Flashman Papers 3-Book Collection 4: Flashman and the Dragon, Flashman on the March, Flashman and the Tiger. George Fraser MacDonald
digress no longer, for now I have to tell you of one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen, a marvel to compare with any on earth – and no one will ever see it again. There are many beautiful things in the world, mostly works of Nature – a Colorado sunset, dawn over the South China Sea, Elspeth, primroses, cold moonlight on the Sahara, an English woodland after rain. Man cannot make anything to equal these, but just once, in this critic’s opinion, he came so close that I’d hate to live on the difference. And it was done by shaping Nature, delicately and with infinite patience, as probably only Chinese artists and craftsmen could have done it. This was what I was privileged to see that September morning.
As I remember, we were leaving a little village, on a narrow road between high stone walls, which took us over a stone bridge and a causeway through a lake to a great carved entrance gate. Beyond that was a courtyard, and a massive building, blazing with gold in the rising sun; we drove past it and a scattering of lesser pavilions, and then it burst on the view in all its perfect, silent splendour, and I gasped aloud in wonder, while the eunuchs squeaked and laughed and nudged each other to see the barbarian stricken dumb as he gazed for the first time on the Summer Palace.
As you may have heard, it was not a palace at all, but a garden eight miles long – but it wasn’t a garden, either. It was fairyland, and how d’you describe that? I can only tell you that in that vast parkland, stretching away to distant, hazy hills, there was every beauty of nature and human architecture, blended together in a harmony of shape and colour so perfect that it stopped the breath in your throat, and you could only sit and wonder. I can talk of groves of trees, of velvet lawns, of labyrinths of lakes with pavilioned islands, of temples and summer houses and palaces, of gleaming roofs of imperial yellow porcelain seen through leaves of darkest green, of slow streams meandering through woods, of waterfalls cascading silently down mossy rocks, of fields of flowers, of pebbled paths winding past marble basins where fountains played like silver needles in the sunlight, of deer cropping daintily beneath spreading branches, of willow-pattern bridges, of dark grottoes where pale gold statues shone faintly in the shadows, of lotus pools where swans slept – I can write these things down, and say that they were spread out like a great magic carpet in glorious panorama as far as the eye could see, and what does it convey? Very little; it may even sound vulgar and overdone. But you see, I can’t describe how one delicate shade of colour blends into another, and both into a third which is not a colour at all, but a radiance; I can’t show you how the curve of a temple roof harmonises with the branches that frame it, or with the landscape about it; I can’t make you see the grace of a slender path winding serpentine among the islands of a lake that is itself a soft mirror bordered by ever-changing reflections; I can’t say why the ripple of water beneath the prow of a slow-gliding pleasure barge seems to have been designed to complement the shape of barge and lake and lily-pad, and to have been rippling since Time began. I can only say that all these things blended into one great unified perfection that was beyond belief, and damned expensive, too.
It had taken centuries to make, and if all the great artists of the Classical Age and the Renaissance had seen it, they’d have agreed that the fellows who designed it (for design, of course, was its secret and its glory) knew their business. Being a Philistine, I will add only: never talk to me about Art or Beauty or Good Taste or Style, because I’ve seen the bloody elephant.
