Considering the immense damage that the British once did to China, and all of it essentially perpetrated in the hot pursuit of tea, it is not too surprising to find that it is well-nigh impossible to get today what most Britons would consider a decent cup of the stuff anywhere in the People's Republic.
You can of course always get Earl Grey at the Portman Hotel in Shanghai, or Lapsang Souchong at the White Swan in Canton – but these are teas imported from India, and they will cost you five dollars a pot. In a city like Jiujiang, once the epicentre of an industry that had half a world bent in mute submission, it is about as pointless to ask for a cup of oolong or keemun or orange pekoe as it would be to demand a plate of scones and clotted cream. The damage that the British did to China's body politic was echoed in the damage they did to her tea business – more so, in truth, because while the former recovered and survived, the latter was more or less done to death.
At the Jiujiang Hotel that night, it not only appeared impossible to get any tea: there also wasn't any food. The boat was late – because of the floods, Captain Wu kept insisting – and we finally disembarked at midnight and found a broken-down taxi. As it limped along with us to what all agreed was the best hotel, we still had high hopes for a substantial dinner. The Jiujiang was after all a spanking new hotel, tricked out impressively in chrome and polished marble. It had fake columns six feet wide, coloured fountains playing outside and in, a doorman who wore the uniform of some steamy Latin republic – a mauve shako, a long heliotrope jacket in velvet with gold epaulettes and the yellow stripes of a master sergeant – and a small battalion of scarlet-coated little girls who stood behind a reception desk so long that the girls at one end had to telephone to speak to colleagues at the other.
‘Welcome to our new Jiujiang Hotel,’ said one of them, as I approached her for rooms. She bowed low. ‘We offer five-star comfort and extreme luxury for all our honoured foreign guests.’ It was a memorized speech, but good. She smiled, and pushed a ‘foreigners' registration form' at me. She tried to give another to Lily, who sniffed haughtily, said something curt, and flashed her Chinese identity card. The girl blushed and handed her instead the much smaller form that Chinese are required to sign. ‘Smaller card, smaller price,’ she said, with a winsome grin. The cost of a room for a Chinese citizen was ten dollars. For me, three times as much.
Right then, I said, as I handed over the deposit money. Food.
‘Oh dear,’ said the girl. She telephoned her friend at the far end of the desk, and both shook their heads as if connected by an invisible string.
‘No food here. All the cooks gone home. They leave at eight, to have their dinner.’
‘Not even a cup of tea?' I wailed, in mock disgust. But I was too tired to argue. They must have seen my dismay, for they kept up a continual bright banter all the time I was checking in, and while the man in the shako wrestled gamely with our two rucksacks, trying and failing repeatedly to load them onto his velveted back.
‘President Jiang Zemin was here last week,’ said the girl, conversationally. I stopped in my tracks.
‘You mean – the president of China?’ I asked. She nodded.
‘He came here, to this hotel?’ I had turned to listen, and I must have looked incredulous, for she nodded vigorously for emphasis.
‘Certainly he did. And you know how much he spent? Four hundred thousand yuan – just two days he was here. Four hundred thousand. Can you believe it?’
I couldn't. Nor could I really believe she was telling me this. This was the kind of information only imparted in whispers in the old days and never, never mentioned to foreigners.
‘Look – I show you the bill we made up.’ She waved a long sheet of paper at me. ‘Bodyguards, secretaries, members of the Central Committee. They took two whole floors. They came in on Tuesday, and they left on Thursday.’
I asked why. Why would the president of the People's Republic come to a tired old one-time tea port halfway up the Yangtze? It wasn't as though he was running for elected office and needed to secure the votes in Jiangxi province (although with more than 25 million of them, they would be handy to have in the event China ever became a democracy).
‘Yes, I can answer that, too,’ replied the girl, eagerly. She would go far, this young woman. She was really good. ‘You know the dam they are building up at Sanxia – the Three Gorges. Well, a million and a quarter people are going to have to move out, you know? President Jiang was here because he wants to suggest to the mayor of Jiujiang that quite a lot of them should move here. To this city. I think it is about two hundred thousand. They will come here in a number of stages. We heard them talking about it weeks ago. Our mayor wasn't sure it was a good idea. So the President came down from Beijing to tell him it was.
‘So they had their talks, and I hear they've decided exactly where they're going to put them, where they're going to live. Beijing's going to give some money to the city to build some houses, over near Binjiang Road, on the Yangtze, on the riverside. Plenty of room there. It'll be good for the city. There's no life here. It'll be good to have a few more people.’
The would-be Nicaraguan master sergeant, who had finally managed to get the two rucksacks over his epaulettes and was perspiring heavily from the effort, ushered us into the lift. I asked the girl why it was that she knew so much, and why she was talking so much. I propped the lift door ajar.
‘The odd thing is – the main owner of this hotel is actually a journalist,’ she said. ‘He used to work for the Renmin Wenbao. He still writes stories, in fact. But he thought it was better to run a hotel. He bought sixty per cent of it. But he talks news all the time. It's part of life here – he makes me take an interest in everyone who comes to stay here. It is much more interesting. You will meet him tomorrow, I think. He will confirm all that I am saying.’
I made notes of this rather unexpected exchange and then climbed into the lumpy bed. No matter how grand hotel reception halls may be in China, the carpets upstairs are always stained and the beds are always lumpy. I was too tired to care: it must have been about one o'clock by the time I fell asleep.
