Author Archives: ixarette

Pot Heads

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Liang Taihe is showing me a big copper pot. We don’t quite understand what it was for, he says. They must have performed some ritual purpose. This one has carbon-scoring at the bottom, so it was previously used for cooking something, but the thing about the ancient Yelang people was that when they buried someone of great importance, they would stick one of these on their heads.

Right then, so they were nutters.

I think, he says, that they put them on their heads in the ceremonies as well. Like magic hats.

I have my own theory, which is that since many scholars have argued that these pots served some sort of ritual purpose in life, possibly the leaders of the Yelang were shamans, and that in life they would boil up some sort of trance-inducing concoction and stick their heads in to breath up the steam.

Professor Liang looks at me as if I am mad.

And then, I say, they see the spirits. And when they die, they put the pot on their heads because they will be with the spirits always.

Okay, he says gingerly, let’s put that one on the back burner, shall we?

Like the Dian people of Yunnan, with whom they shared a border, the Yelang people left no written records, and much of what we have to go on about them is only divinable from the metalware in their graves. The archaeological record shows a bunch of pot-headed burials, particularly in a village called Kele two hours outside Hezhang. It also shows bronzeware with multiple influences from outside, including a ge dagger-axe with a taotie design clearly from the Central Plains of China, and a short sword with a hilt made in Yelang, but a blade shipped in from Sichuan.

Late in the Han dynasty, the Yelang rebelled. The access to silk that they were promised turned out to be the thin end of an imperialist wedge, and when they tried to fight back against the Han, they finally discovered just how much bigger and better prepared the Chinese were. The last king of Dian was beheaded, and many of his people fled south. Archaeologists in the hills of Laos and Cambodia have found graves occupied by lone figures with pots on their heads.

There’s a lot of argument about where Yelang actually was. It’s widely believed that it was in Guizhou, and the fact that the pot-headed burials show that there was a culture of some sort here seems to suggest that it was the Yelang heartland. “Heartland,” however, isn’t good enough for the tourist authorities, who ten years ago tried to bribe Professor Liang to proclaim that Hezhang was the “capital” of Yelang. He took their money, went onstage, and told them all that the notion of a capital in those times was a free-floating concept. People moved around, populations were lower, and frankly, “capital” is a modern term and with that in mind, they could have their bribe money back. Then he walked off the stage.

I associate Guizhou with discomfort. Two years ago, I spent a miserable week up a mountain here, washing in cold water and eating unmentionables. The food is much the same – since arriving here I have been assailed by pig’s ears and chicken foot soup. You should try our bowl-covering pork, says the Propaganda man. It’s a slab of pork so large that it covers the whole rim of your rice bowl.

Which sounds nice, except that half the slab is pure fat.

Have a pig’s trotter, he says, shoving one in my face.

The new Guizhou Provincial Museum is supposed to look like something famous, but none of us can work out what it is. Possibly a pile of Lego. We’ll be filming here tomorrow with Professor Liang, when it’s closed to the public, but the museum is oddly under-attended, even on a Sunday, so we get pick-up shots of all the things he is liable to be pointing at.

He is aghast at the displays, and claims to have sent the curators a list of 200 points of contention.

“These bracelets are wrong,” he says. “I found them all on the arm of one skeleton. They need to be put together in a series to understand them, but they’ve just stuck them under glass separately, like we’re in some kind of shop. And this sign says that pot is bronze, whereas it’s clearly copper. Who are these idiots?”

Professor Liang is kvetching about the inaccuracy of the signage, which mixes up the chronological order of the artefacts, and can’t tell bronze from copper or stone from clay. But he is having a whale of a time, getting to summarise his career for a film crew, and talk through impact and outreach, two of his favourite topics.

“Archaeology is impenetrable to the lay reader,” he says, “and Chinese archaeology is often impenetrable to other archaeologists. I’ve done everything I can to get our stuff translated into English so it actually gets cited outside China, but also to write in clear, simple language so that people don’t want to kill themselves when they are reading it.”

We’ve been shut out of the archives by his successors, who bluntly proclaim that if it’s not in the gallery, it’s not in the vaults.

“That’s not true,” he says. “I know we’ve sent some pieces off to an exhibition in Chongqing, but I dug these bronzes out of the earth with my own hands, and I know there are hundreds of them back there.” But the authorities have spoken, and he’s called in all the favours that he can, so our last few questions need to be moved to an empty coffee shop.

We put on a brief comedy routine of two men with five degrees between them, unsuccessfully attempting to get two lattes out of a coffee machine, and I get him on the record about what happened to the Yelang people, who either fled across the border to the south, or were swiftly assimilated within the Han population.

I ask him about the Chinese proverb “Yelang zi da” (Yelang thinks too highly of itself), and he relates it to the Han dynasty, when the shutting off of the Silk Road by barbarian incursions led the emperors to suddenly start pushing into the south-west in search of a trade route to India. This brings us back to where we started, with the Han ambassadors demanding the submission of the local peoples, the Dian king musing whether the Han realm is all that bigger than his own, and the Yelang king fatally refusing to let trade through his kingdom without a toll.

