Worlds Elsewhere (63 page)

Sesethu was smiling broadly, snapping her fingers. ‘I really like the rhythm of Shakespeare. He has an excellent beat.'

Throughout my journey I had often heard about the so-called ‘Born Frees', young people born after the 1994 elections. In the minds of everyone over the age of approximately twenty the Born Frees were held to be heedless, cosseted, ruinously ignorant of South Africa's politics and recent past.

Anyone with that view should come to Khayelitsha and spend twenty minutes talking to the serious-minded grade tens at Chris Hani school, I thought. They knew more about South Africa than people three times their age.

Eager not to be left out of the discussion, one of the boys leapt to his feet and recited lines I hadn't heard for years:

I'd last heard Donne's holy sonnet being tweezered apart in a university seminar room. It occurred to me that I'd never properly attended to the battering, belligerent strength of Donne's belief, the urgency of his terms. There was no missing them here. The boy's voice was quiet and steady. When he finished, there was a moment of silence.

Chris Hani had big plans: they were excitedly organising a trip to the British Shakespeare Schools Festival, if they could raise the funds, and were keen to stage
Macbeth
again, make it tighter and better.

I wanted to ask more, but they were keen to get going. Today was the last day of term. Shakespeare was all very well, their body language said, but I should get some things in perspective. School holidays were school holidays.

As they were zipping up their jackets and pulling on their mittens, I asked the question I had wanted to ask all along: what they thought about the idea that Shakespeare wasn't someone kids like them should spend time with – that, as some people still argued in South Africa, he was just some dead white guy, no concern of theirs.

A girl was in the group. She had been sitting quietly by, huddled in her green-and-brown-striped hoodie, listening intently but not speaking. She was standing near the door, her brow knotted.

‘From my own opinion,' she said carefully, ‘Shakespeare is for everyone. I can learn from Shakespeare when I am from South Africa. I don't need to be European. I think they are wrong if they are saying that.'

Shyly, she ducked her head and headed out into the afternoon.

In June 2011, Wen Jiabao, then premier of China, arrived in Britain on a three-day state visit. A pressing list of issues awaited his attention. One was the relationship between China's latest five-year economic plan and the Eurozone crisis. Sino-British defence goals were in urgent need of harmonisation. More delicately, there was what the official press release called ‘enhancing mutual understanding' – diplomatic-speak for fence-mending after wrangles over China's record on human rights. In London, it was announced, Wen would be officially welcomed at 10 Downing Street by prime minister David Cameron, and would make a speech among ‘Friendly Personages' at the Royal Society.

Instead of his plane putting down at Heathrow or somewhere close to the capital, however, Wen's officials directed it further north, to the small airport outside Birmingham. Partly this was convenient for a visit to the MG car plant at Longbridge, now under the control of the mighty Chinese state-owned SAIC conglomerate. But there was another reason, too. Before embarking on official business, premier Wen wanted to indulge in a spot of pleasure. He wanted to visit Stratford-upon-Avon.

On a bright, blustery summer morning, Wen spent an hour and a half in Stratford, twenty-five minutes longer than his minders had scheduled. He was escorted around Shakespeare's Birthplace and shown a copy of the First Folio, then invited to admire the only surviving letter to the poet, from fellow Warwickshireman Richard Quiney. (It is unclear whether it was pointed out to Wen, vis-à-vis the UK's ballooning trade deficit with China, that Quiney was asking Shakespeare for a loan.)

Afterwards the Chinese premier sat on a bench in the sunshine, accompanied by the British culture secretary, to watch a scene from
Hamlet.
Beneath a fluttering Chinese flag, Ophelia presented him with a sprig of rosemary for remembrance.

Wen had his own remembrances: he'd been a fan of Shakespeare since he was a lad. ‘His works are not to be read only once or even ten times,' he observed sagely to the assembled media. ‘They must be read up to a hundred times to be fully understood.' The official Xinhua news agency let it be known that the premier had even been boning up on criticism during the flight. He was particularly taken by Goethe's reverence for the poet, and had cited a line from
‘Zum Shakespeares Tag'
as proof.

Before leaving the Birthplace, Wen donated a copy of
Love's Labour's Lost,
translated into Mandarin by the scholar Liang Shiqiu. In the visitors' book, he composed his own homage, in elegantly drawn Chinese characters:

The premier was also reported to have made a wisecrack about
Hamlet,
though no one I spoke to afterwards could recall what it was.

I consulted journalistic colleagues about what was really going on here. During a trip burdened with major geopolitical issues and trade negotiations worth billions of pounds, for a Chinese leader to take time out for a jolly seemed unusual. In Hungary, his previous port of call, Wen had disappeared rapidly into meetings with prime minister Viktor Orbán; in Berlin, where he headed next, a bilateral summit about the euro with Angela Merkel had been top priority. The British PM, meanwhile, had been left kicking his heels in London while his counterpart cooed over a First Folio and two pretty young actresses.

Politics were not, of course, absent from Wen's visit to Stratford: culture, my colleagues reminded me, was an instrument of soft power, in twenty-first-century China as much as sixteenth-century England. Sitting on his bench at the Birthplace, the premier made a point of stating – lest anyone forget – that China had its own Shakespeares: ‘The literary figures of China have produced a myriad of literary works, and reading these works will help one better understand the course of the development of our great nation.'

