Author and TV presenter Jonathan Clements discusses the rise and fall of the so-called “Kingdom of Dongning”, an enclave of Ming loyalists that held out on Taiwan for twenty years after the Manchu conquest of China. Torn between opposing ideologies of resistance and accommodation, Dongning clung to the memory of the Ming dynasty, even as its last pretenders died out and mainland support thinned and faded.
A mere footnote in most accounts of Asian history, it was nevertheless a pivotal influence on the history of Taiwan. Includes incest, strangling and sword-lions.
Bored with the two-hour wait for everybody to get their stuff together for breakfast, the director storms off back towards our hostel, thereby stumbling across a bunch of peasants slaughtering a pig in a field. It is a wedding party, getting ready for a blowout tomorrow where 1000 guests will work their way through a quarter of a tonne of pork, 184 chicken feet, 40 chickens (feet included), and by my calculations, about 30 carp. A conga line of assistants is bringing in one-gallon containers of vegetable soup, which until last week appeared to have contained industrial paint. The film crew swiftly invades the scene, with Mack the fixer running point to befriend the responsible parties, armed with several packets of fags to hand out.
We get footage of the production line of chickens being slaughtered, boiled, plucked and skinned; the fish being gutted; the pigs being blowtorched, much of it in the open air on the waste ground by the power station, which is apparently where the happy couple’s home has been built. The blushing bride is four months pregnant, and reveals that there is no ceremony as such. Just her and her husband welcoming guests at a jerry-built arbour, she handing out melon seeds, and him handing out fags. If we’re lucky she will put on new tracksuit. Then they will stage eight or nine sittings for dinner to get through their thousand anticipated guests, and in the evening there will be some dancing.
So, not actually a wedding at all. Two common-law cohabitants are staging a dinner party presumably to get their hands on some gifts, as every one of the thousand guests is expected to hand over some money. But it’ll do. The director, who has been ill for a week and miserable for most of the shoot, is so pleased with herself for discovering this ready-made big finish for the episode that she smiles for a whole ten minutes.
We manage to interview the bride in her family’s restaurant in the afternoon. She turns out to be one of those people the camera loves, and goes from plain to gorgeous when Daniel the cameraman fiddles with his lenses. However, two other crew members have take over the interview, because I am temporarily indisposed, groaning on the throne back in the hotel (probably too much information for you, but nothing I have eaten has stayed inside me long for the last three days). Although I rush back to take my spot as the interviewer, they tell me to stay out of it, because they have “already established a rapport.” Which leaves me with nothing to do but grin like a loon at the back, as they crash the interview into the floor, distracting the subject, leading her into one-word answers, fluffing their questions and failing to pursue any new openings revealed in the answers.
I’d been feeling for a couple of days that I was not achieving much, but watching them tank it reminds me that I do often contribute to the production, sometimes in almost imperceptible ways like knowing what questions to ask. The ingredients list for the wedding menu above, for example, was something I assembled on my own initiative, sending Mack the fixer into the kitchen to get the precise numbers while the director was still trying to decide where to place the camera. It formed the basis of my 20 seconds on camera which would have otherwise been simply “Ooh, look, a wedding!”
The director growls a warning that I am starting to sound like Fluffy, her term of abuse for a presenter on another series who tried to turn everything into a cooking show. Before you ask, her term of abuse for me is either Chicken Wings, because of the way I stand, or Treediot, because I don’t know anything about plants.
I try very hard to enjoy myself on location. I see places that I would never in a million years even think of going to, and on the good days, there is lovely Chinese food. But on this trip we have been particularly out in the boonies, away from good restaurants and flushing toilets, and that has taken its toll. So instead I keep my mind on the money.
If we were better embedded in the village, it would have been fun for me to be one of the kitchen skivvies trying to feed a thousand people, but the best we can do is gawp at the industrial production-line quality of such a large-scale meal.
Mickey the sound man is waylaid by three girls plying brownish, gloopy local ale, and forced to drink three cups of it before he is allowed through the front gate. I myself have to keep moving to avoid similar aggressive hospitality. The director succumbs to a couple of the niblets in the kitchen, but soon cries off the food when she sees leftover soup being poured back into the industrial paint containers from whence it came, ready to be ladled out again to some other guest.
