Once On A Moonless Night Part 1

Once on a moonless night.

by Dai Sijie.

PART ONE.

CHINA.

1978 1979

1.

LET'S CALL IT THE MUTILATED RELIC, this sc.r.a.p of sacred text, written in a long-dead language, on a roll of silk which fell victim to a violent fit of anger and was torn in two, not by a pair of hands or a knife or scissors but quite genuinely by the teeth of an enraged emperor.

My chance meeting with Professor Tang Li sometime in mid-July 1978 in a conference room of the Peking Hotel, and what he revealed to me about that treasure, both shine out to this day like a little square of light in the hazy and confused labyrinth that my memories of China have become.

For the first time in my life I was being paid in my capacity as interpreter in a meeting set up by a Hollywood production company to discuss the screenplay of The Last Emperor The Last Emperor, which went on to be the major film that everyone knows, garlanded with nine or ten Oscars and generating astronomical box office takings. With permission from the University of Peking, where I was enrolled in the Chinese literature department as a foreign student, and armed with a notebook bought the day before specially for the occasion, I made my way to the Peking Hotel in the middle of a summer afternoon so hot it vaporised everything, turning the city into a cauldron steadily stewing its population. Creaking their last, my bicycle wheels sank into the cloying asphalt, softened by the heat and giving off little spirals of blue smoke. The foyer of the eight-storey hotel (the city's only skysc.r.a.per at the time) was overflowing with excited activity, the revolving gla.s.s door besieged by a noisy succession of fifty a hundred, two hundred people, I couldn't tell. Judging by their accents they had come from every corner of China. Parents laden with provisions and children carrying violin cases on their backs and, despite the heat, wearing Western-style blazers with white shirts b.u.t.toned up to the neck and ties or bow ties, even though some of them were barely six or seven years old. As soon as each child appeared in the foyer, a riot broke out; the others would swarm over and huddle round, peering anxiously and bombarding the newcomer with impatient questions. It looked just like a crowd of worried refugees jostling at the doors of an emba.s.sy. After a while I gathered that they were each waiting for a private audience with Yehudi Menuhin, who came to China once a year on a mission that was as charitable as it was artistic (and in which there was a certain element of personal publicity): to find one or two child prodigies, a new Chinese Mozart. This was a golden opportunity for these young violinists, an unhoped-for chance to set off for the United States and attend a music school directed by the master himself.

The lift wasn't working and the climb to the eighth floor, where my meeting was being held, required considerable effort, especially as there were violinists everywhere in the stairwell too, milling about like ants, sitting or even lying on the stairs, along corridors and in the corners of window ledges. Eventually, almost rigid with exhaustion, I reached the meeting room and found that it was, quite by coincidence, right next to the budding violinists' audition room, which had its door closed.

I was invited to join a group comprising a representative for the Italian-American director, a production a.s.sistant, another translator and a dozen eminent Chinese historians. We were seated around a rectangular table covered in a white cloth dotted with tins of Coca-Cola, cups of tea, ashtrays and vases of plastic and paper roses, and in the middle, in pride of place, stood an imposing and majestic professional tape recorder. On the wall hung an enlargement of a black-and-white photograph of Puyi, the last emperor, taken in the Forbidden City on a particularly raw winter day in 1920. He was wearing a Western-style jacket and gla.s.ses with rimless round lenses, his features tense, his expression dark.

The introductions and handshakes were accompanied by my halting translation from Chinese into English laced with a strong French accent, while the other translator, who was barely more at ease than I was, translated from English into Chinese; protocol was strictly respected. I noticed a Chinese man of about sixty, not like the others who all wore short-sleeved shirts; he was draped in traditional Chinese dress (a tunic in dark blue satin, b.u.t.toned at the side and falling to the floor) which, bearing in mind the season, made him look slightly absurd if also touching. He alone bowed to greet the organisers of the meeting, but with no hint of sycophancy, and occasionally he raised an elegant hand, in a gesture so slow it seemed to date from a different age, to stroke his long white beard, which wafted gently in the draught from the fan hanging from the ceiling. It seemed time had stopped over him, he alone was the incarnation of an entire era, a separate universe. When he spoke his name, in just two characters, I was struck by their simplicity and familiarity, which I mentally a.s.sociated with ... I searched and searched as I looked at his face, but in vain. The memory stayed buried in some recess of my mind, paralysed by the nerves of this first professional experience.

When I translated the nickname that his Chinese colleagues gave him-the Living Dictionary of the Forbidden City-the directors representative burst out laughing and promised, rather condescendingly, to hire this "gentleman" for a walk-on part or even a minor role. The other Chinese people present fell about laughing, but not the old man. I heard the hum of mosquitoes dancing in the artificial draft from the fan, flitting across beams of light that striped the room. The sound of a violin through the wall acted as background music to the meeting, a Mendelssohn sonata or concerto, gentle, slightly mawkish.

Two or three hours elapsed before I turned to look at the man in traditional dress again. The meeting, during which he had remained silent, was drawing to a close and the partic.i.p.ants were glancing impatiently at their watches when he suddenly began to speak in a cracked, reedy, almost strangled voice.

"If we have a few more minutes I would like, very humbly, as humbly as my background dictates, to plead the case for re-establishing the truth."

In a fraction of a second, as I translated what he had said, I thought I knew what his name reminded me of. It was ... Just then a large mosquito which was stuck to the forehead of the directors representative caught my eye; I saw it take off, hover, veer back and land very precisely on the end of his nose, probably a less oily site. A verse from a Russian poet whom I had just read in translation came to mind: "the mosquito beatifically raised its ruby belly." That was exactly it. As for knowing who the old Chinese man was, my vague recollections were extinguished almost before they were lit.

"I would beg the director and his writers," went on the old man, "either by your intermediary or through the tape recorder on which my eminent colleagues cannot help focusing, to throw this screenplay-or at least this version-in one of the hotel's bins, where, despite the establishments reputation, there's quite a substantial population of hidden little scrabbling creatures who, I can only hope, will nibble it page by page, word by word. So very far is it from the true character of Puyi, who, contrary to the untruthful biography on which your screenplay is based, was a pathologically complex person, and I'm not referring here to his h.o.m.os.e.xuality, for many an emperor before him had similar tendencies. That is not the question, but his s.a.d.i.s.tic cruelty and frequent fits of delirium-as unpredictable as they were uncontrollable-were due to schizophrenia, in the purely medical sense of the term."

In our collective silence we could make out through the wall the individual notes in the opening melody of the allegro from a Beethoven concerto, then a slap rang out, one the director's representative administered to himself. The mosquito, which I could no longer see, must have avoided the blow and escaped.

"Piece of s.h.i.t!"