Lunch is at a Hmong restaurant where the waitresses proudly show us a plate of writhing, bloody catfish, deep wounds hacked in their sides, still in their death throes. The TV on the wall is showing a video loop of Guizhou tourism, including many sites we have visited, including the village where I once accidentally married a local girl for a couple of hours. I think there is supposed to be a romantic narrative, suggesting a foreign back-packer who runs into a Eurasian supermodel on the bullet train, and that they fall in love among the terraced rice fields and dancing girls in pewter head-dresses. Except, because it’s a loop, it’s entirely possible to walk in halfway and assume it’s a video about a couple who somehow fall out on their trip, drifting apart among the waterfalls and forests, until they return home sitting far apart on the bullet train, with her displaying a greater interest in her guidebook than in him.

“Your work is very hard,” notes Professor Liang. “I never had any idea. About all the sound interference, and the background noise, the lighting issues and the equipment required.” But I think today has been one of the best days of his life, and he regrets that it won’t go on forever.

The director films the pair of us getting into the car, ready for the journey to Kele that we have already shot, and after I rev past the camera and into the sunset, she pronounces that we are done.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events appeared in Route Awakening S05E05 (2019).

The Mansions of the Western Ocean

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“Where to?” says the driver.

“The New Summer Palace.”

“Huh?”

“The Summer Palace.”

“Oh, the new Summer Palace.”

Yes, because the Old Summer Palace is a thousand miles away in Beijing, so it is unlikely that I would want to be driven there, although presumably he could just buy a new car with the proceeds if I did.

I am in Zhuhai, a city on the Pearl River Estuary that, if foreigners have heard of it at all, is known largely for being one of the factory satellites of Hong Kong in the late twentieth century. But the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences once proclaimed it to be the Most Liveable City in China, it shares a border with Macao that you can literally walk across, and its relentlessly modern focus conceals some fascinating historical stories, such as the time that the locals fought off British opium smugglers, not to mention a floating seafood restaurant the size of an aircraft carrier.

Many readers of this parish will already be aware of the Old Summer Palace (the Yuanming Yuan, or the Garden of Perfect Brightness), which lies in carefully curated ruins in north Beijing. It was infamously the site of a mass looting and burning by the British and French during the Second Opium War. The Chinese keep it in pieces as a reminder, although I am by far not the only person to point out that much of the damage done to the site was done to it by the Chinese themselves over the ensuing century, when it was raided for building materials, converted into market gardens, and used to herd pigs. Sixteen areas of it, in fact, were left untouched by the foreigners, and later destroyed at leisure by the Chinese, who cut down the ancient trees for lumber and sold off the brickwork.

The ruins of the original in Beijing (Wikimedia Commons)

Ever in search of something to lure in visitors the city of Zhuhai has built a replica of the Old Summer Palace in its glory days, piling up the hillside of a local mountain that conveniently resembles the feng shui of the original location. It’s probably the nicest park I have ever been to, full of little pop-up exhibits and installations and the usual tat sellers and snackeries. It was a lovely place to spend an afternoon, marred only by a few ill-judged frills, such as ghastly rubber-duck themed pedalos in the lake.

Visitors are also encouraged to dress up by costume rental stalls, which in one sense adds to the ambience when one runs into a Ming princess or a Manchu cavalryman, but also clogs the byways with the usual cosplayer entitlement. Now that they have put on a posh frock, they expect the world around them to stop while their boyfriend takes an ill-framed picture into the sun with a camera he doesn’t know how to use, which is something of an imposition on everybody else who has just as much a right to walk along the path and among the temples.

I’ve less come to see the Chinese architecture than the recreation of one of the sites from the original that has most caught my imagination. Annihilated during the looting, one sector of the original comprised an ornate baroque folly intended to recreate the look and feel of Versailles. The Xiyang Lou (“Mansions of the Western Ocean”) were an occidentalist dream – an imagined imperial Europe designed in the 1740s by the Italian Giuseppe Castiglione, with fountains and water features created by French Michel Benoist, both of them Jesuits trying to amaze the Qianlong Emperor with visions of the Far West.

The Zhuhai park recreates the mansions and their most famous feature, Benoist’s “water clock” comprising a fountain edged with bronze effigies of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, designed so that each would vomit water from its mouth for each doubled hour of the Chinese day. I was there in the early afternoon, so really ought to have seen the change-over from the Hour of the Goat to the Hour of the Monkey, but none of the fountains were operating on the day I was there.

You’ll notice here the perennial problems of the travelling author in search of pictures. Ever since acquiring the photographs for the first edition of my Confucius biography cost me more than I was paid to write it, I have tried my best to secure my own images. Sometimes, however, what you are paying professionals for is not merely framing, but also opportunity. You can see here my bad luck with the lack of a blue sky on the one day in my life that I am present to take a picture, and the annoyance of a modern building poking out behind the baroque architecture — the replica Mansions of the Western Ocean are in the south-west of the park, close to the entrance and the modern streets outside.

