On the outskirts of Nanjing I knocked a young woman off her bicycle. She was wearing a long white linen skirt and she fell with the slow grace of a ballerina, managing perfectly to preserve her dignity. It was all, without a doubt, my fault.
Moments before our driver had been pulled over by the police. The routine that ensued was to become a familiar one: an officer with a flag leaps from behind a bush, waves us to a halt, mentions some alleged infraction; the driver is persuaded to cross the road and discuss matters with a group of well-fed-looking colleague-officers, a not insubstantial sum in folding money changes hands, the first policeman is told to return the licence, drop his red flag and let us proceed, whereupon he then wedges himself behind the bush once again. Thus does traffic in China keep moving smoothly; thus does the small corps of car owners pay a reasonable additional tax for the privilege; and thus do policemen lie abed happily each night.
During these early days of my own journey I was innocent enough and arrogant enough to think I might be able to help – or to object or argue – when a situation like this presented itself. In this instance, Lily warned me not to try, saying sternly that my presence would only complicate matters. She bade me stay in the car. Ignoring her advice I opened the right-side back door to get out – and very nearly killed the young woman.
There was a sudden cry, a scraping sound like fingernails on a blackboard, and a sickening crunch. The door was slammed rudely and forcefully back on me and then I watched in appalled silence the slow-motion image of a young woman going down with her skittering bicycle, like the last moments of a dying swan. Her front wheel headed downward from the levee on which we were parked, the other wheel swerved back into the roadway, and between them fell the woman, sinking slowly onto the gravel and the mud. She turned her head around fast so that her long mane of black hair whipped around behind her, and she glared at me – a handsome face that looked at once perplexed that anyone could not know that Chinese cyclists rode close to cars and that is how it was and always had been and how foolish of anyone to open a door without looking, and angry that she was about to be hurt, perhaps, and also that in front of a carful of strangers she was going to fall over and tumble and show her legs, and worse, and lose her dignity and face and the elegant comeliness with which she evidently tried to ride her bicycle every day.
Gravity did its powerful work, and I thought the woman would steadily and inevitably succumb. But instead she fought for all she was worth, and as she fell so her legs twisted this way and that, and her arms did the same, and she stared ahead and around with such concentration that, by the kind of miracle no foreigner could ever manage, she did eventually stop the great black confection of iron and rubber that I recognized as a Flying Pigeon brand bicycle from falling any more, and she managed to halt its forward progress and its downward progress and its tipping and skidding as well, and she managed to stop herself falling too – she just sank, caught her balance and her breath and her dignity, and stopped, in a crumpled mass of white linen, lying between two upright wheels and in a cloud of dust.
With a sudden weary sag of her shoulders she remounted the saddle, looked back at me in silent fury once more, straightened her wheels, shook her head in defiance of that gravity and momentum and the baleful influence of the foreigner who had initiated all this, and shakily, nervously, bumpily and then with ever-growing confidence she resumed her ride, joining in with the uncaring rows of other cyclists and merging among them, anonymous and dignified once again. She gave me one last look – a beautiful face framed by a marvel of hair, her white blouse slightly off one shoulder but still crisp and fresh, her long white skirt a little crumpled and with a small smudge of dust down one side. She looked glorious, I thought, newly arisen from what could have been the wreckage of her day, and riding serenely off into the afternoon sun.
Rising from wreckage of one kind and another has been a perennial occupation for the city of Nanjing. Very few places in China have soared and plummeted with such fantastic and tragic recklessness. The city was the glorious capital of some dynasties, and then remaindered as a dusty and provincial backwater for others. There was, as in many Chinese cities of long history, at least one of those tragedies that scholars later term an ‘incident’: this came in 1927, when Nationalist troops killed seven foreigners, and a force of foreign gunboats sent to retaliate shelled and killed twice as many Chinese. But there had been more terrible tragedies too: during late Qing times, for example – for the eleven years between March 1853 and July 1864 – the city became the headquarters of a notorious sect of power-hungry fanatics, the Taipings, whose resistance was eventually destroyed (along with most of the city) after a siege partly staged by a foreign-led mercenary army, and whose leader was driven to suicide (it is said) by swallowing gold.* This most traumatic of events was sandwiched between two other humiliations: ten years before the arrival of the Taiping rebels, the city had been forced to bow low before one group of barbarians, the British; and seventy years after the Taipings, Nanjing became an epicentre of mayhem and cruelty at the hands of another group, the Japanese.
It is a city that, more than almost any other in China, has fully deserved the doleful and all-too-common description that you will read in all Chinese history books, a sentence that appears in one guise or other, referring to some such place in some such time at the hands of some such madness: ‘Its population was greatly reduced, its trade destroyed, and many of its beautiful, historic buildings and part of its walls, reduced to ruins.’ Nanjing has had, in other words, a horribly chequered past.
And yet on the surface you would never know it. Her present is blandly prosperous. Her image is relentlessly upbeat. It seems as though under the Communists the city of Nanjing has been urged, cajoled, made to rise from all that has gone before. Perhaps because of her past glories she has had money spent on her, she has come in for the caring attention of the central government, and has been persuaded to shake herself free of the more wretched side of her history. And she has gone along with the country's perceived wishes: she has washed off the dust and grime and, even if she is slightly crumpled from all of her trials, she looks well enough now, and quite presentable. Which is what the country seems to want for its most shabbily treated town.
For whenever I told a Chinese that I was planning to go up the Yangtze and stop a while at Nanjing, they would invariably say what they would never say if I admitted I was off to somewhere more pedestrian, like Harbin or Changsha or Canton: ‘Oh, really? Nanjing! How nice! How lucky you are!’ one man said. ‘Lovely city!’ said another. One elderly man in New York became dreamy-eyed and hinted at romance, muttering a nostalgic formula: ‘The flower boats! Taking your ease under the shade of a weeping willow, listening to a pretty little singsong girl… ah, that was the life… What a fine, fine place!’ This old man knew what had happened to the city through the years; but he seemed to be caught up like everyone else in the earnestness with which the rest of China seems to be trying to reinvent Nanjing. ‘One of the most interesting cities in our country – truly,’ said Lily. ‘All of us are very proud of Nanjing – of the way her people have risen above all their sufferings.’
