This put me in something of a dilemma. There was no photograph of Song Liang in China Daily. If there had been, I could tell Mira or Ruby to call the police and tell them that the person I thought had stolen the box might be the employee of the Cultural Relics Bureau who had been killed in Xi’an. But there was no photograph, so if I said that, they might quite rightly wonder how I knew of it, and I would have to say I was there, something I was extremely reluctant to do, not the least because I thought being linked in some way with two suspicious deaths was going to keep me in China for the rest of my life.
Our route took us past the statues that mark either the beginning or the end, depending on your geographic and political point of view, of the fabled Silk Route, through the burgeoning modern city that spreads outside Xi’an’s old city walls, thence past miles of farmland to the place where the emperors and their families centered in that area went to spend eternity.
The tombs were interesting to be sure. We visited T’ang Princess Yongtai’s tomb, a young woman who may have been executed by a rather nasty piece of work named Empress Wu Zetian, or may, as her tombstone related, have died in childbirth. Perhaps Empress Wu had the tombstone carved with her version of events. Princess Yongtai was the granddaughter of the Emperor Gaozong. She was also the granddaughter or Empress Wu, the woman who may have ordered her killed.
These were dangerous times to be a princess, it seems. Was Lingfei a princess? That might explain why her body had disappeared, stolen by an unpleasant rival.
To reach the sarcophagus, you descend a long ramp sloping quite steeply downward, past a few badly faded frescoes depicting the princess’s maids in lovely gowns and elaborate hairstyles, little niches filled with terra-cotta figures of servants and so on, infinitely smaller than the life-size warriors the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi had formed for himself, and past a shaft that had been cut by tomb robbers at some point in the distant past. The air was unpleasantly damp, almost fetid, at the bottom where the sarcophagus stood, and there was nothing much to see other than a large stone sarcophagus, but at least I knew what a T’ang tomb looked like.
I also learned that several hundred objects had been found in the princess’s tomb, including lots of gold and silver. Could I safely assume the silver boxes had at some point been in Lingfei’s tomb, even if her body had disappeared? Yet another question for the “Don’t Know” side of the equation.
Quite unexpectedly the most interesting part of the visit was that to Famen Si, a Buddhist temple an hour or so west of Xi’an. During the T’ang dynasty, emperors went to Famen Si to worship, and the temple’s most famous relic, a finger bone purported to be that of the Buddha himself, was also carried in a great procession to Chang’an, now Xi’an, from time to time. It seems that an Indian prince, determined to earn celestial points in his lifetime, had dispersed a number of such relics, and Chang’an had one. The relic was essentially forgotten, but when the stupa at Famen Si collapsed in 1981, an underground chamber was found, and in it, the relic.
What was interesting to me, and had perhaps been for Burton as well, was an exquisite little museum on the site in which I found a series of silver boxes with hinged and rounded lids that were supposed to contain said finger bone. All of these boxes looked to contain a finger bone when they were opened, but only one of them had the real thing. These boxes were not unlike Dory’s missing box, and I found myself wondering once again whether the smallest of Lingfei’s boxes had held anything. There certainly hadn’t been anything in it when it went up for auction, but that didn’t mean much. Whatever it was could have disintegrated over the intervening centuries, or it could have been something more permanent, a particularly costly jewel perhaps, that someone had decided to separate from the box at some point. Was it the contents, and not the box itself that were so important to someone? It did lead me to believe, given the finger bone of the Buddha, that silver casket boxes held important objects.
Once again I was filled with regret that the silver box was gone. I wanted to know who Lingfei had been, partly because it might be relevant to what was happening now, but also because I was interested in her, assuming I was correct in considering her a woman. If she was a princess, I stood a chance of finding her; if not, it would be much more difficult. History records the famous, the victorious, the wealthy, and by and large, the men. If Lingfei was none or these things, her voice might remain silent forever, except, of course for the words and the pictures on the boxes. That made them all the more important.
When I was safely back at the hotel, my first order of business was to call Ruby in Beijing. I asked her if she knew who the man in black at the auction house that day was. She said she didn’t. I said that somebody had to, somebody other than the police.
“I wonder if David knows him?” she mused.
“Can you ask him?” I said, as casually as possible. I didn’t want to ask him myself.
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll call you back.”
She did call back, but only to say that David was in Shanghai for a couple of days. She didn’t know him well enough to have his mobile, so she’d call him in a day or two. I had his mobile number. He’d given me his card at the party at Dr. Xie’s after the auction. I still didn’t want to phone him myself, but I didn’t seem to have any choice. I called, but got his voice mail. I didn’t leave a message.
Next, I went to the business center and searched for Lingfei on the Internet. As always zillions of entries came up, but nothing that helped me. There was a Chinese appliance manufacturer with Lingfei in its name, that’s about all. Then I tried famous Chinese women of history. Once again there was no Lingfei, but there was a Meifei and a Yang Guifei. The latter two were concubines of Illustrious August, Yang Guifei a woman he neglected affairs of state to spend time with, and who was known as Number One Consort. All three names had “fei” as a suffix. I knew two were concubines. Was fei“ a job description as opposed to a name? Was Lingfei a concubine, too? You wouldn’t think an appliance company Would have ”concubine“ in its name, but that, I thought, might be due to the lack of subtlety in translating Chinese into English. This Meifei, for example, was called Plum Concubine, but ”mei“ also meant rose, so maybe there were two meanings for something we would write as ”fei,“ but which would actually be two different Chinese characters with different corresponding meanings.
I had a flashback to New York, to Burton’s exit from the auction house preview. Had he not said something like “Farewell, my concubine”? Had he been talking to Lingfei and the box rather than to me? It would have been a relief at the time to know that, but even now it was useful. Lingfei was an imperial concubine!
If she was, I was soon to learn as I searched further, she was in serious danger of being lost in a crowd. According to what I read, Illustrious August had a harem of approximately forty thousand women. Apparently there was something called the Flank Court where the wives of men who had displeased the emperor were sent. New emperors tended to free the women held by the previous emperor, but since Illustrious August had reigned for more than four decades, from 712 to 756, there were a lot of women in his harem by the time he passed on. They were there on sufferance as it were, both acquired and discarded at his whim. Being of a feminist bent, the whole idea of a harem made me distinctly nauseous, but I read on.
Other than his propensity to keep forty thousand women around for his personal pleasure, Illustrious August looked to have been a good emperor. He had several names; all emperors did. He was born Li Longji. The T’ang dynasty was founded by the Li family, and he was a Li. His dynastic title was T’ang Mingdi, also known as Minghuang. We know him best as Emperor Xuanzong. Emperors got special names after their deaths that encapsulated their reigns. If someone was a bad emperor, he got a bad name. Xuanzong is remembered as Illustrious August, or Profound Ancestor, which spoke well of him. Contrary to my earlier impression, perhaps he hadn’t named himself. From my perspective, he seemed to have had the most glorious reign of all in terms of culture. He loved music, and he even wrote some himself. There is a song he is supposed to have written when he was on a journey to the moon or something like that.