PART TWO

Dreams, pale and quiet as cotton, depart for some other sky. Drift, return. Wisps and fragments, real as hallucinations. I was there again this morning, in the temple, I’m certain of it, when the dusty grey light of day crept in under the hem of my curtains, seeping through the thin material to press its cold fingers down on my eyelids. Sparks dispersed across the membrane of my closed eyes. The temple was lost in the shadows; I pulled the covers up over my face, inhaling the remnants of darkness. The wind outside my window whizzed and whistled around the tenement courtyard, giving the loose sheets of metal that covered Widow Xu’s makeshift kitchen a good shake and rattling a plastic bag that sounded like it had been hung on my door. My thoughts, dragged into reality, coalesced around the contents of the bag. I guessed it held breakfast, maybe dark, dense sesame buns, still smelling of the oven, and my mouth watered a little at the thought.

Widow Xu looks after me like that. It’s hard convincing women of her generation, one above my own, that an unmarried man in his late fifties can look after himself, and to be honest, I don’t try too hard to do so.

My dreams sent up another brief flare and I made a half-hearted attempt to follow them, but my stomach growled and the flare extinguished itself. I sighed, something I apparently do every morning upon waking, or so Chunmei, and all those that came after her, claimed. A stomach is more easily ignored than a bladder. All my organs were clamouring for attention. I didn’t relish the idea of leaving my warm bed for a dash through the cold to the public toilet in the lane with its clammy cement walls and stinking troughs. I had a chamber pot, but even that seemed like too much effort, and with all the windows shut, the air in my small room was already too close. I contemplated lighting a cigarette and coughed a little in anticipation. Just as I edged the covers down to my chin, my phone whistled for attention. I opened my reluctant eyes and picked it up: a reminder – Argentinian red. It was just past ten a.m. Sparrow’s fart, as an Australian friend used to call dawn. I switched the phone to silent and turned the footsteps of my mind back onto the path towards my temple of dreams.

Twenty-five years ago, it was. I stayed put at first. I was defiant. I was numb. I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving this wounded city. I went to the meetings. We all did. There wasn’t a choice. We read the editorials and recited the catechism, letting the flatness in our voices and the catch in our throats tell their own stories. The director of the publishing house hadn’t marched with us, but he protected us as best he could.

When the hunger strike began, Old Mou, whom I’d always taken for the quiet type, had been the first to declare he was going to the square in support of the students. The mysterious force field of the square had been drawing us all in. But we hadn’t made a point of saying so aloud. Old Mou was a funny one. He hadn’t updated his wardrobe since the late seventies. He still wore a white button-down shirt tucked into blue pants long after the rest of us were in jeans, and his hair swirled around the crown of his head in classic clueless ‘screwtop’ style. Old Mou wasn’t really old. He was my age, the age when everyone puts a ‘Young’ in front of your surname. But you simply couldn’t imagine calling him Young Mou. He specialised in nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century philosophy and spoke in aphorisms.

They came for Old Mou first. He went like a hero in one of those revolutionary movies, his head held high until they pushed it down for him. I slipped out of the office soon afterwards; as soon as I could. Guts churning, I got on my bike and rode numbly towards the Yuanmingyuan. For someone who edited philosophy books for a living, my brain was remarkably clear of thought. I didn’t see them coming. So I can’t really say where they came from. All I know is that, suddenly, a group of armed soldiers surrounded my bicycle. They pointed their guns at my head. ‘Dismount!’ one bellowed, and I did before he had finished saying, ‘Now!’ People say that when you face death, your life flashes before your eyes. But for me, at that moment, I couldn’t even have told you my name. All I saw were the gaping mouths of their rifle barrels, the indifferent eyes of the soldiers, and the shards of sunlight ricocheting off the mirrored sunglasses of their leader. I felt the earth quake under my feet. The detonations of my heart against my rib cage filled my ears. Then the leader demanded to see my ID, every word a piece of shrapnel piercing my consciousness. I have no idea how long it went on. Seconds blew out into eternities and imploded again like dying stars. And to this day I still don’t know why it happened. But in the end, after he had inscribed the details of my name, workplace and address in steely little strokes into his notebook, the soldiers lowered their guns, leaving me with knocking knees and a trouser leg full of steaming piss.

I’m no hero. When they left, I sank to the ground and vomited. And then, for my body had not yet exhausted its humiliations, I cried. Chunmei. She was already half a world away. She had had to go quickly and she could. So she went. Anyone who was able to leave, left. It was simple calculus back then. I could neither blame her nor stop her. Before the morning of her departure, I thought my heart had felt all the pain it possibly could. But the human capacity for suffering, like that for love, has no limits.

When the Cultural Revolution erupted I was eleven years old. One tearful, fearful night, my parents burned priceless paintings and calligraphy scrolls that had been in the family for generations as well as all their letters and diaries. They did this so that the Red Guards, when they came, would have nothing to find, nothing to charge them with. And it was so. The Red Guards found nothing but ashes. But they still strung up my father in the ‘aeroplane position’, shaved off half my mother’s hair and tormented them in front of howling mobs. How much worse could it have been, I wonder, if they had preserved those treasures?

Minutes after the soldiers released me, I swung my bike around and pedalled home as fast as I could go, the skin of my thighs sticky against the urine-soaked cotton of my trousers. I had nothing as precious as antique scrolls or paintings. Just a collection of the underground literature journal Today, in which I’d published my first poems, a bunch of other samizdat poetry manuscripts and Chunmei’s letters. I thought about burning all of these but, luckily as it turned out, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I hid them under the floorboards in a friend’s house. I thought to keep only one thing on me, a mimeographed collection of Q’s poetry, the broken indigo characters of his confident pen dancing in lines across the rough grey paper. Folding it carefully, I placed it in the inner pocket of my jacket, where it pressed up against the envelope with my meagre savings. Then I decided Q’s poems were too precious to risk losing, and put them under the floorboards as well.

I left Beijing by bus. My waipo lived in Hebei. I stayed with her a few days. She didn’t ask me anything, not even why I’d arrived without notice on her doorstep. But she watched me with those wise old eyes and listened to what I said and to what I didn’t say. When I told her I was hitting the road, she didn’t ask where I was going next. She stuffed my bag with boiled eggs, dried meats and mantou and pressed a small purse of cash into my hand. Take care of yourself, child, she said, and I came dangerously close to weeping once more.

In those days, a little money went a long way on the road, and you could stay under the radar if you knew how. I wandered aimlessly, catching buses at random, lost in a world that no longer made sense. Memories followed me like flies, buzzing in my ears, fouling everything. I floated them down rivers on fishermen’s skiffs, ploughed them into terraced fields of rice, offered them to passing clouds and drank them down in lonely toasts. And still they adhered to me like the pathetic fact of my survival itself. On an oppressively hot morning in September, I arrived, listless and uninterested, at a small town in the southwest.

The familiar tides of guilt and fury and despair lapped at my heels as I walked the dispiriting, anonymous streets. I was too hot and exhausted to try to outrun them. On top of everything else, I’d got some sort of urinary tract infection; it burned when I peed and, just that morning, there was a drop of blood in it as well. I didn’t want to go to some hick doctor, so I took it as a sign it was time to return to Beijing. I bought my ticket for a train leaving that very night.

I had time to kill. From behind a whitewashed wall, the curlicue grey roof of a Daoist temple beckoned like a crooked finger. In religion, at least, I’ve always been a child of Mao. Others may suck on the opium pipe of Christianity, Buddhism, Baha’i or whatever other system of salvation allows them their sleep, but I don’t need a god of any sort to tell me what hell is. As for Daoism, it may have been founded on the basis of a philosophy, yet no system of belief slipped faster or further down the muddy hill of superstitious ritual than Daoism-as-religion. I get that a Christian needs to believe that Jesus slid out of a virgin’s womb, and a Buddhist in the possibility of Nirvana. If, in the end, some of the new ghosts of that June made it to heaven or got a better deal on the upswing of their next cycle of reincarnation, I’d be more than glad for them. But no Daoist potion of immortality has ever stopped a bullet. You might as well don a Boxer’s red sash.

On the other hand, there’s something to be said about Buddhist or Daoist temples, especially if you need to pass some time before your train leaves. You can hang out as long as you like and the agreeable architecture provides plenty of shade. A sign inside the arched entrance of this one reminded visitors that it was a place of worship. It asked that they dress appropriately, not take photos and that they greet the monks with respect. So far as I was aware, I had never dressed inappropriately in my life, I didn’t own a camera and I believed that all people should be greeted with respect. I entered.

The first hall contained large, gaudily painted icons of guardian deities. The room was cool and deliciously scented by both burning incense and the fruit ripening on the altars in the late summer heat. I stood before the first icon and closed my eyes, worshipping the air. The sweat coursing down my neck and limbs tingled as it cooled and evaporated. I felt calm settle over me. When I opened my eyes, an elderly monk with an unruly grey topknot and moon-sliver eyes was standing to one side of me. He was stroking his wispy grey beard; his well-washed blue robe hung as tentatively on his thin body as if he were a wraith. I wondered how long he’d been there, how long I’d stood there. My sweat had dried, leaving snail-trails of salt down the insides of my arms.

The monk rounded the icon to exit that first hall into the courtyard. A minute or two later I followed. I drew in a sharp breath at the sight of a particularly lyrical array of pavilions for prayer and meditation. When I chanced upon that temple, I hadn’t imagined what grace lay beyond its humble gate. I looked back towards the hall from which I’d come. The old monk was standing by a large standing brazier in which was planted a forest of burning joss. From his sleeve, he produced a wad of gilded spirit paper and applied it to the tip of a stick of burning incense until the whole lot burst into flame. Immediately, a breeze lifted the scraps of burning gilt and tossed them into the air above the uptilted, charcoal eaves. There they frolicked in a glittering, manic dance of golden joy, before drifting gently back to earth as dark ash. Somewhere inside me a window was flung open, and the sadness and anger and guilt that were weighing me down grew wings and flew out to chase those sparkling shards of reflected sunlight. My head opened like a flower. A blue, cloudless sky melted into the infinite. I felt formless as water, light as air. There were tears on my cheek and I was surprised to realise they were my own. I cannot explain any of this.

The monk appeared to be waiting for me. Beckoning for me to follow him, he turned on his heel. I followed, pulling my head along on a string like a balloon – at least that’s what it felt like. We arrived at a back section of the temple that I guessed was the monks’ living quarters. A handful of monks sat in the shade of the buildings or under the trees in groups of two or three, some talking quietly, some reading. It must have been about eleven. A few were eating lunch from plain ceramic bowls.

Coming to a halt outside a small, simple room, he glanced inside. ‘Come,’ he said, urging me in before him with a flap of his papery hands. The whitewashed walls of the room smelled of lime. They were covered with meditation maps of the human body and posters with illustrations of Daoist medicinal herbs. Two younger top-knotted monks were seated in wicker chairs at a small card table over which a man with a civilian haircut presided. There were two empty chairs. The elderly monk eased himself into one. ‘Sit down,’ the layman said, as though expecting me. I did. The three monks smiled at me. One was skinny, young, dark, eager, and present; another around my own age – almost thirty-five – and palely ethereal.

As for the layman, he was at the softening stage of middle age. His cheeks were relaxing into jowls, and he had a smile that seemed childlike one moment, canny the next. His nose was long and his tobacco-stained bottom teeth crossed like the legs of a man at ease. Under a pompadour of thick, shoe-polish-black hair, his eyes shone small and bright. He wore quiet cotton trousers and a loud Hawaiian shirt that paraded hula-ing maidens with gaily coloured tropical flowers in their hair across the tidy mound of his belly. What is he here to sell? I thought.

He handed me his card, which I studied as he poured fragrant, honey-coloured gongfu tea into a tiny terracotta cup, the inside of which was glazed the nostalgic blue of a Beijing autumn sky. On the table was a saucer of roasted sunflower seeds and before each of the monks lay a small pile of shells. The card read: Master Happy Fish, Vice-director, XX Provincial Daoist Association, XX Township Chief Daoist Adviser and Daoist Physician. It gave the temple as his residence and said consultations needed to be arranged in advance. It listed a phone number.

‘First, we will eat,’ he announced. Another monk entered, as though on cue, with five bowls containing rice, pickle, chilli, spinach and tofu. I realised with a shock that I hadn’t eaten since the previous evening. I wondered how the messenger-monk had known to bring five bowls.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’re very kind.’ I hadn’t spoken to anyone that whole day. I wondered if my words were slow or slurred; I felt strangely high, like I had smoked a bit of weed, something we all did back then. It grew wild and was the one bit of fun the authorities hadn’t yet worked out that we were having.

‘One day soon,’ said Master Happy Fish, as though answering a question, ‘I will retreat to the mountains. That phone number on my card will no longer work. My forwarding address will be at the end of the rainbow.’ He roared with laughter at this obscure joke. I smiled politely, and nodded as he leaned forward, tapped my knee, looked into my eyes and assured me, ‘But if you want to find me again, you’ll know how.’

By any rational reckoning, this was the charlatan I’d spent my life avoiding. And yet I made no attempt to leave. Maybe I was tired of rationality. Or maybe I was just ready for a charlatan.

‘Bazi?’

