The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China

by Huan Hsu

  “I remember very clearly, I was twenty years old, just graduated from high school, and ready to take the gaokao,” Chen Bang Ning said. “But there was none that year, and we all came over here to smash things.”

  “Why did you do it?” I said.

  “You didn’t have a choice. If you didn’t go, you were labeled as a reactionary. They smashed all the Buddhas and dragged out the monks trying to protect them. I didn’t smash anything, but I went along.”

  I asked to see old Jiujiang, but Chen Bang Ning said that other than a few houses on one street, nothing from my grandmother’s time was left. So we walked to the Yangtze and climbed up the levee to see the water, the color of a dirty mop and catching the apocalyptic sun’s colors. Cargo ships drifted in both directions, dwarfed by the wide river. Xingang was about ten kilometers downstream, Chen Bang Ning said.

  We walked back to one of the lakes that Jiujiang arranged itself around and boarded a city bus for Tang Hou Cun’s house. Along the way Chen Bang Ning pointed to a building in the distance, where San Gu spent many years before going to live with Liu Cong Ji in Shandong. “During the Cultural Revolution, I worried so much that she’d commit suicide,” Chen Bang Ning said. “I’d visit her every week to check on her. And she was worried that they would pick me up. We all had culture, so we suffered. We were considered bad people. It’s amazing how those events determine the lives of everyone afterward. They could have so easily been in each other’s positions. It’s all luck.”

  Chen Bang Ning told me that I was the first member of the family to visit since Lewis had passed through in 1985 on business. “When Lewis came, we were probably the equivalent of Taiwan in the fifties, but we’d already started to improve,” he said. “And the last twenty-five years, each day has been better than the last. You see how much of a country’s development depends on the ups and downs of life? The politics weren’t right for us, but they are now.”

  Tang Hou Cun lived in a bright three-bedroom unit on the fifth floor of a six-story low-rise for retired electric company employees. He was my grandmother’s cousin on her mother’s side. His grandfather, Tang Hua Xian, had been born the same year as my great-great-grandfather and passed the imperial examination in the same year, 1895. For many years my grandmother sent money back to his family.

  Tang Hou Cun seemed much younger than eighty, moving lightly and with an unhurried primness. He had a thin, long face with hollow cheeks, deep-set eyes, and dyed hair. His seafoam polo shirt was tucked tightly into gray checkered slacks. “This house is nothing compared to what you’re used to in the States, I know,” Tang Hou Cun said. “It’s very inferior. But we live very comfortably.”

  We sat down at a square table for the meal that Tang Hou Cun’s wife had prepared. Crucian carp that Tang had caught in the morning (“I caught twenty-four pounds today!” he said), sautéed in oil and then simmered in garlic, vinegar, and soy sauce and thickened with piles of roe; quick-pickled cucumber; fatty pork and dried tofu in soy sauce; crispy duck; green beans sautéed with homemade sausage; and a soup of greens, tomatoes, and farm eggs. In keeping with Chinese manners, Tang’s wife apologized for the food. “This is just a simple meal with what we have at home,” she said.

  I was stuffing my mouth as quickly as I could swallow but managed to say, “This is delicious.”

  Tang Hou Cun brought out a special baijiu, explaining that this variety’s name had something to do with fate; he repeatedly said that it was fate that had brought me to Jiujiang, and toasted me after nearly every bite. “Here’s to you, the first of your generation to visit us,” Tang Hou Cun said. “We’re so happy you came. Someone from my grandson’s generation has finally come.” The wine burned all the way down but left behind a pleasant, floral aftertaste. Once I had nearly finished all the food on the table, Tang’s wife brought out the rice. “To fill up the space that everything else didn’t,” she said. “You’ve hardly eaten anything.”

  Most of the small talk during dinner took place in the local dialect, about family members for whom I couldn’t keep the relationships straight, and family stories that I couldn’t understand. I gazed around the house. Scrolls of calligraphy hung on the walls, and the display cases separating the living and dining rooms were full of porcelain. I tried not to act too interested but remarked that it looked like he was a collector. “Yes, I used to go to Jingdezhen all the time, but now I just buy things in Jiujiang,” Tang Hou Cun said.

