The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China

by Huan Hsu

  San Yi Po instructed me to hold them lightly between my fingertips and knock them together, an old trick to determine the authenticity of silver. Other metals made a dull jangle, but silver would ring clean and pure. I balanced a coin on each of my middle fingers and brought them together. They produced a crystalline, high-pitched chime, as a sparkle would sound, that reverberated through the room. Proof.

  MY GRANDMOTHER GRADUATED FROM GINLING WOMEN’S College with a chemistry degree in June 1937, just six months before the Japanese would occupy Nanjing and begin the Rape of Nanking. The afternoon of the graduation ceremony, her entire class served as bridesmaids in a classmate’s wedding. They wore custom-made light green qipaos and daisy chains in their hair and split into two lines that the bride walked between. The class had pooled their money to buy a set of Jingdezhen porcelain and charged my grandmother with ordering the gift, having it inscribed in Jiujiang, and sending it to the newlyweds. But by the time the porcelain was ready to mail, the war had begun, and my grandmother, in a hurry to leave, left the set at home in Xingang. She never found out if her family mailed the gift for her, or what happened to her classmate. Many years later, once my grandmother was in Taiwan, she cleared her conscience by donating a sum of money to Ginling in the name of the class of 1937.

  The Rulison school wanted my grandmother to return to Jiujiang and teach, but she had gotten used to her freedom. In spite of the war, missionary schools all over China were hiring, and Ginling graduates were in high demand, especially one with a minor in education like my grandmother. Her parents were long dead, the age difference with her sisters had prevented her from developing a close bond with them, and she had no interest in living anywhere near the thumb of her grandfather as an adult. Eager to explore a new part of China, and still angry at her grandfather for preventing her from going to medical school, she accepted a job with Union Normal School for Girls in Guangzhou.

  By then Republic of China president Chiang Kai-shek was waging battles against the Japanese throughout northern and central China. The south, however, remained relatively peaceful, and my grandmother wrote back to Xingang that she had arrived safely in Guangzhou. But just a few days later, the Japanese began bombing the city, targeting transportation and military assets but hitting schools and missions, too. The Union leadership moved the institution into the countryside and rented an abandoned school, but less than a month later the Japanese began to use the school as a landmark for lining up their bombing runs on the train station. Every day Japanese planes circled the school to orient themselves, flew off to drop a bomb, and returned for another pass as the terrified Union teachers and students took shelter in the basement, unsure if a bomb might also fall on them. The school moved again, this time to the neutral territory of Macau, a privilege not afforded to public Chinese schools, which stuck it out in the countryside and hoped for the best. The Union students and teachers crammed into rowboats, covered with tarps and launched at intervals to prevent drawing attention from the Japanese, and floated south to Macau.

  While my great-great-grandfather made his harrowing escape to Chongqing, my grandmother remained tucked away in paradise. Macau’s skies were uncluttered with bombers, its streets clear of soldiers, and Union had created a campus out of a group of vacant houses near the beach. Despite the war raging across the border, the school’s laboratory remained fully stocked with chemicals and equipment. Everything my grandmother requested, including scripts for the drama club that she advised, could be procured. My grandmother taught chemistry and natural sciences, and her students scored well on their college entrance exams; many of them went on to become departmental heads at various universities or physicians, fulfilling my grandmother’s dream by proxy. After dinner she would descend the hill and spend the last bit of light walking the seaside. On weekends the teachers took in Deanna Durbin musicals at the movie theater.

  My grandmother was introduced to a Hong Kong hotelier who sought an English and Mandarin speaker to tutor his children. Soon she was taking the ferry to Hong Kong during vacations and staying in the Metropole Hotel in the city center. In the evenings she would visit her old chemistry lab partner from Ginling. They would go out for a movie and ice cream or, if it was particularly hot that night, cool off by riding the ferry to Kowloon and back, chatting and watching the lights in Victoria Harbor.