That evening as we drove in from Yangzhou – having passed the still angry cyclist – the first view was the one that seemed most apt, a panorama that showed off Nanjing's newness and her determined effort to be modern. We crossed the river not by ferry, as we had been forced to do at Zhenjiang, but on a vast bridge – the bridge that is closest to the river mouth, and one of the longest, heaviest, ugliest, most graceless triumphs of engineering built to cross a river anywhere in the world. It has a magnificence to it, though: it is solid and imperturbable looking, lined with ranks of the five-bulbed egg-lamps that have been a ubiquitous feature of the Chinese landscape since 1949 – and which were probably made in the first factory in the first Chinese soviet ever created. The bridge has four buff concrete towers, two at each end, with triple-flamed beacons on top; and on the landward side of each of these, two collections of heroic statues, one in memory of those who built the bridge, the other in honour of all of those who harbour socialist sympathies around the world.
Until I read the inscription I was rather puzzled by this second statue. It seemed a little odd to have the entrance to Nanjing memorialized by a very white cement statue of a group of people led by an obviously very black man. He was looking joyous and defiant and – given the hearty (although heartily denied) Chinese dislike for their black brethren – very irrelevant. Or certainly discordant. There was a woman running a food stall on the other side of the road: I asked her what she thought.
‘Of what?’ she grunted. ‘That statue? Wonderful, I think.’ But what, I pressed, of having a black man leading the group? She squinted up at it, disbelief written over her face.
‘Black? Black? My word – yes! I suppose he is. Would you believe I never noticed. Working on this very spot night and day for the last eight years. Eight years! I know those statues like my own bed. It never occurred to me that man might be black. Of course I can see he is now. He couldn't be anything else.’
And she wrinkled her nose, as if there was a nasty smell in the air. Which, this being Nanjing – producer of lead, zinc, dolomite, iron, televisions, cars, clocks, watches and, to judge from the huge flames I could see gushing up from refinery towers all around, petroleum products in abundance – there probably was. Time was when Nanjing was the world's great producer of a soft silk called pongee: this, not an industry known for its smell, has now all but vanished.
Building the bridge had been extraordinarily difficult. The Yangtze is for most of its length an almost impossible river for an engineer to deal with – it is very fast, very deep, it is given to eccentric turbulences and cruel unpredictability, and it rises and falls to a degree that most bridge foundations would find fatally punishing. In Nanjing, the range of water levels is particularly complicated, for not only is the river narrow enough for the outflow to vary hugely with the seasons, but it is also close enough to the sea for the effects of tides to be noticed still. (They say you can feel these effects as far away as Datong, a full 350 miles upstream, though the ocean's practical effects on shipping are of no real importance above Wuhu, 289 miles from the ocean. And it is here at Nanjing, 50 miles below Wuhu, where the river is said to start being properly tidal.)
The Yangtze at Nanjing is on average eighteen feet higher in July than it is in January; and at high tide it is nearly four feet higher than that – so the buttresses and columns designed to support the 20,000-foot-long, twin-deck, four-lane-roadway-above-two-track-railway* bridge have to withstand the river's current, the sea's tides, the estuary's bores and a range in water height that is unknown on any river elsewhere on the planet.
The problem was first approached in 1958, when the Chinese realized that they must end the nonsense and delay of having to use ferryboats to get their railway passengers and freight across the great river. The Russians, masters of river bridging at the time, were asked for advice, and then assistance – they eventually agreed to provide a design, as well as technical help and the right kind of steel. But shortly thereafter political relations with Moscow went into a tailspin and their engineers were hauled back home – insisting anyway that no bridge could be constructed over so wide and wayward a river for at least another three hundred miles upstream.
They hadn't realized just who they were talking to. The China of the late 1950s was a country intoxicated with the madness of her Great Leap Forward, a people suffused with a barely rational pride and determination, and a nation whose technical institutes were filled with engineers who insisted they could manage the building of this bridge, however difficult, quite alone. It took them eight years, and it required the total reorganization of the Chinese steel industry to provide the necessary bars and girders. But they did it. At the end of 1968, when the whole world was in the midst of revolutionary ferment and when China was starting her own, the Yangtze First Bridge was formally and proudly opened. The Chinese way, it must have seemed back then, was capable of achieving almost anything: the bridge may be ugly and graceless, but it works, and thus far it has shown few signs that it is about to fall down.
I had the address of one man in Nanjing, an Italian who worked for a truck-assembly joint venture and who had lived in the same hotel in fact the same hotel room – for the previous eight years. I telephoned him. ‘Come immediately, prontissimo!’ he demanded, and he gave me the address of the Jinling Hotel, thirty-six storeys, locally owned and, by all standards, a five-star establishment. It was in the centre of town, at the junction of four avenues each named Zhong Shan (North, South and so on), in honour of Sun Yat-sen.
Every town in China has something – a main street, a boulevard, an esplanade, a mighty building, a bund – that is named after Sun Yat-sen: Zhong Shan is the Mandarin rendering of a name that is essentially romanized Cantonese – the Christian, Western-educated Father of Modern China having been, in an irony that most Chinese would prefer to forget, a Southerner. For Nanjing to have four streets named after the great man is no surprise: it was in this city that he set up his first capital, and it is on the outskirts of this city that, after his death in 1925 at only fifty-nine, he was buried. The mausoleum, tricked out in pale blue tile, is probably the city's principal place of pilgrimage – a place of respectful comfort for the mainlanders, though for the more raucous Taiwanese who visit it has recently become a kind of Oriental Graceland, a shrine to another fallen king, and every bit as vulgar, and its souvenir stalls and hawkers, as the grave in Tennessee.