I told him the date and time of my birth – my bazi, ‘eight characters’. He did some calculations on his fingers and then reached for my hand. He laid three fingers flat across my wrist and stared off into an upper corner of the room. Mental calculations played across his drifting features like arctic lights on snow. ‘You won’t marry,’ he told me cheerfully, ‘and if you do it won’t last. But you’ll be fine. Anyway, you don’t like being tied down. Do you want some pills for that?’

A laugh shot out from my throat, like a burst of machine-gun fire. If I hadn’t cried in a long while, neither had I laughed. ‘For what?’ I gasped, recovering. ‘Will the pills make me want to be tied down?’

He chuckled. ‘There are no pills for that. No. I’m talking about your urinary tract infection. The pissing problem. Although to be honest, I’d see a Western doctor for that one.’

He got me.

Q, I thought, would love this story. Would have loved this story. I blinked.

After a few minutes, Master Happy Fish, who’d been observing me, took my tea, which had cooled in its cup, and tossed it onto the cement floor. He poured hot water into the teapot and freshened the tea in my cup before attending to the others. After a minute or two he took out a pack of cigarettes and pressed one on me. Every so often, one of the monks slurped his tea. Outside, in the temple grounds, birds sang. A slanting shaft of sunlight crept into the room from the window, illuminating a sleeping ginger cat. It opened one eye, yawned and lazily stretched out one paw, extending its claws and then retracting them. I thought of Mimi Four, my black-and-white cat, whom I’d left with neighbours. Trustworthy ones. Not the ones who, I was quite certain, were responsible for the disappearance of Mimis One to Three and the subsequent, heartbreaking, cooking smells that thickened the air in the publishing house dorm where I was living at the time.

Master Happy Fish patted his pompadour and gave his riot of a shirt a jaunty tug where it had surfed up over his exuberant belly. The old monk fingered his beard like he was playing a harp; the young skinny monk straightened up, rotating his head and then his shoulder blades in a way that set off a succession of sounds like a string of distant firecrackers. With a few slow blinks, the ethereal one gave the impression that he had spread his wings to flutter back earthwards for a visit. Master Happy Fish laughed for no reason and said, ‘There are many different types of Daoism. You see these three monks?’

I nodded.

‘They don’t eat meat. They don’t shop for nice clothes. They don’t look at pretty women.’ A quick smile flashed from monk to monk at the phrase pretty women. ‘They meditate every day. It’s necessary for them at this stage.’ Subtly, they appeared to arrange themselves as though for my inspection. I had a vision of my mind as a bucket, collecting rain water. ‘Me,’ Master Happy Fish continued, ‘I eat meat. I like nice clothes.’ He indicated his shirt. ‘And I look at pretty women. At the level I am at it is okay to look. It will be okay for them to look too when they reach that level. They will know when they get there. It will not be when they no longer think to look. Nor will it be when they look but no longer think.’

‘When will it be?’ I asked.

‘When they look and are able to see, and when they think and are able to know.’

The skinny, eager monk leaned forward. Speaking in a stage whisper, he told me, ‘That is why he is a master.’

‘Have some more tea,’ said Master Happy Fish, as if the monk hadn’t spoken. ‘It is high-grade leaf from Yunnan. Delicious and good for the digestion. A devotee brings me reels of it every time he comes.’

He gestured towards a corner of the room. Stacked there were perhaps a dozen tightly packed discs of tea, the shape and size of film reels. Later, pu’er tea, packed like that, would become a fetish and status symbol for the moneyed classes in Beijing and elsewhere. At that time, we didn’t have moneyed classes. There were just officials, some of whom had a lot more money than they ought to have had, the odd successful ‘individual entrepreneur’ and the rest of us. In fact, the student demonstrations of the first half of the year had started as a reaction to the rising corruption: ‘Sell the Benzes and Save the Nation’. It was only when the Benz-driving leadership used the press to denounce the students and raw power to try to shut down their protests that a free press and democracy jumped to the top of the agenda. (Thinking about all this now, it wasn’t that the students, or any of us, had been naïve, exactly, but we hadn’t even known what corruption was, what it could be, the altitudinal heights it could reach. We never could have imagined the eczema-spread of corruption that disfigures our nation’s face today – tea reels were, back then, simply something to marvel at.)

‘All religion attempts to answer one question. Do you know what that is?’

I thought about it, recalling what ought to have struck me the moment that Master Happy Fish had told me his name. The Daoist sage Zhuang Zi, with whom I share a surname, once asserted that fish were happy. His interlocutor challenged him as to how he could know this: ‘You are not a fish.’ Zhuang Zi replied: ‘And you are not me. How do you know that I do not know if fish are happy?’ I looked at Master Happy Fish and asked cheekily: ‘How do you know the fish are happy?’

‘Ha ha ha!’ Master Happy Fish slapped his thigh as his laughter streamed out like a progression of musical notes. ‘That is a very important question.’

‘It’s not the one you were looking for, though.’

Master Happy Fish shrugged. ‘It wasn’t, but it could be.’ He poured more tea. I was afraid he wouldn’t go on, that I had stopped him in his tracks. I waited.

‘Where do we come from, what path should our lives follow while we’re here, and where do we go when we’re gone?’

For a moment, I thought he was asking me. I was still pondering the answers when I realised that was the question.

‘A Christian believes our origins are in original sin. In this life we should do our best to expiate this sin. How well we do determines where we go – heaven or hell. A Buddhist believes we come from a previous life. We spend this life trying to accumulate good karma to add to or balance the store inherited from the previous life. How well we do determines how we are born into the next cycle of life. The Daoist –’ and here he paused for effect ‘– the Daoist says we come from Nature, while we’re on earth we should shunqi ziran, follow the flow of Nature, and after we die we return to Nature. On a practical level, all religions instruct their believers to do good things. Charity, for example, is one of the five pillars of Islam. Daoism is no exception. We say, do good deeds, be a good person and leave the world at least as good a place as you found it. Daoism is very simple, really. You are a poet.’

A beat.

‘Me?’ I felt like I’d been snapped out of a trance by a hypnotist. ‘Yes, I –’

‘A poet of sadness. You feel sorrow over life’s impermanence.’

My throat thickened with emotion. Maybe he called everyone a poet, maybe everyone thought of themselves as a poet. And perhaps we were all given over to sorrow over life’s impermanence, or at least all of us whose wanderings led us to pass through the gates of temples and drift within their perfumed courtyards. Yet, though I cannot explain it, I had the feeling that he knew everything about me, and understood me better, perhaps if only at that moment, than I did myself. For the second time I thought of Q, the one friend who could explain anything, and regretted that he was not there with me to share in my wonder. On the other hand, in this Daoist temple in this provincial town in the southwest, I felt Q was as present by my side as he’d ever been since I met him that first electric year at university.

‘There’s an American boy who teaches English in the university here,’ said Master Happy Fish. ‘His Chinese is very good. He comes here every Saturday to study Daoist philosophy and kung-fu with our young monk here.’ He indicated the ethereal one, who nodded in his vague fashion. ‘Afterwards, he comes in for tea and we talk. The American’s name is Ruosi.’

‘Ross,’ said the ethereal monk, with, so far as I could tell, flawless pronunciation.

‘Exactly. Ruosi. Ruosi has told us about a woman author from his country whose name is Rice. I thought this strange. Surely an American author would be called Bread! Ha ha!’ The monks chuckled with the tolerant air of listening to a familiar joke retold. Master Happy Fish continued. ‘Ruosi said that this Rice writes about vampires. You know vampires?’ I nodded. ‘For her vampires, Ruosi told us, the great sorrow is the permanence of life. So you see? If you stand in one place the moon looks brighter in the other place. But if you stand in the other place, the moon looks brighter in the first place. As a Daoist, of course, it’s particularly interesting to contemplate the existential dilemma of the vampires. We are famous, as you know, for our pursuit of the elixir of immortality. I would like to read these vampire novels one day. Unfortunately, they are not translated and all I can manage in English is “hello” and “thank you”, and according to Ruosi, when I say “thank you” it sounds like I have put someone to the bottom of the sea. Sank you. But should I be unhappy that I cannot read these novels by this Miss Rice?’ He didn’t look particularly unhappy.

‘No,’ I guessed. Master Happy Fish clapped twice, economical but enthusiastic applause, and the monks beamed.

‘Correct! You see, unhappiness is the distance between what you desire and what you can or do have. Put another way, it is the space between what you wish to be true and what is true, the gap between what you hope to achieve and what you are capable of achieving. You are a poet. If you yearn for the Nobel Literary Prize, chances are that you will be unhappy. If you write poetry, the most beautiful poetry you can possibly write, you will be happy. Striving for perfection, for improvement and progress, is a good thing. Of course, I could strive to learn English but in this case, I think it’s more sensible to adjust my expectations. I don’t want to be forever sending people to the bottom of the sea.’

I liked this jovial, pot-bellied, flamboyant explainer, charlatan or not; if I had meandered into his realm by accident, it was – pardon the pun – a very happy one indeed.

Master Happy Fish proceeded to answer many other questions I hadn’t yet asked. At least I don’t recall asking them. I can’t honestly remember. There are many things that are difficult to remember that I wish I could remember more easily, and other things that are hard to forget that I would prefer never to have to think about again.

These are some of the other things Master Happy Fish told me that day:

‘You don’t live in a house or apartment or even any city on earth. You live in your head. You should get out a bit more.’

‘Be. Know. Do. And don’t forget to dance.’

‘Dance, but wear the right shoes. Which may be no shoes at all.’

‘A line is the shortest distance between two points. A line is a succession of points. Look at the line and see the points. Stand on a point and see the line. If it’s a fishing line, then go fishing.’

‘Leave and come back. Come back and leave. Always write postcards. If you can’t write postcards, write poems.’

I asked him if I should learn to meditate.

‘Don’t meditate if you think it will make you smarter; meditate if you think it will make you less smart.’

‘Wear less black and more white and yellow.’

This, I told him somewhat apologetically, would be difficult. I wore white shirts but was otherwise wedded to black and grey and navy. I couldn’t see myself in yellow.

‘Get a scarf,’ he shrugged. ‘You’d look good in a scarf. And socks. Yellow socks are good. Sunlight for the feet.’

Finally, he advised me to wake up at dawn every day and exchange breaths with the trees. I told him that dawn was usually when I went to bed. I asked if the advice still held under those circumstances, and if the trees would be offended if in exchange for their pure green exhalations I occasionally gave them alcohol-tinged vapours. He said the advice still held. The trees could deal with it. He also suggested that if I was ever at a loose end I should open a bar.

Whoomph.

Whenever I am standing behind the bar and I hear the heavy, padded door-curtain fall back into place with an airy, muffled thud, I feel a thrill of anticipation. I couldn’t tell you what I am hoping for, exactly, and perhaps I don’t want to know, because all these years later Master Happy Fish’s counsel is ever in my ears. Desire creates the space for unhappiness. In the years before I met him, and especially in the years leading up to 1989, no one could have told me this, least of all a Daoist master in a Hawaiian shirt. I wouldn’t have listened. There are still moments when I don’t hear as well as I should. At the same time, and to be honest, probably more as a result of age, exhaustion and experience than philosophy, I do believe that I’m at the point where, like Master Happy Fish, I can look at pretty girls and all the rest and leave it at hope, that scudding step or two short of desire. I’ve only just got here. But I do wonder if here is not just the crumbling edge of a cliff that could still hurl me onto the rocks and into the sea.

When I was young, I was ruled by desire. My desire had no limits. I wanted sex, love, excitement and fame. I wanted to experience every emotion in every poem that had ever been written, to sleep with every woman who had ever been born, delve into every school of philosophy and see every wonder this world had to offer. I wanted to walk among the clouds and feel the stars in my hair. My senses could be set alight by the rustle of leaves in the wind, the whirr of bicycle wheels in a lonely hutong, the earthy musk of an approaching thunderstorm, the throaty sound of a Beijing girl’s cursing, the sight of spring’s first green buds on the trees standing sentinel against the dusty red walls of the Forbidden City, or the flat, swelling heat of July. The ruins of the Yuanmingyuan whispered their lyrical melancholy directly into my ears and the touch of a girl’s skin was enough to singe the hair off my own.

My generation was old enough to remember the long dark night of the Cultural Revolution but not so old that we were broken by it. We came of age in those uncertain years when everyone seemed to be holding their breath. We first let our breath out on Tiananmen Square in 1976, when Premier Zhou died and we mourned him, ourselves and the nation’s fate. After that there were the rumblings of earthquakes, terrestrial and political. We wept over lost opportunities, fear and uncertainty when Mao died in September that year. It was fitting, perhaps, that although he’d asked for cremation, the nation could not quite see its way clear even to burying him, and so he was preserved, destined to rise and fall, rise and fall in his mausoleum on an almost daily basis so that generations to come could be reassured – or otherwise – by the knowledge he remained among us.

After all the eternal waiting for something to happen, hoping and dreaming, in the late seventies, we got an intoxicating whiff of freedom with Democracy Wall, where we expressed ourselves in poetry and art alongside the manifestos. We felt so lucky, and yet we understood how exquisitely tenuous it all was. We saw that luck threatened as the decade passed with each new bullshit campaign against ‘spiritual pollution’, ‘bourgeois liberalism’, or whatever bogeyman was haunting the dreams of the Politburo at night. So, like wild animals, we pursued freedom ferociously, pouncing on it, bringing it down alive, gorging ourselves on its steaming entrails.

