Osbert Sit,vell Escape with Me! An Oriental Sketch-book ESCAPE WITH ME! AN ORIENTAL SKETCH-BOOK BY OSBERT SITWELL LONDON MACMILLAN & CO. LTD 1 939 TO MY FRIENDS HAROLD ACTON C. M. McDONALD AND LAURENCE SICKMAN COPYRl'G~ P:R.XN'TED J:N GREAT BJEU:TAJ:N BY a. &: a. CLARJC, LJ:MJ:TED, EDJ:NBOR.GH ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS IT should be unnecessary now to have to state how pro found a gratitude, for the preservation and opening out of Angkor, all lovers of beauty must owe to the French authori ties in Cambodia, or how much is due, in particular, to Dr. Marchal and Monsieur Victor Goloube:ff for their investiga tions, and for the art with which they have been executed. In the writing of Chapter V, I am much indebted to Monsieur Goloubeff for the benefit of his conversa tion during my visit to Angkor, and to Dr. Marchal, whose Guide Archeologi'lue I have frequently consulted. For the historical facts concerning Greater India, I must, in addition, make my acknowledgements to Dr. Quaritch Wales, the author of Towards Angkor (Harrap & Co., 1937), which I have several times occasion to quote. I owe a personal debt, which I should like here to acknowledge, to my friends Mr. Harold Acton, Mr. C. M. McDonald and Mr. Laurence Sickman-to whom I dedicate this book-for their kindness to me in Peking. But for the benefit of their familiarity with the city and with Chinese customs, and without their thoughtfulness, I should have seen little either of Peking or of the Chinese. I must also gratefully proclaim my obligation to Dr. Derk Bodde for his translation of Tun Lich'en's Annual Customs and Festwal.s in Peking (Henri Vetch, Peking, 1936. In China, $9 : abroad, 13s. 6d. : in United States, $4-50); to Mr. Robert W. Swallow for his SidJligkts on Pelcing Life (China Booksellers Ltd., Peking, 1927) ; and to my friend Mr. L. C. Arlington and Mr. William Lewisohn V ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS for their very delightful joint guide-book, In Search ofO ld Peking (Henri Vetch, Peking, 1935). Miss Corrinne Lamb's The Chinese Festive Board (Henri Vetch, Peking, 1935) was of much assistance to me in the writing of the pages on Chinese food. I must, further, thank those responsible for permitting me to publish the various beautiful photographs which accompany the text. In particular, I wish to make the most appreciative acknowledgements to that distinguished painter of Chinese life, Mr. Thomas Handforth, for allow ing me to reproduce several photographs of Peking scenes, which are only less exquisite than his drawings, and to Dr. Gustav Ecke for his remarkable photograph of the effigy of Kang T'ieh, the Eunuch General. I should perhaps mention here that the end papers are reproduced from a fragment of the Empress Dowager's favourite wall paper, which she employed often, both for the decoration of rooms in her palaces and for the papering of the cano pied royal barges on the Imperial lakes. OSBERT SITWELL vi PREFACE THE volume which you now open, Gentle Reader, is above all, in the phraseology of the day, escapist-or so, at least, I hope and trust, being pre-First-World-War by nature and by my age, pre-slump by disposition, and so a citizen of no mean city. I journeyed to China, for example, very largely to escape from Europe, but more especially in order to see China, and the wonderful beauty of the system of life it incorporated, before this should perish; I did not go there to observe the form taken by the Social Struggle ( though one could not help seeing the increasing grip in those days of the communist creed upon all the younger and more intelligent students of the Universities ; a result of despair, of the hopeless position in which China patently found herself), nor out of pure love of wandering, nor, alas I in response to a request from my publishers to write a strong left-wing book about that country. Though I have long carried on a private, one-man campaign against stupidity, and the brutality and greed which are two of its symptoms, I am no soldier of a cause militant. The volume that has resulted, therefore, is intended for amusement, for a record and description, and was not created with instruction for its purpose. It is proudly free of any political aim (o r any aim at all, I might say, except that of getting itself written) : though this is not to pretend that I have not my prejudices, or will not vent them, but to confess that these, if innumer able, vary, except in one or two directions where they have grown permanent, from day to day. Moreover, when they are political, they remain plain, wicked prejudices, without vii PREFACE any need of justification or of being transmuted into virtuous aims. The world, I know, is full of wickedness and folly ( though more, I still believe, of the latter than of the former - indeed, the greatest instance of it ever so far recorded in history has taken place in my own lifetime): but I have not for the moment the time, though often the inclination, to_ set it right. The chief duty confronting every author was - and still is - to use his eyes, to record what he sees, and what, because of them, he feels. Much of beauty and of merit yet remains in the old world ; let those who are blind to it prepare the new. (Who can regret sincerely that Holbein failed to give up his art in order to take a prominent part in the religious controversies of his day, that Botticelli, Michelangelo and Titian did not spend their time crusading on behalf of a United Italy, that Cezanne, by refusing to fight in the Franco-Prussian War, so skilfully avoided wasting a year or two, or that Watteau and F ragonard refrained from throwing down their paint brushes so that they might prepare for the revolutionary struggle that lay ahead ?) In consequence, this is neither a communist book about Iceland or the Faroe Islands, nor a fascist volume about Spain. It is, in the main, concerned with China and Indo-China, and the journey thither: but I shall again essay, as on former occasions, to use the travel