Yearly Archives: 2018

Flamenco, 1: palmas—soleares, bulerías

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*First in a series, rounded up here!*

palmas

Tony and Two-Jags explore the intricacies of flamenco palmas.

Coinciding with the thrilling Portugal–Spain match the other day was a flamenco gig in Chiswick with the splendid Ramon Ruiz.

Unlike the football, it’s not a competition, but much as I love fado (and you just have to listen to the Carminho song there; see also here), I’ve long been enchanted by flamenco. One benefit of the life of a touring WAM muso: how blessed to have had the chance to wind down from performing Bach Passions in Andalucia in time for late-night sessions in flamenco bars.

Acton

The rustic Andalucian charm of Ramon’s courtyard. Photo: Ramon Ruiz.

Recently my passion has been reinvigorated by occasional palmas sessions with Ramon. Flamenco is yet another illustration of the wonders of all the diverse regional cultures throughout Europe (e.g. east Europe, or Italy). And despite the efforts of those who would float off into an imperial ocean idyll of tweed and Morris dancing, London is still a wonderful microcosm of world music! You can find everything…

YouTube opens up a rich world of flamenco, not least the fantastic documentary series Rito y geografïa del cante. [1] Here’s a briefer introduction to flamenco as part of social life:

This is just a preliminary reccy—more to follow.

* * *

Flamenco is about as far as you could possibly get from its cosy tourist image—Torremolinos, castanets, rose between the teeth, and all that. Like tango or rebetika, its life is “among the folk”, as the Chinese would say: at lineage gatherings, at informal fiestas and local peña clubs; and it’s rooted in the exorcizing of suffering. Rather than the commodified tablau shows, one lives in hope of sitting in on a juerga among aficionados (cf. the touring musos’ game). [2]

* * *

Like Lorca [name-dropper—Ed.], my taste draws me to the intensity of cante jondo “deep singing”, with genres like seguiriyas and martinetes. But my Spanish is rudimentary, I don’t play guitar, and No Way am I going to dance (like, ever)—so a great way of learning is to get a basic grasp of the wonderful palmas hand-clapping that accompanies singing, guitar, and dancing. Not to mention foot stamping, and the cajón box.

Come to that, palmas is a great way for British kids to become musically competent, growing into music—as Ramon finds in his school workshops.

Like the human voice, our hands, our bodies, are the most elemental musical instruments. Hand-clapping, relegated in northern societies to children’s games, is a captivating art in some Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern cultures. And it’s belatedly come into its own with so-called minimalism—Steve Reich’s Clapping music,

and Anna Meredith’s exhilarating Hands free.

* * *

Complementing my explorations of YouTube clips, I’m finding some practical sites useful, like this and this; also instructive are Ian Biddle’s chapter on cante and the Appendix “Cante, definition and classification” of Paul Hecht’s The wind cried.

As usual, we need an overview of the genres: this tree suggests the riches of all the various palos styles.

And then, within all these palos are the compas rhythmic patterns—embodied by specific (hands-on!) palmas. Not to mention all the local styles of towns throughout Andalucia—Seville, Jerez, Cádiz, Morón de la Frontera, Granada…

For a sophisticated model of metrical analysis, see here.

Palmas seems like a relatively easy way of getting a basic grip on flamenco. But focusing narrowly on the rhythms, it still takes me a lot of time to absorb the important clues from the guitar and voice that are equally basic.

Ramon suggests I begin with soleares (linguistic note: associated with soledad, like saudade in fado!) and bulerías—the latter faster, difficult but much prized.

Here’s a soleares from Perrate de Utrera, with the ever-quirky Diego del Gastor:

And bulerías by the de Utrera sisters, with Diego del Gastor:

I start by internalising the basic 12-beat cycle while swimming, taking breaths before the accents:

       1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

or rather (beginning on 12)

12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12…

So it’s a recurring hemiola* pattern; that should be simple enough, but at first, for pedantic hidebound WAMmies like me it feels as if it begins on the “wrong” beat. (¿¡Surely this is as wacky as the Spanish upside-down question and exclamation marks?!). One soon learns to bounce off the 12, but I find it harder to internalize the varying patterns in the second half of the cycle.

