The courtesan and poet Zuo Fen had two cats Xe Ming and Xi Ming. Living in her distant court with only her maid Hu Yin, her cats were often her closest companions and, like herself, of a crepuscular nature.
      It was the very depths of winter and the first moon of the Solstice had risen. The old year had nearly passed.
      The day itself was almost over. Most of the inner courts retired before the new day began (at about 11.0pm), but not Zuo Fen. She summoned her maid to dress her in her winter furs, gathered her cats on a long chain leash, and walked out into the Haulin Gardens.
      These large and semi-wild gardens were adjacent to the walls of her personal court. The father of the present Emperor had created there a forest once stocked with game, a lake to the brim with carp and rich in waterfowl, and a series of tall structures surrounded by a moat from which astronomers were able to observe the firmament.
      Emperor Wu liked to think of Zuo Fen walking at night in his father’s park, though he rarely saw her there. He knew that she valued that time alone to prepare herself for his visits, visits that rarely occurred until the Tiger hours between 3.0am and 6.0am when his goat-drawn carriage would find its way to her court unbidden. She herself would welcome him with steaming chai and sometimes a new rhapsody. They would recline on her bed and discuss the content and significance of certain writings they knew and loved. Discussion sometimes became an elaborate game when a favoured Classical text would be taken as the starting point for an exchange of quotation. Gradually quotation would be displaced by subtle invention and Zuo Fen would find the Emperor manoeuvring her into making declarations of a passionate or ****** nature.
       It seemed her very voice captivated him and despite herself and her inclinations they would join as lovers with an intensity of purpose, a great tenderness, and deep joy. He would rest his head inside her cloak and allow her lips to caress his ears with tales of river and mountain, descriptions of the flights of birds and the opening of flowers. He spoke to her ******* of the rising moon, its myriad reflections on the waters of Ling Lake, and of its trees whose winter branches caressed the cold surface.

Whilst Zuo Fen walked in the midnight park with her cats she reflected on an afternoon of frustration. She had attempted to assemble a new poem for her Lord.  Despite being himself an accomplished poet and having an extraordinary memory for Classical verse, the Emperor retained a penchant for stories about Mei-Lim, a young Suchan girl dragged from her family to serve as a courtesan at his court.
      Zuo Fen had invented this girl to articulate some of her own expressions of homesickness, despair, periods of constant tearfulness, and abject loneliness. Such things seemed to touch something in the Emperor. It was as though he enjoyed wallowing in these descriptions and his favourite A Rhapsody on Being far from Home he loved to hear from the poet’s own lips, again and again. Zuo Fen felt she was tempting providence not to compose something new, before being ordered to do so.
      As she struggled through the afternoon to inject some fresh and meaningful content into a story already milked dry Zuo Fen became aware of her cats. Xi Ming lay languorously across her folded feet. Xe Ming perched like an immutable porcelain figure on a stool beside her low writing table.
Zuo Fen often consulted her cats. ‘Xi Ming, will my Lord like this stanza?’

“The stones that ring out from your pony’s hooves
announce your path through the cloud forest”

She would always wait patiently for Xi Ming’s reply, playing a game with her imagination to extract an answer from the cinnamon scented air of her winter chamber.
      ‘He will think his pony’s hooves will flash with sparks kindling the fire of his passion as he prepares to meet his beloved’.
      ‘Oh such a wise cat, Xi Ming’, and she would press his warm body further into her lap. But today, as she imagined this dialogue, a second voice appeared in her thoughts.
      ‘Gracious Lady, your Xe Ming knows his under-standing is poor, his education weak, but surely this image, taken as it is from the poet Lu Ji, suggests how unlikely it would be for the spark of love and passion to take hold without nurture and care, impossible on a hard journey’.
       This was unprecedented. What had brought such a response from her imagination? And before she could elicit an answer it was as though Xe Ming spoke with these words of Confucius.

“Do not be concerned about others not appreciating you, be concerned about you not appreciating others”

Being the very sensible woman she was, Zuo Fen dismissed such admonition (from a cat) and called for tea.

Later as she walked her beauties by the frozen lake, the golden carp nosing around just beneath the ice, she recalled the moment and wondered. A thought came to her  . . .
       She would petition Xe Ming’s help to write a new rhapsody, perhaps titled Rhapsody on the Thought of Separation.

Both Zuo Fen’s cats came from her parental home in Lingzhi. They were large, big-***** mountain cats; strong animals with bear-like paws, short whiskered and big eared. Their coats were a glassy grey, the hairs tipped with a sprinkling of white giving the fur an impression of being wet with dew or caught by a brief shower.
       When she thought of her esteemed father, the Imperial Archivist, there was always a cat somewhere; in his study at home, in the official archives where he worked. There was always a cat close at hand, listening?
       What texts did her father know by heart that she did not know? What about the Lu Yu – the Confucian text book of advice and etiquette for court officials. She had never bothered to learn it, even read it seemed unnecessary, but through her brother Zuo Si she knew something of its contents and purpose.

Confucius was once asked what were the qualifications of public office. ‘Revere the five forms of goodness and abandon the four vices and you can qualify for public office’.
       For the life of her Zuo Fen could not remember these five forms of goodness (although she could make a stab at guessing them). As for those vices? No, she was without an idea. If she had ever known, their detail had totally passed from her memory.
       Settled once again in her chamber she called Hu Yin and asked her to remove Xi Ming for the night. She had three hours or so before the Emperor might appear. There was time.
        Xe Ming was by nature a distant cat, aloof, never seeking affection. He would look the other way if regarded, pace to the corner of a room if spoken to. In summer he would hide himself in the deep undergrowth of Zuo Fen’s garden.
       Tonight Zuo Fen picked him up and placed him on her left shoulder. She walked around her room stroking him gently with her small strong fingers, so different from the manicured talons of her colleagues in the Purple Palace. Embroidery, of which she was an accomplished exponent, was impossible with long nails.
       From her scroll cupboard she selected her brother’s annotated copy of the Lun Yu, placing it unrolled on her desk. It would be those questions from the disciple Tzu Chang, she thought, so the final chapters perhaps. She sat down carefully on the thick fleece and Mongolian rug in front of her desk letting Xe Ming spill over her arms into a space beside her.
       This was strange indeed. As she sat beside Xe Ming in the light of the butter lamps holding his flickering gaze it was as though a veil began to lift between them.
       ‘At last you understand’, a voice appeared to whisper,’ after all this time you have realised . . .’
      Zuo Fen lost track of time. The cat was completely motionless. She could hear Hu Yin snoring lightly next door, no doubt glad to have Xi Ming beside her on her mat.
      ‘Xe Ming’, she said softly, ‘today I heard you quote from Confucius’.
      The cat remained inscrutable, completely still.
      ‘I think you may be able to help me write a new poem for my Lord. Heaven knows I need something or he will tire of me and this court will cease to enjoy his favour’.
      ‘Xe Ming, I have to test you. I think you can ‘speak’ to me, but I need to learn to talk to you’.
      ‘Tzu Chang once asked Confucius what were the qualifications needed for public office? Confucius said, I believe, that there were five forms of goodness to revere, and four vices to abandon’.
       ‘Can you tell me what they are?’
      Xe Ming turned his back on Zuo Fen and stepped gently away from the table and into a dark and distant corner of the chamber.
      ‘The gentle man is generous but not extravagant, works without complaint, has desires without being greedy, is at peace, but not arrogant, and commands respect but not fear’.
      Zuo Fen felt her breathing come short and fast. This voice inside her; richly-texture, male, so close it could be from a lover at the epicentre of a passionate entanglement; it caressed her.
      She heard herself say aloud, ‘and the four vices’.
      ‘To cause a death or imprisonment without teaching can be called cruelty; to judge results without prerequisites can be called tyranny; to impose deadlines on improper orders can be thievery; and when giving in the procedure of receipt and disbursement, to stint can be called officious’.
       Xe Ming then appeared out of the darkness and came and sat in the folds of her night cloak, between her legs. She stroked his glistening fur.
       Zuo Fen didn’t need to consult the Lu Yu on her desk. She knew this was unnecessary. She got to her feet and stepped through the curtains into an antechamber to relieve herself.
       When she returned Xe Ming had assumed his porcelain figure pose. So she gathered a fresh scroll, her writing brushes, her inks, her wax stamps, and wrote:

‘I was born in a humble, isolated, thatched house,
and was never well versed in writing.
I never saw the marvellous pictures of books,
nor had I heard of the classics of earlier sages.
I am dimwitted, humble and ignorant . . ‘

As she stopped to consider the next chain of characters she saw in her mind’s eye the Purple Palace, the palace of the concubines of the Emperor. Sitting next to the Purple Chamber there was a large grey cat, its fur sprinkled with tiny flecks of white looking as though the animal had been caught in a shower of rain.
       Zuo Fen turned from her script to see where Xe Ming had got to, but he had gone. She knew however that he would always be there. Wherever her imagination took her, she could seek out this cat and the words would flow.

Before returning to her new text Zuo Fen thought she might remind herself of Liu Xie’s words on the form of the Rhapsody. If Emperor Wu appeared later she would quote it (to his astonishment) from The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons.

*The rhapsody derives from poetry,
A fork in the road, a different line of development;
It describes objects, pictures and their appearance,
With a brilliance akin to sculpture and painting.
What is clogged and confined it invariably opens up;
It depicts the commonplace with unbounded charm;
But the goal of the form is of beauty well ordered,
Words retained for their loveliness when weeds have been cut away.

In the morning the wind is vicious, tossing vigorously the woodland on the heights above the village. The sky is a hanging of grey and charcoal black bands of cloud. On horseback and in her male attire Zuo Fen is led by the village guide up the steep forest path. She is already questioning the past, the accounts she’s read of the annual transhumance to this remote spot that give no answer to its sudden abandonment. It seems the Emperor made himself incommunicado for the latter part of the third season. The palace inventory shows local provisioning, and the most carefully chosen companions. They also describe how season-by-season the habitation was enlarged in order to accommodate further and different visitors. Poets and musicians were particularly favoured and would accompany the Emperor to select locations to add a delicate resonance of word and sound to the natural world.
​         As the travellers came out of the forest a wilderness of rock and moorland stretched before them, relentlessly upward. The path was now vague and Meng Ning was perplexed at how his guide had brought him across this terrain in the near darkness of the previous afternoon. The ponies often stumbled here and in the high wind he had to stop himself from looking behind to check his Lady’s progress. Eventually the ascent became less precipitous and a clearer path asserted itself, and in the near distance a pile of stones marked the summit. There, Meng Ning alighted to see Zuo Fen walking purposefully beside her horse leading her maid for whom this was an unaccustomed adventure. Together they approached him as he surveyed the panorama that to the west revealed Lake Psumano, a silver thread of water curled between the thick forests.
​        In silence Zuo Fen handed the reins of her pony to Meng Ning and with a signal to the village guide strode off on the descent to Eryi-lou.
 
‘We are to wait here until my Lady is out of sight,’ said Mei Lim’s smiling voice. ‘Then we may go forward.’
 
Mei Lim sat firmly in the saddle, as though assuming command of this small party. This now comprised herself, Meng,Ning and two rough-spoken men from the village each leading a pack-horse of luggage and provisions.  
 
‘You know I travelled as far as Stone Village on my Lady’s visit to the Tai Mountains. I would have gone further but she required me to stay. She is a woman who is in love with the wilderness, who will walk out in any weather to greet it lovingly. You should have no fear for her. She is a strong woman.’
​          Meng Ning nodded, declining to speak, afraid to disturb the rough music of the winds that seemed to press on them from all directions. Such is the journeying spirit, he thought, and looking into the distance realized Zuo Fen and her guide had disappeared from view.
          ​Soon the autumn forest had been regained and Zuo Fen and her guide began the descent to Eryi-lou. The path here was well made and marked at regularly distances with small stone columns. The whirlwind, that had buffeted the travellers since their departure, was now being played out in the highest treetops leaving ground level to echo like a large hall as the trees above swayed, groaned and cracked sharply in the heights. Soon vistas of the lake began to appear. They were still high above, the path frequently winding in steep loops across the hillside. Suddenly they found themselves looking down almost precipitously onto rooftops, a maze of buildings falling in tiers, joined together with walkways and terraces, many invaded now by trees and undergrowth: the Emperor’s summer palace of Eryi-lou.
​          Here, Zuo Fen bade her guide turn back. She would now imagine reclaiming this place of her waking dream, alone. When she felt confident her guide had retreated up the path she removed the pins from her hair, loosened her cloak, took off her stout boots of Yak leather. There would be more later.
 