“And while it is a serious and meticulously researched history it is also genuinely gripping with ‘Blimey! I didn’t know that!’ moments on every other page. Really terrific stuff.”
Over on Russell Hogg’s wonderful podcast Subject to Change, I discuss the history of Taiwan, with reference to an unexpected appearance by the Daleks, things to do with a dead deer, genocidal acts, the pirate king, the Zombie Ming dynasty, a “racist excuse”, “the most shameful thing the British have ever done” and a bunch of other things to be found in my book Rebel Island. Part one can be found at this link.
And then there is part two: How to take over an island chain by invading somewhere else; a world-class stamp-collecting scam; the “uncrowned king” of Taiwan; the Musha Incident reconsidered as a high-school shooting, the rise and fall of the Takasago Volunteers; uses and abuses of Triad assassins, and the rise of the “outside the party” movement.
Mr He has nut-brown skin, burned like the Tibetans by the hot sun in the thin air of the Himalayan foothills. He is wearing the ankle-length scarlet robes of a Dongba shaman, and a five pointed cardboard crown decorated with visceral images of deities and animal spirits. There is a long necklace of coloured beads around his neck. He carries a sprig of mountain fir, a tambourine-like shamanic drum, a necklace made of bones and an ancient book of Naxi spells, written in tribal hieroglyphs. He is sitting in the back of the Buick, next to another Mr He, who is also nut-brown but with a dark, piratic moustache, clad from head to foot in army surplus camo gear. He is wearing a single leather glove, and perched on it is a hawk… which is also in the back of the car, occasionally flapping its wings in the shaman’s face.
Mickey is crammed into the passenger seat with all his sound gear, including a large fluffy boom mike that the hawk keeps mistaking for an otter. Luckily for us, there wasn’t enough room in the car for the three hunting dogs, because it already feels like I am driving down a bumpy mountain path with the cast of a Fellini film in the back. All we really need is a couple of dwarves and a pantomime horse’s head protruding from the sunroof. The glassy lake beneath us is called Yuhu, and we bump and jostle along a track that is usually reserved for ponies and quadbikes. It is the oddest and least enthusiastic session of carpool karaoke yet devised, as Mickey starts to sing Bohemian Rhapsody.
Just as a confusing week with the Kam was ultimately saved by a mud fight, our lacklustre showing with the Naxi is pinning all its hopes on a day on the mountain heaths with a bunch of falconers. Mack the fixer has asked Big Li to fix something up, and Big Li has reached outside the Li circle to the He family, who have rustled up some men with birds of prey and Swiss army knives, and a wizard. The idea is for the Dongba shaman to perform a ceremony to the gods of mountains and hunting, and for us to then go looking for pheasants among the rock-strewn meadows beneath the snow-capped peak of Jade Snow Mountain — original inspiration for Shangri-La and alleged home to the many couples from Naxi history who have committed double-suicide rather than submit to the pressure to marry their cousins.
But somewhere in all the fixers fixing with other fixers, something has been lost in translation. We wanted the hawking party for the whole day, preferably with a menagerie of spare pheasants we could release into the meadows for their own little version of the Hunger Games if the wild ones wouldn’t cooperate. For some reason, the bunch of dodgy-looking Naxi have shown up armed with little more than excuses. The hawk isn’t hungry enough. There are too many people on the hillside. The hawk is scared of Mickey’s boom mike. And they have only turned up with two spare pheasant-like birds as possible prey.
The hawk resolutely flies in precisely the opposite direction from any wild birds that the dogs faithfully root out, and is literally unable to grab a pheasant when one is held up in front of it. The director glumly gets some footage of me holding it (its talons remarkably gentle on my wrist, as if it is afraid of leaving a mark), and of Mr He the army-fatigues guy blowing his whistle and largely failing to get it to return. After half an hour, the pheasants have caught more prey than the hawk, and He the Hawker has resorted to using his GPS locator, which beeps angrily whenever it works out where the transponder on the back of the eagle is.