But the park in Zhuhai is also unexpectedly educational, packed with recreations of court life in the Qing dynasty, and, for some reason, scattered with statues of dozens of obscure figures from Chinese medical history. For the visitor who can read the plaques, these include Mi Huangfu (215-282 AD), the inventor of acupuncture, the Ming dynasty gynecologist Tan Yunxian (1462-1556), and Hua Tuo (145-208), the Han dynasty pioneer of anaesthesia. I have no idea why the replica Old Summer Palace also serves as an open-air museum of Chinese medical pioneers, but I was intensely interested in the implied narratives not of “Traditional Chinese Medicine”, but of medicine medicine, with characters such as Bian Que (407-310 BC), the “father of pulse theory.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. The New Yuangmingyuan in Zhuhai is free to enter duing the day, and 120 yuan in the evenings.

Exciting Life Activity Zone

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It costs £4.50 to take the metro from Mongkok in Hong Kong to the end of the line at Lo Wu (Shell Lake). There, I exit the platform and go through passport control. There is a walkway across a viscous, khaki-coloured stream, no wider than the Thames at Kew. That is the Sham Chun (the Deep Drainage) river. When I reach the other side, Cantonese converts to Mandarin and I am back in China. Lo Wu is now Luo Hu. Shamchun is now Shenzhen.

The area has been repeatedly buffeted by history. In the 17th century, when the Manchus took extreme action to thwart the piratic raids of the Ming restorationist Koxinga, they forced two thirds of the population to move off their land. Twenty years later, the empty land was resettled by Hakka, the “guest people” of China, always scrambling to eke an existence from the worst bits of real estate. Far along the Shenzhen metro line at Nanlian, I drop in on a surviving Hakka “village” – a fortress the size of a city block, with musket slits, crenellations and watchtowers to repel marauders. Inside is a warren of tiny alleyways and residences, an entire community piled on top of each other, sacrificing privacy for protection.

The fort’s sole guardian is a bored teenage girl. The local Hakka really don’t seem to give much of a toss about preserving their heritage, and many of the exhibits in the fort are dusty and forlorn. Matters are not helped by the earnest decision to use the location as the site for an open-air exhibition of international poster design, which means that my attempt to get an authentic photograph of Qing dynasty architecture is thwarted by brightly-coloured adverts for the Berlinale film festival and an exhibition of Dutch pottery.

In 1898 the Sham Chun river became the arbitrary border between China and the “New Territories” ceded to Britain on a 99-year lease. The little river suddenly became a gulf between different worlds, splitting families and sundering contacts. It also, of course, didn’t. Those personal contacts across the water continued to endure, in smuggling and unofficial endeavours. In the war against Japan, the Shenzhen side became a bastion for the East River column, a guerrilla group devoted to exterminating the Japanese.

And then, in the 1980s, the border moved again. Shenzhen was rebranded a Special Economic Zone – a factory city to bring in foreign currency from Hong Kong. This meant that it was also walled off from the rest of China by the “Second Line” – a border fence to keep out would be economic migrants. All this was the brainchild of Deng Xiaoping, whose statue is on the top of Lotus Flower Hill, gazing proudly down at the towers of its Central Business District. It ballooned from fishing village to a city of 17.8 million people in 25 years. It’s a long climb to the top of the hill, but the Deng Xiaoping statue is one of the likely pictures I need to make today’s travel worthwhile. As I line up to get him in the viewfinder, a young Chinese woman bows three times before him, as if she is praying.

I am spending the night at Xiaomeisha, a supposed beach resort at the far eastern end of the metro line, as if someone tried to knock up Southend from scratch. The entire place is still a building site, and my hotel is entertainingly terrible. I can’t turn on the TV; I don’t know where the bathroom light switch is; the toilet and the shower are the same thing, and the “view” is of the 24-hour building site of a nearby tower block, with a constant cement mixer churning.

Luckily, my room has an Exciting Life Activity Zone pod – a bedside repository that threatens to pop open to reveal condoms, “Indian Spirit Oil”, a “Female Jumping Egg”, a dildo, a can of Coke, and, apparently, an entire Chinese woman in lingerie and cat ears. It conjures up fantastic visions of some of the fun nights to be had here to the sound of the cement mixer outside, but sadly, I only have myself for company.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China.

August Fixes Everything (1942)

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Despite never making it that far up the promotional ladder, August Kivipaasi (Aku Korhonen) has become a much-loved figure at Nikkari Bank, where he has been a cashier for 25 years. He offers sage advice to the janitor Nuutinen (Anton Soini), who wants to buy himself a cottage in the forest (the Finnish dream), and frets that young Anna (Toini Vartiainen), in demanding that her would-be fiancé Hannes (Hannes Häyränen) scrape up a suitable nest-egg before marriage, will doom him to never marrying at all. August still carries a torch for his colleague Maria (Siiri Angerkoski), but the pair of them never married because he could never quite pronounce that the time is right.

