FROM THE MOMENT when our journey was conceived Mr. H had professed an almost ungovernable curiosity with regard to the famous lama temples of Jehol. This was, however, to some extent quenched by propinquity, and our visit to them was mysteriously deferred whenever I suggested it. But at last we set off, in the Japanese Consul’s car. We took with us a gendarme from the Consulate, for it was alleged that a guard was necessary.
On the outskirts of the city, under the palace wall, the car stuck; the rains had made a quagmire of the road. But I was pleased, because I needed exercise, and the nearest of the temples was less than two miles away. Mr. H – splendide mendax – maintained that he too was passionately fond of walking, and as we strode off briskly through the blazing midsummer noon regaled me with highly statistical accounts of the pedestrian exploits of his youth. The gendarme followed behind us, carrying some kaoliang cakes wrapped up in a coloured handkerchief and wearing an amused expression.
It was a lovely day. The hills shimmered in the heat. A patrol of Japanese cavalry clattered along a causeway under the palace wall and disappeared through the city gate. Peasants with wide hats and copper-coloured torsos were working in the sparse fields of the river valley along which we walked. The poppy fields, rather surprisingly, were patches of white and mauve; I hardly saw a scarlet poppy all the time I was in Manchuria. Along the crest of the very steep hill on our left ran the machicolated wall surrounding Tang Yu Lin’s park. On our right was the river.
We started in good order, but Mr. H’s enthusiasm for our mode of progress had waned perceptibly within the first half mile, and when we reached the first temple he was showing signs of distress. The gendarme had some more than tepid water in his water-bottle, and I suggested that we should supplement this by getting tea from the monks. The idea was greeted by the Japanese with surprise and a certain repugnance, but thirst overcame their qualms, and soon we found ourselves seated in a small room within the purlieus of the temple walls. Our hosts were two Buddhist monks, dingily habited but full of a charming courtesy. We talked to them through the gendarme, who knew Chinese.
It was pleasant, sitting there in the little bare room and drinking tea. The cakes which the gendarme had bought from a stall in the streets of Jehol were excellent, and even Mr. H so far overcame his suspicions of Chinese cooking as to eat the insides of them, leaving the potentially contaminated crust. The monks had a little terrapin in a China bowl, and at the expense of this creature several obscure jokes were cracked. The tortoise and its kindred are, I believe, regarded with the gravest disapproval by the Chinese, who call them ‘Forgetting Eight’, meaning the eight ethical principles. In the light of a belief that all specimens of this genus belong to the male sex, it is inevitable that their habits should appear at times indefensible. A similar suspicion of sodomy clouds the reputation of the hare.
The roof of the monks’ room was papered with, among other things, several pages from a San Francisco newspaper. ‘Chair for Love Nest Slayer’, ‘Booze Probe Slated’, – through these and other not less heartening legends the light of western civilization faintly irradiated a corner of the farthest East.
Fortified by the tea, we set out to view the temples. But Mr. H’s heart was no longer in the expedition. He became more and more inwardly subdued, more and more outwardly truculent. A growing tendency on his part to sit down on things for several minutes at a time gave to our progress the semblance of a subtle and peculiar variant of Musical Chairs, in which I was for ever delicately riding him off all vacant seating accommodation. At last, after about an hour, he threw up the sponge and went home. He and the gendarme disappeared down the road towards the city, walking very slowly. I was left to my own devices.
I have not the knowledge to tell you anything worth knowing about these temples, nor the skill in writing to convey their charm. Imagine a chain of huge, brightly coloured forts, set dispersedly in a waste of jagged and spectacular hills. They are deserted save by a shy handful of monks, who can less justly be called caretakers than the impotent spectators of decay. In their dark halls the gods gesticulate in silence; a thin filament of smoke, rising from a bowl full of the grey dust of joss-sticks, is their only certificate against complete oblivion. Their gold faces scowl importantly among the heavy shadows; their swords are furiously brandished. There are hundreds of them standing there in the half-darkness, fantastic, taut, tremendous. Yet all the tribute they will get in a week is a few paper ‘cash’ burnt by a peasant.
