Ten miles across the peninsula from the city of Hav proper, which is by any standards unusual, the Chinese have created a town of their own which seems quite deliberately its antithesis: a town without surprises, homogenous in its slatternly makeshift feeling, and imbued with all the standard Chineseness of all the Chinatowns that ever were — the tireless crowds and the smell of cooking, the piles of medicinal roots and powders, the shining varnished dead ducks hanging from their hooks, the burbling bewildered live ones jammed in their market pens, the men in shirtsleeves leaning over the balconies of upstairs restaurants, the severe old ladies on kitchen chairs, the children tied together with string like puppets, as they are taken for walks in parks, the rolls of silk from Shanghai, the bookshops hung with scroll paintings of the Yangtze Gorges, the nasal clanging of radio music, the clic-clac of the abacus, the men playing draughts beneath trees, the disconsolate sniffing dogs, the rich men passing in the back seats of their Mercedes, the poor men pedalling their bicycle rickshaws, the buckets full of verminous threshing fish, the labourers bent double with teachests on their backs, the dubious little hotels, their halls brightly lit with unshaded bulbs, the glimpses of girls at sewing-machines in second-storey windows, the fibrous blackened harbour-craft, the old-fashioned bicycles, the shops full of Hong Kong television sets, the Yellow Rose Department Store, the Star Dry-Cleaning Company, the pictures here of Chiang Kai Shek peak-capped against a rising sun, there of Mao Tse-Tung bare-headed against the Great Wall — in short, the threshed, meshed, patternless, hodge-podge, sleepless, diligent and ordinary disorder of the Chinese presence.
How I enjoyed it last night! As we loitered around the streets of Yuan Wen Kuo, digesting our Sautéed Chicken with Wolf-berry (recommended to me in Beijing long ago as a specific against depression), I felt extraordinarily reassured by the prosaic activity of it all. I felt in fact, in a calm illogical way, as though I were enjoying a brief spell of home leave from the front.
Perhaps this is what the architects and soothsayers had in mind when, so many centuries ago, they laid out on this inconceivably distant shore the pattern of the first Chinese city west of the Gobi Desert. The principles of Feng Shui, the Chinese art of relating buildings to their landscapes, are easy to recognize in Yuan Wen Kuo. Two low hillocks, still bare but for an ornamental tea-house on each of them, stand here half a mile or so from the water’s edge, facing south-west. Nothing could be more suitable. Though down the generations the shape of the town has inevitably been blurred, essentially Yuan Wen Kuo still lies, as the Feng Shui men doubtless decreed, between the benevolent arms of the Azure Dragon, the White Tiger, and the Black Tortoise — the three protective ridges which protect it from the north. Halfway up the hill they laid out the main street, for Feng Shui insisted that a site should be commanding, but not exposed; though there are a few rich villas now near the summit of the slope, the ridge itself remains bare to this day, except for the semaphore mast overlooking the fishing-harbour at the eastern end.
We are told that the imperial architect Han Tu Chu himself decreed the original ground-plan, but architecturally Yuan Wen Kuo never seems to have been anything special. Perhaps, being so far away, and so vulnerable, the Chinese thought it was hardly worth spending money on expensive buildings there. Marco Polo dismissed it cursorily. ‘There is nothing to be said about Yuan Wen Kuo. Let us now move on to other places.’ Ibn Batuta thought it ‘mean and dirty, with small narrow houses and thieving people’, and was glad to get back to the civilized comforts of the Medina, where he was told of a charitable fund established especially to help the victims of extortion in Yuan Wen Kuo. Possibly it was the unimpressive character of the place that encouraged the Chinese authorities, when the time came in the fifteenth century, to build the House of the Chinese Master with such fine extravagance.
By acumen and experience Yuan Wen Kuo survived the Ottoman period — Chinese money from Hav became highly influential in Constantinople — and the town came vigorously into its own again with the arrival of New Hav, which was mostly built by Chinese contractors, and which offered endless opportunities for Chinese speculators. The Palace of Delights (which with its more discreet annexe, the House of Secret Wonders, had existed in Ibn Batuta’s time) arose anew as a great pleasure-dome in the middle of Yuan Wen Kuo, and among the Europeans of the concessions became the place to go for a racy evening out. As for our own times, they tell me that hardly a development in the Gulf, hardly a new hotel in Abu Dhabi or a university in Oman, fails to send home its quotient of profit to the Chinese financiers of Hav.
The Palace of Delights, by the way, is still there, an ugly concrete block set in a scrubby garden, and is still in its modest way a place of pleasure: there is a restaurant in it, and a concert hall, and there are rival information departments set up by the local factions of Communist China and Taiwan — each with its glass-fronted cabinet full of propaganda booklets, each staffed, as I discovered when I once laboured up the bare concrete steps to their offices, by young men and women with time on their hands to explain their respective points of view until Tuesday week. In its great days, though, the Palace of Delights was something altogether different. I know several people who remember it from the days between the wars, and they make it sound terrific.
There was not just one restaurant then, but a regular covey of them, each serving a different Chinese cuisine, on a different floor, to the music of a different band. Then four or five night clubs pullulated until dawn, and there were fortune-tellers, and beauty parlours, and shops of many kinds, and performing animals, and photographers to take your picture dressed as mandarin or empress, or alternatively not dressed at all. Magicians made rabbits vanish on staircases, fire-eaters stalked the corridors, there were story-tellers, gambling-booths, sideshows offering freaks or dancing-girls or distorting mirrors. You could get married at the Palace of Delights. You could find an amanuensis to write a letter for you, or a wizard to cast you a spell. I have been told that more than a thousand people worked there, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s the profits were immense.
The clientele of the House of Secret Wonders (which has been pointed out to me as a low wooden building, now half-collapsed and covered with tangled creeper) is claimed to have been too distinguished to list — Armand says that in his last years Kolchok himself was a regular customer. The most intriguing rumour I have heard concerns a tall young Englishman with a pale gingery beard, who was said almost to have lived in the place for several months in the years before the First World War. He seemed to be well-off, he had lodgings in a Chinese apartment house along the road, and he apparently had nothing whatever to do with Europeans. After a time he vanished, and people forgot all about him; it is only in recent years that he has been tentatively identified as that queer and beguiling recluse Sir Edmund Backhouse, who lived for most of the rest of his life in Beijing, and deceived the whole world of oriental scholarship with his fake scrolls and fantasies.
I often go to Yuan Wen Kuo. I like to have lunch on the Boating restaurant in the harbour, and spend the afternoon sketching from its deck, kept cool, with lemonades and thoughtfully adjusted canopies by its obliging owners. I love to watch the fisher-people at work, especially when on festival days they dress up their boats with huge heraldic flags, pennants and trailing crimson dragons, giving them a wonderfully piratical splendour.
Actually, piracy used to be notorious among the Hav Chinese. Fast pirate craft roamed the eastern Mediterranean out of Yuan Wen Kuo, ravaging the Syrian trade routes, preying upon the traffic of the Dardanelles, raiding isolated villages on the coasts of Cyprus and Lebanon. Even the Venetians, partners in profit to the Hav Chinese, often had occasion to complain about their piracy on the high seas, and in the fifteenth century there were persistent rumours of collusion between the terrible Uskok pirates of the Adriatic and those of Yuan Wen Kuo; a Chinese seaman was among those beheaded after the capture of an Uskok ship by the Venetians in 1458, and to this day in the Yugoslav village of Senj, the old Uskok headquarters, people of faintly oriental cast are said to be descendants of Hav Chinese (though some withered scholars scorn the whole story as merely a semantic confusion between Hav and the Dalmatian island of Hvar…).