​Barefoot, she began her descent to the palace eventually finding a staircase to one of the terraces from which she began to survey the palace. She found many of the rooms as she had dreamed them, small guest apartments with open spaces where doors and windows might have been, and hangings of the richest almost translucent silks, torn, faded, some covering the ground. The detritus of twenty autumns had blown through these spaces: plant material had taken root in between the planks of the raised wooden floors. Miraculously, there were rooms almost untouched by nature, just piles of leaves providing a matted covering.
         ​In one room somewhat larger than its surrounding structures Zuo Fen feels a special and continuing presence. A veranda-like structure occupied its lake-facing wall. This room, almost a hall, had been recently swept. There is a faint memory of incense as she comes close to the wooden walls. She paces the area until she feels guided to a spot where perhaps a formal chair has long ago been positioned. From there she can see the leaves but not the trunks of the trees as they swirl about in the continuing wind. A long vista of the silver lake spreads itself across the hall’s panorama. But the space enjoys shelter from the prevailing wind and has a stillness and silence all its own. Here, after removing her cloak, her thick riding trousers, the woolen garments that bound warmth to her, she kneels in her shift, closing her eyes to feel the room, the palace, its surroundings, come close to her all but naked body in its repose.
       ​Losing all sense of time it is only the gentle covering of her shoulders by Mei Lim that wakes her from her reverie.
 
‘Gracious Lady, we are installed in rooms kept for the use of official visitors. The guardian here is a young woman with a small child. She would like to welcome you when you are dressed and have eaten.’
 
And so, being led by her maid, Zuo Fen is taken to a distant suite of rooms suited to the autumn weather. There are recently lit braziers, and fitted doors and windows provide a little protection against the relentless wind and the damp cold. Mei Lim reassembles her lady’s wardrobe, and having dressed her, places a hot infusion into her cold hands. The afternoon light has barely a few hours left, but already the cold deepens. This will be a hard place to spend the night, a palace built for the third season – the summer of the solstice, a time of laughter and of fire, and the phoenix red.
 
Meng Ning is also imagining the palace in its summer dress when to wake at dawn would be witness to the sun flooding the partially cleared forest from its heights. The palace is lit up by vibrant reflections off the lake and the very roofs of the many buildings pulsate and shimmer with the heat of a cloudless day. The women of the palace are deep in slumber, their maids with silent tread reclaiming their ladies’ dignity after a night which may have seen much experimental congress of men and women amidst the subtle music of the qujin, the drinking of local wine, the close inspection and divination of the heavens reflected in the still lake, and the elaborate trading between memories of poetry and folk tale.  Even without such imaginings, to be here, and in the company of the illustrious Zuo Fen is the richest gift in a life otherwise stunted by ceremony and courtly intrigue. Zuo Fen has clearly taken Emperor Wu beyond custom and, though briefly, fashioned moments of love and friendship. To witness this woman at close quarters, this artist of the brush whose selection of characters holds both charm and innocence is wondrous. Even in these cold quarters he is warmed by the thought of her presence and the journey they will make tomorrow along the lake shore – to the Red Slate Path.

( to be continued )

When Zuo Fen woke day was well advanced into the Horse hour. In her darkened room a frame of the brightest light pulsed around the shuttered window. A breeze of scents from her herb garden brought sage, motherwort and lovage to cleanse the confined air, what remained of his visit, those rare aromatic oils from a body freed from its robes. Turning her head into the pillow that odour of him embraced her once more as in the deepest and most prolonged kiss , when with no space to breathe passion displaces reason in the mind.
 
The goat cart had brought him silently to her court in the Tiger hour, as was his custom in these summer days when, tired of his women’s attention, he seeks her company. In the vestibule her maid leaves a bowl of fresh water scented with lemon juice, a towel, her late uncle’s comb, a salve for his hands. Without removing his shoes, an Emperor’s privilege, he enters her study pausing momentarily while Xi-Lu removes himself from the exalted presence, his long tail *****, his walk provocative, dismissive. Zuo Fen is at her desk, brush in hand she finishes a copy of  ‘A Rhapsody for my Lord’. She has submitted herself to enter yet again that persona of the young concubine taken from her family to serve that community from which there seems no escape.
 
I was born in a humble, isolated, thatched house,
And was never well-versed in writing.
I never saw the marvellous pictures of books,
Nor had I heard of the classics of ancient sages.
I am dim-witted, humble and ignorant,
But was mistakenly placed in the Purple Palace . . .
 
He loves to hear her read such words, to imagine this fragile girl, and see her life at court described in the poet’s elegant characters. Zuo Fen’s scrolls lie on his second desk. Touching them, as he does frequently, is to touch her, is to feel mystery of her long body with its disregard of the courtly customs of his many, many women; the soft hair on her legs, the deep forest guarding her hidden ***, her peasant feet, her long fingers with their scent of ink and herbs.
 
He kneels beside her, gradually opening his ringed hand wide on her gowned thigh, then closing, then opening. A habit: an affectation. His head is bent in an obeisance he has no need to make, only, as he desires her he does this, so she knows this is so. She is prepared, as always, to act the part, or be this self she has opened to him, in all innocence at first, then in quiet delight that this is so and no more.
 
‘A rhapsody for me perhaps?’
‘What does Liu Xie say? The rhapsody is a fork in the road . . .
‘ . . . a different line’, he interrupts and quotes,’ it describes people and objects. It pictures appearance with a brilliance akin to sculpture or painting.’
‘What is clogged and confined it invariably opens. It depicts the commonplace with unbounded charm.’
‘But the goal of the form is beauty well-ordered . . . . as you are, dearest poet.’
‘You spoilt the richness of Lui Xie’s ending . . .’
‘I would rather speak of your beauty than Xie’s talk of gardening.’
‘Weeding is not gardening my Lord.’
 
And with that he summons her to read her rhapsody whilst his hands part her gown . . .
 
Over the years since he took her maidenhead, brusquely, with the impatience of his station, and she, on their second encounter deflowered him in turn with her poem about the pleasure due to woman, they had become as one branch on the same tree. She sought to be, and was, his equal in the prowess of scholastic memory. She had honed such facility with the word: years of training from her father in the palace archives and later in the mind games invented by and played with her brother. Then, as she entered womanhood and feared oblivion in an arranged marriage, she invented the persona of the pale girl, a fiction, who, with great gentleness and poetry, guided the male reader into the secrets of a woman’s ****** pleasure and fulfilment. In disguise, and with her brother’s help, she had sought those outside concubinage - for whom the congress of the male and female is rarely negotiable. She listened and transcribed, then gradually drew the Emperor into a web of new experience to which he readily succumbed, and the like of which he could have hardly imagined. He wished to promote her to the first lady of his Purple Chamber. She declined, insisting he provide her with a court distant from his palace rooms, yet close to the Zu-lin gardens, a place of quiet, meditation and the study of astronomy.
 
But today, this hot summer’s day, she had reckoned to be her birthday. She expected due recognition for one whose days moved closer to that age when a birthday is traditionally and lavishly celebrated. Her maid Mei-Lim would have already prepared the egg dishes associated with this special day. Her brother Zuo-Si may have penned a celebratory ode, and later would visit her with his lute to caress his subtle words of invention.
 
Your green eyes reflect a world apart
Where into silence words are formed dew-like,
Glistening as the sun rises on this precious day.
As a stony spring washes over precious jade,
delicate fishes swim in its depths
dancing to your reflection on the cool surface.
No need of strings, or bamboo instruments
When mountains and waters give forth their pure notes . . .
 
Her lord had left on her desk his own Confucian-led offering, in brushstrokes of his time-stretched hand, but his own hand nevertheless, and then in salutation the flower-like character leh (joy)
 
‘Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart’.
 
Meanwhile Xi-Lu stirred on the coverlet reminding Zuo Fen that the day was advancing and he had received no attention or conversation. It was whispered abroad that this lady spoke with her cat whom each afternoon would accompany his mistress on a walk through the adjacent gardens. It was true, Zuo Fen had taught Xi-Lu to converse in the dialect of her late mother’s province, but that is another story.
 
Lying on her back, eyes firmly shut, Zuo Fen surveyed the past year, a year of her brother’s pilgrimage to the Tai Mountains, his subsequent disappearance at the onset of winter, her Lord’s anger then indulgence as he allowed her to seek Zuo Si’s whereabouts. She thought of her sojourn in Ryzoki, the village of stone, where she discovered the blind servant girl who had revealed not only her brother’s whereabouts but her undying love for this strange, ungainly, uncomfortably ugly man who, with the experience gained from his sister’s persistent research had finally learned to love and be loved in equal measure for his gentle and tender actions. And together, their triumph: in ‘summoning the recluse’, and not one alone but a community of five living harmoniously in caves of the limestone heights. Now returned they had worked in ever secret ways to serve their Emperor in his conflict against the war-lord Tang.
 
She now resolved to take a brief holiday from this espionage, her stroking of the Emperor’s mind and body, and those caring sisterly duties she so readily performed. She would remove herself and her maid to a forest cabin: to lie in the dry mottled grass of summer and listen to the rustle of leaves, the chatter of birds, the sounds of insects and the creak-crack of the forest in the summer heat. She would plan a new chapter in her work as a poet and writer: she would be the pale girl no longer but a woman of strength and confidence made beautiful by good fortune, wise management and a generosity of spirit. She needed to prepare herself for her Lord’s demise, when their joyful hours living the lives of Prince and Lady of Xiang, he with his stallion gathering galingales, she with her dreams of an underwater house, would no longer be. She would study the ways of the old. She would seek to learn how peace and serenity might overcome those afflictions of age and circumstance, and when it is said that love’s chemistry distils pure joy through the intense refinement of memory.

The sun rises tentatively through the forest heights behind the palace. In the pre-dawn light Jia Li has secured water and fuel for her visitors and despite the attentions of the pack horse men, who have returned from an evening at her village the worse for drink, she settles to feed her infant child. Meng Ning enters to seek her counsel. She already guesses his intentions and answers his brief questions with confidence. She knows the route to the Red Slate Path, perhaps four li distant. The path is clear, though little used. It is not a place those of her village visit, though she has learnt that the path itself defies nature’s attempts to cover its existence.
    Zuo Fen is standing on the terrace as Meng Ning returns to the Emperor’s Hall. She has slept deeply, is refreshed after a period of meditation and, despite the cold, has been washed and massaged by her maid. She appears dressed for walking, her boots, fur cloak and hat in purposeful combination. As she surveys the lake flocks of wild geese and duck chatter and squabble as they float on the surface. There are some experimental flights, pairs of duck taking off to fly in wide arcs only to return to the same stretch of water from where they rose in tandem. Soon the geese will leave to fly across the forests and moorland for distant harvested fields where they will spend the day foraging. Meng Ning points to a distant peninsula jutting out from the northern shore of the lake. Behind it, he says, lies the cove of the Red Slate Path. Perhaps there they will be able to understand more keenly the why of this mystery.

‘At such a distance,’ says Zuo Fen, ‘the detail of a boat would be quite lost. I imagine the peninsula acting like a pointing finger to its floating form. There is already fashioning within me a possible story that might explain this mystery.’

She smiles warmly at Meng Ning who bows his head rather than stare into her jade green eyes. She moves closer to his standing posture, taking his left hand secure but tense against the balustrade of the veranda. Lowering one leg before the other she slowly kneels, removing her hat, loosening her fur cloak that now spreads itself of its own accord beside and behind her. With both hands behind her neck she lifts her long hair found to parted and tied in simple peasant fashion. Raising her hands to full-stretch her sleeping hair warm from the bare skin of her back slowly cascades forward and across each of her ******* to curl like two cats in the bowl of her robe.

