Once on a Moonless Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

of signs as far removed from Chinese writing as the unfamiliar language on the manuscript. To Puyi those signs did not belong to a language at all, but to a system of purely graphic symbols with no grammatical rules or syntactical relationships. It was the language he had always been looking for, one he had found only in dreams or as a child, a language without verbs, just nouns, nouns and nouns—a language, I like to think, with which he could have written his own motto, painted in large characters on the walls of his residence: No verbs, therefore no concerns .
    “After the inscriptions on tortoiseshell, Puyi was inspired by patterns suggesting a primitive sort of writing, painted or engraved on two ceramic articles in his possession: a pot with openwork sides to display its contents and ajar with a narrow neck. He then widened his field of research, obtaining photographs and copies of prehistoric engravings found deep inside legendary caves in far-flung provinces. In 1980 a distant cousin of his published a two-volume work entitled Glyphs and Rock Carvings Acquired by Puyi .
Little by little, [the cousin states in his preface,] as he copied and recopied them, Puyi managed to hear a dialogue between these patterns, the suns, human bones, birds, frogs, fish, plants and insects, not unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs. As several weeks could pass without his speaking to anyone but his Japanese sumo, this verbless exchange thrumming round inside his head constituted his only conversations. In a wine-coloured leather diary for 1930 (probably a gift from his English tutor and now conserved at the Museum of Contemporary History), there are some brief notes sufficiently explicit to demonstrate that, in his mind, these glyphs and rock carvings were associated with images of paradise, which ended up haunting his dreams. On the page for the 8th of November, for example, he writes: “dreamed of Banpo, a giraffe” … Banpo was known from pictograms dating back to the second half of the second millennium before our era.
    “One day,” the professor went on, “he received a letter from Borneo, an Indonesian island whose Dutch governor had had copies made of the alphabets of several languages once used by native peoples. Among them was one letter of the Phoenician alphabet, which attracted Puyi’s attention because it resembled a sign on the manuscript. Peculiarly, instead of leaping for joy, he simply glanced at a map of the world, placed his finger on this land lost in the middle of an ocean which—in An Shih-Kao’s day—had not yet been crossed and cried: ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, no!’ With which he removed his finger and had the letter filed in archives still known as the Court Archives, the better to forget it.
    “Another letter, a surprisingly thick one, its envelope smothered in strange stamps and postmarks, arrived in Puyi’s residence in Tianjin in mid-August 1931. The place was shrouded in gloomy silence, this was a month before the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. The sumo came into his room and put the letter on the emperor’s bedside table while he lay huddled in his freezing bed, tortured by worry and migraines, haunted by the thought of becoming a puppet for the Japanese who would name him emperor of Manchuria, casting infamy over the entire Chinese people. That same day the only Chinese scholar familiar with Sanskrit, the sacred language of India, was summoned before Puyi to read the letter. All that emerged from this consultation was that the author of the letter was a ruler from a region which once belonged to ancient India but was now part of Nepal, and its Kapilavastu district had been Buddha’s birthplace two thousand five hundred years earlier. On orders from his superior, a British governor who had fought the Boxers in Peking in his youth, he was sending Puyi a copy of The Hitopadeśa , a collection of fables written in a local language called Newari, a combination of Sanskrit and a north Himalayan dialect