Today’s young people have grown up with the domesticated version of some of the freedoms we hunted and they’ve become tame too. I once saw a documentary about a zoo somewhere overseas where the animals have lots of room to roam. They’re still fenced in, and they still depend on their keepers for food, but they’re happy enough. That’s what it feels like today compared to the eighties. So long as you don’t jump the fence into the wilds of political activism, you can do pretty much whatever you like – make money, make love, play video games all day or dance all night. We, on the other hand, had to fight for every scrap of freedom: to wear the clothes we wanted to wear, to write songs and poems and make art that said what we wanted it to say, even just to walk hand in hand with the person we fancied. Every time we headbutted our cage, the walls moved outwards a metre or two. We did such a good job of widening it that kids today, half of them anyway, don’t even realise they’re still in a cage. Maybe they’re too busy trying to make a living, maybe they’re just sufficiently entertained, but I don’t know how many even try to figure out where the fences are. That bit about hunting down freedom and feeding on its entrails? That was Q’s metaphor. He was always prowling the edges of the cage.

I met Q at university. I’ll never forget the first time I saw him. I’d just swung one of the precious places in the hastily rebuilt university system – and at one of Beijing’s top universities. My parents had come back from a stint at the ‘cadre school’ where they’d been sent after their punishment to ‘learn from the peasantry’ (only to learn what a mixed bag the revolution had been in the countryside). They returned to work in offices where they still found the occasional bloodstain on the walls, and where the corridors were haunted by the ghosts of colleagues who’d been beaten to death or hanged themselves. I was their future and their hope. And I, who’d spent years deprived of formal education, was infinitely conscious of my good luck. I would study hard and do them proud. I arrived at my dorm room with a small pile of clothes that gave off a motherly tang of laundry soap and sunshine, a hard pencil case with the slogan Aim higher with every step in Mao’s calligraphy on the cover and my father’s best pen cosseted within, a dictionary, an enamel washbasin, a toothbrush cup, a pale green thermos, a thick paper packet of rough tea leaves and a lidded jar to drink from, plus a few other items that I proceeded to arrange on and around one of the top bunks. One of my new flatmates, a southerner called Wu Jian, gave me a nail from which to hang my new khaki book bag with the name of the university stencilled across the top flap. I hammered the nail into the wall above my bed with the spine of my dictionary, cursing with what I gauged to be very grown-up confidence when a spray of plaster hit my blanket.

Another classmate, Shugang, was busy colonising the third of the room’s four bunks. We were chatting about the classes we planned to take and the pretty girls we’d already seen on campus. We were trying to act a lot more off-hand and worldly than any of us actually were, when Q appeared in the doorway. Through some trick of perception, the angle of the sunlight streaming through the window perhaps, he emanated an almost godly glow. We were pretending to be cool even if the word, via English, had yet to arrive in China as ku. Q was the very definition of it. We all wore more or less the same clothes – cotton shirts of aspirational whiteness tucked into navy-blue or army-green loose cotton trousers, and black cloth shoes. Q’s clothes were no different but he wore them with style. It wasn’t a question of fashion – there was no such thing back then. It was something in the way he’d rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, something about the way his trousers, not definably less shapeless than ours, hung on his lean and muscular body. Q wore his clothes like a man. I’d felt grown up going off to university, but I knew in that instant I was still a boy.

Q already owned the room. All three of us hastily jumped to present ourselves as though to a king. He had a natural majesty that occasionally bordered on arrogance, but when the arrogant are that majestic, people tend to forgive them. He flashed that secret, knowing smile that we’d all eventually see slay one girl after the other – and that none of us could even come close to imitating, though we certainly tried. He told us his name, but said that we should just call him Q, like the English letter, because his dad had nicknamed him that when he was little to remind him always to question things. It’s funny; if anyone else was called Q everyone automatically would have teased them, called them Ah Q after the infamously self-defeating and un-self-aware protagonist of Lu Xun’s famous story, but Q – no one even thought to mention it.

‘Your dad sounds pretty great. Is he a teacher?’ Wu Jian asked.

‘My dad, he …’ When he named his dad, our awe doubled, tripled, went off the charts. His dad had recently been politically ‘rehabilitated’ and honoured. We’d all read about how he’d returned from overseas in 1949 as a ‘patriotic intellectual’ and worked alongside Liang Sicheng and others to try to save Beijing’s historic physical heritage, and had ended up in a labour reform camp in the late 1950s, where his health was ruined by three years of near-starvation in the great famine that, we didn’t know at the time, was largely man-made. Mao-made. We didn’t know a lot of things at the time. Thinking back on it now, I’m not sure we did know all that much about Q’s father. It’s more likely that we had a general notion about who his father was, what he’d done, and what happened to him, and time filled in the details.

I do remember very clearly how Q merely had to glance at the bottom bunk where Shugang had spread his things and Shugang volunteered that if Q wanted that bunk he’d happily switch to the top one. ‘No need,’ said Q then, and I think we all understood that what he really meant was that when you’re Q, there’s no need to make people do something to prove that they would do it if you so much as asked.

One late Saturday afternoon in the spring, Wu Jian was seated at his desk. He was supposed to be reading a book on Greek mythology but he was obsessing about some girl to Shugang, who sat on his bunk huddled over his feet, trimming his toenails. I was lying on my bunk, reading, young, restless. Q was out somewhere.

That morning, a ferocious sandstorm had roared through the city. Now, an eye-achingly beautiful afternoon stretched blue angel wings over a city that was still blinking from under its blanket of grit. Observing the seraphic sky over the top of my book, I was filled with a kind of ecstasy. I wrote my first poem then and there, and Q, when he returned, called it ‘genius’. I don’t think it was, and I don’t know if he meant it, but from that day on I considered myself, and eventually became, a poet. That’s just the sort of person Q was and the effect he had on people. On me.

Those were heady days: there was the brief explosion of public free expression that was Democracy Wall, with its furious poetry and handwritten pleas for justice and freedom; the first exhibitions of art that didn’t obey any diktat but that of the artists’ own will; the normalisation of relations with the US; the open-air poetry readings; the tapes of pop music smuggled in by foreign journalists and others that somehow made their way into the hands of people like us – or people like Q, who then put them into the hands of people like us. The older generation, beaten and broken, licked their wounds and wept for their lost years. We were the found generation. Our moon was high, our season come and we were all riding the bore of the Qiantang River. We were young. The water was beautiful. And the air was full of siren calls.

I met Chunmei in my first year at university. So far as I was concerned, it was love at first sight. She was in my philosophy class, whip-smart, moon-faced and tough-minded, and it took me months to summon the courage to strike up a friendship and two years to persuade her to go out with me. When she did, I was in bliss.

It would be unfair to say she disliked Q. No one disliked Q. It was impossible. He was charming, witty and charismatic. He was a party to which you wanted to be invited, a virus you wanted to catch. But some women had a stronger immune system than others, and I was unquestionably grateful that Chunmei was one. But as I saw her more I saw him less and life, I hate to say it, lost a bit of its colour.

We all graduated and got our work assignments – Chunmei to the Academy of Social Sciences, me to the Philosophy Publishing House, Q to People’s Literature. The underground art and poetry scene was losing out to rock ’n’ roll – we’d been the rock stars of our generation, the next had real rock stars. We, artists and poets, went to all the ‘parties’ – everyone used the English word – where Cui Jian and Dou Wei and the other rockers played. But for the first time in our lives, we were no longer the youngest people in the room. We’d been little kids in the Cultural Revolution, which was when the new generation had been born.

The old gang still got together for drinking sessions that lasted into the wee hours; Q could always make you forget that you had to get on your bike and pedal to work the next day. Life was still exciting. We weren’t the youngest but we were still dancing. In 1989, of course, the rug was finally pulled from under all our feet and everyone went flying.

In 1931, after the execution of five young writers by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, Lu Xun wrote, ‘I can but stand by, looking on as friends become new ghosts. I seek an angry poem from among the swords.’ Do dreams die? Or do they just await new dreamers? Some of us disappeared forever. Some of us went overseas. Some, shedding all dreams except those of wealth, threw their arms over their head, bounced and dived into the sea. That’s what we called going into business in the nineties: xiahai, jumping into the sea. Me, I wrote futile poems of anguish and anger. Then I stopped.

As the Tang poet wrote, once the river’s water has flowed into the sea, it never returns to its source. If Li Po and Dionysus had once been my gods, over the years their temples fell into ruin and debasement. Karaoke bars and nightclubs where girls’ thighs carry price tags are not altars of Dionysus; they are the shrines of Mammon. When Li Po composed his famous poem that went, ‘If life is to have meaning, live it to the full; raise not an empty goblet to the moon,’ he never said the goblet had to be made of gold or that it should be filled with XO or 2005 Château this or that. With whom should one raise a goblet in such an age?

Some part of me stayed in that Daoist temple, or perhaps some part of that temple stayed in me. When I told my friends about my encounter with Master Happy Fish they found it most amusing. Shugang gave me the nickname that has stuck to me to this day like toffee to teeth: the Sage. Sometimes even I forget it’s not my real name.

After Chunmei left for Canada, and following the open-heart surgery without anaesthetic that was our protracted, long-distance break-up, I had other girlfriends, long and short term, serious and less so, and continued my work at the Philosophy Publishing House, more and more robotically editing treatises on the meaning of life. But I wrote no more poetry: 1989 knocked the poetry, the romance and the wind out of me.

Then, on the day of the Spring Purification Festival in the middle of the first decade of the new millennium, the third day of the third lunar month, I was at a dinner with Wu Jian, Shugang and other old friends and classmates. One of them, now a darling of the international art scene, had invited the gang to a new restaurant outside the Fourth Ring Road called the Orchid Pavilion. The name came from the famous fourth-century gathering to celebrate the day of Spring Purification commemorated by the poet Wang Xizhi in the single most treasured work of calligraphy in all Chinese history. The festival happened to fall on the weekend that year, so we could make a proper night of it.

The taxi driver, a rough-edged young man from the rural suburbs, had never heard of the Orchid Pavilion Teahouse. When we finally found it, I admit I was as amazed as he was by this stark, funereal-white garden teahouse set in a vast field of Zen-raked white gravel. A solemn attendant in a wide-sleeved damask robe, looking like he’d stepped straight out of the Song scroll painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival, led me to a private courtyard. At its centre was a gracious pavilion; it was designed with similar elegant austerity to the rest of the place. It featured sliding walls to accommodate the weather. The table was low, the chairs cushiony and a meandering channel was carved into the floor to allow a clear stream to flow past each seat.

The party had already begun when I crossed the miniature humpbacked bridge into the pavilion. They gave me a raucous welcome and said that my punishment for being late was to bottoms-up a cup of wuliangye on the spot. As we joked and teased one another about thinning hair and thickening waists, remarking on the latter with the traditional, now backhanded compliment of fafule, how your fortune has grown, a team of discreet servers laid out a sumptuous drinkers’ banquet: plate upon plate of cold, room-temperature, and hot dishes, northern taste with southern finesse. Our porcelain wine cups boasted an unusual and, as one young server self-importantly demonstrated, hydrodynamic design: they floated in the stream. As though speaking to schoolchildren, the boy recited a prepared spiel about Wang Xizhi and the Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion, explaining how when a floating cup stopped where one was sitting, that person had to drink it and compose a poem. We listened politely, humouring him as though we’d never heard the story before. But when the boy went on with a few stale suggestions as to what and how we might poetise (raising our cups to the moon, etc.), we gently shooed him away.

Our host raised his glass and toasted from the Preface: ‘Furen zhi xiangyu, fuyang yishi.’ The bonds that connect us stretch across a lifetime. Then, formalities dispensed with, we joked around, drank, and caught up on each other’s news, the divorces, the children, the travels and the latest trends in the art and poetry that was once so central to all of our lives.

‘To absent friends.’

‘To Q, if only he were able to be here tonight.’

‘To Q.’

‘Q.’

‘Sage? You’re unusually quiet.’

I quoted another line from Wang Xizhi’s ode to impermanence: ‘Zhongqi yu jin.’ And in the end, all returns to nothingness.

A silence.

‘Speaking of which,’ said Jiayu, whom we called Yoga because her name sounded like the word for yoga – yujia – backwards, ‘remember years ago, when you told us about that temple and Master Happy Fish?’

‘And you all gave me so much shit for it.’

‘I know, I know.’ Yoga laughed. ‘But the story stayed with me, and a few years later, I was on a recce in the southwest.’ Yoga had become a documentary filmmaker. Her work, which centred on environmental issues, couldn’t be shown in China but it was invited to festivals all over the world. ‘I found myself in this little town. Something about the name rang a bell, but it took me a while to work out why, and then I remembered your story. I found my way to the temple. It’s been renovated something terrible, I mean tacky. And the monks looked a bit central casting, if you know what I mean. As in Communist Party Central. Kind of weird, if you ask me, as I thought they only really bothered these days with the bigger temples in the big cities, but what would I know? Anyway, I went in and asked for Master Happy Fish. Everyone, from the gatekeeper to the fortune tellers to the monks and even the lady sweeping around the deities, looked at me with a strange mix of blankness and suspicion, which suggested that either they had never heard of him, or that something, I don’t know, bad had happened and that I’d rung all the alarm bells. In the end, I left, wishing I’d never gone in. I don’t know what I was hoping for, enlightenment, amusement, or just a good story to tell you next time we met. Sadly, it was all something of an anticlimax. There was nothing of the place that remotely matched your story except for the architecture.’