Giancarlo was standing alone in the Jinling's vast marble lobby when we arrived. He was a tall Turinese in his early sixties, with grey hair like wire wool, big teeth discoloured by years of smoking strong Craven ‘A' cigarettes and a nose as big as a small rodent. He wore a loudly checked sports jacket and a yellow cravat. He had the booming and eternally genial voice of an expatriate who was happy tonight because, for one marginally less tedious evening than most, he was about to meet a fellow wanderer, someone who might know the name of his country's latest prime minister or some news from the FIFA Cup or the Tour de France, and who might join him later for an espresso or a glass of grappa – of which, he added, he had ample supplies in his room.
“Ow are you, Meester Simmon?’ he boomed from twenty paces. ‘I 'ave cheap room for you. I also 'ave deener, which I, Giancarlo, will cook for you. You come now, please, immediate, immediate. You will drop your bags 'ere. Giancarlo will look after everything. You will 'ave wonderful time, yes?’
Eight years in the same hotel room in China can do strange things to a man. Giancarlo Barolo had clearly gone a little mad: after years in which his natural Piedmontese exuberance had been dismissed as eccentricity and had struck few sparks in either the hotel or his office, he decided to go for broke, to play his role as caricature. So he now swept waitresses off their feet and planted blizzards of tiny kisses on their cheeks, he rushed wildly into kitchens throwing startled Chinese chefs away from their woks and commandeering the stoves himself, he complained loudly about wines and demanded his own, he sat down with startled lone foreign businessmen to enjoy, if briefly, their company, he made endlessly long telephone calls to distant half-forgotten friends around the world, and each night at nine – this night being no different – he retired to his double room, which is furnished with a few paintings and carpets, and listened to Verdi and Rossini, and tried to forget.
Before I met him on this journey, it had never been entirely clear why he had stayed for so long. He does not speak Chinese, nor does he like China very much. He has no particular loyalty to the truck-making firm he works for, nor has he ambitions for the factory his eight years here have helped create. He loathes banquets, speeches, local food: he has had one marriage and two failed love affairs, and he doubts if he will have another.
Night after night we watched him do his routine – frightening waitresses, dismissing chefs, summoning managers, retching after tasting the local wines – except after sipping one particular Chinese red wine, a merlot, which he claimed was as good as any of the younger Antinoris. We usually said good night to him, exhausted by the performance, no later than nine each night. Behind the bluster and the braggadocio was loneliness, of course: what secret back home had compelled this man to bury himself in the wilds of central China? Who knows, any more than they knew what had really compelled celebrated westerners like the forger-scholar Edmund Backhouse to become a recluse in Beijing, or the botanist Joseph Rock to go on his ceaseless explorations in Yunnan, or the Good Man in Africa to stay for so long and so good in Africa and to choose the expatriate life with its constant frisson of solitary danger? Giancarlo seemed a picture of sadness blanketed in an enigma, but nonetheless living under the guise of being a character, a good chap, knows the scene, old boy, knows simply everyone. He was being laughed at, and knew it, and yet was unable, despite his good humour, to laugh back.
But he had a certain wisdom, and he knew Nanjing well, which is why I had sought him out. The bluster irritated me: I wanted him to be serious for a moment. He obliged one evening before dinner, when we were alone. We talked about Shanghai, a city he disliked with a passion. I said how it seemed to me unique in being a city that didn't have any real history, that it was a city without roots of any substance, except for those few years when it was a fishing village and the brief period when it was inhabited by noisy and truculent foreigners.
‘This is very different, you know,’ he replied. ‘Here is nothing else but history, you know,’ he said. ‘Nanjing is a little like your Irish city, Belfast is it? Looks new on the surface – all this gleeter, like this hotel, the shops, the pretty girls. It looks like Hong Kong, yes? But below is very different, you can feel it when you stay here long. The people here are all trapped by their city's past. And very bad past it has had. Sadder than most places. The people here look as if they have forgotten, but in fact they never can. They are very old-fashioned people. Very conservative. So very different from Shanghai.
‘You say you are going up the Yangtze and seeing if you can go backward in time? Well, coming here you have stepped back a hundred years. At least. Maybe getting on for four hundred years, back to the end of the Ming. It may not look like it. But you have. Like a living museum, Nanjing. This is why I don't like it – and at the same time it is perhaps why I do like it too. Italy is much the same in some ways. Great cities are often trapped by their past – particularly when it is a past filled with tragedy. I find that not good, and yet very good. It makes the people keep their feet on the ground. Shanghai – I spit at it! Hateful place! Here – well, there is something I like, just a bit.’
And that was as near as he came to offering an explanation. Lily came in just then, and the moment was gone. Giancarlo winked at me, stood up and kissed her noisily, and began his routine. He bellowed at the waiter: ‘This garbage, you are calling it chicken? I, Giancarlo, will come cook something good for my friends. They will not eat this rubbish food. So you please, most kind, get out of my way, prontissimo!’
I had come to Nanjing armed with an old Japanese guidebook, and I had done so very much on purpose.
Not long after Karl Baedeker and John Murray had uncovered the delights of Europe and published them in pocket-sized compendiums in Leipzig and London, so a Japanese nobleman, Baron Gotō – and for far less amiable reasons – began to do much the same for Asia, in Tokyo. By today's standards Gotō was not a very laudable figure: he was a keen believer in Japan's right to expand and to rule the lesser peoples of Asia, he had been a fairly brutal civil administrator of Formosa during her early years as a Japanese colony, and he had come to China to run the South Manchurian Railway. But his colonial attitudes aside (and what Briton can decry colonial attitudes?), he did inspire editors and writers to produce excellent guidebooks. The small red volumes published between 1908 and 1920 under the colophon of the Imperial Japanese Government Railways remain masterly.
