夢の都...
It was known as the "City of Dreams." But not much remains of what was once the most populous city in the world; for the ever-flooding Yellow River has all but washed away the history of this once beautiful capital city of a thousand years ago, Kaifeng.
Fortunately there is a famous hand-scroll, thought to have been once part of my lover's collection and now kept at the Palace Museum in Beijing, called Going Up-River at the Qing Ming Festival, which shows us something of what the city must have been like in its heyday.
A full five meters in length (!) the horizontally unrolling handscroll begins at right-- in the suburbs. Well outside the city gates of Kaifeng, we see people traveling on donkeys or on foot among the willow trees and thatched-roof dwellings in what is really a semi-rural scene. Just for those few out there who may not recall, the Qing Ming Festival referred to in the painting’s title is an important festival in China even today, and occurs on the third day of the third month according to the lunar calendar. It is a day of Purification when Chinese people travel back to their hometowns to sweep the tombs of their ancestors and celebrate the return of spring, and the people we see in the painting are perhaps home from the capital to visit family or to pay their respects at the family tomb or shrine.
Canals created from the great Yellow River dominate the scene with boats traveling lazily up and down the waterways. If we follow the canal from the suburbs traveling down the painting, we soon find ourselves drifting closer and closer toward the great gates of the capital. As opposed to the Tang dynasty when the gates at Chang’an and Loyang were guarded during the day and then shut firmly at night, I am told that at Song Kaifeng, the city gates were open twenty-four hours a day, and people were free to move in and out of the city as they liked.
And so we too walk through the great gate..
Traveling through the painting, before long we arrive at the gracefully arched Rainbow Bridge-- considered by many to be the central focal point of the painting of the handscroll. Packed with people (there are over 700 people drawn carefully into this picture), the bridge is lined with food stalls and vendors, with ladies being carried aloof in palanquins trying to make their way through the crowded city scene. As a large boat packed with passengers struggles to negotiate its way under the bridge, we finally make our way though the great city gate and enter the city proper. Passing a camel train of traders on their way out of the city, we come to the painting’s secondary focal point: the town pub. An imposing two-story building, the sign out front reads: zhengdian (?), the “main branch” of what must have been a chain of pubs.
From here we come to a main intersection, crowded with ox-drawn carts, more palanquins full of aristocratic ladies and all variety of people; we see merchants, Buddhist priests, professional story-tellers, gentlemen, peddlers as well as deliverymen all making their way through the crowded scene. Although the artist, Zhang Zeduan, was an Artist at Court, in this picture he depicts not the refined world of the Palace but rather the vibrant and prosperous world of this great merchant city-- which is reminiscent of another, much later "Eastern Capital" to the east (東京).
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Kaifeng
It was into this city that my man was born and raised in. The readers of these pages will-- I am quite sure-- recall that, perhaps more than anything, I love to think of him roaming the busy streets disguised as a scholar.
Didn't Peter the Great also take a long overseas trip disguised as an aristocrat? I remember reading about him causing all kinds of trouble in England when he wanted to keep up his show but of course everyone knew he was the emperor-- or did I only imagine reading that? And wasn't another emperor's galavanting in disguise the reason why you still knock your fingers on the table after receiving tea in Hong Kong? Don't quote me, I am away from my books and my trusty librarian Señor Borges isn't returning my calls again-- so this is just how I remember it-- not necessarily how it really was...
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And, so he had special tunnels dug under the Forbidden City in order to visit his favorite courtesan’s house or walk the streets of Kaifeng un-detected and so could continue obliviously writing his poetry and lavishly spending on the arts as his country teetered on the edge of disaster.
I think when one is facing a terrible dilemna there are 3 possible approaches.
One, you can ignore the problem.
Two, you can face the problem head-on
or
Three, you can seek to eliminate the causes of the problem so that the problem will cease to arise.
His detractors perhaps could accuse Huizong of the first, while those who are fond of him might prefer to posit the third.
And, there he was. The country on the brink of disaster and rather than mobilizing the army, he sought instead to throw himself into the study and re-cataloging of the ancient bronzes. As if to say, in the words of one of my aristocratic friends, if I could just get the bronzes right, everything else would follow suit.
Great archaeological and art historical research-- respected even today-- was undertaken to both interpret the inscriptions found on the bronzes as well as to properly reconstruct the rituals in which they were used so that “[k]nowledge that was barely retained in the Han period, and was all but lost since the third century, was recovered almost in an instant.” For this purpose, Huizong created several palace institutes devoted to the Rites and Music, and countless new bronzes vessels were re-cast closely following the aesthetic and technical blueprint of the ancients, to the success that, also in the words of James C.Y. Watt, “[t]oward the end of the Northern Song, period, bronzes made in the archaic style were virtually indistinguishable from Shang and Zhou prototypes.”
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Knowing their government by seeing their ritual; knowing their virtue by hearing their music (Mencius)
It is such an obvious point and yet for some strange reason, it is one that I delight in thinking about. And that is, that in the same way that ritual served as an expression of the government and an music expression of the virute of the people, so too did ritual also serve to shape and affect the government as music helped to influence the virtue of the people. Because probably not all that unlike the way you couldn't perform the elaborate procedures of tea ceremony unless you had prepared yourself, at the same time the performing of the procedures would itself have a profound affect on the performer.
Alan Baumler wrote a post a few days ago concerning teaching about the Rites and Music to US-based students. Like Alan, in my thinking, I tend to somehow remain focused on the Rites, when in fact it might just be the music that will serve to be the more interesting thing to think about. Awhile back, I was told by a man serving at the Court in Yogyakarta that the Javanese gamelan had its roots in this ancient Chinese ritual music. I don't know whether this is accurate or not, but when I think of this ancient music that so delighted my man, I almost always imagine it to sound like the music in one of my favorite gamelan recordings, Court Music of Kraton Surakarta (King Records). All the japanese recordings in this series are absolutely gorgeous, but this one in particular has a strong affect on my mood.
Alan ends his post, with this link to a Daniel Bell book (concerning Confucianism and music), and so I guess I too should add that the much-awaited (??) Daniel Bell book reading will start here sometime next week and continue on at Chris' place-- or vice versa. For those interested, please check back next week.
Cheers!
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Google has a really surprisingly good article on the painting here.
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