  My grandmother remembered her years in Macau as the most blissful period of her life. Then, in December 1941, on the same day as the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces invaded Hong Kong. The badly outnumbered British colony fought for more than two weeks before surrendering on Christmas Day. That cut off Macau’s primary supply line. What little food that got into Macau became more and more expensive, until nothing came at all. My grandmother ventured out one day to buy some biscuits and had them stolen right out of her hand. A male teacher happened to be behind her and snatched the biscuits back. Bodies accumulated in the streets and on the doorstep of the Union campus. Rumors of cannibalism spread, and the school’s ayis made it a daily habit to go out and look at the carcasses. No one dared to go out at night. My grandmother began to think about making a run for it back to Chongqing.

  At the time the Kuomintang was desperate for skilled manpower and enticed educated overseas Chinese back to the mainland with jobs, free housing, and free postsecondary schooling, plus a monthly stipend. My grandmother found a travel partner in another Union teacher, and they entered China through Guangzhou Bay, which was still a French territorial holding. From there they went through Guangxi and Guizhou, walking, riding boats, and hitching rides with Kuomintang military trucks, sitting on top of sacks of rice and canned goods as dust kicked up by the tires covered them head to toe. They carried just a single large bag each, packed with clothing and food. My grandmother left everything else, including all her letters and an entire suitcase full of photographs, in Macau. They bivouacked in filthy roadside inns, wrapping themselves in their own clean bedding in a futile attempt to ward off critters, but were so exhausted that they slept through the bedbug attacks.

  But that would be as bad as it got. And the coolies and porters who carried their bags treated them honorably. After four weeks on the road, my grandmother reached Chongqing. She bunked in a residence for returning Chinese until she found one of her former science professors from Ginling, who used to host pancake and milk breakfasts on the weekends for his students, and who arranged for her to live with another married couple. The professor also introduced her to the director of the education ministry, who saw my grandmother’s chemistry degree and assigned her to the ballistics research laboratory in a munitions factory that had relocated from Nanjing.

  The arsenal dated back to 1865, when a Qing viceroy set up the Jinling Manufacturing Bureau. In the aftermath of the Opium War defeats, a group of Qing officials argued for the adoption of Western weaponry and military technology. These “self-strengtheners” proposed opening arsenals and shipyards in each major port, and the Jinling Arsenal, as it became known, was soon making guns, shells, and even rockets. But the self-strengthening movement was concerned only with developing modern armaments, not social change, and like most of the last-gasp Qing reforms, it had a brief period of growth followed by a sharp decline. By the time the Kuomintang took control of the arsenal in 1934, its physical plant was so badly outdated that the new government had to start from scratch.

  A supervisor at the munitions factory, believing that women should marry, especially in wartime, introduced my grandmother to a metallurgist from the materials and testing department. He was tall, liked to eat peanuts and play basketball, and came from Hubei province, Jiangxi’s neighbor to the northwest. They married about six months later. I’d asked my grandmother about her first impressions of my grandfather. “It wasn’t as if I took one look and liked him or loved him,” she said. “My professor said to not stay single, it’s better if you’re married, so I listened. I didn’t marry him because I liked him. They just told me that being married was safer and more conve
nient. So we got married. Whatever.”

  During my grandparents’ courtship, my grandfather’s apprentice, a teenager named Chang Guo Liang, delivered the letters they wrote back and forth, walking about an hour between the two departments. Chang Guo Liang remained at my grandfather’s side when the munitions factory returned to Nanjing after the Sino-Japanese War and when the family fled to Taiwan. As the ablest man in the group, he helped them out of plenty of tight situations and literally became part of the family. He lived with them for many years, and when he married, my mother and her brothers called his wife by the kinship term for “sister-in-law.” Now in his eighties, he lived in Kaohsiung, on Taiwan’s southern tip and the island’s second-largest city, where my mother had grown up. Both my grandmother and San Yi Po had told me that he might still have a porcelain jar from my great-great-grandfather’s collection.