‘Maybe you had the wrong temple,’ someone suggested.

‘Maybe,’ Yoga conceded.

Everyone looked at me. I shrugged, zhongqi yu jin, I repeated, and we all drank to ‘nothingness’. When she’d begun her story, my guts had clenched around a nameless apprehension, but by the time she finished, I realised that I felt completely fine about Master Happy Fish’s disappearance. What was, was. What is, is. It was only in that moment that I realised that perhaps I truly had absorbed his lessons, and at the same time wondered if I’d made the whole story up myself, if it hadn’t been some sort of necessary hallucination.

Later that night, or early the next morning, and restless with alcohol and memory, I reached for my dog-eared copy of Zhuangzi. It fell open to the chapter on ‘the Great and Venerable Teacher’. There is a passage there about accepting death as part of life. A man hides a boat in a gorge, but someone steals it all the same. Zhuangzi speaks of the futility of hiding little things in bigger things, for only the world can hide the world. In other words, the only constancy is inconstancy, the only safety is understanding that there is no safety.

I did something I hadn’t done in years: I took up my pen. From it poured poems about love and loss and friendship, new and old Orchid Pavilions, unlikely philosopher–monks and the eternal temples of the mind. The sun was high in the east by the time I’d finished. I felt light, unburdened and terribly dehydrated. I put the notebook aside, drank a big glass of water and fell into a deep sleep.

I didn’t look at the poems again for several weeks, not wishing to discover that they were just the pathetic, boring scribbles of an old drunk with a tired pen. But when I did, I recognised that my spark, however modest, had returned. I showed them to a friend who worked with me at the Philosophy Publishing House.

When I started at the publishing house I was an idealist. It was perhaps a function of the times that it seemed credible that people would read books on philosophy, consider or reconsider how they lived and the values they lived by, and that this could be a redemptive project, for both the individual and society. A bit naïve in retrospect. By the time of the second coming of my poetic inspiration, the only philosophy people were interested in was that of Lee Iacocca. It is a cynical world in which the chief form of guidance people seek is that which points them to entrepreneurial and material success. Writers sent us manuscripts on pop psychology and self-help: ‘Sun Zi and the Art of Start-Ups’, that kind of thing. Worse, we began to consider them.

If you happen to pass by one of the new multi-storey bookshops, like the one at Xidan in Beijing where queues can form before the doors even open, you’d be excused for thinking that this is a nation devoted to literature and the arts (including that of self-reflection). But take a closer look. The shelves are heaped with the biographies and autobiographies of successful capitalists, inspirational tracts on accumulating wealth, hastily translated potboilers and bestsellers from the Anglosphere, anything and everything to do with computers and programming, and an infinite number of study guides, including many geared to the examinations for entrance to American universities. As for the history sections, they are full of sepia photographs and tomes covering the great, glorious and correct history of the Communist Party from every angle – except from inside a labour camp or underneath a tank tread. The histories of Beijing stretch back hundreds of thousands of years to Peking Man, but either stop or begin to shed detail in 1949.

Back in the nineties, friends told me about cultish qigong masters who caused them to shout and shake in stadiums full of the possessed. One, who later emigrated to Australia, even followed the path of Falungong with its lunatic talk of ‘emanations’ and magically shrinking and expanding flying saucers. As I saw it, like those who’d ‘found Jesus’, they were merely substituting one catechism for another: Hail Mary (or Master Li) instead of Hail Mao. This was a time when philosophy ought to have come into its own: people were fundamentally re-evaluating their beliefs, their moral systems, all the Who am I?s and What am I doing here?s.

And yet philosophy floundered. Some questions couldn’t be asked, of course. But it seemed that those who cared didn’t have the time, and those who had the time didn’t care. Some people I knew found Jesus. I distrusted their certainty and the shining, heavenward light in their eyes. One friend found madness. His uncertainty, and the way the lights had gone out in his eyes, frightened me just as much. After a while, my work began to feel like packaging up machine parts or stacking cabbages. My nephews and nieces – for I was of the last generation where it was normal to have brothers and sisters – never once said, wow, uncle, tell me more about those books you publish. They just tapped at their phones and spoke to each other in code. And poetry – forget it. We grew up on Yang Lian, Bei Dao, Mang Ke, Zhai Yongming and the soulful, witty lyrics of Luo Dayou; younger people sing meile meile meile wo zuile zuile zuile – beauty beauty beauty I’m drunk drunk drunk – and that’s about as good as it gets. (Maybe it gets better. Maybe I’m just getting old and failing to pay attention. And we had some pretty crap pop songs too.)

Anyway, you know what Beijing is like. The friend at the publishing house to whom I showed my poems, Lao Ma, still cared about poetry and said he loved them. He had a friend in a Shandong province poetry publishing house. The friend’s friend, Kong, allegedly a descendant of Confucius, was coming to town a few days later. Lao Ma invited us both to dinner at a Yunnan restaurant. Kong waved fried bees around with his chopsticks and, in that Shandong accent that sends the four tones racing for cover, swore that he’d never, in his whole life, seen anything like my poetry. I was a genius. I was Shakespeare, Blake, Zhuangzi, Li Po, Bei Dao, Yang Lian and Tagore all rolled into one. It was completely ridiculous. Guojiang, I said, bored and embarrassed. You overstate. This set off a fresh round of flattery even more over the top than the last. I concluded he was a huyou, someone who talks big and persuasively but would never deliver the goods.

After dinner we exchanged cards. Back home, I stuck his card in a drawer and didn’t think any more about it. I had more pressing issues on my mind. My parents were trying to fight eviction from the home they’d lived in half their life. My brother had just had a cancer scare. And Chunmei got in touch after all these years to send me photographs of her and her Canadian husband’s three children. Something about the direct and unaffected way her kids stared into the lens marked them as unmistakeably foreign. I searched their faces for her features and wished she’d sent a photo of herself instead. I wondered what our children would have looked like.

A few weeks later, Kong phoned up and changed my life.

‘Wow,’ I said. ‘That’s great news.’ Kong apologised for the paltriness of the advance. I reminded him that I too worked in publishing. I had no illusions that the path to wealth or glory was paved with poetry.

The proposed cover design appalled me: a sentimental, soft-focus photo of a pretty girl looking wistfully at a rose, recalling the crappiest sort of romance fiction. In the Eternal Way of the Author, I protested, and in the Eternal Way of the Publisher, they paid no heed.

I dedicated the book to Q. My original title, a reference to the lessons of Master Happy Fish, was Unhappiness is the Measure. They said it was too downbeat and suggested Love and the Orchid Pavilion. I say ‘suggested’ but it was no more a suggestion than an invitation to drop by the local police station for a cup of tea is a neighbourly gesture. I thought about Master Happy Fish and what he might do in my place. Follow the flow. So I said, yes, of course, that’s fine. When it came out, they gave me twenty complimentary copies. I gave two to Lao Ma, whose latest project was seducing some young starlet. He gave one copy to her as a gift. The starlet, Shanshan, shot to genuine stardom when, the following month, a TV series about the Qing dynasty in which she played the young Empress Dowager Cixi became a huge hit all across China. She wrote in her Weibo micro-blog about how she reached for my book of poetry first thing every morning, before she even got out of bed; it was her inspiration and her bible. I nearly tossed my noodles when I read that. This was just embarrassment piled on embarrassment.

I hadn’t realised that, by then, Shanshan had more than 730,000 followers. She urged them to buy the book. A significant number of them did. To my bewilderment, and despite that accursed cover, it became a literary sensation. The critics and serious cultural commentators loved it (even if they universally bagged the cover) – and those who didn’t argued their case so vociferously that it drove even more people to read it, if only out of curiosity. The Shandong publishers put out a special hardcover edition with a more dignified cover, then published a collection of the poetry I’d written back in the late seventies and early eighties and hidden under the floorboards of my friend’s place that time – all of which, weirdly, flew off the shelves. I was invited to appear on TV, interviewed by radio stations, profiled on the internet. Someone set up a fan site. Everyone wanted to know, Who is Q? Is she your girlfriend?

I said Q was a friend, a male friend, but they paid no heed. They didn’t believe me or want to believe me, so I stopped trying to explain. Those who know, know. That’s enough. Not everyone has to know everything. Apparently, my silence contributed to my ‘aura of mystery’. I stopped reading about myself.

A man with a name, an aura of mystery and a few spare yuan in his pocket can do very well in a place like Beijing, this capital of culture and greatness that is also a city of whores. At bookshop appearances, young women practically hurled themselves into my arms. At first it was like manna from heaven. But I knew that the girls wanted to sleep with the idea of me they’d formed from my work, the me of my poetry, not the me of me. I didn’t blame them. The me of me was a far more prosaic creature.

I soon grew weary of dating girls who hadn’t been around in 1989. It’s not something you can explain to people, what having lived through something like that does to a person. When I’ve tried to talk about it with them, I would watch as my words drew tears to their pretty, widened eyes and feel disappointed, even disgusted with myself. While it was never my intention, it felt trivialising to talk about it like that, like I was playing for sympathy, for those cheap tears or, worse, using it for seduction: tragedy porn. The same went for the story of Master Happy Fish and the temple: enlightenment porn. The worst was when some girl, well-versed in pop psychology, nodded as though understanding: post-traumatic stress disorder, stages of grieving, that sort of thing. They thought they got me. Even I didn’t get me. Still don’t.

When I made the decision to stop sharing my bed with girls who weren’t there then, that left me with the women who had been. Of those, the ones who were single, sexy and sane appeared to be few and far between. I discovered I didn’t mind all that much, and even grew to love sleeping alone.

The publishers wanted more new poems. But a poet’s art, in my case anyway, is an uncertain kind of alchemy. A grey cloud of glumness shadows our skies for a moment. By the time we’ve done with it, frozen it, remoulded it into something symbolic and metaphorical, it is no longer a perfectly ordinary, bog-standard pedestrian bad mood but the elevated and beautiful state known as melancholy. A poet’s senses are always heightened, a poet’s soul is sensitive; a poet knows how to be bored by the most tedious and lengthy of editorial conferences and give that boredom the form of existential despair. I sound cynical, but I never wrote out of cynicism. I could not write simply for the sake of publication. If I found the poetry, or it found me again, fine. Otherwise – nothing doing.

Kong took me out for more bees and bugs and asked if there wasn’t something else left from those days. That’s when I remembered. There was. Q’s poetry. I told him, and he said that he didn’t want someone else’s poems, he wanted mine. Perhaps I could put my name to them. Q was unlikely to object. But if I had taken anything from my time studying and publishing philosophy, it was that moral questions require moral answers.

I’d left my job at the publishing house by then, able to live on and even save money from my book sales. I was never one for luxury – as many a disappointed young woman had discovered when I introduced her to the dazayuan with its rattling tin roof and lack of mod-cons. I eventually took Master Happy Fish’s advice, and opened a bar. As Li Po had also written in his wonderful ode to wine and drunkenness, ‘History forgets a sage, but legend preserves a drinker.’

I called my bar Fei Chang Dao and let people work it out for themselves. Bar-keeping may seem like the most relaxed of occupations to the drinkers who come here and laugh and joke with me when it’s busy or see me reading books of poetry, fiction or philosophy when it’s quiet. But running this place keeps me busier than I seem. I meet with suppliers of wine and liquor, manage the books, pay taxes, wash all the glasses myself, wipe down the counter and tables, water the plants in the courtyard, feed the cats and run a mop over the floor at the end of the night. I also speak to the local police and Neighbourhood Committee whenever required – just yesterday, they popped in to show me a composite of a man who stabbed and robbed someone at the Drum Tower subway station. Didn’t look like anyone who’d ever come in here but I told them I’d keep an eye out. I offered them a drink. They refused. I insisted. They didn’t say no. It’s all part of the job, just like putting up the flag on National Day. But within all this motion, there is perfect stillness, emptiness, a kind of happiness.

On this night, I am mulling wine at the bar and listening to jazz. There is nothing on my mind but spice and warmth and the niggling thought that I need to re-order those Argentinian reds. Waves of conversation in the room beyond the antechamber crest and break like a gentle sea. I’ll do a round of the room soon, greet my customers, hear about their lives, collect their empties, take their orders. This antechamber is the heart of my kingdom. I am the Guardian of the Gate in the Temple to the Grape and when someone comes along who doesn’t suit the place – too loud, too much bling, too much about them for sale – I not-so-regretfully inform them that it’s a private club, members only. On days when no one comes, I read: philosophy, poetry, whatever interests me on the day. My mind is a very private club. After a few people surprised me reading and commented on my choice of reading matter – Wow, philosophy! I like Nietzsche, have you ever read Nietzsche? – that sort of thing, I began to wrap my books in brown butcher’s paper, like we did when we were schoolkids. I could be reading Steve Jobs’ biography for all anyone knows. But I’m not.

Tonight, as nearly every night since the day I opened, an Englishman, Oliver, sits reading on the old sofa in the antechamber, a tumbler in his hand and his pug, Chouchou, snoring at his feet. Apparently there’s an English language pun involved in the name: chouchou – ugly, the dog’s a ‘pug’, so ‘pug-ugly’. This seems to amuse other foreigners. Oliver prefers his scotch Japanese and neat. He appreciates that I have an encyclopaedic knowledge of scotches and whiskeys and that I read a lot as well. Sometimes we recommend books to one another. We get along well.

