Though she herself went by feeling, she had the computer take the weight too. She activated the scale feature and clicked down the top of her laptop, which in this position took readings to a hundredth of an ounce. Weight and dimensions were transferred by the computer into the appraisal report. She took the flask up again and turned it every way. So hoi moon. So ideally shaped. And such a sedate, noble hue to the Yongle cobalt design.
Yet there was something else that had caught her eye about it: its box. Glued along the bottom, on one edge, ran a thin strip of crumbly yellow silk. Some kind of mark, most likely, from an inventory or catalog. She centered the flask on her felt tray and took up the box and turned it over.
After the last royal family moved out, several attempts had been made to list and assess what was in the Forbidden City. Mostly they were sporadic, partial stabs at a job so huge it was almost impossible to complete. And of course, everything had ended on the night in 1931 when Japan had occupied Manchuria and the art had to be carried out of the Palace.
But each time Palace officials had tried to sort through what they had, they’d hired people, made plans-they’d kept records, which were left behind. And they also left all manner of histories and lists and schedules. Lia had seen quite a few of these. They were in her memory.
She sat on the floor against a rolled-up rug that braced her back. She needed a minute of quiet to go down to the bottom. She was looking for this particular cataloging effort-the one that had marked its boxes with strips of yellow silk. She wanted to fix it in time. Then there’d be one more point in the chronology, one more moment when she knew these pots were still inside the Palace walls.
She took her hearing aids out. The emptiness inflated in her and she felt the familiar wash of pleasure and acceptance. There were the gates to the memory world; there was the way inside. She walked the brick lanes, reviewing what she knew. She found discrete nuggets; records, photos, newspaper accounts, Palace documents, and memorials. After a while they came together to form the picture in her mind.
In March, 1924, a young man awoke in Peking.
It was the tapping of his Ayi on the rice-paper-and-wood-lattice window that awakened him, her melodious voice saying his name. He pulled the quilts closer about himself. Not yet.
Then he remembered. Last night his father had spoken to him of a new post, with the Committee for the Disposition of the Qing Imperial Household Possessions. It was perfect for him. His education had been classical, aiming him, as thirty-eight generations before him had been aimed, at success in the imperial examinations. Yet he would be the first of his line not to sit for them. They had been abolished. The old examination yards had been knocked down.
He dressed quickly in the frigid room, lighting only the small oil lamp, leaving the brazier cold. He secured his trousers at the ankles and then fitted a gown shaped like a close sleeveless jacket over his shirt. Out of the room he hurried, across the flagstones and through the open gate to the Chrysanthemum Court. It was not time for chrysanthemums. It was Third Month. The air was wet and spiked with cold. The Gobi dust had not yet blown in to cover everything with its fine silt.
Breakfast was hand-cut noodles in a soup of young chicken, mantou, pickled vegetable, and green tea. The Wens ate lightly in the morning.
Guangyu took his place at the table opposite his white-haired father, in a low wooden chair inset with natural marble that falsely appeared to be an ink painting of mountains among clouds.
“Second Director Tian of the Committee sent his valet here this morning,” said Guangyu’s father.
Guangyu inclined his head.
“You are to go there today and talk to him.” The older man knew this work would suit his son. Guangyu did better with art than anything else. And it was an official post too-of a sort.
So Guangyu went downtown to an office near the rear gate of the Forbidden City and met Second Director Tian.
The young man found the Second Director preoccupied behind stacks of aging, crumbling inventories, their spidery archaic characters organized according to forgotten systems and principles.
So many back courts in the Palace had been closed off, dust-covered, unused for many decades, and yet were filled, stacked, with boxes from floor to ceiling. Guangyu knew this; it was a thing about which art lovers whispered. There were scrolls, rare books, textiles, porcelains, paintings, bronzes, enamels, calligraphies, diamonds, jade, treasures from all the corners of the empire and from beyond all seven oceans. All of it jumbled together, piled up, half forgotten.
Guangyu stood in the Second Director’s office, nervous in his well-made gown. He was educated. He could recite the Five Classics and develop an elegant eight-legged essay on any Confucian citation. None of that mattered anymore.
“Mr. Wen. How fast can you write?”
“How fast?” Guangyu thought he might have heard wrong. “I suppose… forty characters a minute.”
“Oh! Very good.” Second Director smiled. “The job is yours.”
Guangyu stared. Did the man really not care for his academic rank? His knowledge of art?
Tian pulled out a sheet of paper and swirled his brush. “What objects would you like to list?” He looked up when Guangyu did not answer. “Come!” he said. “Paintings, jade, bronzes, porcelains-“
“Porcelains,” Guangyu said.
“Porcelains.” Tian wrote directions on a piece of paper and handed it to Guangyu with a smudgily printed map. “Go to number twenty-four, the Pavilion for Listening to Cicadas. Rear court, southeast room. Begin there.”
Guangyu looked at the map.
“And here,” said Tian. He handed the young man a roll of yellow silk tape. “Every box you list should have a strip of this glued to the bottom.” Tian held up two fingers to show Guangyu how long the strip was to be. “Otherwise you will lose your way. There are too many works.” He smiled again. “You will see.”
Guangyu made a reverence, offered his thanks, and went away down the hutong, past the gangs of children shouting rhymes, the old men airing caged birds, the women carrying home food. He crossed the street, darting in a youthful pulse of excitement between the rickshas and carts and sputtering motorcars. Men on foot formed a soft, dark-moving tide of gowns and fedoras. Itinerant vendors offered fruit and hot teas. Ruddy-faced market women rearranged their vegetables.
He passed a few girls of his own class too, well-bred girls, avoiding his eyes as they were trained to avoid the eyes of all men, hidden behind robes, nothing of them visible except dark eyes and the slim fluttering ends of fingers. He walked past them, clutching his map and his roll of yellow silk tape, to the rear entrance of the Forbidden City.
A guard examined his paper and waved him through. Guangyu had never imagined he would enter this part of the Palace. Until just recently the last Qing emperor, Pu Yi, had lived here.
Now in front of him lay the imperial garden. He turned away from the artistic arrangement of rocks and twisted trees, the famous viewing pavilion. The marble balustrades, the paving stones of mosaics and fossils, the aged and massive Joined-Together Cypress, all of these he saw, awestruck, but kept walking. Here were the pavilions that had once housed the minor females, the passed-over concubines, their handmaids and eunuchs. Past the Palace of Pure Affection and the Palace of Southern View, then an opening, a turn to the right, and he found himself on a narrow street running north-south, which was flanked by high, tile-roofed walls. Everything was empty and silent. He stepped through a gate in the east wall that took him away from the larger ceremonial buildings-the Hall of Worshiping Ancestors and the Palace in Honor of Talent, in which, if Guangyu remembered correctly, congratulations were traditionally offered on the birth of a son. Away from these he entered a dusty labyrinth of smaller courts, barred by massive ceramic-tile spirit screens and topped by roofline arrangements of guardian animal figures. Between the broken, abandoned paving stones, tufts of grass pushed up. There were acres of this. He still had not seen another person.