book as a vehicle of a special kind, giving, in addition to the pages concerned with his present voyage, something of the passing thoughts and reflections, as well as memories, of the traveller ; further, I claim the right once more, as in former volumes which dealt with countries nearer home, to alight at random, as from the air, at any point con venient to me in space or history, and to be allowed to use viii PREFACE the widest range of comparison for the enforcement of a visual image. Moreover, the book that follows is approached, all through, from the visual and sensual angles, rather than from those of knowledge and learning : I hope, for example, effectively to describe Angkor, but I shall not endeavour to tell you the history of its kings, the details of its religious and social systems, or to dwell upon the conditions of the slaves who built the temples ; that must be left to those who, by the work of a lifetime, have qualified themselves to attempt it. Further, though I have seen nearly all the important monuments of Angkor and its district, I shall only concern myself with the few that were more significant to me than any others. . .. Again, with China, my judg ments and impressions may, for all I know, be more chinoiserie than Chinese, for I cannot - nor in any case would I - divest myself of Western ideas and of the culture which, such of it as I possess, comes from the shores of the Mediterranean, and not from those of the China Seas. And so I remain a traveller, overcome with wonder at strange sights and events, but often, I dare say, not fully grasping their cause or implication. My understanding is that of the eye ; my only sure claim, to know and appreciate both beauty and character when I meet them. But, nevertheless, while confessedly I am no sinologue, I grew, inevitably, to comprehend certain facts about China and Chinese life which are almost impossible to understand without visiting the country. Yet it is of Peking that I shall attempt, when the moment comes, to write, not of China, except in so far as Peking represents China : (I shall, too, continue to call it Peking, and neither Pekin nor the modern Peiping, for it is as Peking that I have always ix PREFACE thought of it since I first read its magic name in childhood upon the programme of a pantomime). Even then, so vast is the subject that I shall only choose to write of those things which I feel I know, or of which I may have seen a unique aspect. I shall talk of the loolc. of the Forbidden City (and try to communicate it to the reader), more than of its history, of which I know little : because its aspect must be more familiar to me than to most Europeans, since, until a comparatively short time ago, only an ambassador could enter it, and even he was supposed to spend most of his time in kowtowing and prostrating himself before the Emperor, rather than in observing the things round him. Whereas, during the four months in which I lived in this city, I think no single day passed except I wandered at least once in some part of the Palace, sometimes only for twenty minutes, sometimes for hours, and I have seen it in winter and summer, under rain and sun and snow. And the Forbidden City is the heart of that metropolis I came to know and love, in similarly watching its aspect change through the seasons from winter to full summer. On arrival there, all save the Forbidden City seemed a bare, Breughel-like world of brown lanes, squat and narrow, of ribbed brown roofs, and of tall, naked trees posing their neat but web-like intricacies above them against a deep blue sky (a cept when a dust-storm whirled down from the Gobi Desert, carrying its load a thousand feet in the air, overcasting the sun with a thin yellow cloud, and insinuating a fine layer of sand upon every chair and table, and even between the pages of my notebooks), and of figures in padded blue robes, or patched blue canvas, and crowned, many of them, with triptychal fur hats that framed faces in a new way : when I left, it was a sighing, young summer X PREFACE forest, the gardens were full of blossoms and on the stone paving stood plants, moulded to the fashion of the trees on a Chinese wallpaper, and large earthenware bowls of goggling goldfish, engaged in their eternal skirt-dance of :Bowing fins and veils, while figures in the thinnest· silk gowns fanned themselves beneath the tender, quivering shadow of young l~ves. I stayed there long enough, in fact, to appreciate, where this city is concerned, the truth of what Dr. Derk Bodde says so eloquently in a preface to his translation of Lich'en's Annual Customs and Festivals in Peld.ng.1 "Indeed," he writes, "what the translator has felt most strongly in making this translation, and what he hopes his readers will feel, is the sentiment . . . of the essential oneness and harmony of man with the universe. It is a sentiment which permeates much of the greatest Chinese art and poetry, for in the Chinese, as perhaps in no other people, has been developed a keen consciousness and awareness of the movement and rhythm of nature, as evidenced in the yearly rotation of the seasons. It is an awareness which has made them deliberately subordinate their own activities to that of the forces of nature, so that, as we read this book, we find such things as their foods, the clothes which they put on, and the lighting and taking away of their winter fires, all following in their times a course as rigid as that of the birds in their several migrations." ••• (This periodicity, so truly observed, is perhaps due in part to the reliability of the calendar, that is to say, of the climate itself; for it is possible to predict the exact day of the second, and most severe, snowfall, of the beginning of the 1 Annual Customs anJ Futivals in Pelcing as recorded in the Yen-cliing Sui slulw:lii by Tun Lich'en, translated and annotated by Dr. Derk Bodde. (Henri Vetch, Peking, 1936.) This is a fascinating book, to which I shall many times have occasion to refer in the course of these pages. xi