The River at the Centre of the World (17 page)

Every town in China has something – a main street, a boulevard, an esplanade, a mighty building, a bund – that is named after Sun Yat-sen: Zhong Shan is the Mandarin rendering of a name that is essentially romanized Cantonese – the Christian, Western-educated Father of Modern China having been, in an irony that most Chinese would prefer to forget, a Southerner. For Nanjing to have four streets named after the great man is no surprise: it was in this city that he set up his first capital, and it is on the outskirts of this city that, after his death in 1925 at only fifty-nine, he was buried. The mausoleum, tricked out in pale blue tile, is probably the city's principal place of pilgrimage – a place of respectful comfort for the mainlanders, though for the more raucous Taiwanese who visit it has recently become a kind of Oriental Graceland, a shrine to another fallen king, and every bit as vulgar, and its souvenir stalls and hawkers, as the grave in Tennessee.

Giancarlo was standing alone in the Jinling's vast marble lobby when we arrived. He was a tall Turinese in his early sixties, with grey hair like wire wool, big teeth discoloured by years of smoking strong Craven ‘A' cigarettes and a nose as big as a small rodent. He wore a loudly checked sports jacket and a yellow cravat. He had the booming and eternally genial voice of an expatriate who was happy tonight because, for one marginally less tedious evening than most, he was about to meet a fellow wanderer, someone who might know the name of his country's latest prime minister or some news from the FIFA Cup or the Tour de France, and who might join him later for an espresso or a glass of grappa – of which, he added, he had ample supplies in his room.

“Ow are you, Meester Simmon?’ he boomed from twenty paces. ‘I 'ave cheap room for you. I also 'ave deener, which I, Giancarlo, will cook for you. You come now, please, immediate, immediate. You will drop your bags 'ere. Giancarlo will look after everything. You will 'ave wonderful time, yes?’

Eight years in the same hotel room in China can do strange things to a man. Giancarlo Barolo had clearly gone a little mad: after years in which his natural Piedmontese exuberance had been dismissed as eccentricity and had struck few sparks in either the hotel or his office, he decided to go for broke, to play his role as caricature. So he now swept waitresses off their feet and planted blizzards of tiny kisses on their cheeks, he rushed wildly into kitchens throwing startled Chinese chefs away from their woks and commandeering the stoves himself, he complained loudly about wines and demanded his own, he sat down with startled lone foreign businessmen to enjoy, if briefly, their company, he made endlessly long telephone calls to distant half-forgotten friends around the world, and each night at nine – this night being no different – he retired to his double room, which is furnished with a few paintings and carpets, and listened to Verdi and Rossini, and tried to forget.

Before I met him on this journey, it had never been entirely clear why he had stayed for so long. He does not speak Chinese, nor does he like China very much. He has no particular loyalty to the truck-making firm he works for, nor has he ambitions for the factory his eight years here have helped create. He loathes banquets, speeches, local food: he has had one marriage and two failed love affairs, and he doubts if he will have another.

Night after night we watched him do his routine – frightening waitresses, dismissing chefs, summoning managers, retching after tasting the local wines – except after sipping one particular Chinese red wine, a merlot, which he claimed was as good as any of the younger Antinoris. We usually said good night to him, exhausted by the performance, no later than nine each night. Behind the bluster and the braggadocio was loneliness, of course: what secret back home had compelled this man to bury himself in the wilds of central China? Who knows, any more than they knew what had really compelled celebrated westerners like the forger-scholar Edmund Backhouse to become a recluse in Beijing, or the botanist Joseph Rock to go on his ceaseless explorations in Yunnan, or the Good Man in Africa to stay for so long and so good in Africa and to choose the expatriate life with its constant frisson of solitary danger? Giancarlo seemed a picture of sadness blanketed in an enigma, but nonetheless living under the guise of being a character, a good chap,
knows the scene, old boy, knows simply everyone
. He was being laughed at, and knew it, and yet was unable, despite his good humour, to laugh back.

But he had a certain wisdom, and he knew Nanjing well, which is why I had sought him out. The bluster irritated me: I wanted him to be serious for a moment. He obliged one evening before dinner, when we were alone. We talked about Shanghai, a city he disliked with a passion. I said how it seemed to me unique in being a city that didn't have any real history, that it was a city without roots of any substance, except for those few years when it was a fishing village and the brief period when it was inhabited by noisy and truculent foreigners.