Not, however, just as guides. Certainly, on one level the books offer hugely detailed, highly accurate, prettily designed and compact tours d‘horizon – they remain undeniably useful, even nearly a century on. But they also offer, unwittingly – and this is why I had decided to stuff them into my rucksack back in New York – an unexpected window on the Japanese mind, a revealing look at the way that Japan then regarded her neighbour states across the sea. Each of the books deals in detail with peoples (Koreans, Manchurians, Formosans and, most particularly, the Chinese) whom the Japanese considered then, and perhaps still consider today, to be amusing, colourful, interesting – but grossly inferior. Given time, Japanese readers of these volumes must have thought, each would be ripe for the plucking.
I had with me Volume IV. Its chapter on Nanjing can be seen, in hindsight, as offering the first lip-smacking, appetite-whetting accounts of a city that the Japanese were soon to brutalize like few others, anywhere. Baron Gotōs tidy little book must have seemed to the sterner souls in the Japanese army rather like a menu card in a fancy Roppongi restaurant: oh come ye sons of Nippon, some might have heard its siren call, and feast yourselves on this! Beneath the come-hither of it all, a sneering tone is audible, if faintly.
Encircled by these cyclopean walls, the city has been planned on a most magnificent scale, no unworthy capital of a great empire… Before the coming of the Taiping rebels there existed tolerably good roads and drainage… The Taipings made dreadful havoc everywhere and scarcely anything had been done by way of repairs, until the recent introduction of the new regime… which is now making roads and repairing the drainage, burning up all the garbage and filth. Carp and mandarin-fish are caught in the Yangtze-kiang, and are of a very fine flavour. The Flower Boats in the Chin-hwai-ho contain chairs, tables and quilts, food and liquor as well as singing girls… There is a club, the Hwa-Ying, established by the Japanese and Chinese together.
Such was the beguiling image of Nanjing – pools filled with succulent carp, boatfuls of pretty flower girls, a walled capital of great beauty – in the autumn and early winter of 1937. It was a treasure that such unworthies as mere Chinese should not be allowed to keep. Japan's ambitions in China – which she had stoutly denied throughout her annexation of Manchuria, and her installation of Pu Yi as the puppet emperor – were by now nakedly apparent. In July she had instigated the Marco Polo Bridge incident, which many see as the true origin of the Pacific War. By August she was occupying Beijing and Tianjin. In November she landed troops in Hangzhou Bay, and she took Shanghai with extraordinary violence but without so much as an official murmur from the League of Nations, the spokesman for the outside world; and now, come December, her soldiers were racing towards Nanjing, which for the past ten years had been the capital of the Chinese Republic.
Chiang Kai-shek was wily enough to know what would happen. He fled up along the Yangtze to Wuhan and Chongqing, declaring each a new capital in turn. Foreign ambassadors did much the same, pleading not unreasonably that they needed to be wherever the nation's heads of state and government presided and resided. Only the ragged remains of Chiang's Nanjing garrison, together with a few hundred foreigners and half a million wretched civilians, were left to face the music. Chiang had left Nanjing, the city that Baron Gotōs writers had called, in their oily way, ‘one of the most interesting in China’, in the hands of an incompetent scoundrel of a general, a former warlord. And he fled too, when six divisions, containing 120,000 well-trained Japanese soldiers, began to bear down on the walls of his city.
The battle for the land south of the Yangtze was well fought: Chinese soldiers in Jiangyin and Zhenjiang fought bravely, but hopelessly. The tanks and field pieces and planes of the Japanese advanced along the river's right bank, day by ghastly day. By 6 December 1937 their troops were surrounding Nanjing on three sides – and the river that streamed below the city walls on the fourth, the west side, was about to be crossed by General Matsui Iwane's soldiers, who were also advancing on the river's left bank.
Mitsubishi bombers began to pound the city nightly: casualties were terrible. But the Chinese, even leaderless, fought on doughtily. Japanese losses rose stubbornly. There was hand-to-hand fighting in the suburbs – down where Lily and I had driven, where I had knocked the young woman from her bicycle – soldiers from the armies of the two competing tiger-states had fought with bayonets and bare hands, the victims broken and dying amid the rubble and the backyard paddies. One unit of the Chinese Army did manage to break out from within the walls which were, at 21 miles long, 40 feet high, and dating from the Ming dynasty, at the time one of the grandest sets of city walls to be found anywhere in China, a wonder of the Eastern world – and do battle with the onrushing armies. But it was all, inevitably, to no avail.
On the evening of Monday 13 December 1937 General Matsui entered through the great eastern gates of Nanjing's wall and proceeded to unleash one of the most horrifying episodes of soldierly excess in modern times. It has since become known as the Rape of Nanking – but rape was only a part of it. This was cruelty on an epic scale, the settling of unspoken scores and the uncollaring of decades of blind hatred, one race for the other.
Thousands tried first to flee across the river, to swim to safety. But the river in December is cold and swirling with residual autumn currents, and the pace of the swimmers was slow: machine-gunners raked them with bullets, and hundreds, maybe thousands, drowned. One Japanese, Masuda Rokusuke, reckoned later he had shot five hundred, at least. But after this, as terrible an atrocity as it would have been alone, the Japanese turned their attention to the hundreds of thousands who remained behind.
They performed a formal gate-opening ceremony and then commenced their butchery. Katazukeru was one word for it: tidying up. Shori – treatment – was another. Missionaries and doctors and foreign businessmen and women stood in horror as the terror unfolded and then went on and on and on, for six terrible weeks. Japanese soldiers treated the soldiers and civilians they had pinioned in Nanjing as animals, available for every act of barbarism and butchery it is possible to imagine. The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal said later that 200,000 men were slaughtered, and 20,000 women raped.
Children were used for bayonet practice. Women were raped repeatedly by dozens of soldiers standing in line, one after another. Old people were buried alive. Contests were held to see how many heads could be cut off with a single sword blade – the winner claimed 106, and his victory made headlines in the Tokyo press. Women had sharpened bamboo poles thrust deep into their vaginas. Men were lashed between the poles of bullock carts and made to pull away booty looted from the stores, then shot or burned to death. The Japanese hacked and sliced and filleted and butchered and battered and burned their way through an unprotected civilian people. They lined them up and machine-gunned them to death. They herded them into ruined buildings and doused them with paraffin and torched them. They humiliated them in every way imaginable, and most unimaginable ways as well.
