There were men all over China in this game-some smuggling out ancient religious statuary, others classical bronzes-but in Jingdezhen it was porcelain, and men like Bai were the traveling businessmen in the middle. In Hong Kong in particular, where they avoided names as much as possible, people called them ah chans. The generic form of address suited everybody. The buyers and sellers wanted to know as little as possible about the illegalities, while the ah chans themselves wanted to be known by no one.
It was just past ten in the morning, early for Bai. Generally he slept late. Today his mind was a buzzing jumble of plans.
Already the air around him was humid and raucous with birds. The hillside was a deep-green jumble of banana trees, bamboo, and miniature palms. He slid his hands into his pockets and his mind went to the thing he’d been thinking about, considering back and forth, all through the night. He had the opportunity now to take a really big job. Profitable-and dangerous. He didn’t like to risk so much. But for half a million ren min bi… Bai squeezed his eyes shut. He could do anything with that amount of money. He could take Lili, his third wife, and launch a business in Hong Kong. That was the real porcelain world. That was the place. He could become a dealer. A man of knowledge. His heart raced with the rightness of it.
And if he failed, if he got caught… but this was a thought from which Bai had to willfully turn away. He could not get caught.
Just leap, he thought. The jobs he was used to were smaller jobs, the modest shipments to Hong Kong, the few brocade boxes tied in plastic string, held so delicately between his knees on airplanes and in the cabs of rented trucks or cars. And there was always a celestial moment when the money changed hands in those fine Hong Kong ateliers. Then he was briefly not an ah chan at all but a real businessman, legitimate. A learned man in porcelain. A dealer and a scholar. Destiny favor me, he thought.
He looked down the hill at the spreading smokestacks of Jingdezhen, where life was still grittily real. Where on the lawn below him, middle-aged people in soft clothes moved through tai chi in wobbly lines. Where in front of him, egrets, tall, swaying, lifted and planted their long legs. The light ran warm and mottled down the path.
He thought about what he had said to Gao Yideng, the man from Beijing who had called him. “Three days, then,” he said, agreeing. “We’ll meet in Shanghai. We’ll discuss it.”
He had written down the address of the meeting place, a teahouse on Huashan Lu. And as soon as he hung up he started thinking. So many pieces to move. How? A ferry? Trucks? For this amount of money I can do it. Curse danger out of my path. I can.
And he blinked the morning sun away from him as he moved down the street, into the busy center of the town, and closer and closer to the longed-for, cigarette-stained darkness of the Perfect Garden Teahouse, just a few blocks ahead.
Lia sat on her heels before a pair of doucai Yongzheng bowls, decorated in brilliant enamel with the Eight Daoist Immortals among swirling clouds. She picked up one and cradled it. She understood the glaze through the glassy resistance it gave her fingers. To her, the clarity of this finish was what the word refinement meant. Just holding the pot, she was lighter and higher, a little more evolved.
She put down the bowls and typed. Now again she came to the need for a linkup, some suggestive proof of origins, a tie-in to the web of art history. This time she didn’t need to go into her memory world. She knew already. There was a similar pair of bowls, executed and ornamented like these, in the collection of the National Palace Museum in Beijing.
She picked up the next one. It was a blue-and-white dragon dish from the Xuande period. So fantastic. Waves of disbelief churned through her as she looked at it. How could an assortment this big, with this much cream, just materialize? Where had it been?
The blue-and-white dish was fine, gorgeous in fact, of the quality that might have been owned by the aristocratic classes as well as the emperor. She had seen a lot of these in this first crate. Yet she had seen a few undeniable masterpieces too. Imperial pieces. This was the thing experts like her most dreamed of finding, pots commissioned by the emperor.
Because these pots were the most perfect, the most truly priceless. They literally could not be improved upon. During the thousand years of imperial production in Jingdezhen, overseers had judged all the creations of the artists at the emperor’s kilns. Works deemed utterly perfect were sent to the capital for the Son of Heaven. Others, whether imperfect, overruns, or simply too experimental, were destroyed, some achingly beautiful but still destroyed, and always in the same ritual fashion-with a metal rod rammed down on them and the shards thrown in the pit.
The artist had to go back, each time, and try again. Because if the next pot crossed the invisible line and was perfect, it would be borne as exquisite treasure to the Son of Heaven. And it would become immortal.
By modern times, the emperor’s holdings had become, if not the largest, arguably the greatest art collection in selective terms the world had ever known. Continuously built for eleven centuries, it stayed in the Palace as dynasties came and went. Each new emperor inherited the art; many added to it. Despite losses, much remained intact. Jades, scroll paintings, bronzes, porcelains, calligraphy… more than a million masterpieces had accumulated by the dawn of the twentieth century. This treasure was not moved out of the Forbidden City until 1931, and then only when the Japanese occupation of Manchuria extended to within a few hundred kilometers of the capital.
Could this group have come from the Palace holdings? She sat back and scanned the rows of crates. It was outrageous, unthinkable. She had to be rational. Yet one thing was sure: Wherever they came from, the pots were stunningly valuable. They were worth-she saw the numbers take dizzy shape in her head-more than one hundred million dollars. That was more than she could even imagine someone paying, so she pushed it aside and went on working.
“You heard what I said,” she repeated to Dr. Zheng. “There are eight hundred of them. Roughly. More or less.”
“That’s not possible,” he said for the third time.
She could feel herself smiling. “Look, I’ve checked two of the crates. Twenty pots each. Twenty drop-dead pots. And there are forty crates total, same size.” She understood; it was too much to believe. In a world in which it was a major event to find two, first they had twenty. Now eight hundred. And so far, they were breathtaking. “How’s David?” she said, nudging her well-loved director off his closed loop of amazement.
“Oh! He’s fine! David’s fine. He’s just where he’s supposed to be today. Lia, don’t worry. Hospitals in Japan are first-rate. He’s being showered with attention. Half the Tokyo office is there!” Dr. Zheng grumbled affectionately over this loss of productivity, proud of the network of relationships that held together the working world around him.
“But of course I worry. The last time I saw him he was being wheeled into the O.R.”
“He’s doing fine.”
“I’ll call him when we get off.”
“No,” Zheng said quickly. “David doesn’t need to know what you’ve just told me. It would serve nothing. It would gain us nothing. Think what it could cost. Eight hundred pots! No one can find out.”
“I see what you mean. Then I’ll call him but I won’t tell him.”
Zheng laughed, his characteristic little staccato bounce. “Impossible! You? You’re a terrible liar.”
She laughed. “You’re right! That’s true.”