When you penetrate these courtyards you ought by rights to feel oppressed. The place is empty and silent. Above you curl the sweeping and bedragoned eaves of the great yellow roof which so enchanted your eyes from a distance. But the ground at your feet is thick with the tarnished golden fragments of its tiles, and you are forced to wonder how much longer that roof will shine so bravely in the sun. The walls are breached: a turret has dissolved into a pile of stones: a staircase leads up the side of an overhanging terrace into thin air. Decay is seeping through the structure of the temple. Decay pervades its atmosphere.
You ought by rights to feel oppressed, but I did not. It did not seem to me to matter that these peacock monuments to a faith had become its tombs. Nor did I care that they were neglected. Pomp, and a formal impressiveness, do not appeal to me even in buildings. I could not believe that these courtyards would have been a nicer place to spend an afternoon in if they had been well-kempt. A few goats, a mongrel, a pair of magpies and a visitant kestrel were better company than a throng of worshippers. Give me the lion and lizard in preference to the personally conducted tour and the postcard vendor. I wandered contentedly, without even the rudiments of historical knowledge to guide and interpret for me. Blissfully ignorant, I was under no distracting compulsion to identify influences and correlate periods. It was like – if the analogy is not too strained – it was like spending Christmas Day alone: a great occasion, with none of a great occasion’s responsibilities.
There was a god which stood 120 feet high and had eighteen pairs of arms. I climbed musty and untrodden wooden staircases in which, when I went up, one step in three was missing and which I left still further demolished. The face of the image, viewed at disconcertingly short range from a balcony among the roof beams, wore a complacent expression. In another temple there were obscene images, discreetly covered with a cloth. Then there was a blue-tiled roof on which complex golden dragons raced furiously. One is missing and is said to have flown away, an action betraying, in my view, a lack of sagacity. It was a lovely place.
The Potala is the biggest and most impressive of the temples. It was completed, like the rest of them, by the Emperor Ch’ien-lung in the late eighteenth century, and is in many respects a copy of the Tibetan Potala. It forms one of a line which faces, across a narrow valley, the sharply ascending spur of hills crowned by Tang Yu Lin’s palace wall. I had it on good authority that the best place from which to photograph the Potala was this wall which confronted and from a great height overlooked it. Mr. H and the gendarme, to whom I had confided this information, had forbidden me to attempt the ascent. The outward portions of the palace wall, they said, were patrolled by Manchukuo troops, and these would be liable to shoot on sight any stranger seen scaling the semi-precipitous thousand-foot face whose crest they guarded.
But the crenellated sky-line was empty; if sentries were posted they were asleep in the shade on the inside of the wall. Mr. H’s solicitude, and his flattering estimate of Manchurian marksmanship, were no longer factors in the situation. So I climbed, sweating, to the base of the wall, following the vertical line of a gully which offered cover in the unlikely event of the Manchukuo patrols taking their duties seriously. Scattered below me – each as self-contained and as markedly individual as the farms in the bottom of an English valley – the temples seemed even more attractive than before. They were like curious jewels cast up by the sea of hills indefinitely tumbling behind them. I sat for a long time, at the base of thirty unscalable feet of stone, looking out over a desolation exquisitely picketed.
My aesthetic raptures, I am sorry to say, are rare and never last for long. Thirst, a very sublunary incentive, brought my thoughts from the skies and my feet once more down into the valley. I reached it safely, though I admit that, now my back was to the wall, the misguided but withering volleys of Mr. H’s imagination seemed a less unlikely phenomenon than they had an hour ago. An enemy you cannot see is always to some extent terrible, even if non-existent.
In the outer courtyards of the Potala I found a very small, very pockmarked Mongol and explained to him, by signs, my need for tea. When it was ready I drank it sitting on the k’ang in his tiny dwelling, on the walls of which hung temple keys, an old gun, a horn, some bridles, and other small things. Through a dense cloud in which wood-smoke and flies played equally obscurantist parts we grinned and nodded at each other. He was a charming man. I overpaid him and went my way.