Some time later, however, I was awakened by a noise. There was someone knocking at my door, softly but insistently. I looked at my watch: it was just before two. Well accustomed to the sensual thrills in Eastern hotels that begin with a soft tap from outside, I tiptoed over to the door and with an expectant flourish threw it open.
Two of the reception girls stood there, together with a crisp young man who was wheeling a small trolley laden with food. Lily was standing there too, a towel draped around her. They had, prudently, gone to her room first.
‘They've been to their homes and cooked for us,’ she explained. ‘They thought we looked hungry, and they knew we were disappointed. So look – noodles! beef! beer! These Jiujiang people are wonderful, yes?’
And I had to agree. The young man was in charge of the hotel's food, and he had been telephoned at home. He in turn had roused his mother and asked her to prepare something for two strangers who had come in late from the Nanjing steamer. The girls had set the trays. They would accept no money, and they only apologized that everything had taken so long, and that perhaps they had awakened me.
As they were leaving, one of the girls suddenly made as if she had remembered something, and produced from her pocket a set of utensils wrapped in a napkin.
‘Knife and fork,’ she announced proudly. ‘In case you no good at kuai-zi. Many foreign guests prefer these.’ She gave them to me, bowed slightly and smiled, and then quietly backed out of the door.
On my table were a bowl of wheat noodles, a plate of stir-fried beef and garlic, a small orange, a much ablated bar of gritty Chinese chocolate and a tall bottle of the local beer with its label glued upside-down. There was also, in deference to the plea I thought had gone unheard (and also, I liked to think, in deference to where we were), a pale little bamboo box with a line of four characters that I recognized in an instant: Yun Wu Lu Cha – Lushan Misty Clouds Green Tea. The city's most famous product of old, the seven-times-processed tea, once reserved as a gift for emperors, and still to be found here, even at two in the morning.
Wen Zi-jian, the hotel's owner-manager – who said he had indeed once been a reporter but who was reluctant to explain how on a journalist's salary he had managed to collect enough cash to finance buying part of a hotel – arranged a car for us the next day. He stood alongside his man in the extravagant shako and waved us off. No need to pay the bill now, he said – settle everything when you leave town. He would arrange tickets on the next upstream boat – although perhaps we would like to ride in his car, as he was going to Wuhan himself in a day or so? Mr Wen was a most accommodating man, and his hotel a little gem. But we said no – we preferred to go by ship. We would talk about it over dinner, maybe, when we got back from our excursion to tea country.
The Lushan road began to slope steeply upwards within yards. Jiujiang's suburbs – or at least the untidy mess of thatched huts, army- and police-barrack blocks and filling stations that passes for suburbia in most of China – clung onto the roadside like moss, but soon gave way to fields of corn and huddles of banana palms. Before long the straight road began to wind and then to curve in hairpins as we clawed our way up the side of the mountain. Lily, who said she had never been in a car for more than two hours at a stretch, began to look green, and closed her eyes – a shame, since the clumps of banana trees soon gave way to peach trees in blossom, and to long stands of azalea bushes.
It was easy to see why the Europeans used to flock to Lushan. It had the same kind of appeal as Indian hill stations like Simla, or Ooty, or Kodikanal, or Murree – cool where below is hot, blue where below is brown, crisp where below is soggy, and, above all, somewhat like home where below is wholly like abroad. They had come up here for holidays, and some had built summer homes here – small limestone bungalows with a living room and two bedrooms and a hut outside the scullery where the maid or the amah might stay.
The big companies had built villas here – Chiang Kai-shek had built one too, and named it after his wife, Mei-ling – and most of these are now hotels. There are sanatoriums, where the old or the sick can take advantage of the cool, clear air; and there is a botanical garden, designed by a Briton in 1934, and brimming with an orderly wilderness of around four thousand kinds of native plants. And there are the memorable views and sights – the peaks up on the Guling ridge that they call the Five Old Men, the Cave of the Immortals, the Single Drop Spring from which one might drink and be guaranteed eternal life.
Long before it had attracted China's expatriate community, Lushan had drawn painters and poets and contemplative souls, too. It was a place to get away and reflect, to pause, to write, to compose lines of poetry. Li Bai, the most famous of the Tang poets, visited often and wrote poems that all Chinese children know by heart; and Mao Zedong came here for the more prosaic reasons of state, and he came away having written poems that are still quoted today, and for reasons of poetry, not state.
The Yangtze plain was below, and it fell away behind us, and before long the river itself came into view – a brown swathe of winding-cloth, more than a mile wide, stretching far into the hazes of two horizons. It seemed then that when afloat on its surface, pinioned between the buoys of the navigation channel, or when walking on a bund beside its banks, the river looks merely immense: but from up here, half a mile up on the flanks of a mountain, the Yangtze looked like a primary feature of the planet, as much a part of the visible fabric of things as the canals on Mars, or the rings around Saturn. It was so dominant a feature of the land, and of so important and self-regarding a land, that one could see exactly why the Chinese had only one name for it. Other bodies of flowing water might be called this river or that stream or those brooks; from up here it did seem quite right that what wound terrifyingly below, erasing all thoughts of others, was properly called in these parts just Jiang. The River. Nothing more.