‘Mei Lim is with Jia Li’, Zuo Fen says curiously and with a voice Meng Ning has not encountered before. ‘I fell to sleep dreaming of your kind presence and the joy of being touched and kissed.’ He cannot see her face as she speaks, only the quivering fall of her hair across her kneeling body. ‘I awoke feeling your breath on my cheek and so brought your limbs to entwine with my own.’ He now senses the delicate unguents of her body; they compass him about, his hand falls from the balustrade to touch her hair.

Finding her right ear his fingers describe its shape, its sculptured relief of folded forms and crevices. He is becoming faint with something outside passion that requires him to go beyond her ear and flow of hair about his fingers. He unties his cloak, letting it drop behind him. He removes his boots and outer garments. She follows his example. He moves to her side, adopts the position of the swallow resting on the wind. They face one another.  To the accompaniment of their breathing, her hands begin a dance in the space between their lower limbs as though they are birds turning and falling in flight. Unlike the courtesans he sees at court her nails are short, her fingers long. Then, it is as though her hand holds a brush forming characters and she begins to write on his body with short deft movements this way that way describing her flight of passion. Some intuition tells him to allow this, and not to seek repricocity, as it seems from her breathing that these very actions give her the greatest delight, bring her to the edge of the first coitus. Eyes closed, he moves his nose into a glancing embrace with her own, feeling there a semblance of perspiration, that tell-tale sign of a woman’s readiness for the deeper embrace. She responds to this with sighs and swift movements of rapture that envelope him, and now, as she quickly brings her limbs into a right conjunction, he places one hand beneath her, the other to recline her body gently to the floor, her cloak becoming a pillow for her head.
    He now looks directly at her, her face expressionless as though all thought and feeling has entered her body in preparation to receive his own. She does not blink. There is a moment of great stillness, a great wave of calm breaks, moves forward and pulls back – and again, again. In an instant he will enter her Jade Gate to caress and kiss and move where only his Lord has visited. He knows that once there he will seal his own fate . . .
     It is the talk of poets that women are often at their most sensitive to love’s attention in the morning hours, and that this was, for so many reasons, the most impractical of times for men. Zuo Fen herself had written fu poems that took the reader to the most intimate moments of a concubine’s experience in the morning hours, those times when alone the body gathers to itself its essential nature, and is often caressed with the woman’s own hand and thoughts. To understand such circumstance, to hold its sweetness as an abiding taste during the formalities of the day, only to release its flavour in the pleasure hours of the night, was a manly attribute, said to be treasured, indeed honoured by women.
      When Meng Ning withdrew Zuo Fen lay for some while letting the unaccustomed circumstance and its location only gradually allow a return to conscious and present thoughts. She pictured now her journey to the Red Slate Path, Jia Li, her baby on her back, striding beside Meng Ning, then herself and finally Mei Lim - who would have entreated her mistress to be allowed to accompany her. There was the glade, a small bowl in the hillside where it was just possible to see a small cave from which, glistening, the broken patterns of the slate path fell after half a li into the lake. She would investigate the cave. She would walk to the water’s edge, where the trees stepped into and reached over the lake to lay a carpet of fallen leaves. Then to see the path gradually, gradually disappear into the depths.
    Whilst Zuo Fen, with her eyes closed, projected her thoughts forward in time, with accustomed tact Mei Lim left those accouterments a woman needs after the attentions of a lover. She feared for the young man, though she knew her Lord prized too much his Lady of The Purple Chamber to effect jealousy or display anger.
    As the sun cleared away the thin cloud and approached its zenith the company broached the crest of the hill above the glade. It was, Zuo Fen had to admit, just as she had imagined lying prone and in disarray in the Emperor’s hall. In silence, and in the company of her imagination, she now paced from cave to path to water, and standing at the very edge of the lake’s bank focused her mind to envisage the events of twenty years past.
     It was as though a rhapsody was already formed. She found herself recounting the tale in her world of characters where there is only present time. She felt her hand describe them with the flow of her brush, heard the sound of its movement across the thick parchment. She was slow to notice that Meng Ning had disrobed and was entering the water. Without a word she watched him move through the carpet of floating leaves, some sticking to his nakedness, and onwards, slowly, following the submerged path until his torso then only his shoulders were visible. She then knew what he hoped to find, even after the passage of so many years.

She saw it all, suddenly. The sorcerer Yang Mo and the Emperor’s second wife descending the Red Slate Path as a cavalcade of fire and smoke, loud flashes of light, noises of brass and clashing metal enveloped the glade and the boat itself. The watching company witnessed for a moment the couple disappear under the waters only for their collective sight to be shrouded in a climaxed confusion of the sorcerer’s devices and effects.

When, finally the smoke cleared, the boat and the lovers had vanished.

Zuo Fen watched Meng Ning disappear from view. She imagined him, as the pearl fishers she had heard tell of, diving down to the depths, holding his breath to seek what might remain of the illusory boat. But time passed beyond the possibility of what she knew could be endured by human-kind. The surface of the water remained unbroken. The division of open water made by Meng Ning in breaking apart the carpet of floating leaves was already reforming itself.
   Removing her cloak and her boots, and unpinning her hair, Zuo Fen stepped into the water. A memory floated towards her of bathing in the lake near to her summer retreat. Water held no fear for her, only now the cold consumed her. Her loosed hair, and her elaborate untied robe settled on the water’s surface: to surround her like a lily pad, she the budding flower at its centre. She felt her feet still firmly on the Red Slate Path, her chin now resting on the water’s surface. Whatever had happened to Meng Ning she knew her action to be compliant. She had immersed herself with the very element that had brought him either death or, as she knew in her heart, a most honorable escape.

Zuo Fen meets Jia Li and her child Hui Ying. The temporary guardian of the palace speaks with the help of one of the pack-horse men who understands something of the dialect this young woman owns. Zuo Fen would rather envelope Jia Li with her eyes than communicate in three-way speech. And so when Jia Li begins haltingly to tell the same tale told to Meng Ning the previous night Zuo Fen halts her translator with a gesture until the story – and this is what it appears to be – is told.

(Here Zuo Fen assumes the persona of Jia Li as part of her rhapsody titled The Sorcerer of Eryi-lou)

Alone in this crumbling palace
I guard my father’s charge,
He has been ill since late Spring
And I have disgraced my family
With a child whose father stayed
but a week trading horses.
Hui Ying was born here
And here we hope to stay.

I have now come to recognize
Many spirits of the past.
Mostly invisible I take them by surprise
In their mortal form; meeting a lady
And her maid on the hall terrace;
Seeing two men bent over
A game of go in a lesser chamber.
Music and the sound of poetry float
Variously through the many rooms.
The aroma of food comes and goes.
The burning of incense is ever present.

For many seasons my village supported
Palace life during the Emperor’s summer visits.
We provisioned and provided animals
For food and transport. Our young men,
Our women too were propositioned
For the more elaborate practices of the court.
Twenty summers long the palace secured for us
a livelihood beyond expectation.

Over time the events of the Emperor’s
Last sojourn in the palace became
For us the stuff of legend, though we do not
Embroider its story and have remained silent
Out of respect for the Emperor’s memory.
We know his son has rarely ventured here.

Let me only tell what has come from
my father’s lips, what he as a young man
Witnessed and through his guardianship
Has protected and honoured. He was chosen
By officials of the Emperor as a trusted servant,
A man who would oversee what had been precious,
What had been valued here, and is still deemed to be.

My father has spoken to me of the disappearance
Of the Emperor’s second wife with the sorcerer Yang Mo,
A disappearance witnessed by the whole company of visitors,
By the Emperor himself, and his son. I am charged to tell
Of this only to those bearing Emperor Wu’s seal.  Know I speak
With all truth and honesty in lieu of my father’s presence.

Amongst the many guests honoured by the Emperor
The sorcerer Yang Mo arrived by invitation
To spend part of the third season at Eryi-lou.
Already well-known to the court he had come
At the express wish of second wife Xie Jiu.
It is said that he created many remarkable illusions.
Unusual objects and rare animals were summoned to appear,
Rain fell and winds blew inside the Emperor’s hall,
There were piercings of flesh and limbs seemingly severed.
One morning it is said Yang Mo caused a boat
To appear on the lake, thereby at odds with the legend
That no vessel should ever touch its surface. Forthwith,
The Emperor decreed that such sorcery should
cease. But he was discouraged by second wife Xie Jiu
Who wished to visit the boat and sail on the lake.
Yang Mo offered to escort her across the waters
And led the assembled company to a small beach where
A path of red slate had been laid.  This appeared from
within a cave in the hillside. From thence it travelled
to the water’s edge and beyond, under the water
in the direction of the magical boat. Yang Mo is said
to have brought wind and fire and smoke
To play upon the company, finally inviting Xie Jiu to step
On the Red Slate Path and accompany him across the waters.
The couple walked slowly down the path into the lake
Gradually divesting themselves of their garments
As the waters consumed them. Then, before their very eyes
The Emperor’s guests and entourage saw the boat
Enveloped in a pall of smoke and disappear from view.
Yang Mo and Xie Jui were never seen again.

The Emperor was enraged, realizing suddenly
he had been tricked and made to look a cuckold
in front of his own court. In such a remote region
He had the slenderest of means available
to search for the missing couple. He resolved
to leave Eryi-lou immediately. Neither He or
His son nor his court has ever returned.

Allowing Jia Li to tell this tale without interruption had proved a right and wise decision. No sooner had the young woman realized her story had grasped the undivided attention of this celebrated courtesan than her words of description seemed to take on a rough poetry. Zuo Fen felt herself summoning unbidden images of the sorcerer’s illusions, moments of secret and forbidden congress between Yang Mo and Xie Jiu, the appearance of the sailing vessel from the early morning mists, the lovers slowly processing down the Red Slate Path, the disbelief and then fury of the Emperor.
      When Jia Li had taken leave to comfort her infant child Zuo Fen called Mei Lim to summon Meng Ning. She was clearly troubled by how her autumn visions from the west had brought her to this place and its unforeseen legacy of magic and deceit. The illusion of the sailing vessel and the walk into the lake on the Red Slate Path, both were elaborate and well-contrived artifices. They required skilled assistants and collaborators and the most careful planning. Sitting in silence opposite one another the courtesan and the chamberlain set their minds to consider the possible and elaborate trickery that might have been brought to bear on the complicit theft of the Emperor’s second wife. It seemed clear that all official record of what had passed had been expunged, and the Emperor had decided to abandon not only his summer sojourn but also his palace - immediately and forever.
        Zuo Fen wondered at the fate of the lovers. There could be no future for them within the known territories of the Empire. Their lives would have to begin again far distant. The province of Yunnan perhaps? But she laid that thought aside.

(to be continued)

Gradually as darkness fell the wind that had beset the travellers all day subsided and the particular silence of the lakeside clearing assumed a presence. It was a silence of the discrete movements of animals and sporadic calls of birds, the settling now into stillness of trees wind-tossed for a night and day, the breathing to and fro movement of a large body of water that already held the night sky’s reflections and would soon be enveloped in moonlight. Zou Fen rose and beckoned Meng Ning to accompany her to the Emperor’s Hall. There, they stood together on the long veranda and looked down through the sporadic trees onto the lake.

‘It is said that the Master did not discuss anomalies, feats of strength, civil disorder, or the spirits,’ said Zuo Fen quoting Confucius. ‘It is for you and I to disregard sorcery as nothing but illusion and cunning. We must bend our thoughts to seeking explanations from circumstance.’

‘We know, my Lady, that Yang Mo had already seduced the Emperor and his guests with his many and infamous illusions. To achieve these feats of the miraculous would have required a sizable retinue and the most careful preparation. It is unlikely that the Emperor would have countenanced such sorcery in daylight hours, so we might imagine how with the play of lanterns, fire and smoke Yang Mo was able to make the impossible seem possible. Like the actor he undoubtedly was, he was probably a man of commanding presence - all eyes would have been upon his person, all ears tuned to his words. And round about the harsh clangorous sounds and shouts of his assistants would be sustained as his illusions began to unfold.’

