What Am I Doing Here? (25 page)

In modern horse-breeding there are two main streams of blood. One comes from the ‘cold-blooded' stocks of the north. The ponies of the Huns had descended from a ‘cold-blooded' wild horse that still survives in Outer Mongolia and is named after an obstinate Russian traveller called Colonel Przwalsky. It has an upright bristly mane, a Roman nose, heavy lower jaw and a thick neck that looks as if it is made for battling against headwinds and snowdrifts. The steppe ponies of this northern strain have a lolloping trot and marvellous endurance.

The ‘hot-blooded' strain, represented by today's Arabian, is almost another animal. It has a ‘dished' gazelle-like skull, flaring nostrils, eyes set well down the head, an arched neck, a flowing mane and tail, a depressed spine with two ridges of muscle along it (the Chinese ‘tiger-back'), and a light bounding gallop. On all points it differs from the descendants of Przwalsky's horse. And the blood-sweating? Some say that it is to be explained by a parasitic insect called
Parafiliaria multipapilosa
, but Lady Wentworth, who bred the finest Arabians in England, once had a horse that sweated blood. And she would have been the first to spot a parasite.

How ‘hot blood' came to Ferghana is a matter of conjecture. It
had
been in the region for some time. Three centuries earlier, twelve fine thoroughbreds were buried in the ice-bound grave of a tribal chieftain in the Altai Mountains, north of the Wu-sun. ‘Hot blood' (mixed with some heavier stock) also coursed in the battle-chargers, bred for Greek cavalry on the Thessalian Plain. One can see it in the flaring nostrils of Selene's horse on the Parthenon (which, allowing for differences of artistic convention, closely resembles Commander Chang's horses). But in some way the Ferghana horses must have been yet more special. Fourteen centuries later, as Marco Polo passed through the region, he learned of a local breed which claimed a pedigree going back to Bucephalus, the famous Thessalian battle horse of Alexander the Great. Could Wu-ti's Heavenly Horses be descended from the only real love of the other God King?

There are two possible explanations for Wu-ti's horse mania. The more conventional one suggests, of course, that the Chinese army needed the ‘hot-blooded' animal, as modern armies need rockets and tanks. The marvellous cavalcade of ‘hot-blooded'horses from the Tomb of Commander Chang shows that the new strain was prized for cavalry three centuries later. But there is a suggestion, first made by Arthur Waley, that military operations were not uppermost in Wu-ti's mind when he nearly ruined China to get the Heavenly Breed. Instead his horse-rustling may have been an affair of the spirit.

All religions have propounded a belief in an immortal soul which flies off after death, while some have believed it possible to pre-empt the inconvenience of death by arranging to fly off while the body still breathes. But the soul needs a ‘vehicle' – a chariot, a saddle or wings (and we must not forget that for 3,000 years a man came nearest to flight on a galloping horse). Our hobby-horses and merry-go-rounds are the last vestiges of the ‘vehicles' in European folklore which helped one ‘get out of oneself.

In Chinese mythology the horse was the magical ‘vehicle' which escorted legendary emperors to a happy place in the Far West. It was the ‘Friend of the Dragon' and was ‘born from the waters of a pool'. Wu-ti had been looking for such an animal all his-life. In 121 BC a strange horse had emerged from the Ordos River but that proved a disappointment. When at last the real Heavenly Horses arrived in China he must have felt confident about his imminent take-off. ‘They will draw me up,' he wrote in a poem, ‘and carry me to the Holy Mountain. I shall reach the Jade Terrace . . . ' And this is why he kept the horses close to the palace, waiting for the event he projected in fantasy.

One morning, when all the omens were favourable, he would descend from his apartments. Sweet music would be playing. He would mount the chariot drawn by the steeds of the wind. Gently they would lift in the air and fly to the Land of Perpetual Peace. The Royal Mother of the West would be standing on her jade ramparts to greet him. She would hand him one of her celebrated peaches that ripened every 6,000 years, and his wizened skin would stretch into the smoothness of youth . . .