With this vengeful cry, the man leapt from his chair, crushed the insect between his hands and threw its oozing, bleeding corpse into an ashtray, where he burned it with the tip of his cigarette.

"What the h.e.l.l was that mosquito doing here?" he said. "Did he want to get into movies too?"

He roared with laughter and declared that, on that note, the meeting was closed. Before leaving he turned to me.

"Tell the old man I'm sure he knows the truth, but it's too dark, too negative, it won't work with a Western audience, it has nothing to offer a movie, no one's interested in that, least of all a world-famous director whose ambitions can be summed up in one word: Oscar."

He left. While I translated, struggling to find attenuating words and turns of phrase, the Living Dictionary of the Forbidden City stared at me with eyes bulging from their sockets, his smooth beard and white hair stiff with rage.

It was only after his blue-robed figure had vanished, still reeling, through the doorway and I had closed my scribbled notebook in relief that-without even searching my memory-the thing I could not remember earlier came to me. Tang Li, well, of course! The author of The Secret Biography of Cixi The Secret Biography of Cixi. I stood up, reached the door, launched myself into the corridor, b.u.mped into someone and thundered down the stairs, which were still heaving with future Mozarts so I had to zig-zag my way through them on every floor. As if finally seeing the Bearer of Good News, the highly strung crowd, tortured by their long anxious wait, sprang to life again. The fact that I was obviously in a hurry, my little translator's notebook, my Western appearance ... all insignificant details, granted, but enough to whip up their emotions and create ripples of excitement that escorted me all the way down to street level, along with waves of questions, supplications and fears concerning the choices made by the king of violins. They clearly took me for his powerful a.s.sistant who worked behind the scenes scheduling the on-camera auditions. Despite my explanations (and my futile swearing in the name of film and of another king-this time of cinematography), the young performers' parents continued to hound me, G.o.d knows why. One mother of about thirty, a hunchback with permed hair and a sweaty face, picked up the hem of her cheap skirt, dragged her offspring by the arm, followed by her bald husband, and bore down on me like a determined predator, descending the stairs with the fervent energy of a good soldier, close on my heels all the way. But she must have tripped on a step, because her bag fell, scattering tins of food, sandwiches, bottles of water and a red apple, which bounced from stair to stair right to the bottom of the flight.

It was almost dark outside. I had to leave my bicycle where it was parked and, by dint of various acrobatic manoeuvres, cross the tightly packed streams not of cars (which were rare commodities at the time) but of bicycles advancing inexorably, in order to catch up with the old man in the long blue robe at the tram stop on the other side of the widest boulevard in China, built in the pa.s.sion for all things huge that was the 1950s, in imitation of Moscow's Red Square. Another couple of seconds and I would have missed the tram. The driver set off, but my relief evaporated when I saw-still running and now out of breath-the father, the boy and the violin case, but not the mother, at least. I rushed to the door, which shuddered under the father's blows and eventually opened. Once more they interrogated me furiously; I explained who I was, helped by the testimony of the old historian who had come to my aid and whose hostility seemed to have vanished on that imposing grey boulevard, known the world over for its military parades, its huge ma.s.s demonstrations and, years later, the student ma.s.sacre. The father, floundering between the names Menuhin, Bertolucci and Puyi, eventually gave up and a group of schoolchildren surging towards the door pushed him and his son aside, helpless.

Rather than the old historians steady, motionless, almost bulging eyes, it is his voice that comes to mind and still rings in my ears, a quivering thread of a voice, cracked and very gentle, drowned out most of the time by the racket of the tram. His voice and the way he cleared his throat when he succ.u.mbed to a wave of sadness or indignation. Standing among the other pa.s.sengers, holding on to a leather strap, with no comment on the lurching corners which threatened to throw him over, without looking at me, he took up the subject of Puyi exactly where he had been interrupted that afternoon, as if nothing had happened in between and the meeting were carrying on quite naturally in that dusty tramcar.