The driver thought he could sneak up past the town barrier without paying, but he was wrong. After eighteen miles of hairpins the road straightened and we came to a massive cement gate, adorned with lions and dragons. There was a metal pole, raised, with an ugly-looking youth in a powder-blue uniform standing idly beside it. We passed by, but he yelled and cursed as we did, and so the driver stopped in mute obedience. The thug in pale blue demanded thirty yuan for the privilege of entering the village of Guling, a part of Lushan town: Guling had been made into a provincial park, he said, and the buildings needed to be maintained.
‘Buildings that you people built,’ he snarled, once he saw he was dealing with a foreigner. ‘You didn't make them so good. They keep falling down. Who is to pay for the repairs? Thirty yuan is cheap.’
Lushan is known throughout China for three reasons. For tea, for pleasure and for politics. And in particular, in the latter category, for the events that took place in the Guling People's Theatre during one week in the summer of Lushan's most celebrated and infamous year – 1959.
The story of tea, however, which in its own way becomes enmeshed in the other two strands of Lushan's fame, began almost exactly three hundred years before. It was in 1657 that bags of it were first offered for sale at Garway's Coffee House in London. Historians like to think that coffee, cocoa and tea all actually arrived in London and were first sampled five years before, in 1652: but in the lore of the tea industry, 1657 is said to be when the fabric of English social and commercial life began to include as an essential significant quantities of this hot brown infusion. The year marked by this development in the drinking habits of the infant British Empire also saw, and as a direct result, the beginning of the end for the existence of the infinitely older Empire of China.
The tea plant that did it all is a potentially massive piece of botany. It is a kind of camellia that if allowed will happily grow up to sixty feet high: but in the tea gardens of China and elsewhere it is pruned and punished until it keeps itself to a stunted three- or four-foot bush, easy for the pickers to reach round. All camellias belong to the Theacea family, whose 240 species include a mere seven – Camellia sinensis among them, tea proper – that are amenable to infusion. Eighty are more obviously familiar as the garden camellias that, with their pink and white flowers and glossy green leaves, decorate herbaceous borders all around the temperate world.
All of the Theacea, whether big or small tea plants or red or cream floral bushes, came first from western China. They were brought to the outside world by the great plant hunters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries:* but not, significantly, until then. In 1657 none of this – words like ‘Theacea’, ‘Camellia' or even ‘tea' – was known to the excited patrons of Garway's. Back then no one had the first idea how the leaves in their new drink were grown, or what or exactly where they came from. They knew only that they liked the brew, that it was mildly stimulating, and that it was a better bet for imbibing than the two customary choices in the London of the day, dirty water or alcohol. At their coffeehouse counters and to the servants who entered their withdrawing rooms, they became accustomed to asking for it, using the pronunciation tay, which was perhaps their version of the Chinese word ‘cha’.
As well they might. The hessian bags on offer in Mr Garway's emporium did in fact all come from China, and more specifically from Canton. They came via Lisbon and Amsterdam, for the Portuguese and the Dutch had rights to trade in Canton – albeit under the strict supervision of the Court. Commerce with outsiders was for the Chinese an unnecessary vulgarism. The rights to indulge in it were granted simply as a boon to barbarians who had a need for Chinese goods. The dynasts of the Qing deluded themselves into believing that they, on the other hand, needed nothing from outside.
It did not take long for the British East India Company to get involved in the tea trade and to try to convince the Chinese otherwise. In 1669, the supercargoes on company ships were buying cases of Chinese tea in Java – where it was cultivated, as it was in Japan and Formosa. By 1686, they were purchasing it in Canton itself. Such was the rocketing demand for the leaf in England (and so huge were the tax revenues that the British government found it could earn by levying duty both at home and on the tea exported to their colonies, like North America) that the company made huge profits. Its agents began to buy so many tons of tea from the Canton merchants that it established a near monopoly, bitterly contested by other foreigners. A new generation of ships – the magnificent tea clippers – were built in yards in London and all around the English coast to supply the huge demand: they would speed home from the China coast with hundreds of tons of tea aboard, and with additional tons of Chinese porcelain for ballast.*
But before long an embarrassing question arose: how exactly were the Chinese to be paid for all this tea? In the early days they had been happy to accept copper, one of the few minerals in which the Empire was then deficient. They would also accept gold, though they preferred silver. Yet by the middle of the eighteenth century the demand for tea had swollen to such a level that London, already near bankrupted by its European wars, found it could no longer afford to pay in metal of any kind. The company men offered paper money, but the Chinese were disdainful. They said they had no use for such stuff and distrusted it, viewing it quite sensibly as merely a promise of payment made by men quite probably unreliable. To the Chinese, it was just a new piece of foreign devilry.
Caught in a money trap, men can do terrible things. The British were caught, and terrible things they promptly did – deciding as an act of East India Company policy that the tea trade with Canton should in future be balanced by selling the Chinese the one commodity that the peasantry appeared urgently to need – the dried, fermented, and pressed juice of the head of the Indian white poppy: opium.
This drug had been declared illegal by China in 1729. Growing, supplying or smoking it were ultimately to become capital offences. But it was an identifiable need, a popular craving, and once Britain had identified it as such, so the purveyors – and in the early days the monopoly belonged to the company – exploited the craving to the hilt. Patna and Benares and the other great opium-growing centres in India began to produce the flat brown cakes or four-pound cannonballs of pressed opium by the hundreds: sixty tons in 1776, three hundred in 1790. It was then but a short trip to take it from Calcutta to Canton – opium ships ran a virtual shuttle-service in the summer, running the drug from Indian godown to Chinese godown and selling at an incredible profit.
