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coffin, which was being brought from the ancestral family temple in the North City. Her father had bought it, as was the custom, many years before, and the wood, a species of camphor, was of a quality and thickness now unobtainable. Every month for at least twenty years, a fresh layer of lacquer had been put on it.
    We walked on, and just as we reached the main gate, the immense coffin arrived on the shoulders of six bearers, its surface black and sparkling in the light from their lanterns. One end of it was high, made to look like the stern of a Chinese junk, and its sides had been shaped like those of a boat, to enable it to cleave the black waters where the dead travel. As it came sliding darkly through the gate, the Communist soldiers, most of whom had been recruited from superstitious peasant stock, drew back, muttering, their eyes wide. Aimee touched the coffin as it passed, and a moment later we said good night. I walked away, and, outside the huge gate, turned back and saw her standing there, looking ghostlike in her white robe, watching me. The soldiers were in clumps about her, though they did not stand too close, and I could still see, behind her, the dark shape of the coffin receding into the darkness.
    In the three days before the climax of the funeral rites, the Yu mansion changed considerably. Over all the tiled outdoor courts, box-shaped roofs of reed matting, looking something like large sheds, were erected on bamboo scaffolding. Framed panes of brightly painted glass were set in the sides of these, above the level of the surrounding buildings and galleries. In this way almost an acre of open courts was changed into lofty rooms smelling of straw and filled with golden-yellow dust.
    I was in the house early on the second morning, when a Communist cadre came. In Western usage, the term applies to a number of men forming the skeleton of a larger group, but it is the approved Chinese Communist designation for one man acting as a sort of political commissar. This man arrived just as the workmen were beginning the day’s construction and cleaning. He strode angrily about the courts watching the bustle, and after he had asked the workmen (most of them professional funeral caterers and descendants of funeral caterers, who took pride in their work and charged enormous prices) what they were doing and how much they were getting paid, he joined the soldiers and conferred with them. Presently, they produced from somewhere a flaking blackboard, and for the next hour the main courtyard rang with Communist hymns. The cadre wrote the first lines on the blackboard, and the soldiers shouted them and went on from there.
    â€œOut of the East comes the sun, out of the East comes Mao Tse-tung,” they sang. “In Red Leaf Village, the landlords are gone. Ai ya! The farmers dance and sing. Red Warriors liberate the south. The people are throwing flowers at their feet.”
    When the soldiers were done singing, they took out the paper-bound Communist catechisms that they all carried and, in response to the questions of the cadre, read aloud in their flat country accents.
    â€œWhat is the place of the soldier in New China?”
    â€œThe soldier protects the people and drives the running dogs of imperialism from our shores.”
    â€œWhat is the Soviet Union?”
    â€œThe Soviet Union is China’s big brother and is helping us drive the imperialist reactionaries into the sea.”
    After quite a lot of this, the soldiers all sat down on the folding campstools they carried strapped to their backs, and the cadre began barking out a lecture on the evils of bureaucratic capitalism and amassed wealth. “All this is the old, evil China,” he said. He waved his arms as if to sweep away the mansion and the workmen. The soldiers glared about them. “All these people employed for one dead old man is a reactionary crime against New China!” The soldiers stirred, and snarled at the workmen. “But