Once on a Moonless Night

by Dai Sijie

  “I remember seeing one of those arrows,” Tumchooq adds, “at the bottom of a metal box that my mother always kept padlocked; in among her jewellery, some old stamps, official family documents and ration tickets for rice and oil, wrapped in blue brocade decorated with little pearls and tied with a thin yellow silk ribbon was a sheath made of rhinoceros horn, also tied round with yellow silk ribbon. It housed a wooden arrow thirty centimetres long, which, unusually, was painted white; one end was tapered and black, fitted with a rusted iron head, the other still had the vestiges of fletching with balding feathers, and it had a small whistle attached to it: an ancient Chinese invention which dates back several centuries, a sort of flute shaped like a tiny gourd, as thin and light as an empty eggshell; and, if you looked with a magnifying glass, you could see Chinese characters engraved on it: Cixi’s name and title in stylised form. Long ago these were known as coded whistle-arrows. When a general received one of these, falling from the sky, sent by Her Majesty, he had to act immediately on the instructions secretly implied by the arrow, its secret so closely guarded that the sender would not allow herself to write it down or have it transmitted by word of mouth.”

  Tumchooq and I were now heading towards the communal living quarters for the employees of the Forbidden City, where his mother lived; although, he claimed, she had gone to work, even though it was Sunday.

  “Eighteen seventy-four saw a key event in Cixi’s life,” he went on. “After thirteen years as regent she had to restore imperial authority to her son, Tongzhi, the child emperor who had now grown up and reached the age of maturity: eighteen. The law of the Empire requiring Cixi to renounce all power would deprive her of the only pleasure she had known in widowhood. Like a pre-programmed death. Soon she would be the subject of monstrous slander, accused of causing the downfall of the Empire, bringing disaster on the entire country and having blood on her hands. Her victims’ families would testify to her cruelty and perversity, making a tally of the dead and clamouring for her head. I think those twelve arrows asked her favourite great-nephew to avenge her or save her from Hell.”

  When Tumchooq lifted the lid on the box that belonged to his mother I stood for a long time looking at that fascinating arrow, its slender, pointed end made of lead pocked with greenish rust, which I feel I can still see gleaming before my eyes to this day. I couldn’t help bringing it up to my mouth and was tempted to dab it with the tip of my tongue to see whether it was poisoned, when I had an idea: Had Cixi ordered her great-nephew to carry out an assassination? Did she simply want to hear this arrow whistling through the air or did she, in fact, want to see it piercing the chest—the very heart—of the son who had driven her from the throne?

  Neither Mulian Saves His Mother nor The White Arrow was played out on the stage of history, but the pages written then were worthy of the darkest noir fiction: Emperor Tongzhi had barely assumed power and started presiding single-handed over Court audiences in the Palace of Eternal Peace, when he was struck down by a violent illness—smallpox, according to the diagnosis of Court doctors—and died the following year, 1875, at the age of nineteen. Shortly afterwards an official announcement stated that his wife, who was pregnant, had brought an end to two lives, hers and that of the future hereditary prince she carried in her belly a suicide called into question by most historians, some of whom even suspect Cixi was so incapable of renouncing power that she assassinated her son, daughter-in-law and unborn grandson. In any event, Cixi, Her Majesty the Master of China, still bearing the title of dowager empress, installed her nephew Guangxu on the throne, another child emperor who was just four, descended from the same lineage and of the same generation as his predecessor, Tongzhi.

  It was the most contested succession in Chinas history. Cixi was trampling a sacred protocol which had seen the Empire perpetuated for two thousand years: when an emperor died without an heir, his succession had to be secured by a child from the imperial family, but from a different lineage and of the previous generation. Any breach of this Confucian law risked the collapse of the Empire. Cixi’s method for silencing protests proved simple, efficient and irrevocable: any ministers or courtiers who confronted her were condemned to decapitation, with the exception of just one or two who were each granted the favour of being sent a long, sturdy silk belt embroidered with celestial landscapes and graciously offered by the merciful dowager empress for them to hang themselves and, therefore, have the privilege of arriving in the afterlife with their bodies intact.

  No one will ever know the true causes of the Empires collapse. Was it pure coincidence? The combination of several negative events? Or simply the inevitable consequence, foretold by Confucian law, of Tongzhi’s illegal succession by Guangxu? The latter grew up in turn, took power, initiated political and economic reforms and was eventually brought down by his aunt Cixi and imprisoned on an islet in the middle of the lake within the Forbidden City. He died aged thirty-seven, in 1908, also childless. The ultimate mystery was that Cixi, unable to resist her own impulses, installed another child emperor on the throne, only to die the following day. Two years later the dynasty was overthrown and replaced by the Republic. A new era dawned.

