V. To China: Books from the Sky [by Sarah Howe]

 

a small jar of night      a thousand frontiers carrying him

the sky of old age continues the firing in the kiln

continues arranging this pot plant     lamplight

a glazed hand refines a blue cough

in his flesh he embroiders the fragile whiteness of posterity

     –Yang Lian, ‘Father’s Blue & White Porcelain’, trans. Bill Herbert

 

My posts this week have been ‘To China’: part return, part letter, to a land that will always be just over the horizon. In my last blog, I’d like to bring us full circle, back to the imaginary China of Cathy Song’s poem with which I began: ‘That blue flower on the map’. In Chinese, the word for the type of decorated porcelain we call ‘blue and white ware’, prized in Europe ever since it was first imported in the early seventeenth century, means literally, ‘blue flowers’ (青花 qing hua). The word ‘China’ is not in fact a native Chinese one: the Chinese’s own name for their country is 中国 (Zhongguo, Middle Kingdom). The name ‘chinni’ was used elsewhere in Asia in various forms (it is found in Sanskrit for example) to describe the land which the English came to identify by name with its imported ceramics. The word passed through East Asia, via India, along the same trade routes as the porcelain goods themselves.

‘Father’s Blue & White Porcelain’ by the Chinese poet Yang Lian (who has lived in exile in London since he was blacklisted in the wake of 1989’s Tiananmen protests) is a poem I first encountered in Bill Herbert’s translation, and have since re-read many times. One thing that struck me is how different the symbolic freight borne by its china vessel is from the traditional poetic associations of porcelain, in the west at least. This is partly a question of gender. Take Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1712), where Belinda is surrounded by the bric-a-brac associated with her decorative brand of femininity, her precious maidenhead compared to ‘some frail China Jar’ which might ‘receive a Flaw.’ All painted surface, she takes on the hollow and fragile character of the porcelain tea sets she prizes:

 

Not louder Shrieks to pitying Heav’n are cast,

When Husbands or when Lap-dogs breathe their last,

Or when rich China Vessels, fal’n from high,

In glittring Dust and painted Fragments lie.

 

Here the china tea cup’s translucent shell denotes a person without depth. By contrast, in Yang Lian’s poem, the porcelain surface becomes a ‘frontier’ onto untold vistas, one of which is death. Turning space inside out, the little vessel contains not just tea, but the entire universe – ‘a small jar of night’ (which in the second stanza becomes ‘a cup of darkness tea’). The white-as-porcelain skin of traditional female beauty becomes, for Yang Lian, ‘the fragile whiteness of posterity’, glimpsed in the pallor of an elderly father. (In Chinese culture, white not black is the colour of mourning.) The white surfaces of porcelain wait to be inscribed with a culture’s notions about gender, selfhood, and memory. The blue and white china’s ‘posterity’ resides in the fact that it is at once more breakable than a human body and more durable, more capable of lasting. 

Late last summer, my husband and I retraced the northward path through China of the Italian Jesuit Missionary, Matteo Ricci, who for historians has come to symbolize the beginning of modern relations between China and the West. On the sideleg of our journey which took us to the grim northeastern town of Jingdezhen, we were following not Ricci, but his fellow Italian and long-time companion on the China Mission, Michele Ruggieri (1543-1607). Jingdezhen is often called the ‘porcelain capital of China’, since for centuries it was the centre of the country’s porcelain production, an expertise that continues to this today. Ruggieri and his companions arrived at Jingdezhen by boat, in their ongoing quest to forge north and reach Beijing. The sight that would have greeted them as they walked up the bankside was a hill-surrounded wooden town darkening the sky with the smoke from a thousand kilns.

Today Jingdezhen is no postcard. Our short flight landed in the small hours of the morning, leaving us to be scalped for a ride to our hotel. Jingdezhen is the only city I’ve been to in China in recent times where many back streets are lined with refuse heaps a couple of feet deep, containing food scraps, plastic packaging, muddled with broken porcelain fragments of all colours – waste that that people don’t even bother to tie in bags before they dump it across the path from the back door. So unhurried at rubbish collection is the local government that the grounds outside one plate factory, which went bankrupt years ago, are still surreally piled with stacks – in some places six feet high – of white dinnerplates, greyed with a scrim of rained-on smog, grass growing up between their half-toppled towers. Ruggieri didn’t have much to say about the place, save for noting that the china wares were cheaper at source than back in Guangzhou, the port from which shiploads were already beginning to set sail for Europe.

