PROLOGUE

My dear ________,

What follows may strike you as a wild tale, far-fetched and fantastical, but I assure you of its veracity. I don’t deny that many men have called me a liar and a fraud. Such calumnies may have even reached your ears. The thought of this pains me deeply. But know that these are but the revilements of small men, parish-pump pettifoggers cursed with too great a poverty of imagination to apprehend life’s feral richness.

Envy turns men vicious. I have suffered much from their jealousy – and truly jealousy is no less a deadly sin than the lust and covetousness of which they accuse me! Charge me with greed! I do not shy from the fact that I am a passionate collector, lover and connoisseur not only of rare books and jade, but of all that life offers in the way of experience. T’an hsin bu tsu : a heart that is never fulfilled, always craving more. And yes, mea culpa encore, I plead guilty, as well, to the sin of lust. I have been a sensualist – the intimate of courtesans, catamites, sepoys, eunuchs and sybarites, lords and ministers, poets and painters, with whom I shared many a fragrant, pomegranate night. And then there were those sultry, unforgettable interludes in the Great Within. Are those truly such insufferable crimes? So be it. Je m’accuse!

My head is crowded with all that I want to tell you, and all that I need to tell you. My tale and yours too involves the most incredible of love affairs, the greatest of scandals, and the most dreadful and unnecessary of murders. I would confide in you every detail if I could. And yet I am conscious of the relentless onward march of the “inaudible and noiseless foot of Time”. In my youth I had often imagined that I would end my days in meditative retreat in a monastery outside of Palermo. That fantasy, alas, is not destined for fulfilment. Later, I had a dream, expressed to my old friend Mrs. Danby, that I might pass my waning years in the Western Hills of Peking, at the Temple of Pi Mo Yen, that tranquil haven that inspired Lin-ch’ing’s composition Footsteps of a Solitary Goose in the Snow , but even that modest aspiration seems to have escaped my reach. No, my last stop before the Final Judgment is destined to be this humble bed in St. Michael’s Hospital in the Foreign Legation Quarter of Peking.

The manifold illnesses and privations that have long ravaged my naturally weak constitution have now taken it over. Comprising a malevolent host, a veritable family of ill-wishers, an audience that cannot contain its longing to see fall the final curtain, they now besiege this poor body of mine. This body that once afforded such exquisite pleasures now presents me daily with the insufferable pains of decay. So I lie, collapsed upon starched hospital sheets amidst tubes and potions, sheathed in a frayed and greying white gown of no dignity, the face that my Messalina once praised as “handsome” now lined and crushed with age and illness, and a life once splendid and wondrous in variety reduced to a dreary, colourless routine of salves and medicaments.

Thus, propped up on goose-down pillows, I write to you with a sense of urgency and a leaking pen. (H has promised to replace the pen on his next visit, and to type up these disorganised scribbles on his new Remington typewriter – he is the kindest of friends one could wish for in old age.)

At least the surgeons, doctors and Sisters of Mercy here at St. Michael’s sont français; although I have been forced by circumstances into the Foreign Legation Quarter, which I have sought to avoid for most of the near half-century I have spent in Peking, I am grateful that the last accents I will hear will not be those of my own benighted countrymen.

When I was still sheltering in the British Legation, before coming to this hospital, the British envoy offered to repatriate me, to send me “home” as he phrased it. He does not know – or perhaps he does – of the raptors there who would joyfully sharpen their claws on my frail bones, the Shylocks, the calumniators, the men of bourgeois morality, small talents and large envies who would like nothing more than to see me arrive on those blasted shores with my tail between my legs. In many cases they are, bien sûr, the very same people who once clamoured for a share in my treasures or a glimpse of my wit, who happily exploited my talents when they saw profit therein for their journalism or business needs. No! I shall never return to deuced England. Better to stay in my beloved Peking, whatever the consequences.

Not that there is much in these whitewashed corridors or, indeed, the world beyond this hospital’s faded curtains, to inspire me to tarry any longer in this life than is absolutely necessary. It is 1944. The world is at war for the third time in my life. First came the Russo–Japanese War in 1904, so beloved of that odious Australian, Morrison, who traded trifles of jam and chocolate for the translations of mine that gave him his over inflated reputation as the most informed of the Peking correspondents. Then came the even more extreme horrors of the Great War, which, thankfully, largely spared us in China.

The twentieth century here has nonetheless proved grim indeed. The decaying universe of beauty and power, which was the last dynasty, gave way to a rather more prosaic and troubled republic that proved itself equal to the ancien régime in corruption but not in style. Now the Japanese, once the shining light of East Asia, ride roughshod over civilisation in the East whilst their German allies brutalise Europe.

I, who once celebrated the victories of the Japanese over smug little bourgeois England, I, who was prepared to glorify the triumph of a nation of aesthetes over the country of the vulgus, I, who celebrated their restoration of the House of Aisin Gioro in Manchuria for reasons that will become manifest – even I have officially become in their eyes an “enemy alien”. (Et tu, Brute?)

I had no inkling of what was to come on that foully hot July day in 1937, the events of which are now known as the Incident at Marco Polo Bridge, the start of China’s War of Resistance against Japan. In the confused aftermath of the assault on the walled city of Wan P’ing and the Japanese march into Peking from the Yung Ting Men Gate, I briefly took shelter in the British Legation for the first time. That decision surprised everyone, not least myself.

