Compassionate Longevity, the Palace of Eternal Health and the Palace of Peaceful Longevity, all of which were reserved for emperors’ mothers. Suddenly, as if in a bad dream, we realised we were lost somewhere in a long, narrow, paved passageway, hemmed in on both sides by crushingly tall, dark red walls with the starry sky as our only source of light.
“We didn’t lose our heads straight away. According to Ma, all we had to do was keep heading west and it was a mathematical certainty that would bring us out in front of the Imperial Archives building where my mother worked, a building erected by the communists, like a tall screen to obstruct the malevolent eyes of spies (who might stay at the Peking Hotel, an ancient edifice several storeys high and not that far away) desperate to know what was going on in another part of the Forbidden City, which had been converted into a residence for Mao and his closest collaborators in the early 1950s.
“I’ll never forget how frantically and desperately we raced through the city that winter’s night, which was mercifully clear, with my mother’s building obstinately refusing to appear. We ran till we were completely out of breath, like two poor bees lost in an enormous hive, two puppets stranded in a maze infinitely repeating its hard, straight geometric lines. An endless succession of buildings, all on the same level, distributed regularly around a multitude of rectangular courtyards, each deceptively and misleadingly the spitting image of the last. Roadways parallel to the main axis—more harsh straight lines, some of which went on for hundreds of metres—cut across the Forbidden City, which just went on producing the same long red walls. Most of the roads and passages ran from north to south, seeming to force us away from the west, where we were heading, and towards the north into increasingly enclosed secret places, many of them dead ends, that kept on multiplying. It was as if they took pleasure in standing in for each other in the half-light, just to make fun of us.
“And then suddenly a courtyard mysteriously lit up by dazzling lights appeared behind some jujube trees, the outline of their thin, naked branches sharply picked out as Chinese lantern shadows on a grey wall crowned with varnished tiles. This was Yang Xin Dian, the Hall of Spiritual Food. There were two or three crows perched on a metal bar holding a sign which read: Exhibition of Ancient Chinese Punishments and Tortures.
“Puffing and blowing, we stepped into a traditional courtyard; it was square, shaped like an imperial seal, and edged on three sides with single-storey buildings each with an opening down one wall and topped with an impressive ‘swallow-winged’ enamelled roof, which reared up and glittered against the serene night sky, as if set into it. The roofs were supported by squat, blood-red columns. There were two old women in blue overalls pulling out the weeds that pushed up in the gaps between the paving stones. They told us the private view of the exhibition was the following day, and that ‘The Chairman’—in other words, the museum’s head curator—would be coming at any moment with his staff to give his decisive opinion as the final arbiter.
“We should have left, there was a nasty feeling in the air. Even so, we snuck into the building on the right. I didn’t know what was in the ones on the left and in the middle and I never found out, but everything in the one we went into had to do with implements of death. Methodically catalogued with a historians attention to detail was a complete collection of real instruments of torture, accompanied by detailed explanations, paintings, drawings, photographs, scale models, sculptures and high-relief carvings in wood or ivory I was particularly struck by the Technicolor realism of a terracotta sculpture of a man torn apart by five magnificent Thoroughbreds, each taking a share of his living body, galloping in opposite directions, their manes flying in the wind. One of them was more frantic than the others, rearing and whinnying, its head thrown back and mouth wide open. The exhibition allowed itself the luxury of philosophising, presenting a cosmological point of view, and listing the means of torture according to the five primordial elements: water (for example, drowning), wood (beating), metal (the torture of a thousand blades), earth (burying alive) and fire (burning at the stake).
“In one corner of this vast Hell I was disturbed by a particular