Shadow of the Silk Road

by Colin Thubron

  Such a story, he says, emerged from the Tang dynasty, when a garrison commander, besieged by rebels, found his six-hundred-strong force close to starvation. Instead of surrendering, he first killed his wife and fed her to his soldiers, then one by one killed the weaker men and fed them to the stronger. Finally his troops were reduced to a hundred. They were overwhelmed three days before relief came.

  ‘And this has always been held up as glorious in our history–an example of perfect service to the state! So I’ve rewritten it in another spirit. How should it be judged?’ He frowns with a slow, delicate regret. ‘You know, in China we have no tradition of respect for human life. It’s simply not in our past.’ His hands have lifted from his lap and clench at his chest. They look rougher than a scholar’s should; I remember his years in the mines. ‘That is our problem: inhumanity.’

  My hand brushes his arm. I feel for his compassion–surprising myself–a surge of consolation, and I realise that I have never lost some misgiving at this hard land. It is the residue, I know, of the Cultural Revolution.

  Hu Ji says quietly: ‘That’s why the Tiananmen Square massacre could happen.’

  I hear myself ask: ‘Could it happen again?’

  Seconds go by before he says: ‘I don’t think so. We have opened up too much to the world now. We are overseen.’

  Is that the only reason? I wonder. So has nothing really changed? I glance round the restaurant. Twenty years ago the place would have been pompous with the stiff suits and buttoned collars of banqueting bureaucrats. Now there are family groups, business colleagues, teenagers flirting. Yet for a moment my anxiety imagines that all is as before, and that the men sitting in their black or grey jackets, dark shirts, have merely exchanged one uniform for another.

  But Hu Ji is looking at his daughter, says softly: ‘Our culture is starting to change, it’s true.’

  He is seeing it in her; and she answers my unspoken question: ‘I don’t know what my generation would do in revolution. But I think mine are more selfish. They have a conscience. They must decide things for themselves.’

  Her gaze stays innocent on mine. She is twenty-eight, but looks a child. For a moment I do not understand her–the equation of conscience with selfishness is strange. But ever since the Cultural Revolution, she implies–when morality was vested in a near-mystical leadership–the lifeline between authority and virtue had snapped. Responsibility could no longer be displaced upward, but had come to rest, with guilt, in the confines of the self. Implicitly Mingzhao is announcing the death of the whole Confucian order, which places in an immutable hierarchy every person under heaven. Prematurely, smiling back into her earnest face, I imagine a huge, tectonic shift beneath the Chinese surface, as the timeless submission of selfhood to the group loosens into individual life.

  These thoughts are still jostling in bewilderment as the last dumplings vanish down our throats. Hu Ji has relaxed, sighing, over a little glass of rice wine. As a young man, he says, he worked as assistant to the author Shen Congwen, who fell silent under Communism–and something of the old man’s sweetness and liberalism, I think, has survived in him.

  ‘But it’s not true the Red Guards felt no guilt,’ says Mingzhao. ‘My own teacher was beaten brutally, and one of his ex-students still can’t bear to face him. After thirty-seven years, he still can’t bear it.’

  Hu Ji puts down his glass. ‘We were very young. It was like a fever.’

  In his words, unintended, lie a faint reproof to the foreigner. How could I understand? Not even in the intellect, let alone the heart. I was born into a society of other inhumanities.

  Before gloom can gather, Mingzhao asks me brightly: ‘What period would you have liked to live in?’ She enjoys these parlour games.

  ‘It depends if I were rich or poor,’ I laugh. ‘And you?’

  ‘It depends if I were a man or a woman.’

  We turn to her father. Surely he would choose to live under the Tang. But he only smiles, and says uncertainly: ‘The future.’

  The silk flows cold through my hands. Its colours are rich, faintly synthetic. The woman asks forty-five yuan (five dollars) per square foot. She says her cloth comes from the old silk-producing cities of Hangzhou and Suzhou in the east, and I imagine their patterns unchanged since the Sung. They are bustling with dragons and phoenixes, or webbed in a gold skein of flowers.

