Hav by Jan Morris

Author:Jan Morris
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781590174708
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2011-11-11T15:52:40.888000+00:00

18

Among the Chinese — Feng Shui in Hav — the Palace of Delights — piracy — X’s story — ad infinitum

To Yuan Wen Kuo last night, for dinner with M, in the cool of the July evening. We ate early at the Lotus Blossom Garden, and afterwards wandered agreeably around the streets thinking how pleasantly unremarkable everything looked. The Chinese consider it lucky to live in uninteresting times, and it seemed to me that by and large they go to some lengths to live in uninteresting places, too.

Ten miles across the peninsula from the city of Hav proper, which is by any standards unusual, the Chinese have created a town of their own which seems quite deliberately its antithesis: a town without surprises, homogenous in its slatternly makeshift feeling, and imbued with all the standard Chineseness of all the Chinatowns that ever were — the tireless crowds and the smell of cooking, the piles of medicinal roots and powders, the shining varnished dead ducks hanging from their hooks, the burbling bewildered live ones jammed in their market pens, the men in shirtsleeves leaning over the balconies of upstairs restaurants, the severe old ladies on kitchen chairs, the children tied together with string like puppets, as they are taken for walks in parks, the rolls of silk from Shanghai, the bookshops hung with scroll paintings of the Yangtze Gorges, the nasal clanging of radio music, the clic-clac of the abacus, the men playing draughts beneath trees, the disconsolate sniffing dogs, the rich men passing in the back seats of their Mercedes, the poor men pedalling their bicycle rickshaws, the buckets full of verminous threshing fish, the labourers bent double with teachests on their backs, the dubious little hotels, their halls brightly lit with unshaded bulbs, the glimpses of girls at sewing-machines in second-storey windows, the fibrous blackened harbour-craft, the old-fashioned bicycles, the shops full of Hong Kong television sets, the Yellow Rose Department Store, the Star Dry-Cleaning Company, the pictures here of Chiang Kai Shek peak-capped against a rising sun, there of Mao Tse-Tung bare-headed against the Great Wall — in short, the threshed, meshed, patternless, hodge-podge, sleepless, diligent and ordinary disorder of the Chinese presence.

How I enjoyed it last night! As we loitered around the streets of Yuan Wen Kuo, digesting our Sautéed Chicken with Wolf-berry (recommended to me in Beijing long ago as a specific against depression), I felt extraordinarily reassured by the prosaic activity of it all. I felt in fact, in a calm illogical way, as though I were enjoying a brief spell of home leave from the front.

Perhaps this is what the architects and soothsayers had in mind when, so many centuries ago, they laid out on this inconceivably distant shore the pattern of the first Chinese city west of the Gobi Desert. The principles of Feng Shui, the Chinese art of relating buildings to their landscapes, are easy to recognize in Yuan Wen Kuo. Two low hillocks, still bare but for an ornamental tea-house on each of them, stand here half a mile or so from the water’s edge, facing south-west.

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