I say it was a vast garden, but in fact it was many. The main one was the Ewen-ming-ewen, the Enclosed and Beautiful Garden, a great walled park with palaces which were museums of all Chinese art and civilisation, accumulated through the ages; then there was the Chingming-ewen, the Golden and Brilliant Garden, with its hills crowned by a six-storey jade tower and a magnificently ruined lamasery, and the Fragrant Hills, the Jade Fountain Park, the Imperial Hunting Park, the Garden of Clear Rippling Water, and the one to which I was taken, the Wang-shaw-ewen, or Birthday Garden, which was reckoned the most perfect of all, with its views of the whole shooting-match, and beyond that distant Pekin, and the surrounding hills.38
This miracle was all for the personal delight of the Emperor and his court; no other visitors ever saw it, which was perhaps as well, since I should think it was by far the richest treasure house there has ever been in the world. To give you a notion, Yehonala’s favourite pavilion was a modest cabin covering about an acre, roofed with gold leaf and apparently constructed of marble, jade, and ivory throughout; its scores of rooms were stuffed with priceless fabrics, carpets, and furs, statuary of every precious metal and porcelain, clocks, jewellery, paintings – I remember going along a verandah, looking out at the glorious scenery, and suddenly realising that I was no longer out of doors, but was staring at a wall so cunningly decorated that it appeared to be a continuation of the world outside; I had walked a good ten paces before I discovered that I was no longer seeing reality, but artifice, and when I went back and stood at gaze, I could hardly tell where one ended and t’other began. It was almost sickening to think of the genius and labour that had gone to the making of such a vain thing – yet it was lovely, and as to the movable loot … well, an entire wing was devoted to thousands of magnificent silk dresses, scarves, and shawls; you absolutely waded through them; another wing was given over to jewelled ornaments so brilliant and numerous that the eye could not bear to look at them for long; one vast room was filled with the most intricate mechanical toys crusted with gems, jade jack-in-the-boxes, walking dolls, blasted diamond frogs and beetles hopping and scuttling all over the shop, and you’d no sooner escaped them than you were in a room walled in solid silver and carpeted in ermine and sable, with gold racks covered in – ladies’ shoes.39
That was Yehonala’s house – and there were hundreds like it, palaces, temples, museums, art galleries, libraries, summer houses, and pavilions, all crammed with treasures so opulent that … why, if those Russian Easter eggs that are so admired had found their way into the Summer Palace, I swear they’d have boiled ’em. God knows what it was all worth – or what it was all for. Greed? Vanity? An attempt to create a luxurious paradise on earth, so that the earth could be forgotten? If the last, then it succeeded, for you forgot the world in an instant. It should have seemed just a great, overstuffed bazaar – but it didn’t, probably because of this last detail which I shall tell you, and then I’m done with description: every one of the millions of precious things in the Summer Palace, from the forty-foot jade vases in the Hall of Audience, so fragile that you could read print through them, to the tiny gold thimble on a corner shelf in the room of Yehonala’s chief seamstress, was labelled with its description, origin, and the exact position which it must occupy in the room. Think of that the next time you drop a book on the table.
Possibly because of recent events, and my new surroundings, my memories of the first two days in that house are all at random. I saw no one but the eunuchs, whose first task was to groom the barbarian and make him fit for human consumption; Little An was early on the scene, scowling sullenly and instructing the lads to see me shaved, scrubbed, and suitably attired – I had to be careful not to understand the shrill directions screamed at me, and to appear to cotton on slowly. I insisted on bathing and shaving myself, and recall sitting in a splendid marble bathing pool, using a jewelled razor on my chest, arms, and legs, and damning (in English) the eyes of the bollockless brigade as they twittered round the brink pouring in the salts and oils to make me smell Chinese. I had a splendid shouting-match with An on the subject of my moustache and whiskers, which he indicated must come off, and which I by Saxon oath and gesture showed I was ready to defend to the last. Finally I removed them – the first time I’d been clean-shaven since I rode as a bronco Apache in Mangus Colorado’s spring war party back in ’50 – but dug in my heels about my top-hair; I’d been bald, when I was Crown Prince of Strackenz, and looked hellish. (Gad, I’ve suffered in my time.)
Another memory is of sleeping in silk sheets on a bed so soft I had to climb out and camp on the floor. I suppose I ate, and loafed, but it’s fairly hazy until the second night, when they took me in a closed sedan chair to the Imperial apartments in the Ewen-ming-ewen.
This was a piece of pure effrontery on Yehonala’s part, and showed not only her supreme confidence in her power, but the extent of that power, and the fear she inspired among the minions of the Imperial court. The Emperor was down in the Forbidden City still, with all his retinue of nobles