‘Wisely spoken Meng Ning,’ says Zuo Fen, ‘a most convincing exposition. So we must imagine how after a long presentation of illusory wonders, the imbibing of much wine and other intoxigents inhaled or consumed, the first presage of dawn comes upon the company. Guests and their consorts seek the privacy of their quarters, lights are dimmed, only the meditative music of the zither sounds in the Emperor’s hall as new confections of poetry continue to vie with the ancient verses. Then, as the Emperor rises to seek his chamber there, half hidden amongst the wraiths of mist floating on the lake, lies a sailing vessel, its single sail empty of wind, a spectre at once marvelous and shocking.’

‘But an illusionary boat, possibly a vessel that could not and need not run with the wind, something constructed, a shell no more, made out of the lightest wood or taut cloth that in the blue dawn would seem more substantial than it is, fashioned and placed in position by Yang Mo’s assistants at a right distance to evoke the illusion of reality.’

‘The Emperor summons his court and its guests, summons Yang Mo, regarding this as a step taken beyond what protocol allows, a violation of the ancient spirit traditions of the lake. Yang Mo stands his ground suggesting that this is his greatest illusion yet, that there is no harm done, and should the Emperor decline to sail on the ****** waters he will take himself away from his presence boat and all.’

‘At this Xie Jui, the second wife, lets it be known that she regards with some contempt the prohibition of a vessel’s presence on the lake. She wishes passage on the boat and if the Emperor will not accompany her she will go alone with Yang Mo. At this the Emperor is incensed but challenges Yang Mo to explain how he will deliver Xie Jui to the vessel.’

‘This is where, My Lady, we will need to seek the Red Slate Path that, it is said, Yang Mo prepared to take himself and his passenger to the waiting boat - only to disappear from view in front of the very eyes of the assembly. Our task for tomorrow perhaps?  Jia Li can be our guide as she surely knows its location.’

And so, as the three quarter moon rises over Eryi-lou and the chamberlain takes his leave of the courtesan, Mei Lim appears from the near darkness to escort her mistress to the small chamber where they will pass the night. Zuo Fen remains in a trance-like state but allows the ministrations of her maid to prepare her for the business of sleep.
      Meanwhile Meng Ning, intoxicated by Zuo Fen’s presence, does not return to his quarters but takes the terrace steps down, down to the lakeshore. He allows his official skills as a poet to fashion an array of characters he will first commit to memory, only later write out in his fine calligraphic script, and then destroy. Whereas Zuo Fen commutes between dream and reality he has no such pleasure. This is a stark, cold place at autumn’s end. But this condition only seems to excite and fuel his passion for this woman, this gracious, mysterious woman with whom he has spent the recent hours in close proximity. Her face floats before his eyes; her precise lips and still perfect teeth, gentle chin and youthful neck, the beauty and grace of her bearing seated cross-legged like a sage before him.  He imagines for a brief moment her long nakedness revealed in the bright moonlight under which he now stands. Holding this momentary image close to his physical self he makes his way up the many terraces to the small wooden chamber in which he will sleep.
       Despite her journeying and the revelations of the day Zuo Fen lies awake. She is savouring a very different quality of the night in this remote place. For many years she has remained wakeful in the hours of the Rat and the Ox to welcome her Lord Wu should his goat cart find its way to her court. She would like to rise and reflect on the images that hold sleep from her – but fears to wake her maid without whose close attention she might falter. This natural world beyond her court and the Emperor’s gardens are of an almost constant wonder. She reflects that as she gets older each season seems to become more vivid than its predecessor. This autumn, with its vivid dreams and visions, she likens to flowers picked from her garden, their colours and textures continuing to hold true and firm. Between such thoughts the intimacy of her time with Meng Ning remind her of the delight of human association. Aside from her dear brother Zuo-Si she has rarely known that keen intimacy of another man - other than her Lord. Though she has, she reflects further, in the writing of The Pale Girl, allowed her mind to explore the variousness of the body’s pleasure. To school Meng Ning in the arts of passion would be pleasurable indeed, and she considers he would be a most willing and attentive student. She imagines, for a moment, guiding him towards the exacting refinements of touch and stroke a woman requires to achieve the deepest coitus. Her body stirs as this thought takes hold and caresses her towards necessary sleep.

(to be continued)

It was the eve of the mid-autumn festival. Day had followed day of clear skies but ever-lower temperatures had brought crisp and chill mornings. Zuo Fen began to fear that a first frost would damage her late flowering plants, the delicate tea flowers of the osmanthus. She was already aware of the seven grasses of autumn now present in her garden and would recite standing amongst them the traditional seasonal poem:
 
Flowers blossoming

in autumn fields - 

when I count them on my fingers

they then number seven.

The flowers of bush clover,

eulalia, arrowroot, 

pink, patrinia, 

also, mistflower 

and morning faces flower.
 
Oh the whiteness of Autumn, the season of courage and sadness, a time for the lighting of white candles against the dying of the day. Upon rising Zuo Fen would stand in meditation facing west, the seasonal direction of dreams and visions. Again and again her mind state visited a habitation in the distant mountains, a sprawling summer palace seemingly empty but for the slightest echoes of recent occupation or maybe a caretaker’s attention. In her recurring vision she would walk from room to room, each kaleidoscopic in colour of hanging silks and elaborate murals. Eventually she would find her way outside into a neglected garden that dropped in gentle terraces to a lake where she would observe the ‘thousand colours of water, brilliances and blues.’
 
One morning a young chamberlain sent from her Lord visited her court. He had remained rapt at the sight of the courtesan of the Purple Chamber standing trance-like in her garden. Meng Ning had often positioned himself in the undertaking of the Emperor’s duties to communicate with Zuo Fen, whom Meng Ning admired and was secretly enamored. A few well-chosen words of respect and critical admiration for the poetess had been all it took for Emperor Wu to summon Meng Ning as courier of his express command to his most favoured concubine. Unfailingly gracious towards the formal attentions of the young man Zuo Fen had come to feel at ease with this respectful figure who had succeeded in charming both her cats and Mei Ling her maid.
​       As she stood motionless, attired in her gardening robe and clogs, she became aware of Meng Ning’s presence and, before turning to acknowledge him with a greeting, allowed a thought to form in herself. She would seek his help to identify the summer palace of her waking dreams.
       ​Yes, he knew of such a place, sixty li distant, a hard path it was said, but ladies of the court had once graced its many linked pavilions in the third season. The lake held a restless spirit and it was said no boat had ever sailed its surface. How did he know this, she had asked. A petition from a recluse, a former minister of the treasury, had been received at court requesting its occupation for the winter months. It had been refused, indeed dismissed without further consideration. Meng Ning had been curious as he had once viewed the lake from its western end, but from which the habitation was entirely hidden. Did the Honoured Lady know of the mysterious Red Slate Path said to appear briefly from out of a cave in the steep wooded hillside, cross a bowl-like glade and disappear into the lake depths? The Honoured Lady did not, but was nevertheless caught by Meng Ning’s description which, when he had delivered his message from Emperor Wu and retired, she fell to placing inside her already rich vision of property, lake, and precipitous woodland whose trees and bushes she was busy mind-painting with autumn leaves and berries.
 
After a day of thought and planning Zuo Fen developed an intricate strategy to visit the palace and environs of Eryi-lou. She told herself that she was searching for inspiration to compose an autumn sequence for her Lord that would recall the days of his esteemed father. She had discovered in the palace archives that in his declining years he had summered in this remote place, had filled its pavilions with only his most favoured concubines, its guest apartments with poets and musicians. She asked for Meng Ning’s services as guide and protector.
​      She had expected a blunt refusal, but to her astonishment, her request was granted, but only during the twelve days surrounding her monthly courses. She had smiled at this condition having been almost entirely free from her natural cycle for several years, something not unknown for a woman who had never been with child. Mei Ling dutifully made apparent false evidence of this charade.
​       It was a small party that left the Eastern Gate on a day that promised rain and high wind; seven in all, four to carry Zou Fen’s sedan. But this was to be understood as a matter of protocol rather than necessity, as within 6 li of the palace a pair of ponies for Zou Fen appeared in the road. Drawing back the curtains of her sedan she stepped out dressed as a male traveller, her movements and manner in such a disguise confidently rendered from her months searching for her brother Zuo Si in the wilderness of the Tai Mountains. Meng Ning was both astonished and alarmed as he had not been forewarned of this way of things. It seemed that Zuo Si had probably made all the necessary arrangements.

(to be continued)

Thus reconfigured the party covered the first two days of the journey with speed and ease. As evening approached on the second day it was clear that a village resthouse was to be favoured as its owner had ridden out to greet his illustrious guests. He assured the party of complete secrecy, their valuable horses to be his special concern.
​   Away from the palace Zuo Fen set herself to enjoy the rural pleasures of an autumn evening. This time of freedom from the palace duties, from her Lord’s often-indiscriminate attention, she valued as a most generous gift. She composed swiftly a fu poem in gratitude to her Lord’s trust and favour.
 
How fortunate to dip this hand
In a flowing stream whose water
Is already touched by the first snows
Know that I shall bring its caress
to the mouthpiece of my Lord’s  jade flute
holding its body with spread fingers
to press to open to close to open
 
The stream bisected the village, a village of stone and wattle buildings, though the rest house was stone through and through. She had ventured on her arrival up onto its flat roof covered as it was with harvest produce laid out in abundance. The colours and textures of peppers, yams, marrows, eggplant, and such curious mushrooms as she had never before seen, all this she gathered with joy into her imagination’s memory.
​      With Mei Ling’s help she then transformed herself back into a woman, though with the simplest of robes over the Mongolian garments of wool she favoured to fend off the cold. Then, after alarming the resthouse keeper’s wife and servants by entering the kitchen, she planned a meal to her liking, sought the herb garden and enquired about the storing of vegetables for the long winter ahead.
      ​As the evening progressed she was surprised to discover Meng Ning had gone on ahead to Eryi-lou. It was a capricious decision born of his wariness of Zuo Fen. He felt intimidated by the persona she had assumed. Here was a woman of infinite grace yet simple charm who in the time it took to travel 6 li had become unrecognizable. Even her voice she dropped into a lower register and gained louder amplitude. When they reached the village he had moved purposefully to provide assistance as she prepared to dismount, only to see her grip the high pommel and swing her leg confidently across her pony and her body slide down the pony’s flanks to a standing position. So as the late afternoon light failed he had driven his horse up and up the mountain path, forcing himself to think only of the route and task ahead. He had acquired the company of a local guide who, on foot, out-paced his horse, but would see him safe down the path in the coming darkness. There would be a moon, but it had yet to rise.
        ​To his surprise the caretaker of Eryi-lou was a young woman, a daughter perhaps of its official guardian Gao Cheng, a daughter Meng Ning considered banished to this remote spot: she carried a small child on her back. He would enquire later. For now, he sought in her company to reconnoiter the decaying web of wooden pavilions, some already invaded by nature. It was then he realized his mistake. He thought himself into Zuo Fen’s mind. Surely she would wish to come upon this place untouched and unprepared by his offices. He motioned to the young woman to come outside, and standing on one of the many terraces explained his error, asked her not to speak of his inappropriate visit, but made to suggest that there was a room ‘always kept for an official’s visit’, that it be swept and suitably provisioned. Her voice responded in a dialect he could hardly decipher. It had the edge of a lone bird’s roosting call. He knew she was trying to explain something of importance to him, but he quickly lost the thread. He could see the faint gleam of the lake reflected in her eyes, hear the snuffle of her baby carried against on her back, and in the near distance he was aware of the village guide admonishing his horse. He bowed and left.
 