With the tin-eared lack of tact common to management, director Visapää (Thure Bahne) shows up at August’s quarter-century employee celebration to tell him that he and Maria have to be let go in order to clear space for his personal cronies as chief cashiers. As the staff protest, the bank’s chairman Baron von Bergenbohm (Jalmari Rinne), hems and haws, and suggests that a note of thanks for August’s long service should be entered into the general meeting’s minutes, as if that will solve everything.

When it comes to present the bank’s accounts, August refuses to hand them over, claiming that he has been industriously embezzling funds for the last 25 years, in lieu of the raise he was never granted. Accusing upper management of corruption and incompetence, he offers to hand the matter to the police, which will mean all the money is gone for good, or to give half of it back if the bank agrees to his demands.

Hannes and Anna need raises, so they can afford to get married. The bank will loan Nuutinen eight thousand marks so he can have his dream shed. Johanssen the family man (Eero Leväluona) is to get a raise as well, so his kids don’t starve. The bank acquiesces, and August reveals that he was lying about the embezzlement just to get some leverage. He makes a final demand: that Visapää shows up fifteen minutes early each day, instead of an hour late, and all is well.

Hannes and Anna can get married, but with their increased salaries, so can August and Maria, acquiring in the process a ready-mix family in the form of two Winter War orphans. As the cast gathers at Nuutinen’s cottage for a sing-song, Maria warns them not to wait as long as they did to start making a family. “Finland needs many, many children now,” comments Nuutinen, “Girls and boys. So go forth and multiply!”

This was a remake of the Swedish film Blyge Anton (1940), itself based on Alexander Faragó’s play Der Herr Schlögl. It’s not clear when Faragó’s play originally was performed, but by the time it was adapted for the Swedish screen in 1940, the screenwriters had wedged in a reference to a Swedish woman who had served in Finland’s Winter War. The Swedish original was screened in Finland in 1941 as The Poor Groom (Kehno sulhanen), but clearly struck enough of a chord with writer-director Toivo Särkkä for him to buy the rights to make his own adaptation.

Ironically, the Swedes in this version are the bad guys – there are pointedly Swedish names for many of the upper-class twits that August and his angry bankers are striking against. In some fashion, this may reflect Finland’s steady drift towards the left – it was only three years earlier, in Scorned (1939), that an alliance of self-made industrialists took on the corrupt saw-mill bosses. But here, our have-a-go hero is a man of little means, relying purely on his charisma and goodwill to outsmart the bosses – whereas Scorned was critical both of the Swedes and the Reds, August järjestää kaiken is a gentle parable of socialist bargaining.

The Finnish version piles on even more pointed references to the aftermath of the Winter War, and closes with a rendition of several verses of the song “Suomen kevät” (Finnish spring): “Finnish spring has finally arrived / the summer of our north.” However, it omits a controversial verse written in a time of German-inspired desire for lebensraum: “For a peaceful tomorrow / like our ancestors / for the creation of greater Finland / in the land of Kalevala.” For extra timeliness, there is even a moment of self-referential humour, when Anna suggests they could go to the cinema to see Marriage Inc. (1942) – a gag that backfires a little, as it ends up sounding like even the cast wish they were in a different film.

In spite of Aku Korhonen’s enduring status as a much-loved icon of Finnish cinema, the box office receipts for August Fixes Everything were disappointing, and the newspapers chose to make an example of it. The anonymous “O” in the Ilta Sanomat let it have it with both barrels, saying that it: “…very clearly reveals one of the worst stumbling blocks of Finnish film, its incurable dependence on theatre. In fact, is August anything but filmed theatre? That slow tempo of action, those long discussions, explications and moods, gestures and movements, the pathetic, theatrical tone of the dialogue – when will Finnish cinema really free itself from this burden? This critic is also bothered by the film’s constant melodrama, its weighty sentimentality, its heavy-handed didacticism. Undoubtedly, the latest [Suomi Filmiteollisuus] novelty is no achievement. It is a strange mixture of histrionics, farce and melodrama.”

And it’s true. So much of the action revolves around August at his little cashier’s desk, which both frames him and imprisons him. The cast and crew only get out of the bank setting with great difficulty, for a stroll in the park and the grand finale in the countryside. Otherwise, the movie struggles to hide the fact that this is a story that more or less takes place in a single room.

Olavi Vesterdahl in Aamulehti was more forgiving, but also singled out the film’s origins as part of the problem. He wrote that he had never seen Faragó’s play (few people had, and looking at the Swedish sources, I suspect it may have been rushed into screen adaptation before it even made it to the stage), but that he assumed it to have been a farce. As far as Vesterdahl could tell, a light and witty confection had been ruined by attempts to shove in meaningful social commentary and unwelcome pathos. “[A] film that is half farce, half something else vague, somewhere between sentimentality and simpering banality, is a sad revelation. However, many similar films have dulled the taste of our film audience to such an extent that this film will probably sell out like a piece of counterfeit money.”

