A new day and a new
rating. It’s lovely outside and the U.S. embassy concurs that today is a
breathe-with-impunity “24” which is “Good” by the U.S. rating system. Now all things being fare the Chinese site
should be showing an aggregate of yesterday which was God-awful and have
spiked. Ahh, but something’s askew. The Chinese site is higher, but only
slightly. They are reading in at “40-60”
for the greater downtown area and what’s more where “50” will push you into the
“Moderate” pollution zone on the U.S. rating, the Chinese site refers to this
rating as “Excellent”, which to my old teachers ears, sounds even better than
“Good.”
And no matter what the rating, you wouldn’t suggest that
today was the least bit “moody” or evocative, unless you were trying to invoke
Corsica, or somewhere similarly bright, azure, sunny. Big old Gene Ammons and his boss tenor sound
blowing out “The Black Cat” from a ‘Legends of Acid Jazz’ collection in my
earholes compliments the positivity. Just compare today's view with the same snap from yesterday:
I poked around a bit so I might one day make good on the
suggestion that one day I'd photograph the two hills, Mount Huabuzhu and
Mount Que that were featured in the Zhao Mengfu painting I’d referenced
yesterday: “Autumn Colors on the Qiao and Hua Mountains”
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 The search for the latter is coming up
short, but sure enough, Mount Huabuzhu even has its own Wiki page, with the
somewhat less impressive moniker of Hua Hill:
During the Spring and Autumn Period (approximately 771 until
476 BC) the hill was
the staging ground for a major battle between the Qi kingdom and the Jin. (589
BC,) The Jin had the best of it. Roughly one thousand and twenty years later the
turbulent Wei Dynasty (386 – 535 AD) that followed the fall of the Han and
preceded the rise of the Tang, the early Chinese geographer, who wrote like a
poet, Li Daoyuan (427 – 469) described Hua Hill in his “Commentary on the Water
Classic”
"Without a mountain range to
support it, the peak alone stands gracefully and loftily. Its verdant cliff
rises into the blue, tinting the moon with its green."
Clearly Hua-Hill already had a substantive pedigree by the
time the Tang Dynasty (618–907) hard drinking, heavy-weight poet Li Bai
(701-762) parked a stool beneath the protrusion roughly two hundred and ninety
years later, and invoked the “ancients” and memorialize what he saw:
昔我游齐都，
登华不注峰。
茲山何峻拔，
绿秀如芙蓉。
In ancient times I traveled to the Capital of Qi,
climbed the Huabuzhu peak.
This mountain is delicately beautiful,
the emerald-green [hill] is pure like a lotus leaf.
I think this begins
to give us some human scale for what the hills symbolized by the time our man
with memory and the brushes from yesterday, Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322) gathered
his wits in 1295, to render a version of Hua Hill, in his “Autumn Colors at
Qiao and Hua Mountains" a copy of which hangs in my home. Zhao Mengfu was born during the last years of
the Song Dynasty (960–1279). Li Bai is a
Tang poet and the Tang, of course precede the Song, and the tendency is there
to condense history and think of them as roughly cotemporaneous. (As if Charlemagne (742 – 814) and Thomas
Aquinas (1225-1274) were stomping around at roughly the same time) So Zhao Mengfu’s effort would have been at
least five hundred and thirty years after Li Bai penned his poem. Li Bai would have been “ancient” history for
Zhao Mengfu.
So when Zhao Mengfu
writes that the hill was “known from antiquity for its sharp peak” he wasn’t
kidding. For Li Daoyuan the Qi and Jin
Kingdoms, were “ancient”. For Li Bai,
the Wei were certainly, “ancient”, and for Zhao Mengfu, Li Bai and everyone
else who proceeded him, were, “the ancients”.
But wait, there’s
more. Why do we even have this scroll to
gaze on today? Why is it preserved
beneath a different set of hills on the outskirts of Taipei today? We have to go forward through the Yuan
Dynasty (1271–1368) during which Zhao Mengfu served, through the Ming Dynasty
(1368-1644) up through to the middle of the Qing (1644–1912) and park our Aldous
Huxley time machine a full four hundred and seventy years off in the future, to
the reign of Emperor Qianlong (1711–1799) and extend our thanks to the great
Manchu emperor/collector.
If you bothered to
take a look at the scroll I’d posted yesterday you’d have notice that it is
positively polluted with red stamps. Did
Zhao Mengfu stamp up the space after completing the pastoral scene? Nope.
The “tagging”, the graffiti if you will, came from someone beyond
reproach. The New York subway-ification,
of the “ancient” scroll was done by the emperor who was an art collector,
beyond reproach and could certainly get away with stamping “fuck yeah, I am way
into this” all over the work, which he did.
“Qianlong’s passion can be seen, for instance, in his fondness for
Autumn Colors on the Qiao and Hua Mountains a scroll for which he wrote:
“the large character title for the painting, showered over it his
numerous seals, and wrote a total of nine colophons, thus covering up almost
all the empty areas.”
On an inspection tour of Shandong province in 1748, he saw the Qiao and
Hua mountains in person, was reminded of the painting, and had couriers bring
it overland from the palace to compare it to the real thing.
I love this. So I wasn’t the first idiot to consider
comparing the “contemporary” view of the hill to the work of Zhao Mengfu. I referenced that Shandong is a “three-hour
drive” from here yesterday. Ten years
ago it would have been a six-hour drive.
In the days of Qianlong it would have been a three week trek, no doubt,
weather permitting. Amazing to think of
him ordering some poor slob, or collection of slobs to gallop back to Beijing
and gather the scroll so he could consider the view in comparison. But that’s what he did. It is, generally, nice to be the
emperor.
And, chewing on all
this, that precedes and follows the creation of the venerable scroll “Autumn Colors at Qiao and Hua Mountains"
I for one am humbled by the relativity of what “ancient” means. And as John King Fairbank pointed in his
modern Chinese history classic: “The Great Chinese Revolution 1800-1985”, Chinese view geography rather different from Americans. http://www.amazon.com/Great-Chinese-Revolution-1800-1985/dp/006039076X/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1384063886&sr=1-4&keywords=JOhn+King+Fairbank
I wrote about
visiting Mount Parnassus in Greece last month.
It has a history certainly as old as Mount Hua. But in Western civilization the seat of the
sepulcher moves, quite some distance depending on where you’re viewing from. As Ernest Lee Tuveson suggestions, in
“Redeemer Nation” Americans see the sepulcher moving from the Holy Land,
through Western Europe to Washington D.C.
And the Russians saw a progression that traveled to Constantinople and
on to Moscow. http://www.amazon.com/Redeemer-Nation-Americas-Millennial-Reprint/dp/0226819213
For Americans
viewing Chinese history, it would be as if Mount Parnassus were in Ohio,
Jerusalem were in Buffalo, Rome were in Pittsburgh, London in New York.
Mount Hua remains
there, a few hours drive from Beijing. I
can’t wait to take a look myself having considered its “ancient” history in
some context other than a guide- book.
Mount Hua exists now “in the cloud” so no one will need to return to
Beijing, or send to Taipei, for points of comparison.
Handscroll,_ink_and_colors_on_paper,_28.4_x_93.2_cm_National_Palace_Museum,_Taipei.jpg){kind=link}
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