‘You are a most considerate companion, Meng Ning,’ Zou Fen said, as summoned to her presence, the chamberlain prostrated himself before the woman he was charged to serve and protect.
‘My lady, you already know I am a fool.’
‘Yes, but an honest fool with a kind heart. You sought my well-being at Eryi-lou, but I think you rightly imagined I might wish to experience this dream habitation in an inviolate state. Let us say you made a dream journey there. No harm done.’
     ​He explained about the caretaker and that a suite of rooms was always kept ready for an official. That was all he would say. He was about to retreat from the guest room now vivid with firelight and rich with the scent of cinnamon, when she lifted her hand to stay his going.
 
‘You are a brave young man to accept charge of my company. I am sure you know how my Lord is likely to remove you from his circle on our return. I feel unworthy of such sacrifice. I did not expect my Lord’s favour in this enterprise, but my words, my application, were clearly persuasive. I feel we are bound together you and I, and we must see our enterprise be the making of a fine poetic rhapsody for the autumn season – something you might share one day with your children and their children. You must understand that I am already moving towards a meeting of reality and the world of dreams and visions. Do not be afraid should I seek your intimate council. I know already you dream a little of my person. You may even imagine our conjunction as lovers. Women know these things, and, as you may have heard, I have tutored your Emperor in the ways of the Pale Girl.’
 
‘My lady . . .
 
Zou Fen reaches out for paper and brush Mei Lim had placed to her right hand. Kneeling on the roughly swept floor, her long limbs hidden under her cloak, she deftly paints seven lines of characters:
 
The autumn air is clear,
The autumn moon is bright.
Fallen leaves gather and scatter,
The jackdaw perches and starts anew.
We think of each other- when will we meet?
This hour, this night, my feelings are . . .
 
‘I wonder how we are to cast the final character?’
‘Not yet, and not here my Lady’. And with that Meng Ning takes his leave.
 
(to be continued)

As a woman, and in the service of my Lord the Emperor Wu, my life is governed by his command. At twenty I was summoned to this life at court and have made of it what I can, within the limitations of the courtesan I am supposed to be, and the poet I have now become. Unlike my male counterparts, some of whom have lately found seclusion in the wilderness of rivers and mountains, I have only my personal court of three rooms and its tiny garden and ornamental pond. But I live close to the surrounding walls of the Zu-lin Gardens with its astronomical observatories and bold attempts at recreating illusions of celebrated locations in the Tai mountains. There, walking with my cat Xi-Lu in the afternoons, I imagine a solitary life, a life suffused with the emptiness I crave.
 
In the hot, dry summer days my maid Mei-Lim and I have sought a temporary retreat in the pine forests above Lingzhi. Carried in a litter up the mountain paths we are left in a commodious hut, its open walls making those simple pleasures of drinking, eating and sleeping more acute, intense. For a few precious days I rest and meditate, breathe the mountain air and the resinous scents of the trees. I escape the daily commerce of the court and belong to a world that for the rest of the year I have to imagine, the world of the recluse. To gain the status of the recluse, open to my male counterparts, is forbidden to women of the court. I am woman first, a poet and calligrapher second. My brother, should he so wish, could present a petition to revoke his position as a man of letters, an official commentator on the affairs of state. But he is not so inclined. He has already achieved notoriety and influence through his writing on the social conditions of town and city. He revels in a world of chatter, gossip and intrigue; he appears to fear the wilderness life.  
 
I must be thankful that my own life is maintained on the periphery. I am physically distant from the hub of daily ceremonial. I only participate at my Lord’s express command. I regularly feign illness and fatigue to avoid petty conflict and difficulty. Yet I receive commissions I cannot waver: to honour a departed official; to celebrate a son’s birth to the Second Wife; to fulfil in verse my Lord’s curious need to know about the intimate sorrows of his young concubines, their loneliness and heartache.
 
Occasionally a Rhapsody is requested for an important visitor. The Emperor Wu is proud to present as welcome gifts such poetic creations executed in fine calligraphy, and from a woman of his court. Surely a sign of enlightment and progress he boasts! Yet in these creations my observations are parochial: early morning frost on the cabbage leaves in my garden; the sound of geese on their late afternoon flight to Star Lake; the disposition of the heavens on an Autumn night. I live by the Tao of Lao-Tzu, perceiving the whole world from my doorstep.
 
But I long for the reclusive life, to leave this court for my family’s estate in the valley my peasant mother lived as a child. At fourteen she was chosen to sustain the Emperor’s annual wish for young girls to be groomed for concubinage. Like her daughter she is tall, though not as plain as I; she put her past behind her and conceded her adolescence to the training required by the court. At twenty she was recommended to my father, the court archivist, as second wife. When she first met this quiet, dedicated man on the day before her marriage she closed her eyes in blessing. My father taught her the arts of the library and schooled her well. From her I have received keen eyes of jade green and a prestigious memory, a memory developed she said from my father’s joy of reading to her in their private hours, and before she could read herself. Each morning he would examine her to discover what she had remembered of the text read the night before. When I was a little child she would quote to me the Confucian texts on which she had been ****** schooled, and she then would tell me of her childhood home. She primed my imagination and my poetic world with descriptions of a domestic rural life.
 
Sometimes in the arms of my Lord I have freely rhapsodized in chusi metre these delicate word paintings of my mother’s home. She would say ‘We will walk now to the ruined tower beside the lake. Listen to the carolling birds. As the sparse clouds move across the sky the warm sun strokes the winter grass. Across the deep lake the forests are empty. Now we are climbing the narrow steps to the platform from which you and I will look towards the sun setting in the west. See the shadows are lengthening and the air becomes colder. The blackbird’s solitary song heralds the evening.  Look, an owl glides silently beneath us.’
 
My Lord will then quote from Hsieh Ling-yun,.
 
‘I meet sky, unable to soar among clouds,
face a lake, call those depths beyond me.’
 
And I will match this quotation, as he will expect.
 
‘Too simple-minded to perfect Integrity,
and too feeble to plough fields in seclusion.’
 
He will then gaze into my eyes in wonder that this obscure poem rests in my memory and that I will decode the minimal grammar of these early characters with such poetry. His characters: Sky – Bird – Cloud – Lake – Depth. My characters: Fool – Truth – Child – Winter field – Isolation.
 
Our combined invention seems to take him out of his Emperor-self. He is for a while the poet-scholar-sage he imagines he would like to be, and I his foot-sore companion following his wilderness journey. And then we turn our attention to our bodies, and I surprise him with my admonitions to gentleness, to patience, to arousing my pleasure. After such poetry he is all pleasure, sensitive to the slightest touch, and I have my pleasure in knowing I can control this powerful man with words and the stroke of my fingertips rather than by delicate youthful beauty or the guile and perverse ingenuity of an ****** act. He is still learning to recognise the nature and particularness of my desires. I am not as his other women: who confuse pleasure with pain.
 
Thoughts of my mother. Without my dear father, dead ten years, she is a boat without a rudder sailing on a distant lake. She greets each day as a gift she must honour with good humour despite the pain of her limbs, the difficulty of walking, of sitting, of eating, even talking. Such is the hurt that governs her ageing. She has always understood that my position has forbidden marriage and children, though the latter might be a possibility I have not wished it and made it known to my Lord that it must not be. My mother remains in limbo, neither son or daughter seeking to further her lineage, she has returned to her sister’s home in the distant village of her birth, a thatched house of twenty rooms,
 
‘Elms and willows shading the eaves at the back,
and, in front,  peach and plum spread wide.
 
Villages lost across mist-haze distances,
Kitchen smoke drifting wide-open country,
 
Dogs bark deep among the back roads out here
And cockerels crow from mulberry treetops.
 
My esteemed colleague T’ao Ch’ien made this poetry. After a distinguished career in government service he returned to the life of a recluse-farmer on his family farm. Living alone in a three-roomed hut he lives out his life as a recluse and has endured considerable poverty. One poem I know tells of him begging for food. His world is fields-and-gardens in contrast to Hsieh Ling-yin who is rivers-and-mountains. Ch’ien’s commitment to the recluse life has brought forth words that confront death and the reality of human experience without delusion.
 
‘At home here in what lasts, I wait out life.’
 
Thus my mother waits out her life, frail, crumbling more with each turning year.
 
To live beyond the need to organise daily commitments due to others, to step out into my garden and only consider the dew glistening on the loropetalum. My mind is forever full of what is to be done, what must be completed, what has to be said to this visitor who will today come to my court at the Wu hour. Only at my desk does this incessant chattering in the mind cease, as I move my brush to shape a character, or as the needle enters the cloth, all is stilled, the world retreats; there is the inner silence I crave.
 
I long to see with my own eyes those scenes my mother painted for me with her words. I only know them in my mind’s eye having travelled so little these past fifteen years. I look out from this still dark room onto my small garden to see the morning gathering its light above the rooftops. My camellia bush is in flower though a thin frost covers the garden stones.
 
And so I must imagine how it might be, how I might live the recluse life. How much can I jettison? These fine clothes, this silken nightgown beneath the furs I wrap myself in against the early morning air. My maid is sleeping. Who will make my tea? Minister to me when I take to my bed? What would become of my cat, my books, the choice-haired brushes? Like T’ao Ch’ien could I leave the court wearing a single robe and with one bag over my shoulders? Could I walk for ten days into the mountains? I would disguise myself as a man perhaps. I am tall for a woman, and though my body flows in broad curves there are ways this might be assuaged, enough perhaps to survive unmolested on the road.
 
Such dreams! My Lord would see me returned within hours and send a servant to remain at my gate thereafter. I will compose a rhapsody about a concubine of standing, who has even occupied the purple chamber, but now seeks to relinquish her privileged life, who coverts the uncertainty of nature, who would endure pain and privation in a hut on some distant mountain, who will sleep on a mat on its earth floor. Perhaps this will excite my Lord, light a fire in his imagination. As though in preparation for this task I remove my furs, I loose the knot of my silk gown. Naked, I reach for an old under shift letting it fall around my still-slender body and imagine myself tying the lacings myself in the open air, imagine making my toilet alone as the sun appears from behind a distant mountain on a new day. My mind occupies itself with the tiny detail of living thus: bare feet on cold earth, a walk to nearby stream, the gathering of berries and mountain herbs, the making of fire, the washing of my few clothes, imagining. Imagining. To live alone will see every moment filled with the tasks of keeping alive. I will become in tune with my surroundings. I will take only what I need and rely on no one. Dreaming will end and reality will be the slug on my mat, the bone-chilling incessant mists of winter, the thorn in the foot, the wild winds of autumn. My hands will become stained and rough, my long limbs tanned and scratched, my delicate complexion freckled and wind-pocked, my hair tied roughly back. I will become an animal foraging on a dank hillside. Such thoughts fill me with deep longing and a ****** desire to be tzu-jan  - with what surrounds me, ablaze with ****** self.
 
It is not thought the custom of a woman to hold such desires. We are creatures of order and comfort. We do not live on the edge of things, but crave security and well-being. We learn to endure the privations of being at the behest of others. Husbands, children, lovers, our relatives take our bodies to them as places of comfort, rest and desire. We work at maintaining an ordered flow of existence. Whatever our station, mistress or servant we compliment, we keep things in order, whether that is the common hearth or the accounts of our husband’s court. Now my rhapsody begins:
 
A Rhapsody on a woman wishing to live as a recluse
 
As a lady of my Emperor’s court I am bound in service.
My court is not my own, I have the barest of means.
My rooms are full of gifts I am forced barter for bread.
Though the artefacts of my hands and mind
Are valued and widely renown,
Their commissioning is an expectation of my station,
With no direct reward attached.
To dress appropriately for my Lord’s convocations and assemblies
I am forced to negotiate with chamberlains and treasurers.
A bolt of silk, gold thread, the services of a needlewoman
Require formal entreaties and may lie dormant for weeks
Before acknowledgement and release.
 
I was chosen for my literary skills, my prestigious memory,
Not for my ****** beauty, though I have been called
‘Lady of the most gracious movement’ and
My speaking voice has clarity and is capable of many colours.
I sing, but plainly and without passion
Lest I interfere with the truth of music’s message.
 