  

Once you start to look behind its buildings’ low-rise concrete shells, Jingdezhen’s street level geography can be divided up according to areas of specialised activity. One street is populated solely by families expert in sticking the royal blue decal transfers of dragons and intertwining flowers onto plain white pots. In the glazers’ row, the ground floor shops contain stacked tub after tub of pastel-pale liquid, whose jewel-like intensity would emerge only after firing. The corridor of an abandoned train track is forested by the slipcasters’ drying urns, released from and sat atop their moulds, like a graveyard’s monuments. Heading up the hills out of town, you hear a thunk, thunk, thunk, even before you reach the hamlet dedicated to pounding, with ten-foot long wooden hammers set into pits, the crushed raw earth that will be transported to the clay mixing factories closer to town. Wander around Jingdezhen for long enough, and you will see every stage of the porcelain-making process unfold before you.

The buildings in Jingdezhen all have names like ‘Big Pot Factory no. 4’. (The Big Pot Factory’s tallest vases reached an incredible fifteen feet or so, destined for swanky hotel lobbies elsewhere in the country.) The English word ‘factory’ which they use to translate the Chinese signs is an interesting misnomer, suggesting as it does the kind of dehumanising mechanised production line conjured in Marx. In fact, the majority of enterprises in Jingdezhen are family-run, with a workshop on the ground floor while the family live above – a father might crouch outside throwing clay on his wheel, cigarette balanced in the corner of his mouth, while a toddler sits on a plastic chair next to him eating a bowl of instant noodles. At most such workshops-cum-homes, we hovered outside the threshold not wanting to intrude, our interest bemusedly tolerated. The only factory that seemed at all keen to sell us anything (from their shop floor of glass cases with hovering assistants) was one of the larger ones, dedicated to producing fine reproductions of antique vases. The most arresting room was the one occupied by the tables and tables of fine-work painters, mostly youngish women, who would sit all day under the white light of special bulbs to keep the colours they were seeing pure. They were painstakingly copying, from printed-out photographs set on the table beside them, the patterns of decoration from many models of precious vase, dating from several dynasties, whose originals are now in museums in Shanghai and Beijing. This particular factory’s wares are on sale in the Beijing museum’s gift shop – I recognised the name when we went there a couple of weeks later – so that you too can take a Ming vase home with you. Some of the more eye-watering price tags suggest the peculiar status of these reproductions, which are copycat but also artefacts in their own right.

Over the course of weeks, a vase’s initially blank body would progress from one end of the room to the other. One woman would paint on with the finest of brushes the outlines, first in freehand pink then firmed up in dark blue. The next would fill in all the pale yellow segments of pattern, before passing it on to another who would fill in the cerise, and so on. The work was so time consuming that it struck me that the value of these objects stems not only from the skill that goes into their making, but from time – whose passing, in the form of sheer labour, they so conspicuously mark. The work was indeed highly skilled, and by the standards of provincial Chinese cities paid well; so much so that the artisans would bring in their children after school to pass on their knowledge to the next generation, just as many of them had been taught by their mothers. We saw one little girl, about ten, tasked with a brush and a practice plate in the corner. It was clear that this was the most important homework she could do.

While complexly geometric, the patterns on the pots were also reminiscent of the natural world – the scales of a fish, the curls of a cloud. The Chinese word for written language or script, 文 (wen), also means pattern (it is a pictograph of interlocking lines). According to myth, the inventor of Chinese writing was a demigod called Cangjie, who was instructed by the Yellow Emperor to discover a better way of recording information. Struggling with the commission, Cangjie retreated to the riverbank to seek inspiration. It didn’t come until, one day, a phoenix cruising in the sky above him let go something from its beak, which dropped to earth. It turned out to be an animal, which Cangjie didn’t see, but which left its hoofprint in the mud before bounding away. Cangjie discovered that the hoofprint belonged to a Pixiu, or hybrid winged lion, whose foot’s characteristic outline set it apart from all other creatures’ prints. In this way, Cangjie worked out the key to his task: he must try to discern the essential character of all things in nature and create patterns that corresponded to them. Having created the first pictographs, Cangjie then began combining them into compounds, mating one with another, to create a hybrid language capable of abstract reference, and not tied to simply pointing at things in the world. The legend of Cangjie does actually correspond quite closely to what philologists imagine were the origins of the Chinese writing system, from an initial pictographic stage to its subsequent development.

