In Xanadu (54 page)

Before he left, Bushell discovered a broken memorial tablet. On it was inscribed a form of ancient Chinese character, surrounded by a border of dragons, boldly carved in deep relief. Later, when the inscription was translated it was discovered that the tablet had been raised by Kubla Khan in memory of a Buddhist chief priest. The inscription left no doubt about the identity of the ruin on which the botanist had stumbled. It was indeed the Xanadu of which Coleridge had written, a name known to every schoolchild. But this did not lead Bushell to trumpet his discovery. He quietly wrote it up inside the scholarly botanical report that he submitted to the Royal Geographical Society in 1874. Fellow scholars carefully noted his findings (Yule refers to Bushell's expedition in his footnotes to
The Travels),
but the world at large remained ignorant of the doctor's work. Although the ruins lay only one hundred miles north of Peking, no other expedition was mounted to investigate the remains of Kubla Khan's summer capital. Despite its mythical fame, Xanadu itself seems to have remained a scholarly lacunae. If we were to reach the city, we would be the first Europeans to see the ruins for over a century.

It was not far to go, but the same circumstance which had for centuries left the ruins in obscurity hindered us from reaching them. Inner Mongolia is a sensitive border region facing China's old enemy, the Soviet Union. The area is closed to foreigners. If we were to have any hope of reaching Xanadu, the journey would involve us getting back into our ridiculous disguises and undergoing the same exhausting routine we had followed on the southern Silk Route. It was a terrible prospect. But having come this far, we had to try and finish the journey.

The following two days were full of confusion. It was now the first week of October and the Cambridge term was due to begin in four days. If we were to try and get to Xanadu it would mean arriving late for the beginning of term; not in itself any great loss, but a bit undiplomatic with finals drawing in. With this in mind, Lou and I agreed that before we left for Mongolia we had better arrange the flight home and organize a transfer of funds from London to pay for it. It sounded simple. In fact it took forty-eight hours of negotiating with bankers, pleading with bored airline officials and telephone calls across the world - ages sitting in hot waiting rooms - before we had two seats booked for the following Thursday and the necessary funds on their way. We had a very tight schedule. We calculated that it would take two days of nonstop travelling to get to Duolon, the nearest town to the ruins, and two further days to return. Our charter flight, the only one we could afford for a fortnight, left in six days. This left only one day spare in which to get to the ruins from Duolon, a distance of about twenty-five miles. We had no accurate directions and our only guide, Bushell's article, was over a century out of date. For all we knew the ruins might be miles from any road. Whether or not we succeeded in finding Xanadu in that one day left to us, we would have to return to Peking or else miss our flight.

To minimize complications we booked a seat on the train north and a hotel room at the end of the line in Chengde. By Friday evening we were ready to set off on the last leg of the journey. We packed what we needed for four days' travelling into one rucksack and placed the spare in the hotel's safe room. The following morning we got up at five-thirty and caught the train to Chengde, the old Jehol, site of the summer palace of the Manchu dynasty.

The train was nearly empty. On the seat opposite us, two Chinese students were sitting tenuously holding each other's hands. Neither spoke. The girl, who was taller than the boy, wore a frilly blouse and an embroidered jersey. She looked out of the window. The boy chain-smoked.

The transition from town to country took place very gradually. As we neared the suburbs the gardens backing onto the railway line grew in size. Blocks of flats and lines of warehouses gave way to allotments. The buildings were spaced further apart; gradually we came to farmsteads and high pitched roofs and thatched outhouses. There were maize fields and vines. In some of the strips peasants were ploughing with teams of blinkered ponies or pairs of long-horned cattle; at the edge of one strip you could see clusters of hives and a bee keeper shrouded in netting. Then, slowly, we began to rise. The hills had jagged peaks, cleft like a dragon's back. It got colder and the Chinese girl shivered and pulled a jacket out of her bag. In the valleys the arable fields turned to hill pasture. The villages had water mills. The hills grew higher and a purple haze hung over the water meadows. We crossed the Great Wall and passed into Manchuria.

The railway follows the route of the old Imperial road. It was the route taken by Lord Macartney, the first English ambassador to the Chinese court, when he came to negotiate a commercial treaty with the Chinese Emperor, Ch'ien-lung, in 1783. He travelled in a neat English post-chaise drawn by four Tartar horses. Behind him followed a cart full of presents for the Emperor; these included two full-length Joshua Reynolds portraits of King George III. Macartney, an ancestor of the consul at Kashgar, thought the scenery 'uncommon picturesque' but the views he enjoyed were to be the only reward he was to get for his labours. The Chinese, as he discovered, had no interest in trade. In his letter of reply to George III, the Emperor wrote that he acknowledged the receipt of the 'local products' presented as tribute articles' but regretted that the Celestial Empire had not 'the slightest need' of England's manufactures. A court letter went further. 'The English are ignorant barbarians,' it read, 'totally uninformed as to the proper ceremonies. It is not worth treating them with too much courtesy.' The Chinese had no interest in the English; they knew little about them and had no desire to enlarge on that knowledge. According to the
Huang Ch'ing chih-kung
t
'u,
an illustrated Imperial handbook to 'the tribute nations', England belonged to Holland. 'The men mostly drink wine,' it maintained, 'and the unmarried women lace up their hips in their desire to be slim. They keep snuff in metallic wire boxes and carry these boxes about with them.' Another authority, the
Hai-lu,
written by a Chinese sailor who had visited Europe, filled out this somewhat sketchy picture. Holland, England's overlord, was in fact a region in north-west France and its people were 'all the same as in Portugal'.