Since I was a child in my father’s library
I have sought out the works of those whose words
Paint visions of a world that as a woman
I may never see, the world of the wilderness,
Of rivers and mountains,
Of fields and gardens.
Yet I am denied by my *** and my station
To experience passing amongst these wonders
Except as contrived imitations in the palace gardens.
 
Each day I struggle to tease from the small corner
Of my enclosed eye-space some enrichment
Some elemental thing to colour meaning:
To extend the bounds of my home
Across the walls of this palace
Into the world beyond.
 
I have let it be known that I welcome interviews
With officials from distant courts to hear of their journeying,
To gather word images if only at second-hand.
Only yesterday an emissary recounted
His travels to Stone Lake in the far South-West,
Beyond the gorges of the Yang-tze.
With his eyes I have seen the mountains of Suchan:
With his ears I have heard the oars crackling
Like shattering jade in the freezing water.
Images and sounds from a thousand miles
Of travel are extract from this man’s memory.
 
Such a sharing of experience leaves me
Excited but dismayed: that I shall never
Visit this vast expanse of water and hear
Its wild cranes sing from their floating nests
In the summer moonlight.
 
I seek to disappear into a distant landscape
Where the self and its constructions of the world may
Dissolve away until nothing remains but the no-mind.
My thoughts are full of the practicalities of journeying
Of an imagined location, that lonely place
Where I may be at one with myself.
Where I may delight in the everyday Way,
Myself among mist and vine, rock and cave.
Not this lady of many parts and purposes whose poems must
Speak of lives, sorrow and joy, pleasure and pain
Set amongst personal conflict and intrigue
That in containing these things, bring order to disorder;
Salve the conscience, bathe hurt, soothe sleight.

It took him a week to master thought-diversion. He would leave home to walk to work and the moment the door was shut it was as though she followed him like a shadow on snow. If he wasn’t careful the ten-minute walk would be swallowed up in an imagined conversation. He had already allowed himself too many dark thoughts of tears and silences. He saw her befreckled by weeks in a light he had only read about. She would be a stranger for a while, a visitor from another world (until she gradually lost the glow on her skin and the smell of Africa became an elusive memory). He was frightened that he would be overwhelmed by her physical grace enriched by   southern summer and the weight of her experience, having so little to offer in return. So he practised thought diversion: as her shadow entered his consciousness he would divert his attention to China of the Third Century and what he would write next about Zuo Fen and her illustrious brother.

Sister and brother Zou gradually took on a fictional life. This he fuelled by reading poetry of the period and his daily beachcombing along the shores of the Internet. He built up an impressive bibliography for his next visit to the university library. Even in the Han Dynasty there was so much material to study, though much of it the stuff of secondary sources.

One morning he took down from his library shelf Max Loehr’s The Great Painters of China and immediately became seduced by the court images of Ku Kai’chih. This painter is the only artist of this period of Chinese antiquity to be represented today by extant copies. There was also a possible original, a handscroll in The British Museum. It is said Ku was the first portrait artist to give a psychological interpretation of the person portrayed. Before him there seems in portraiture to have been little differentiation in the characterization of figures. His images hold a wonder all their own.

As David looked at the book’s illustrative plates, showing details from The Admonitions of the Instructress to the Palace Ladies, the world of Zuo Fen began to reveal itself. A ‘palace lady’ she certainly was, and so possibly similar to the image before him: a concubine reclines in her bamboo screen and silk-curtained bed; her Lord sits respectively at right-angles to her and half-way down her bed. The artist has captured his feet deftly lifting themselves out of square-toed slippers, whilst Zuo Fen drapes one arm over the painted bamboo screen, her manner resolute and confident. Perhaps she has taken note of those admonitions of her instructress. Her Lord has turned his head to gaze at her directly and to listen. Restless hands hide beneath his gown.

        ‘Honoured Lord, as we have talked lately of flowing water and the symmetry of love I am reminded of the god and goddess of Xiang River’.
       ‘In the Nine Songs of Qu Yaun?’
       ‘Yes, my Lord. The opening verse has the Prince of Xiang say: You have not come; I wait with apprehension / And wonder who makes you prevaricate on your island / When I am so splendidly and perfectly attired in your honour?
       ‘Hmm. . . so you favour this new gown.’
       ‘It is finely made, but perhaps does not suit the light of this hour’.
       ‘Let the Yangzi River flow calmly, / I look for you, but you have not come.’
      ‘I gaze at the distance in a trance, /  Only to see the grey green waters run by.’
        ‘Honourable Companion, I fear you feel my mind lies elsewhere . ‘
       ‘I know you ride the cassia boat downstream.’
       ‘Indeed, my oar is of cassia and my rudder of orchid’.
        ‘I fancy that you build a house underwater, thatching it with a roof of lotus leaves . . .’
       ‘Well, if that is so, drop your sleeves into the Yangzi River and present the thin dress you wear to the bay of Li.’
       ‘I am in awe of my Lord’s recall of such verses . . . I love the Lady of Xiang’s description of the underwater house . . . with its curtains of fig leaves and screens of split basil.’
      ‘But will you send me all the spirits of Juiyi mountains to bring me to your side . . . will they come together as numerous as clouds?’
      ‘My Lord, my nose perspires . . .’
      ‘I offer my jade ring to the Yangzi River / and yield my jade pendant to the bay of Li. / I gather galingale fronds on an islet of fragrant grasses, / still hoping to present them to you. / If I leave, I might not have another chance. / So I’d rather stay here and linger a little longer.’
        ‘I gather the powerful roots of galingale / hoping to offer them to you who are still far away. / If I leave, I might not have another chance. / So I’d rather stay here and linger a little longer.’
      ‘Even though your nose perspires and your ******* harden . . .’
        ‘Kind Lord, you have taken the wrong role in the dialogue. Surely it is the Plain Girl who gives such advise to the Yellow Emperor.’
        ‘And I thought only men read the Sunujing . . .’
        ‘You forget I have a dear brother . . .’
       ‘With whom you have read the Sunujing! . . and no I have not forgotten . . . he sought permission to travel to the Tai mountains, some fool’s errand my minister states.’
         ‘He may surprise you on his return.’
        ‘Only you can surprise me now.’
       ‘My Lord, you know I lack such gifts . . . I hear your sandals dropping to the floor’.
      ‘I sail my boat ever closer to the wind / and the waves are
stirred like drifting snow.’
     ‘I can hear my beloved calling my name. / I shall hasten so that I can ride beside him.’


She seemed so child-like in that singular room of the garden annex. Her head had buried itself between the two pillows so only her ever-curling hair was visible. Opening a small portion of the curtains drawn across the blue metalled-framed French windows, he gazed at her sleeping in the dull light of just dawn. Outside a river-mist lay across the autumnal garden where they had walked yesterday before their tour of the estate. Unable to sleep he had sat in their hosts’ kitchen and mapped their guided walk in the rain, noting down his observations of this remote valley in a sprawling narrative. On the edge of moorland it was a world constrained and contained, with its brooding batchelor-owned farms and the silent legacy everywhere of a Victorian hagiographer and antiquarian. As he wrote and drew, snapshot-like images of her intervened unbidden. She both entranced and purposeful in a physical landscape she delighted in and knew how to read. Although longing to lie next to her he had sat gently for a moment on her bed, feeling the weight of her sleeping form move towards him as the mattress sagged, his bare feet cold on the stone floor. He placed his poem on the empty companion pillow, and returned through the chill of unheated rooms to the desert warmth of the Agared kitchen.


Lying in your arms
I am surprised to hear a voice
That seems in the right key
To sing what is in my heart.

After so many dark
inarticulate hours
I,  desperate
To express this love
That drowns me,
Suddenly come up for breath
(after floundering in
the cold water of night)
to find there were words
like little boats of paper
carrying a tea light,
a vivid yellow flame
on the black depths,
floating gently towards you . . .

Oh log of memory
record these sailing messages
So carefully placed, rehearsed,
Launched and found complete.

Knowing I must not talk of love,
Knowing no other word
(feeling the shape of your knee
with my right hand),
knowing this time will not
come again, I summon
to myself one last intimacy
before the diary of reason closes.

Zou Fen often wrote about herself as a rustic illiterate, country-born in a thatched hut, but given (inexplicably) the purple chamber at the Palace. As the daughter of a significant officer of the Imperial Court she appears to have developed a fictional persona to induce and taste the extremes of melancholy. Otherwise she is mind-travelling the natural world from her courtyard garden, observing in the growth of a tiny plant or the flight of distant bird, the whole pattern of nature. These things fill her rhapsodies and fu poems.

As a young man Zuo Si had wild flights of fantasy. He imagined himself as a warrior. In verse he recalls reading Precepts on the Art of War by Ssu-ma Jang Chu. With a scholar’s knife he writes of quelling the barbarian hordes (the Tibetans) in their incursions along the Yang-tze. When triumphant he would not accept the Emperor’s gift of a title and estate, but would retire to a cottage in the country. Then again, as a student scholar, he describes failure, penury and isolation ‘left stranded like a fish in a pond, without – he hasn’t a single penny in his account: within – not a peck of grain in the larder.’ He was never thus.

Like all good writers sister and brother Zou were the keenest observers. They took into and upon themselves what they saw and gathered from the lives of others, and so often their playful painted characters hide the truth of their real lives. David looks at his dishevelled poetry and wonders about its veracity. He always thought of Rachel as his first (and only) reader; but what if she were not? What would he write? What would his poems say?

*I lie on my back in her bed.
On her stomach, her arm on my chest,
She props herself against me
so that I see her face in close up.
She gazes
out of the window

I don’t think I have slept at all,
My own bed was so cold.
She warms me for a while.

All night
I’ve been thinking
what to say to her,
and now I am too weary
to speak.

I am in despair,
Yet I ache with joy
At having her so close.

I wish I knew who I was,
What I could be,
What I might become.

A voice tells me
that such intimacy
will not come again.

Honourable Younger Sister,

This village is a world of stone. Lanes, houses, courtyard walls, towers, pavilions, tables, benches are all hewn from ancient red rock. The stone streets are lustrous with the passage of feet and shine in the moonlight; tomorrow they will glisten in the morning rain. After six days on the path into the mountains I finally rest at this inn. Here I can buy light: to write in this loft whilst the house sleeps, though a dutiful daughter dozes against the foot of the stair-ladder to serve me should I require sustenance. Frightened by my ugliness I summoned up my sweetest voice for her and soon there was a shy smile and downcast eyes. These are long nights for the village poor, but few here as poor as those whose shelters I sought on the path. Tonight I miss the steaming breath and ceaseless rustle of the animals brought indoors for warmth and security. My travelling robes are already filthy, but my body remains clean. As soon as I depart each night’s shelter I search for a stream to strip and wash thoroughly in the ice-cold water.

Dear sister, we have both been taught that the function of letter-writing is to unburden the mind of its melancholy thoughts in the form of elegant colours; its purpose to state one’s feelings without reserve. My thoughts turn constantly on whether I have it in me to ‘summon the recluse’. Have I the stamina, the patience, the resolve to seek out these elusive souls? Such thoughts induce fear rather than melancholy, fear of failure.

Already my journey into these mountains has crossed the season of late autumn into that of early winter. I am told the russet-red leaves and pink berries of the Ash, the deceptive Rowan and speckled-leafed Lace set the mountainside alight as the sun rises into a clear sky. For me clouds hang all day in the steep valleys, and so hide the heights where the solitary ones are believed to live. They alone see with the dawn the mountain peaks aflame   It is only in the very late afternoon that the sun melts the clouds, breaks through, and enlivens the landscape, turning it gold, then amber, and a final dull red before the blue blackness of dusk descends. Beyond this village my sources tell me there is real wilderness, and paths are few. I am to be my own guide.