‘This is very different, you know,’ he replied. ‘Here is nothing else but history, you know,’ he said. ‘Nanjing is a little like your Irish city, Belfast is it? Looks new on the surface – all this
gleeter
, like this hotel, the shops, the pretty girls. It looks like Hong Kong, yes? But below is very different, you can feel it when you stay here long. The people here are all trapped by their city's past. And very bad past it has had. Sadder than most places. The people here look as if they have forgotten, but in fact they never can. They are very old-fashioned people. Very conservative. So very different from Shanghai.

‘You say you are going up the Yangtze and seeing if you can go backward in time? Well, coming here you have stepped back a hundred years. At least. Maybe getting on for four hundred years, back to the end of the Ming. It may not look like it. But you have. Like a living museum, Nanjing. This is why I don't like it – and at the same time it is perhaps why I do like it too. Italy is much the same in some ways. Great cities are often trapped by their past – particularly when it is a past filled with tragedy. I find that not good, and yet very good. It makes the people keep their feet on the ground. Shanghai – I spit at it! Hateful place! Here – well, there is something I like, just a bit.’

And that was as near as he came to offering an explanation. Lily came in just then, and the moment was gone. Giancarlo winked at me, stood up and kissed her noisily, and began his routine. He bellowed at the waiter: ‘This garbage, you are calling it chicken? I, Giancarlo, will come cook something good for my friends. They will not eat this rubbish food. So you please, most kind, get out of my way,
prontissimo
!’

I had come to Nanjing armed with an old Japanese guidebook, and I had done so very much on purpose.

Not long after Karl Baedeker and John Murray had uncovered the delights of Europe and published them in pocket-sized compendiums in Leipzig and London, so a Japanese nobleman, Baron Gotō – and for far less amiable reasons – began to do much the same for Asia, in Tokyo. By today's standards Gotō was not a very laudable figure: he was a keen believer in Japan's right to expand and to rule the lesser peoples of Asia, he had been a fairly brutal civil administrator of Formosa during her early years as a Japanese colony, and he had come to China to run the South Manchurian Railway. But his colonial attitudes aside (and what Briton can decry colonial attitudes?), he did inspire editors and writers to produce excellent guidebooks. The small red volumes published between 1908 and 1920 under the colophon of the Imperial Japanese Government Railways remain masterly.

Not, however, just as guides. Certainly, on one level the books offer hugely detailed, highly accurate, prettily designed and compact
tours d‘horizon
– they remain undeniably useful, even nearly a century on. But they also offer, unwittingly – and this is why I had decided to stuff them into my rucksack back in New York – an unexpected window on the Japanese mind, a revealing look at the way that Japan then regarded her neighbour states across the sea. Each of the books deals in detail with peoples (Koreans, Manchurians, Formosans and, most particularly, the Chinese) whom the Japanese considered then, and perhaps still consider today, to be amusing, colourful, interesting – but grossly inferior. Given time, Japanese readers of these volumes must have thought, each would be ripe for the plucking.

I had with me Volume IV. Its chapter on Nanjing can be seen, in hindsight, as offering the first lip-smacking, appetite-whetting accounts of a city that the Japanese were soon to brutalize like few others, anywhere. Baron Gotōs tidy little book must have seemed to the sterner souls in the Japanese army rather like a menu card in a fancy Roppongi restaurant: oh come ye sons of Nippon, some might have heard its siren call, and feast yourselves on this! Beneath the come-hither of it all, a sneering tone is audible, if faintly.

Encircled by these cyclopean walls, the city has been planned on a most magnificent scale, no unworthy capital of a great empire… Before the coming of the Taiping rebels there existed tolerably good roads and drainage… The Taipings made dreadful havoc everywhere and scarcely anything had been done by way of repairs, until the recent introduction of the new regime… which is now making roads and repairing the drainage, burning up all the garbage and filth. Carp and mandarin-fish are caught in the Yangtze-kiang, and are of a very fine flavour. The Flower Boats in the Chin-hwai-ho contain chairs, tables and quilts, food and liquor as well as singing girls… There is a club, the Hwa-Ying, established by the Japanese and Chinese together.

