Worlds Elsewhere (64 page)

At least geographically, it looked like a solid decision. Located off Tiananmen Square and just across from the Forbidden City, the NCPA, known locally as the ‘Egg', rose like a pale mirage behind the Great Hall of the People, the home of the Communist Party of China. Surrounded by water, its entrances and exits buried underground, it had a mystical and impregnable aura, and appeared from the outside – disconcertingly, I felt – to be floating in mid-air. Inside, it was no less awesome: 150,000 square metres of curved glass and titanium, a taut ellipsoid skin covering half a city block. Entering was like boarding a spacecraft from another and considerably more sophisticated planet. Harry was right: it was rather a building.

As we patrolled the curved front wall, he rattled through the statistics. Designed by the French starchitect Paul Andreu, the Egg had taken twelve years to build, and cost roughly 3.2 billion yuan (north of £300 million). It cost a third of that each year simply to run, heavily
subsidised by the Chinese government. When it was pointed out that the upfront expenditure came to half a million yuan (£50,000) per seat, roughly what it would cost to have each one studded with jade and covered in silk, the powers that be had magnificently replied that the arts were ‘not for profit'. Opened in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the NCPA showed the world that the Chinese were serious about culture. Very serious indeed.

This much I'd been expecting. Along with billions of others, I had watched the grandiose Olympics opening ceremony and goggled at pictures of the megalomaniacal structures by Koolhaas and Foster and Arup that now stippled Beijing's skyline. What I had not appreciated was that, in China's National Centre for the Performing Arts, the Chinese arts were a rarefied commodity. Barring a few half-hearted displays in the lobby, in fact, I couldn't see any of the stuff at all. The complex contained three state-of-the-art auditoriums. The main house, which seated 2,416, was designed specifically for European opera, the music hall for symphony orchestras. Though the smallest space – which, at 1,040 seats, was only a whisker smaller than the British National Theatre's largest auditorium – could accommodate
jingju,
traditional Beijing opera, its
raison d'être
was western drama and dance.

Zhang proudly escorted me through a CD shop stuffed with western classical music and an exhibition heavy with Puccini, Verdi, Donizetti, Bizet. In the six years of its existence the NCPA had staged nearly 70 new opera productions to an average of 80 per cent capacity. Many tickets cost under 80 yuan, less than the price of a decent meal.

A lift whisked us soundlessly to the top floor, which led to an open gantry from which we could gaze over the full sweep of the building. The ellipsoid curved giddily away beneath, blending into the polished marble floor so that it appeared never to end. In the foyer far below, a soprano was mounting a full-frontal assault on the ‘Queen of the Night' aria from
Die Zauberflöte.
Top Fs pinged shrilly off the glass.

As Harry rushed off to locate a disorientated Spanish television crew, I drifted into yet another exhibition, this one devoted to the building itself: flowcharts and graphs, showing dizzying rises in audience numbers, online membership, VIP card holders, web visitors. Even if the whole lot were blithe fiction, it was impressive. ‘Since its opening,' one panel read, ‘NCPA has been adhering to the guiding principle to be
“an important engine for the development and prosperity of socialist culture” and to be “World-class with Chinese characteristics”.'

There was no mistaking the nod to Deng Xiaoping's famous formulation, first uttered in 1982 and since adopted into the Communist Party manifesto. Wily moderniser that he was, I felt that Deng might have balked at the phrase being used to advertise a French-designed shrine to Wagner and Verdi.

As I turned around, a poster announcing a festival caught my eye.
SALUTE! SHAKESPEARE
it read, in bilious yellow text on a hot-pink background. Next to it was a face I hadn't seen for a while – though for novelty's sake the artist had superimposed a migrainous pattern of swoops and swirls in magenta, vermilion and tangerine. It looked as if Shakespeare had been assaulted by Andy Warhol while recovering from an LSD trip.