Chinese tea was sold to the British for sixty dollars a ton. For the same amount of money the Chinese merchants could buy just half a box of the opium – one layer from a standard Patna box, with twenty four-pound balls sealed in pitch and sewn up in a gunnysack. It was, from the British point of view, a perfect trade – a true licence to print money. And while the East India Company made the first good money, its own monopoly was eventually weakened and broken – after which time magnificent baronies grew up in London, headed by men who could count their cash ten thousand miles away from where their dirty trade was done, and who were making profits quite as fast and as furiously as do the cocaine bosses of Colombia three centuries later.
There was a signal difference between then and now, however. While the Colombians are today condemned all around the world, firms in Victorian times, like Jardine, Matheson & Co. and their main rivals Lancelot Dent and Company, the American firm of Russell & Co., a lone British entrepreneur named Innes and the Parsi trader Heerjeebhoy Rustomjee, were all handsomely and officially rewarded for their business – of which opium dealing produced the greatest profit. They were able to accumulate an impressive storehouse, one that in many cases is maintained today, of respectability, political power, influence and official honours.*
The almost fantastic cascade of political consequences of the opium trade, and China's attempts to ban it and thus curb the westerners' profiteering, are well known. They included two vicious wars between Britain and China, any number of manifestly unequal treaties that were then imposed on the vanquished Chinese (such as that signed back on HMS Cornwallis, moored in mid-Yangtze off Nanjing in 1842), the cession of Hong Kong to Britain, the steady slicing away of China (the Shandong peninsula going to Germany, Port Arthur to Russia, the Manchurian railway concession to Japan, Port Edward to Britain, and so on), its invasion by soldiers from Europe, the Americas, and Japan, the fall of the Manchu dynasty, the fall of the Republic, the creation of the People's Republic. It is by no means stretching things to say that the opium trade led more or less directly to the dropping of the atomic bomb as well – for once the Japanese had found themselves able to defeat the war-weakened Chinese at battle, to annex Manchuria and to invade and occupy fully half of the Empire, so they found an increasing confidence in their own belief that they should rule the Pacific, and began promptly to try to do so, overrunning Malaya and Burma, bombing Pearl Harbor.
And if all in the name of opium, then all in the name of tea. The Chinese sent other products too – rhubarb and silk and the kentledge-ballast of which porcelain was the main part. But tea was what the fuss was really all about, and opium was needed to pay for it. Never, at least in this context, was there a more appropriate metaphor than a tempest in a teacup.
But there was one further complication, and an unkind irony it was. The very Chinese tea industry whose existence sparked all of this was itself eventually consumed and virtually destroyed by those who had been its greatest patrons. The British all but ruined China, and on the way they set about ruining its tea business with a vengeance, too.
This happened because of a chance discovery that was made in 1820 by the new commissioner of Cooch Behar in India – the finding of a plant, not seen before. The new commissioner sent samples of it down to Calcutta, where it was received by a young and ambitious Dane named Nathaniel Wallich, who had just been appointed botanist to the Government of India. He suspected what was later confirmed in London: the plant was Camellia sinenis, the tea tree, and it grew in abundance in Assam. It was not, however, used by any of the locals as an infusion. No Indian of the time drank tea. That was all to change, drastically.
Tea, it was realized by the British, would grow as well in the hills of eastern India as it already did in the hills of western China. From the British colonists' point of view this presented a perfect opportunity. For India was their territory, and they could henceforth grow their crop on what they believed to be their land. In less than thirty years from Wallich's identification, tea plants were being cultivated and processed in India on a prodigious scale, on sprawling plantations, their managements British, their factories equipped with English machinery and European efficiency. A new industry had been established. A new subculture, that of the planter-wallah, had been created.
In all those places where Englishmen ruled – Assam, Darjeeling, Bengal, Burma, Ceylon – the very same plants that were being farmed so secretly and primitively across the border in Yunnan and Sichuan were being made to turn out twice as much tea in a third of the time for a quarter the cost of labour. Where the Yangtze valley had for all history been the capital of tea, it was now, thanks to the foreigners, the turn of the vàlley of the Brahmaputra.
The Chinese monopoly – until that time broken only by Japan, Formosa and some enterprising Javans – was now ripped asunder. The Yangtze treaty ports – Jiujiang down below me here, and Hankou just a day's sailing upstream – continued to be important bases for tea sales only for another few years. By the time the Suez Canal was opened to traffic in 1869, it made sound commercial sense for Europe to buy all its teas from India. They were cheaper, of better quality, and they were rushed to the London markets with dispatch. From henceforth what was called in the drawing room ‘China tea' was to be a product of the tea industry of the Indian Empire, and all profit was to be made by the English traders and all taxes paid to the English Crown. The China tea industry was brought back to the condition it had been in before the Portuguese traders first came to Canton: it was in business to supply just the Emperor and his people.
