The River at the Centre of the World (4 page)

The caption gave the name: ‘H. C. Weng Collection, New Hampshire’. A couple of phone calls – one to the publisher, another to the Department of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – brought a further name, Wan-go Weng, and the vague thought from one of the Metropolitan's staff that he did indeed live in New Hampshire, quite probably near a university town. But as to exactly where, infinite regrets, no idea.

I had once visited Dartmouth College, near the town of Hanover, and I had a hunch this might be the place. I called directory information and my luck was in: there was indeed a listing for Weng, W. G. Within moments I had Mr Weng on the line, his barely accented Chinese voice thin, educated, precise, cheerful. I introduced myself, first in poor Chinese to suggest some credentials, then in English.

Yes, he said, he had the picture. It was one of his most precious possessions. It was locked away in a bank vault. He took it out every few years, to gaze at it, just as handscroll paintings are meant to be gazed at. Would I like to see it? He could easily take it out of the bank on a Friday evening, in time for a weekend when I might be free. He suggested a Sunday a week or so after Christmas. Would I come mid-afternoon? ‘You are English, yes?’ He gave a courteous little giggle of pleasure. ‘Teatime, yes? We'll see you for tea. I've no doubt we will have a lot of snow by then. I will send you a map. You must take care driving in the weather we have.’

Wan-go Weng and his wife lived at the end of a rutted lane in the low hills above the Connecticut River valley. Their house was new, made of warm polished pale woods like pine and butternut, and it was well insulated against the bitter cold that in these parts lasts long into the spring. Mr Weng came to the door – a slight, kindly-looking figure, he smiled easily and often. He led me indoors, through an airy living room on whose walls hung a number of small ink-brush drawings. There was a spare elegance about the place, everything tidy and bright and clean, everything chosen for a purpose, no clutter.

‘I have the scroll,’ he said, and pointed to a neat cherry-wood box, maybe two feet long and eight inches wide and deep, sitting on the kitchen table. ‘We'll look at it in a moment. But first it's important to know how I came to get it. Part of the magic of a handscroll is in its history – in how many hands it has scrolled through, if you will. Best only to see the picture when you know its story.’

Wang Hui had been one, perhaps the most distinguished, of the famous Four Wangs, the painters who won the unstinting patronage of the Chinese courts in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. He was born in 1632 – the same year as Vermeer and Christopher Wren – and he died in 1717. He was a contemporary of Rembrandt, Velázquez, Frans Hals; and though his art did not appear in the West until long after his death, the first exports from China – most notably tea – did make their appearance at about this time in England. The craze for chinoiserie, which would before long make such classical and orthodox and Confucian styles as Wang's all the rage in modish houses of London and Paris, was to erupt during his lifetime – not that he ever knew.

His best-known commission came in 1691, when the second Qing emperor, Kangxi, demanded that he accompany the court on a seventy-day Imperial Progress, an official tour through the southern and eastern provinces of the country. Wang painted like a man possessed: he produced no fewer than twelve handscrolls, recording faithfully – for he was a keenly traditional painter of the no-frills Confucian school – all the minutiae of court life and country habits. And he brought the same painstaking approach, rather dry and fussy by some accounts, to his triumphal painting of the Long River.

He completed this sometime around the end of the seventeenth century, and there is some suggestion – though no documentation to prove – that he gave it to a Court official for safekeeping. When he, and later the mandarin, died, the box, the silk wrapping cloth, and the tightly rolled painting inside were passed to a succession of wise men. The only one of these to have a personal link with Wan-go Weng was the latter's great-great-grandfather, who owned it during the opening years of the twentieth century.

This man, though a Han Chinese in the Manchu court, had once been tutor to two of the child-emperors. For his troubles he had been appointed a mandarin of the First Rank: he was allowed the distinction of wearing a violet robe,
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a hat with a scarlet button on top, and a peacock feather. His great-great-grandson knows of him as an austere, Confucian, conservative figure – one of the few men in Court who stood firmly against those appeasers who wanted to treat with the Japanese. He would brook no nonsense from the invaders: he represented the unflinching spirit of China at her apogee.