"History tells us that the two child emperors, Guangxu and Puyi, appointed successively and thirty years apart by their aunt, the empress Cixi, were struck by the same mysterious disorder: impotence, to give it its name, and this brought an end to any hopes of perpetuating their lineage. Puyi's case seems all the more fateful as, bearing in mind his status as last emperor, the phenomenon takes on an almost metaphysical dimension far beyond his personal destiny. He was, anyway, a sickly child and his fragile state was aggravated over the years by countless Chinese and Western remedies, high-dose injections, prayers, rituals and all sorts of cures, aromatic fumigations and aphrodisiacs extracted from the t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es of various species of mammal, bird and fish, the most famous of which is incontrovertibly the Tibetan 'gra.s.s worm,' a small flatworm, a plathelminth of the peziza order, about two or three centimetres long, it looks like the grey silkworm and is called Bombyx mori Bombyx mori. This worm owes its name to the fact that after it dies in winter its body, buried beneath the Himalayan snow, turns into gra.s.s, which eventually pokes through the snow and grows all through the spring, now enjoying an entirely vegetal existence. Even so, ma.s.sive doses of this powerful aphrodisiac famous for its success were unable to stir the imperial organ from its lethargy Worse than that, they plunged the emperor into states of extreme panic, bringing on outbursts when he believed he was prey to tiny creatures writhing inside his stomach, invading his liver and making their way up to his heart and brain, sometimes claiming it was caterpillars with pearly grey fur that were inside him, breaking him down, eating him up and coupling in his insides to the death, sometimes pointed bamboo shoots that he felt he could see gleaming green, springing up from every part of his body as it cooled, cooled, cooled like a field the day after a lost battle, like a drifting iceberg. Then he would throw himself body and soul into calligraphy, a true art at the time as it still is now. From morning till night he applied himself to copying out the works of another emperor, Huizong (1082-1135) of the Song dynasty, an artistic genius but a very mediocre administrator who also experienced a long period of sterility and undertook an arduous military campaign until the late arrival of his first child, not before he had had an artificial mountain erected to the north of the capital on the advice of a soothsayer. At the end of his reign the country was in ruins and he lost the war. When the 'Northern Barbarians,' the Jins, headed for the capital he gave the order, on the advice of another soothsayer, to open the gates of the city, believing a celestial army would come to his aid. He lived his last years-as Puyi would later-in captivity in the absolute silence of the far north, eight thousand kilometres from the palace he could now visit only in his dreams. So few of his works were left in this world that each of them, even down to fragments of letters, a.s.sumed an immeasurable value; they were of primordial importance in the imperial family's collection, and Puyi, who was its sole heir, could enjoy not only admiring them but also copying them. He would spread out on the table a masterpiece, often written on hemp paper coloured yellow by a concoction of vegetable pulp used to protect it from worms and insects, a type of paper used only for transcribing sutras and which acquired an attractive warm grey patina with age. Then he would lay over it a thin sheet of translucent paper covered with a light coating of wax, which meant he could trace with perfect accuracy. He had brushes made just like those used by his predecessor, with bristles of polecat hairs, reputed for their stiffness, arranged around a central point; mastering them takes years of a.s.siduous practice but produces an elastic resistance that lends each stroke a keen powerful edge and transposes every nuance of the calligrapher's personality. In the Forbidden City there is still a graveyard for the polecat-hair brushes once used by Puyi; each has its own tomb, a headstone and an epitaph written by the emperor himself with the maker's name, the date it was first used, the day it was sc.r.a.pped, etc. During these long daily tracing sessions, Puyi felt the giant of Chinese calligraphy guiding his hand, entrusting to him the secret held within each stroke and every character; if we are to believe the diagnosis made by the Court doctors years later, this activity created a hypnotic, emotional, besotted relationship between the tracer and the man whose work he traced, and gave rise to the particular brand of self-sublimation referred to by the strange term 'transference.' So the young emperor felt he was slipping into the persona of another captive monarch; when he dipped his brush in ink, when the bristles swelled, filling with the exact measure of ink Huizong would have used, Puyi found himself in a prison camp eight hundred years earlier, looking at a snow-covered landscape, at the tents for guards and prisoners, at vast plains and the summits of distant hills. He held his breath, his hand exerted its gentle pressure, a concentration of all Huizong's stylistic precision and elegance. Under this pressure, the point of long polecat hairs released the correct amount of ink onto the paper, or rather it was Puyi's personality which was released onto it, or, as he often claimed, Huizong's. Over time he confused the traces of ink with trails of urine that left furrows in the thick carpet of snow inside Huizong's tent one stormy night. The unfortunate prisoner, tormented by a prostate problem, had woken in the middle of the night but not had time to reach the latrines outside. Sometimes, while he was copying, Puyi shed tears which ran over the waxed tracing paper, and the traces of those tears can be seen to this day on the yellow hemp paper of one of Huizong's works conserved at the Tokyo Museum. He would fly into a tantrum when he failed to master a vital technique-one that was not particular to Huizong but also adopted by other great calligraphers-which consisted in always working with a raised hand, without leaning either hand or elbow on the table so that, by suspending the entire arm, the pressure exerted by the point of the brush on the paper could be regulated, allowing each movement to take wing with complete freedom, and creating a rhythmic sequence of downstrokes and upstrokes. The moment Puyi lifted his wrist in the air it stopped obeying him and quivered like a leaf, which put him into a paroxysm of rage and, perverse as he was, the only way he could calm himself was to take pleasure in the suffering of others: with a gloved hand he would whip or cave in the skull of one or several eunuchs who had witnessed his failure, his s.a.d.i.s.tic inspiration conceiving hideous tortures for the sole pleasure of hearing his victims weep and beg and shriek in pain.

"Early in April 1925, thirteen years after the fall of the empire, Puyi was released from his gilded prison, the Forbidden City, guarded by the newly formed Republican Army, following a sort of epileptic fit which plunged him into a profound state of lethargy and left him more dead than alive. He was moved to the j.a.panese concession of Tianjin, south of Peking, where he stayed in bed for weeks on end, and only smiled again when a procession of porters some two kilometres long arrived, their shoulders chafing under great swaying trunks. There were three thousand of them, all filled with precious objects collected by his ancestors, but in his eyes the most beautiful of these trunks full of national treasures, of streaming pearls, rivers of diamonds, cascades of jade, gold, porcelain, copper, sculptures, paintings, calligraphy, etc., was the one set aside for the works of Emperor Huizong. As soon as his convalescence was under way, he threw himself back into his masters works in order, this time, to copy the paintings, a field in which Huizong excelled perhaps even more than in calligraphy, occupying a position comparable to that of Modigliani or Degas in Western painting.

"No one could be absolutely sure what his recovery could be attributed to: Was it Huizong's painting or the j.a.panese sumo wrestler by the name of Yamata whose body was so huge his tiny head seemed to be tucked inside his sloping shoulders, and who played an indispensable part in the emperors day-to-day life? Towards noon Puyi would indicate he was awake by ringing a bell and the sumo wrestler, naked as the day he was born, would approach him, moving like a silent mountain, and carry him to the bathroom in his warm arms that were as soft as any woman's. He would lay him in a marble bath where the temperature of the water had been regulated and was scrupulously monitored-using a German thermometer-by the sumo himself, who knew that the least discrepancy in heat would provoke a fresh outburst from his obsessive master. And so, still half asleep, as Puyi once described to his cousin with whom, as with everyone, he referred to himself as the emperor and in the third person," the professor explained, "the emperor listened to the creaking and groaning of his frame as it swelled in the warm water, lulled by the voice of a young virgin who sat beside the bath reading a novel he had chosen the day before. It was usually an extract from Jin Ping Mei Jin Ping Mei, read by a succession of Chinese girls each more beautiful than the last. Sometimes, on the advice of his sumo, the emperor might also ask for erotic j.a.panese works; then the reading would be done by a j.a.panese girl and, although the emperor didn't understand a single word of the language, the girl's voice mingling with the misty steam bewitched him so that, when he found the strength to open his eyes for a fraction of a second, he thought he saw a mermaid, for the young girl's pearly grey skirt shimmered in the steam room like a fish tail, whose scales (according to legend) would come away in handfuls if a man so much as looked at them, scales that the emperor thought he could see floating on the surface of the water like slivers of silver all around his body beached in the bath. He rang again to signal the conclusion of his bath, the sumo came in, lifted him from the tub, carried him at arm's length into his bedroom, laid him on his bed and wrapped him in large, soft, thick towels impregnated with a heady perfume. The emperor lay in complete darkness for a long time, hearing and seeing nothing, inhaling the exquisite scent of flowers, plants and musk, until he dissolved into it. Time, which flashes past elsewhere, drew itself out so slowly for him that every minute seemed an eternity.