Soldiers staked their victims out on the wrecked ground and knifed them and raped them and then took snapshots of one another doing so, and sent the films off to shops in Shanghai to be developed and sent back home to Japan to demonstrate how they had ‘taught the Chinese a thing or two’. They did what they did with swagger and brute pride: they had caught the Chinese, from whose loins they had once sprung, and taken them down a peg or two, or more. They had brought the mighty Celestials low, had showed them who were the masters now.
Lily and I spent a stunned afternoon wandering around the museum to this horror show. Its compound is in a distant suburb, and its buildings are ugly, though better maintained than most state-funded operations. There is a rock garden, with names of victims, and a large concrete building with an inscription over the main entrance: Victims, 300,000. There are sandboxes filled with skulls and bones, said to be those of murdered and tortured Chinese.
The Massacre Museum was built not to demonstrate a horror that must never be permitted to happen again, but, according to a notice on the wall, ‘to commemorate the victory of the Chinese people in the anti-Japanese war… to educate the people… to promote friendship between the Japanese and Chinese people…’ Lily and I were as dazed and quiet as all the others who came, even though the tour buses from which they spilled made us think they would be noisy and would behave like tourists, gawking and insensitive. Instead, everyone came here well prepared to be shocked, and they saw it all, and they duly were. Rooms after rooms of black-and-white pictures (not grainy or out of focus or the hasty work of surreptitious spies, but well-posed, well-composed studies) – snaps, for the wife and children back in Sapporo and Kagoshima and Tokyo – of man behaving with the utmost incivility and depravity towards his fellow man… and woman.
One of the display cabinets held a roll call of the International Relief Committee, a body set up in a hurry in response to the terrible happenings. There was John Rabe of Siemens, J. M. Hanson from the Texas Oil Company, J. V. Pickering of Standard Vacuum, Ivor Mackay from Swires, the Rev. W. P. Mills of the Presbyterian Mission, E. Sperling of the Shanghai Insurance Company – such comfortable, suburban names, having to deal with such horrors. They set up a number of encampments that they called ‘safety zones’,* where terrified civilians could take sanctuary from the marauders. But time and again the Japanese stormed into the zones anyway and took young men away, adding them to the steadily rising toll of victims. Afterwards the committee members wrote a report; nine years later they gave evidence to the War Crimes Tribunal. They did their best: but against the awful power of the Japanese army, it was little enough.
And against the awful power of Japanese disbelief, their story still has not been properly told in Japan itself. For years there was no mention of it; history books spoke not a word of the atrocities, and merely praised Japan's action in ultimately liberating Asian countries from foreign – or rather, Western – domination. School history books spoke of the Japanese Army's ‘advances' into China, rather than its ‘invasion’. The terrible happenings in Nanjing were summarized with surgical succinctness: ‘In December Japanese troops occupied Nanjing. At this time [explains a footnote] Japanese troops were reported to have killed many Chinese, including civilians, and Japan was the target of international criticism.’
As late as 1991, senior Japanese officials were insisting that the story of the Rape of Nanking was all invention, that spiteful and humiliated Chinese were telling lies to besmirch the reputation of their innocent neighbour. Only in 1995 did a Japanese prime minister make a first formal apology: but there was still plenty of opposition to his doing so, and scepticism continues among many Japanese that they might be capable of such a thing.
The museum – which has captions in Japanese, and a book of condolence and a room where Japanese visitors could leave their gifts and their apologies – was in the process of expanding. There were cranes and backhoes all around, piles of gravel, bags of cement. More sculptures are being added in the garden, more rooms being built above and below ground, the further to remind the world of what happens when a people goes mad for blood.
There was a small cinema in the complex, and every few minutes a film was shown. One might think that a film of a massacre would merely appeal to a voyeuristic streak in all our natures; but watching the Chinese – and a few Japanese, amazingly – who sat on those hard metal chairs and watched in rapt and sad attention the images of life being squeezed and burned and choked and stabbed out of so. many victims, I felt that it was something else, something very different from mere voyeurism, that had brought them all there. There was a sense of shame, a sense of awful incredulity, that man might be capable of such things.
There was a sense, too, undeniable, that in their attitude to the Chinese, the Japanese were somehow different. True, they were cruel beyond belief to the alien others with whom they dealt in the Pacific War – to the Burmese, the Filipinos, the Malays, the Americans and the British. But to the Chinese it was always much, much worse. They were terrible to the Koreans: they were pathologically inhuman to the Chinese, and the Chinese never have forgotten, and never will forget.
Yet it was not as if the Rape was the end of the atrocities in Nanjing. The Japanese did something far more terrible for the next six years, in a compound only half a mile from our hotel.
For some years it has been known that the Japanese occupation troops in China had set up a huge biological experimentation camp at a place called Pingshan, near Harbin in Manchuria. I had been there once: it had been called Unit 731, and what was left of it, in the squalid outskirts of a cold and windy industrial town, was a most unutterably depressing place. There was a small museum among the coal heaps, showing photographs of some of the victims who had been experimented upon, who had been given ghastly diseases while they were still alive, and observed in the throes of their agonizing deaths. The fields where women had been crucified naked and left soaked in winter to freeze and have their frostbitten limbs plunged later into boiling water were still there. The stakes to which men were tied while bombs containing typhus bacilli were exploded near them, they remained as well. Tables where men had been injected with gasoline, or horse urine, or prussic acid, and where children had been dissected alive… The Japanese, commanded by a man named Ishii, had not regarded their prisoners as humans at all – they called them maruta, logs of wood. And on a wooden log you may perform any indignity you like.