Daniel the cameraman is in a filthy mood. The director says it is because he has a cold, but I suspect it’s because of the crushing weight of wasted opportunity. Today’s set-up, if the fixer’s fixer’s fixer had got his ducks in a row, would have offered any cameraman a shot at an international award — wizards in the forest, and hawks coming out of the sky. But the prey won’t run, and the hawk won’t hunt, and the rare moments when there’s some action or chasing, Daniel invariably has the wrong lens on his camera, or ends up focussing on the wizard having a fag behind a tree. Then the hawkers reveal that this last half hour is all they have scheduled. Far from spending the day on the mountain, they have another hawking party to go to, and are ready to pack up and run off, observing with something of a hungry glint in their eyes that maybe we can come up with something better the day after tomorrow. The hawk has been so hapless at chasing the pheasants that we still have both of them alive, staring at us with what only can be described as avian sneers. We have barely seconds of footage, which causes Sohkiak to suggest that before the hunters go, we set up a scene where I drive the Buick across the mountainous landscape, with a camera stuck to the front of the car for a good view of our mad passengers.
The hunters all bugger off to a more interesting hunt somewhere else, and we are left with the Dongba shaman. He is as friendly as any wizard might be when offered a week’s wages to set fire to some twigs on a hillside, and gamely talks me through the career path of an exorcist and sometime children’s entertainer. He lights a pile of fir branches and intones dour prayers in Naxi to the gods of the mountain. He is much too polite to suggest that we might have avoided a lot of palaver if he had asked the gods’ permission before we started chasing a couple of pheasants around a lake, and that in terms of prioritising wizardry, we might have got what we deserved.
“Hong Kong is so crowded already. Where do ghosts live?”
Asian psychiatrists learn their trade in English. Like Dr Jim Law (Leslie Cheung) in Inner Senses, the books on their shelves are in a foreign language, as are their lessons and interactions with their peers. They have a scientific, westernised outlook that differs from the countrymen they often treat. Jim takes this to extremes, reducing even happiness to simple terms of chemical secretions.
His patients, like the audience for Inner Senses, are steeped in folklore and movies, such as Dracula and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with which Jim taunts his fellow psychologists at a conference. When Yan (Karena Lam) says “I see ghosts”, her words echo not only The Sixth Sense, but also its Asian imitators, particularly The Eye.
Inner Senses is concerned with the spinning of tales and the active imagination. Yan only seems to see ghosts after she hears scary stories; she is primed to believe. A failed writer who must subsist as a translator, she retains a writer’s readiness to be spooked and inspired by what goes on around her. And yet Jim tells stories, too. In their first meeting, he lies about his belief in ghosts, and helps her construct an alibi for her attendance, ostensibly to placate her cousin, but actually to lure her back for further sessions.
Inner Senses teases its audience with false trails of movie folklore. Its early moments invoke Dark Water or The Amityville Horror with creepy scenes of house-buying. Jim alludes to a wartime graveyard below his building – an Asian variant on the old “Indian Burial Ground” cliché. Even the leads’ first meeting seems contrived along B-movie horror lines, with a new patient dumped on Jim by a vacationing psychologist. But there is a reason for everything, and the bad lie of Jim’s fellow doctor is the white lie of Chinese match-making – even though he risks breaking the rules of psychiatry by encouraging a relationship with a patient, the deceptive doctor is still doing what he can to set up his wife’s cousin with a suitable spouse.
Inner Senses places so much value on stories because its leading man believes in the power of suggestion. It is not spirits that bother Jim, but the people who believe in them, for their hysteria can be contagious. Jim speaks like a psychologist, but also like a filmmaker, of inspirations and memories that write and draw themselves. Part of his planned therapy involves a video camera, the chance for Yan to exorcise demons by proving they aren’t real on film.
There are two films within Inner Senses. Its first hour relates the case of Yan, before turning on the case of her therapist – Jim’s own inner Scully telling him that there must be a perfectly rational explanation. But his inner Mulder wants to believe that there are ghosts, for such a romantic decision would mean that Yan was sane, making her more of a potential mate.
But even the calm, rational Dr Jim Law has skeletons in his closet, and whether he believes in ghosts or not, he is certainly being haunted by something, something not from the spiritual world at all. Inner Senses takes an hour to set up Jim’s relentless rationality, and then confronts him with a terror born of the mundane world. Despite its obvious parallels to Sixth Sense, it is part of a psychological horror tradition that goes back to The Shining and beyond, of men who haunt themselves.