Our driver had a screw-topped jar beside him, half-filled with what he called his tea. This was a pale green tepid liquid that lay on top of an inch-thick and occasionally swirling sediment of coarse green leaves. Every so often the driver would unscrew the lid, take a swig – at an angle that just prevented any leaves getting in his mouth – then set the jar down again to settle. Every couple of hours he would take the opportunity to replenish the jar with boiling water, from one of the elephantine thermos flasks that are a modern Chinese ubiquity: the strength of the infusion would diminish steadily, until at the end of the day his jar looked as though it held old pond water from which a layer of even older spinach had precipitated. He sipped away at it nonetheless, though I suspect more out of habit than delight.
Every driver in China is similarly equipped. As well as every officer worker, every policeman in his booth, every hotel receptionist, every bank clerk, probably every airline pilot too. You peer over the counter in a shop, or at a currency exchange, or in a government office, and as like as not one of the clerks who is awake will be sipping on a jar of tea. Not an elegant porcelain cup with its domed lid slightly off centre; not a tiny faience beaker of iron-tea that you get in fancy Chaozhou restaurants; but a glass jar, by Kilner, Mason, or old Nescafé, and with a rusty old lid, screwed down tight. The Chinese tea ceremony that was has come to a pretty pass. The old reverence for what used to be called the ‘froth of the liquid jade' has been denatured to a point of unrecognizability. Tea drinking in China today is no more than ‘watering the ox’.
As with the ceremonial and romance, so with the business. I had asked on every street corner down below for the address of the Jiujiang Tea Company, from whose wharves thousands of cases of oolongs and pekoes and souchongs had once been placed on the waiting clippers for London. But the company was nowhere to be found, and the only remark I heard was a disdainful ‘red tea – no good' from a grizzled ancient who remembered when the town did still export a fair amount of the stuff, back in the thirties.
Red tea is what the Chinese call black tea, and they loathe it. It is what, generally speaking, westerners drink. Black tea is what has vanished from the Chinese scene, and good riddance to it, most Chinese seem to say.
It used to be said – a myth, I suspect – that black tea was the result of the first reaction of a Chinese tea merchant on being told that the foreign devils, the Portuguese in Canton, actually wanted to buy tea. He had no reason to suppose barbarians could appreciate anything of good quality, so he took the meanest-looking sticks and twigs and leathery leaves and stuffed them in bags and dropped them into the hold of a Europe-bound ship. By journey's end in Lisbon they had rotted and turned black – but the Europeans liked the infusion that resulted, and they demanded more. The Chinese were happy to oblige. They were happy to supply Europe with the leavings of their own green tea crop, letting it mature and ferment over the period of a long ocean crossing.
There is a measure of truth to the story. Black tea (the Chinese call it red because of the colour of the infusion; we call it black because of the colour of the leaves) is nothing more than green tea that has undergone processing, heating and fermenting.
The most commonly accepted process for making modern tea is known as CTC – in which the tea leaves plucked from the bushes (two-leaves-and-a-bud, the same formula taught to tea pickers whether they are in Sri Lanka or on the hills beside the Yangtze) are first crushed, to release their aromas and their more potent alkaloid chemicals;* then torn, to pop their leaf cells; and finally curled, so that the surface area available for fermentation is expanded.
Crushed, torn and curled tea leaves are then gently withered, roasted, dried and finally packaged – sometimes in the process scented with bergamot (as in Earl Grey) or rope tar (as in Lapsang Souchong). The craft of tea making is as infinitely subtle and complicated a business as the making of wine – and the steady advance of crush-tear-curl machines, which are to be found in all tea factories from Nepal to Nairobi, is deplored by those who think they know. It brings mechanized mediocrity, they say, to a once original little universe of good taste.
But in any case little such machinery is available any more in China. For although a small amount of the half-processed half-fermented tea known as oolong is made here, almost all the tea sold within and exported from China is green tea – tea that is picked and steam-blasted and then dried without being allowed to ferment at all. Green tea is raw tea, or in some senses dead tea. Whether it is good or not depends almost totally on the quality of the leaf, and not nearly so much on the quality of the processing. Lushan Misty Clouds Green Tea was famous throughout China because of where it came from – because of the legends about the fullness of the bushes, the youth and beauty of the women who picked it, the roll call of all the Courts that drank it – not, to any great extent, on how it was made.
And so it was with a sense of mounting excitement that I eventually tracked down the gate to the Lushan Tea Research Institute. It had taken us two hours of patient searching along the butterfly-filled lanes of the hilltop – past caves and waterfalls and beside cliffs that loomed high over the whorls of the distant Yangtze – before I found what I wanted. It was three in the afternoon, pleasantly warm, the air filled with scents of late spring – an appropriate time I thought to see the Lushan Institute, the cosmic centre of whatever was left of the world of Chinese tea.
‘Go away!’ was the first thing anybody said. ‘This place has nothing to do with tea.’
Three policemen were sprawled on the sun-dappled grass outside a decrepit mansion. One of them, the man who had shouted, got to his feet and started swinging a black-metal billy club. ‘Electric tip,’ warned Lily. She had pointed out clubs like this before, back in Shanghai. They had batteries and a coil inside, and were used for crowd control. They could inflict a nasty shock if the policeman didn't like you.
I pointed to the brass plaque on the gate outside. ‘Not here,’ said the guard. ‘Next door.’
We walked next door, to a small outhouse of a building that was connected to the old mansion by a low corridor. It seemed empty, except that in one office on the second floor we found one old woman asleep at her desk. Was this the research institute? we asked. No, she said. Over the road. We crossed the lane to a third building, Grecian style, overlooking gardens. There was a receptionist here. Tea institute? we said. Not here, she replied. Over the road. Building on the left. The very building, as it happened, from which we had been ejected in the first place.
