This is book No. 34 on Paul French’s Ultimate China Bookshelf.
Blurbs:
“Blofeld asserts that he tells this story unashamedly, but it’s the delicate odor of faded scandals rising from these pages that gives the book its charm. Ideal reading from an armchair on a rainy day.”
—The Los Angeles Times
“In City of Lingering Splendour John Blofeld gives a very different and personal view of Peking in the 1930s. This is not a book about wars and chaos, but rather, as the subtitle indicates, ‘a frank account of old Peking’s exotic pleasures.’ In the midst of all the disorder, as the book shows, people went on with their lives.”
—Robert J. Antony, The Park City Daily News
“As I turned its pages I smelt the Peking smells. I heard again the cries in the street. I longed for an evening in one of those strange and delectable restaurants where dinner is a poem.”
—Desmond Donnelly, The Daily Telegraph
“This is a frankly nostalgic account of Peking in the years before the Second World War when many of the ancient traditions still flourished in the era before Mao Tse-tung’s Red Dawn.”
—The Guardian
About the author:
John Blofeld (1913–1987) was a world-renowned British scholar and writer who devoted his life to the study of Eastern religion, especially Taoism and Buddhism. He grew up in England in a family with no Asian connections, though was entranced by statues of the Buddha seen in seaside novelty shops as a boy. He arrived in China, having dropped out of Cambridge, at just 22 years of age in 1934, though already with a high degree of fluency in Chinese (having spent a couple of years in Hong Kong previously). The following years are the ones described in City of Lingering Splendour, a time when he was dividing his time between teaching in Tianjin and exploring Beijing. He happened to return home to England in 1937 on family matters and so missed the Japanese occupation of northern China.
Blofeld left China in 1948 for Hong Kong before eventually moving to Bangkok, where he worked for the UN and became a university professor. He became a Buddhist and wrote a study of the religion, Wheel of Life (1989), after writing a history of Bangkok (1983). He later considered himself one of the world’s first “hippies.” He was married to Chang Mei-fang, whom he had met in Beijing. He died at 74 in Bangkok.
The book in 150 words:
In 1934, in his early twenties, John Blofeld spent what he described as three exquisitely happy years in Beijing during the era of the last emperor, when the breathtaking greatness of China’s ancient traditions was still everywhere evident. Blofeld, an unabashed aesthete, describes a city still saturated in the atmosphere of the recent imperial past, still recalling Empress Dowager Cixi. Blofeld wanders the hutongs and alleys, the palaces and temples of the Forbidden City, lotus-covered lakes and lush pleasure gardens, bustling bazaars, and peaceful bathhouses. It is an almost dreamlike landscape Blofeld describes, though with occasional rude awakenings into the modern world, the less privileged districts and communities of Beijing, and the deteriorating situation with Japan.
Your free takeaways:
This is the story of the joyful years I spent in Peking at a time before the Second World War. The disciples of Mao Tse-Tung will scarcely feel grateful for my eulogy of an era preceding the “Red Dawn” by some fifteen years, yet I am convinced that there are still Pekingese who, in the silence of their hearts, share my incurable nostalgia for a way of life now vanished from the earth.
It was my good fortune to live in Peking at a time when she was permitted to remain faithful to some of her centuries-old traditions. I can speak of her only as she was then, having seen nothing of her new guise as the capital of the People’s Republic and second city of the communist world. When I knew her she resembled a deposed empress, still clad in the remains of her imperial wardrobe, making ineffectual attempts to pose as an ordinary housewife.
Caged songbirds being taken out for their morning airing, bearded scholars seen for once without their robes, their baggy trousers tightly secured above the ankle to allow more freedom to weave with their arms, legs and torso the tortuous patterns of Chinese eurythmics; younger men shadow-fencing, each with two red-tasseled swords; wild birds perched upon branches yellowed or bared by the autumn cold; and the first white frost melting on the grass — thus Central Park (now Ritan Park) in October an hour or so after dawn.
Several days before Ching Ming (the Spring Festival), I received a note from the Singing-Master enclosing two tickets for an operatic performance by the greatest of all living female impersonators — Mei Lan-fang. Already approaching fifty, Mei had managed to keep his voice close to the peak of its perfection and he could still play the part of a seventeen-year-old girl with unrivaled grace and mastery.
Why this book should be on your China bookshelf:
I realize that this may not be a popular opinion, especially perhaps in the 2020s, but there has to be a place on our Ultimate China Bookshelf for nostalgia. Whenever a foreign “China hand” is interviewed by Xinhua, there is a rote set of questions — age, university, first contact with China, and, always, what is your favorite city in China? (The countryside is not apparently a valid answer.) The great writer on China and former Keeper of the Chinese Collection at the British Library Frances Wood once told me that her answer to this question, which she had been asked approximately 400 times over four decades, was always, “Old Peking.” It never once made it into print!
Still, at all stages of modern China, where foreigners have lived, there we can find nostalgia. Think of writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, including Pierre Loti, Harold Acton, Daniele Varé; the Chinese writers are often not immune to its charms, either — Lǎo Shě 老舍, Bā Jīn 巴金, and Zhāng Àilíng 张爱玲 (Eileen Chang), among others.
But all of these writers, whether they be soldier/diplomat-authors like Loti or Varé, full-time aesthetes like Acton, or Chinese writers of the vernacular school, also know the reality. Nobody forgets the looting of the city by foreign troops, the burning of the Summer Palace, the Opium Wars, or the imminent arrival of aggressive Japan. Still, there is always a tendency to look back, to seek a China seemingly lost to progress, modernity.
Of course, eras, epochs, dynasties don’t totally begin and end on set days, months, or years. In the late 1950s in Shanghai, you could still see women in qipao and sporting piled-up beehive hairstyles of the 1930s and 1940s. Perhaps especially in Beijing, old notions persisted: of the city as an imperial one, a religious one, a traditional one (Jing-pai) with bathhouses, temples, and no shortage of former palace eunuchs, Manchu bannermen, and Qing functionaries. As one of the reviewers above noted, Blofeld gets the smells, bells, whistles, and street noises of Old Peking.
When it was first published, Blofeld was accused of downplaying the poverty of the era and the rampant corruption of the Nationalist government. His only defense was that many books focused on those elements, and he was a political naïf, a young man seeking aesthetic and sensual pleasures. A valid criticism, but not a crime. What we are left with is a portrait of a city that ceased to exist just a couple of years later. After the July 1937 Japanese occupation of Beijing, it was never the same again — occupied, ravaged, liberated, and then plunged into civil war, “liberated” again and plunged into communism. Not much “exotic pleasure” in that 12-year span. Blofeld shows us the last days, the “salad days,” the “lotus years,” the “Weimar era” of the city.
Next time:
John Blofeld knew Beijing in the 1930s — the last vestiges of the old world, the rush to modernity. Luckily for him, he managed to escape the Japanese invasion. By the end of the long-drawn-out occupation in 1945, Beijing emerged as a different place — scarred, changed, engaged in renewed fights both ideological and physical. The world was about to change, and one young American hunkered down in a hutong courtyard amid one of the city’s last truly aristocratic families and recorded this unique period of interregnum.
