Six Harmonies pills to fortify the organs, and an elixir called the Three Immortals to treat stomach and indigestion ailments. We hoped we could avoid the towns along the way, skirting all of them by means of endless detours. The Green Gang had presumably lost our trail after being defeated in Nanking, and we were unlikely to see them again, but it was best to go as covertly as possible, just in case. There was always a chance they might already know our next destination and be there, waiting to attack as soon as we reached the monastery. Mr. Jiang was convinced we'd be out of danger as soon as we reached Wu Tang: There wasn't an army in China that would dare attack a group of Taoist monks who were masters in the martial arts.
“Shaolin?” I asked the antiquarian as we walked on a wide embankment between terraced plots one afternoon, the setting sun in front of us. We were approaching a little village called Mao-ch'en-tu in the middle of a small valley.
“No, madame. Shaolin is a very aggressive, external style of Buddhist martial art. The monks in Wudang practice internal, Taoist styles intended for defense. These are much more powerful and secret, based on strength and flexibility in the torso and legs. The two techniques are completely different. According to tradition, the tai chi they practice at Wudang Monastery—”
“They practice tai chi in Wudang?” I interrupted excitedly. I'd been studying these exercises with Lao Jiang over the last few weeks while my niece played Wei-ch'i with Biao. Not only had I discovered a love for it, but the required concentration calmed my nerves and the physical effort was conditioning my poor, out-of-shape muscles. The slow, gentle, fluid movements—which had names as exotic as “Grasp Bird's Tail,” “Strum the Pei Pa” or “Wild Stork Spreads Wings”—were much more exhausting than any normal exercise. What I found most difficult, however, was the strange philosophy surrounding each and every one of the movements and the breathing techniques that went along with them.
“In fact,” Lao Jiang explained, “tai chi as we know it today originated in Wudang with Zhang Sanfeng, one of its most famous monks.”
“So then it didn't come from the Yellow Emperor?”
Lao Jiang smiled, holding on tightly to his horse's reins. “All tai chi comes from the Yellow Emperor, madame. He gave us the Thirteen Essential Postures that Zhang Sanfeng worked on at Wudang Monastery in the thirteenth century. Legend has it that one day Zhang was meditating out in the countryside when he suddenly saw a heron and a snake begin to fight. The heron was futilely trying to impale the snake with its beak while the snake was unsuccessfully trying to strike the heron with its tail. Time passed, and neither of the two exhausted creatures had managed to vanquish the other, so they each went their separate ways. Zhang realized that flexibility was the greatest strength and could be beaten by gentleness. As you know, the wind cannot break the grass. As of that moment, Zhang Sanfeng devoted himself to applying this discovery to the martial arts and dedicated his life as a monk to developing the Tao, achieving incredible martial and healing abilities. He studied the Five Elements, the Eight Trigrams, the Nine Stars, and the I Ching in depth, all of which allowed him to understand how human energy works and how to attain health, longevity, and immortality.”
I was stunned into silence. Had I heard properly, or had the gurgling stream running alongside confused me? Had Lao Jiang just said “immortality”?
“You're not going to tell me that Zhang Sanfeng is still alive, are you?”
“Well, he began studying at Wudang when he was seventy years old, and the chronicles say he died when he was a hundred and thirty. That is what we, the Chinese, call immortality: a long life in which to perfect ourselves and attain Tao, true immortality. Of course, that's how we've characterized it in the last millennium or millennium and a half. Before that, emperors were often poisoned by the immortality pills their alchemists prepared for them. In fact, the First Emperor, Shi Huang Ti was obsessed with discovering the secret to eternal life and went to great lengths to find it.”
“And here I thought the so-called immortality pills, the elixir of eternal youth, and the transmutation of mercury into gold were cooked up in medieval European pots.”
“No, madam
e. As with many things, alchemy was born in China and is thousands of years older than that in your medieval Europe—which is nothing more than a cheap imitation, if I may say so.”