If one is truly mad, one is often too mad to tell. Therapists pity the mild or worsening cases, aware that they are losing their minds but unable to stop it. Leslie Cheung himself wrote of “experiencing emotional difficulties” in his personal life during and after the filming of Inner Senses. Shortly after his haunted performance in this movie garnered him a Best Actor nomination in the Hong Kong Film Awards, Cheung went into the 24th floor café of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and asked for a notepad. He wrote a brief message thanking his own psychotherapist for his efforts, but complaining of a year of suffering. He then jumped from the balcony to his death.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. This article originally appeared in the sleeve notes to the Tartan Video release of Inner Senses.
Mr Wang’s studio is literally next door to our hotel, which gives everybody a lie-in. I start to wish, however, that I had never got out of bed, since Mr Wang’s studio appears to specialise in pictures of pets. Why UNESCO accorded him intangible cultural heritage, I’ll never know, because his output seems to include funny pandas, twee scenes of traditional mountains-and-water, and the silk-weave equivalent of a painting of two dogs playing billiards.
The people in Mr Wang’s studio are heartily sick of film crews, and would really much prefer to be left to get on with their work. Mr Wang makes himself scarce when we arrive, thereby depriving us of the chance to interview anyone but his flunkies. But they tsk and tut and bend over their looms as I wander around them, enthusing to camera about the not-particularly-lost art of kesi, in a single 45-second speech that I manage to get right more often than not.
We drop in on a dye factory for more B-rolls, and then stop off at a water-town to send up the drone to get pictures of little pagodas and winding, flagstoned streets. This particular one, Shantang, stretches along either side of a seven-mile stretch of canal, and is infested with pushy rickshaw drivers and people who want to shout hello and/or stand behind the camera peering into the viewfinder.
The day finishes up back in Suzhou proper, next to another picturesque canal populated by fan shops, ice cream parlours and dumpling shops. We’ve come to see Chen Yingqin, a lady whose kesi is way, way better than Mr Wang’s. She seems to spend most of her time telling clueless customers in her shop that, no, the “watercolour” on the wall is not a watercolour at all, but actually an image composed of thousands of silk threads. She also does calligraphy, replicating everything from the pressure of the ink brush to little imperfections in the characters. I ask about one picture, of a Chinese landscape, and she confesses that it took her nine months.
The prices reflect this. A square embroidered image of a single Chinese character, (Chan, which is to say, what the Japanese call Zen), the size of an LP, retails at a steep £3000. She also makes wallets at £100 a throw, and similar luxury goods for the super-rich.
A neatly “printed” series of characters on gold silk is recognisable to me from the simple layout, even before I get close enough to read it, or its title.
“Is that the Heart Sutra?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says, flabbergasted. “I am slightly disconcerted that you know that.”
She is giggly and vivacious in her interview, which makes a nice change from stage-struck old men, and seems genuinely sorry to see us go. She even laughs along when the producer and I have a fight about the statue on the mantelpiece, with her maintaining that it is Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, and me maintaining that it is Buddha himself.
“If it’s Guanyin,” I protest, “then where are her tits?”
Apparently it is Buddha. Although Guanyin is also Buddha. It’s complicated.
At a loose end in Shanghai, I dropped by the site of the first congress of the Communist Party of China, a nondescript building at what used to be 106 Rue Wantz in the French Concession. A small museum inside chronicles the various individuals and events that literally got that Party started, although most of the Chinese visitors were keener to have their photograph taken by the entirely everyday front door with its “106” nameplate.
I was more excited by the presence of a bona fide First Congress of the Communist Party of China gift shop, where I shopped in a frenzy for my First Congress of the Communist Party of China umbrella, my First Congress of the Communist Party of China pen, my First Congress of the Communist Party of China tote bags, and my First Congress of the Communist Party of China fridge magnet. There was even an I’ve Been to the First Congress of the Communist Party of China frame outside, where I had my photograph taken, loaded with First Congress of the Communist Party of China swag, while Chinese onlookers giggled nervously and said: “Heehee, foreigner.”
For author Lin Chunfeng, I am one of millions of people taking part in the subject of his new book, Red Tourism in China: Commodification of Propaganda. I have always been interested in some of the big Communist displays of statuary and commemoration, such as the Martyrs Cemetery in Shanghai and the Martyrs Park in Guangzhou, but Lin’s book examines such sites as part of a growing and, in some sense, relatively recent phenomenon, as the Communist Party attempts to merge the disparate disciplines of education, propaganda, national cohesion and social harmony. Today, Red Tourism is a massive component of Chinese leisure travel, amounting to 540 million visits a year, or 20% of all domestic Chinese tourism. To put this in context, private investment in tourist experiences in Mao’s old base at Yan’an has topped 50 billion yuan, ten times the amount spent to build Shanghai Disneyland.
