Xuantong saw a hen-and-chicks motif, after the Song painter Huang Chuan. It was a supreme paternal symbol. And it echoed the design of a much more ancient ritual cup pictured in the Book of Rites. The cups, the chickens scratching in the dirt with their little babies all around, would invoke the love of a parent for his children, of an emperor for his subjects. They would be truly celestial.
At last the deep tolling bell ceased. He glanced across the great expanse of trees to the tiled roofs of the capital. He knew that throughout the city, men, women, and children had heard the bell and emerged from their homes. They would be standing in their lanes now, facing the Temple of Heaven, facing him, the Son of Heaven. He smiled. His face was lit with an easy benevolence. In his mind’s eye he saw the chicken cups.
“I found a fake,” she blurted out the instant Zheng picked up the phone. She’d been beside herself waiting to call him. She knew exactly when he got to his office, when he clicked the lid off his steaming mug of tea. She knew just when he’d be ready to pick up his private line.
“A fake what?”
“A Chenghua chicken cup! Can you believe it?”
“Hmm,” he said with a smile in his voice. “Audacious.”
“Oh, it’s good too,” she assured him, “it’s beautiful. The clay color is fantastic.”
“How did you know?”
“The painting-the painting is awfully good. But it’s too intentional. You know.”
“Oh yes.”
“And the reign mark is too clear. Too nice. You know, the artist thought of everything. Even the wear marks are random. But to paint with that Chenghua subtlety-this was done by a master! I have to admit.” She swallowed. “It had me going for a while. I had to look at it a long time.”
“A chicken cup!” Dr. Zheng was still taken with the boldness of it. “Doesn’t he realize how much it would take to convince us there is a nineteenth cup in the world?”
“Who? Gao? Maybe he doesn’t know it’s a fake,” she said. “We don’t know who put the cup in there. Or when. But I’ll tell you, it’s good. Amazingly good.”
“A chicken cup!”
“I know. And who knows what else? This could be just the start.”
“Oh,” he said. “Expect more. You’ll find more.” He said it matter-of-factly, with the half-charmed rue of someone who knows. “Marvelous, isn’t it?” She heard the popping skitter of his laugh. “That the first one should be a Chenghua chicken cup. It’s so impertinent! When was it made?”
“Recently, I think.”
“How I’d love to know the artist.”
“And I,” she said. Because whoever had created this cup understood what hoi moon meant. Yes, she wanted to meet the maker of this cup, very much. “I’ll try to find out,” she promised him.
“Luo Na,” Dr. Zheng said. “If anyone can do it, it will be you.”
In Shanghai, in Sophia’s Teahouse on Huashan Lu, Gao Yideng waited for the ah chan. He was an executive and a master at delegation, but this was his extremely personal matter and he would handle it himself. If he succeeded in selling this collection, he could take payment anywhere in the world, and almost no one would know. It was a private lifeline into which he had put a great deal of thought.
He watched the door. While he waited he drank the delicate tea called bai xue yu, snowy buds of jasmine. From speakers behind the creamy walls a saxophone rippled quietly. The square, border-inlaid table in front of him was set with clean, contemporary tea ware and, for the ever present and soothing reminder of the past, an ancient wooden caddy filled with antique tea implements: wood tongs, a paddle with a twirled handle. This place was both safe and quiet. No one knew him.
The bell jingled above the door, and a string-bodied southerner came in. They knew each other at once. Gao took in his puffed-up hairstyle, his weak chin and insufferable sunglasses.
“Bai Xing,” the ah chan said, touching his hand briefly to his chest in introduction as he slipped into the sage-green leather chair opposite. “Bai Xing” was as close to a real name as he ever gave out. It was not his original name given by his family either, but his long-standing, most-favored sobriquet.
“Thanks for coming,” Gao said.
“You too.”
Then the waitress was there in khakis and a black T-shirt, silver drops in her ears, pretty. Bai quickly scanned the menu. “Gong ju hua cha,” he said, Paying tribute to the emperor chrysanthemum. This tea choice was a luck charm for the ah chan, since Emperor was the name he wanted to earn when this was over. Emperor Bai.
Gao Yideng was watching the waitress. She was one of the young cognoscenti, with her hair cut straight across at chin length and her eyes well-honed and world-weary. Quite a contrast to this ah chan, who was still too fresh and unschooled to realize he was risking everything, his life, which was of inconceivable value, for half a million ren min bi, which was nothing, only money. Yet the man from the provinces wanted this risk. He was keening for it. That showed in the attentive angle of his face and the glitter in his eyes.
Gao looked briefly away from the ah chan and out the window. Facing them was an apartment building called White Pearl, the characters still carved in its lintel stone. It happened to be the first building Gao Yideng had ever bought. It was five stories, fifteen apartments. He had strung together a barely tenable web of bank loans, investors, and money from overseas relatives to do it. In the end all of them had profited hugely, but at first it was terrifying. He had the unbearable, pounding press of other people’s money riding on him. He had to look at the drab shell that was still Shanghai back then and say, yes, in ten years it will be transformed. And he’d been right. It had sprouted a gleaming, futuristic skyline. Land prices soared, though as in Beijing, building went too far and vacancy rates had been frightening. But Gao’s positions had been good, well timed and well chosen.
And he had chosen well with this art collection too. He had acquired it at the right time and now he’d release it at the best moment. He knew a veiled government sale was perfectly plausible to the Americans, as long as the visa was in order-which it was. The visa to Hong Kong was the main thing. And the visa had cost him dearly.
It was in Hong Kong that the Americans would take delivery of the art. And once in Hong Kong, the porcelains would be untouchable. That was what Hong Kong had always been, a free port, no questions asked. It had been so under the British and now, back under Chinese rule, it still was. Once art or antiquities were in Hong Kong it ceased to matter who had owned them, or how they had gotten there. They were legal.
Caches of such past glory turned up all the time in China. To find art, to buy it as Gao had done and resell it in China-this was perfectly legal. It was getting it out of China that was hard. “Mr. Bai,” he said to the ah chan. “This contract will be quite demanding.”
“I’m ready,” Bai said. “If you get me the right vehicle I can do it.”
And Gao smiled his thin smile.
Lia drew out a white Yongle vase, high and round-shouldered in the meiping style, incised with a design of delicate mimosa leaves. A pot like this was called sweet-white. The dulcet glow came from advances in clay and glazing made during the Yongle reign. She had once sorted through fragments of sweet-white discovered in a Ming stratum of an ancient kiln off Zhongshan Road in Jingdezhen. She saw through and through why sweet-white lent itself so perfectly to the subtly traced, incised style the Chinese called an-hua. And here it was in its fullness and perfection, right in front of her. The meiping vase was six hundred years old, and as nuanced and lovely as the day it was made. Similar to another one mentioned in an inventory of ceramic monochromes from the Palace Museum in Taiwan.