That night we camped on the outskirts of Mao-ch'en-tu. We'd been traveling for three days, and the children—as well as those of us who weren't such children—were growing tired. However, Lao Jiang insisted we were going too slowly and needed to pick up the pace. He repeated, “Let your rapidity be that of the wind, your compactness that of the forest. In raiding and plundering be like fire, in immovability like a mountain,” more than once, but Fernanda, Biao, and I grew increasingly battered from sleeping on the ground. Our feet were blistered, and our legs ached at the end of a long day. It was too difficult a trek for inexperienced hikers such as we. Some nights we stayed with peasants whose houses appeared all alone in the middle of nowhere, but my niece and I found we much preferred sleeping out under the stars with the snakes and lizards, rather than subjecting ourselves to the torture of fleas, rats, cockroaches, and the unbearable smells in houses where people and animals shared the same room, covered in the owners’ gobs of spit and pig and chicken excrement. China is a country of smells. You'd have to grow up there not to suffer as Fernanda and I suffered. Luckily, there was plenty of water throughout Hubei province, and we were able to wash ourselves and our clothes quite regularly.
It soon became obvious we were not the only group traveling through the vast Chinese countryside with a long journey ahead. Whole families and entire small villages moved as slowly as a death caravan along the same paths, fleeing hunger and war. It was shockingly sad to see parents carrying their sick, malnourished children, plus old men and women piled into handcarts along with the furniture, bundles, and objects that must have been all the meager family possessions that hadn't been sold. One day a man offered his young daughter to us in exchange for a few copper coins. I was horrified, even more so when I learned that this was commonplace, because daughters, unlike sons, are not valued very highly within the family. My heart broken, I wanted to buy and feed the poor, hungry girl but Lao Jiang angrily forbade it. He said we'd only encourage human trafficking if we participated in it and that furthermore, as soon as word got out, we'd be hounded by hundreds of parents, all with the same aspirations. The antiquarian explained that people had begun to emigrate to Manchuria, fleeing banditry, famines due to droughts or floods, as well as the abusive taxes and murders by military leaders indifferent to the people's misery. Manchuria had been an autonomous state since 1921, governed by the dictator Chang Tso-lin,29 a former warlord. Economic activity was possible given the relative peace there, and the poor were thus arriving en masse.
Immersed in this river of humanity, we continued our journey to Wudang, passing villages that had recently been plundered and burned, the ruins still smoldering amid fields strewn with graves. We often came across regiments of mean-looking soldiers who shot anyone that resisted their thieving and violence. We luckily never suffered anything of the sort. On days we'd seen someone die, or bodies dumped by the side of the road, Fernanda and Biao couldn't sleep or would startle awake. It said a great deal, Lao Jiang commented, that the living would abandon their dead in strange lands without a proper burial in a country where ancestors and family are of the utmost importance.
Fifteen days after we left Hankow—and exactly one month after Fernanda and I had arrived in China—near a place called Yang-chia-fan a group of armed, dirty, ragged-looking young men planted themselves in our way and refused to let us pass. While the soldiers quickly took aim, the children and I, frightened half to death, sought cover behind the horses. One strapping young man walked toward Lao Jiang and, after wiping his hands on his threadbare pants, held out a medium- size folder. The antiquarian opened and carefully examined it. They then began to talk. Both seemed quite calm, and Lao Jiang gave no indication of danger. Though I was dying of curiosity, I didn't ask Biao what they were saying. I was afraid it might unnerve the rest of the group still standing behind their leader and didn't want them to begin firing on us or severing the tendons in our knees. The antiquarian came back a few minutes later. He said something to the soldier in charge, and they all lowered their weapons but remained looking stern. I couldn't help but notice an extreme expression of displeasure cross one of their faces.
“Don't be alarmed,” Lao Jiang said, resting a hand on the saddle of the horse we were hiding behind. “They're young peasant members of the Kungchantang, the Communist Party's revolutionary army.”
“And what do they want?” I whispered.
Lao Jiang furrowed his brow before answering. “It seems, madame, that someone from the Kuomintang let the cat out of the bag.”
“What? How can that be?”
“Calm down,” he entreated, looking worried. “I don't want to believe it was Dr. Sun Yat-sen himself, but he is an old friend of Chicherin, minister of foreign affairs for the Soviet Union,” he reflected out loud. “In any event, the Nationalists and the Communists have been on good terms to date, so it's not going to be easy to discover where the leak occurred.”
“So they know the whole story of the First Emperor's tomb?”
“No. They just know it has something to do with money, with riches. That's all. The Kungchantang, of course, now wants its share. These young men will join our soldiers to help protect us from the Green Gang and the imperialists. That is their mission. The one I was talking to is their leader. His name is Shao.”