  After dinner Tang Hou Cun showed me the books of poetry and history that he had written, and photocopies of my grandmother’s records from Rulison, along with an article that she had written celebrating Rulison’s sixtieth anniversary in 1932. I couldn’t read it but expressed my admiration. Tang Hou Cun repeated much of the family history that I already knew, but with a special focus on and obvious pride in its intellectual achievements.

  “We can tell right away that you’re very adaptable, not like Lewis and Richard, who are so bossy and temperamental,” Tang Hou Cun said, the baijiu having loosened him up a bit. Lewis’s trip to Jiujiang came up frequently over the evening, and I got the sense that it had left some scars. “We’re glad you don’t have the character of those two brothers. They have no interest in Jiujiang history or culture or even their family here.”

  Tang Hou Cun’s younger son showed up, a friendly, chainsmoking man with a flat top. A short discussion about what I should call him followed. He was one generation older than I was, so we settled on “uncle.” Perhaps my struggle to understand the arcane kinship terms made Tang Hou Cun worry that we weren’t going to be able to communicate. “I know a guy, Yin, his son made a fortune in English schools,” he said. “Let’s go see if he can translate for us.”

  A wealthy local seemed like a good contact to make, so we stumbled out to the lake, tracing its shore to a gated community of quasi-Western villas and streets lined with foreign sedans. Tang Hou Cun’s friend Yin was eighty-three years old and also from Xingang but had lived in England and the United States before he returned to the mainland and married a Taiwanese woman.

  Yin and his wife were not expecting us but were too polite to turn us away, so he invited us in, and his wife disappeared into the kitchen to make tea for us. It was a grotesque house, with vaulted ceilings, imitation leather sofas, metallic floral print pillows, and a flat-screen television in the fireplace. The walls overhead were peeling. Yin’s son and grandson were in the next room, but he didn’t introduce us. Tang Hou Cun did the talking, and I kept quiet, not understanding the conversation but feeling that I was being sized up. After a few minutes, we stood up and left. Yin had decided not to help.

  Tang Hou Cun was good and drunk now, and outside the house he returned to trashing the Chang brothers. “Richard, he came here in 2008 and he didn’t even tell us!” Tang Hou Cun said. Richard had considered Jiujiang as a site for a manufacturing facility, and after his tour the city’s daily newspaper had splashed a photograph of him with local officials above the fold; Tang Hou Cun had kept a copy of the paper. “That’s how we found out about his visit. Can you believe this? Why would he not recognize his own family? We should all have been part of this, to show that he comes from a prominent, cultured, educated family, not some farmer’s family. Hang on, I need to take a leak.”

  Tang Hou Cun walked up to the side of one villa and emptied himself against its wall. “But if he doesn’t want to contact us, that’s his business,” he concluded. “Maybe they think mainlanders want their money. But look, I’m comfortable, what do I want money for? Yes, we’ve been poor, but we’re not poor of mind.”

  I RETURNED TO Tang Hou Cun’s apartment in the morning. We sat in the living room, the sun streaming in while his wife snapped the ends off green beans. On the coffee table were baskets of apples and oranges and peaches that his wife had picked the day before. Military jets screamed overhead every few minutes, setting off car alarms.

  Tang Hou Cun’s family had owned land, but his father was a gambler and opium addict who sold off his proper
ty piece by piece to pay for it. Si Yi Po had described Tang Hou Cun’s father as a baizi, or wastrel, and said that he once stole his wife’s earrings—one of the last items of value that the family owned—right off her ears. Tang’s father’s first wife was a shinu, a stone woman, who bore him no children. His second wife gave birth to many children, but only a few survived. By the time Tang Hou Cun came along, his family had regressed beyond genteel poverty. The only remnants of their former glory were nineteen cases of books, which his father used to kindle fires.

  “My family waned,” Tang Hou Cun said. “Only the Liu family, they radiated. There were dozens of people who possessed land in Xingang, but they didn’t develop like this, they didn’t have relatives in America. Grandfather had culture and knowledge, those were his mediums. He knew that there was no future in farming. Look at how many Lius went to missionary schools. Think of how much that all cost.”