Shortly before I left for the Yangtze a new book was published, telling in great detail the story of another camp, but this time in Nanjing. Called Unit Ei 1644, it was commanded by a general named Masuda Tomosada. It was just as terrible a place as Pingshan, set down next to an old hospital on Zhong Shan Road East, close to the old Ming Palace, which was then and still is now a museum. Of the Japanese compound – the ten-foot walls, electrified fences, a four-storey research annexe – there remains no evidence. Lily and I went to the exact address, but all we found was a shopping arcade and a car showroom. There was a black Rolls-Royce car on display, a 1993 Silver Spur. The salesman was asking for three million yuan – but warned that taxes would amount to another million, at the very least. ‘I have been trying to sell it for a year. Business is a little slow. I can't say why.’
The Rolls-Royce in China was known as a Lao-si Lai-si, its closest phonetic equivalent. There were two others in the city, the salesman said, one owned by the head of Nanjing Petrochemical Corporation, the other parked in the basement of our hotel. But perhaps if I wasn't interested in the Rolls-Royce, I might care for a Ferrari? I asked if he knew that he was selling his cars on the site of an old Japanese death camp, and all he said was that in Japan ‘they have many of these cars. Very rich people, the Japanese.’
Next door Lily ran into a man she knew from the time she lived in Nanjing. He ran a hairdressing salon, his own business, and he was doing very well. He had no idea that he was blow-drying and coiffing where once Japanese technicians had murdered scores of people, all in the so-called interests of biological science. He shuddered theatrically. ‘Their hair is very different from ours. You can always tell a Japanese girl by her haircut. Much neater. Much tidier.’
The Japanese had also been tidy in the way they organized their camp. They had called the captured citizens of the Chinese capital zaimoku – lumber – and no indignity was too great for them either. The ‘lumber storage unit' was on the top floor of the research building. Prisoners, brought to what they had thought was a prison hospital, were fed copiously and nutritiously in a refectory on the floor below as they were prepared for the coming experiments. Then they were taken upstairs to what the guards called ‘the rooms that did not open’. White-coated technicians were brought in to the room – interpreters told the prisoners that they were doctors, would give them injections to cure their ailments. But the injections were of bizarrely horrific substances, with names as sinister-sounding as their effects: nitrile prussiate, cyanide hydric, arsen-ite, acetone, crystallized blowfish poison, and the distilled venoms of cobras, habu snakes and a vile reptile called an amagasu. The scientists watched unemotionally as the victims choked and screamed towards paralysis and spasm, and in most cases, death. If not dead by chemicals, then – since they were now hopelessly contaminated and useless for further work – by a bullet in the head, and quick incineration in the camp furnace.
The Japanese bred fleas in Nanjing, too, which they infected with a variety of bacilli and had released in distant parts of China, experimenting once again on the possible effectiveness of biological warfare. They manufactured phials of anthrax and plague and paratyphoid, all designed to be used in poisoning wells and rivers. Plague was proudly referred to as a Nanjing speciality.
The experiments continued for six years. The Zhong Shan East Road camp had been set up on 18 April 1939 as the Central China Anti-Epidemic Water Supply Unit. It was closed, in a frantic hurry, in the early days of August 1945. The remaining ‘lumber' was murdered and burned. The files were destroyed, the buildings were levelled. General Masuda fled home to Japan. He was detained by the Americans and, it has subsequently been revealed, he exchanged the information he had on this grotesque biology for immunity from prosecution. None of those involved in this terrible trade were tried: the world may have loathed what they had done, but eagerly accepted the data from all their terrible tests. It was one of the uglier examples of the end retroactively justifying the means – particularly since the means were carried out by Orientals, and not by those living in the supposedly civilized West.
General Masuda died when his motorcycle hit a truck east of Tokyo, in 1952. He is remembered a little among the old people of Nanjing; but it goes without saying that neither he, nor any other Japanese, is missed.
But as to why all these things happened – no one then or since has come up with any kind of acceptable answer.
As Lily came away from the film at the Massacre Museum she said she had found it difficult to breathe, she was so horrified. Her chest had tightened in a way she had never experienced before.
‘Why did they kill all those civilians, those innocent people? Why couldn't they just kill the Chinese soldiers? There seems to have been no point in it! I really cannot bring myself to like the Japanese, you know.’ The gifts in a glass cabinet – plastic flowers, a child's painting, bottles of sake – seemed to her tawdry, puny, and not sincere enough. Only one thing cheered her: the surrender table, which had a room to itself, and around which Chiang Kai-shek had made the Japanese sit on child-sized chairs, so that their stature appeared as diminished as they deserved.
I asked her about the grudging, half-hearted apologies that had been occasionally wrested from the Japanese, now that the war has faded somewhat by time. She thought for a moment.
‘I cannot believe we will not meet them again one day. I think one day they will have to answer for what they did. They were powerful then. But we are becoming more so now. We will get our own back for all this, I think. I hope.’ have heard Chinese say many times that they believe that if they ever do go to war, serious war, it will one day be against the Japanese, against the detested ‘little people’. From the strength of feeling in Nanjing, a feeling that is so strong and palpable it infects the very air, I can well believe it. One day, the city seems to be constantly murmuring, we will teach those little people a lesson.
Outside what remains of the city's western wall is a small stream, polluted now, but still overhung with the sycamores shipped in from France. It leads into the Yangtze itself, disgorging beside an island where the port has been built, and from which the Yangtze steamers leave. I had bought tickets on an evening boat upriver: we made our way along the little stream, which is called the Chin-huai, and tried hard to conjure up memories of this as one of China's epicentres of erotic delight.
For the Chin-huai was where the famous flower boats were moored. They had lovely names – Lady Sincerity, Laughing Peach Blossom, Singing Fragrance, Iris Pavilion. Some were large – ten yards long, and with room for parties. Most were tiny, with room for only one singsong girl, and for her customer.