The regional press was more positive, although much of the commentary in papers like Vaasa and Uusi Aura feel to me like local hacks sitting on the fence because they were afraid they might have missed something. Kauppalehti hit the nail on the head, by describing a substandard script lifted out of the shallows by a reliable performer. “[Aku Korhonen] is undoubtedly our best film comedian, for whom the poverty of the script did not cause any difficulties. He brought his cashier to life down to the last lines and almost all the merits of the film must be attributed to him.”

With 21st-century eyes, this does look awfully like a comedy with the laughs taken out, although there is a touching finale as the main cast gather at Nuutinen’s cottage, for him to boast about his “very own potato barn” (at least, I think he said peruna talo) and for the camera to cut away to his hutch full of rabbits whenever he mentions the need to breed new Finns. Shot on a happy summer day in 1942, even as soldiers were fighting and dying in the Continuation War in Karelia, it represents a bright, and overly optimistic hope that by the time the film reached cinemas that September, the fighting would be over, and the Finns could return to their forest idyll.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films so that you don’t have to.

The City of God in Asia

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I’ve deliberately chosen this hotel in Zhuhai because it is in walking distance of Gongbei, the massive border crossing to Macao. I join the dawn hordes streaming towards the border, across the wide expanse of its square out in front. There are men in hi-viz jackets and schoolgirls in uniform, many of them joining the “Macao Residents” line – so, in fact, not Macao residents at all, but actually living over the border and commuting every day.

The kettling is designed for thousands of people, but there is only one person in front of me at the Foreigners line to leave China, and again at the line to enter Macao. I am through in fifteen minutes, and at first glance, I might as well be back in Hong Kong again. But the streets are narrower, there is more tiling on everything, and the first shop I see is St Mary’s Bakery.

In the course of my day in Macao, I manage to somehow walk across the entire old town, from the northern warren of tower blocks, past yet another statue of Lin Zexu, hero of the Opium Wars, through the tunnel that passes under Guia Hill, around the empty mall at Fisherman’s Wharf, and all the way to the statue of the Goddess of Mercy that faces the casino-riddled island of Taipa. The signage is all bilingual in Portuguese and Chinese, but while I hear Mandarin, Hakka and Cantonese spoken around me, I do not hear a single word of Portuguese all day.

Macao’s signature location is the Ruins of St Paul’s, a towering church façade at the top of steps in the old town, a magnet for hordes of selfie-taking influencers and girls who think that a V-sign, jumping in the air, or pointing poutily makes their photos more interesting. Google Macao, and the Ruins of St Paul’s is among the first images that show up. People show up, take their picture and then sod off back into the maze of side-streets, where pushy hawkers try to get them to buy Macao fridge magnets and pork cakes.

St Paul’s is not the name of the church. The church is called the Church of the Mother of God. St Paul’s is the name of the college complex that it was part of, founded in 1573 by the Italian Jesuit Alessandro Valignano. Valignano will be a name familiar to many in this parish, because he is a major character in my book Christ’s Samurai. Horrified that missionaries in Japan didn’t speak Japanese, he set up a Japanese-language boot camp in Macao, which he intended as “the City of God in Asia” – the centre of all Jesuit activities. St Paul’s College was the result, the site of Macao’s first printing press, which churned out Japanese learning materials and… Bible stuff. In the 1630s, it became a training ground for Japanese priests (exiles and the children of exiles) ready to undertake the one-way clandestine mission to enter Japan and administer to the underground Christian communities.

In fact, so many exiled Japanese were in Macao at the time that locals mistook them for the advance party of a Jesuit scheme to invade China, with their churches assumed to be forts and their seminaries taken for barracks. The church façade was partly built by Japanese masons, living in exile as their country turned increasingly anti-Christian. This has turned the extant stonework into one of the only surviving examples of what some have called “Japanese Baroque”, with a quirky take on Christian themes, and multiple appearances of Japanese chrysanthemums. The Virgin Mary is depicted subduing a seven-headed dragon, and a skeleton exhorts passers-by in Chinese: “Remember death and do not sin.”

The seven-headed beast of Revelation 17 is supposedly ridden by Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and the Abominations of the Earth, so quite possibly the legend next to it that reads “The Virgin Mary Tramples on the Dragon’s Head” is a desperate attempt to explain why she’s there, which only muddles thing further, because there is an image of another woman on the dragon, and an image of Mary next to the dragon, and I sense we are looking at the 1630s equivalent of an argument between rival commenters in Google Docs as a priest frantically tries to stop Dave the Japanese Stone Mason from accidentally committing any further carved heresies.