Such was the beguiling image of Nanjing – pools filled with succulent carp, boatfuls of pretty flower girls, a walled capital of great beauty – in the autumn and early winter of 1937. It was a treasure that such unworthies as mere Chinese should not be allowed to keep. Japan's ambitions in China – which she had stoutly denied throughout her annexation of Manchuria, and her installation of Pu Yi as the puppet emperor – were by now nakedly apparent. In July she had instigated the Marco Polo Bridge incident, which many see as the true origin of the Pacific War. By August she was occupying Beijing and Tianjin. In November she landed troops in Hangzhou Bay, and she took Shanghai with extraordinary violence but without so much as an official murmur from the League of Nations, the spokesman for the outside world; and now, come December, her soldiers were racing towards Nanjing, which for the past ten years had been the capital of the Chinese Republic.

Chiang Kai-shek was wily enough to know what would happen. He fled up along the Yangtze to Wuhan and Chongqing, declaring each a new capital in turn. Foreign ambassadors did much the same, pleading not unreasonably that they needed to be wherever the nation's heads of state and government presided and resided. Only the ragged remains of Chiang's Nanjing garrison, together with a few hundred foreigners and half a million wretched civilians, were left to face the music. Chiang had left Nanjing, the city that Baron Gotōs writers had called, in their oily way, ‘one of the most interesting in China’, in the hands of an incompetent scoundrel of a general, a former warlord. And he fled too, when six divisions, containing 120,000 well-trained Japanese soldiers, began to bear down on the walls of his city.

The battle for the land south of the Yangtze was well fought: Chinese soldiers in Jiangyin and Zhenjiang fought bravely, but hopelessly. The tanks and field pieces and planes of the Japanese advanced along the river's right bank, day by ghastly day. By 6 December 1937 their troops were surrounding Nanjing on three sides – and the river that streamed below the city walls on the fourth, the west side, was about to be crossed by General Matsui Iwane's soldiers, who were also advancing on the river's left bank.

Mitsubishi bombers began to pound the city nightly: casualties were terrible. But the Chinese, even leaderless, fought on doughtily. Japanese losses rose stubbornly. There was hand-to-hand fighting in the suburbs – down where Lily and I had driven, where I had knocked the young woman from her bicycle – soldiers from the armies of the two competing tiger-states had fought with bayonets and bare hands, the victims broken and dying amid the rubble and the backyard paddies. One unit of the Chinese Army did manage to break out from within the walls which were, at 21 miles long, 40 feet high, and dating from the Ming dynasty, at the time one of the grandest sets of city walls to be found anywhere in China, a wonder of the Eastern world – and do battle with the onrushing armies. But it was all, inevitably, to no avail.

On the evening of Monday 13 December 1937 General Matsui entered through the great eastern gates of Nanjing's wall and proceeded to unleash one of the most horrifying episodes of soldierly excess in modern times. It has since become known as the Rape of Nanking – but rape was only a part of it. This was cruelty on an epic scale, the settling of unspoken scores and the uncollaring of decades of blind hatred, one race for the other.

Thousands tried first to flee across the river, to swim to safety. But the river in December is cold and swirling with residual autumn currents, and the pace of the swimmers was slow: machine-gunners raked them with bullets, and hundreds, maybe thousands, drowned. One Japanese, Masuda Rokusuke, reckoned later he had shot five hundred, at least. But after this, as terrible an atrocity as it would have been alone, the Japanese turned their attention to the hundreds of thousands who remained behind.

They performed a formal gate-opening ceremony and then commenced their butchery.
Katazukeru
was one word for it: tidying up.
Shori
– treatment – was another. Missionaries and doctors and foreign businessmen and women stood in horror as the terror unfolded and then went on and on and on, for six terrible weeks. Japanese soldiers treated the soldiers and civilians they had pinioned in Nanjing as animals, available for every act of barbarism and butchery it is possible to imagine. The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal said later that 200,000 men were slaughtered, and 20,000 women raped.

Children were used for bayonet practice. Women were raped repeatedly by dozens of soldiers standing in line, one after another. Old people were buried alive. Contests were held to see how many heads could be cut off with a single sword blade – the winner claimed 106, and his victory made headlines in the Tokyo press. Women had sharpened bamboo poles thrust deep into their vaginas. Men were lashed between the poles of bullock carts and made to pull away booty looted from the stores, then shot or burned to death. The Japanese hacked and sliced and filleted and butchered and battered and burned their way through an unprotected civilian people. They lined them up and machine-gunned them to death. They herded them into ruined buildings and doused them with paraffin and torched them. They humiliated them in every way imaginable, and most unimaginable ways as well.