Shadow of the Silk Road Read Online Free PDF

twenty-eight-year-old daughter Mingzhao, who looks like porcelain, like him. We are alone. The last time he was here, he says, the foundations were a heap of rubble. And now this. ‘It is strange.’ I cannot tell what he is thinking.
    For a long time we climb over this perfect, sterile geometry. Beneath us the city moans invisibly through smog: the drumming of a train, faint cries. Sometimes his daughter takes his arm, as if comforting him for something. I try to imagine the imperial Son of Heaven conducting state affairs from this gashed hillside, gazing down on the ocean of his prostrate officials or the passage of a military parade. Viewed from below, wrote chroniclers, the palace seemed to float in clouds. But now the great ramp of platforms, shorn of all structures, all colour, makes a cold, Aztec symmetry against the hill.
    ‘Look…here is some of the old stone…and here.’ The professor tugs back some plastic sheets to show a patch of wall, the socket for a pillar. They lie isolated in the waxy sheen of reconstruction. ‘You see how vast it was. There’s a Tang-era palace in Japan, but you could fit it into one wing of this…’ His pride sounds sombre in the bleakness. ‘The first time I came here, nearly forty years ago, this place was almost out in countryside, and people were carting away its stone for their houses…’ He shivers in the wind.
    ‘Why were you here?’
    But I think I know. Nearly forty years ago, at the start of the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards had rampaged all through the country.
    He says tightly: ‘We travelled free by train everywhere that summer. We were happy for a moment.’ At that time the pillaging of the Tang palace had made perfect sense: the destruction of the feudal past by the working masses.
    But Hu had come because he loved history…
    He belonged to that lost generation who were banished to the countryside after the chaos grew too great. Many Red Guards returned years later with their faith annihilated, their schooldays wasted, to a world which was forgetting them. Some lived with thememory of unspeakable things. Ageing towards its sixties now, this cynical generation makes a black hole in China’s heart. Yet Hu Ji, I sense, has escaped.
    As we mount the Linde hall, the pleasure palace of nineteen successive Tang emperors, his daughter falls back beside me. She is pretty and delicate, with child’s hands. Her father is tracing where the columns of the banqueting chamber have left their circles in the flower-speckled earth. ‘In the Cultural Revolution he was sent into the mines,’ she says. ‘He was there eleven years. He had silicosis in his lungs long afterwards. But he kept up his studies even there. I’ve seen his old notebooks, covered in Maoist slogans.’ Her father is stooping curiously over a stone-lined basin: a solitary detail in the ruined earth. ‘But what he most remembers,’ she says, ‘is his old tutor. This man committed suicide just before the Revolution, knowing what was coming. My father feels a great debt to him, and great sadness.’
    Hu Ji has stood up among the ghosts of Tang banqueteers. ‘Imagine here,’ he says, ‘the music of the emperors!’ We gaze over the mounds, the faltering lines of brick. ‘The emperor Xuanzong had an orchestra and a dance troupe of thirty thousand!’
    This ruler, he says, changed their musical instrumentation for ever, to play the Western music which the Chinese loved. Its flutes and harps still sound on their tomb walls. He enjoys these transmutations, as I do: how the harp travelled east from Central Asia or the flute went west; or how the horsehead fiddle–created in legend by a Mongolian prince to speak his sorrow to his dying horse–moved down the Silk Road to become the ancestor of strings everywhere, even the European violin.
    Hu Ji is now lamenting Xuanzong, the emperor of China’s misfortune. He ruled for forty years or more, but his generals were catastrophically defeated by the