  AS I HEADED SOUTH FROM TAIPEI, THE COUNTRYSIDE wrinkled into green folds. Soon I entered Taiwan’s mountainous tea country. Chinese tea culture stretches back thousands of years, when emperors insisted that their tea be picked only by virgins who—for fear it would taint their crops—weren’t allowed to eat anything smelly or spicy for two weeks beforehand. Mainland China’s most famous tea region, Wuyishan, a range of craggy, fog-bound peaks in Fujian province, was described in a Tang dynasty monograph as having the perfect conditions for growing tea. Taiwan’s mountains offered some of the same growing conditions as Wuyishan, and British entrepreneurs set up plantations on them during the nineteenth century with seedlings from Wuyishan’s tea trees. As the story went, those seedlings developed unique characteristics in Taiwan that altered the processing slightly, which resulted in a distinctive flavor. “But you can’t say they’re different,” one tea expert told me. “Their environment made them this way.”

  When the Japanese arrived in 1895, they codified the tea tradition, developing rituals around its brewing, serving, and drinking. Fifty years later the Kuomintang brought the remnants of China’s tea culture; they might have lost the mainland, but they were going to preserve their history and traditions in Taiwan. Children in Taiwan grew up hearing that they were the fuxing de jidi, or revival base, for Chinese culture.

  While mainland China suffered under trade embargoes until 1971, Taiwanese tea became an important export. The chayiguan, or teahouse, appeared. Chinese teahouses were traditionally rest stops for travelers to eat, drink, and take in an opera performance, but Taiwan’s were for cultured people. Chayiguans served high-quality teas, developed an etiquette for brewing and drinking tea, and perhaps most important, provided a place for political dissidents to meet when martial law was still in place.

  When China opened and Taiwanese began returning to the mainland, they brought their tea—and their tea culture—with them. It was this tea culture, born in China and nurtured in Taiwan, that began the rediscovery of Chinese culture by the mainland and was inexorably linked to porcelain. The connection of tea with everyday life, including the vessels used to prepare and drink it, was the beginning of modern China’s reacquaintance with its ancient traditions.

  THE MAIN DOOR to Chang Guo Liang’s apartment on the southern outskirts of Kaohsiung was open, and through the mosquito screen I saw him jump out of his chair, almost tripping as he ran to greet me, while a toy poodle mix yapped. Chang Guo Liang was a compact man with white hair, a large nose, and a pinched expression that made me think of a hare. He wore gray slacks, a red T-shirt, and socks with individual toes that gave him little purchase on the bare floor.

  All his years in Taiwan had done little to affect his native Sichuan accent, which sometimes made him difficult to understand while we sat in his living room and talked. I had not learned of his existence until recently, but he knew all about me from my grandmother, whom he phoned regularly. His house was spare, the kind of concrete box that Chinese people furnished but never seemed to finish. A three-dimensional photograph of Jesus knocking on a door stood on a shelf, a piece of embroidery that read “Always Rejoice” hung on the wall, and an old Mitsubishi sewing machine was tucked into the corner. Chang Guo Liang’s twelve-year-old grandson, Stanley, slouched on the sofa and watched cartoons while he played a handheld video game.

  It was late afternoon, still light enough for a stroll, so Chang Guo Liang changed into a collared shirt and slipped into silver and blue running shoes. We wound our way out of the mammoth apartment complex and headed toward a small river that Chang Guo Liang followed for his daily walks. He wanted to show me the old arsenal where my grandparents had worked. The surrounding area had been rice paddies and sugarcane fields when my grandparents first arrived, and much of it didn’t appear far removed from those days. The rest had been colonized by major thoroughfares, new high-rises, shopping centers, and plastics factories. A frightening number of feral dogs roamed the empty lots.

  Chang Guo Liang was born in 1925 in a village near Chongqing. His parents were porcelain merchants. He remembered Japanese warplanes bombing Chongqing in 1938 and the city burning for days on end. The movement of consumer goods effectively stopped after that, and although the family had no political leanings, Chang Guo Liang’s father asked a family friend to get Chang Guo Liang a job in the arsenal where my grandmother worked; he would be safer there than in the army. He was assigned to my grandfather’s department to do metallography—cutting material, polishing it, and then inspecting it under a microscope. Chang Guo Liang had only a middle school education, but he was bright and quickly picked up the names of the different alloys and how to test them. As my grandfather rose to become the head of the department, he brought Chang Guo Liang with him.