  “In 1975,” Tumchooq told me, “a hundred years after Guangxu was appointed as heir, I read a book which was banned at the time, called The Secret Biography of Cixi. It was given to me by Ma, an old friend from primary school, who’d moved away to Sichuan just before the Cultural Revolution to join his parents, who were both doctors. We hadn’t seen each other for about ten years and I didn’t actually recognise him straight away. He was sitting on the ground outside my house. I thought he was a beggar at first, because he was so thin and dirty and raggedy. The State had sent him off to some mountain in Sichuan for seven years to be re-educated by so-called revolutionary peasants. Poor as he was, he’d come to give me that book. I could have cried. He’d travelled by train—but like a vagrant, without a ticket—for three days and three nights. No one else in the world would have done that for me. I’m sure they wouldn’t. He’d found the book on the black market and swapped it for another banned book, the second volume of Jean-Christophe, a French novel translated by Fu Lei. His favourite novel. I remember asking him what he’d done with the first volume. ‘I gave it to a doctor who did some important stuff for a girlfriend’—‘What sort of stuff?’—‘An abortion.’ Silence. ‘Your girlfriend?’—‘No, Luo’s, a friend who was sent to be re-educated in the same village as me.’ Ma had other friends besides me. Lots of friends. He always did, wherever he went. People being re-educated, locals, prisoners, thieves, tramps, girls, boys, young, old. I didn’t. I’m lonely as a red-haired horse. My life, no, let’s say the chapter on friendship, began with Ma and he’s still the only protagonist.

  “The Secret Biography of Cixi was published in 1948, six years before I was born. It’s a minor historical masterpiece written by Tang Li, a professor at Peking University. I think of him as a geographer devoting the best years of his life, if not his whole life, to studying a river, following it all the way up to its source, in a boat or on foot, stopping every now and then and pursuing a tributary, however small and remote and insignificant it may be, so that eventually he knows the river by heart the way a lover knows his partner’s body. It’s the only decent book with a few well-documented pages about the life of Seventy-one.”

  Tumchooq lent me that book, which took me on a journey through the vast labyrinth that is an imperial family, a dynasty. Limited until then to school history books, I felt with every page I turned that I was finally getting somewhere in my understanding of China.

  I was impressed, among other things, by the family tree drawn up by the author in the chapter about the illegitimacy of Tongzhi’s succession by Guangxu. A representation as clear and precise as an anatomical illustration with all the ramifications of blood vessels, veins and prolific, converging arteries. By following one of these branches I found the name Zai Lan, followed by the word “Seventy-one” in brackets, born to one of the great lineages o
f direct imperial descent which ended two generations after him.

  There is no doubt Cixi knew every detail of this genealogy by heart, the author pointed out. She knew, her clan knew, the Court knew that when Tongzhi died the only legitimate heir by his relationship and degree of descent was Zai Lan, the dowager empress’s favourite great-nephew. But in Cixi’s eyes he had a fatal flaw: he was thirteen years old, nine years older than Guangxu.

  Nine years! She must have counted those nine years again and again. As the author of the biography related, during the first weeks of mourning for her son, she spent days on end calculating, weighing up the pros and cons, wandering like a ghost through the huge gardens of her palace in the middle of the night. Sometimes she was so exhausted that she asked to be carried by her great eunuch, Li Lianying, so that she could continue her nocturnal walk all the way to the Pavilion of Silk Worms, a luxurious place she adored, lit by flickering lantern flames. She would sit between the racks waiting for inspiration as she watched one of the countless caterpillars metamorphose into a beautiful moth. She eventually made up her mind, choosing the other child to reign, because, although illegal, he would guarantee her nine more years’ enjoyment of the absolute pleasure of being Her Majesty the Master of China. More’s the pity!

  No one would have believed [wrote the historian] that the thirteen-year-old adolescent, Cixi’s great-nephew, would be able to recover from such frustration: on the threshold of an earthly paradise, within reach of the throne borne by dragons, he was thrown out. All the politicians, of aristocratic descent or otherwise, thought he was lost. His family was disgraced. No one ever stopped outside their residence to the west of the Pavilion of Peace, not any more, no prestigious visitors in palanquins, no nobles in carriages, once so numerous they created bottlenecks and their drivers argued for space with local porters. The cacophony of noise and shouts fell silent. The Court intendant stopped sending generous or at least symbolic gifts to mark special occasions. When, at the age of sixteen, he married the daughter of a low-ranking administrator, the ceremony was held in his quarters in a low-ceilinged, all but deserted room. At about this time he started visiting instructors in the art of the pipa (a sort of Chinese lute). They gradually put him back on his feet and one of them—a blind man who was both a musician and a soothsayer and whose word was respected as an oracle by the population of Peking as well as in the realm of martial arts—predicted his future, a prediction that remained confidential with the exception of one sentence: “The flame of your life will be extinguished at the age of seventy-one.” From that day Zai Lan adopted this number as a nickname, as if trying to master his own destiny. A neutral nickname with no social or political complexion, but sufficiently mysterious for some to perceive it as a code name for a clandestine anti-Western organisation which would go on to be a driving force in the Boxer Rising years later.

