one else in the world would have done that for me. I’m sure they wouldn’t. He’d found the book on the black market and swapped it for another banned book, the second volume of Jean-Christophe, a French novel translated by Fu Lei. His favourite novel. I remember asking him what he’d done with the first volume. ‘I gave it to a doctor who did some important stuff for a girlfriend’—‘What sort of stuff?’—‘An abortion.’ Silence. ‘Your girlfriend?’—‘No, Luo’s, a friend who was sent to be re-educated in the same village as me.’ Ma had other friends besides me. Lots of friends. He always did, wherever he went. People being re-educated, locals, prisoners, thieves, tramps, girls, boys, young, old. I didn’t. I’m lonely as a red-haired horse. My life, no, let’s say the chapter on friendship, began with Ma and he’s still the only protagonist.
“The Secret Biography of Cixi was published in 1948, six years before I was born. It’s a minor historical masterpiece written by Tang Li, a professor at Peking University. I think of him as a geographer devoting the best years of his life, if not his whole life, to studying a river, following it all the way up to its source, in a boat or on foot, stopping every now and then and pursuing a tributary, however small and remote and insignificant it may be, so that eventually he knows the river by heart the way a lover knows his partner’s body. It’s the only decent book with a few well-documented pages about the life of Seventy-one.”
Tumchooq lent me that book, which took me on a journey through the vast labyrinth that is an imperial family, a dynasty. Limited until then to school history books, I felt with every page I turned that I was finally getting somewhere in my understanding of China.
I was impressed, among other things, by the family tree drawn up by the author in the chapter about the illegitimacy of Tongzhi’s succession by Guangxu. A representation as clear and precise as an anatomical illustration with all the ramifications of blood vessels, veins and prolific, converging arteries. By following one of these branches I found the name Zai Lan, followed by the word “Seventy-one” in brackets, born to one of the great lineages of direct imperial descent which ended two generations after him.
There is no doubt Cixi knew every detail of this genealogy by heart, the author pointed out. She knew, her clan knew, the Court knew that when Tongzhi died the only legitimate heir by his relationship and degree of descent was Zai Lan, the dowager empress’s favourite great-nephew. But in Cixi’s eyes he had a fatal flaw: he was thirteen years old, nine years older than Guangxu.
Nine years! She must have counted those nine years again and again. As the author of the biography related, during the first weeks of mourning for her son, she spent days on end calculating, weighing up the pros and cons, wandering like a ghost through the huge gardens of her palace in the middle of the night. Sometimes she was so exhausted that she asked to be carried by her great eunuch, Li Lianying, so that she could continue her nocturnal walk all the way to the Pavilion of Silk Worms, a luxurious place she adored, lit by flickering lantern flames. She would sit between the racks waiting for inspiration as she watched one of the countless caterpillars metamorphose into a beautiful moth. She eventually made up her mind, choosing the other child to reign, because, although illegal, he would guarantee her nine more years’ enjoyment of the absolute pleasure of being Her Majesty the Master of China. More’s the pity!
No one would have believed [wrote the historian] that the thirteen-year-old adolescent, Cixi’s great-nephew, would be able to recover from such frustration: on the threshold of an earthly paradise, within reach of the throne borne by dragons, he was thrown out. All the politicians, of aristocratic descent or otherwise, thought he was lost. His family was disgraced. No one ever stopped outside their residence to the west of the Pavilion of Peace, not any more, no prestigious visitors in palanquins, no nobles in carriages, once so numerous they created bottlenecks and their drivers argued for space with local porters. The cacophony of noise and shouts fell silent. The Court intendant stopped sending generous or at least symbolic gifts to mark special occasions. When, at the age of sixteen, he married the daughter of a low-ranking administrator,