  “Does anyone still remember him in Xingang?” I asked.

  “Faded out,” Tang Hou Cun said. “After three generations, who would know Liu Da Xian Sheng?” He repeated the moniker that the villagers used for my great-great-grandfather, “Lord Liu.”

  When Tang Hou Cun was still young, his father died of tuberculosis, and my great-great-grandfather stepped in to support his family. Tang remembered playing at the Liu house as a child, visiting during the Lunar New Year, and having to kowtow upon entering the house—he described it as “a mansion.” Liu had even selected Tang’s name for him, which meant “abundant purity.”

  But my great-great-grandfather didn’t take Tang Hou Cun and his mother to Chongqing with him, leaving them in Xingang to spend the Sino-Japanese War under Japanese occupation. Tang recalled the Japanese soldiers as “short and fat. They liked to wear jockey shorts. They looked ugly to the Chinese.”

  “How did they treat you?” I asked.

  “Very nice,” he said. “A Japanese lieutenant came to my family and offered wool yarn in exchange for our things.” Sometimes a soldier, whom the locals called taijun, a term of respect that the Japanese demanded, might offer him a peach or a piece of chocolate. “Our life was okay. As long as you could farm, you could live.”

  “The Japanese didn’t take your crops?”

  “No, not for all the years they were here.”

  “Unlike the Communists.”

  “The Communists, well, they messed things up. They changed policies, launched movements.”

  Tang Hou Cun’s prodigal father turned out to be a blessing once the Communists took over. The family was classified as “poor peasants,” which saved them from the worst persecution, and the Communist policy of opening doors to workers and peasants allowed Tang to apply for a study allowance. He enrolled in school and seemed poised to gain an advantage that had seemed impossible just a few years earlier. Then in 1956 the government unveiled a campaign encouraging citizens, especially intellectuals, to express their opinions, criticisms, and advice for the regime. This campaign became known as the Hundred Flowers Movement, from Mao Zedong’s statement “The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science.” The response was muted at first, and Mao had to put his full weight behind the movement to get it going, practically begging for intellectuals to air their grievances. In the summer of 1957 came a deluge of criticisms, most of which would not have been out of place today: corruption and overprivilege among party cadres, government control over intellectuals, poor standards of living, the punitiveness of earlier campaigns against dissenters and “counterrevolutionaries,” the culture of fear and silence created by the government, irrational planning practices, and neglect of children’s education. The unprecedented freedom of speech led Peking University students to cover a wall—dubbed “Democratic Wall”—on campus with posters critical of the government, and student protests erupted in cities across the country.

  Tang Hou Cun got caught up in the zeitgeist, making critical comments of his own. By July 1957, however, Mao quickly reversed course. The government announced its antirightist campaign in August 1957, right when Tang Hou Cun was starting his first year at Jiangxi Normal University in Nanchang. For more than 300,000 intellectuals, their reward for obeying Mao’s initial instructions was to be deemed “rightists” and enemies of the state. The label not only ruined their careers in China but also resulted in them being sent to jail or labor camps, or exiled to the countryside for the rest of their lives. Students were executed. Others, like Liu Cong Ji’s father, Ting Gong, were driven to suicide.

  One of the ways the government rooted out “rightists” was by issuing a quota. Mao claimed that at least 5 percent of the population consisted of “rightists,” and as the campaign wore on, the quotas were raised. Any work unit or school class that found itself under the quota had to fill it by any means. At Jiangxi Normal University, Tang Hou Cun was added to the rolls of “rightists” and expelled from school. He was fortunate to manage to find work at the electric company, where he stayed for the next fifty years. In his free time, he continued to study classical literature, practice calligraphy, and write poems and essays on literary theory. “The Tangs and Lius had this principle, ‘Study is the only good thing to do in the world,’ ” he said. “I did the electric company to eat, but my heart was always in this, culture.”