The policemen were still there, and this time they lay mutely as we marched past them. This building turned out to be empty too, although there was a poster showing a young woman picking tea on a misty hillside, which augured well. We peered into each office on all three of the floors. It had been a foreign-built club, by the look of things, perhaps a summertime chum-mery. There was no one there. On the way down the back staircase, however, we met a man – middle-aged, smoking, sandals, a querulous look on his long and lugubrious face. He appeared to have been woken up, and he rubbed his eyes with surprise on seeing us.
Tea institute? we asked again. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, in a tone of sleepy exasperation. ‘This is the place. Come to my office, building across the road. I will telephone.’ He picked up an old black bakelite telephone and bellowed into it, assuming that I wouldn't understand. ‘Ling! Wake up, Ling!’ he said. ‘There's a blessed foreigner here. Round up everybody. Go to the meeting room!’
Five minutes later and we were sitting in his office on pink polyester-ruched armchairs in a room furnished like a schoolroom. The lugubrious man, who introduced himself as Dr Ye, had by now assembled three equally sleepy-looking men, one of whom was Ling. The door kept opening to admit latecomers. None looked very good-tempered. A very old woman came in staggering under the weight of a huge iron kettle and did the rounds of the room, filling everyone's beakers with well-boiled tea. Most people lit cigarettes and sat staring at me. It was ten minutes before everyone was assembled, and then Dr Ye looked across, waiting for a question.
I said something about how sad it was that China's tea industry had withered away. Maybe – maybe this august research institute was going to breathe new life into it, I ventured, hopefully. There was a long pause.
‘Rice,’ said Dr Ye eventually. It was not exactly what I had been expecting.
‘Come again?’ I inquired.
‘Rice. Jiujiang is a big rice-exporting town.’ He looked around him. There were nods of approval, then silence again. One man was already falling asleep, his cigarette dangling dangerously.
I tried to focus Dr Ye's mind. ‘But wasn't this a big tea city, once upon a time?’ There was a further long pause, broken only by snoring. His next declaration made me start.
‘They employ virgin girls,’ he said. ‘They used to pierce their tongues with needles. They were the best:’
This conversation was generating a sort of strange fog, although through it I could discern small dark objects that did seem to relate to tea, if peripherally. I had once heard an old story to the effect that the finest Lushan teas were picked only by virgin girls, and that the green leaves were sent by courier to the Emperor himself. Why the girls pricked their tongues with needles was never clear, and Dr Ye did not choose to enlighten me.
‘We have developed a machine for picking.’ He let this remark hang in the smoky air. So this is where the conversation was going. It did have a certain time-lapse logic about it. Rice had supplanted tea as the region's major export; once virgin girls were used to pick the two-leaves-and-a-bud, and now the scientists of the Lushan Institute – these sleepy, bad-tempered men assembled here, perhaps – had developed a tea-plucking machine.
If this was so, it was a clear breakthrough. The Georgians once tried to put a modified hedge-cutter to lop the leaves in their Caucasus foothills; and the Japanese made something that looked like a pelican. But both were disasters. Only humans – young, agile, and willing to work for a pittance – could pick tea properly. That was a reality the industry had been living with for hundreds of years, though the dreamers continued to dream.
‘Really,’ I said, suddenly interested. ‘Can I see it? Where is it?’
Dr Ye's knees suddenly started to vibrate in a most curious way, as though they were seismograph needles recording a distant earthquake. Several men closed their eyes – meaning that, with the number already asleep, the whole room looked to be at prayer. But Dr Ye, left alone to answer the question, looked uneasy.
‘It is not here,’ he replied. Where is it? I asked.
‘Nanchang,’ he said.
Had he a picture of it?
‘The film is being developed.’
A paper I could glance at? An article?
‘It is in the office, but' – and he brightened – ‘there is no key!’
So I tried to press him on what else the Lushan Institute did.
‘We have one hundred people here,’ he replied. His knees had stopped shaking. The quake was past. He said with evident pride: ‘They spread the knowledge of tea.’
The room fell silent again, except for some gentle snoring in a corner. So could I see some people picking tea? I asked. ‘It is not the season,’ said Dr Ye, and laughed gently. Then – could I perhaps look in on the processing plant? ‘So sorry. It is being cleaned. Maintenance time.’
The tea I was drinking today – the tea in the big kettle which the aged woman was bringing around again, weaving her way unsteadily between the sprawled feet of the snoozing ancients – was this Lushan Misty Clouds Green Tea?
‘I don't know,’ said Dr Ye. ‘I think we don't have any. Maybe at the shop.’
Lily rolled her eyes, and suggested that we leave. We were learning little. We stood up. Immediately the room came alive, the men rubbing their eyes, lighting fresh cigarettes, smiling.
Dr Ye led us out. ‘We are so glad you could come. May we have your business card please. You are interested in investing here, maybe?’
In the car I laughed, but Lily erupted. ‘This kind of thing makes me really ashamed of China, you know. That you should see such people. They are idiots. These fucking cadres.’ I hadn't heard her employ such colourful language before: I was starting to enjoy this. There was no stopping her now.