"Late in the afternoon, if we are to believe what his cousin remembers," the professor went on, "the emperor would shut himself in his study where the windows were permanently covered with wine-coloured blinds that let in no sunlight, and sit at a desk lit by a lamp with a green shade. There, like a studious pupil, he copied a bird perched on a bare branch painted on silk by Huizong, who initiated this sort of Court painting, the height of Chinese refinement and studied elegance, dominated by a singular kind of purity, unadorned, ghostly, always light but laden with meaning. No one could say whether the bird was in a heavenly sky, an underwater world or a dark aquarium, so utterly devoid was the work of coa.r.s.e earthly realities. Needless to say, the emperor displayed a particular predilection for this kind of painting. The sumo prepared his ink, spread out a length of silk specially manufactured for him by a workshop in Suzhou to replicate exactly the silk used by Huizong eight hundred years earlier: with thick, closely woven threads on a double weft, not like these modern silks, vulgar satins with fine threads doubled up in the warp. His craftsmen used a technique dating back to the era of the Song dynasty, steeping the raw silk in a mixture of glue and alum, firstly with a brush, then by pressing, beating and rubbing it to ensure it was better adapted to take the successive applications of colour washes, a technique invented by Huizong and of which he was master. The emperor sat motionless for hours on end, contemplating the bird he intended to copy, trying to penetrate the secret of its ashen plumage made up of juxtaposed lines that, on closer inspection, disguised infinite precision beneath a continuous quivering; the secret of those clouds of red, sort of shapeless unidentifiable leaves that metamorphosed into petals, stamens, pistils ... around the bird's crimson tail; and that black beak with a single very fine line describing its contour, crystallising it in a fluid shape shot through with invisible vibration; and above all the miracle of its eye, which, even more disturbingly, const.i.tuted an enigma that neither the emperor nor anyone else would ever be able to resolve: how had the painter succeeded in giving it such brilliance and power that you felt-although this was manifestly impossible-that the creature was watching you, crossing over an invisible boundary? The emperor sometimes imagined Huizong had not used a brush, but just his fingernail, applying a drop of ink to it and projecting the droplet a metre's distance so that-either by chance or thanks to a minutely planned gesture-it landed on the painting just where it needed to. The bird's head was painted in transparent colours with delicately deepening shadows, a detailed and natural anatomical depiction, a fragile, vibrant head infused with profound solitude, portraying for the emperor the image of himself as a small boy of three, perched on a throne of filigreed gold, borne by four intertwined dragons, raised to a height that a child's eye could barely reach, the throne on which he had felt his weightless body transformed into that of a little bird huddled in its nest way up high in the audience hall, which was filled with both an icy cold and, paradoxical though this may seem, deathly silence, where the deafening cries of the tens of thousands of courtiers prostrating themselves before him rang round as they would in a vast abyss, merging into a series of long, dark and terrifying echoes.

"What Puyi did not reveal to his cousin," the professor pointed out, "was that, despite the endless time he spent in contemplation, he never succeeded in putting down a single brushstroke, the least spot of ink, the tiniest scribble on the silk. In the end all that Huizong's works inspired in him was profound self-loathing. At the end of each session, the sumo put away the paintbrushes-brushes that had never been dipped into the ink, which slowly thickened, gradually coagulating and clouding irremediably-then he would gather the sc.r.a.ps of virgin silk torn up and thrown away by Puyi, and bury them in the courtyard beneath a layer of earth and rotting leaves. This period of 'meditation on painting,' as Puyi called it, ended in a spectacular episode, not devoid of an element of comedy: late in November 1926, towards the end of a snowy night, some courtiers were horrified to spot Puyi, who was twenty at the time, in the feeble morning light, his frail naked body wrapped in a long boa of black and white feathers as he perched, shivering, on the branch of an elm tree just like the bird painted by Huizong eight hundred years earlier. Not one of his servants dared approach him, except for the sumo, the only person allowed to enter his study (strictly out of bounds to anyone else) so that he could put more wood on the fire in winter and stand behind him mutely waving a fan in summer. No one will ever know what degree of intimacy there was between the young fallen emperor and his j.a.panese sumo but, if the recollections of one of the last eunuchs in Tianjin are to be believed, every time Puyi descended into unshakeable lethargy after a hysterical outburst, the sumo would lie down beside him in his bed and hold him in his arms, day and night. But on the morning in question when the sumo reached out to his master to take him in his arms, the elm branch-which had already bowed considerably under Puyi's weight-snapped with a deafening crack and both men fell, in each others arms, though neither was injured thanks to the snow on the ground in the courtyard.

"Another singular detail is that Huizong, himself a painter and calligrapher, was also a great collector or even the greatest ever, an area that no doubt requires vast wealth but also a knowledge of art, in a word: taste. Even I, who am no artist," the professor confided, "have read and reread once a year the catalogues of Huizong's collection, which list six thousand and three hundred works with their t.i.tles, descriptions, painters' biographies and, most importantly, the emperors own comments, piecing together the genesis of each creation. Almost all of these works have now disappeared, but reading the catalogues affords the same pleasure as looking at an old map of a town or neighbourhood, where the observer can wander through imaginary remains, recognising crossroads, losing his way in a market, following the course of a moat, looking out for its ripples along the sinuous outline of city walls, although it will vanish the moment he feels he has grasped it. Can you understand why a great wave of happiness washed over me when, looking at an enlarged photograph, I spotted the t.i.tles of two works from this mythical catalogue on the label of a chest that was handed down to Huizong and later belonged to our last emperor?

"The first was a piece of calligraphy by Li Bo, the great poet of the Tang dynasty, an autograph transcription of his poem 'The Terrace of the Sun' on hemp paper. Three centuries lie between Li Bo and Huizong, but in his day, as in ours, men of letters were divided into two camps, those who loved Li Bo and those who admired Du Fu, another great poet of the Tang dynasty and an intimate friend of Li Bo. Huizong clearly belonged to the first camp, since, according to the catalogue of his collection, he owned six autograph works of calligraphy by Li Bo (six poems he had written), two in semi-cursive script and executed at the palace before his emperor, who had commissioned them, the other four in full-blown cursive script, and all of them, judging by their t.i.tles, eulogies to alcohol improvised in a drunken state and which Huizong-with a flourish that went beyond his role as an expert-annotated with these words: 'Li Bo and alcohol, ever running to meet each other, became so interchangeable that eventually, like a vanishing apparition, they formed just one creature, compact yet ill-defined, and quite unique.'

"I couldn't help doing some research on the poem called 'The Terrace of the Sun,'" said the professor. "What a journey it must have had, through all the political upheavals, the founding and floundering of dynasties! After Huizong was exiled, the work disappeared, then re-emerged in the Yuan dynasty, at first in the hands of Yan Qin, then Ou Yangxuan (1274-1358), the famous master of the Imperial Archives, then it disappeared again, only to reappear three centuries later in the Ming dynasty in the catalogue of Xiang Zijing, the famous collector, before becoming the property, some time in the late sixteenth century, of the Qing emperors, Puyi's ancestors. Calligraphy may well be simply an artistic version of another form, that is the ideograms which make up the poem, but then not only does it reflect the character and temperament of the artist but (you can believe me on this) it also betrays his heart rate, his breathing and the alcohol on his breath, and all this affords the enthusiast a feeling of euphoria comparable to that of a music lover discovering or, better still, acquiring a two-hundred-year-old recording of a Beethoven piano concerto played by Beethoven himself.