  It is hard to imagine who would wear them now. They reek of past leisure and artifice. Yet this silk is supremely resilient, temperate to wear, absorbent to dyes, almost rot-proof. When all else has disintegrated in the two-thousand-year-old graves of the Han, their silk gifts and shrouds remain, often thinned to colourless slivers, sometimes shockingly vibrant. By Han times the women of every household cultivated silk, and the whole imperial court was shimmering in a hierarchy of complicated grades: silk unicorns and peacocks, peonies and horses. The Tang emperors, dripping with silks, were portrayed in full-length silk portraits, or riding in silk-curtained chariots flying ceremonial silk banners.

  The Chinese discovered in silk an astonishing tensile strength. It was strung to bows and lutes, and became fishing-lines. Even waterproof silk bags appeared for transporting liquids, and lacquered silk cups. Along with bone and wood, silk became the first surface to be written on. It sanctified imperial edicts and in ritual sacrifice carried messages to the dead. Long after the discovery of paper, books of divination and magic were confined to silk, together with all names of ancestral spirits.

  As a surface for painting, too, this was the most precious. The once vast imperial collections of silk scrolls did not last–in one cataclysm rebel soldiers used them for tents and knapsacks–and from those earliest years only copies or fragments remain. But landscape painting became a near-mystical art. Around its mountains and people–sometimes touched in with brushes made of sable hair or mouse whiskers–the expanses of sky or invisible ocean were given up to unpainted silk. Its lustrous emptiness became a living presence. All solids, said the Taoists, were on their way to nonexistence. The silken void was more real than they: pure spirit.

  Above all, for more than a millennium, silk was used to pay off and soften the nomads ravening beyond the Great Wall. Often it took on the status of currency. As lasting as coin, it became salaries, taxes, tribute. By the first century BC the ancestors of the Huns were exchanging its beauty for their horses. In Rome, beyond the other end of the Silk Road, it began fascinating the rich, and subverting the economy. Long afterwards the Visigoths of Alaric, besieging the tired city, were deflected by a partial ransom of four thousand Chinese silks.

  Feng had an aggressive nose and heavy cheeks, and his eyebrows arched in thick feathers. His Arab ancestors had come along the Silk Road seven hundred years ago, he said, and one of his forebears had been general to the first Ming emperor. Arab and Persian blood made his Hui people more handsome than the Chinese, he laughed. But his teeth were blackened pillars on shrunken gums, and he was running to fat.

  As early as the seventh century these traders had arrived along the Silk Road while their Islam was young, or filtered in through the ports of the South China Sea. But through intermarriage, whatever the man said, they had mostly become indistinguishable from those around them. Perhaps only a cyclical history of revolt and suppression, and the Chinese label ‘Hui’, had persuaded them that they were a nation. Sixty thousand strong in Xian now, they remained avid traders, and Arabic words still littered their talk.

  You roam the streets of their quarter at dusk, sensing new activity. They walk in tall white hats, like chefs, and sometimes dangle beards. In the alleys under the green mosque domes, the stalls are rowdy with kebab-sellers, men kneading five-yard-long noodles, and butchers’ kiosks hung with halal lamb and beef.

  In their chief mosque, the fusion of China with Islam is like artful theatre. You wander through courtyards interlocked like those of a Ming palace, where the stelae are carved alternately in Arabic or Mandarin, and a minaret rises out of a porcelain-tiled pagoda. Stone dragon
s and tortoises coil and slumber here and there, ignorant of the Muslim ban on living images. The roofs tilt and swing above their high-coloured eaves, and across the lintels Chinese birds and flowers flock round Koranic inscriptions. An imam’s sermon booms over loudspeakers from a prayer-hall strung with neon lights. The voice is emphatic, overamplified, but I can barely comprehend a word.

  Then, alongside my disquiet, an excitement rises: it is the stir of things transforming, of peoples intermingling and transmuting one another. This, I recognise, is the merchant’s reality: everything convertible, kaleidoscopic. The purity of cultures, even the Chinese, becomes an illusion. So the hybrid mosque is like a promise or a warning. It is the work of the Silk Road, long ago. Nothing ahead of me, I sense, will be homogeneous, constant. To follow a road is to follow diversity: a flow of interlocked voices, arguing, in a cloud of dust.