That Shao wouldn't take his eyes off Fernanda, and I didn't like it one bit.
“Tell them to stay away from my niece,” I declared.
Political relations between the Kuomintang and the Kungchantang may well have been good, but during our entire strange journey neither the five Nationalist soldiers nor the Communist Shao and his six men said a word to one another, unless it was to argue at the top of their lungs. I think they might have killed one another if they could have, and if I could have, I'd have sent them all to some far-off village. Things were not that simple, however: Every now and then, when least expected, shots and shouting in the distance would make our hair stand on end. Our twelve champions, despite their political differences, would draw their weapons and surround us, hurry us off the trail and hide us behind a nearby mound or hill, protecting us until they were certain the danger had passed. Even so, coexistence had become quite uncomfortable, and by the time we reached the Qin Ling Mountains in mid-October—a month after we'd left the Yangtze in Hankow—I couldn't wait to walk through the monastery door. Unfortunately, the hardest part of our journey was still ahead; our ascent into the mountains would coincide with the start of winter. The stunning green landscapes bathed in white mist took our breath away. It even took our horses’ breath away, although our supplies had dwindled and they were only carrying barely enough food and replacement sandals to last us. We were now wearing coats with enormous, long sleeves—called “sleeves that stop the wind”—and fur hats, but Shao's young peasants braved frigid nights and glacial winds in the same clothes they'd been wearing in Yang-chia-fan. I waited in vain for them to leave, to refuse to travel farther, but the first snowfalls only made them laugh uproariously, and a small fire was enough for them to survive the icy nights. It was clear they were used to the harshness of life.
We finally reached a town called Junzhou.30 Located between Mount Wudang and the Han-Shui, that very same tributary of the Yangtze we'd left behind in Hankow a month and a half earlier, Junzhou was home to the immense, crumbling Jingle Palace. It was an ancient villa that had belonged to Zhu Di,31 third Ming emperor and a devout Taoist, who built almost all the temples in Wudang in the early fifteenth century. We decided it would be a good place to spend the night. Since it was a remote, deserted, and decaying mountain village, there were no inns, of course, so we had to stay with a well-off family. After receiving a considerable sum in payment, they allowed us to use their stables and provided us with a huge pot of a stew made of meat, cabbage, turnip, chestnuts, and ginger. The children and
I had water, but, to my dismay, the rest drank a nasty sorghum liquor that warmed their blood and kept them up most of the night, amid passionate political speeches, party hymns, and boisterous arguments. I didn't see the antiquarian when the children and I curled up next to the animals for warmth, on the smelly straw and blankets. But there he was the next morning before sunrise, silently doing his tai chi before he'd even had his usual cup of hot water for breakfast. Careful not to wake Fernanda and Biao, frozen to the bone, I joined in the exercises, watching the first morning light illuminate a perfectly blue sky and enormous sheer peaks covered in forest, the green hue changing without ever losing any of its intensity.
Lao Jiang turned to me as soon as we'd finished the closing movement.
“The soldiers won't be able to accompany us to the monastery,” he said very seriously.
“I'm so happy to hear that!” I burst out. A lovely warmth was spreading through me despite the cold morning air. Tai chi had an odd way of bringing the body to just the right temperature. According to Lao Jiang, once you'd reached a state of relaxation, your mind and internal energy adjusted to one another like yin and yang. Even though the water in the pots was frozen, I felt splendid, as I did every morning after tai chi. It was no wonder I'd survived a trek of nearly 250 miles after years and years of total inactivity.
“The Green Gang could infiltrate Wudang Monastery, madame.”
“Then let the soldiers come with us.”
“I'm not sure you understand, Elvira,” he replied. I was completely taken aback by his use of my name for the very first time and looked at the antiquarian as if he'd lost his mind, but he paid no attention and continued speaking. “The Kuomintang soldiers could, perhaps, stay in the vicinity of the monastery with special permission from the abbot. The Kungchantang, however, oppose anything they consider superstition and doctrine that goes against the interests of the people. They could use rifle butts and bullets to take their beliefs out on the sacred images, palaces, and temples there. We can't have one and not the other. If the Communists stay, so do the Nationalists.”