But, from what anyone could divine, that was it. The real explanation
for Wen starting his visit with Shakespeare was probably the simplest: he was a fan. ‘At least it wasn't Harry Potter,' said a friend.

Wen was certainly not alone: Chinese visitors were thronging the UK. According to the Office for National Statistics, there are now something like 196,000 a year, more than ever before. When I should have been rationalising my notes from South Africa, I spent a morning frowning over ONS spreadsheets. The numbers were modest compared with France (3.9 million visitors annually) and Germany (3.1 million), but when one considered the expense of getting to Britain, let alone the expense of staying, they were astounding. An economy flight from Beijing to London cost something like 6,000 RMB (£600). Say fourteen nights, factoring in accommodation, food and the rest … One wouldn't get much change from 30,000 RMB (£3,000) per person, even if one came as part of a tour group. Some operators demanded a deposit of many thousands of yuan before they'd even accept your booking, not to mention the difficulty and expense of securing a visa.

And why put Stratford on your once-in-a-lifetime itinerary? London is obvious: shopping, must-see sights. The historic cities of Edinburgh or York are clear attractions, likewise hops to Oxford and Cambridge or a stately home such as Blenheim Palace. But a detour to a small town in the Midlands whose chief export is theatre? I'd been sixteen years old before I'd bothered to go to Stratford, and it was only two and a bit hours down the motorway.

I called a Chinese travel agency with offices in Nottingham and Heilongjiang province. Was it really the case that Chinese tourists were eager to go to Stratford-upon-Avon? Absolutely, they said: increasingly so. Of the 40,000 visitors they handled each year, roughly a quarter insisted on a visit. Others organised tours locally, perhaps as a summer holiday after doing a postgraduate degree. In excess of 80,000 Chinese students were in UK higher education at the time, and on master's programmes nearly as many Chinese postgraduates as there were British.

Wen's visit had only increased this surging Bardolatry, not least because the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust had cannily installed a photograph of the premier in the ‘World Pilgrims' section of its museum. The Heilongjiang agency told me that one of their most popular tours
combined two great British brands: Stratford and the Cadbury's chocolate factory at Bournville. And did I know that Birmingham airport was about to start accepting direct flights from Beijing, the first British city outside London to do so? Staff were being taught Mandarin in readiness for a tidal wave of yuan-clutching Chinese.

Why Stratford? I asked, just to check I wasn't missing something.

The manager sounded bemused by my question. ‘For the famous British author, of course.'

As the months went by and the countries on my itinerary crossed and recrossed, China and I kept blundering into each other. I was fascinated to discover that Shakespeare was banned from theatres and schoolrooms during the Cultural Revolution, and that within hours of the ban ending, people had queued around the block to buy copies of the plays. (Wen's youthful passion must have been illicit: the Cultural Revolution only ended when he was thirty-four.) I read that 21 million Chinese fourteen-year-olds studied the trial scene from
The Merchant of Venice
each year – why that play, though, no one seemed sure. Shakespeare-fever had claimed some unlikely victims: according to a report in the
Shanghai Daily,
the bestselling author Zhang Yiyi was undergoing reconstructive surgery to make him look more like the Bard, at a cost of 1.4 million RMB (£150,000). Zhang told the press that ‘life is a process of striving to become a better person'.

I wasn't alone in my burgeoning obsession with all things Chinese: the British government was only too eager to return Wen's overtures. In December 2013, the prime minister, David Cameron, his chancellor and a jumbo-jet-load of business leaders embarked on a three-day trade mission to China. Deals worth £5.6 billion were brokered in everything from satellite technology to health care. Diplomats seemed particularly enthused by a £45-million contract to export British pig semen to Chinese farmers. ‘We're doing all we can to ensure that businesses up and down the country reap the rewards of our relationship with China,' a government spokesperson said.

This time, culture was unnegotiably part of the deal. Britain's and China's culture ministers signed a memorandum of understanding. And I got a tip-off that a major new announcement was on its way. Organised in conjunction with the Royal Shakespeare Company, it was of a project to translate the complete works of Shakespeare into Mandarin, along with a number of Chinese plays into English. Its cost, expected to be £1.5 million and a shock addition to the culture ministry
budget – which was otherwise enthusiastically cutting subsidies for British arts organisations – would be borne by the taxpayer.

Pig semen and Shakespeare, I thought on my way to Heathrow. It was good to know the British still had something to sell.

‘RATHER A BUILDING, IS IT NOT?'

The voice belonged to a young and faintly harassed-looking man. He wore a dark cotton jacket and was clutching a white iPhone and leatherette briefcase. He gestured at a soaring curtain of glass and silvered metal, curving upwards towards apparent infinity. Outside, in the late-morning sun, a lake glinted, its surface so still and smooth it might have been a tray of mercury.

The man bowed modestly and pressed a business card into my hand. On one side it read, ‘Zhang Sihan, Overseas Media Representative, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Beijing'. On the other side was what I presumed to be the same in Mandarin.

He offered a creased smile. ‘But – please to – call me Harry.'

I'd arranged to meet Harry (he was politely insistent) because, looking for a place to begin exploring the journey of Shakespeare through China and its culture, I'd decided I could do worse than begin at the centre of Chinese culture.