Not every venture is a resounding success. Lin recounts the folly of the great golden “Mega Mao” that was erected by an earnest entrepreneur in Henan province in 2016, only to be pulled down at the orders of the authorities shortly before it was completed. The precise reason is unclear – possibly, the Trumpish extreme of the golden Mao was too much even for garish Chinese pop culture, with social media commentators archly commenting on its evocation of Shelley’s Ozymandias. Others pointed to the bitter irony of a statue glorifying the Sun in Our Hearts in the province that arguably suffered the most at the hands of his social experiments. The truth probably lies somewhere in between, tied up in complex issues over patriotic land use and the unsanctioned rezoning of an agricultural area.
A large chunk of Lin’s book is taken up with a discussion of the history and culture of tourism and propaganda in China. He points out that ancient progressions by emperors and princes around the country were often ostensibly undertaken as acts of religious pilgrimage, although the “long, grand journey of the monarch to the ceremony site was often just as propagandistic as the ritual ceremonies for legitimating monarchical power.” And Lin points out that it’s not just the monarchs who are putting on a performance. “Tourism at the grassroots,” he suggests, “has gone mostly unmentioned in both historical records and modern retellings, or at the most, framed as celebrations of holidays along with other rituals and ceremonies that somehow involved travel.”
In part, this performance of pilgrimage can be laid at the feet of Confucianism, which Lin terms an “anti-leisure” philosophy that early tourist companies in China had to wilfully fight among the middle classes, convincing them travel for fun was both desirable and appropriate. Paramount among such entrepreneurs was Chen Guangfu (1881-1976), the Ivy-league alumnus who founded China’s first locally run travel agency back in his native Shanghai, the China Travel Service (CTS). It was Chen who came up with the idea of giving away 20,000 travel pamphlets at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, hiring the journalist Edgar Snow to knock up five different accounts of travel tips, framed as anti-Japanese polemics.
After the end of WW2, tourism was first pushed by a professor from the Department of Foreign Relations of the University of Politics, who argued that it was “not merely a form of education, but a very important part of education in general.” Here, Lin tracks the interests in education and propaganda (a word that he carefully argues has nowhere near as negative an implication in China as it does in the West) of both the Communists and Nationalists, particularly when it came to promoting the commemoration of the war against the Japanese, and pointedly celebrating 1950s China as a melting pot of multiple ethnic groups. Lin identifies some of the mass movements of the Cultural Revolution as a prototype of today’s “Red Tourism”, noting the swift declaration of the Great Rally – a series of sites with revolutionary importance, which no true Red Guard should miss out on. Such fanatic pilgrimages of the Party faithful were eventually shut down by the Party itself in 1967, after several people suffocated on overcrowded trains on their way to lay wreaths at sites like Yan’an and Jinggangshan.
As China “opened up” following the death of Mao, tourism was one of the first topics on the mind of the reformer Deng Xiaoping, who had his beady eye on the potential of a permanently renewable resource of American hard currency. “If each foreign tourist would spend $1000 in China,” he argued in 1978, “with a total of 10 million tourists visiting China every year, China could earn $10 billion.” But Deng’s vision, of course, was a more traditional form of leisure travel – the Great Wall (which was soon opened to visitors on multiple locations), the Terracotta Army, the Forbidden City and whatnot. For many foreigners, the experience of China would be a once-in-a-lifetime whistlestop fortnight of bussing, banquets and an overload of temples.
Official endorsement of tourism as a patriotic and educational Party phenomenon, would not come until 1991, two years after the Tiananmen Square protests caused the authorities to question if modern youth was on-message. Lin smartly relates it to a generational conflict, not only over a young China that had not experienced the formative conflicts, but of the “Little Emperors” born after the instigation of the One-Child Policy, regarded by some sectors as snooty snowflakes with no recollection of true hardship. The actual term Red Tourism (hongse lüyou) is first seen in a magazine article in 1996.