For all I’ve been through and all I now know, and for all my ‘stillness’, I admit that hope still rises this side of an opening door, though I couldn’t tell you what exactly I’m hoping for – or who. Oliver doesn’t look up when the woman enters. I’ve never been able to work out whether he’s genuinely so absorbed by his books that he doesn’t notice people come and go, even when they approach the bar for more drinks or a chat, or if it’s a kind of affectation. When the door-curtain goes whoomph, however, I do look up. I see a woman about my age, foreign-not-foreign, familiar-not-familiar, eyes blinking with an expression like wonder above her scarf-wrapped face, a deer that with one bound has landed inexplicably in a brand-new forest.

She looks at me for a moment and something passes between us, something left over from another life perhaps. It could be just a generational recognition thing. Not that many single women my age come here alone, for whatever reason. Whatever it is between us, it glimmers and is gone, like burning spirit paper in the wind.

‘Ni hao,’ she says.

I’ve barely had the chance to reply when, as though suddenly remembering someone’s house was on fire, she shoots past and into the inner room. Soon she returns with a look that’s equal parts relief and uncertainty.

I’m interested in everyone who comes into my bar. It’s my home, or close enough. I’ve filled it with second-hand furniture that I’ve found here and there, knick-knacks from my travels, old family photos. My CD collection is next to the stereo and my books, unwrapped once finished, are on the shelves for anyone to peruse. In addition, I have a great accumulation of stopped clocks, watches and other timepieces and a small traditional medicine cabinet full of clock and watch parts. Time is of my essence.

Fei Chang Dao is tucked away. There’s no sign on the hutong, and I don’t advertise. That keeps it from becoming, as we say in China, too fuza, too complicated. So when someone like her whom I’ve never seen before walks in on her own, I’m curious to work out who she is. When she returns to the bar after her foray inside, I am again struck by a strange, disconcerting sense of familiarity, as though I had once glimpsed or even held her in a dream.

She removes her hat and shakes loose her hair, which is dark with streaks the colour of ripe pomegranate that I am guessing mask strands of silver. A lock of hair clings to her cheeks with static electricity. Her scarf has settled around her neck, the skin of which appears fine and soft. As she looks around I take in her small chin, heart-shaped face and high-bridged nose. She is almost certainly a hunxue’r, a Eurasian of some description. The years and something very like sorrow have left their marks and shadows on her face, which is not unattractive.

Her lips are blue with cold and she is shivering. She seems to have come a long way. This is even more unusual. Most of my customers, with one or two eccentric exceptions, live in the general neighbourhood of the Drum Tower. No one would come out on a night like this, to a place like this, from any distance without a good reason, and certainly not alone.

‘Here,’ I say on impulse. ‘Give me your hands.’

She looks at me strangely, and I wonder if she feels the connection. She tenders her hands suspiciously, making me doubt that this is such a good idea; in fact I wonder what kind of idea this is at all. But it’s too late for second thoughts. I tug off her gloves and, placing them on the bar, warm her hands in my own, chasing my déjà vu into her eyes. A current passes between us and I feel suddenly self-conscious. What am I doing? Her expression is enigmatic. She looks down at our hands. ‘I don’t even know you.’ Then she cocks her head to one side, and regards me with a sudden, intense curiosity. ‘Or do I? You look so familiar.’

‘I had the same feeling just now,’ I say and then, my tongue speaking ahead of my brain, ‘I thought maybe you might have been a model or an actress.’

‘Ha. That’s nice,’ she replies. ‘But I think maybe you need to get your eyes checked.’ Before I can reply, she shakes her head. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m sure it’ll come to us eventually.’

‘I’m sure it will,’ I agree with a shrug. ‘Beijing. One of the biggest cities and smallest towns in the world.’

I lay one of her hands on top of the gloves, and place the other on top of that. I pat the top one. ‘Stay there,’ I instruct it. Pouring out a mug of the mulled wine, I place it next to her hands. ‘Okay,’ I tell them. ‘You can move now.’ And to her: ‘This should warm you up.’

‘You’ve already warmed me up,’ she answers and coughs, or laughs, I’m not sure. Her Chinese is good; whether or not she’d intended the double entendre, she certainly recognised it once it was out there.

You might think I’d compliment her on her Chinese at this point. It is the last thing I’m about to do. Not out of meanness. An English friend of mine who’d been here for years and was perfectly fluent once told me that if one more Chinese person marvelled aloud at the fact he could use chopsticks or speak the language he’d put on a bear suit and start dancing. He told me that no one in the UK would dream of making a big deal over the fact that someone from another culture could use a fork and knife or speak the language of the country they lived in. When people praised his Chinese, he replied, Ma ren, shima? Are you taking the piss? He had a point. Only non-Chinese with the shakiest grasp on the language took such compliments at face value. The truth is, we Chinese can be kind and we can take the piss, sometimes at the same time, but we rarely ever think that a foreigner’s Chinese is all that good. When it is, we simply treat the foreigner like a human being.

So I reply, ‘Bici.’ Ditto. You’ve warmed me up as well.

Her eyes transform into crescent moons, balanced on their points. ‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’ She is smiling at me over the top of the mug.

Another obscure memory flits past, uncatchable, ominous. The thought comes to me: Zhuangzi, dreaming not of butterflies but of nets.

‘You’re the first. I swear.’

‘That’s the other thing about Beijing. World’s biggest flirts.’

‘I blame the language. It made me do it. How’s the wine, by the way?’

‘Xiang,’ she comments, fragrant, taking another sip before putting it down to loosen the scarf around her neck and undo her coat. ‘Where did you learn to mull wine?’

I tap my fingers on a keyboard made of air. ‘The internet.’

‘Of course.’ Her voice is deep, a little husky. I’ve never understood why even grown Chinese women often choose to speak at the upper register of their voices, as if they were little girls. I’ve noticed that some foreign women in China pick up the habit as well. I probably liked it – I did like it – when I was young and feckless, but that was some time ago. Well, it was a long time ago that I was young, anyway.

‘You can find anything on the internet,’ she is saying. ‘I get a little lost on it sometimes.’ She looks around, as though searching for someone. Her eyes linger on the doorway.

‘Don’t we all,’ my words drawing her unsettled gaze back to me. ‘When surfing the internet,’ I say, ‘it’s good to recall the words of an ancient philosopher who said that life has limits but knowledge none. He cautioned that one shouldn’t pursue the limitless with the limited. I take that to mean we shouldn’t spend too much time online.’

‘I like Zhuangzi,’ she states matter-of-factly.

‘Not everyone would have recognised the quote.’

She shrugs off the compliment. ‘He’s my kind of Daoist. And a good storyteller. But I’d assumed you’d be more of a Laozi kind of guy, judging from the name of your bar. Assuming it’s your bar. Or do you just work here?’

‘It’s my bar. And that’s a good point. It’s a long story.’

‘I’d like to hear it sometime.’

The curtain goes whoomph a second time.

When I dashed into Fei Chang Dao, the first person I saw, sprawled in an armchair as though he owned it, was a bespectacled Englishman, university don circa 1965, poring over a book of Song dynasty philosophy while a caramel pug snored in his lap. A Chinese man with glasses, not too much taller than me, was mulling wine behind the bar. He looked up as I entered. There was a doorway on the right that led to another room, the wing of what would have once been a small courtyard house, less spacious than Mrs Jin’s. This room seemed to be the bar proper. It held an arty mix of comfortable old mismatched sofas and chairs and second-hand tables – what in Australia you might call a Melbourne-style bar. It was packed. Music was playing, though I was barely aware of it at first, so anxious was I to see if my mysterious correspondent was already here.

Inside, draped over an old sofa that somehow complemented the Qing dynasty architecture, was a trio of Chinese emos in Doc – or perhaps Moc Marten boots. One looked up and, finding me of no particular interest, returned her attention to her friends. A pair of stork-like fashionistas, one Chinese, one African, perched on stools at a high table, drawing elegantly on thin cigars and playing with their phones. My heart snagged on the sight of a tender-eyed young blonde listing towards a Chinese dandy with an explosion of multi-coloured hair and a wandering gaze; he toyed with her hand in a manner that could at best be described as reassuring. To complete a picture that could seem congruous only in Beijing, gathered around a large table towards the back was a merry tribe of Mongolians, members, I was quite certain, of a famous rock band, resplendent in traditional robes and with haircuts sampling both Genghis and punk. Or perhaps they were just a less-famous Mongolian band pretending to be them. It occurred to me that they could equally have been a Chinese band pretending to be Mongolian. Perhaps they were just pretending to be a band. There was a lot of that around.

The only piece missing from this picture was anyone who could credibly have been my correspondent. I was relieved – I don’t mind waiting for people (as my relationship with Q more than amply attests), but I hate making people wait for me. I returned to the bar, reeled in by the seductive scent of wine, cloves, cinnamon and anise. Mulled wine! The bartender’s brushstroke eyebrows were drawn into an almost imperceptible frown of concentration; he didn’t seem to notice my return at first, which gave me the chance to study him. He was one of those men for whom middle age was a comfortable fit: silvered, nicely worn and loose-limbed in a thick grey jumper against which pushed the hint of a belly; he looked more like an ageing artist or intellectual than a barman.

His taking my hands to warm them disconcerted me. How long had it been since someone held my hands? I didn’t want to think. But I took to him quickly, to that subtle blend of roguishness and courtesy that has always drawn me to the Beijing character. I know that new people can sometimes give you the impression that you’ve known them forever, or ought to have, and that time has cheated you in only just bringing them to you. Xiangjian henwan. So you will them to become a part of your life. Under the slow burn of his gaze I even felt a faint shiver, a trespass of desire, against which I silently recited Q’s name like an incantation. But more than that, or perhaps interwoven, was that other thing, a spooky familiarity, a kind of a doubling, an inexplicable sense that Q was present, that he had something to do with this night. I felt unmoored. I told myself it was because my nerves were firing from the cold, from the effort of finding this place, from anticipation. The mulled wine was good. It calmed me down.

Whoomph. A cold draught. I turned to see a large man, stooped, infinitely elderly, pass through the insulating curtain over the door. It was, beyond doubt, him. His eyes, cataract blue and kindly, were framed by the heavy asymmetrical folds of his hooded eyelids above and pouches of spider-webbed skin below that served as soft wrinkled pillows for those cloudy marbles. He pulled off his beanie and I noticed his feathery white eyebrows and the ethereal puff of hair floating above his speckled scalp. His aroma was that of centuries past, of age, of the futile, sweet stay of cologne against mortal decay, with a touch of soap-laundered clothing and cold. The years had erased virtually all traces of ethnicity and even gender. And yet if his face was antique parchment, one touch away from dust, it was, I knew, overwritten with history. In that first glance I saw alphabets and characters there, lost languages and libraries. There were whole volumes on Backhouse – for this, beyond doubt, was my correspondent. If his letter had told the truth, and his appearance suggested it might well have, there was an essay or two on me as well.

My eyes fell on the document case of Morocco leather, as creased and ancient as its guardian, who held it clutched against his chest. A presence, a present, a gift from the past, enfolded in soft brown calfskin and cradled in the arms of age.

The old man peeled off his gloves and unfastened his caped overcoat, from which wintry air pulsed like the breath of Stygian night itself, an icy, phantom expiration. If this ancient creature came bearing the night, however, it was surely the black-winged creature of the earliest Greek myths, that goddess Night from whose silver egg Eros sprang double-sexed, vital and unruly with the energy of cosmic creation. Eros, the mischievous, the irresistible. The life force.

For most of his days, Edmund Backhouse had been an apostle of Eros. He even signed himself Bacchus, a trick of the tongue on an amenable surname. When, close to death, like his hero Oscar Wilde, like Baron Corvo, he converted to Catholicism and chose the name of the apostle Paul, it was not quite an exorcism. Nor was it as strange or distant a leap as people imagined, this curvet from Greek to Latin, from the cloven-footed revels of the Dionysian to the sensual, incense-soaked religion of Hadrian the Seventh and Rome. I thought I knew much about Edmund Backhouse, but standing in front of the last man to have been intimately acquainted with him in life – a man who had been mourned, eulogised and supposedly buried back when I was still in secondary school – I realised I knew nothing at all.

‘Dr Hoeppli,’ I began, and faltered. The wonder in my throat left no passage for my voice. I looked towards the bartender as though for help, but he was busy uncapping a bottle of aged scotch.

The old man didn’t react. He continued to study me.

‘I got your letter,’ I started again, suddenly uncertain: had there even been a letter?

It occurred to me that perhaps he was more comfortable speaking in Chinese. After all, this was the man whom the French diplomat Roland de Margerie had once described as a personnage assez curieux, a most curious man, tout à fait absorbé dans la vie chinoise. I switched languages and introduced myself in Chinese, the old-fashioned, respectful way – ‘humble surname’ and all that. Chinese often smiled to see foreigners from different countries conversing in Chinese but it wasn’t any stranger than, say, a Frenchman and a Turk meeting in New York and speaking to one another in English, which is to say, it wasn’t strange at all. (As the Chinese themselves say, shaojian duoguai, that which is not often seen seems odd.) I even clasped my left fist in my right hand and brought it up to my chest in the classic, albeit masculine greeting.

