a state of fully achieved ignorance, without the effort of appearing to listen as the guide gnawed away at the experience with unwanted knowledge and unasked-for expertise.
Min was in increasingly frequent communication with this guide, then was suddenly waving to her. And there she was, waving back. Her hair, inky-slinky black, came down to her shoulders. Her complexion was darker than many of the visitors to the Forbidden City, who were so pale they sheltered from the scorch beneath glowing pink umbrellas. She had a big smile, was wearing a long dress, pale green, sleeveless. She walked towards Min, took off her sunglasses and embraced her. She was holding her sunglasses in one hand behind Min’s back. Her eyes were brown, round but subtly elongated. I liked her confidence (it made me feel confident, even if it also made me wish, simultaneously, that I’d not worn shorts), the way she stood, wearing sandals with a slight heel. Her toenails were painted dark blue. Her name was Li. We shook hands. A bare arm was extended, and then her eyes disappeared again behind her sunglasses. The thirty seconds since she’d waved were more than enough to reverse all previous ideas about a guide. A guide was an excellent idea. What could be better than having the history of this fascinating place explained at length, in all its intricate detail? Without the application of some kind of knowledge I would not be seeing the place at all, just drifting through it in a mist of ignorance and unachieved indifference.
The three of us stepped out of the hot shade and into the blazing sun of the courtyard or whatever it should properly be called—Li didn’t elucidate. I watched her flash into the sunlight and we continued our tour of the Forbidden City. We peered inside a couple of dusty-looking rooms, but there was nothing to see except exhausted beds and depressed chairs. Not that it mattered: the interiors were irrelevant compared with the red-and-gold exteriors, all on an unimaginable scale—the full extent of which Li seemed in no hurry to divulge. She seemed so reluctant to begin her spiel that I prompted her with a few questions, the answers to which I would normally have dreaded.
‘I’m afraid I don’t really know anything about the Forbidden City,’ she said.
‘I thought you were a guide.’
‘No, I’m just a friend of Min’s. She asked me to come.’
Mornings like this prove that you really have to be mad ever to kill yourself. Contemplate it by all means, but never commit to it. Life can improve beyond recognition in the space of a moment. On this occasion life had been pretty good anyway and then it had got better still—and got still better when Li said, ‘If you want me to be a guide, I can try.’
‘Yes, go on. Give it a shot.’
‘Well, let me see. There was a time when the emperor’s wives all lived here. They couldn’t leave. All they could do was walk around. It must have been so boring. Except everyone was always plotting. Not necessarily to get rid of the emperor or one of the other wives, partly just to kill the time. It was intriguing all the time.’
‘Your English is fantastic. Intriguing.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Where did you learn?’
‘Here in Beijing. And then in London. I lived in Camden Town. It was . . . ’ In spite of her language skills she paused, searching for a less bland variant of very nice. ‘Well, it was rather horrible, if I may say.’ Ah, she’d been worried about offending me.
‘What else? Not about Camden, which is famously vile. This place—the wives, the emperor.’
‘All they wanted, the wives, was for the emperor to love them.’ She said it with such conviction it seemed as if she were not just telling their story; she was petitioning on their behalf.
‘And what did he want?’
‘More wives,’ she said. ‘And to get away from the wives he had.’ Was Li married? I glanced at her long, ringless fingers. Looking at her extremities, her fingers and toes, I felt less exposed than at all points in between.
Always concerned about my welfare, Min had gone to buy bottles of water, which glinted in the sun as she carried them over. We all retreated into the shade and continued our stroll, gulping water. I watched Li drink: her hand, the bottle, the water, her lips. We sat on a low wall, looking at the worn grass and cobbles of the courtyard.
‘To our left,’ said Li, ‘you will admire the Hall of Mental Cultivation.’ We were in the shade, looking at a sign in the sunlight that said ‘Hall of Mental Cultivation.’
‘You’re too modest,’ I said. ‘You actually know a great deal about this place. All sorts of arcane stuff that the foreign tourist could never work out for himself.’ I was very taken with the Hall of Mental Cultivation. It sounded so much more relaxing than sitting in the Bodleian and ordering up dreary books from the stacks, but maybe it was more demanding—and enlightening too. Perhaps, in a way that seemed vaguely Chinese, the Hall of Mental Cultivation was the sign showing the way to the Hall of Mental Cultivation. I was happy with this thought, a sign that I was already cultivating my mental faculties, which were becoming concentrated, almost entirely, on Li. Conscious of this, of how rude it might appear, I tore my gaze from her and chatted with Min until she had to take a call updating the afternoon’s schedule.
The three of us walked in the direction indicated by the sign, came to an empty room that was just an empty room like all the others, though the emptiness it contained must have been qualitatively different to that found in the uncultivated elsewhere.
We could only be out in the sun for five minutes at a time. It was roasting, the sky a burned blue. A month earlier, walking through London at ten on a cloudy evening, I’d been told that this was what Beijing looked like at midday: nearly dark with pollution. I’d had a cough at the time and that was also a foretaste of Beijing, apparently; it was impossible to go there without succumbing to a serious throat or lung infection. I told Li what I’d heard: that the pollution was so bad you could see it falling from the sky.
‘A few years ago we broke the record for air pollution. We didn’t only beat record. The machine for measuring broke also. The pollution was so bad the measure—how you say?’
‘Gauge?’
‘Yes, the gauge could not measure it.’
‘It was off the scale.’
‘It was terrible. . . . ’
Li took out her phone; she had an air-quality app which confirmed that the air today was, relatively speaking, mountain-clear. Expats I’d met all had these air-quality apps too, but the source for their measurements was the U.S. Embassy, whose figures were always twice that of the official Chinese figures. None of that mattered as we walked through the magically unpolluted but still-roasting air of the Forbidden City, which easily lived up to its billing as one of the wonders of the world. If it was one of the wonders of the world; I could remember only two others, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the pyramids. Did the Hanging Gardens even exist anymore? Had they ever—in the solipsistic sense of within my lifetime—or had they only been included as a mythic leftover from the vanished past? These days the whole idea of Seven stately Wonders had an elegiac feel: a standard of excellence rendered obsolete by bucket lists of a hundred things to do before you die, whether bungee-jumping over the Zambezi or losing your mind on mushrooms at a full-moon party at Ko Pha Ngan, neither of which I’d done, both of which were on my list of things to avoid before giving the bucket its final kick.
We paused in the corner of yet another square, heading to the Imperial Garden. Li was drinking water. As she raised the bottle to her lips I could see her armpit, hairless and unsweating. And a small scar at the edge of her mouth. It could only be seen when she was in sunlight, when that side of her face was turned to the sun. Min suggested she take a picture of the two of us, of Li and me together. I put my arm around Li’s shoulder but didn’t dare touch her bare skin. When I looked at it later the photo seemed marred by my hand, bunched in a fist like a potato.
‘You look so handsome,’ said Min, glancing at the image on the back of the camera, taking another. She was always saying things like that. A surprising number of her colleagues from the publishing