‘Old Communists, useless old men who get put into jobs like this where they do nothing, nothing. They just sit around and talk and smoke all day, and get paid fat salaries and live in nice houses. You think it's your fault that there's no China tea industry? Well, maybe it is – but it is also half the fault of idiots like that.
‘You know, the sad thing is – there really is good tea here. Look at the hills, look at the weather. They could make it famous around the world. But I'll bet you can't get Lushan tea in your Macy's or your Bloomingdale's? You should be able to – but you can't and it's because of idiots like these.
‘You know the solution? Make it private. Everything that is state-run is useless. Everything that is private is better.’
She brightened suddenly. ‘I have an idea. Why not come and live here and run the tea business in Lushan?’ She was joking, but only half. ‘You could be happy. You would make money. You would be living in a lovely place. The old British houses would make you comfortable, make you feel you were at home. And you could make people have work here. You could bring it back to life.’
She said later she had thought better of it; and I in turn told Lily about those old army couples who had stayed on in some of the Indian hill stations, long after the end of British India, and how wretchedly most of their stories turned out. I doubt if anyone from the old China days had ever wanted to stay on in Lushan, even if the Communists had agreed. It might still have the look of a colonial hill station, it might have the cool pine-tree smell of a hill station and on a crisp late afternoon like this it might look and feel a little like Perthshire in September, or Vermont in October. But only a little, in truth: just a little below the surface it still was China, very much so.
Each time I mentioned Lushan to Lily in the weeks that followed she bristled at the memory. ‘Awful men!’ she would say. ‘Their wretched machine. Of course they never made one. Cheats and liars, all of them. Pah!’
At the People's Theatre, on the road that led from the institute back up to Guling, there was no mistaking the town's Chineseness. There was a car park full of buses, a huge crowd of people, cross-faced girls with small plastic megaphones, tour leaders with yellow flags urging elderly men and women to follow, to hurry up, step lively! and not lag behind. They were all here today – twenty thousand like them come every day of the year, it is said – to see where some of the most momentous decisions of the Communist leadership were made.
Within this ugly little building with its three entrance arches, which looked like the kind of cinema-turned-bingo-hall that is found in blighted industrial suburbs in the English Midlands, China's oldest and most powerful men met, fell out and argued and fought, and performed acts, signed papers and changed policies that affected – and usually for the worse – the lives of tens of millions of Chinese people. The most notable decisions were those taken in early July 1959, during what has been called High Noon at Lushan. Nearly all of the pictures that were on display for the benefit of the tourists – most of whom were brought here in buses by their work units: there were groups of several hundred from a steel factory in Wuhan on this day – were taken during that unseemly week of brawling. It was a week when the rulers of China took decisions that can rightly be said to have provided, for millions, hell's foundations.
1959 was the second year of the Great Leap Forward. So it was a time when some kind of an evaluation could be made of Chairman Mao's bold plan to increase, drastically, China's agricultural and industrial production. His plan had been radical, and in many senses, bizarre: it had called for the establishment of giant agricultural communes, for the transfer of millions of city dwellers to work on grandiose irrigation projects, for the building of tens of thousands of ‘backyard furnaces' that would turn steelmaking into a nationwide cottage industry and swell production. People were told to hand in their pots and pans for melting; communal feeding halls were set up as household kitchens vanished. Society underwent a profound change, with unanticipated and often haphazard consequences, and all in the vain hope of elevating the world's most populous nation into the international premier league.
The Great Leap Forward was an unmitigated disaster – perhaps the most searing indictment of a command economy since Stalin had forced collectivization on the Ukraine in the thirties. Anyone with any insight who gathered in Lushan that summer, for the eighth plenum of the Communist Party Central Committee, knew that it was a disaster – or at the very least that it was going badly wrong. But hardly anyone had the courage or the folly to say so – no one, that is, except for a tiny group of moderates led by the ill-educated but shrewd bulldog of a defence minister, a man who has since been pilloried and victimized into legend, Peng Dehuai. Peng alone felt able to say that what was going on was madness; and in a letter sent from his cool bungalow at one side of Guling to Mao's compound on the other, he told him so.
Given the cruel imperium that was beginning to grip Mao's rule, the result was predictable. The Chairman began by admitting to some mistakes – though in his own defence said that Lenin and Marx had made errors too, but were brilliant and invincible nonetheless – and tried to give the impression of flexibility. It was merely a feint: for the rest of the Lushan meeting Mao tore into Peng and those few men who dared support him – with the result that when all trooped down from the hills at the end of that July, Peng was out of a job, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) was firmly under the hand of Mao, and Peng himself was dispatched into a six-year political exile in a slum on the outskirts of Beijing, sweeping his own floors and carrying out his own night soil, reduced from a hero to a scapegoat in the blink of an eye.
If it was possible to make a connection in Lushan between the growing of tea and the eventual collapse of Imperial China, so it turns out also to be possible, and also in Lushan, to construct a filigree of connections between the angry exchanges in the People's Theatre in 1959 and the terrors that were unleashed in Beijing by Mao and his supporters seven years later that came to be known as the Cultural Revolution. The connections might seem tenuous, only half visible: but unlike the saga of tea and opium and war and treaties, where the links are mostly commercial, political, western and obvious, those that link Peng's sacking and the start of the madness of 1966 are very Chinese, relying as they do to deliver their force on hints, allusions, literature and legend. It is a complicated story, but it is one that has Lushan as its backdrop, and manages to be of huge importance in the history of the country.
