Along the River (38 page)

Wu Xing	Five Elements
xin	heart
Ya Yue	Proper Music
yamen	government office
Yin — Yang	essential ‘forces’ or underlying principles in life that are opposites yet balanced, separate yet interdependent
Yin Yue	Improper and Licentious Music
zhang	a unit of measurement of almost eleven feet; ten   chi make one zhang

Author’s Note

This book is a fantasy based on the ancient Chinese painting titled
Along the River at Qing Ming
. Nicknamed China’s
Mona Lisa
by Chinese-art lovers because of its fame, it was painted in the twelfth century by a court artist named Zhang Ze Duan. During the subsequent dynasties, it has been in the private collection of many Chinese emperors. More than twenty copies were made by various artists.

Pu Yi, the last Emperor of the Qing Dynasty, abdicated his throne in 1912. Nevertheless, he lived in the Forbidden Palace until 1924. When he finally left under duress, he took
Along the River at Qing Ming
with him. In 1932, he went to Manchuria and was installed by the Japanese as the puppet Emperor of Manchukuo (Manchuria) in 1934.

In 1945, the Japanese lost the Second World War and Pu Yi fled from Manchuria. He was captured by the Russians, who put him in jail and placed his painting in a vault at the Bank of China.

In 1950, the Russians returned Pu Yi to Communist China for trial as a war criminal. Meanwhile, his painting was transferred to the Palace Museum in Beijing, where it remains to this day. Mao Ze-dong pardoned Pu Yi in 1959. He worked as a gardener in the Beijing Botanical Gardens after his release from prison, and died eight years later during the Cultural Revolution.

This book is based on the fictional character CC (initials for Chinese Cinderella). CC must leave the boat used in an espionage mission to buy food in the river town of Feng Jie. Pursued by a strange woman dressed in black, she escapes by climbing up a drainpipe but then falls from the roof. She is taken to a hospital. On awakening from a coma, CC is treated for her neurological symptoms. While under hypnosis, she recalls the life she led eight hundred years ago as a young girl in Bian Liang (now called Kaifeng), the capital of China during the Northern Song Dynasty.

Two other paintings are mentioned in this book:
Auspicious Dragon Rock
and
Listening to Zither Music
, both also housed at the Palace Museum in Beijing. They are attributed to Emperor Huizong, whose signature, written in cipher (First Man of All under Heaven—
Tian Xia Yi Ren
, and seal mark can be seen to the left of the two paintings.

My research was carried out at the library of the University of California, Irvine. Although CC, Zhang Mei Lan and Ah Zhao are all fictional characters, the paintings are real. So are the supporting cast of individuals—such as Tong Guan, the eunuch general, and Cai Jing, the Prime Minister—as well as the book’s historical background.

The following two books were enormously helpful:
Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China
by Patricia Ebrey and Maggie Bickford and
Palace Women in the Northern Sung
by Priscilla Ching Chung.

A detail from
Qing Ming Shang He Tu
(
Along the River at Qing Ming
). This particular scene of the boat about to capsize is described on this page. The entire painting is seventeen and a half feet long and only ten inches high. Known as China’s
Mona Lisa
and painted with ink on silk, it captures the holiday atmosphere of ordinary people celebrating Qing Ming, presenting a panorama of Song Dynasty life. Note the period clothing, hairstyles, headgear, sedan chairs, stalls packed with merchandise and the variety of boats on the river.