This step onward from the pure image is what is crucially missing from the American scholar Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1918), celebrated because of its passing through the hands of Ezra Pound. Pound’s emphasis on the pictographic nature of Chinese characters is especially visible in the Cantos, with their brushed hanzi running down the right-hand margin. As with so much about Pound’s engagement with Chinese culture, the message gets a bit distorted in the retelling. In writing Cathay, Pound famously worked from the notes of a deceased American scholar, Fenollosa, who in turn had gleaned what he could about ancient Chinese poetry from two Japanese academics – which explains why Li Bai appears throughout Pound’s oeuvre in the guise of Rihaku, his Japanese name. It is a wonder the Cathay poems’ oft-noted departures from their originals are not more numerous, given this impressive chain of scholarly Chinese whispers. In his introduction to Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, the anthology from which my epigraph comes, Yang Lian describes delightfully how Pound’s vision of China changed direction (‘like a modern import-export business’) to influence, in turn, the Chinese poets of the later twentieth century.

Athanasius Kircher (1601/02-1680) was the Jesuit who sat at home in Rome collating the accounts of China reaching him from the members of his order dispatched to convert the Orient. The resulting encyclopedic volume, China Illustrata (1667), displays Kircher’s belief that Chinese characters descended, via hieroglyphics, from the perfect tongue spoken by Adam in the garden of Eden. Kircher’s plates suggest fanciful etymologies for various Chinese characters – the one for 江 (jiang), river, features fish suspended in a river, lining up like synchronised swimmers to trace the character’s contours. One of Kircher’s full-page plates depicts a Chinese man engaged in calligraphy. It also features a monkey on the floor in the foreground who seems, paper in paw, to be imitating the calligrapher’s actions. Scholars have suggested that this was Kircher’s way of underlining his argument that Chinese characters ‘ape’ nature – that their pictographs are a direct, if slightly simplified, imitation of the natural world. But Kircher’s print of the mimicking ape also uncannily prefigures the widespread perception in later centuries of the Chinese as incorrigible imitators. Long before the age of knockoff iPhones, the Spanish friar, Domingo Navarrete (c.1610–1689), one of Ricci’s successors in China, noted in his journal, ‘The Chinese are very ingenious at imitation. They have imitated to perfection whatsoever they have seen brought out of Europe. In the province of Canton they have counterfeited several things so exactly, that they sell them Inland for Goods brought out from Europe.’

 

There is a certain irony to be uncovered if you google this English translation of Navarette’s passage. It appears in many, if not most articles – presumably all descended from some distant ancestor – produced by Western journalists on the topic of the Chinese knockoff economy and the need for crackdowns. If these economic journalists have read Navarrete’s journals, they will be familiar with some of his other gems: his belief that tofu, so easily produced and nutritious enough to support a civilization, is a miracle food; or his conviction that the way Chinese fishermen could persuade a cormorant to give up its catch into their baskets showed the wondrous organisation of the Chinese polity. In the stratified hierarchy from peasant to emperor, even the animals understood their place.

One more irony stems from the fact that, in the early modern history of the Sino-European porcelain trade, it was the Europeans who were desperate to learn how accurately to copy Chinese goods. At around the same time China began to produce for the export market ceramics painted to European tastes and specifications, European potters were trying to work out what secret combination of minerals would create the clarity and fineness – Matteo Ricci called it ‘the most beautiful and crystalline thing in the world’ – that distinguished porcelain from earthenware. The secret ingredient was kaolin, which vitrifies at a higher temperature than normal clays: the mineral so abundant in the hills above Jingdezhen. When beds of kaolin were discovered in Cornwall in 1754, the result was Wedgwood, who produced the first ceramic material fired within England to actually resemble Chinese porcelain in texture. What was Wedgwood Chinoiserie if not an attempt to copycat a foreign market’s high-end goods? 

When I first started learning to write Chinese characters, it was about copying, copying, copying. Writing each one as many times as you could stand. On the first day of class, my teacher had explained, jotting on the board, that the mark-making involved in setting down hanzi was, whatever Europeans might think, writing not drawing. Derrida would probably not agree with her distinction, but I thought it was an interesting starting point. The evidence she summoned for this position was something called ‘stroke order’ – the traditional rules governing the order and direction in which a character’s strokes must be laid on the page. She told us how she had, a while back, tasked her young son to copy out the character 中 (the ‘middle’ of Middle Kingdom) at the beginning of his own hanzi studies. Oblivious to the established stroke order (which is shown in the diagram below), the little boy began at the top of the ‘stick’, then worked his pencil clockwise around the character’s perimeter, before finally crossing through the middle. According to his mother, he was not writing, but drawing a picture of what writing looks like.