Peng Dehuai had found himself in trouble simply because he had told the truth. Doubtless he saw himself as a martyr, though he left no written record saying so. But the deputy mayor of Beijing, a noted and brilliant Chinese historian, party propagandist and occasional essayist named Wu Han, essentially said as much in an article in the People's Daily shortly after the Lushan meeting, alluding in well-turned historical phrasings to all that had happened. Wu did not mention Peng by name. Instead, he used his stature as a historian to reprise a famous and often told story from the Ming dynasty: that of the summary sacking and imprisonment, in February 1566, of a devout, honest and well-loved court official named Hai Rui.
Hai, who worked for the Board of Revenue, had sent a minute to the Emperor, accusing him of extravagance, banditry and corruption – all of which was evidently true. The Emperor was duly outraged, sacked and fettered Hai – and then suddenly died himself. Hai was released, and then went and did more or less the same thing twice more in his chequered life – he was impeached and dismissed by the governor of Suzhou, whom he had similarly accused, and then he was censured for calling for the introduction of the death penalty for corruption. Hai was too righteous for his own good, perhaps – a prophet without honour in his own time.
Wu Han had been studying Hai Rui, and had already published one article about Hai's decision to stand up for right against the Ming Emperor. This had appeared in the People's Daily on the eve of the Lushan meeting, and it is more than possible that Peng read it. He may even have been inspired by it. But the more important article came after Peng had been sacked. It was a lengthy essay about the sacking of Hai in which he was called ‘a man of courage for all times’, someone who refused to be intimidated. The Emperor, on the other hand, was ‘self-opinionated and unreceptive to criticism’, a man ‘craving vainly for immortality’. To any Chinese skilled in reading between the lines of ideographs, the allusion was clear: yet another good man had been sacked for standing up for right, and a tyrant was in power, behaving as a classical demagogue.
Two years later Wu developed the theme of this now celebrated article into a full-length play, The Dismissal of Hai Rui from Office. It was staged in a Communist Party theatre in Beijing, and it was also published in book form. The idea, lèse-majesté that it obviously was, was being broadcast far and wide. But – was it real criticism, thinly veiled? Was it a red herring? Why was Wu himself not arrested and humiliated for daring to speak out? Scholars still wrestle with such matters: theses tumble from the presses, their authors poring over the bones of the Lushan encounter and all that stemmed from it.
They do so because the echoes of Lushan and the allusive saga of Hai Rui reverberated down the years, most strongly in 1965. It was then that Mao moved to secure absolute control over the PL A, and in the same year Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, had her colleague Yao Wenyuan attack Wu Han's by now infamous play. Yao, Mao's wife and Mao himself were at long last saying: thus far and no further. Those who dared to compare Mao's energetic running of China with the behaviour of a vain and corrupt Ming emperor were, in essence, the new enemy. China must be purged of them, and of all who dared to think like them. Those foolish people who agreed with Wu Han were people who would have agreed with Peng Dehuai; those who condemned Peng and stood alongside Mao would be safe. For the remainder – who knew?
This, then, was the very beginning of what would swiftly become the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a ten-year nightmare that changed the face of the country, horribly and terrifyingly, for ever. Tender and elegant though the essays of the seven-year interregnum may have been, they hid the realities of a mighty power struggle that had been going on ever since the Lushan meeting, and which penetrated to the very core of the new China. As usual what took place in the Middle Kingdom was hidden, at least at first, by the obsequies and curlicues of history and literature. What began with a brief display of plays and poems ended with the deaths of millions in thousands of prisons, and in limitless acres of mud and dirt.
It also saw the end of Peng Dehuai's life. He was arrested by Red Guards at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, fell ill in prison, was denied any treatment for his ailments. He died in pain eight years later, but four years would pass before his family was told. His victimization, which began at Lushan, continued with all the special bitterness that a revolution can employ only when it chooses that to further its ideals it must consume its own children.*
It was early evening and growing cool by the time we were back down from the hills. Mr Wen, the manager of the hotel, was waiting for us in his cavernous marble lobby. Good to his word, he had two tickets for the night steamer to Wuhan, and he now gave us a ride down to the riverside. He asked us again to join him on his drive to the city – the road journey would take five hours, while we would have to be aboard the ship for twelve. But he seemed to understand when I said we wanted to go on the ship.
‘You come to love the river after a while,’ he said. ‘Whenever I do this drive and I go round a curve and there the river is – I feel that I'm back with a friend. It grips your mind somehow. it is always there in the background. It is part of our lives. So I'll think of you when I am driving. In fact I'll envy you, I think.’
He stood on the quay as men lifted the hawsers from the oily bollards and he waved to us. The ship boomed her own three blasts of farewell and edged out into the fairway. The setting sun glimmered its watery way down behind the hills ahead, and within moments Jiujiang was just a smoky smudge astern, its lights swallowed up in the gathering gloom. Somewhere below a karaoke session had begun.
Dark came upon us swiftly. I stood on the deck as we washed steadily through the seamless blackness and listened to the news on the BBC – reception in the Yangtze valley is clear as crystal. They were reporting the Chinese floods, using words like ‘devastating' and ‘catastrophe’. But here the channel buoys winked, the radars swept the unseen banks, the ship moved steadily upstream, this night as every night. The Yangtze seemed her late-springtime self, fast, full and deep.