On a summer's evening you might stroll northward under the trees as we were doing now, the city walls looming to the right, the sentries patrolling silently up above, the ships' sirens echoing mournfully from the great river nearby. Moored in the stream would be the little boats, a paper lantern lit in the stern of each and, underneath and dressed in bright silks, the singsong girl herself. She would have a fan on which were written the names of the songs she could perform: you would pay one hundred copper cash for her to perform three of these, in her high-pitched voice, while two old men would provide strings and timps. There would be a low bed, a kang, and if you liked each other you could hire her entire boat for the evening, on payment of just four Mexican silver dollars, the currency of the time. The old men would be dismissed; standing forlorn on the riverbanks they would cast you off, after which you would drift downriver while the girl sang more songs for you, and then gently extinguished the paper lantern with a brief puff from between her delicate lips…
I was awakened from this pleasant reverie by a Chinese soldier. He had a submachine-gun slung over his shoulder and was demanding to see my passport. We had reached the end of the Chin-huai stream, and the area ahead, on the far side of a crudely built brick wall, was controlled by the military. But only very informally: after I had shown my documents, I was waved through, and within minutes a group of sailors who were working stacking sandbags – for everyone was expecting the Yangtze to flood, as the radio had warned of excessively rapid snowmelt up near the headwaters, in Tibet – stopped and offered me tea. Their official task, they explained, was to guard a boat that was used by Party leaders whenever they came to Nanjing. Chairman Mao had used it many times on the river: perhaps I might like to see it?
I had to walk along a dangerous arrangement of planks balanced on breeze blocks, because all the normal entranceways to the dock were flooded: the river was rising very fast now, and ports upstream were reporting damage, warning that some dykes were in danger of breaking. Mao's pleasure palace is called the Jiang Han 56 – the Han River No. 56 – though in Mao's time it had been called The East Is Red Number One. For nearly twenty years it had been his private yacht. He first used it when he swam in the Yangtze in 1956. He would do so again ten years later in an act that – as a sign of his rebellion against the wishes of the Party elders – essentially signalled the start of the Cultural Revolution.
It was not a pretty boat, and it was furnished poorly, though the stained sofas looked comfortably roomy. There was a lot of chrome and moulded plastic. The wood furnishings reminded me of those you would see on the set of a low-budget sixties television show – Dick Van Dyke's living room sprang to mind, or Mr Wilson's house in Dennis the Menace. A clock, broken, had sun-ray spikes. The main lounge had one of its walls entirely covered with the kind of wallpaper you used to be able to buy in cheap Scandinavian shops, a blown-up photograph of life-sized birch trees offering the illusion of being beside a forest. On another wall was a picture of Bora Bora.
In every room soldiers lay asleep in their underwear, though they got up and saluted groggily when I looked in. One of them, an officer, showed me the cabin where Fidel Castro had once stayed and said Kim Il Sung had been aboard many times. He then took me to a larger room occupied for a week by the Ceauşescus. I doubt if they had much fun. Mao's private stateroom, across the corridor, had a pair of giant armchairs and a huge bed, but little else. The kitchens were dirty, with bamboo buckets full of rice, and thermos flasks waiting to be filled with hot water for tea. Perhaps it had been more luxurious when Mao was its Great Helmsman: today it hardly looked suited for its role as China's royal yacht.
I had one final mission in Nanjing. I had left it until last in deference to what I thought were Lily's increasingly strident nationalist sympathies. Close to where the evening steamer was due to depart was, I had been told, a memorial marking the site of the city's – and perhaps of China's – greatest political humiliation. It had taken place in August 1842. Although this rather accelerated the pace of my backward progress through history (so far in voyaging from Shanghai I had passed back sixty years, to 1937, which was roughly what I had expected), I had always known that this was going to happen: the historical aspect of this journey was only approximate, at best. And while I felt reasonably comfortable in paying only slight attention here to the Nanking Incident of 1927, and the Taiping Rebellion of the 1860s, it was impossible to ignore either the Japanese assault of 1937 or, as in this last excursion, the signing of the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. I told Lily this is what I wanted to see. ‘Oh my God,’ she wailed. ‘Your bloody British Empire again!’
The memorial was tucked away off a side street, not far from the old British Embassy (which is now a seedy two-star hotel and from where a local businessman was trying to sell debentures in a new golf club, at $20,000 apiece). It is in a tiny temple known as the Jing Hui Shi, which was made famous five centuries before when Cheng Ho, the country's most famous explorer, stayed there before he took off on his famous sailing trip to Mogadishu.* It is now called simply the Nanjing Treaty Museum, and it is looked after by an elderly lady named Mrs Chen.
‘How nice to see a foreigner here,’ she said chirpily when I walked in, banging my head on the low doorway. ‘Even the British are welcome here now. This is all just – history.’ She took two yuan from me, and made as if to add some further comment, but whispered that she would say it later. She picked up the telephone and spoke in a low voice to someone on the other end.
The treaty was signed on 29 August 1842, in the captain's cabin on the man-of-war HMS Cornwallis, moored a quarter of a mile offshore. It had come about after British soldiers, fresh from a military success in Zhenjiang, from where we had just come, had established themselves in a commanding position outside the Nanjing city walls. That was 5 August: the local Qing dynasty leadership – charged with plenipotentiary permissions from the Emperor Daoguang's court in Beijing – agreed to negotiate. A seasoned diplomat named Sir Henry Pottinger had been appointed by Lord Palmerston to negotiate for the British and bring to an end the two years of tiresome skirmishing that have since been dignified as the First Opium War. (His predecessor, Charles Elliot, had been summarily sacked by Palmerston for a variety of supposed offences – one being his choice of settling in Hong Kong, which the British prime minister described scathingly, and with a stunning lack of prescience, as merely ‘a barren island with hardly a house upon it’.)