This gesture elicited a glancing smile, or perhaps it was merely a nervous twitch of the lips. Hard to tell, but at last he spoke. ‘I know who you are, my dear. Otherwise, I should not have asked you to meet me, especially on such an inhospitable night.’ The Swiss-watch precision of his English contrasted with the craggy, tobacco-cured quality of his voice. ‘I have followed your career with great interest.’ As he said this, his hand, friable, corded with veins, folded itself around my own. It felt weirdly discarnate, colder than weather, his palsied grip that of congealed air. The nail on his little finger was long and sheathed by a nail protector of fine-spun gold. I’d only ever seen such a thing in photographs of the Empress Dowager and was so tested by the question of how it had fit inside his gloves – or had he slipped it on after taking them off and I simply hadn’t noticed? – that it took me a moment to react to what he said next: ‘And with no little curiosity besides. That novel …’

I stared at him, nonplussed. ‘Novel?’

‘The Empress Lover, of course.’

‘You’ve … you’ve read The Empress Lover? But that’s … No one … However did you find a copy?’

‘I didn’t. I learned of it from your landlady’s micro-blog on Weibo.’ Mrs Jin! What else had she broadcast to the world about me? I wondered.

He raised my left wrist up to his face, and examined my bracelets with a narrow, forensic gaze. Rotating them on my wrist, he examined them minutely, even lifting them off my arm slightly by balancing them in his palm as though to judge their heft. For a long time he said nothing. At long last he nodded. ‘I never did find a copy of your novel. The fact you wrote it was interesting, but it was only one clue among many. Your linguistic facility, your reclusive nature, your looks and, of course, the real key: these bracelets. They fascinated Mrs Jin. I could only hope that they were what they appeared to be from her description and that you hadn’t picked them up at Panjiayuan or some such place, in which case you would not be the person for whom I’ve been searching at all.’ He ran his finger over the dragon one last time and released my hands, which had now been held captive twice in one evening. Those vellum jowls parted around a smile of old ivory and teak. He seemed then to sigh, though perhaps his breathing was simply long with age. ‘Such rare and exquisite jade, so precious and so divinely fashioned.’

‘They belonged to my mother,’ I said, discomposed.

Raising my hand to his lips, he laid upon it a kiss as delicate, dewy and suggestive as rose petals, the sensual kiss of le libertin ancien. ‘Actually,’ he replied, ‘they belonged to your grandmother.’

‘My grandmother?’ A chill ran up my spine. ‘Did you … did you know her?’

‘Regretfully, no.’

A thousand questions tangled in my brain.

The bartender put on a CD by Paris Combo. He had refilled my mug. Picking up a glass of amber spirits for my companion, he indicated for us to follow him into the inner room. ‘It’s warmer there, more comfortable.’ The music danced over the hum of conversation and laughter. On n’a pas besoin, de chercher si loin … The song was about discovering that what you’ve been looking for was beside you all along. I had the same album. I remembered, apropos of nothing, that the singer was called Belle and her husband, also part of the group, was Australian.

Entering the room a second time, now in the company of the barkeeper and Dr H, I sensed the patrons’ eyes on me. I angled my shoulders back and my head upwards a discreet degree or two; my face mirrored the slightly jaded look of the habitué. Like any chameleon, I could make myself at home anywhere. I went instantly from being a wairen, an outsider, to a neiren, one of them. As we passed, the Mongols toasted the bartender: ‘To the Sage!’

I questioned him with my eyes. He shrugged, smiling: ‘Xiao wo,’ he said, ‘they’re making fun of me.’ He led us behind a sandalwood screen into a cosy nook where two comfortable-looking armchairs sat angled as though deep in conversation. Behind them, against the wall, stood a Ming-style altar table. On the table was a lamp. Its shade depicted the ascent of the goddess Chang’E to the moon with her stolen elixir of immortality. Before the chairs stood another, lower table, on which the bartender placed our drinks. On a shelf by the window, a small electrical fish tank glowed blue as tropical fish made of metal, together with their bright blue layered waves, made their unhurried way around the central mechanism. It was one of those rare pieces of kitsch that had crossed to the other side and become strangely, soothingly lovely.

Occupying one of the armchairs was a pair of snoozing cats, one black with a speck of white on her cheek, the other white with a speck of black on her forehead. They lay curled snugly one into the other, tummies pulsing with the mismatched breath of sleep, a softly thrumming wheel of yin and yang. ‘Qu,’ the bartender scolded. Get lost. ‘Qu, qu.’ The white one yawned, opened one eye and closed it again. ‘Impossible creatures.’

Dr H flicked at their ears with a sheathed fingernail. Shaking their silky heads in feline disdain, they sneezed, one after the other, and dethroned.

The old man shrugged off his coat and settled into the seat cushion like snowdrift, gesturing for me to take the other chair. The bartender left us.

‘Why do they call him the Sage?’ I asked Dr H. They seemed to know one another. For all my burning desire to discover what lay inside the leather folder now on Dr H’s lap, I couldn’t contain my curiosity about our host.

‘Because he is the direct descendant, forty-third generation to be precise, of Zhuangzi.’

‘Really?’ I absorbed this information. ‘But I don’t think that’s possible. Once, in Taiwan, I met a direct descendant of Confucius of the seventy-fifth generation and here in Beijing, selling Japanese-style French toast on Nanluoguxiang, a seventy-third-generation direct descendant of the philosopher Mencius. The first was an old man, the second in early middle age. How can the Sage be of only the forty-third generation when his ancestor was of more or less the same vintage as Confucius?’

Dr H’s gaze floated away and anchored itself on the table lamp. For a moment I thought he hadn’t heard the question. Then I twigged. Chang’E and the elixir of eternal youth – the Daoists were renowned for their alchemic potions for longevity and even immortality. The world tilted a few degrees towards the fantastical. Unsure how to respond, I reached for my wine.

Taking that as a signal, Dr H lifted his scotch and toasted me Chinese-style, with both hands and a bow of the head. I toasted back, bowing that little bit lower. He offered me a Panda-brand cigarette from a tarnished silver cigarette case that he had extracted from his coat pocket. I wasn’t much of a smoker, but I’d lived too long in China to say no. The odd cigarette hardly made a difference when the air was so thick with God-knew-what that on the worst days it adhered to your face like some unholy PM2.5 mudpack. I inhaled, stifled a cough and waited.

He glanced up at the clock on the wall. ‘It’s time,’ he said. The clock, I saw now, had stopped at nine minutes past eight. There were other clocks, it struck me now, each one stopped at a different time. I felt as though I had landed at the centre of the Beijing time machine, or perhaps a Tardis, for this tiny space seemed capable of infinite temporal and spatial expansions.

As Dr H’s fingers fumbled with the leather thong on the document case, the rest of the world fell away. Or perhaps it was me falling: given that things had genuinely become ‘curiouser and curiouser’ I wondered if I had not tumbled down some rabbit hole and drunk the potion waiting for me there. Q seemed as distant as the moon. The Sage dropped over the horizon. For the first time in years I found myself in a place without fear, panic, history or regret – only breath.

With the slow precision of an archaeologist, Dr H extracted a rectangular parcel wrapped in threadbare and faded silk. He held it as though weighing it and then, on the verge of handing it to me, placed it on his lap. The silk fluttered and exhaled a sigh of fine dust. The old man fixed me with his snow-cloud regard. ‘You must understand. Sir Edmund was …’ His lower lip trembled slightly. On a horse, it would have signified contentment; Dr H was harder to read. ‘… what he was. Sir Edmund was what he was.’

‘I understand.’

‘I don’t know that you do yet.’ His tone was matter-of-fact. ‘But you will.’

Subconsciously, I touched my bracelets. Dr H raised his scotch to his mouth. He dabbed at his moistened lips with a handkerchief.

‘I … I have a theory,’ I said.

‘About Sir Edmund?’ He leaned forward in his chair.

‘Sort of. About foreigners in China.’

His eyes, which never left my own, widened slightly. ‘Do go on.’

‘There are eight principal archetypes of the foreigner in China. There is the storyteller, who is also a seeker – Marco Polo in the court of Khubilai Khan, every journalist, China scholar and English teacher or traveller compelled to write a book about their experiences. Second is the missionary: the Jesuit Matteo Ricci winding clocks for the court of the Ming emperor Wan Li, the artist Rauschenberg preaching post-modernism in the 1980s.’ Dr H was smiling. ‘Third,’ I ploughed on, ‘is the emissary: Lord Macartney in the court of Qianlong, Kissinger in the court of Mao. Then there’s the imperialist: Lord Elgin burning down the Yuanmingyuan, the yobbo smashing up a bar in Sanlitun. Fifth is the fellow traveller: Edgar Snow awed in the caves of Yan’an, any economist or neo-liberal with a hard-on – pardon my language – at the monotheistic altar of growth. Sixth is the profit-seeker: the British pushing opium in the nineteenth century, the purveyors of surveillance equipment to the dictatorship today, the traders and manufacturers, Vuitton and Bulgari in the court of the National Museum on Tiananmen Square and Gucci and Prada in the malls. Number seven is the desperado, the whore, the dogsbody – the pimps, hookers, gamblers and drinkers of Peking’s Badlands on the eve of the Japanese invasion or their equivalents today, the Russian pole-dancers in the clubs of little Vladivostok over by Ritan, the Nigerian drug-pedlars of Sanlitun, the Mongolian prostitutes and other economic refugees. Finally, number eight is the lover who, like the hero or heroine of every China book by a non-Chinese author under the sun, is the one foreigner who truly understands China and who, overcoming obstacles, blah blah blah, falls in love with a beautiful or handsome Chinese, and is recognised in the great court of Chinese public opinion as being not like the other foreigners and therefore wonderful: any protagonist in a James Clavell or Nicole Mones novel.’ (Me.)

‘That’s quite a theory. I like it very much. Where do you think Sir Edmund fits in?’ He didn’t wait for me to answer. ‘Perhaps there is a ninth archetype?’

‘I believe he might have been beyond archetype.’

‘Think about it.’

I did. ‘The trickster?’

As if I’d produced a password, and without another word, he handed me the parcel. It was lighter than I expected. In what was probably just a consequence of the flickering light, for the goddess of immortality appeared to have a loose filament, my companion seemed in that instant to become less substantial himself, to lose mass, even to rise incrementally on the cushion of his seat.

Feeling a little dizzy, I tried to anchor myself back to reality with words. ‘It couldn’t possibly have been true, what he wrote in Décadence Mandchoue, could it? He wasn’t really the lover of the Empress Dowager … Was he?’

‘He loved her well enough.’ He smiled distantly. ‘You wrote a novel about it.’

I blushed. ‘That was just fiction.’

‘It’s true. He loved her well enough.’ He tilted his glass and stared into it, as though at another world. ‘Though not, of course, as well as he loved Cassia Flower.’

‘The catamite in the employ of the Hall of Chaste Joys.’

‘Or Zhan Baochen.’

‘The young Manchu nobleman.’

He nodded.

‘Whose love,’ I added, like a girl swot trying to curry favour with her teacher, ‘he won by first sneaking him into the palace so that he could make love to the Empress’s handmaiden. When the Empress Dowager caught the pair in flagrante delicto, he interceded on their behalf. But, and I don’t mean any disrespect –’ I wasn’t quite sure how to put this ‘– I always thought, you know, all those things he wrote about in Décadence Mandchoue were in the nature of erotic fantasy.’

‘Do you remember the chapter entitled “The Vampire Prince”?’

‘Yes. It was about one of the sons of Prince Ching, wasn’t it?’

The doctor nodded.

‘Who got a sexual thrill from drawing and sucking blood?’

‘Well done. Do you remember how it began?’

‘With some quotations probably, but I can’t recall …’

‘Judith Gautier, Thomas Moore. Tennyson. Then he wrote these words, which so impressed me on first reading that I have never forgotten them: “Memory and imagination; the first counts as nothing without the second …” You see?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Here,’ he said, placing the leather folder on the table. ‘You’ll want this to protect the manuscript.’ He leaned forward. The chair springs creaked. The black cat, which was rubbing itself against my legs, looked up accusingly. ‘One more thing,’ he said.

‘What’s that?’

‘You’ll find that it is –’ a pause, a flash of teak and ivory ‘– somewhat obscene.’

I tugged at the disintegrating tissue of silk, as loosely threaded as reality seemed to be at that moment. It fell away to reveal a rectangular box of stiff board. This was covered with pasted-on blue cotton that had faded to the colour of winter sky and was marked by a single stain like a teardrop, the colour of tea. A teadrop. The box was toggled in the Chinese manner with smooth, slender points of polished bone. Easing the toggles out of the tight screws of cloth with which they were secured, I gingerly lifted the cover. Within lay a thick sheaf of quarto paper, curling at the edges, yellowed to the colour and crispness of autumn leaves in the Fragrant Hills. Typed by an old-fashioned manual typewriter, it began:

My dear _____, What follows may strike you as a wild tale, far-fetched and fantastical …

… 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 things that defy death. Stories are truth. I hereby give you mine, yours – and Hers.

P.S. The story that this manuscript contains is yours and yours alone, to do with as you please. I cannot know how this finds you, in what situation. I can only pray that it is a good one. Whilst I should be gratified if pride in what you discover leads you to crow, I also must accept in all humility that you may find the revelations contained within confronting, even shocking, so much so that you choose to keep them to yourself. My hope, of course, is that you have been born into an age unlike my own, one of enlightened, liberal views. An age when such stories are, if not commonplace – for this one will never be that – at least not any cause for unpleasant scandal or outcry.