"The hypnotic psychological effect of a piece of calligraphy or a painting (which, according to doctors, was in itself nothing short of miraculous in Puyi's case) is, like all other artistic responses, only ever short-lived and was not enough to affect his pathological condition or to maintain a mental equilibrium, however fragile. And yet, unless I am mistaken, that is exactly what he did experience with the second treasure from Huizong's collection-a ma.n.u.script on a roll of silk in a language that was not known at the time-an object that meant more to him than anything else in the world. The hypnotic power it exerted over him was such that, while Puyi had had the calligraphy by Li Bo hung beside his bed, he hardly ever looked at it, for he was quite incapable of tearing his eyes away from this scroll of ma.n.u.script.

"I can see from your expression," the professor remarked, "how interested you are in this roll and I feel I must put you on your guard before this interest becomes more pa.s.sionate, as it has for anyone who has come close to the ma.n.u.script. I myself, I have to admit, developed a keen enthusiasm for it when I looked into its history, exhausting all available sources, some of which must be viewed with caution, for they are too closely tied up with legend; but I felt that by reconst.i.tuting its peregrinations, however tortuous a course they may have taken, I would be better equipped to talk about the late emperors on whom it had left its mark and to put together lost fragments from the lives of fallen n.o.bility, such as Seventy-one, whom I mention in the book you have read. Time and again I regret the fact that, when it was published, your compatriot Paul d'Ampere had not yet come to China, that the paths of that n.o.ble madman and this ma.n.u.script had not yet crossed, depriving my book of a chapter that would have been more disturbing than all the others.

"This precious roll is made up of two strips of silk sewn together with tiny st.i.tching; the first of them contains the text in an unknown language and the silk is stained an orangey yellow. There is no indication of a date, but, from a scientific study of the weaving, it has been established that the stain was made using a concoction extracted from the bark of the Huangbo tree, characteristic of the Han dynasty, and a.n.a.lysis of the ink, which is of exceptional quality and has retained all the intensity of its strong dark black, seems to prove that this mysterious work probably dates from the second or third century of our era, which makes it the oldest roll preserved to date.

"On the second strip, which is in more luxurious silk stained light blue, there is a long colophon of thirty columns of ivory-coloured Chinese ideograms, with calligraphy details by Huizong in gold dust-which still gleams in places-mixed with glue, a technique used in Buddhist temples for copying sacred texts. (Did Huizong have some premonition about the nature of this text written in an unknown language?) "The colophon begins with a short biography of An Shih-Kao, the first Chinese translator of Buddhist sutras, a hereditary prince of Parthia in the Middle East, who converted to Buddhism, became a monk and, when his father died, gave up his inheritance in favour of his uncle. Leaving the confines of Indo-Iran, he followed a route through the oases of Central Asia, Khotan, Kucha, Turfan ... all the way to Gansu, having travelled through the cosmopolitan cities of Dunhuang, Zangye and Wuwei. He reached the valley of the Yellow River in northern China and his presence there is recorded in the middle of the second century, in the year 148 to be precise, in the capital, Luoyang. Alongside his reputation as a linguistic genius-he spoke some twenty languages-was his vast historic erudition, and not a day pa.s.sed when he did not devote several hours to his works of translation. He spent ten years in his room translating into Chinese the many sutras brought home from his travels. His translations were usually in verse, honed and restrained, betraying no trace of his previous existence as a Parthian prince or indeed of any personal pretension; they stir the readers very soul, whereas his spoken Chinese was hesitant and tainted by a strong accent and grammatical errors. Once in the middle of the night-as he later told his emperor-during a visit to Xi'an, the former capital of China, where he had come to preach in the outskirts around Fufeng, he saw beams of light springing up from the ground on a stretch of wasteland, lighting up certain areas as in mystic visions depicted in religious paintings. According to the report he made to the Court in the year 480 before our era, once the Buddha Shakyamuni achieved the unfathomable peace of Parinirvana, his disciples shared his relics among themselves and set off in several groups, heading in different directions to spread his word all over the world. Those who reached China met with insurmountable problems, for the country was ravaged by war, and they died one after the other. The last of them, a very elderly man, died when he reached the Wei valley along the course of the Yellow River, where he had had to bury the Buddha's relics, which then revealed themselves to An Shih-Kao with those beams of divine light piercing through the earth. It was the first time the Court had heard the name Buddha, which amused everyone; even so, on the emperors orders, the army carried out excavations and found crystal structures in the shape of teeth and finger bones, but larger than normal size, golden in colour and translucent, gleaming in the bottom of a ditch. That was how An Shih-Kao succeeded in converting the emperor of China, who, in memory of this miracle symbolising the triumph of Buddhism, erected a ravishing stupa on the site (a stupa being a tall edifice made of wood and brick and painted white), in whose crypt the Buddha's relics were kept. He had a house built beside it for An Shih-Kao to spend the rest of his days praying, meditating, translating and teaching. After An Shih-Kao's terrible death (he was a.s.sa.s.sinated during one of his frequent religious pilgrimages), his house became the first Chinese Buddhist temple, the Temple of the Gates of the Law.

"Almost a thousand years pa.s.sed, the colophon written by Huizong goes on, and in mid-August of the year 1128, deep into a stormy night racked with thunderclaps and squalls of hail and torrential rain, the superior at the Temple of the Gates of the Law had the extraordinary sensation of the sky being torn in two by lightning and a hallucinatory vision of the stupa floating several feet above the ground, defying the laws of gravity and eventually vanishing in a puff of smoke. He woke the two hundred monks in the temple, announced his vision to them and asked them to pray with him all night for the stupa to be removed to the eternal peace of Parinirvana. As dawn broke the rain slackened, the dark mists stopped swirling and there was a huge thunderclap, creating so much electric discharge that the sky seemed to explode and the ground to disintegrate. The framework of the temple cracked and shuddered; then, in a fraction of a second, the left side of the stupa, which had been struck by lightning, collapsed. The right side remained standing in the rain, its damaged silhouette-bearing the clear tear line, which ran from the highest point right down to the ground-outlined against the sky like a fragment ripped from an architectural drawing. The following morning, in among the lightning-blackened bricks and planks at the foot of the building, soaking wet pages of the Avatamsaka Sutra were found lying in concentric circles on the ground. This was Buddha's 'Flower Garland' Sutra, which the monks were not surprised to see here, as, for many centuries, faithful wealthy donors had had the right to lay down offerings (rolls of silk or sheets of paper on which scribes had been paid to copy out sacred texts) inside the thick walls of the temple. But when the superior of the monastery climbed to the top of the broken stupa to take down a pitifully damaged bronze statue of Buddha, a ma.n.u.script rolled on valuable shafts made of white sandalwood, jade and ivory fell from the belly of the statue. Unsettled by the unfamiliar language on the roll as much as by the circ.u.mstances in which it was found, he presented himself to Emperor Huizong in person to offer him the ma.n.u.script, convinced that it bore a message concerning a higher authority. What came next proves that deciphering this text would have tremendous repercussions on the country's fate as much as on that of the emperor himself.