You and I are so adept at the play of words. Our honoured father encouraged us, and as custodian of the Imperial Archives he knew how words could be arranged to both conceal and reveal; we played with the characters as other children played with coloured stones. So with the poems we call “Chao Yin”, let us play with verb “Chao” as both to seek and to summon. Chu Hsi, a courtier of that prince of Huai-nan, was sent into the wilderness to summon an errant official back to his post. His poems speak of terrors of the mountains, their ‘murky depths sending shivers of fright’ of ‘the caves of leopards and tigers’, and of the deep forest where ‘a man climbs from fear’. The poetic form uses “Chao” as in the ancient ceremonial song “Chao ***”. This calls on a dead person’s soul to re-enter the body, so ‘a summoning of the soul’. In those times such poems argued against the recluse, the withdrawn one, and sought a return. Today there is this feeling abroad that we need to consort with the recluse, to taste his solitude. Does the solitary life speak of the ineffable Way? Or is it in the search for the solitary one that a moment of enlightenment may present itself? As the saying goes: ‘to travel one must surely uncover truth’. In my bones I feel ready to invert this old poetic form. I must summon the spirit of the recluse out of the mountain fastness, but not seek his return. I need to touch his ways, see evidence of his mountain life, for a while to walk his paths breathing the same air. In my heart I expect nothing but his absence. I foresee I may reach his shelter and find his gate ajar, though the embers of the hearth still warm. He will be on some distant peak gathering herbs. If on a precipitous path I was to turn a corner and find him before me I have no words prepared. For the moment it seems I am exploring an idea through this summoning and seeking, not a living, breathing body.

Tomorrow I shall reconnoitre. My official hairpin and staff will command any audience, but for reliable answers, I am far from confident. There is always talk, rumours, sightings. The common people respect these beings as kindly mountain spirits and guardians of the wilderness. At the fork in a path, by the crossing place of a stream, corn, persimmons and millet are left for them. Such offerings will be replaced in time by the rarest mountain herbs, wild fruits, the skin of leopard or bear.

Your last letter spoke of ‘following my path into the mountains’. You have always defied convention, so it would be no surprise to find you here on my return, although I think your Lord would not sanction it. He would find such a request unfathomable. I am still perplexed at your situation, that you, the most homely of women should be so favoured, so adorned, and yet so free. It is that confidence you hold to yourself.  

To me, you have always been the essence of woman. What knowledge I possess of your kind comes from you alone. The infrequent gropings that occasionally present themselves I have only dismissed. An hour in your company smoothes and stills both soul and body. Your movements and gestures are always quiet and true, as are your woven words that sing in my memory on the path.

I read your letter
And savoured your words,
Your sorrowful songs of separation.
I can almost imagine your face before me
And I sigh and sob out of control.
When will we meet again
To amuse ourselves with prose and verse?
How can I tell you of my misery
Except with these woven words?

Have I remembered your poem correctly? I expected no response to my own lines on our separation. On the very morning of my departure your scroll arrived. I delayed to read it, delaying further to know your words: to carry them in my memory on my journey. In our respective verse we follow the way of tradition: the lonely woman in her room; the man travelling far from home. How many thousand poems describe this antithesis?

My life has always been sheltered by the expectations of scholarship, the requirements of official rank, and more recently acclaim due to my songs and poems. This journey begins a new page, as a seeker and summoner. Follow my path deeper into the mountains, be at my side when I rest, calm my fear of the heights and the depths of dark ravines, reveal to me the words to paint the scene. Know that I share with you everything that is to come, without reservation.

Remember the words of Lun Yu: ‘The good man delights in mountains. The wise man delights in water’. In these mountains the sound of water is present everywhere.

A stony spring rinses bits of jade
Minnows now and then emerge, and disappear.
Here what need of my silk-strung gujin? –
The mountain water has its own crystal song.

Your brother Zuo Si

A thousand peaks: no more birds in flight.
Ten thousand paths: all trace of people gone.

In a lone boat, rain cloak and hat of reeds.
An old man’s fishing the cold river snow.

I am alone in this mountain fastness, on a steep downward path in the deepest shadow. I play with the twelve characters of Lui Tsung-yaun’s poem. How few poems tell of the desolation of winter. The coming of Spring, the passing of Autumn? Yes. But the onset of Winter? Even my sharp memory only recalls a meagre handful of poems to this season: the time of the first snows. Against all good sense I set out from Stone Village too late in the year: now I search for comforting word images to accompany me on this journey. Just below the snowline I pass through a stunted forest of ancient walnut trees almost leafless; the unrelenting wind has dispatched them crinkled brown into the valley below. I see there a winding river. I see its distant lake. I think of this poem known since my teenage years, puzzled over that one could see in one sweep of the horizon a thousand peaks. Here are that thousand and more if the ranks of limestone pillars in these mountains can be counted as peaks. I count them as peaks. And those thousand paths? At every turn there is some fresh way falling into the valley, or a faint trail rising to the heights. But this path I tread asserts itself on the traveller. Its stones are worn and the excrement of passing pack animals sticks to my boots.

Last night a cave, tonight I will reach the village of Psnumako. My former guide provided its name with a disdain he could not hide. When questioned he warned me not to enter without a stout staff against the mastiffs that guard each house, supposedly ******* during the day but apt to break their bonds at the smell of a stranger.

The steep and ever steeper descent brings pain to my knees. At this hour of the day my body would prefer to climb to the heights, but descend I must. The cold, the damp cold begins to stiffen weary limbs. I am tired from a day’s travel, tired from three hard climbs, two descents and this, my third, to complete before nightfall. I enter a narrow gorge loud with clamour of running water, cascade upon cascade flowing from the heights, falling fast to the river soon to interrupt my path. I shall have to force a crossing. What passed for a bridge were two fallen pines lashed together.  Now they lie akimbo a little distant, thrown apart like sticks by the spring flood as the deep snows melt. I must divest myself of boots and lower garments and wade across, stumbling on stones up to my waist in swift waters, terrified under the weight of my pack that I will fall and be swept under and along. To travel alone at such moments is foolhardy, but on this cold afternoon I have no choice.

I am so intent on preparing for this crossing it is only when I reach the end of the path that I notice snow is falling, its flakes sharp and white against the dark-water flow. The whirl and turn of the water mesmerises. Fatigue, fatigue embraces me, a day’s fatigue holds me fast on the river’s stony side. I close my eyes and hear the water rush and place myself into the protection of a mountain charm learnt from a passing traveller. Dwarfed by the size of his burden I see him negotiate a narrow path high above a chasm; he walked trance-like to the intoning of this charm.

It is soon done, the cold crossing, and with a lighter step I walk the remaining leagues to the lake-side and sight of the village. There are the faintest sparks of light amongst the silhouettes of houses. Animals are being brought in from the home fields against the night. A sudden shout, the barking of dogs, and now the snow falls thick and fast.

The guttural dialect here is barely discernable as speech. We are from different worlds this shepherd and I who meet at the stupa guarding the village entrance. This is not a Buddhist shrine but an acknowledgement of some mountain giant of terrifying aspect. The shepherd sees my official insignia and nods, knowing I will require shelter. He utters what may be a welcome, but could be a warning, and leads me forth. The mastiffs leap and bay as I pass between the primitive two-storey houses, animals below, humankind above. He disappears. I stop and wait. He returns with a woman who beckons me to climb the ladder to what may be her home. A widow perhaps? She is alone unless the rank darkness hides a man or child. But there is none. I hear animals move and grunt under the floor, a mat of dirt and straw. There is a sleeping loft, a cooking corner. I can see little else. But I am out of the snow, the biting wind, the cold. She pulls at my cloak, wet and caked with ice. There is a bowl placed in my hands; a rough tea. I speak a greeting, but there is no reply just a rustle of straw as she moves across the room.

The stupor of a journey’s pause is upon me. After three days on the trail to the heights I am numb with fatigue. I need food and sleep. I need rest before a final trek into the wilderness. Beyond Psnumako Lake known paths end. Except for the tracks used by shepherds to move their flocks to different seasonal pastures, there is wilderness. I hope for guidance, for the whereabouts of the sages who, in the winter months I am told, leave their reed huts on the heights for caves in the lower valleys. I shall be patient, remain here a little while. I am now immune to the discomfort and dirt of travel. That is how it is. That is how is must be. I miss only the mental absorption of writing, the caress of the brush on a scroll. In my home in Louyang I keep brush and paper close to hand; wherever I may be I can write, even in, especially in, the privy. If a line comes to me I can write it down. Here there is only the comfort of memory.

To think that in the past I wrote of this mountain wilderness out of my imagination and the descriptions of others. I once thought of these remote places as havens of spiritual liberation.

In the hills there is the sound of zither.
White clouds stay over shaded peaks,
Red flowers shine in the sunlit woods
Rocks are washed in the stream like jade;

How very different is the reality of it all; in this emerging winter world of mist, where the sun rarely visits and most living things have departed, where wind colours silence and one’s footfall becomes consolation. The sound of stone rubbing stone on the path is the eternal present. There have been days when only a distant crow moves in the landscape. Lammergeyers are known in these parts, but I have yet to see one. If there are wild beasts, they shun me.

As this bowl of tea cools in my hands but warms my frozen fingers I form pictures of the past day on its dark surface. Before dawn from the mouth of a river cave I sensed changes in the qualities of darkness that have hidden the heights above me. Then a perceptible line appeared and divided the mountain from the sky. That line became variegated; there were trees bristling on the highest rocks. It appears that at this hour the prevalent mist settles in the valleys leaving the sky clear.

The woman comes to me. She kneels to untie my boots. She looks with a curious innocence at my strangeness, the distortion of my face, the cleft palette, the deformed upper lip, the squint of my left eye. She is kindly as I give her my best smile though my face seems frozen still. There is a whisper, a prayer of welcome possibly. Then she bows her head, unravels a long scarf to reveal a mane of oiled hair, and sets about removing my boots. I see only the top of her head, a severe parting, hair held tightly in wooden combs. I close my eyes to bring to mind the image of Xaoli, so slight in comparison, her butterfly hands flittering into and around my sleeves, her seeing touch mapping out the extent of me, each piece of clothing, only later my face.

My reverie is broken by the entrance of two men. They squat behind the woman and, after taking in my ugliness and my hairpins of office, patiently wait for her to finish and retire. We stand and bow, then sit again amongst the straw.

‘Honoured Lord, I am Yun. You have travelled from Stone Village? And beyond?’

I pass him the Emperor’s seal he cannot read, but remain silent.

‘You are seeking those who live in the heights? The village only sees their servants, young boys sent for a goat or flasks of barley spirit. They bring herbs our women favour. Some have seen their huts when seeking lost animals. Now it is said they are gathered in the caves like animals waiting for the spring moon.’

‘When was the village last visited by their kind?’

‘ Hanlu, my Lord, the time of cold dew, two boys appeared with a pony. There was trading. They brought Chrysanthemum flowers and herbs for two geese and wine. They left scrolls for passage to Stone Village. Now the snows fall we may not see them until the Spring’

‘How far are your summer pastures? Have you any who would guide me there ?’

‘We do not seek these places after the first snows. The sages haunt the region beyond Chang Mountain. Before the 11th moon you might pass into the valley of Lidong where it is believed their caves lie, but to return before the Spring will not be possible.’

‘How many days there?’

‘Allow four. A difficult way, unmarked, rarely trodden, much climbing. There is one here who we could send with you – part of the way, and at a price, My Lord. Dahan travelled two seasons since as groom to a party of six with ponies, but then in late Spring.’

‘I will stay three days.’

‘Just so My Lord. Xiu Li will see to your wishes.’

And they depart, Yun’s companion has remained silent throughout, though searched my face continually. By the door he places his hand against the stout bag that carries my lute. ‘Guqin’, he says tenderly.

This instrument is my pass to the community of the reclusive. I am renown for my songs and their singing. My third-best guqin has not left its bag since Stone Village and I fear damage despite all my care on the path.