  In 1947, two years after the Japanese surrendered, the munitions factory returned to Nanjing. From Chongqing my grandparents, their two infant children, and Chang Guo Liang boarded the Tian Xiang Lun, or “Heavenly Peace,” of the Minsheng line, the largest privately owned shipping company in China at the time, and steamed east on the Yangtze. Chang Guo Liang remembered the wind sweeping veils of sand from the tops of the cliffs as they passed through the Three Gorges and Yangtze River dolphins flipping and rolling in the ship’s wake near Dongting Lake. They stopped in Jiujiang to buy household items, but the water was low and a rowboat had to transfer them to shore. My grandmother, pregnant with Richard, was able to see San Gu, Pei Ke, and Cong Ji, who were all at Rulison in the city, but didn’t make it back to Xingang to visit her grandfather. By the time they returned to the ship, the weather had changed; the waves swelled and their caps turned white. Docking the rowboat next to the ship for reboarding was a dangerous maneuver that risked being smashed against the hull or carried downstream by the swift current. Somehow Chang Guo Liang managed to hook the rope with a gaff and saved the day.

  My grandparents lived in Nanjing for less than two years before Chiang Kai-shek sounded the retreat to Taiwan. Everyone rushed to leave before the ports closed. My grandparents, their three children, and Chang Guo Liang arrived in Shanghai in the middle of winter and moved into a ramshackle dormitory made of bamboo and mud near the pier in Wusong, the site of China’s first railway. Much of the mud had fallen off, and when the wind blew, snowflakes swirled in their room. Without running water or a stove, Chang Guo Liang trudged thirty minutes past frozen ponds and streams and dead automobiles to fetch hot water, his hands numb despite wearing two pairs of gloves.

  While my grandfather’s unit waited for its boat, my grandmother took the children to stay with an old Rulison classmate who had married a high-ranking customs officer. Then one day my grandfather appeared and told them to get their things; the boat was leaving. Each person was allowed two pieces of luggage. My grandmother left a few cases of belongings with her classmate, who in turn gave my grandmother a gold ring for safekeeping. My grandmother’s belongings were all taken by the Communists, and the classmate never got out of China, suffering greatly during the various movements against intellectuals and elites, but my grandmother managed to return the ring after China reopened.

  The family boarded th
e ship on January 2, 1949. Richard celebrated his first birthday on the boat. At the mouth where the Huangpu joined the Yangtze, they passed the wreckage of the Jiangya, sunk a month before by a Japanese mine and claiming more than two thousand lives. While my grandmother and her family stayed in a passenger cabin, Chang Guo Liang slept on deck with the rest of the single men. He wore as many layers as he could fit, and it was still cold. He got seasick. “Nothing was convenient,” he said.

  My family did manage to bring with them a crate of Jingdezhen porcelains, perhaps bought in Jiujiang during the shopping trip on the way to Nanjing. My mother remembered seeing the wooden case in the closet in Taiwan when she was young, stacks of blue and white plates and bowls and covered jars for salt and fermentation. Over the years the pieces broke or got lost. None of them survived.

  The ship sailed for three days before landing in Kaoshiung. Everyone who had been shivering with cold in Shanghai stripped to their undershirts to cope with the tropical climate. As they entered the harbor, they could see farm girls standing on the pier, dressed in pointed hats and wooden clogs. They lived in tents for a month, subsisting on moldy brown rice, eaten out of government-issued metal bowls. “It was so can,” Lewis once told me, using a word for “miserable.” Part of the poverty stemmed from Chiang Kai-shek’s policy of destroying resources instead of moving them to Taiwan; he didn’t want to leave anything for the new Communist regime, even if it meant that his loyalists on the island would suffer. “God, he was such a son of a bitch,” Lewis said. “I fucking hate Chiang Kai-shek.”

  Lewis was originally supposed to stay on the mainland. My grandfather thought Lewis was too difficult a child and wanted to leave him with Pei Sheng, but my grandmother insisted that the family stay together. (Later, during the Cultural Revolution, when Taiwan was awash with images of the Red Guards running amok, my grandmother would joke, “Thank God we brought Lewis with us. Otherwise he’d have been the leader of the Red Guards for sure.”)