The driver took her northwest along Gulou, past the drum tower, and through a maze of hutongs to the shores of Houhai Lake, a long, thin finger of water here in north central Beijing. They drove along the lake and then turned sharply into the walled grounds of a sprawling white house trimmed with red verandas.
A uniformed man in the gatehouse nodded them past. She jumped out and ran in. The garden was gorgeously tended, with light pooling down through trees over rocks and ponds, but she walked quickly through it and up a few slate steps to a stone-paved veranda. At the front door, under the incandescently painted roof overhang, a small man in a brown suit was waiting.
She returned his polite greetings and followed him in over the worn, thin carpeting. It took her eyes a few seconds to adjust to the dark. Then she saw they were crossing a long living room, green walls reaching high up to ornate moldings and European chandeliers, curtains drawn behind square, Chinese-style arrangements of couches and tea tables. The must and smell of decades rose with every soft scuff of their feet. At the end of the living room, they followed a corridor past a dining room filled with Swiss clocks and a whitewashed, light-filled kitchen. Then the man opened a screen door and they stepped down into an enclosed inner court, across the grass, and up the steps on the other side. He clicked open the glass-paned doors and flung them wide.
“The light should be here, I believe.” He reached into the room and brushed the wall. The room choked in an incandescent flood.
She stood staring. It was a vast room filled with wood packing crates. They made four neat rows. She counted. Forty crates. Forty of them. That couldn’t be. There were supposed to be twenty pots, which would be one crate. If there were forty crates of pots, there were- She hesitated.
“Mr.-” She turned to look for the man. He was gone.
2
She went to the first crate, the one nearest her. It opened easily.
At first all she saw was the nest of packed, tight-spiral wood shavings, flattened by years, springing up as if breathing at last. She sank her fingers in and rustled through. There, the first box. Her fingers traced its cotton-cloth-covered shape.
She unrolled a length of thick felt on the floor and set the indigo-dyed box on it. She eased the ivory bit from its loop and tipped it open.
Resting in the silk was a covered jar in underglaze blue, ornately bordered and inscribed in a faux-Arabic script. She recognized the Zhengde period, 1506 to 1521. The court had been infatuated at that time with the motifs of the Middle East, like this ten-inch jar, almost perfectly potted. She lifted it and checked the mark and period. Yes. Made in the reign of Zhengde.
She turned on her laptop and brought up her template for measuring, describing, and recording. She entered everything about the Zhengde jar, carefully, quickly, heart going fast. There had to be eight hundred pots in this room. She made digital photos all the way around the piece, recorded all its physical details. At the same time she memorized what she saw and assigned it a place in her memory world. There were already many thousands of pots in there. Pots were the workhorses of her memory, the marching majority of its inhabitants. She loved adding to their number.
To do so she used the age-old method of maintaining an imaginary structure. Through history, mnemonists had done this, stored their memories in temples, palaces, or villas they kept in their minds. Lia had chosen the layout of the old imperial examination halls in Beijing, to which candidates once came from all over China to sit for the three-day exam of their lives. The complex had thousands of cubicles in orderly rows, the door to each marked with a different Chinese character. For her this was ideal. She could continue memorizing all her life and never use it all up. At its simplest level, the memory world was a repository of all she knew, indispensable in documenting the history of pots. But on a deeper level, where knowledge and imagination intersected, this world of brick-paved lanes and cubicles sometimes brought history to life so that she could actually see it unfolding. Whole scenes, events, lives played in front of her eyes. She didn’t talk much about this to others. It was hers alone.
But now she needed to make only a surface visit to the memory world, for provenance on this Zhengde jar. She was quite sure it was genuine, and old. Therefore it had to have been recorded somewhere. And somewhere she would find it.
She sat down cross-legged on the floor to concentrate, her hands around the jar. She felt it through the pads of her fingers. Once connected to it she walked into memory in her mind’s eye. She saw herself passing through the wooden gates into the examination yard, walking down the central avenue where she kept all the reference lists and catalogs. If this underglaze blue-and-white jar was made during the Zhengde reign, chances were it was described, part of the Palace collection or some private inventory.
She found it in the middle section of the avenue, which housed the records of the Palace collection. The jar was listed in “Gems of Porcelain,” a catalog of album paintings created for the Qianlong emperor in the eighteenth century. It was there, one of Qianlong’s choice pieces, the blue-and-white faux-Islamic jar.
A smile creased her face at that transient sense of completion brought on by a stroke of insight. Listed in Qianlong’s “Gems of Porcelain”… She finished the entry and replaced the jar in its silk-padded box. That was one. She returned it to its crate. Now another.
Standing over the big, old-fashioned wooden packing case, she dug through the shavings with the glee of a child. She could hardly wait for a sufficiently decent hour to call Zheng and tell him.
The ah chan, called Bai, walked in the new morning light through Tian Hua Tang Park in the town of Jingdezhen. The broad-leafed glade cast shadows on the lawn and the crossing cement paths. This was Jiangxi Province, in the rolling mountains of southeast China. Bai’s home was here, a small apartment on a gravel street up the hill. In that apartment he studied porcelain. The accumulated virtue of thousands of years of art was not easily known, but Bai believed that every hour of study paid him back tenfold in business success. It took a lot of knowledge to tell the real from the fake. And even in the realm of what was real, one had to have knowledge to successfully offer a small price for a quality article, jia lian wu mei, and resell high.
Bai walked the path down through the park, around the tree-shaded lake, and into downtown Jingdezhen, the center of China’s porcelain world. For a thousand years this entrepôt of artists, potters, painters, and forgers had been home to the emperor’s kilns. Now the place was a mishmash of factories and artisans and backyard producers, a cobweb of ancient streets blaring TV sounds and tinny music and the pneumatic sputter of machinery.
Through the Communist era, the town had been dominated by huge ceramics factories, turning out modestly priced dishware for the world’s discount stores. But in the early 1990s the era of privatization took hold and most of the factories closed. Instantly, the artists and small manufacturers sprouted again like mushrooms after rain. Once more, Jingdezhen was what it had always been: a decentralized, polyglot ceramics production center where the greatest Chinese artists lived and worked.
Few of them created modern pieces. Most strove to reproduce the great works of the past. Some of these were great works in themselves, every bit as demanding as their originals. Yet Jingdezhen was also the place where the real thing could be found-rare, magnificent antiques-because here the traffic in pots was brisk and continuous.
And this trade in antiquities had spawned another world in Jingdezhen-the world of smugglers, ah chans, people like Bai. Without them the old masterworks would never make it out of China and into Hong Kong. And until such pots crossed that magic border they would never fetch more than a fraction of their potential price. Never mind that it was a terrible crime to take them out, punishable by death. A bullet in the back of the head. Banish bad destiny. There was unthinkable money in it.