 

 

At school in Hong Kong in the 1950s, my mother was taught to write not with a pen or pencil, but with brush and ink. While I tend to sentimentalize the idea, she mostly complains about the experience. She hardly ever has cause to write in Chinese now, but when she does, the biro tip hovers for several seconds at the beginning, a millimetre above the paper, as though waiting for her to summon the necessary characters from deep storage – to re-see them on a blackboard in a childhood classroom. Even if she writes with just a blue biro, her strokes taper delicately with the hand’s varying pressure, much like a calligrapher’s brush. After a year’s study, I still write Chinese in pencil (never in ink) so that I can always go back a step. My characters’ heavy-pressed lines – no tapering here – smack of an illiterate’s halting X (which in China by the way is an O). Not writing, but a drawing of writing.

The earliest European-produced imitations of Chinese porcelain often feature in their decoration what art historians have dubbed ‘pseudo-Chinese characters’. That is, an idea of Chinese writing concocted by an artisan who has a loose graphic grasp of what it looks like, but doesn’t understand the semantic principles involved. This heart-shaped dish, which originated in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century is tin-glazed earthenware rather than porcelain, but is instantly recognisable as Chinoiserie blue and white. The geometric markings contained within the rim’s four squares represent a Dutch artisan’s imagination of Chinese writing, without actually being writing. You could say they work a little like the mangled Ciceronian Latin of the Lorem ipsum... placeholder text used in design projects to demonstrate the graphic effect of writing, in the supposed absence of meaningful content. Some other eighteenth-century European designers managed to approach the ‘feel’ of Chinese characters and their structure more closely than the Dutch dish’s anonymous artist, but still without producing characters that would be legible to a Chinese reader. The pseudo-Chinese seals, like hallmarks, painted onto the base of many Chinoiserie vases are a good example of this. I’m not sure art historians would think about these pseudo-characters like this, but it seems to me they are not a million miles from Hong Kong’s RLOEX watches, or the interlocking Cs of the CHUNEL towel seat covers I keep seeing in Chinese taxis. 

To end this meditation on word and image, genuine and fake, sense and nonsense, I’d like to leave you with an artwork by the Chongqing-born artist Xu Bing. To create his 天书 (Tianshu), or A Book from the Sky (1991), he spent four years carving out of pear-wood – in reverse – a set of 4000 moveable type
characters. The pages of the book he printed with them look, from afar, like they contain Chinese characters, but on coming closer turn out to be nonsensical. They are written in no legible human language. Unfolding in this spurious tongue, the book’s early chapters are set out as prose, the third chapter segues into the varying line lengths of verse, while the end of the volume mimics the typographic layout of notes and glossary. Of course, a viewer who does not know Chinese would not even necessarily realise without being told that the book is unreadable. For the literate native speaker the effect is quite different, while also kind of the same, implanting in them the niggling feeling that there is meaning to be had here, but that it is always just around the corner. Perhaps it transports them back to the portion of childhood before they learned to read. What Tianshu reminds me of is, as a child, dragging my mother’s copy of 300 Tang Poems and others off the shelf, flicking through their pages, pretending to myself that I could read. It took Xu Bing four years to carve and print his pear-wood blocks. If nothing else, his Book from the Sky records the passage – and conspicuous wastage? – of his time and labour.

The work’s original title was the less snappy, An Analyzed Reflection of the End of This Century, but Xu Bing renamed it after audiences started referring to it as tianshu, A Book from the Sky. The Chinese idiom tianshu, ‘天书’ (which might also be translated ‘a book from heaven’ or ‘celestial script’) is used to refer to any unknown and indecipherable system of writing, right down to a doctor’s untidy scrawl. The entry for 天书 in my Chinese dictionary offers up by way of English translation that old quasi-xenophobic phrase, ‘It’s all Greek to me’. Guess how Greeks express the same sentiment (something I had always idly wondered): Αυτά μου φαίνονται κινέζικα! This seems like Chinese to me! In the Chinese version of the idiom, confusion is directed not towards the babble of other nations, but towards the heavens: the idea is that the tianshu’s written language is so alien it seems to have come from the gods. Writing that fell out of the sky, like the cargo from a passing phoenix’s beak.

 

–Sarah Howe