But it was not long before the combined effects of Japanese and the barbarian intervention in China – to say nothing of Communism and the civil war – sapped the energies of such proud figures as this. China's Empire was ebbing its way towards extinction, the mandarinate along with it. It was during these turbulent times that the then-young Mr Weng was given charge of the painting: during the dreadful and chaotic days in 1949, when the Communists and the Nationalists were slugging it out for control, it was one of the few connections, it seemed to him, with the courtly and stable dignity of China's past. He was in Shanghai at the time, and he was planning to flee to the United States. It was vital, his family said, that he take Wang Hui's picture with him.

The tale would have had more derring-do about it had the young Mr Weng managed to escape from the Communist armies with the cherry-wood box under his arm, hidden under a cloak, his only possession. But in fact the box, along with his other luggage, went in a crate, deep in the hold of a President Lines freighter that sailed out of the Whangpoo and out of the mouth of the Yangtze and across the Pacific.

He, in more of a hurry than his bags, came out just ahead of Mao's troops by flying on the very last North West Airlines turbo-prop flight to leave China in November 1949. He reached New York via airfields in Tokyo, an Aleutian island, Anchorage, Edmonton and Minneapolis. The freighter steaming across the ocean duly docked somewhere on New York's Lower West Side. Mr Weng was eventually reunited with his boxes and with the picture, and
Wang Hui's Wen Li Chang Jiang
has never been out of America since.

This history all duly recited, we went over to the dining-room table, which was now brilliant in the late afternoon sun. Mr Weng, with steady and delicate movements, unfastened the two tiny ivory hasps that kept the box lid shut. Inside was what looked like a bolt of grey silk: it too was fastened with ties of ivory and white cotton, which Mr Weng undid, his hands shaking a little.

It is rare indeed that we can ever touch a work of art that is as old as three hundred years. Pictures of great age and value are invariably guarded and protected – those on public display generally well, those in private hands usually jealously. They are suspended beyond our grasp, high, unreachable, beyond molestation. Or like some sculptures they may be put behind a little fence, or a tracery of velvet ropes, or with a discreet sign that warns Don't Touch. But Chinese handscrolls had quite a different purpose.

They were meant to be touched. They were never meant for mere public display. Rather, they were specifically offered to give both visual and tactile pleasure to the owner, at home, in private. They were all part of Confucian civility: with his books and his pipes and his wine – and his paintings – a Chinese man of former times could indulge himself of an evening with a sensual experience of the highest order. As we were doing now. I watched as Mr Weng unrolled the beginning of the painting, and I felt the same electric thrill at the sensation as civilized old Chinese men must have felt through dozens of decades before.

The paper was soft, faintly spongy, like parchment, and it stayed quite flat on the table even though it had been tightly rolled for the last five years. It had a small bamboo stiffener at the end, and as he pulled it out towards the right – the picture itself remaining unrolled to the left – he laid it over the table edge, just in case there was a tendency for the paper to spring back. But there was none: it stayed just where it was, and so he unrolled, and unrolled, and watched slowly as, one by one, and as though appearing through a summer sea-mist of the purest white, small objects – junks and fishing boats! I began to identify – began to appear on the paper.

They were black. Some were triangular, some elongate. In one or two of them small figures could be made out, men in wide conical hats peering intently downward. We were on the ocean, near the coast. Mr Weng unrolled some more – the fast-forming but still slender roll at the right beginning to swell, the mother roll on the left diminishing very slightly.

Low cliffs then came into view, one with a pagoda, nine storeys high, perhaps a monument to some vainglorious Chinese duke. Then came more cliffs, a city wall, two low and tree-fringed banks of what was now clearly a river, coming together out of nowhere, and moving in a rough parallel to the left. There was a patch of colour, a dab of yellowish brown pastel on a small curved roof in a village in the foreground. ‘Shanghai!’ said Mr Weng. ‘Small place, back then.’