I have asked the devoted H——— to arrange for the publication of my memoirs once we are both gone from this world that so delights in scandal and persecution. I should not wish for the opprobrium that those writings will inevitably attract to fall upon his dear head. Whether it attaches itself to yours will be your choice. One doesn’t get to choose one’s ancestors any more than one gets to choose the rest of one’s family, but one can own them or not as one pleases.

P.P.S. Carpe diem! Carpe noctem! Carpe vinum!

Seize the day. Seize the night. Seize the wine. Well the last was easy, anyway. Confused and intrigued, I looked over at the old man who had brought me this extraordinary missive. His eyes were closed. The white cat had climbed onto his lap, and his hand rested on her fat purring belly. A glass of pinot noir had magically replaced my mug of mulled wine, though my mouth still tasted of cinnamon and cloves. I still had no clue as to what this was all about or what it had to do with me. At the same time, I felt like an accidental crusader who’d stumbled upon the Holy Grail. For it was clear to me that what I held on my lap was the never-before-seen last will and testament of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse.

The old man’s eyes opened a crack. ‘You are wondering, perhaps, why I had not waited, as Sir Edmund had urged, to publish the memoirs after my death.’

I wasn’t sure what to say. It didn’t seem very diplomatic to speak of death to a man so apparently tottering close to its edge. His milky eyes fluttered open and twinkled under their asymmetrical hoods. ‘The truth is, I could not resist.’

‘Resist?’

‘Observing the response. I was deeply curious as to how they would be received. And then, of course,’ he continued, indicating the manuscript, ‘there was this. I had done my best to get this to your father, for whom it was originally intended, but that proved impossible. The relatives who took him in after he was sent away had been so scandalised – and they didn’t know the half of it! – that they would have nothing to do with anyone who had even known Sir Edmund. They even changed your father’s name and refused to pass on any messages. Until I found him – or his progeny; that is, you – I could not rest. And so I chose to prolong my life.’

Each time he said ‘your father’ I felt an electric shock. I was confused too. I knew my mother had scandalised her family and had been sent away, but my father? I didn’t get it. And then there was this strange claim: ‘Prolong your life?’ I blurted. ‘How …’

He shrugged, the soft mounds of his shoulders rising and falling like geological eras. ‘Many years ago, I was travelling in the southwest of China. I was studying a parasite of medical interest particular to that part of China. We ended up in a small and charmless nondescript town that did have one place of beauty, a Daoist temple. It is a long story, and some of the details, including the name of the town, are lost to memory. But I met a Daoist master there, a remarkable man, a wise man, a man of arcane knowledge – even if he struck me at first as appearing less a holy man than a vulgar peasant dressed in town clothing, even a snake-oil salesman. He asked me no questions, but gave me advice that struck me at the time as perceptive and amusing. Then he gave me a pouch with pills of his own devising which he claimed I would need later in life. He said that I would want to extend my natural lifespan and that these would help; he said that immortality was difficult but a long life not so much. I am a man of science. I took the pouch, and back in Beijing I analysed the contents of one of the pills. It contained what seemed to me for the most part to be perfectly ordinary herbs, but for one ingredient which I could not identify. I never had the chance to return, and forgot about him and the pills for a long time – until the long and difficult search for your father caused me to recall that they were still in my possession. I did not actually believe they would do anything, and considered that, in any case, the years had probably rendered them useless, but as a man of science, I am ever open to the testing of hypotheses. To make a long story short, the medicine worked. So I faked my own death.’

I reeled, struggling to comprehend.

‘I’m not the first to do so, and I won’t be the last, though I like to think that my motives were perhaps more honourable than many others who have taken this path or will take it in the future.’

‘Was it hard?’ was all I could think to say.

‘It’s easier than you’d think, especially if you have left no, what do you call it, digital footprint. In fact, I’ve barely left any footprints at all. The Weibo account I use to follow Mrs Jin is registered under the name of a kindly neighbour, who trusted me not to abuse it. You see, I have always valued two qualities that, from what I understand, are quite out of fashion these days – discretion and privacy. I was never the absolute master of these, of course, that dear Sir Edmund was. But I do believe that his life makes an excellent case for the way in which discretion provides the greatest possible space for its opposite, and privacy enables the sort of absolute freedom that those who live in the public eye could only dream of, if they only knew to dream of it. This is something that I fear the, what is it, Facebook generation will never understand.’

‘Indeed,’ I said, and asked after a brief pause, ‘Was the reaction to the publication of Décadence Mandchoue what you expected? What you hoped for?’

Dr Hoeppli’s face collapsed a little around his smile. ‘The Daily Telegraph called it “outrageous”, the South China Morning Post “remarkable”, and the New York Times wrote up its publication. This was gratifying. And yet none appears to have taken it as seriously as I had hoped on his behalf. It would have been impossible to publish earlier; even Lady Chatterley’s Lover only just squeaked past the censors in 1960, and not without a massive trial of the publisher for obscenity. Besides, Hugh Trevor-Roper rather soured people on Sir Edmund, I fear. You do know his brother was gay, don’t you?’

‘Backhouse’s brother?’

‘No, Hugh Trevor-Roper’s brother Patrick, the philanthropist, eye surgeon and art historian. He outed himself in 1955. There may have been some issues there for him. Perhaps it was the issue. It sometimes is for people. I honestly don’t know.’

‘I didn’t know about Trevor-Roper’s brother. But what, if you don’t mind my asking, does this –’ I gestured at the letter and the manuscript ‘– all this, what does it have to do with me? How did Backhouse know my father?’ Maybe it was the exhaustion of a long day compounding my confusion, but I felt impatience and emotion gritting up my voice.

Dr Hoeppli reached for his glass. ‘You have seen those carved balls of ivory and jade, I presume, in which concentric spherical shells, each capable of independent movement, surround a solid centre?’

I nodded.

‘Keep reading.’

So I did. In the periphery of my gaze, Dr H appeared to fade away like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, leaving behind not a grin, but that hoary, glittering gaze and the submarine clink of ice on glass like the bells on the necks of camels in a distant caravan.

A burst of gunfire crackles somewhere outside the hospital as I write. Battles are fought daily within the hospital, too, between the septic and the antiseptic. The reek of wounds festering under plaster brawls with the tang of rubbing alcohol, and the animal fetor of the hot wet blankets used on patients in the respirator ambushes the crisp starchiness of the nurses’ freshly laundered uniforms. Through the noisome air comes a continual chorus of cries and groans.

The excess of bleach in which the bedclothes are boiled causes them to scratch against my thin and sensitive skin, and bruises appear out of nowhere, dressed in the imperial colours of yellow and purple – surely an irony of cruel Nature! These sad buttocks of mine, that once craved to passer par les verges, are now plagued by bedsores, welts of a rather less enjoyable type than those inflicted by a lover’s lash. Once I believed that I had first acquired this particular perversion in that sanctum of Uranian thought that was Winchester. (You may be familiar with Betjeman’s “The Wykehamist” – “Broad of Church and broad of mind, Broad before and broad behind, A keen ecclesiologist, A rather dirty Wykehamist”.) Yet, one also recalls Juvenal: Nemo repente fuit turpissimus, “No one becomes debauched overnight.” One is, one supposes, born this way. Besides, I am in good company. Among the many great and famous men who have shared this predilection is J.J. Rousseau, who wrote in Confessions of the thrill of his governess’s fessée.

I must assume that my speaking so frankly does not shock you. I cannot know when you will receive this letter but, as I have said, I hope that it will be in a more enlightened age than that of my own. It is my fervent desire that you should understand me, and if that proves impossible, at least to forgive me.

But fond memories of the lash are neither here nor there. As the great Ming novelists were wont to say when running into a narrative cul-de-sac, or when an unspooling thread of a tangential story threatened to unravel the weave of plot, “Of this we shall speak no more.”

I would prefer not to tarry here, in this place and this life, any longer than is necessary to convey this, my true and secret history, to you. Of course, one cannot time one’s departure from life as though one were an actor on a stage. These decisions are in the hands of a merciful God, whose consolations I have sought of late. My memories span continents and eras, and they are infused with incense and osmanthus. (Oh, Cassia Flower! His perfect beauty was itself a most intoxicating perfume.) They are also pricked through with the slings and arrows I have been forced to endure. Without wanting to rehearse all of them – for that should take another lifetime – I would like to clear the air on some of the more outstanding calumnies that have attached to my name, for fear that you may have been misled by tattle.

Whilst still at Merton College, for example, I was frightfully embarrassed when the actress Ellen Terry, whom I adored, took it upon herself to return my heartfelt gift of a diamond-studded tiara (that in truth had not half her own dazzle!) after various creditors of mine claimed they had lent me the money to buy it and now needed to be repaid.

I confess that I have never taken to accounting as to language. For all my efforts at honest business, I share with many members of my class that cheerful disposition towards money that can, alas, so easily lead one into debt or – as has been so often the case with me – a genteel poverty. In later years, my natural generosity led me to bestow many gifts of rare manuscripts and precious books to the Bodleian. Had I sold them, I could easily have lifted my fortunes. And yet so-called scholars question their authenticity and petty men use past debts and present doubts to sully my good name. To quote one of the Chinese language’s many expressive sayings, t’iao chin huang ho ye hsi bu ch’ing , it is like jumping into the Yellow River – one can never come out clean. But I have never set out purposefully to be a misdemeanant.

Without going into unnecessary detail, I shall not deny that thanks to my naturally trusting soul and scholarly naivety (for what, after all, is a man of books to know of the treacherous world of commerce?), I have often been vulnerable to misuse by rapacious middlemen and so-called “partners”. Lady Luck, capricious creature that she is, has not always been on my side either. And so I have left a regrettable trail of bad debts, infamy and misunderstanding wherever I’ve travelled in this wide world, and I have travelled widely and lived fully. I assure you that in my intentions I have ever been honourable.

I am also, I concede, something of a coward. When in trouble, I find myself beset by illness and humours that mandate a retreat from the world. Whilst even I suspect that some of these might be psychosomatic in origin (I admit to some hypochondriac tendencies), I assure you that the suffering is avowedly most real. On the other hand, for the record, I didn’t run away to America after Oxford to escape my creditors, including those who claimed they had helped me in my donation to Oscar Wilde’s defence fund (dear Oscar, who once praised my “charming tool”!), and much less was I “sent away” to America due to “madness”. No.

I travelled there voluntarily in the company of Lord Montagu, who insisted on my presence, and paid for our first-class passage across the Atlantic. Lord Montagu was a man of violent and powerful carnality, whom I loved passionately at the time and who loved me as well. It was not politic to speak of it then, of course, and so rumours naturally filled the seemingly unaccountable void. As I have written in my memoirs, one cannot live a quiet, hidden life without making enemies.

But one must learn to view these things lightly. As Yehonala, the All-Nourishing, Perfect, Worshipful and Exalted Empress Dowager Cixi once remarked to me in the silken languor that followed our lovemaking, life is but “a mirage and a sensual delusion like the morning dew or the evening glow”. My Empress lover, she who allowed me to slip behind those forbidden walls and taste the true exotic, has been gone for nigh forty years, and yet I only need close my eyes to see her face, as lovely as any maiden’s. I see in my mind’s eye, as though they were before me now, the great lacquered wings of her hair as glossy as the imperial brocades that so readily slipped from her slim shoulders. Even at her great age, her skin was as lustrous and smooth as the pearls adorning her neck, and her eyes as luminous as the skies over Peking in autumn. I can hear her, teasing me in that high imperious voice: “Foolish boy. My very own devil-man.”

Her Majesty had the most delicate musk you can imagine, enhanced by daily applications of sandalwood oil and jasmine. That musk remains in my nostrils still from those hundreds of sensual encounters for which Chief Eunuch Li Lien-ying, knowing my natural inclinations lay elsewhere, amply prepared me with aphrodisiac philtres and the promise, fulfilled like cups overflowing, of more naturally amenable pleasures afterwards.

It is true that she was nearly seventy and I in my early thirties (though already tormented by lumbago and poor eyesight) when she first summoned me to the imperial boudoir. Yet I shall never forget those lust-soaked hours, for the Old Buddha was more than my match in perversity. You should also know, however, of her refinement. She loved the opera. Sometimes she’d invite me to watch a command performance of one of her favourite operas at a theatre in the Summer Palace, the Yi Ho Yuan, where we would recline on embroidered pillows of Soochow silk on the woven mats of the ta .

Other days, she commanded me to enact plays with her, at the Temple of the Azure Clouds, to which we’d repaired to view the autumn foliage of the Western Hills perhaps, or on a retreat to the Summer Palace, wherever and whenever it took her fancy. I sang lao sheng , the part of the elderly male, though I was still in my vital years. In some moods, she took on the role of the hua tan , the flirtatious maiden, and in others the ch’ing yi , the virtuous woman. She liked to play the drunken concubine Yang Kui-fei in Hundred Flowers Pavilion, but when we essayed the tragedy of Farewell My Concubine, it was she who insisted on playing the tyrant, making me the concubine, dancing unto death.