An inscription on a cornerstone reads: “Virgini Magnae Matri Civitas Macaensis Libens Posuit an. 1602”[The City of Macao built this Church in honour of the Great Virgin Mother in the year 1602]. By the “City of Macao”, it refers to the Christian inhabitants, who were persuaded by the incumbent Captain-Major to donate a half percent of their earnings to build a church if the ship they were waiting for turned out not to have been destroyed in a storm as expected. It was the first wager in Macao’s long gambling history, and paid off a few days later. But work on the building continued until 1640, leaving ample time for new Japanese workers to flee their homeland and to work on the façade.

The interior was also once a triumph of oriental artistry, although we can only imagine the decorations as reported by Peter Mundy in 1637: “Carved in wood, curiously guilt and painted with exquisite collours, as vermillion, azure, etts., Devided into squares, and att the Joyning of each squares greatt roses of Many Folds or leaves one under another, lessning till all end in a Knobbe.” There were also numerous pictures, now also lost, thought to have been made by Japanese students of Father Giovanni Nicolao, who formerly taught painting in Arima and Nagasaki, but arrived in Japan, with his students, in 1614 following the latest anti-Christian prohibition.

At least one painting by Nicolao’s students is known to have survived the fire that destroyed the building in 1835. It now hangs in St Joseph’s Seminary, nearby, and is an image of St Michael, drawn as only a Japanese painter would imagine him, clad in samurai armour, wielding a katana, his helmet decoration a ring of bursting rays. Takashi Miyanaga, in a 1995 article, determines that it must have been part of a roof image above the “Altar of St Michael” where several prominent Japanese Christians were buried, which would imply that there was, at very least, a second panel depicting the dragon that Michael is supposed to be fighting, although in the extant image, there are only a few of its flames landing near his foot.

Jonathan Clements is the author of Christ’s Samurai: The True Story of the Shimabara Rebellion. You can hear him talking about Japan’s Christian Century on the Subject to Change podcast.

Calling Occupants

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“Swept up in the UFO fervor of the era, aviation journalist Yusuke Matsumura derived a strong inspiration from the flying-saucer cult of George van Tassel in the United States, suggesting that aliens could be contacted through telepathy by chanting the mantra ‘Bentra, Bentra.'”

Over at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, I write up the Cosmic Brotherhood Association, a Japanese saucer cult that cast a long shadow in popular culture.

Miss Impossible

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“Though in me you behold / the injury of many a blasting hour / Let it not tell your judgement I am old / Not age, but sorrow over me hath power.”

Penelope Clements (1947-2025)

All right, strap in.

We had some arguments about the order of service. The cover image was pretty easy to decide upon. That’s my mother, not yet 22 years old, on her wedding day. She always wanted to be remembered as being young and beautiful, and it’s such a striking image.

The back cover was tougher. I found a nice one of her in Austria, but her partner, Ian, wanted something else.

“I want,” he said, “a picture that shows her doing what she loved best.”

“What?” I said. “Moaning?”

“No,” he said, “I want a picture of her on the Orient Express, when she was at her happiest.”

I remembered that she told me that when they took their last trip on the Orient Express, it was the last time she remembered walking into a room and everybody turning around and staring, ‘coz she was all dolled up, like someone who was just about to get murdered in an Agatha Christie novel. That was very important to her, and it was something that diminished as she got older, and she felt that she was becoming invisible. I said she should suck it up, because that’s how the rest of us have to live all the time.

Of all of you here today, only her sister Wendy has known her for every iteration, every period in her life. For the rest of you, I am sure that something I say will be news. And let’s start at the beginning. We don’t know why she was called Penelope, but we do know that her mother knew the story of the Odyssey, and who the original Penelope was. We think that she was named in honour of a wife who waited for years for her husband to come home from the war, which is indeed what my grandmother had just done.

There was a line of shops along Victory Parade, near the street where she grew up, and the butchers and the bakers, but presumably not candlestick makers, all called her Miss Impossible. I asked Wendy why, and she said it was probably something to do with her being such a prodigy, and so witty and talkative, but was it? Was it, really? Wasn’t it more likely that they were all sick of her imaginary friends, Yibbits and Yubbets, for whom doors had to be opened otherwise they would remain trapped in the shops?

Cousin John is here, with whom she and Wendy formed a club that met daily on an imaginary pirate ship at the bottom of the garden. For some reason, it was called Donna, and to get there, they had to navigate the garden on rollerskates, while carrying beanpoles. I don’t know why this is important, but I was supposed to tell you.

I want to mention something more relevant, I think, which is the influence of the Bulgin family, for whom my grandmother worked. They were something big in avionics, and had a mansion in Westcliff, and for some reason, they took her family under their wing, and showered them with kindnesses. It was visits to the Bulgins’ that instilled my mother with a love of art, of music, of plays and the finer things. They would get a hamper every Christmas from Fortnum & Mason, inspiring her ever after to what her own mother called her airs and graces.