Ch'ien-lung may not have been interested in the English, but he was very interested in his gardens at Chengde. Here, at the back of his summer palace, he created a huge willow-pattern world of lakes and pagodas. It was an impossible rural idyll - a kind of Chinese Petit Trianon, but there was no doubt as to its beauty. Macartney thought it exquisite and wrote that if he had not known that Capability Brown had never visited China, he would have sworn that he had drawn his happiest ideas from the Imperial gardens at Jehol. What was unclear was what state of preservation they would be in. When Peter Fleming visited Chengde (the old Jehol) in the 1930s the temples were already in a bad state of decay and I had heard in Peking that the Cultural Revolution had accelerated the destruction.

We arrived late in the afternoon; the town straddled a ridge below a rim of lavender-coloured mountains. When Fleming came here, Chengde was a garrison town for the occupying Japanese and was full of short soldiers in gaiters performing mock assaults on pagodas; he thought it like 'staying in Windsor in 1919 supposing the Germans had won the war'. There was also a curious complement of American missionaries, including Mr Panter ('very tall, very doleful
...
the voice of Doom'), Mrs Panter (who played the harmonium) and young Mr Titherton (on probation, a kind of apprentice missionary'). But the town we saw had a very different character. There were neither missionaries nor soldiers to be seen and Chengde now had the unmistakable air of a summer resort out of season.

Our visit got off to a good start. We found a taxi driver who spoke English and was prepared to help buy us a ticket to Duolon. He did not even ask for a commission. At the hotel, however, things were a little more difficult.

My name is Dalrymple,' I told the receptionist. 'We have a reservation.'

It has been cancelled,' replied the girl.

Not by me it hasn't.'

It has been cancelled,' the girl repeated.

Who by?'

The receptionist consulted a register. It was cancelled yesterday by Yu San.' Who is Yu San?'

I don't know,' said the girl. 'She is your friend not mine.'

No convincing explanation for this incident ever emerged;
I
knew no one called Yu San. But there was certainly no problem with the hotel being booked up. It was cold and damp and empty. The season had turned and we were the only guests. It was a strange, grey place with wide stairs and long, echoing half-lit corridors, but I rather liked it. It reminded me of a Highland fishing lodge where I had once been stranded on a cold night in late November.

I left Lou there, and went to explore the summer palace before it closed. At the entrance the postcard sellers were packing up their stands, but I persuaded the custodian to let me in and I slipped off behind the palace to the lakes beyond. The gardens were as beautiful as they were unexpected. I marvelled at the care with which the park had been laid out: the winding paths and the deserted potpourri pavilions; the weeping willows, the walnuts and the corianders reflected in the lake; the lilies and lotus flowers floating beneath the flying eaves of the temples - and all shrouded in mist and smelling of wet earth and falling leaves. The dying light of autumn. As I wandered along the lake shore, I suddenly realized how long I had been travelling. Summer was gone. There is no autumn in the desert; when travelling through the great expanses of sand, one's sense of passing time and changing season becomes numbed. It was only now, when I found myself suddenly propelled halfway to winter, that I realized for how long I had been on the move. Jerusalem and Acre seemed many weeks distant; I could barely remember a time when the day did not begin by packing a rucksack and paying a hotel bill. Now the imminent prospect of reaching my destination seemed slightly alarming. To stop moving was going to be very odd. A whole segment of life was going to end. A whole new series of responsibilities loomed: getting home, getting back to Cambridge, finals.
...

Wandering around Chengde that afternoon one thing did become clear. At long last I understood the Chinese arrogance that fostered the dismissive attitude to Lord Macartney and the first English to visit China in the eighteenth century; an attitude which still lingered, despite the decline of the Middle Kingdom, into this century. The gardens in Chengde were the one place I saw that had retained some glimpse of the fragile elegance and dignity of Imperial China. They made any European garden I had ever seen seem stiff and crude and formal; here you could easily understand the Chinese thinking Westerners barbarians: of course they had no interest in England's manufactures! But if the beauty of Chengde made some things clear, it made other things more difficult to understand. In the Cultural Revolution the monks who were still clinging on in the Lama temples when Peter Fleming visited were all lined up and shot; many of the temples were demolished, the others were left to fall apart. Over China as a whole one million people were killed and thirty million persecuted. What I did not understand was how the nation which, for five thousand years had produced the most delicate and elegant art the world ever saw, could suddenly turn face and became viciously, violently iconoclastic. Paul Scott was puzzled by a similar paradox in India: how could the Indians, the most courteous and gentle people on earth, suddenly turn to frenzies of orgiastic violence? Scott's answer was that the Indian really was emotionally predisposed against violence; hence his hysteria when he surrendered to it. 'He goes beyond all ordinary bounds, like someone mad, because he is going against his own faith as well.' By analogy, I thought, perhaps the Cultural Revolution was as brutal as it was simply because it went so deeply against everything Chinese culture stood for. The fragile ideal represented by Chengde was a testament to that.