So I am certain that it was something of a relief to all concerned when things appeared to calm down somewhat, and in a less apocalyptic mood I returned to my home at 28, 28 Yang Jou Hutung, Mutton Lane. I even cheered the Japanese successes until that terrible day in 1939 (almost five years ago!) when, living up to the names by which they are commonly known in Chinese, kui tse and wo k’ou , devils and dwarf pirates, the soldiers of the Empire of the Sun drove me from my humble but beloved home.

It was a day full of barked threats in a language I wished, for once, that I did not understand. I shall never forget the arrogance of the Nipponese bayonet as it sliced through the threads of the silk scarf at my throat, a treasured gift from dear Cassia Flower, or the insolent tramp of muddy boots on my fine Hsinkiang carpet, a present from none other than His Excellency Jung Lu (a charming man, incidentally – I could see at our first meeting the source of the Old Buddha’s attraction to him).

The memory of what the Japanese did that day stabs me still. They were exultant when they found the precious shawl of pearls, the famous shawl that once belonged to the Old Buddha – which I could not, in the end, bear to sell and so had hid from the world (including – and I know this wasn’t my most noble moment – the man who paid me a considerable advance for his share of it). They knocked the Four Treasures of my writing desk to the floor, sending my brushes clattering, shattering my inkstone, and causing my hsüan-chi rice paper to fly through the air like autumn leaves on a breezy day in the Western Hills.

No small part of me died as I watched them – was forced to watch them – loot my treasures, shred my papers and burn my precious manuscripts, including the Anglo– Chinese dictionary that represented the work of half a century. They also either took for themselves or consigned to the flames my letters, the rare diaries I’d collected, the imperial histories, and all the books in my library, including some, then rare and now non-existent – all except what I could beg from them and cram into a suitcase. They made a bonfire of the very stuff and matter of my life. Gone to ash and smoke. And then, to add insult to injury, one of them, unbuttoning his fly to reveal the fleshy purple of his samurai sword, urinated on the ashes. An acrid stench filled the air of a room that had previously been infused only with , shu-hsiang, the scent of books.

All they permitted me to salvage was my life, in the narrowest, literal sense, as well as what I could stuff into that suitcase. This included a few poor and threadbare garments, a red leather case with the document of my succession to the baronetcy, a sable-lined coat that once belonged to a Chinese noble and a few treasured books. And so I found myself taking refuge for a second time in the myopic little garrulous world of the British Legation. It is ironic. For most of my life I avoided the foreign quarter and its dull, small-minded denizens, instead living happily among the Chinese in the West City. To think that the Japanese I once so admired would drive me into the perfidious embrace of the Legations!

My countrymen at least had the decency to assign me a room within the compound of the British embassy where I had sole possession of a single bed, a rough-hewn table and one servant. Seated at that table, I read my books, worked on my memoirs and took tea. I, who had once worn court robes and the triple-eyed peacock feather in my hat, now humbly attired myself in a Chinese grass-cloth gown the colour of the winter sun when the dust of the Gobi is in the air, on my head a simple black Chinese cap with its modest ornament of rose quartz. The narrow view from my small veranda delimited a world that had once known no borders.

At least I was able to enjoy the company of the books I had salvaged: that perpetually amusing classic Ku-wen Kuan-chi , a rare nineteenth-century edition of Hung Lo Meng , The Dream of the Red Chamber, the erotic masterpiece Chin P’ing Mei , the supernatural Liao Chai Chi Yi , and a beautifully bound volume of the essays of the great Ming dynasty aesthete Chang Tai . I had one volume each of Wilde, Rimbaud, Huysmans and, naturally, Segalen. Miraculously, throughout all the upheavals, I have also retained a precious copy of Romance sans paroles inscribed to me by dear Verlaine; every so often I open it and read the poems aloud. Ó triste, triste était mon âme. . .

My dear friend Baron Corvo once wrote to me from Venice about his appassionato per l’acqua, in particular his mania for swimming the canals of Venice. He described these as “a twilight world of cloudless sky and smoothest sea, all made of warm, liquid, limpid heliotrope and violet and lavender”. He sought out the deeper waters on account of what he called his “vehement dyspathy against getting entangled in weeds or mud, to make my toe-nails dirtier than my finger-nails”. I have always admired his purity. And yet what is this life but the creeping entanglement of weeds and mud?

By the time you read this, I will be dead and so will my detractors, all of us embarked on another turn of the wheel of Samsara, swept away in a swirl of , hung ch’en, red dust – entanglement by its more poetic, Buddhist name.

My time is nigh. Escorted by both the consolations and disappointments of my new Roman faith – a faith shared with and indeed inspired by Corvo and my beloved Wilde, whose later conversion was as much an inspiration to me as his earlier perversions – I shall soon depart for the most fathomless depths of all.

I do not ask that you mourn me. I only implore you: know and remember me as I present myself to you here, without ornament, without pedantry, without guile. And understand this truth – stories are the only thing that defy death. Stories are truth. I hereby give you mine, yours – and Hers.