She represented Essex in athletics, and led bizarre school singalongs in the chemistry lab, standing on a desk and conducted her classmates in rowdy renditions of wartime hits, waving a ruler in the air. She already displayed signs of her later commanding form. On being confronted by a flasher outside the school, she simply shouted at him: “Oh for God’s sake put it away!” and ran off laughing.

With her friend Pam, she’d go to see Elvis movies at the cinema, clutching a loaf of Hovis to eat in their seats. No, I know it’s weird. What can I say, times were different. They went to see Roy Orbison play the Odeon, and his support act was the Beatles. She thought they had nice jackets, but filthy shoes.

She converted to Catholicism, because life isn’t difficult enough. Her friend Rosi’s mum Val said to her: “Oh, you’ll love it, Pen, it’s very theatrical.” Which I find interesting because I always assumed her dramatic streak manifested in her twenties, but clearly it was earlier.

Perhaps you, like me, are fascinated with the work of Holland-Dozier-Holland, the songwriting team who made so many of Motown’s classics. No? Okay, just me, then. So I’d better point out that they tried to tailor their songs to be as general sounding as possible, and tried to avoid mentioning specific girls’ names. They made an exception for their 1967 hit “Bernadette.” Which, quite by coincidence I’m sure, my mother chose as her confirmation name.

On what must have been one of history’s most boring dates, she came here to this church, St Mary’s in Stoke by Nayland, to make brass rubbings with my father. Somewhere in this church, there is an image of a long-dead lady… oh, it’s there is it? Yep, okay, over there. And that image has hung in her houses ever since. It represented for her a vague, but ever solidifying yearning, to one day return to this place and live here. It would be thirty years before she did, but that was when it all started.

She went to work in Austria with my father, at a hotel in Mondsee. She still has an Austrian accent when she speaks German. They used the money to tour Europe, which was a real eye-opener for her, and she fell in love with its history and culture, so far removed from her Essex upbringing. When she eventually had children, her two sons, she would dress them up in lederhosen every Sunday, an experience from which neither of them has quite recovered.

She became active in the Southend Shakespeare Company, eventually rising to become its secretary. She played Ariel in The Tempest, and Perdita in A Winter’s Tale, which is why there is a picture of her in the gallery trying not to laugh at an unconvincing bear. And from there she graduated to the Royal Shakespeare Company, not as an actor, but as a dresser. For those that don’t know, when your leading man comes off stage covered in blood and you have to get him out of his armour and into his nightshirt for the next scene, the dressers are the wardrobe minions who have it all ready in the wings.

It meant that she literally had a backstage pass to Theatreland. When I was a child, we’d be in the street in Covent Garden, and she would suddenly say: “Oh, they’re kicking out for the interval at the Twelfth Night matinee. Let’s go to the green room.” And we’d walk up to this door in a back street, where Gareth Thomas and John Matshikiza were chuffing on cigarettes and trying not to get ash on their doublets.

She went back into secretarial work in the 1980s. Simon Wakefield is here, who was the man who hired her at Canewdon Consultants. And as that’s where she met Ian, basically everything that follows this moment is his fault. Ian had high hopes of retiring to the Costa del Sol and learning to play the guitar, but none of that happened after he met my mother. Instead, he found himself buying a house in Provence, where they spent many happy summers before it was fashionable.

She ended up at Cazenove Capital, which was the highlight of her career. There are some of you from Cazenove’s here today, and I we had a lovely letter from her former boss, saying that she used to administrate a charity on his behalf that I had never even heard of. They handed us a cheque for £500, so although it hasn’t showed up on the memorial webpage, it’s enough money to double the donations made in her name to Shelter. As of yesterday, when Tony and Christine pressed Send on their donation, the official total for donations on and off-line has gone over a thousand pounds, so well done, everybody. [Time Travel Footnote: Cazenove sent another cheque, the total is now at over £2,200].

She was my current age, 53, when she was made redundant, ironically just at the time when she and Ian had scraped together the money to buy their dream house in Suffolk. She wrote in her diary of a desire to reinvent herself, although God knows what as. Instead, there was a degree of bitterness that crept in, and she became a Woman of Letters. Money was a struggle until their pensions kicked in, and she wrote of the brutal awareness that she was too anxious to enjoy what she did have. In particular, she grew steadily annoyed at encounters with people who still had jobs, but were no good at them.

And we have a ream, an actual ream of paper in her files, of her draft letters of complaint to various bodies: the Alliance and Leicester, Prudential Insurance, Oak Farm, Dedham council, Southend United… I did intend to give a reading of some her most cutting remarks, but the Reverend Stéphane says that’s not what a eulogy is supposed to be. Although one of the things that has been really comforting to us since she died is the number of people with a funny story.

We have people here today who have come from Switzerland, and California, condolences from New Zealand and France and Hong Kong. And so many of them involve stories about her colourful language and creative invective. They begin with: “We’ll always remember…” and then it will be something crazy. Like my Australian friends, who said, “We’ll always remember that time when she got into a fight with Thorntons the Confectioners, over whether she could have a four-letter word as a cake decoration.”