In Britain, the 450th anniversary of his birth in April 2014 had caused a modest flurry of interest, most of it centred around a jokey feature in the
Sun
newspaper –
‘FOREST FAIRIES FIASCO'
for a spoof news report on
A Midsummer Night's Dream;
‘HUBBLE BUBBLE THIS SPELLS TROUBLE (GHOST OF BANQUO: AMAZING PICTURES)'
on
Macbeth.
The excitement had soon fizzled. I assumed it would barely have made an impression 6,000 miles away.

Not for the first time, I'd assumed wrong. Checking the news on the way in from the airport, I discovered that
Life Week,
China's bestselling current-affairs magazine, had just placed Shakespeare on the cover of a commemorative issue. In addition to the Salute Shakespeare festival there was at least one other festival, in Shanghai, not to mention the brand-new Asian Shakespeare Association, whose inaugural conference in Taipei I was due at in just over two weeks' time. A British Council survey had pronounced Shakespeare one of the five British ‘icons' most adored by the Chinese, beating even Benedict Cumberbatch and the Queen. If China was hot for western culture, it was positively randy for Shakespeare.

I bent down and attempted to decode the listings. Touring productions of
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
a Chinese-Japanese
Macbeth,
a Chinese
Romeo and Juliet,
Verdi's
Otello …
The thing was going on for seven months.

Harry had rematerialised. He pointed to the poster, beaming. ‘China Central Television filming last week, big press conference!'

In China, apparently, the party was just getting started.

*

By the standards of every country I had so far visited, China was a blushing newcomer on the Shakespearian stage. Two millennia of ‘closed-door' economic and cultural policies meant that no hint of Shakespeare's existence – in common with knowledge about a great deal of western culture – reached mainland China until nearly halfway through the nineteenth century.

Irked by the Middle Kingdom's isolationist policies, the British made periodic attempts to prod the sleeping giant. They were given an excuse in 1839 after the Qing emperor Daoguang banned the sale of opium, one of Britain's most valuable imports to China from India, inside his territories. Promptly declaring war, the British navy overwhelmed the Chinese fleet at Hong Kong and an expeditionary force mounted aggressive assaults against several Chinese cities culminating in the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, the first of what are still bitterly called ‘unequal treaties'. It demanded the cession of Hong Kong and the opening of five treaty ports to British trade.

Yet again, where the East India Company trod, Shakespeare followed – but in China the story had a twist. The very man given the task of confiscating the Company's opium, the diplomat Lin Zexu, took it upon himself to become better acquainted with the enemy by supervising the part-translation of an
Encyclopedia of Geography
by the Scottish writer Hugh Murray. Lin's aim was to introduce his countrymen to the ways of the clever-clever English (pleasingly described as ‘greedy, tough, alcoholic, yet skilful in handicrafts'). The translation was published in 1839, the year hostilities broke out. Shakespeare's name featured in a list of famous British authors – the first time it had appeared in any Chinese publication. Despite Murray's florid assertion that ‘Shakespeare stands unrivalled among ancient and modern poets, by his profound and extensive knowledge of mankind, his boundless range of observation throughout all nature', nothing made it through to the Chinese version other than the terse statement that he was ‘prolific'.

More details trickled through. In 1856, an English missionary translated a Chinese textbook in which there was mention of a mysterious writer called ‘Shekesibi'. In 1877, the first ever Chinese ambassador to London observed in his diary that the most renowned writer of his adopted country was ‘a talented playwright living in England about two hundred years ago. His stature is comparable to the Greek poet Homer.' In 1895, the scholar Yan Fu translated yet another reference work, this time dilating on
Julius Caesar
:

This view of Shakespeare as a supreme embodiment of western rationalism was influential. Determined to end their country's ancient resistance to outside influences, in the early twentieth century a group of intellectuals began to argue that if China had any hope of modernising, it was high time to engage with western culture. In 1907 the young writer Lu Xun, studying in Japan – itself forced to open up at the barrel of a western gunboat – wrote an astringent article arguing that Dante, Goethe, Byron, Milton, Pushkin and Shakespeare were ‘warriors of the spirit', and that China must recruit and train its own spiritual warriors. The call would often be repeated.