"Huizong, a weakened sovereign, an artist shipwrecked on a throne, ended his colophon in a hand that admittedly proved he still had a dazzling mastery of the skill but increasingly lacked discipline: 'My imperial person, in his concern to decipher the ma.n.u.script, devoted all his erudition and hours of research, reading and reflection to every last sign. In vain.' As this item seemed to date back to the period of An Shih-Kao, the emperor asked the then king of Parthia, where this genius originated, to send him a delegation of intellectuals and experts, but they too were unable to identify the language. They pointed out that, according to the annals of history, An Shih-Kao was familiar with some twenty languages, most of them dead. The mystery remains impenetrable but the emperor is convinced that, despite its brevity, the text is a sutra, since it was positioned at the very top of the reliquary, inside the most sacred statue. This hypothesis is joined by another, from Su Shi, the emperor's favoured poet with very p.r.o.nounced inclinations towards Buddhism: remembering that An Shih-Kao was a.s.sa.s.sinated, Su wondered whether there was any secret link between this crime and the roll of silk in which An Shih-Kao might reveal something about the authenticity of the relics.'

"As for Puyi," the professor went on, after gazing for a while at the silent streets flitting by through the tram window, "his fascination with the ma.n.u.script took an unexpected turn. Towards the end of the 1920s, before the beginning of the Sino-j.a.panese War, Puyi, who was then twenty-five, was confronted with the dilemma of behaving patriotically at the risk of never regaining his throne or collaborating with the j.a.panese who might one day restore him to his imperial role, albeit at the expense of his honour. It was at this point, as if trying to find a message to resolve his dilemma, that he threw himself into deciphering the unknown language, firstly on a whim but later with a nervous intensity that gradually consumed him. Books translated by An Shih-Kao began to overrun his study, dining room, bedroom, bed and soon his whole existence. For the most part these works, devoted to various techniques of dhyana meditation or to numerical categories, made him feel faint and dizzy, bringing on migraines that clouded his little round eyes and made imaginary motes of dust dance across his field of vision, but he forced himself to apply a system conceived by one of his former tutors with the aim, after considerable circ.u.mnavigations, of identifying one word or phrase that might have sprung from the great translator's hand in an unguarded moment, betraying the secret to the labyrinthine construction of this unknown language. One day, when he was reading the nineteenth volume of one of the seven versions (the number of pages and contents of each version vary and even contradict each other depending on when they were written, const.i.tuting several areas of controversy) of the Buddha.n.u.smri Tisamadhi-Sutra Buddha.n.u.smri Tisamadhi-Sutra (a meditative sutra that evokes different manifestations of Buddha), he had a sudden conviction that all An Shih-Kao's translations belonged to the cla.s.sic tradition of Hinayana, a school of thought known for its strict discipline and which had fallen out of usage long since in China but was, and still is to this day, very widespread in Burma, Sikkim, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, etc. Convinced he was on the right track, Puyi then noted these countries down in red ink and sent their heads of state or their British guardians official letters essentially asking for their help in deciphering the signs. At first these letters went unanswered without upsetting Puyi at all, because he had now turned his research to another field of investigation: the origins of Chinese writing. His aim was to find the oldest glyptic signs which might have a link to those in the ma.n.u.script and that a linguistic genius like An Shih-Kao would have been able to write. Puyi would certainly never have thrown himself into such an enterprise had he had any idea of the complexity this work entailed or the erudition it required. To some historians, this long march towards the origins of the Chinese language represents a final flurry of patriotism from the last emperor, but they also hold that he ended up losing himself along the way, which, in my humble opinion, is by no means a certainty, because a man in a state of mental torture is sometimes better equipped to approach the truth than scholars. Puyi had three thousand chests of national treasures and he started by asking to see a collection of small, thin-walled bronze alcohol flasks made during the Zhou era (late eleventh century-256 B.C.). Using a magnifying gla.s.s, he studied their minute inscriptions, where he found no trace of the unknown language, but-examining the signs that soothsayers had had carved onto these small yet solemn and imposing receptacles-he felt for the first time that they const.i.tuted a separate ritual language with little connection to Chinese writing. This idea was reinforced when he scrutinised another, still older glyptic language used by soothsayers about two thousand years before our era. He found it in his collection of rare antiquities that had never belonged to previous emperors, but had been given to him by a private collector at the beginning of the twentieth century: inscriptions on sections of tortoise-sh.e.l.l, which had been used for divination by reading the patterns of cracks on them, kinds of diagrams that soothsayers created by burning the sh.e.l.ls; the interpretation (in some cases propitious, in others not) of these diagrams, the date, name of the interested party and reason for the sacrifice were later engraved on the sh.e.l.ls, themselves so thin and fragile that most would barely want to touch them with their fingertips for fear they would crumble to dust. During this period Puyi's doctors, concerned to see him laugh a great deal of the time for no apparent reason, worried about his mental health. I myself am convinced he was at last savouring a brief moment of happiness when he could forget the outside world, his political dilemma, his impotence, etc., as he laid out those tortoisesh.e.l.ls and wandered along pathways through an ornamental garden of signs as far removed from Chinese writing as the unfamiliar language on the ma.n.u.script. To Puyi those signs did not belong to a language at all, but to a system of purely graphic symbols with no grammatical rules or syntactical relationships. It was the language he had always been looking for, one he had found only in dreams or as a child, a language without verbs, just nouns, nouns and nouns-a language, I like to think, with which he could have written his own motto, painted in large characters on the walls of his residence: No (a meditative sutra that evokes different manifestations of Buddha), he had a sudden conviction that all An Shih-Kao's translations belonged to the cla.s.sic tradition of Hinayana, a school of thought known for its strict discipline and which had fallen out of usage long since in China but was, and still is to this day, very widespread in Burma, Sikkim, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, etc. Convinced he was on the right track, Puyi then noted these countries down in red ink and sent their heads of state or their British guardians official letters essentially asking for their help in deciphering the signs. At first these letters went unanswered without upsetting Puyi at all, because he had now turned his research to another field of investigation: the origins of Chinese writing. His aim was to find the oldest glyptic signs which might have a link to those in the ma.n.u.script and that a linguistic genius like An Shih-Kao would have been able to write. Puyi would certainly never have thrown himself into such an enterprise had he had any idea of the complexity this work entailed or the erudition it required. To some historians, this long march towards the origins of the Chinese language represents a final flurry of patriotism from the last emperor, but they also hold that he ended up losing himself along the way, which, in my humble opinion, is by no means a certainty, because a man in a state of mental torture is sometimes better equipped to approach the truth than scholars. Puyi had three thousand chests of national treasures and he started by asking to see a collection of small, thin-walled bronze alcohol flasks made during the Zhou era (late eleventh century-256 B.C.). Using a magnifying gla.s.s, he studied their minute inscriptions, where he found no trace of the unknown language, but-examining the signs that soothsayers had had carved onto these small yet solemn and imposing receptacles-he felt for the first time that they const.i.tuted a separate ritual language with little connection to Chinese writing. This idea was reinforced when he scrutinised another, still older glyptic language used by soothsayers about two thousand years before our era. He found it in his collection of rare antiquities that had never belonged to previous emperors, but had been given to him by a private collector at the beginning of the twentieth century: inscriptions on sections of tortoise-sh.e.l.l, which had been used for divination by reading the patterns of cracks on them, kinds of diagrams that soothsayers created by burning the sh.e.l.ls; the interpretation (in some cases propitious, in others not) of these diagrams, the date, name of the interested party and reason for the sacrifice were later engraved on the sh.e.l.ls, themselves so thin and fragile that most would barely want to touch them with their fingertips for fear they would crumble to dust. During this period Puyi's doctors, concerned to see him laugh a great deal of the time for no apparent reason, worried about his mental health. I myself am convinced he was at last savouring a brief moment of happiness when he could forget the outside world, his political dilemma, his impotence, etc., as he laid out those tortoisesh.e.l.ls and wandered along pathways through an ornamental garden of signs as far removed from Chinese writing as the unfamiliar language on the ma.n.u.script. To Puyi those signs did not belong to a language at all, but to a system of purely graphic symbols with no grammatical rules or syntactical relationships. It was the language he had always been looking for, one he had found only in dreams or as a child, a language without verbs, just nouns, nouns and nouns-a language, I like to think, with which he could have written his own motto, painted in large characters on the walls of his residence: No verbs, therefore no concerns verbs, therefore no concerns.