  Huang was still dreaming his big dream, and hoping, I think, that I might become part of it. One evening he caught me returning to my hotel, and grasped my arm in sudden conspiracy. He knew a man, he said, who collected things. You understand, things.

  ‘He knows people in the villages, farmers. They find tombs. They go down on ropes with a lamp, and take the things out at night. By day they cover the hole up again.’

  ‘How does this man get them?’

  ‘He stays in a village for two days, three, then he begins to hear who has the antiques. They start to come to him. There are some villages where they’ve become very rich.’

  I said uselessly, knowing these people’s poverty, ‘They’re destroying history.’ Huang was silent. ‘And it must be dangerous.’

  ‘The air in the tombs is very bad. Some have died down there.’

  That night, in a dead-end alley, Huang shouted up at a curtained window. The silhouette of a woman came and went. Then silence. The smuggler presented a moving target, Huang said. His shop was rented for a few months only; so was his house. ‘But you don’t have to buy. Just look. Just look.’

  The door opened on an owlish, sallow face, and we were motioned round the corner. The corrugated-iron gates of a shop rattled up and crashed down again behind us. In its dimness I saw that the man was very young. A pair of thin-rimmed spectacles turned his eyes to weak headlamps. His moustache was a light dust. He looked like the kind of student who was crushed in Tiananmen Square. And his shop showed almost nothing: a few Qing vases and some modern scroll paintings–the usual horses and landscapes. A cover.

  ‘You are interested in these?’ He pointed to some lurid oils by a local painter.

  ‘No, not these.’ I wondered what Huang had told him about me.

  The man hovered behind his counter, fumbled in boxes, and I heard a lock click. His owl’s eyes flickered to mine. Then cautiously he unwrapped something from swathes of cloth, and stood it upright, without speaking. I found myself looking at a Han dynasty terracotta soldier in a blue jerkin with red sleeves, very faded. Its face was smudged away except for a pinch of nose, and its right hand grasped a lost weapon. I’d seen identical pieces in the Shaanxi museum that morning. Perhaps too identical.

  The smuggler said: ‘Two thousand dollars.’

  I circled it uncertainly. It was interesting, unlovable. The smuggler circled it with me, as if afraid I might snatch it. Perhaps he was older than I imagined, I thought. He carried a cold, pedantic authority. One by one he began unwrapping other Han pieces: a yellow dragon coiled in a roundel–the detritus of some building, it seemed; a little incense-burner upheld by stumpy beasts; pieces of green pottery.

  Huang’s chatter drained away against the man’s silence, and we peered at these objects unspeaking across two thousand years. I found no clue for doubting them. This region was riddled with ancient cemeteries, impossible to police. The smuggler dusted the dragon with remote tenderness. Unbelieving, like him, in their efficacy for the dead, I gazed on these only as dissociated objects. Yet once snatched from the context of their tombs, I knew, their scientific value was lost.

  After a while the man began rummaging in his cupboards again, and gentled a statuette out of a cardboard box. This, I sensed, was his real treasure. More than anything that he said, the fluttering care with which he unfolded it, and the tightening in his face, betrayed its value. ‘Tang dynasty,’ he said.

  It was the foot-high figurine of a temple guardian. Its head twisted upward in a leonine roar, its cap’s earflaps were flying out and one fist was raised in fury. It was still coated in earth. He wanted six thousand dollars for it.

  It was, of course, hideous. It was meant to be. I shook my head.

  He said: ‘This comes from an imperial tomb.’

  I asked in disbelief: ‘Which emperor?’

  He answered at once: ‘Taizong.’ So he imagined it early seventh century, and I had no idea if this could be so. He said: ‘This will sell for three hundred thousand dollars in New York.’

  I said: ‘I can’t take it out.’

  ‘I understand.’ He pursed his lips. ‘These are the most risky to take out. But if you have a friend in the embassy, or business contacts in Hong Kong…they can ship it to you anywhere. No questions.’

  ‘No questions,’ echoed Huang.

  I looked back at the statuette indifferently. Huang’s eyes had dilated. ‘You could make big money back home.’

  Then, almost casually, as if in afterthought, the smuggler lifted something heavy from a nest of paper and set it on the counter. ‘Tang dynasty. Only four thousand dollars.’