“We’ll always remember that time she punched a horse….” No, I made that one up.

These ripples that we make in life, how people remember us, the effects that we have on each other’s lives, are fascinating to me. So many of you have mentioned moments, or interests, or decorations in their life that they owe to her, and they can be the most ridiculous things. I have a writer friend, who was the only person in her circle who didn’t get chapped hands during COVID, “…because I always used L’Occitane soap, and I first encountered it with your mother.” Or my friend Kimbers, in Texas, who said: “I’ll always think of your mother when I have spaghetti carbonara.”

Apparently, I was told, she’d never had spaghetti carbonara before, but the first time she ate it, she was sitting across from my mother in an Italian restaurant, and my mother was in full-on Apocalypse mode, ranting in a four-letter frenzy about the Bishop of Brentwood.

Just ahead of Brexit, my mother sent a Fortnum & Mason hamper across the border to me in my Finnish home. The natives crowded around it like jackals, peering in incomprehension at jars of Piccalilli and bespoke marmalade. It was a distant echo of the Bulgins’ kindnesses, half a century after they were dead. And I see some wag has actually put some of the flowers today in a Fortnum & Mason hamper… bravo.

You’ve told me about the effects she has had on the pictures on your walls, the books on your shelves, the music you listen to and the food you eat. And that’s been very comforting for us, to see fragments of her in other people’s lives.

Some of you have been surprised at the fact that she is being buried here, in the church she first visited as a twenty-year-old woman. You all listened to her witter for decades about how she wanted to have her ashes scattered all over Cornwall or something. But no, in 2022, she changed her will. She decided not just to live here, but to die here as well, which is why I invite all of you to walk with me down the Crown, where there will be Scotch Eggs for me and some sort of buffet nonsense for the rest of you, and to share more stories of her colourful, influential and often sweary life. Because when we are gone, the ripples we leave in the eyes of others are all that remains.

I didn’t know for sure what I was going to say when I stepped up to the lectern, but this was it as best I can remember it. Photos by Michael Clements, Kati Clements, Peter Finlay, and some others lost to time.

Time Out

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“Film writer Jonathan Clements’s book Anime: A History explores the symbiotic relationship between the Chinese and Japanese animation industries, and the way in which the Chinese have recently disengaged from Japan to go it alone. He notes that China’s latest Five-Year Plan encompassed not only nuclear power and tractor parts, but also the animation industry.”

I’m back punditing about Ne Zha 2, this time for Dave Hughes over at Time Out. Before anyone asks, when I said “Chinese original” of Kung Fu Panda, I was rushing out the door and groping towards the original culture and themes that inspired it: kung fu, wuxia and whatnot. My comments on the film remain resolutely industrial, because that’s what I do, but if you want a more aesthetic take on the movie, Mihaela Mihailova looks at it here at the Association for Chinese Animation Studies blog.

The Lyemun Battery

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When the British first occupied Hong Kong in the 1840s, their main enemy was malaria, which killed a quarter of the garrison within months. But there was also the prospect of an enemy showing up from the sea.

It took them forty years, and the prospect of Russian agitation in the region to persuade London to front the cash for a gun battery facing the Lyemun channel that led to Victoria Harbour, although rather embarrassingly, it never got used. It was installed in 1888, but someone soon realised that the emplacements were too high, and it couldn’t actually hit any ship in the channel at all.

In fact, if the Lyemun Battery opened fire, the only thing it stood a chance of hitting were the suburbs of East Kowloon, which had been British territory for the previous two decades.

Today the Lyemun Battery is home to the cumbersomely titled Hong Kong Museum of the War of Resistance and Coastal Defence. What would have otherwise been a relatively obscure museum about a gun on a hill that never got to shoot at anybody has been rebranded and expanded to take into account the story of the defence of Hong Kong since the time of the Mongols. This, in turn, has been aimed at reminding everybody that (a) Hong Kong is part of China, and (b) it also was an enemy of the Japanese in the Second World War, just like China… which Hong Kong has always been part of.

Unfortunately, such protestations unpack in the galleries to recount centuries of complete indifference shown by the Chinese authorities towards Hong Kong. There wasn’t even a concept of sea defence until the Ming dynasty, claims one exhibit. The gallery about the People’s Liberation Army’s 17 years in the territory doesn’t have a whole lot to say, and limits itself to pictures of them marching up and down a bit.

There are some interesting stories about the anti-Japanese underground in WW2 and the Hong Kong Volunteers, who became a sort of guerrilla organisation, celebrated here in a quirky statue that appears to be emerging from a manhole. There is also a memorial to the sad story of Joseph Hughes, the twenty-year-old soldier from Glasgow who was killed desperately trying to put out an ammunition fire on the truck he’d been driving, and was awarded a posthumous George Cross in 1946.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China.