  As well as for the pipa, Seventy-one earned a tremendous reputation in the art of falconry; each of his eagles, bred from pure royal strains, wore a bell attached to one foot, and this would ring even when the bird was invisible, flying one or two hundred metres above Peking. He used his own money to publish a work called The Art of Falconry, written in delicious rhyming verse in the same style as nomadic songs. Always respecting the rules of alliteration (according to which the two or four lines constituting each rhyme have to begin with the same sound), he guides us one step at a time through a vast field: he examines the vitreous body of the eagles eye with a magnifying glass, analyses their sight and the colour changes in their feathers, studies the best places to train and fly them, the influence of meteorological conditions and warm and cold airstreams, gives details of their diet, which must not include pork, and explains how to prepare meat for them, including how it must be stewed in spring and autumn; he establishes medical diagnoses based on the colour of their droppings, indicates relevant remedies copied from old books … A fascinating work, even in the censored version amputated of the chapter on the art of divination based on interpreting eagles’ flight, probably learned from his blind pipa instructor. During the Boxer Rising, which erupted in 1900, various collaborators of Western powers thought they detected a coded language in his book, claiming the rebels used a sort of mnemonic process taking the rhymes at the beginning of each phrase to memorise orders from their superiors and transmit them by word of mouth so that no written message could ever fall into enemy hands. When it comes to finding a scapegoat, human imagination knows no limits.

  Seventy-one’s personality [the historian goes on in such a professorial tone that I felt I could almost hear his voice ringing round a lecture theatre] is a perfect illustration of what is known in psychoanalysis as the frustration complex. Like every frustration, the one he experienced at the age of thirteen engendered aggression. Granted, he never attacked his great-aunt Cixi, remaining loyal to her to the end, as required by the Confucian moral code, but he demonstrated violent tendencies when he met Cixi’s new allies, the Westerners, and this coincided with the hostility the whole country displayed towards enemy powers at the end of the nineteenth century Seventy-one used to send his sovereign reports about crimes committed by European missionaries, and some of these were circulated at Court and spread widely through the streets of the city On the strength of the injustice he had suffered and his legendary marginal status, Seventy-one became so popular that, when the Boxer crisis struck, Cixi asked for his help and appointed him as a senior member of the State Council to act as an intermediary between herself and the rebels. At the end of this blood-soaked episode, the eight Western powers—including Great Britain, France, Germany and Russia—invaded Peking again; history was repeating itself: acts of revenge, palaces ransacked, pillage, arson, rape and the signature of a peace treaty. In the text of the treaty, between the first article (in which China was to concede a significant portion of territory to each of the eight allied countries) and the third (stating there would be astronomical payments), the second focused exclusively on the personal fate of Seventy-one: Chinese government authorities undertook to condemn Prince Zai Lan, senior member of the State Council, to decapitation. In their great leniency and out of respect for the empress, the allied countries agreed the criminal should be granted mercy, his punishment taking the form of permanent exile beyond the Great Wall, in Manchuria, but he could not be granted imperial amnesty.

  His farewells were the most dramatic I have ever known. He was exiled to a minor district of Manchuria where countless anti-Western rebels had perished before him. Acting on Seventy-one’s orders, his wife had had an aviary built so that, with special permission from the law courts, he could take his eagles with him. Day after day the dimensions of the aviary grew, adding new levels until there were four storeys of small compartments, because his friends, his admirers and even complete strangers came in droves to offer him birds, the poorest of them bringing humble chickens. It was a Noah’s Ark: eagles, nightjars, turtledoves, cranes, mandarin ducks, parrots, cockatoos, nightingales, canaries, red-beaked crows, tawny owls, barn owls, pigeons, flamingos, swallows, pheasants, skylarks, magpies, kingfishers, pelicans, storks, grebes, woodpeckers, sparrows, chaffinches, hoopoes, cockerels, hens, ducks, geese … As dawn broke one morning in late autumn, escorted like a criminal by a dozen Chinese soldiers and wearing a wooden yoke round his neck, he left the city in which he had spent all thirty-eight years of his life. He had barely stepped through the West Gate of Peking before the soldiers took off the yoke so he could breakfast with them in a small inn, but a group of horsemen from the army of the foreign powers caught up with them. Speaking through a translator, the captain announced the order given by the commander in chief, General Valleri, to kill all the birds on the spot to ensure they did not become messengers between the exiled prince and Peking’s last remaining rebels. The horsemen dismounted, guns in hand, loaded their weapons, arranged themselves in a firing line and opened fire at point-blank range on the aviary. Strangled squawking and frantic flapping of wings in the blood-splattered Noah’s Ark.
According to some witnesses, Seventy-one completely lost his head at the sight of this massacre and punctured his own eyeballs with a knife he found in the inn’s kitchen. After a month-long journey he arrived in Manchuria blind and mad, with his gigantic empty aviary, which, for many years to come, he took with him on weekly authorised trips deep into the Manchurian desert. His children would steer the little cart over to a dune and he would approach the empty aviary, his hands easily identifying the spaces originally reserved for eagles. He stroked the bamboo bars, inhaled the smell left by his birds of prey, lifted his face to the sky and admired their invisible flight, revelling in the long, mournful ringing of their bells. He called them by name, giving them a succession of incomprehensible instructions and orders to attack. His cries rang out in the infinite desert, fierce as a shepherd gathering his flock, filled with hatred and bitterness. Eventually he would put on the thick leather gauntlet that covered his arm up to the elbow, and raise his arm so they could come to rest on it while he stood like a pillar of salt on the sand dune.