"After the inscriptions on tortoisesh.e.l.l, Puyi was inspired by patterns suggesting a primitive sort of writing, painted or engraved on two ceramic articles in his possession: a pot with openwork sides to display its contents and ajar with a narrow neck. He then widened his field of research, obtaining photographs and copies of prehistoric engravings found deep inside legendary caves in far-flung provinces. In 1980 a distant cousin of his published a two-volume work ent.i.tled Glyphs and Rock Carvings Acquired by Puyi Glyphs and Rock Carvings Acquired by Puyi.

Little by little, [the cousin states in his preface,] as he copied and recopied them, Puyi managed to hear a dialogue between these patterns, the suns, human bones, birds, frogs, fish, plants and insects, not unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs. As several weeks could pa.s.s without his speaking to anyone but his j.a.panese sumo, this verbless exchange thrumming round inside his head const.i.tuted his only conversations. In a wine-coloured leather diary for 1930 (probably a gift from his English tutor and now conserved at the Museum of Contemporary History), there are some brief notes sufficiently explicit to demonstrate that, in his mind, these glyphs and rock carvings were a.s.sociated with images of paradise, which ended up haunting his dreams. On the page for the 8th of November, for example, he writes: "dreamed of Banpo, a giraffe" ... Banpo was known from pictograms dating back to the second half of the second millennium before our era.

"One day," the professor went on, "he received a letter from Borneo, an Indonesian island whose Dutch governor had had copies made of the alphabets of several languages once used by native peoples. Among them was one letter of the Phoenician alphabet, which attracted Puyi's attention because it resembled a sign on the ma.n.u.script. Peculiarly, instead of leaping for joy, he simply glanced at a map of the world, placed his finger on this land lost in the middle of an ocean which-in An Shih-Kao's day-had not yet been crossed and cried: 'Oh, for goodness' sake, no!' With which he removed his finger and had the letter filed in archives still known as the Court Archives, the better to forget it.

"Another letter, a surprisingly thick one, its envelope smothered in strange stamps and postmarks, arrived in Puyi's residence in Tianjin in mid-August 1931. The place was shrouded in gloomy silence, this was a month before the j.a.panese invasion of Manchuria. The sumo came into his room and put the letter on the emperor's bedside table while he lay huddled in his freezing bed, tortured by worry and migraines, haunted by the thought of becoming a puppet for the j.a.panese who would name him emperor of Manchuria, casting infamy over the entire Chinese people. That same day the only Chinese scholar familiar with Sanskrit, the sacred language of India, was summoned before Puyi to read the letter. All that emerged from this consultation was that the author of the letter was a ruler from a region which once belonged to ancient India but was now part of Nepal, and its Kapilavastu district had been Buddha's birthplace two thousand five hundred years earlier. On orders from his superior, a British governor who had fought the Boxers in Peking in his youth, he was sending Puyi a copy of The Hitopadea The Hitopadea, a collection of fables written in a local language called Newari, a combination of Sanskrit and a north Himalayan dialect used by nomads. This letter fostered an infatuation with Sanskrit in Puyi, who was quite won over by its grammar, as it was explained to him by the scholar, or rather by one essential grammatical point, the only one that held his attention: in this very rich, very precise language, verbs existed only in the pa.s.sive form. You could never say, for example: 'The cook is preparing rice,' but rather: 'Rice is being prepared by the cook.' Tormented by a feeling of failure and the thought that he would soon leave his residence and be no more than a puppet emperor in captivity, Puyi felt every sentence p.r.o.nounced by the scholar resonating in his ears like some gentle incantatory formula, his every word opening a new doorway through which he alone could reach the skies with his magician by his side. In the s.p.a.ce of an afternoon an idyllic world was born in his mind, a world where verbs-actions-were reduced to their pa.s.sive form, thus making every kind of threat disappear. No gesture or movement had any meaning now other than submitting, like a virgin sheet of paper that accepts having print over its entire surface, sometimes even being deeply dented in the process.

"That evening the Sanskrit scholar, exhausted by his new pupil's ardour, took his leave immediately after dinner to sleep in one of the many empty bedrooms. Puyi, on the other hand, as he later recounted, spent a sleepless night learning the alphabet and a dozen or so Sanskrit words by heart, floundering in the contrast between long and short vowels, their solemn weight, the way they alternated, and in the framework of consonants, the voiced and unvoiced, the aspirates and the unvoiced aspirates. He even tried to compose a sentence-his first in Sanskrit-to taste the pleasures of pa.s.sive experience and pa.s.sive desire; he succeeded and it was beautiful. Then he discovered, and this too was beautiful, how to decline the concept of despair in the pa.s.sive form and, better still, in pa.s.sive past participles. Oh, the power of pa.s.sivity!