Lin has some great number-crunching on the economics of Red Tourism, which is often counter-intuitive or unexpected. He notes that many sites are piously free-entry, which disincentivises everyday tour guides from bringing their groups there in search of the usual rake-off. Conversely, a suitably high-level Redness in local sites can hoist the local economy way above its expected height –bringing in amenities usually reserved for much higher-tier cities. Apparently, the average Baskin-Robbins franchisee will not get out of bed for a third-tier city, unless it is guaranteed to have a regular influx of middle-class tourists. Tutting over his noodles in Yan’an, Lin observes that they have cost him three times as much as they would in the major metropolis at Baoji.
Lin’s chief case study is the city of Yan’an, the site of Mao’s 1930s guerrilla resistance, once favoured because it was remote, inhospitable and inaccessible. Now it is a mecca of Red Tourism, blessed by ultra-modern transport links – starting in 2025, it will be just 2.5 hours from Xi’an by bullet train – where the economic impact leisure travel has outstripped agriculture in the local economy. As is true all over China, out-of-work farmers form a huge labour pool for the tourist trade, which is one of the reasons why female soldiery is over-represented in the local re-enactment shows.
And what shows! Lin zooms in on Yan’an Defence, an explosive military spectacular re-enacting life in the Communist bolthole, interrupted by a sudden assault by Nationalist bombers. Originally performed four times a day to appreciative and occasionally fearful crowds, it was one of the lynchpins of the Yan’an experience, unwisely boasting in its advertising of featuring “real guns and real bullets” – one of which killed a performer in 2010. Lin gets to see Yan’an Defence at the height of its glory days; today, apparently, it is only put on once a day, with a reduced complement of “one horse and three donkeys.”
A similar celebration of the Battle of Taierzhuang requires so much explosives per performance that it cannot possibly operate without government contacts. Lin reports on multiple daily onstage injuries for the performers, who must wade through the pyrotechnics of 800 blanks and 80 explosions per show, rattling their eardrums and scorching their costumes. In 2014, preparations for a re-enactment of the Liaoshen Campaign are marred by an unscheduled explosion which claims the lives of two pyro-technicians, two workers, and three Party officials who happened to be walking past.
Lin’s reporting is not only a captivating glimpse of the lives of such performers, often uneducated, unemployed surplus labourers, exposed to the elements, replaying traumatic military actions several times a day without holidays or injury pay. He also delves into the way that such disasters were “handled” through the use of “soft news” (ruanwen), paid newspaper content that is now largely discouraged in China, although certain Chinese institutions are happy to throw money at it overseas, outside the Party’s jurisdiction.
In such remote areas, Lin smartly follows the money, investigating the way in which the authorities will happily help foster a Red Tourism site as long as their grants return double the investment. They will hand over a million dollars for Famous Pond Mao Once Looked At experience – not as frivolous as it sounds; such a site is one of the barrel-scraping 82 locations in the Chairman’s Shaoshan birthplace – but only if they see two million returned in the form of local infrastructure, transport links, job creation and businesses.
Lin’s book is an engaging introduction to the topic of Red Tourism, and presents a long view of it, dropping back in on his Yan’an case study to observe how it evolves over the years. This is a much overlooked element of so many studies in tourism, which tend to regard each phenomenon as fixed and unchanging. He returns late in the book to sample Golden Yan’an, a new “old” town built on expropriated farmland, and seemingly offering employment to the former farmers by getting them to dress up in a multi-faceted Chinese history experience.
Lin points out the economic issues that are associated with this, as policy wonks neglect to mention to the farmers that the very prosperity they are promised is fated to push up local prices, and devalue the compensation they received for their land, as well as the wages they might earn working on the site. He also has a stern critical eye for Golden Yan’an as a modular experience, with one street evoking the Song dynasty, and another the Qing, while a third recreates the era of Yan’an as a revolutionary headquarters. Shrewdly, Lin points out the difference that the visitors themselves can bring as participants, noting the contrast between an almost deserted street populated by pious statues, versus a vibrant marketplace thronging with cosplaying visitors.
It’s difficult to get the visitors to provide their own entertainment, of course, but sometimes it pays dividends. In its heyday, Yan’an Defence would even charge visitors $2 to dress up as revolutionaries and cower from the bullets onstage, rather than in the bleachers. In a perfect world, the visitors can bring their own passion – one of the most moving sites I have visited outside China is Ellis Island in New York, not for the museum to be found there, but for the emotional reaction of the many visitors, confronted with the fact that they are standing on the very spot where their ancestors became Americans.