During these idylls, our every need was looked after by the eunuch bawd Li Lien-ying. Palace maids with their lips painted, like hers, into rosy little buds, brought us fragrant tea in lidded, yellow-glazed bowls fired at Ching Te Chen for her ancestor Yung Cheng. (I liked them so much she later made gifts of them to me.) The tea was brewed from the first delicate leaves of the Hangchow crop, picked by the untainted sweet hands of young virgins. Palace maids rowed on low skiffs into Kunming Lake at dusk, singing, to insert parcels of tea into the closing petals of lotus flowers. If I awoke early enough, I would amble down to the edge of the lake to listen to their sweet song and watch how, with infinite grace, they would recover the parcels when the flowers opened the following morning. The pretty apple-green, blush-pink and peacock-feather-blue of their silk garments glowed in the rosy dawn that fell upon the palace like a shower of pink and gold, their slender oars lapping like tongues at the lake’s surface.

Sometimes, while the Old Buddha enjoyed her customary pipe of opium, she would send me to feast on the nests of swallows and dishes of meats so divinely prepared that, it was said, “Buddha would have jumped the fence” for them. I rarely indulged in the vice of opium myself, for my imagination has always been opiate enough – it had propelled me, after all, from the dreary, plain earnestness of my Quaker home into the very heart of a universe of beauty, now – alas – vanished forever. As I have written in the volume of my memoirs I call Décadence Mandchoue, “As at the end of my life, I recall those garish days, the phantom and the delusion of power, those Gods dethroned and empires of the past, I bow before the Buddha’s precept: ‘Learn happiness by abolishing desire.’”

I am aware that when the manuscripts, my Ricordo Dei Felici Tempi, memories of happy times, are made public, there will be those who accuse me of lying and fabrication. That they will also accuse me of obscenity is certain, for I reveal in full my penchant ignoble. I should perhaps be used to such denouncements by now, but I have never managed to grow an elephant’s hide; had I been blessed with one of half the thickness, I should have been spared much in the way of both choler and melancholy, those yellow and black bilious humours that ravage the body as much as the soul.

I shall address the accusation that I am but a common fabulator squarely and assure you: there has never been anything common about my fabulations.

The Chinese have a saying, yuan che shang ko , those who are willing take the bait. You see, my dear, it is easy to seduce people into one’s bed when one knows of what they dream. The dreams of my victims (if one must call those who have profited from my petty deceptions “victims”) have ever been simple, material, even vulgar.

To wit: wealth, power, a brush with fame or the famous. Present them a simulacrum of what they desire and voilà!, they lie down like whores and present their posteriors as readily as any catamite in the Hall of Chaste Joys. Whenever I have promised people access to direct profit from enterprises most fanciful, they show no scruples, but snuggle eagerly under my patchwork quilt of lies, stretch out luxuriously upon the mattress of insubstantiality, and lay their puffed-up and stupidly happy little heads upon the pillow of my dissimulation, displaying their fondements et parties sexuelles and waiting for la gamme réciproque to commence. Yet, as the Chinese would say, yo hsiang tang piaotze, yo hsiang li p’ai-fang , they want to act the harlot but also wish to have a monument erected to their chastity.

And so the very ones who once praised to the skies Bland’s and my work on Her Excellency (I refer of course to China Under the Empress Dowager) – calling it an “indispensable guide through the bewildering maze of Chinese politics” and “the most informing book in Chinese affairs that has appeared within a decade” etcetera etcetera – later turned around with their Janus faces to accuse me of being a plagiarist. Plagiarism! They wound me still with their words. Plagiarism is an offence committed by incompetents. Forgery, as everyone knows, is, par contraste, a crime of genius.

There is palpable joy in the discovery that, almost to a man, those who ought to know better, or are convinced that they already do, have proven most willing to loll supine in my bed of enchantment. As Plato said, “Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.”

I don’t write this in order to gloat, even if I have taken something of a smug tone, despite myself. I should not presume, nor am I that cruel, for all my admitted fondness for la discipline et les verges. It is important for you to understand that whereas I well know that I have perhaps, from time to time, shaded the borders between truth and fiction a little too heavily, what I am about to reveal to you is, beyond any suspicion, the truth.

There was once ample proof to back my story – letters and documents and photographs. These I kept in a small camphor box, affixed with a Chinese puzzle lock that opened only when one aligned the characters to spell out an erotic poem from the Ch’in P’ing Mei . The box was a gift from my dear Cassia Flower. The Japanese threw it into the fire! O Tempus edax rerum! Time, devourer of everything!

Forgive the ramblings of an old man, and I fear I do ramble. Ch’ang hua tuan shuo , to make a long story short, the only proof of what I am about to tell you lies in two carved jade bracelets of inestimable value, gifts from the Old Buddha herself. It will ultimately be by these that my friend H will know that you are the intended – and you will know that what I say is true. But allow me a necessary digression.

It was with mille coquetteries of an intellectual and practical nature that the Jesuits ingratiated themselves with the Ming and early Ch’ing emperors. Coming from Italy, Spain, France and other corners of the Catholic empire, they were fluent in Mandarin and later Manchu as well. They beguiled the emperors with their discourses on philosophy and foreign lands, impressed them with their skills at cartography, medicine and mathematics, and taught them and their eunuchs how to play the harpsichord. Matteo Ricci even gave us the English name of this great city when he invented the first system for transcription of the Chinese language into roman letters and called it Pequim. (I was deeply moved when the Old Buddha made a gift to me of some Louis d’or that a Jesuit had presented to the K’ang Hsi emperor; the gold coins had been minted in 1702 during the reign of Louis XIV.)

Their other contribution, seemingly trivial, was to tend to the vast imperial collection of Western clocks, keeping them wound and in good repair. The empire has long been conceived of as encompassing both time and space, the former symbolised by the sundial in front of the Hall of Supreme Tranquillity and the urgency with which each dynasty approached the task of writing the history of the one it had vanquished. The notion that one can control time by marking it, and history by writing it, is a profound one.

I sometimes think that it was, obscurely, an act of winding back the clock that caused the Old Buddha to take me into her literal embrace. When the Allied Forces arrived in Peking to relieve the Boxer siege of the Legation Quarter she was forced to shed her jewels and abandon her treasures, fleeing in the rough indigo guise of the peasant woman and transported in the bone-jolting litters of the common people. It was only thus that she could be sure of escaping the wrathful barbarian legions of England, France, America, Russia and the rest, who, confronted with the superior civilisation of the Celestials, only understood how to burn and plunder, pillage and rape. They tramped through the vacated palace in their filthy boots, shameless as Visigoths, heaping their pockets with the priceless treasures of her ancestors and setting an example for the vengeful and covetous foreign residents of the city.

The actions of my so-called compatriots shamed me so much that when some trusty Manchu friends asked me to join with them in rescuing and secreting some of the palace’s greatest treasures until the court was once more in a position to receive them, I had no hesitation in agreeing, despite the apparent danger of our mission, which necessarily was of a clandestine nature.

Later, I had the opportunity to return these, which I did through these same contacts, and was most gratified and surprised to receive, in return, an invitation to an audience in the Forbidden City with the Empress Dowager herself. I relate the story in detail in my memoirs, but without knowing whether or not you have yet had a chance to read them, I must tell you that of course I had had no contact with her before that. I was an unimportant foreigner, teaching and translating, discreetly disporting myself in the Hall of Chaste Joys, going about my business, which took me only as close to the palace as its high walls and moats and guards would permit. She asked me many intelligent questions that revealed the liveliness of her mind. In me, if you will permit me a moment of immodest candour, she discovered a conversationalist of an intellectual breadth and depth that was lacking in her other confidants in the court. I sensed she also felt free to discuss with me events of political import without fear that it would later become the stuff and fodder of machination and intrigue within the court.

Not long after that I was summoned back to the palace for an audience of a rather different sort, and so began my lustful and long affair with this remarkable and unusually erotic woman, ruler of China, and nearly four decades my senior. Her demands were simple and reasonable: I could indulge to my heart’s content in coition with princes, eunuchs, male courtesans, actors in the Peking Opera, or any other males I amorously desired. But no other woman, foreign or Manchu, would ever share my bed. I gladly gave my promise, for I had never thought to sleep with a woman before her, nor indeed after. And so began an affair that, whilst well-known among the denizens of the court itself and I dare say a subject of some fascination among the nobility generally, was, perforce, discreet.

It was thus that, following her death in 1908, I wrote far more harshly than I felt, and although with great detail, far less than I knew, about the Old Buddha in the biography I wrote with that hack Bland. Even in Décadence Mandchoue, the ultimate fate of which I cannot know, I have obscured the most astonishing aspect of our relationship (astonishing both to her and myself): the child.

Shivering, I once read, is a bodily reflex designed to preserve or achieve homeostasis, the internal stability of such properties as body temperature. So if your core temperature drops, the muscle groups around your vital organs will begin to quiver, expending energy to create warmth and ward off hypothermia. When you shiver because of fever, it’s because, despite your elevated body temperature, you feel cold.

There are other reasons why we shiver. When shocked or scared or very nervous, adrenaline makes the heart beat faster. It also speeds up your breathing and diverts blood from the digestive system to your muscles so they get an extra dose of oxygen. It’s part of the body’s fight-or-flight response and, like extreme cold, it can leave you shaking too.

The space in Fei Chang Dao where I sat was close to a heater and toasty warm. Yet my shivering caused my bracelets to chime: Qiangqiang, chengcheng, dingding, lingling, langlang, shanshan.

Had I possessed a womb inside my trou fignon, I dare say I should have been made pregnant a thousand times by a thousand men, not to mention one woman whose ejaculations, as I have recorded in my memoirs, were as formidable as those of any sailor or duke. But Nature, munificent in its perversity, arranged otherwise.

It is perhaps not surprising that when there are hundreds of acts of heterosexual copulation of all possible manners and positions between two devout bawds, such as she and I, that at least one would bear fruit. I do believe I can name the exact moment of conception, incidentally, for I recall having the most tremendous orgasm and she too that day had been possessed of an extraordinary concupiscence. Some six months later, in the late spring of 1908, we decided to pay a visit to the White Cloud Temple, for in that time of many whims and urges, she had a sudden compulsion to consult the T’aoist soothsayers there. Her condition was becoming more than obvious, though she had it put about that she had simply indulged too much in the black sesame-paste dumplings and other delicacies for which she had in recent times developed a great appetite. The passage to the temple was, of course, completely private, and no one outside her intimate circle of eunuchs and handmaidens was ever permitted to cast eyes upon her. She had always ruled, as was the custom for regents, from behind a decorative barrier, in the situation described both literally and metaphorically as ch’ui lien t’ing cheng , guiding politics from behind the screen. The monks received her into the temple, and after much bowing and chanting and burning of incense, a séance of sorts began, and at the end of it they told her that a new era was dawning, and a successor to the throne was assured, yet were she to continue with her “indulgence” then it would spell disaster for her and the empire. She paled then, as did I, not that we ever had any illusions that this new life we had quite thoughtlessly and rather miraculously created would be welcomed as had her first-born, the T’ung Chih emperor, when he came into the world half a century earlier, in 1856, as the son and heir of the Hsien-feng emperor.

Here I need to say a few words about my servant and friend Ch’ang. Those who believed that he had appropriated a considerable fortune from me in the various dealings in antiques and curios for which he acted as middleman, who whispered that I was under his control after he took possession of my former house on Shih-Fuma Street, where I continued to reside as his tenant, might be surprised to see that I persist in calling him my friend. But they do not know the extent of his involvement or sacrifice in this secret business.

After my goddess, despite her advanced age, delivered our son with an ease and speed that would have been remarkable in a much younger woman, it was necessary for every reason to hide his existence from the world. The revolutionaries were active at home and overseas, calling for an end to the “foreign” dynasty that had brought so much humiliation upon China. They argued that it was time China took her place among the modern nations of the world. Had our son been announced, all the anti-Ch’ing and anti-foreign sentiment in China would have combined to rip this tiny, innocent life and, I dare say, our own, to shreds. Life, limb and reputation were all at stake.

Ch’ang was crafty and reliable, and to make a long story short, for the hand that holds the pen is already shaking with exhaustion, between myself and Li Lien-ying we promised him the resources with which to raise the boy as his own under my roof. Not long after that, the emperor, already sickly, passed away and she followed by one day, assassinated I am sure – though the history books will never record it – by the treacherous Yuan Shih-kai who, several years later, as president of the republic, found out about the infant’s existence and sent assailants to my home.

And so Ch’ang was not, as is commonly presumed, knifed and strangled as the result of some shady business deal gone wrong. The murderers were looking for the child and tortured him when he said he didn’t know where he was. The police were well compensated for protecting the murderers, as was attested by the sudden sprouting of rings of gold and jade on the hands of their chief soon after. But the truth was that the boy had been sent away at the tender age of four, around the time he began to look unmistakeably like his mother. Ch’ang was not faultless in this affair, for after the boy’s departure, seeing the end of his profitable use to me, he made certain claims upon my property that were backed by threats of blackmail.

I sent the boy, with his legacy of the carved jade bracelets and the useless, possibly even harmful, knowledge that he was born a prince, into the care of relatives in England. I am not sure if they were more relieved at this apparent proof that I had been cured of my inversion, or scandalised by the fact that the mother had most certainly not been of the white race. In any case, they wished to have nothing more to do with me and I never saw our son again. Sic transit gloria mundi. Or as Augustus said, Acta est fabula: Plaudite! The play is over. Applaud!