Later, as the village mastiffs gradually cease their baying as the quarter moon rises I take this instrument and place it across my lap. Its seven silk strings I wipe with a cloth and gently tune with its tasselled pegs. I then prepare myself through meditation to avoid the intrusion of distracting thoughts. With my eyes closed I allow my hands to seek out and name each part of guqin: from the Forehead of the Top Board, to the String Eyes, the Dew Collector, The Mountain, Shoulder and Phoenix Wings, past the Waist, the Hat Lines and the Dragon’s Beard, to the Dragon’s Gums and thence to the Inner Top Board. I can feel the Pillar of Heaven – the sound post – has moved a little in my recent travels. So too the Pillar of Earth – but with care I move both to their rightful positions. And so on naming the inner and outer parts of each of the two boards that make up the guqin. I begin to regulate my breathing and allow the fingers of my left hand to stroke and touch, to press and oscillate in the manner of vibrato. Zhoa Wenji describes twenty-three kinds of vibrato. I feel in turn each of the hui, the thirteen gold studs that mark the harmonic nodes and allow me to play the guqin by touch alone. In these moments of preparation I hear the words of my teacher: a good player makes sounds that are plentiful but not confused. As the moon reflecting on water, so the sounds are together but not combined. Like wind in the pines, they are combined but also spread out. Such sounds are valued for their lightness. Avoid the addition of inappropriate  "guest" sounds. This is the refined theory of the guqin. To be knowledgeable about music, one must seek this, then one can realize its beauty.

I have tuned to the Huangzhong mode. The song *Amidst Mountains Thinking of an Old Friend I have brought to mind. I recall the words of The Slender Hermit who says of this piece that its interest lies in holding cherished thoughts, but having no way to tell these to anyone. There are emotions about the present time, longings and laments for the past, but there is no way to express any of this. And so this piece.

In this poor reed hut the room is filled with mist and haze,
how far away are the things I love;
the old plum tree seems exhausted, its flowers about to die,
the mountains are lonely and I am nostalgic for past times.
The moon shines brightly on this lovely evening,
from this distance I think of my old friend and wonder where he is.
The green of the mountains never fades,
but before I know it my hair will turn white;
the moon is waning and flowers wither,
Old friend, I dream constantly of meeting you.
How hard it is to recall the joy of our last meeting!
With the many mountain ranges,
and its hidden tigers and coiled dragons,
I am unable return to you in Chang An.
The road is distant, the tall trees make the road dark,
and the world is vast.

I mourn Aquila and Lyra
separated by the Milky Way like the cowherd and weaving girl,
on the ground we are separated by 1,000 li
in the sky we are each in a separate place,
though our passions remain strong
There has been no warm correspondence,
there is restraint to the bright harmony,
and the flowing streams are swallowed by the setting sun.

The thought of this song of mid autumn touches me before its words have issued from my lips. I play the last two lines in harmonics and sing.

My brother Zuo Si tells me I am well trained in the technique of writing, so well trained that when I come to put brush to paper I don’t have to punish myself with deep thoughts. See now how my hand flows to and fro and the characters appear.

I write a rhapsody for my Lord.

The philosopher Lu Ji says that whilst poetry traces emotion with delicacy, rhapsody embodies objects with light. My rhapsody is a bright star between Ts’an and Ch’en. On this bitter day I am describing the pine and cypress trees on the high peaks, where the first snows of winter cling hesitantly to their branches in the still air. I reflect on the emerald glow of their foliage in spring, their heavy fragrance in summer, the song of their branches in the autumn winds, their stillness in the desolation of winter.

I have a distant court in this vast palace. This suits my temperament and my literary disposition. I have the joy of my garden and the views of the Tai mountains.  I am a curiosity here. If I hold any of the arts of love I have little idea what they are. I do not spend my days plucking the dark hairs from my arms or deliberating over my wardrobe. It is understood that I am often unwell.

I aspire to arrange all things properly: to calm myself to write, to let my imagination sail on the open seas. My brother tells me I was chosen because of my stillness, observant gaze and gentle voice. If I am beautiful it is only because I absorb into myself the grace of the natural world I see about me. It is this self that dreams in my imagination. When I am with my Lord he touches my petalled mouth, inhales the distinct perfume of my nervousness, places his hand against my cheek and bids me speak.

I shift the thick blind to gaze at my garden. It waits for spring as I do. Winter only draws to itself past memories or desires for the future. It is too cold and damp to rest, to hibernate like the snake. It is easy to dream for a while, and being trained in the art of literature I can, with concentration, place myself anywhere.

Now, I am walking below the tall trunks of the cypress groves high on Linzi ridge. Looking down on the green river I absorb the aura of these great trees.

Now, I am kneeling at my desk, my feet wrapped in furs against the cold: I pour tea to warm the cup I hold in my writing hand.

Now, I ponder on the recluse Chi Songzi wandering amongst the highest pines to attain the Way. I follow his careful movements on the rocky path, his intense attention given to every live thing. I feel the different qualities of the breeze that lifts from the dark valley below.  My bare feet gather to themselves a miniature garden; soil, seeds, insects and grubs cling to my toes. Treading pine needles release a heady odure; above me the rock thrush chatter in the swaying branches.

The cold returns to my fingers and this vision retreats. This room is soon dark as the afternoon progresses. My maid has, during my oblivious state, left rice and vegetables. My rhapsody holds to its unfinished state with equanimity. I must of course fashion into its closing lines statements to please my Lord. The cypress tree trunks are steadfast like a man of wisdom or some such nonsense. This must wait for my attention on another day.

I am not like my brother who writes so slowly that his Rhapsody of the Capitals took up (it is said) ten years of his attention. My thoughts are agile and come to the page fully-formed. If I am calm (and well) a rhapsody may be finished in within my monthly cycle.  Much of this time is taken in dreaming, returning to images of my childhood, recalling conversations, remembering the thoughts and expressions of others. I read too the tales of travellers and poets. In summer my garden becomes a map of this world onto which I place and arrange my thoughts. As I tend my plants I tend these thoughts.

I now cover with a cloth the characters written in these past chilled hours and attend for a while to the business of palace life. An interview with my Lord’s second wife’s cousin – there has been a bereavement in her court and so a request to discuss a memorial ode. A scribe from the imperial archives demands I view a recent sequence of poems before it takes its place in Emperor Wu’s personal collection. I need to discuss the household accounts with my cook.

On my walnut chest a letter from Zuo Si: to read, to answer. His second gujin is wrapped in my bedclothes against the damp air. At night its delicate shape lies next to me. My left hand will caress its many silk strings, its long lacquered body, the smooth ivory of its pegs. Even in these winter months he is travelling, searching out those scholars and artists who have retreated from the official world of court and patronage to obscurity in remote places. After many years of work on the history of city life he is now writing poetry of seclusion and the wilderness. Famed through the Northern Kingdom his poetry and songs open every door, his work so often copied it is said to effect the price of paper.

My maid has already lit the butter lamp in my inner chamber, the protocol due to my position. I remove the clothes of the day, bathe briefly and dress in my court gown and rich furs. It is my duty to wait. By my side is the scroll of my Rhapsody on Thoughts of Separation. A recent favourite of my Lord’s, we have read this together in the stillness of the Tiger hours. The poem speaks with the voice of a young concubine newly separated from her home and family. She tells of her loneliness, her tears of anxiety, her ten thousand unremitting cares. Such words appear to stir my Lord . . .

My name is Zhou Yuanten, but call me Eddie. I am a doctoral student at Xinjiang University –in the far, far west, but at Brunel to study this year. My English is good. I lived in Boston, Massachusetts for undergraduate years. I majored in piano at the New England C and then discovered I wanted to compose rather than play. So I go to MIT and soon I discover the English do it so differently, so I apply to Brunel. And at Brunel they then say of this place ‘you have to go.’ So here I am.

So surprising to be greeted in Chinese! And not just Nin Hao, we have a conversation! His accent is Northern Mandarin. He is writing a novel, he explains, about poets Zuo-Fen and Zuo-Si. We have 15 minutes conversation every day and I help him with his characters. Strange, to most of the class he is nobody, but to foreign students here we know him through his website and his software. I have even played his colours piece, The Goethe Triangle.

It is joy to be respected by a teacher and his sessions are like no other I’ve had here, and here I mean the UK. Oh, so laid-back, so lazy so many teachers. People lack energy here. They are dreamers and only think of themselves. He is full of energy and talks often about this Imogen of whom I never hear. Her father a great composer and she copied his music from when she was a girl – such beautiful calligraphy. Her father loved India and learned Sanskrit. He should have learned Mandarin; at least that is a living language. ‘Imo’, he says, ‘is my heroine, my mentor, the musician I most revere.’ He showed us her library and what was her studio in one of the old buildings here. He gives me this little book about her ten years in this place. A strange looking lady; there’s a photograph of her conducting Bach in the Great Hall. She looks like she is dancing.

This morning some are not here, but there are little notes on the desk with apologies perhaps. He leaves them untouched and we make chords again, and scales and arpeggios and Slonimsky’s famous melodic patterns. We write and write. He sings, we sing too. There is a horn and a cello with us today. They play and make jokes. They show us harmonics and tunings and bend our ears in new directions we do not expect. Those who complain about this course not being ‘advanced’ will eat their words; only I think some of those are not here.

As Chinese we hear sound in a different way I think. In our language tone is so important. To each word there are four tones that make meaning quite different. Chinese uses only about 400 syllables, compared to 4000 in English. So there are lots of syllables, like ****, that have multiple meanings. I tell him the story of the Lion-eating Poet, which he does not know!! I am writing this out for him, all 92 characters. Just one word **** but with four meanings – lion, ten, to make, to be. The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den is the story of a poet (****) named **** who loves to eat lions (**** ****) goes to market (****) to buy ten (****) of them, takes them home to eat (****) and discovers they are made (****) of stone (****).

So I have no trouble hearing what others struggle to hear. We make pieces that are all about tone, and on a single note. Mark, the cellist, plays the opening of Lutoslawski’s Concerto – forty-two repetitions of a tenor ‘D’ a second apart. I had never heard this – a cadenza at the beginning of a concerto. Now we write a duo, on just one note. We write; they play. We are like many Mozarts trying to write only what we have already heard, making only one copy. I use the four tones and must teach the players the signs. I demonstrate and he says of the 1st tone – ‘Going to the Dentist, the 2nd – Climbing a ladder, the 3rd – ‘The Rollercoaster’, the 4th –‘Stepping on a pin’. We all do it!

And there are all these microtones. We listen to a moment of Ravel’s Bolero and pieces by Thomas Ades and Julian Anderson, then in detail (and with the score) to part of Duet for piano and orchestra by George Benjamin. This is spectral music. He is daring to introduce this – very difficult subject - this idea that a sound could be mimicked (? Is that the word – to impersonate?) by analysing it for the frequencies that make it up, and then getting instruments with similar acoustic properties to play the frequencies as pitches. So the need for microtones – goodbye equal temperament! Great in theory, difficult in practice.

This afternoon we are to study spectral composing using our computers. Until now we use our computers or smart phones to listen to extracts. He has this page of web links on his website for each session. Instead of listening through hi-fi we listen through our headphones. Better of course by far, no birds sounds or instruments playing next door. We can hear it again anytime. So there is software to download, Fourier analysis I suppose, he tries hard not to use any science or maths because there are some here who object, but they are fools. Even Bach knew of acoustics – designing the organs he played.

We finish this morning studying harmonic rhythm and this word tonality nobody seems quite able to describe. To him even the chromatic scale is tonality, and he shows in a duet for horn and cello how our ears take in tonality change. This is not about keys, but about groupings of pitches – anywhere – so a tonality can be spread across several octaves. So often, he says, composers are not aware of the tonalities they create, they don’t hear harmonic rhythm. They’re missing an opportunity! Sound can be coloured by awareness of what makes up a tonality. So understanding spectral music must help towards this. It is very liberating all this. If we take sound as a starting point rather than a system we can go anywhere.

Yesterday he asked me about a book he is reading. Did I know it? A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo. Of course I know this very funny book. He said he liked to think of music in the same way the character of the Chinese girl Z thinks about love.

“Love,” this English word: like other English words it has a tense. “Loved”, or “will love”, or “have loved.” All these specific tenses mean Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exists in particular period of time. In Chinese, Love is ài in pinyin. It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.

And so it is with music. Music is a being, a situation, a circumstance. It holds past and future. It is wondrous, just like love.