Despite this, when Shakespeare was finally translated into Chinese, it was not as drama, but bedtime stories. Back in the nineteenth century, the British brother-and-sister team Charles and Mary Lamb collaborated on a book entitled
Tales from Shakespeare, Designed for the Use of Young Persons,
first published in 1807. Containing twenty stories drawn from the most popular plays,
The Tempest
to
Othello, Tales from Shakespeare
cleverly stitched pieces of the original text on to a narrative webbing supplied by the Lambs themselves, embroidering the plays into attractive moral samplers. Originally intended, in the words of the Preface, to ‘be submitted to the young reader as an introduction to the study of Shakespeare', they were aimed at young female readers most especially, less likely to be given education.
Lamb's Tales,
as the book became known – in early editions only Charles was credited – has never been out of print in the English-speaking world since.

Much as the abbreviated scripts toured around Europe by the English Comedians in the 1600s helped propagate Shakespeare's stories in cultures where his work was unfamiliar, so too did the Lambs'
Tales
two centuries later. Short, cheap to publish and a great deal more straightforward to translate than Renaissance playtexts, they became enormously popular worldwide, especially in Asia (the film-maker Vishal Bhardwaj, who I'd
spoken to in Mumbai, was one of many satisfied Indian readers). Though bowdlerised and heavily edited, they helped Shakespeare become a globally recognised name, reaching audiences far beyond the British children they were originally intended to serve.

First translated into Japanese in the 1870s, the
Tales
were printed in nearly a hundred separate editions in Japan in the next sixty years. Chinese readers had to wait until 1903, when an enterprising translator – unfortunately anonymous – published a selection of ten stories in classical Chinese. Each was given a sensationalistic heading, designed to snag the eye of male book-buyers: ‘Proteus Sells Out his Close Friend for Lust' for
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
; ‘Playing Tricks, the Devoted Wife Steals the Ring' for
All's Well That Ends Well.
The book's introduction emphasised the theme of Shakespeare as a global icon:

The subtext was clear: Shakespeare, already the world's poet, was long overdue in China. In recognition of this novelty, the publishers proudly called the book
Xiewai qitan
– ‘Strange Tales from Overseas'.

It took another version of the Lambs'
Tales,
this time the complete set of twenty, to plant Shakespeare's stories firmly in the imaginations of Chinese readers. Lin Shu (1852–1924), perhaps the most prolific Chinese editor-translator of his period, forged a highly profitable career making foreign texts available to eager consumers, translating writers including Dickens, Hugo and Balzac, and
The Arabian Nights
– with the help of a team of assistants, as Lin himself knew no foreign languages. In 1904, they brought out a new book entitled
Yingguo shiren yinbian yanyu
(‘An English Poet Reciting from Afar on Joyous Occasions'), which rendered all the Lambs' stories into semi-classical Chinese for the first time.

Lin's introduction went to some trouble to explain that, despite his title, these Shakespearian tales were an excellent match for Chinese sensibilities, where
shenguai xiaoshuo,
fantastical stories of gods and spirits, were established genre fiction. ‘Shakespeare looked to fairies and monsters for his inspiration, themes and language,' Lin argued, continuing, ‘the intellectual elite of the west is so fond of Shakespeare's
poetry that every household in the country seems to be reading and reciting his lines all day long.'

The Merchant of Venice,
the first volume in the collection, became
Rou quan
(‘A Bond of Flesh').
Hamlet
was given the evocative title
Gui zhao
('A Ghost's Summons').
A Midsummer Night's Dream
evolved into
Xian kuai
(‘Cunning Fairies') while
Romeo and Juliet became
the enticing
Zhu qing
(‘Committing the Crime of Passion'). Lin's translators also recalibrated the texts for Chinese consumers:
Hamlet
became a Confucian parable on the importance of filial duty and respect; others were adjusted to make them resemble popular Qing-era love stories.