At the beginning of the second week of August, Sir Henry Pottinger entered the little Jing Hui temple and seated himself at a hastily set-up conference table. On the other side, resplendent in his purple robes and scarlet-buttoned cap, was a Manchu mandarin named Qiyang. For two weeks these two, and their attendant advisers and translators, worked out an agreement that would change China's history for all time. The resulting treaty would force the Celestials to open themselves up to commerce with the barbarians – a term that was formally used in this treaty, and would be for another ten years. It would also begin the dismemberment of the Chinese nation – and spark the wider ambitions of the still slumbering island-nation nearby.
The Treaty's full text, written in elegant calligraphy, can be read on one of the walls of the small museum. Any visiting Chinese – and there are not many visitors at all, so tiny and tucked away is the place (I found it odd that they keep it open at all) – may read all of the twelve clauses, and realize how humiliating it must have been then, and how eager the Chinese are to rid themselves of the humiliation today.
The second clause was the most unpalatable of all. ‘The island of Hong Kong shall be possessed in perpetuity by Her Majesty Queen Victoria and her successors, and shall be ruled as they see fit.’ There were other matters: five treaty ports to be opened, $21 million to be paid in compensation for burned opium and other indignities,* the establishment of a customs service with fair duties levied on goods, the formal abandonment of phrases like ‘petition' and ‘beg' in all further communications between the two courts. But they were as nothing compared to the savagery of having to give up an island, part of the most ancient empire on earth. It was a bitter pill for Daoguang to swallow then. Over subsequent years other morsels fell to other nations – Manchuria and Liaoning and Shandong and even the Summer Palace in Beijing itself, and the bitterness and isolation of China increased, and she retreated to her lonely contemplation of nobler times of old, and of her hopes of nobler times to come.
Mrs Chen came up to us, telling Lily to stop tutting and clicking her tongue. ‘It is not this man's fault,’ she said, kindly, looking at me. ‘Besides –’ only she was interrupted by a bespectacled, cheerful-looking old man who introduced himself as Professor Wang, director of the Nanjing Relics Bureau.
‘Besides, Mrs Chen,’ he said, drawing himself up for a lecture, ‘all this humiliation is about to be ended now – isn't it? Now we have almost everything back. Manchuria is ours again. Shandong was taken back from the Germans. The Russians were kicked out. So were the Japanese – the hateful Japanese. The Portuguese are leaving Macau.
‘Now all that remains are you people, the British. And very soon now you will go. Your Mrs Thatcher knew that she could not defend the Pottinger treaty. She knew that Hong Kong could not be held for ever. So you are having to give up and go home.
‘Once you have done that we will have all of China back. Maybe Taiwan, too. It will be a glorious day for us. Then the treaty signed here will just be a relic – of no importance. People will not forget. But they will never let it happen again.’
Professor Wang let that sink in, then smiled broadly at Lily, sighed with pleased relief and suggested that Mrs Chen pour us all cups of tea. ‘Now we must be friends. But equal friends. Not like before. We Chinese are at least the equal of you now, don't you agree? At the very least, equal.’
We waited in the gathering gloom for our 9 p.m. boat to Jiujiang, and other points upstream. Kathleen, an American woman I knew vaguely who taught at one of the universities in Nanjing, had come to see us off. She was from Connecticut and was in love with China, didn't much want to go home. She taught English to a class of about forty students. That day they had been reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
I had been telling her of the conversation with Professor Wang, and I remarked that he – like many Chinese these days – seemed to have been much more candid with me, much more forceful and direct than used to be the case. Perhaps, I said, he was displaying something of the country's new self-confidence, a new belief in itself.
‘I'm not so sure,’ she said. Some things were still only discussed behind veils, she went on, were talked about only with great embarrassment. Sex, for instance.
‘Only today it happened. I have a student called Nancy, twenty-one, beautiful, perfect English. I had asked her to précis the book. She got to the bit where Alec D'Urberville rapes Tess when she is sleeping in the wood. The rape that led to the child, near the start of the story. Well, Nancy was telling the class how Alec had taken her for a ride, how they had gotten lost, how they had to stop in the wood.
‘Nancy paused in the story here. “And then?” I asked. She blushed. She didn't want to say it. And then finally she came out with it.
“‘Alec,” she said, “was then very rude to her.”
‘I was amazed, for a moment. Then I asked her what she meant – rude? But she wouldn't say, and just hung her head. That wasn't rude that was rape! I yelled. I suppose I was a bit too American about it – trying to force the issue. But she wouldn't talk about it, and nor would anyone else in the class.’
Lily said: ‘That's Nanjing for you – very conservative place. Very conservative people.’
‘I'll say,’ said Kathleen. ‘It was even worse when I started talking about homosexuality. I thought I'd go for broke. I told them it exists everywhere – in China as well as everywhere else. I told them there were gay prostitutes on the pedestrian bridge near the Shin Jie gate, near your hotel. They just wouldn't believe it.
‘They said that there are hardly any homosexuals in China, and that I wasn't to import my ideas about them, please.’
Lily stood up. ‘We must get on board now,’ she said. Her mood, changeable at the best of times, had suddenly hardened. I was afraid I knew what was coming.
‘The students are right, you know,’ she said. ‘There really is no homosexuality here – except for some ill people. It is a disease, a mental disease. Something that can be cured. It is quite disgusting. Americans allow it. We do not. I can't blame them for not wanting to talk about it.
‘But Tess and the rape. That's different. That's just Nanjing people. Nancy was a very typical girl. People in Shanghai wouldn't feel the same. Rape is a very sensitive subject here. I am sure you both know that.’
The boat's siren sounded. Thanks be, I muttered to myself. The last thing I wanted to be caught in the midst of was a fight between a stridently and vocally modern American woman and my tough-as-nails companion. The Clash of Two Civilizations had nothing on a full-blown argument between these two. I said my farewells to Kathleen, who rolled her eyes heavenward. Lily and I joined the throng, feeding ourselves into the huge crush of people at the gangplank like a slab of beef going into a mincer.
‘Soldiers go first!’ scolded a woman guard, harshly. That was always the way: Let the Soldiers Pass First, said a notice board. They Make Great Sacrifices for Our Nation.