 

I
t is a cold, sunny Sunday in Yunan. On the plain below Jade Dragon Mountain, the villagers of Beisha are letting off fire-crackers to celebrate the building of a house, and the village doctor is holding a feast in his upper room, in honour of his first-born grandson.

The sun filters through the lattices, bounces off rafters hung with corn-cobs and lights up everyone's faces. Apart from us, almost all the guests are members of the Nakhi tribe.

The Nakhi are the descendants of Tibetan nomads who, many centuries ago, exchanged their tents for houses and settled in the Lijiang Valley, to grow rice and buckwheat at an altitude of over 8,000 feet. Their religion was – and surreptitiously still is – a combination of Tibetan Lamaism, Chinese Taoism and a far, far older shamanistic belief: in the spirits of cloud and wind and pine.

The Doctor has seated us, with his four brothers, at the table of honour beside the east window.

Below, along the street, there are lines of weeping willows and a quickwater stream in which some pale brown ducks are playing. Led by the drake, they swim furiously against the current, whizz back down to the bridge and then begin all over again.

The panelled housefronts are painted the colour of oxblood. Their walls are of mud brick, flecked with chaff, and their tiled roofs stretch away, rising and sagging, in the direction of the old dynastic temple of the ancient kings of Mu.

None of the Doctor's brothers looks the least bit alike. The most vigorous is a leathery, Mongol-eyed peasant, who keeps refilling my bowl of firewater. The second, with bristly grey hair and a face of smiling wrinkles, sits immobile as a meditating monk. The other two are a tiny man with a wandering gaze and a shadowy presence under a fur-lined hat.

Looking across to the ladies' table, we are amazed by the full-fleshed, dimpled beauty of the young girls and the quiet dignity of the older women. They are all in traditional costume, in the celestial colours – blue and white. Some, it is true, are wearing Mao caps, but most are in a curved blue bonnet, rather like a Flemish coif. Our Shanghai friend, Tsong-Zong, says we might well be guests at Brueghel's
The Peasant Wedding.

Apart from the bonnet, the women's costume consists of a blue bodice, a pleated white apron and a stiff, quilted cape secured with crossbands. Every Nakhi woman carries the cosmos on her back: the upper part of the cape is a band of indigo representing the night sky; the lower, a lobe of creamy silk or sheepskin that stands for the light of day. The two halves are separated by a row of seven disks that symbolise the stars – although the sun and moon, once worn on either shoulder, have now gone out of fashion.

Girls come up from the kitchen with the sweet course: apples preserved in honey, melon in ginger, sour plums in alcohol. More girls then come with the ‘Nine Dishes' – the ‘Nine Dragons', as they've been called since the Chou dynasty: in this case, cubes of pork fat and winter sausage, water chestnuts, lotus root, carp, taros, bean tops, rice fritters, a fungus known as tree ears, and a heap of tripe and antique eggs that go, like sulphur bombs, straight to the gut.

From time to time, the Doctor himself appears at the head of the stairs, in a white clinician's mobcap and silver-grey cotton greatcoat. He surveys the company with the amused, slightly otherworldly air of a Taoist gentleman-scholar, and flicks his wispy beard from side to side. As soon as the meal is over, he appears again, hypodermic in hand, as if to remind us that healing, even on this ‘Big Happy Day', is a work without end.

The grandson's name is Te-Sho: ‘Te' for virtue, ‘Sho' for longevity. On a sheet of red paper, now pinned to the porch, the old man has written the following:

The focus of all this adoration is swaddled in a length of gold-and-purple Tibetan brocade, and has the face of a man born wise. He is on show downstairs, in his mother's lap. The bedroom has white-papered walls to which are pasted scarlet cutouts of characters representing happiness and of butterflies flying in pairs.

Apart from the Doctor's herbal and his English dictionary, the swaddling clothes are the family's only treasure to survive the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards ransacked the house.

The Doctor takes the baby and cradles him in his arms.

‘I have plenty,' he says, gesturing to the revellers in the courtyard. ‘Six years ago I had nothing. But now I have plenty.' His wife comes from the kitchen and stands beside him. And with her deep blue bonnet, and smile of tender resignation, she reminds us of Martha or Mary in a Florentine altarpiece.