  During the Cultural Revolution, Tang threw all his books, including San Gu’s collection that had ended up in his possession, into the street so people wishing to destroy the “four olds” could trample them with their feet. “The Cultural Revolution was more severe than anything Qin Shi Huang did,” Tang Hou Cun said, referring to the Qin dynasty “First Emperor” of a unified China in 221 B.C., who, in an attempt to destroy any schools of thought or opinions that conflicted with his own, as well as histories that might undermine or diminish his legacy, had the entire archives burned and buried hundreds of scholars alive.

  Tang Hou Cun ran back to his library and emerged with a set of threadbound books by a Tang dynasty writer named Han Yu, printed in the 1920s and 1930s. “I bought these in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution,” he said. “Paid twelve kuai for them. I reckon they’re worth about twelve hundred kuai now, though I’d never sell them.”

  “How did you manage to buy books then?”

  “If I’m throwing out books here, and I buy a few there, who’s going to know?” he said. “I couldn’t not buy them.”

  He scurried back to the library to bring out more. Ming dynasty texts, wood-block prints, books from Republican-era publishers. I flipped through them politely and then asked about his porcelain.

  Tang excitedly guided me through the living room displays: Ming bowls, blue and white ginger jars, a pair of cloisonné vases, Cultural Revolution porcelains bearing Mao’s slogans. He took out a pair of plates painted with a large blue and red fish. “The family had tons of these,” Tang said. “We used them around the house.”

  Then he led me to the spare bedroom, with two cabinets packed with porcelain, some of them marked with imperial seals. He handed me a squat celadon jar with a Kangxi reign mark. “This is from our house,” Tang said. “Your grandmother has seen it. She’d recognize it from her childhood.”

  Finally, he showed me a broken fencai teapot marked with Guangxu’s seal. “It’s real,” Tang said. “Your grandmother would also know it. These are all from our old house. I saved them.”

  Tang said he knew all about the story of the buried porcelain, so I asked him if he remembered seeing any items in Liu’s house after the war.

  “Let me tell you,” Tang Hou Cun said, “all that porcelain Grandfather Liu had on display at his house, it was all from official kilns.”

  “What about your porcelain collection?” I said. “Were any of those from—”

  “I don’t have much porcelain anymore,” he said, leading me back to the living room and placing me on the sofa. “I also bought coins. Here, I’ll show you.”

  He dis
appeared into his library again and came out with a box of coins—bronze Han and Song dynasty wu zhu qian coins with square holes, kuan yong Japanese coins, Republican silver dollars. “I bought all these Han bronze coins here,” he said. “There are so many fakes, but these are real. They were definitely taken out of the ground.”

  “Did they dig up people’s graves during the Cultural Revolution?” I asked.

  “No, not then. That came later, based on economic reasons. My old grandfather’s grave was looted two, three times.”

  “What about the Liu family?”

  “No, probably not, because the cemetery was near the village. But I can’t say for sure. There were some bad eggs in the Liu family.”

  I HAD PROMISED SAN YI PO THAT I WOULD LOOK FOR THE family’s villa on Lushan, so like my fleeing relatives seventy years earlier, I made the trek up the mountain to the former summer resort of Guling. But instead of walking, I rode with Tang Hou Cun’s son. On our way out of the city, we stopped at a friend’s office to grab a laminated set of papers, which he said would help us on the mountain. After a smooth highway ride for about ten miles, we reached the foothills, and for the next ten miles we made one nauseating S-turn after another up the mountain, Tang burning through a pack of cigarettes along the way. Just before I was sure I would vomit, we reached the tollbooth on the summit. “Let me do the talking,” Tang said. He presented the papers, explaining that we were local police inspecting the speed limit signs, while I struck my best arrogant official pose. The tollbooth operator let us through, saving us from paying the entrance fee and, Tang explained, allowing him to take the faster return route down the mountain.

  We motored onto Guling’s main drag, colonial storefronts on one side and an unobstructed view of the valley on the other. Up the mountainside, veils of fog snagged on spruce, tulip poplars, and blossoming dogwoods, revealing red-and-blue-roofed estates. We made a left at the clock tower in the center of town and, after knocking on a door to ask for directions (and Tang relieving himself on the man’s doorstep), found the youth hostel that I had booked, a sturdy stone building sunk into the mountainside below the street.