In the case of Lijiang, famously lampooned by Chen Qiufan as a site of ersatz memories, I have witnessed its rapid transformation from ancient town into classy shopping mall, and as the initial franchises pulled out, into a glorified theme park like everywhere else, that charges an admission fee to the town itself, as if admitting there is nothing worth buying there. But even then, there are hacks and subversions. In 2017, I heard that Lijiang had become the hook-up capital of China, with travelling swingers cheerfully buying their three-day town admission, uncaring about the lack of night-time entertainment, because they were lighting up dating apps like a Christmas tree and meeting each other for sordid orgies. So, at least, I was told by a girl in a bobble hat, halfway up a mountain in Guizhou. Is it still true, seven years on? A lot can change in the world of Chinese tourism.
Two-hour drive out into the hinterland to Chenlu, the heart of the Chinese ceramics industry for the last two thousand years. This valley dotted with chimneys once had a solid square mile of little kilns churning out pottery for the Tang and Song dynasties. Master Wang Zhanjun, a crew-cut slowly transforming into an afro, shows me around his showroom, and the walk-in kiln where he still fires pots in the traditional method. He talks us through the glazes and the temperatures and their fluctuating fortunes, as well as the stories behind several “trick” items that we see on sale in the Xi’an Muslim quarter all the time.
One is the Phoenix Chirping Kettle, said to have been invented to make one of Empress Wu’s dreams come true. It has been designed so that the wine inside it makes a whistling noise when it comes out, which is apparently cause for marvelling in the Tang dynasty.
Another is a wine jug designed to protect Tang princelings from poisoners. Anything poured in the top goes into a reservoir. The wine that actually comes from the spout is secretly filled from the bottom, thereby stopping one’s enemies from topping one up with something toxic. Still another is a “magic” jug that has to be filled from the bottom rather than the top – the result of an intricate maze of internal bulkheads.
The best has to be the Justice Cup, a green receptacle with a dragon’s head rearing inside it. Thanks to something to do with science, a certain amount of liquid will stay inside it, even though there is a hole at the bottom — as the “Pythagorean Cup”, it was a well-known party trick in Ancient Greece. But a single drop over a prescribed maximum, and the entire contents will flow out through the bottom. The cup was said to have been presented to the Tang prince Li Mao by his father, the Xuanzong Emperor, at his wedding to the beautiful Yang Yuhuan. Xuanzong asked the bride what she thought the cup meant, and she replied that it had to be something to do with all things in moderation, lest overindulgence lead to the loss of all.
This is particularly ironic, since the Xuanzong Emperor ended up forcing Li Mao to divorce Yang Yuhuan, who as Yang Guifei, became his mistress, consort and eventual wrecker of the Tang Empire. No, before you ask, still no takers for The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, my book on the subject that has been failing to attract any publisher’s interest for over a decade now. Its time will come; there is no hurry. For my part, I spent much of the day scaring the producers with stories of the atrocities of Empress Wu, which amounts to some small revenge on them for all the times they have talked about their bowel movements at breakfast.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening S02E06 (2016).
“Clements writes accessible narrative histories of East Asia designed for a general readership. In this book, his informative accounts of time and place are interleaved with human interest stories written in a no-nonsense style to provide a bird’s-eye view of the challenging terrain that is Taiwan’s past.”
China history heavyweight Antonia Finnane writes a long and appreciative piece for Inside Story about my book Rebel Island. I am fangirling a bit.
One of the earliest pictures in the Wellington Koo Museum has an innocence to it that belies its importance. It shows our hero as a young teenager clad in a Manchu robe, clutching a straw boater and proudly leaning on his bicycle. This is the young Koo, a student at Shanghai’s Anglo-Chinese School, at precisely the time that his lifelong interest in justice was about to begin. For it was on that bicycle that Koo rode off to school, and on that bicycle that he was stopped and fined for riding on the pavement, whereas the English boy riding just ahead of him was waved through without a word. It was the young Koo’s first encounter with extraterritoriality, that weird concept that permitted foreigners in Qing China to be treated and tried under their own laws, rather than those of the Chinese among whom they dwelled.