The Red Guards stripped him of everything, and he was forbidden to practise. ‘It was she who saved me,' he says. ‘Without her I could not have lived.'

Their son, the father of three weeks' standing, is a young man of twenty-seven in a neat blue Chinese suit. He is a self-taught teacher of English, and now also a student of medicine.

Proudly, he shows us his wedding cup – a porcelain bowl painted with peacocks, on which the village calligrapher has added a couplet by the Tang poet Pai-ju-li:

The calligrapher – a courteous, hook-nosed old gentleman – is the Doctor's cousin and also one of the party. He has spent many years, as an ideological bygone, in jail. But now – in this new, relaxed undoctrinaire China - he has retired to his tiny house by the stream: to practise the arts of seal cutting, brush-work and the culture of orchids. On Tuesday, when we called on him, he showed us a lilac autumn crocus, with a label in Chinese reading ‘Italian autumn narcissus'.

The Doctor, too; is a passionate plant collector, though of a rather different stamp. Behind his surgery is a garden with paths of pebble-mosaic where a plum tree casts its shadow, like a sundial, on the whitewashed walls, and there are raised beds for growing medicinal herbs. Most of the herbs he has gathered himself, from the slopes of the Snow Range: heaven's hemp (for the bladder); orchid root (for migraine);
Meconopsis horridula
(for dysentery), and a lichen that will cure shrunken ovaries, or bronchitis if taken with bear's grease.

He owes much of his botanical knowledge to his student days in Nanjing. But some he learned from the strange, solitary European - with red face, spectacles and a terrible temper – who taught him his first smattering of English – at whom, as his retinue passed up the village street, the boys would clamour: ‘Le-Ke! Le-Ke!' – ‘Rock! Rock!' – and scamper out of reach.

Joseph F. Rock - ‘Dr Lock' as the Nakhi remember him – was the Austro-American botanist and explorer who lived in the Lijiang Valley, off and on, from 1922 to 1949. My interest in him goes back many years to a summer evening in the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, when I found that all the trees I liked best bore Rock's name on their labels.

‘Tell me,' the Doctor asked on a previous visit, ‘why was Le-Ke so angry with us?'

‘He wasn't angry with you,' I said. ‘He was born angry.'

I should perhaps have added that the targets of his anger included the National Geographic magazine (for rewriting his prose), his Viennese nephew, Harvard University, women, the State Department, the Kuomintang, Reds, red tape, missionaries, Holy Rollers, Chinese bandits and bankrupt Western civilisation.

Rock was the son of an Austrian manservant who ended up as major-domo to a Polish nobleman, Count Potocki. His mother died when he was six. At thirteen, already under the spell of an imaginary Cathay, he taught himself Chinese characters.

Tuberculosis notwithstanding, young Rock ran away to sea: to Hamburg, to New York, to Honolulu – where, without training, he set himself up as
the
botanist of the Hawaiian Islands. He wrote three indispensable books on the flora, then went to Burma in search of a plant to cure leprosy. He ‘discovered' Lijiang, thereafter to be the base for his travels along the Tibetan border: to the former kingdoms of Muli, Choni and Yungning, and to the mountain of Minya Konka, which, in a moment of rashness, he claimed to be the highest in the world. (He had miscalculated by about a mile.) Yet, though he introduced hundreds of new or rare plants to Western gardens and sent off thousands and thousands of herbarium specimens, he never wrote a paper on the botany of China.

Instead, he gave his life to recording the customs, ceremonies and the unique pictographic script of his Nakhi friends. Lijiang was the only home he ever knew; and after he was booted out, he could still write, in a letter, ‘I want to die among those beautiful mountains rather than in a bleak hospital bed all alone.'

This, then, was the meticulous autodidact, who would pack ‘David Copperfield' in his baggage to remind him of his wretched childhood; who travelled ‘
en prince
' (at the expense of his American backers), ate off gold plate, played records of Caruso to mountain villagers and liked to glance back, across a hillside, at his cavalcade ‘half a mile long'.