  I stared at it in shock. In the sordid secrecy of his shop, locked in that yellow light and silence, it was beautiful. A head of Guanyin, the goddess of mercy, almost life size. Under the commotion of her coiffured hair and flower-studded headdress, the face was stilled into an abstract peace. The deep double curve of the brows above the near-closed eyes imposed a geometric severity. In this stone diagram the delicate nose and mouth made no disturbance. Carved from the white local granite, she might have been sleeping.

  The man sensed my quickened interest. ‘I can put you in touch with someone in Hong Kong…’

  I gazed at the face in a turmoil of indecision. It was in Tang dynasty China that the mustachioed Indian Bodhisattva, who ushered souls to paradise, underwent a sex change and became the goddess Guanyin. Perhaps those serenely androgynous features recorded the moment of transition. If genuine, the head was all but priceless. But I had no way to know, no way to save it. I glanced back at the smuggler. I wanted to despise him. But he looked clouded, abstract. Beneath his drift of boyish hair shone a scholar’s forehead, polished like eggshell. I wondered vaguely: if I denounced him, would he be executed? A life for a statue.

  Perhaps it was to save myself, or him, that I began to decide the head was fake. It was surely too smooth, too perfect? Where was its body? And why did he value it less than the tomb guardian? If it was a forgery, I concluded in bewilderment, it was pure kitsch. I stared at it again, in frustration. The face was a radiant blank: a receptacle for people’s dreams. Gently I put it back in its paper nest, and covered it over.

  For a while the smuggler talked of other, exculpating things: the rash of urban unemployment, the hardships of peasant life. Then his interest faded. He sensed me slipping away. A few minutes later the iron gate rattled down and he was gone, leaving Huang and me in the unlit alley.

  For an hour or two I put the goddess’s head out of my mind. Only afterwards, over several days, I wondered in misery if perhaps it were not genuine. Then I would stray into daydream. I imagined myself years hence, wandering the Chinese galleries of the Metropolitan or the British Museum, and coming across a cabinet of new acquisitions. There, chastened, I would gaze into its face in recognition: ‘Head of Avalokitesvara (Guanyin). Tang dynasty, 8th century AD. Provenance unknown.’

  In the glare of the restaurant, under his black helmet of hair, Huang’s eyes were burning with their own frustration. For a long time the sweet-and-sour pork lay untouched between his hands, while his words stammered out like firecrackers. He had
just given in his notice.

  The catalyst had been a casual e-mail from the Brazilian lawyer; then Huang’s impatience had grown unbearable. ‘My friend write me from Brazil: “Mr Huang, you can work in business for a Brazilian company.” This sentence very important to my heart. Now what does this mean, do you think? “You can work in business for…”’ He repeated it like a spell, as if the words contained something they would not yield up. What was their true essence? “‘You can work…” ’

  I felt fear for him again. What would he do? He knew no word of Portuguese. And what would the lawyer feel when Mr Huang turned up on his doorstep?

  ‘My father was very angry,’ he said. ‘Because my job is good, powerful. Many people want such a job. But he knows that since I grew up I have had this big dream. I tell him: I will be all right, I have some English and a clever heart. Then my father understand.’

  ‘You must try to find a Chinese trading company,’ I said, ‘somewhere you can use your Mandarin.’

  ‘Trading? How is that spelt?’ He took out his notepad. ‘T…r…a…’

  ‘But what about your wife and daughter?’

  His eyes sank to his meal. ‘Oh, this is my big problem.’ He poked at the sweet-and-sour. ‘First time I tell my wife she’s very angry. One week, don’t touch me! Don’t even speak with me! I understand her thought. But later I explain everything to her mother, who knows that my heart and my dream are very big, and that I will develop good business. So at last my wife says okay, okay, I understand you.’ But he looked rueful. ‘You know our women are very strong, too strong. Seventy per cent, I’d say, are stronger than their men…’

  ‘Will your wife come with you?’

  ‘The first year I am alone. Then when I’ve made a good life, my wife come over to find job. My daughter will go to my mother, maybe to my wife’s mother. Sometimes here, sometimes there–no problem! They all love her, they all want her.’