Up later on a weekend
morning and it is moody outside. Aashish Khan, the classical Indian sarod
player, allows the pensive feeling room to permeate the house, stating, pausing
with Ustad Allah Rakha. I stand by front
window in the kitchen. Overcast, fall
day that would be easy to ascribe as polluted.
And in this day and age, why wonder.
I just checked the U.S. Embassy Beijing
“Real Time Air Quality Index” and indeed, it is currently reading with
an AQI of 188 downtown, which rates squarely as “Unhealthy.” And this probably
means it’s still unhealthy if you drive for three hours in any direction from
here. http://aqicn.org/city/beijing/usembassy/
The helpful folks at
the embassy have thoughtfully left a link for the official Chinese site as
well, as a point of comparison. http://www.cnemc.cn/ and here http://zx.bjmemc.com.cn/ I don’t know if
I’m conducting an apples to apples comparison, but after digging around on the
China site, it appears that the official Chinese graph is registering my
neighborhood as “54” which is rated as “Good” and if we assume there is parity
between the measurement scales this rating would only be moderately hazardous
by the U.S. embassy’s standards. Indeed,
the readings for cities in a three-hour drive from here never drop below what
the Chinese site lists as “slightly contaminated.”
So what’s going
on? Frankly I hadn’t really wanted to
spend the afternoon writing about particulate matter but having raised the
question, and being on line, I have subsequently found out that there are many
differences in the way that China and the U.S. measures things. This article from Greenpeace provides
considerable detail:
China’s reading is
an aggregate number of different locales, all taken from the day before and
utilizes a different formula for calculation.
The U.S. embassy reading is real time feed, which is helpful, but
somewhat misleading, as the definitions like “hazardous” really define a day’s
worth of breathing. Indeed, the U.S.
government calculates an average reading of the day before, to measure AQI in
the back in the U.S. itself. Here is the
reading for my home, the 12601 zip, back in the Mid Hudson Valley of New York
State: http://airnow.gov/index.cfm?action=airnow.local_city&zipcode=12601&submit=Go
Breathe deep mom,
you’re looking “good” at “24”. There is now
also, of course, an iPhone app, that I could download and compare the two
ratings, to my heart’s content.
And we’re left with
the fact that it is not only moody out there, but likely sub optimal for people
with heart conditions. Right. But the moody bit was what really caught my
attention as my day began. There is
something remarkably evocative to a moody, overcast day in China. And it speaks
to something much, much older than the industrial revolution. Somber, contemplative, weighty, it hits you
the moment you gaze outside on an overcast Chinese day. Sometimes that kind of
day can make you miss China, like a laceration, when you are not here.
Zhao Mengfu, 1254-1322,
was a prince of the Song imperial family, who lived through the fall of the
Southern Song (1279) and the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhao_Mengfu
Unlike many trained scholars of the period, who refused to serve in the new,
barbarian, Mongol dynasty, Zhao Mengfu served as an official in the senior-most
Hanlin Academy for Kublai Khan. Like all
great Confucian scholars he was trained to be a remarkable generalist, capable
of adjudicating, writing calligraphy and of course painting. Not as “master” or an “artist” but as a
gentleman.
I don’t know what
the AQI index was for this time of year in 1295, but lets just say the feeling
was moody. (There probably exists an
iPhone app that would let me use a ‘carbon-14, big-data, algorithm to discern
precisely what the AQI was for 11/09/1295, but I’m going to resist the
temptation to investigate). I know that
it was moody all those years ago, because it was in that year that Zhao Mengfu
painted the remarkable “Autumn Colors on the Qiao and Hua Mountains” which
hangs in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2a_Zhao_Mengfu_Autumn_Colors_on_the_Qiao_and_Hua_Mountains_(central_part)Handscroll,_ink_and_colors_on_paper,_28.4_x_93.2_cm_National_Palace_Museum,_Taipei.jpg
(If you’ve ever
visited the Forbidden City in Beijing, and found it a bit austere and hollow,
that is because the Louvre and Vatican Museum’s worth of civilizational
testimonials are all kept across the brine in Taipei.)
I have a copy of
this remarkable scroll, which hangs in my house. Perhaps like an Irish American urge to have a
photo mighty Ben Bulben under which Yeats lies buried, testifying to something
sturdy and Irish in the home, I wanted to hang this scroll in the house because
the subject matter is my wife’s home province of Shandong. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/under-ben-bulben/
Zhao Mengfu was
stationed as an official in Shandong, about a three-hour’s drive from here, and
upon retirement he was to return to his home in the south (modern day Zhejiang,
I believe). He knew he’d be visiting
another scholar, a friend who hailed from Shandong, en route, and as a gift he painted from memory two
classic mountain scenes from the gentleman's home province. And though in
reality the mountains are many miles apart, he has brought them together into
one, unified view. The inscription on
the painting reads:
"The
father of Chou Mi was a native of Ch'i-chou. After retiring from office in
Ch'i-chou and on my way home, I visited the scenery of the area to describe it
for Chou Mi. Mt. Hua-pu-chu is known as the most famous mountain in the area,
having been known from antiquity and unique for its sharp peak. Therefore, I
did this painting of it. To the east is Mt. Ch'iao, so I gave this work the
title 'Autumn Colors on the Ch'iao and Hua Mountains.' Done by Chao Meng-fu of
Wu-hsing in the twelfth lunar month of the first year of the Chen-yüan era in
the Yüan [i.e., 1295]." http://theme.npm.edu.tw/exh102/animecarnival/en/ch04-1.html
The scroll captures
perfectly this “moody” feeling I described having felt when I fist considered
the walkway in front of my home, a few hours ago. A somber, fall feeling just before the dread
winter settles. Sad, knowing, and populated from long before there were
industrial pollutants, is this view into some other gentleman’s civilized
China. Just look at the dusty, xanthous,
landscape. (Click on the NPM link above, as my meager photo doesn't begin to do justice) Trees denuded, land
overworked by people, of course, always, people, then as now. Trees tired, pulled, scattered plants
preparing to die, even the water looks dusty and dry as though it were part of
the land. The people then, as now are
busy, and they appear to be provided for.
If you drive to
Shandong today, there are far more pollutants and considerably more people,
(roughly 96 million of them, to, say, Germany’s 82 million), but the somber
yellow atmosphere, land worked and worked again by people for centuries
extending out flat for miles and, off in the distance a few mountains or
clusters of houses, the mood on an autumn drive through Shandong today, is
consistent with what Zhao Mengfu tried to capture during this strange, new time
of barbarian rule. Shandong, a dry ochre
peninsula, through which the Yellow River flows out into the sea that surrounds all and defines a people, is perhaps the archetype for DustyBrine. 河清海晏[1], the objective.
I was very excited
when I brought the scroll home from a business trip to Taipei a few years back. My wife considered it and quickly stated she had
no idea where either mountain was from.
I have had older, knowledgeable guests from Shandong come, consider the
painting and tell me they have no idea where either mountain is in the
province. Perhaps they’ve been
excavated. But I bet their still
there. Next trip out, perhaps at Chinese
New Year, when, if anything the mood will be that much more moody in Shandong,
we’ll have to find one and then the other peak and see what’s become of the
mountains that Zhao Mengfu captured from memory, seven hundred and eighteen
years ago, this fall.
I’ll snap a picture of
them and share it with you, as I won’t have the gentlemanly chops to render
either hill from memory.
Handscroll,_ink_and_colors_on_paper,_28.4_x_93.2_cm_National_Palace_Museum,_Taipei.jpg){kind=link}
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