"He did not close his eyes until daybreak, sinking into a half sleep, and, in a fleeting fraction of a second, he saw two strangers leaning over him, one tall in a monk's habit with a beard that completely covered his cheeks, the other small and slight, still young but with a greying goatee on the tip of his pointed chin. They disappeared just as they had appeared, before a single word had been exchanged. Only afterwards did Puyi recognise them as An Shih-Kao and Huizong, even though the latter had not been wearing an imperial headdress. He had two votive altars erected to them in a large hall in recognition of his grat.i.tude for this first visit, which he saw as a very good omen, a mute baptism of the sacred language.

"In the last fine days of autumn-which were also, although he did not know this yet, the last fine days of his apolitical life as emperor-to be sure that he could immerse himself in this language to which he was recently converted, whatever the time of day and wherever he might be (in his study, the dining room, the bathroom, the toilet, along a dark corridor, in the disused ballroom or the deserted courtyard), he gave his guest, the professor, sheets of white paper and asked him to write out the names of almost everything in Sanskrit, as in the village struck down with amnesia in One Hundred Years of Solitude One Hundred Years of Solitude. His servants copied out the labels in whitewash letters a hundred times the size on the ground, the walls, doors, windows, armchairs, beds ... even the sumo, who pinned the words raja purusa raja purusa, 'the emperors servant,' on his capacious tunic. For the first time in a long while Puyi could be heard roaring with laughter again, yes, real laughter, in his falsetto voice, granted, but glorious laughter which filled the gloomy house with joy. One morning he met his scholarly visitor in a corridor and greeted him in Sanskrit but, instead of saying 'Good morning,' he employed a polite formula with all its attendant protocol, meant for the emperor alone, without realising he was making a mistake. His guest bowed to thank him but, moments later, was packing his bags, and it was only when he came into Puyi's study with his suitcase and said a simple 'Goodbye' in Sanskrit that light dawned in the emperor's mind and, understanding the absurdity of his mistake, he was filled with elation and laughed till he wept. He experienced similar sensual ecstasy when his wife-a general's daughter he had married six years earlier and to whom he vowed platonic love, although he did not truly know her sweet face or her tender body-came into his study disguised as a young Indian prince, sat on his lap, covered his face in kisses and whispered in his ear: 's bhry y pativrat,' 's bhry y pativrat,' a Sanskrit sentence which he had made her learn by heart in the tomb-like chill of her bedroom, impregnated by a strong smell of opium, and which could be translated as: 'me wife devoted to my husband.' a Sanskrit sentence which he had made her learn by heart in the tomb-like chill of her bedroom, impregnated by a strong smell of opium, and which could be translated as: 'me wife devoted to my husband.'

"But time had run out for Puyi to use the words of this sacred language, which he had learned so quickly and with such appet.i.te as an effective means of defence. Events took an ironic turn when two j.a.panese officers, in civilian dress, came to fetch him and take him out to a car parked by the front door of his residence (for the rest of his life he would remember the squeak of that car's brakes and the furtive sound of footsteps-or rather the absence of any sound of footsteps-made by those two ghosts). He struggled to keep his composure and, with all the dignity of a head of state, responded to the officers' military salute by uttering, syllable by syllable, the longest Sanskrit sentence he knew by heart: Brhmanah Kalaham asahamno bhryvatsalyt svakutumbam parityajya brhmany saya desntaram gatah Brhmanah Kalaham asahamno bhryvatsalyt svakutumbam parityajya brhmany saya desntaram gatah ('After his house was abandoned, unable to bear the disagreement any longer, out of love for his wife, the Brahman fled with her to a foreign country'). After such an exploit and having surprised even himself, Puyi was overcome with joy and experienced patriotic pride for the last time in his life, particularly as, although they understood absolutely nothing, the two ghosts from the land of the Rising Sun had bowed before him on three separate occasions during this interminable sentence. ('After his house was abandoned, unable to bear the disagreement any longer, out of love for his wife, the Brahman fled with her to a foreign country'). After such an exploit and having surprised even himself, Puyi was overcome with joy and experienced patriotic pride for the last time in his life, particularly as, although they understood absolutely nothing, the two ghosts from the land of the Rising Sun had bowed before him on three separate occasions during this interminable sentence.

"But when it came to saying goodbye to his scholarly guest he again used an inappropriate Sanskrit formula without realising it. For reasons of intellectual integrity, his embarra.s.sed guest reminded him that he should have used the term meaning 'goodbye,' and not the one for 'h.e.l.lo' in the present tense. Puyi, who had managed to keep his madness in check up until this point thanks to Sanskrit, succ.u.mbed to a violent fit of hysteria and, shaking like a leaf, called the man every abusive name he could think of so that their farewell scene descended into nightmare. An hour later, at the airfield, his anger subsided when the sumo, the only person permitted to travel with him, appeared with two padlocked, chrome-plated metal chests, which bounced glints of sunlight round the stark, tattered and uncomfortable cabin. He put them down opposite the emperor on an iron seat with cracking dark green paint. These two chests-one filled with works of art counted among the most precious treasures in China if not the world, the other quite priceless, once the property of Emperor Huizong and now Puyi-were cited as exhibits years later by an international tribunal, proving Puyi was not innocent: he had prepared his departure and had, therefore, been guilty of treason when he stepped into that j.a.panese aircraft. A crime that was all the more shameful for being premeditated.

"The six other people on board-a pilot, two co-pilots, the two officers and the sumo-died during the war without leaving any testimony about the incident which happened inside the plane when Puyi, gripped with sudden madness, opened the cabin door in mid-air and threw out torn shreds of various works of art.

"Puyi had never flown before, notes Li Ping, a specialist of the Sino-j.a.panese War, in an article published in the twenty-third edition of the magazine History History, and was taken to a dirty, cramped aircraft intended for transporting freight. It was chosen deliberately by j.a.panese generals for its sorry appearance and, more particularly, its poor state of repair, as a way of thoroughly duping the Chinese administration, a fact revealed by the few doc.u.ments concerning the future emperor of Manchuria's camouflaged departure. In Memoirs of a j.a.panese Colonel Memoirs of a j.a.panese Colonel, which I was lucky enough to buy for a handful of coins from a second-hand bookseller in Kyoto, the author relates, among other things and with supporting photographs, how his own nerves were sorely tested the day he had to take