And so, inch by inch and mile by mile, we journeyed up the Long River of three centuries before. It was a little like watching a film, or seeing the countryside through a long lens with which the director would execute a slow and lazy pan, downstream to upstream. Occasionally, Mr Weng would see something that he thought he recognized. ‘Must be Nanking!’ he'd say. ‘There's the triangle at Chungking, the junction where the Japs used to bomb! You read Han Suyin? Terrifying place to be, Chungking.’ (Mr Weng had a tendency to use the old names, the names that were in use in China at the time he had fled. I thought it helped him cling to the China that had been his home: to talk of Nanjing and Chongqing would be to talk of another country, which in a sense Mao's China had become.)

We passed the representation of what might have been the town that is now called Yichang – though all we could see was a mere hamlet, a few huts huddled behind a low wall. This, I thought, was probably where the great new dam, the subject of so much present-day controversy, was going to be built. Mr Weng had told me he had studied hydrology, and I imagined he might hold a view on the dam, as most people did: but no, he had all the tact and circumspection of the careful scholar and ventured no opinion. ‘I have studied it in detail,’ was all he said as we passed the site by. ‘It is a most complicated issue.’

Some Chinese scroll paintings are adorned with annotations by the artist, the better to help identify the succession of locales. But Wang Hui had done no such thing, and we had to guess at the more fancifully named formations that slid before our eyes. Was this pile of rock, deep in the Three Gorges, Wang's representation of what all China knew as the ‘Military Books' formation? Could the sinuously formed limestone cliff pictured here be what they called the ‘Ox Lung and Horse Liver‘? It was difficult to tell, from this at least, what had prompted China's mariners to imagine once that the strata had been shaped like a pile of volumes, or a dish of umbles.

Steadily we journeyed upriver, and steadily upriver the stream narrowed. The drawing became rather more fanciful as – we must presume – the territory became steadily more unfamiliar to Wang Hui, and it was replaced by the more imaginary river that legend and anecdote had settled inside the artist's grizzled head. How far he had travelled we do not know. We know he completed his Progress, and that great journey must have taken him to a number of places along the course of the Long River – no emperor could avoid passing by, so central was it to dynastic China's topography. But whether the painter travelled as far along it as his scroll implies, we have no knowledge.

Some places to which he may well not have travelled did seem to be there, however – or at least they seemed recognizable. Shigu's Great Bend, for example, appeared to be represented – Mr Weng and I turned our heads this way and that to convince ourselves that one length of delicate tracery was indeed the hairpin turn, despite being hidden on the painting among wildly imagined precipices and waterfalls and mist-shrouded temples with their ever-watching monks. We couldn't be sure. After all, Shigu was getting on for two thousand miles away from country in which the painter lived and where he would have felt comfortable and secure: few Chinese in those days went any farther west from the capital than the Red Basin of Sichuan. They only imagined the wilderness, the terrifying monsters, the godless savagery that stretched beyond.

And then the source, the headwaters – unknown, unvisited and so imagined also. Fifty-three linear feet after those first few fishing boats had appeared bobbing in the East China Sea, so the river-picture came to its end in a swirl of spray and mist and cloudy heavens. A few last peaks were dotted through the snow-folds of the clouds, like nunataks on snow, tiny black triangles against the blankness.

There was an intentional symmetry here: the peaks were there to echo the mainsails of the junks on the estuary waves. Just as the boats would be fewer and fewer as we went away from land, so the mountaintops would grow smaller and less distinct as the artist's mind closed into the clouds. And so then there was nothing – just an expanse of white emptiness, the unsullied heavens from which the river had first come.

But though the painting was now quite done, the scroll itself was not quite ended. I pushed my chair away from the table. Mr Weng stopped me. ‘No, don't stop. There's more,’ he said. ‘This is what I really want to show you. Carry on. You'll get to it soon.’

What Mr Weng had wanted me to see was the artist's colophon, and all the writings that had followed it down the decades. It is a common feature of Chinese handscroll pictures that the last few feet of mulberry paper – the part of the sheet nearest to the core when the painting is wound up – are left blank. The emptiness is first for the painter himself to write a brief but elegant few lines of explanation. Three hundred years ago Wang Hui had done so – his orthodoxy demanded it – and he had written many vertical lines of characters, telling how long the work had taken him, the cities he had visited, the places he liked best. He dated it and signed it, and then sealed it with his chop, in scarlet ink.