Meanwhile, Wang Xizhi’s original manuscript had long ceased to be available for reference. Tang Taizong, who died in 649, had demanded that the Orchid Pavilion be buried with him in his grave at Zhaoling — some 30 kilometres north of what is now Xi’an, where it should still be lying today (if the imperial records told us the truth).
Remarkable paradox: it was only after it finally disappeared forever in the imperial grave that this particular work (which very few calligraphers ever saw in its original form) began to exert its strongest influence, through various indirect and questionable copies. It eventually had its greatest impact at the beginning of the Song period (eleventh century)—700 years after Wang Xizhi’s time. It was then popularised by a calligrapher of genius, Mi Fu, who, under the guise of propounding Wang’s calligraphic style, displayed in fact his own personal creations. The educated public was unable to distinguish the Mi product from the Wang label, as, by this time, practically nothing remained of Wang Xizhi’s original works, with the exception of a few very small, uncertain fragments. From then on, the prestige and influence of the Orchid Pavilion continued to grow steadily. As L. Ledderose neatly summarised it: “It seems somehow uncomfortably symptomatic that it was the lost Orchid Pavilion that was to emerge as the most celebrated work in the history of Chinese calligraphy… What is even more astonishing is that the Orchid Pavilion in addition to being glorified also became a stylistic modeclass="underline" it has been studied by calligraphers for centuries although nobody has ever seen the original!”[19]
Furthermore, there was a final, ironic twist to the story. In 1965, the famous scholar and archaeologist Guo Moruo ignited a bomb that threw the Chinese academic world into turmoil and initiated a heated and still unresolved debate. According to Guo’s findings, not only is the calligraphy of the Orchid Pavilion, as we know it through its Tang and Song copies, from a much later date than Wang Xizhi, but even the text itself could not have been composed by him: in other words, Wang Xizhi neither wrote it nor calligraphed it. The sublime model which inspired the entire development of Chinese calligraphy, the aesthetic and technical cornerstone of this art, may in fact never have existed!
Whether or not this conclusion is accurate (there are some flaws in Guo’s argumentation, but let us leave that aside), it can still provide us with an important clue to the broader issue we have attempted to address: the vital strength, the creativity, the seemingly unlimited capacity for metamorphosis and adaptation which the Chinese tradition displayed for 3,500 years may well derive from the fact that this tradition never let itself be trapped into set forms, static objects and things, where it would have run the risk of paralysis and death.[20]
In a sense, one of the best metaphors for this tradition could be provided by the description of a Chinese garden which a Ming scholar wrote in the sixteenth century. It was a fashion among intellectuals and artists to write records of beautiful gardens, but in the case of our writer, there was a new dimension added to the genre. The garden he described was called the Wuyou Garden — which means “The Garden-that-does-not-exist.” In his essay, the author observed that many famous gardens of the past have entirely disappeared and survive only on paper in literary descriptions. Hence, he wondered why it should be necessary for a garden to have first existed in reality. Why not skip the preliminary stage of actual existence and jump directly into the final state of literary existence which, after all, is the common end of all gardens? What difference is there between a famous garden which exists no more, and this particular garden which never existed at all, since in the end both the former and the latter are known only through the same medium of the written word?[21]
Western visitors in China seem to have been irritated to the point of obsession with what came to be called “Chinese lies” or the “Chinese art of stage-setting and make-believe.” Even intelligent and perceptive observers did not completely escape this trap; in a clever piece written a few years ago by a good scholar,[22] I came across an anecdote which, I think, has a much deeper bearing than the author himself may have realised. A great Buddhist monastery near Nanking was famous for its purity and orthodoxy. The monks were following a rule that conformed strictly to the original tradition of the Indian monasteries: whereas, in other Chinese monasteries, an evening meal is served, in this particular monastery every evening the monks received only a bowl of tea. Foreign scholars who visited the monastery at the beginning of this century much admired the austerity of this custom. These visitors, however, were quite naïve. If they had had the curiosity actually to look into the bowls of the monks, they would have found that what was served under the name of “tea” was in fact a fairly nourishing rice congee, similar in every respect to the food which is being provided at night in all other Chinese monasteries. Only in this particular monastery, out of respect for an ancient tradition, the rice congee was conventionally called “the bowl of tea.”
I wonder if, to some extent, Chinese tradition is not such a “bowl of tea,” which under a most ancient, venerable and constant name can in fact contain all sorts of things, and ultimately anything but tea. Its permanence is first and foremost a permanence of names, covering the endlessly changing and fluid nature of its actual contents.
If this observation is correct, it could also have interesting implications in other areas, and you would naturally be free, for instance, to read in it a forecast regarding the eventual fate of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. This essay, however, was only concerned with China’s past.
POSTSCRIPT
As this essay was going to the printers, I belatedly obtained a remarkable article by F.W. Mote, “A Millennium of Chinese Urban History: Form, Time and Space Concepts in Soochow.”[23] Reading some of the conclusions which Professor Mote drew fifteen years ago from a case study in Chinese urban history, one will realise that the ideas I ventured here are both less original and more sound than might have first appeared!
Having quoted a Western writer who observed at the beginning of the twentieth century that there were no ancient ruins in Suzhou, Mote comments:
His observation is largely correct. Is Soochow then a city of ancient monuments, or a city in which the awareness of antiquity comes from something else? In our tradition we tend to equate the antique presence with authentically ancient physical objects. China has no ruins comparable to the Roman Forum, or even to Angkor Wat, which is a thousand years younger. It has no ancient buildings kept continually in use such as Rome’s Pantheon and Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia. It does not have those, not because of incapacity to build with “hewn stone, as in Athens and Rome” as du Bose suggests. It does not have those because of differences in attitude — a different attitude toward the way of making the monumental achievement, and a different attitude toward the ways of achieving the enduring monument.
Mote then illustrates his point by sketching the history of Suzhou’s Great Pagoda — with a history going back to the third century AD, it was modified, destroyed and rebuilt many times during the ages, ending up as a twentieth-century construction:
This history is typical of China’s ancient monuments. No building with such a pedigree would count for much as an authentic antiquity even in the United States, much less in Rome. It certainly would not count for much among Ruskin’s Stones of Venice.