at the black canopy boats: long ago the old woman was kidnapped and taken onto one of these. At the time she was like those girls with long plaits washing clothes on the stone steps, only she had wooden clogs instead of plastic sandals, and came to the river with a basket to wash vegetables. A boat came alongside and before she realized what was happening two men had grabbed her by the arms and were dragging her into the boat. She didn’t have time to call for help because cotton wadding had been stuffed into her mouth. Before the boat had travelled five li she had been raped in turn by several bandits. In these black canopy boats which have plied the river for a thousand years, once the woven bamboo canopy was drawn, it was possible to perpetrate such crimes in broad daylight. That night she lay naked on the bare deck boards, the next night she was lighting the stove to cook at the prow of the boat…
What will you talk about now? Will you talk about her and Second Master, how she became the bandit’s wife? Or will you talk about why she is always sitting on the doorsill? Back then her eyes weren’t dull like now and she always carried a woven bamboo container in her bosom and her hands were forever busily embroidering. Her plump white fingers would embroider mandarin ducks frolicking in the water or peacocks with their tails outspread. She coiled her black plaits onto the top of her head and held them with a jade and silver hair-clasp, painted her eyebrows and trimmed the hairline around her face, but no-one dared to suggest that she was attractive. People around her, of course, knew that the container had coloured silk threads on top and a pair of loaded shiny black revolvers underneath. If soldiers boarded while the boat was moored, these delicate hands which embroidered would shoot them down one at a time. While this took place, the elusive Second Master would be sure to be at home fast asleep. Second Master took a fancy to the woman and had kept her for himself, so she followed the womanly virtue of following the man she had married. Didn’t anyone in the town ever report them? Well, even rabbits don’t eat the grass growing close to the burrow. Then, miraculously, she assumed a life of her own. As for the once famous bandit chief Second Master, whose fighting prowess was unchallenged by all the bandits prowling the roadways or waterways, in the end he was killed by this woman. How? Second Master was cruel but this woman was worse — men are no match for women when it comes to being cruel. If you don’t believe me you can ask Mr Wu the teacher in the town middle school. He’s been commissioned by the new tourist office of the county to compile a chronicle of the customs, history, and stories of Wuyizhen. The director of the tourist office is the uncle of the wife of Wu’s nephew, otherwise he wouldn’t have got the job. People born and brought up in the locality all have stories to tell and he’s not the only one in town who can write. Who doesn’t want to go down in the annals of history and moreover be able to draw advance overtime payments as well as a writer’s fee? Wu is a local from a family which has been influential for generations. The clan genealogy mounted on yellow silk, confiscated and publicly burnt during the Cultural Revolution, was twelve feet long. His ancestors enjoyed power and high positions as Leader of Court Gendemen during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty and as Hanlin Academician during the reign of the Guangxu Emperor of the Qing Dynasty. However in his father’s generation they ran into the land reforms and the re-allocation of land and, burdened by their landlord classification, suffered decades of misfortune. Now however, his elder brother, an overseas professor on the verge of retirement with whom he’d lost contact, arrived in a car to visit his hometown accompanied by the local county head and with a colour television for him. As a result the cadres in town started showing him respect. Don’t talk about all this. All right, I’ll talk about the rebellion of the Long Hairs — the Taipings. At night they came along and torched half of the main street. Previously, the main street of the town ran along the river-bank from the wharf. The present bus station is located at the end of the main street, on the old site of the Dragon King Temple. Before the Dragon King Temple was reduced to a heap of rubble, on the fifteenth day of the lunar New Year, the evening of the Lantern Festival, the best view of the lanterns was from the opera stage of the Dragon King Temple. The lantern dragons from the four villages along the river congregated there — teams of men wearing red, yellow, blue, white or black turbans depending on the dragon they performed with. At the sound of the gongs and drums, the heads in the crowd thronging the streets begin to move to the beat. The shops along the river all have their bamboo poles out with red packets of cash dangling from them, everyone wants good business during the year. The red packets of old man Qian in the rice shop diagonally opposite the Dragon King Temple are the most lucrative and two strings of five hundred crackers hang from his upstairs window. It’s among exploding crackers and in a sea of light that the lantern performers demonstrate their prowess. One after the other, the dragons wheel and somersault: it’s hardest for the performers manipulating the dragon’s head or holding the embroidered ball. And while I’m telling you this, two dragons appear — the red one from Gulaicun in the village and the black one from town led by Wu Guizi. Don’t go on with this story, don’t. But you do, and go on to tell about the black dragon and about Wu Guizi, the great performer everyone in town knows. The young women are all besotted with him and if they see him they call out, Guizi, come in for some tea, or they bring him a bowl of liquor. Improper behaviour! What? You go on with your story. Wu Guizi, performing in the lead, approaches with the black dragon. He’s covered in sweat and in front of the Dragon King Temple unbuttons his vest and tosses it to someone he knows in the crowd. There’s a black dragon tattoo on his chest and the youngsters on the street shout their approval. At this point, the red dragon from Gulaicun comes onto the scene from the other end of the street. Twenty or so youths of the same build, each charged with strength and energy, have also come to contest the first prize at old man Qian’s rice shop. Neither team will yield and both begin to perform at the same time. The red and the black dragons are lanterns lit by candles and two fiery dragons are seen prancing amongst the heads and feet of the crowd, suddenly rearing their heads and wagging their tails. Wu Guizi is performing with a ball of fire, somersaulting bare-chested on the cobblestones and turning the black dragon into a fiery circle. The red dragon also puts on a good performance — following the embroidered ball closely, it thrusts forward and back like a centipede biting into some living thing. Just as the two strings of five hundred small crackers finish, the employees let off a few hungers. The two teams of contestants, panting and dripping with sweat like eels coming out of water, charge up to grab the red packet hanging from the pole next to the counter. In one bound, it is seized by a youth from Gulaicun. How could Wu Guizi and his team take this humiliation? Loud swearing between the two teams replaces the sound of crackers and then the black and red dragons are embroiled in a fight. The onlookers can’t tell who started it but in any case both had been itching for a fight, and this his how fights often start. As usual the children and women start screaming and women who had been standing on stools at doorways to watch the fun grab their children and retreat indoors. The stools they leave behind turn into vicious weapons for both sides. The town does have a policeman but on a festival day like this people would be buying him drinks or else he’d be hanging around mahjong tables watching people play to find pretexts for extracting bribes … preserving public order isn’t free of charge after all. Civil disturbances of this nature don’t involve the law. The fight results in one death in the black dragon team and two in the red dragon team, and that’s not counting little Yingzi’s big brother who was watching. Three of his ribs were broken when, for no reason at all, someone knocked him down and stomped on him. Luckily, they managed to save his life by using dogskin plaster, a family prescription from Pockmark Tang’s which is next door to Joy of Spring Hall, the brothel with the red lanterns hanging outside. You’ve made it all up and it’s a story you could go on telling, except that she doesn’t want to listen.
In the maple and linden forest in the lower part of the camp, the old botanist who came with me onto the mountain discovers a giant metasequoia. It is a living fern fossil more than forty metres high, a solitary remnant of the ice age a million years ago, but if I look right up to the tips of the gleaming branches some tiny new leaves can be seen. There’s a huge cavernous hole in the trunk which could be a panda’s den. He tells me to climb in and have a look, saying that if it did belong to a panda it would only be inside during winter. I do as he says. The walls are covered in moss. The inside and outside of this huge tree has a green fuzz growing on it and