And from there, Lia knew, the art began its journey. Somewhere along those sixteen years lay her clue.
Jingdezhen was close. Already outside the train window, rising and receding out of the foaming red earth, she could see the low, sharp-topped green hills around the town. They were familiar to her. Like most porcelain people, she’d been here already. On pilgrimage.
She leaned her head against the glass. Thatched mud and brick homes of villagers raced by. Far ahead, down the track, she could see the charcoal haze that hung like a pall over the town, as it had for a thousand years. It was the smoke of pots cooking, an indescribably exciting scent.
The train squealed to a stop. Jingdezhen was the end of the line. The passengers dragged their bags over the steamy platform, across the tile floor, and through a low-ceilinged concrete terminal. The big glass windows were streaked with dirt of many years and admitted only a vague light. She was the only foreigner in the crowd, and tall too. She stood out as they all spilled onto the sidewalk, blinking in the hot liquid glare of the south China summer. Yet no one looked twice at her. They were used to outside pots people.
First she’d go to the Jingdezhen Hotel to get a room. She could see the flashes of Jiangxi’s beauty, even here, walking up Zhushan Lu in the center of town. Banana fronds lined the roadway. Trees rustled over the low concrete buildings. Above the noises of traffic and machinery and the modern world rose the cacophony of birds. She raised her hand for a taxi and had the driver take her high on Lianhuatang Lu, over a park with a small lake, to the Jingdezhen Hotel. It was a pretty, leafy spot backed up against the hillside, a backwater modern hotel with blank, inexpensive furniture, which always seemed empty. She checked in for a night.
From there she went straight to the Ceramics Research Institute. The best local professors and historians were here. She knew a few of them.
“Professor Lu Bin, is he by any chance in his office today?” she inquired of a thirtyish male clerk at the front desk.
“Professor Lu is here.”
“Ah, so excellent.” She handed him her card. “Please convey my apologies for visiting unexpectedly. But if he’s free…”
The clerk picked up the phone, punched a code, and began talking in low and rapid Jiangxi dialect. It was a natural, territory-marking response to her having spoken Mandarin. She waited patiently. “He is free,” the clerk told her finally, and she turned for the stairs. They were worn to soft, smooth basins under her feet.
Professor Lu was waiting for her at the top of the stairs. “Fan Luo Na,” he said with his charming, rumpled surprise. Lu had overlong gray hairs he combed across the top of his head. Sometimes, like now, these picked up electric charge and lifted ghostlike from his scalp. He pulled off his brown glasses and smiled and blinked her into his office.
“It’s been a long time,” she said, which was a standard greeting whether it had been one year or ten. “Everything well?”
“Everything’s well. Now, sit down! Have tea.” He pulled her into his office and busied himself briefly with the things. “Now. Here.” He set the cup in front of her. “Ah! But I have something to show you.”
He fetched a catalog from a drawer in a side table and came back with it. She recognized its cover before he even sat down. It was the book from the last spring auction of Armstrong's, their principal rival house.
He opened it to a marked page. “Just look at this.” He turned it toward her so she could see a tall, narrow-necked vase in iron-red glaze with a dragon design. Late Qing. She glanced at the caption below the photograph. Reign of Xuantong. She remembered it. It was a good piece, not a great one, but good. It had sold for about fifty thousand dollars.
“I made it,” Lu said, unable to keep the glee from his voice.
“You?”
“I made it!” Lu cried. “I sold it to a businessman for five thousand ren min bi.”
That was about six hundred U.S. dollars. “You sold it to an ah chan?”
“A businessman,” he repeated.
“You know,” she said.
“Yes. I know.” He wagged a finger at her. “But maybe I prefer not to know. Anyway. I sell it as fang gu. That’s why my price is low. After that”-he tilted his head in practiced acquiescence-“I cannot control all that happens, can I? Someone may say it is real. I can’t stop them!”
“Professor Lu, I am glad you make such beautiful pieces, and that happens to be the end of my judgment on the matter. But I am curious. Did you tell Armstrong’s when you found out?”
He laughed. “No! Why should I? It is a good piece. Let its owner enjoy it.”
And she smiled with him. But under her smile there was fear, because fakes slipped through all the time, bringing terror with them. In a flashing domino line of memory, she relived all her beautiful pots in Beijing. Which one had she missed; which would still betray her?
She looked back at the catalog Lu Bin was holding open to her, the glossy professional photo of his own work. His iron-red vase was quite good. The meiping form was correct, if a little too thick-bodied and overt. The iron-red glaze was authentic-looking. It was a good piece. Like most of the academics here in Jingdezhen, he was first and forever a potter. “Professor Lu, truly, you surpass yourself,” she told him.
His glasses had slipped down his nose and his stray hairs crackled up. “This! This is just an old teacher’s hobby.”
“Don’t be polite.” She knew that Lu was a serious artist who held an elite status in that world. He made contemporary pieces too. They were technically accomplished. But that was not what porcelain was for him. In the West, where what was fresh and innovative was always sought and always loved, it was different. Here, the heights were often heights of perfection, not genius. Mastery was greater than genius. It was knowable; it could be held in memory with all of its faces and moods. Never fully understood, perhaps-for there was always more to learn-but held and kept. As she knew. “I love it,” she told him. “It’s very fine.”
“Oh, now you are just passing praise.” To accept her compliment would have been inappropriate, but he was pleased and she could tell as much. “When creating fang gu, one should seek not to express one’s soul, but to subsume it, in the prototype.”
“You’re so right,” she said. “There was the man-ah, what was his name?-Geng, was it not, Geng Jiewu?”
“Geng Jiewu!” said Professor Lu. “He used to make the Persian-style Ming pots after those in the Zhengde reign.”
“Yes!” she cried. “And with his false Arabic, he could never resist making it just close enough to real Arabic to be read, and in his Arabic making puns.”
“Do you remember when that was discovered in London?” the older man said.
“Ei, yes,” she answered. “What a thing! And the piece was in a British museum already.” They both laughed, glee and horror gloriously intermingled, completely at one in the sharing of arcana. “And there are others.” She looked across at him. “Do you know, for example, that artist who always ruffles the tail feathers of the chicken when he paints in the Chenghua style? That one? Do you know the man I mean?”
“Old Yu!” he cried.
“Yes,” she said, hardly breathing. “Does he still live?”
“Potter Yu? Of course.” The professor looked at her, seeing now why she’d come. It was on her face. But that was all right. They had shared so much good face and guanxi, she was entitled to ask. “He lives out on Mian Hua Lu on the north edge of the township-off Mian Hua Lu, actually, up the hill; it’s no more than a dirt road. The people out there know his place.” He smiled thinly. “Yu likes to live in what you might call the suburbs. He needs room to work.”