The encounter would propel Koo far away from home, to St John’s College in Shanghai and ultimately to Columbia University in New York, where his PhD thesis on “The Status of Aliens in China” would make him the first Chinese subject to earn a doctorate in the United States. He would return to his native China to become the English secretary to the ill-fated warlord and would-be emperor Yuan Shikai. With the end of the Great War in 1918, Koo travelled to put China’s case at the Paris Peace Conference. Despite technically being outranked by the delegation leader, his eloquence and youth propelled him into the public eye, in several forceful speeches in which he argued, unsuccessfully, that the German colony of Shandong should be returned to the Chinese, and not its Japanese occupiers. When Koo’s argument was rejected, he famously refused to sign the Treaty of Versailles on China’s behalf. It was, he would argue in later life, a turning point in history. If the victorious powers had done right by Shandong, Koo believed, China’s liberals would never have embraced the temptations offered by Communism, and the history of the twentieth century might have been very different.
Koo would become China’s representative to the League of Nations, and soon the Chinese ambassador to the United States. In the stormy 1920s, he served on several occasions as China’s prime minister or acting premier, and had to flee for his life from an angry warlord, relying with cringeworthy irony on the very extraterritoriality that he had fought so hard to dismantle by seeking sanctuary with the British at Weihaiwei. He briefly enjoyed a period as a wanted man with a Nationalist bounty on his head, before another warlord, the infamous Zhang Zuolin, intervened on his behalf and had him restored to his diplomatic career.
During World War Two, Koo served as the Chinese ambassador to the United Kingdom, where he initially arrived to find himself facing openly hostile opposition. His reputation preceded him as an advocate of China’s rights to self-determination, and he received short shrift when he dared to suggest that the British might want to send reinforcements to Hong Kong in case of a Japanese attack. It was in his tenure, however, that the British came to increasingly rely on Chinese help in the war effort, and it was in his presence that a 1943 treaty was signed in which Britain revoked all extraterritorial rights in China. He would also get to sign another document of great personal value to him, when he put his name on the San Francisco Treaty that formally defined the conditions of the Japanese surrender. His signature was also the first to grace the charter of the newly founded United Nations.
Koo supposedly retired in 1956, only to embark upon a second career as a judge in the international court of justice in The Hague. He would rise to the rank of its vice-president before his second, and more permanent retirement in 1967.
All of which brings me to Jiading, a sleepy water-town criss-crossed by canals, so far out in the Shanghai suburbs that it is at the very end of the number 11 metro line. Jiading was Koo’s birthplace in 1888, when it was still a separate county from Shanghai proper, and his museum sprawls across a converted local temple, which it shares with another museum to the politician Hu Juewen, another local boy. But it’s Koo who has the real pulling power as a local hero – somehow present at some of the most important moments of the twentieth century, and blessed with a biting wit and a powerful eloquence in both English and Chinese.
Funded and maintained, at least in part, by Koo’s own descendants, the museum is a fitting tribute to Jiading’s most famous son. Its familial connections have allowed for some intimate and unexpected touches, including gifts exchanged among members of the Koo family, and gallery celebrating the bit of his life that so many biographers gloss over, the long years of his happy retirement. The materials end with Koo’s personal diary, left open at its final entry on the day he died.
I found myself thinking that Wellington Koo would make a fantastic subject for a book, although of course, I have already written one about him, available in both English and Chinese, that was scandalously not included in the big cabinet of Koo-ology near the exit. But Jiading’s Wellington Koo Museum told me a bunch of things I didn’t know about my hero, or possibly a bunch of things that I once knew and since forgot in the fifteen years since I wrote my book. One wonders, as with the similar secretarial exploits of Wang Jingwei, how many of the famous quotes from certain historical figures (in Koo’s case, Yuan Shikai; in Wang’s, Sun Yat-sen) were actually the work of their more eloquent assistants.
There has already been a Wellington Koo movie – My 1919, which rather floridly dramatises the events of the Paris Peace Conference. But there are many more elements of his life that would lend themselves just as readily to a mini-series, putting its protagonist right in the middle of some of the most iconic moments of the twentieth century. The museum in Jiading that bears his name functions as a walk-in producer’s pitch, showing just how exciting and momentous a life Wellington Koo managed to lead.
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