Anyway, you can already hear just how complex the rhythmic variations are. As always, if you’re hampered by a classical education like wat I is (innit), or if you don’t happen to come from a long lineage of Andalucian blacksmiths, then you have to unlearn any ingrained assumptions from WAM and just immerse yourself in the whole style through the experience of the body.

I think of Indian tala; or even the way that household Daoists in Yanggao pick up, largely by ear, their ritual percussion items—seemingly simple but endlessly varied, with large cymbals and drum interacting. Indeed, the way that the clappers often leave the main beat empty reminds me somewhat of Li Manshan “calling the beat” with a busy drum pattern just before the down-beat on the small cymbals.

It’s no good just going oom-pa-pa like a waltz—in one video, Ramon spots some old ladies at the back doing just that! And then there’s the nuance of fuertes hard and sordas soft dynamics, and all the contra-tiempo cross-accents between multiple clappers.

As Ramon explains, it’s a series of questions and answers. I’ll have a better handle on this once I’ve learned to latch onto the guitar, with its chord change on 3, and the extra cadential flourish ending on 10—though the beginner may find few landmarks in between those points. The YouTube option of slowing down playback can come in handy.

Here’s yet another fine programme in the Rito series, with a series of bulérias (featuring, after Camaron, Cristobalina Suarez with young sleeping child from 23.20—see also my Part 2):

This is seriously complex funky stuff. No sooner have you learned a basic pattern than you find how variable it is—like sonata form. Given its considerable theorization (as if that mattered), that theory is orally transmitted, and the brilliant exponents are often semi-literate. But while insisting that flamenco should absolutely be admissible to the ranks of “serious music” (whatever that means), the only important point is that it’s extraordinarily life-enhancing.

For more bulérias, see here.

* * *

I also love it when all extraneous elements are stripped away: when everyone just claps their complex patterns in counterpoint with the dancer’s feet. Or the cantes a palo seco, when the singer dispenses entirely with guitar and even palmas, just howling in solitary pain… I’ll pursue these songs in my third post.

Talking of the Rito y geografïa del cante flamenco series, with all its precious archive footage, the programmes on the Utrera sisters illustrate the compilers’ fine ethnography of lineages, changing society and music, the amateur–professional continuum, and all the subtle distinctions that folk musicians always make:

All this wealth of musicking on our doorstep! I’ll keep studying and updating this post. The next post in this series outlines gender, politics, wine, and deviance!

As an aperitivo for the third post we just have to have a seguiriyas from Camarón de la Isla:

*BTW, lutenist Paul O’Dette told me this story on a long tour of the USA:
Summer school in Utah on baroque music. A professor from England solemnly writes “HEMIOLA” on the board and begins to explain the occasional use of three groups of two within a triple metre. One of the local students guffaws,
“HEY! We don’t have no hee-my-olas in Utaww!”
For another vignette from that tour, see here.

[1] In a nice illustration of how the concepts of “singing” and “music” are culturally conditioned (see also Is music a universal language?), the word flamenco doesn’t appear in the series title!

[2] Among a wealth of sources, in English one might start with the flamenco chapter of The Rough Guide to world music; William Washabaugh, Flamenco: passion, politics and popular culture; ethnographies like D.E. Pohren, A way of life and Paul Hecht, The wind cried; and for cante jondo, see e.g. Timothy Mitchell, Flamenco deep song. Some of these are cited in Parts 2 and 3 of this series.

Taming the Uyghur “heritage”

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I’ve ranted in many posts about the iniquities of “heritage“, particularly (though not only) for China. As if the commodification, reification, and secularization of local Han Chinese cultures isn’t bad enough, it’s still worse for minority traditions such as those of the Tibetans and Uyghurs, for whom the political agenda to sinicize and tame is even clearer.

On the cultural aspect of the repression of the Uyghurs (muqam, meshrep and so on), I’ve just added a link to an excellent detailed recent report on the Intangible Cultural Heritage in Xinjiang, both under my main theoretical discussion Edible, Intangible, dodgy and in my film review Ashiq: the last troubadour. Note also Uyghur culture in crisis.

 

Mountweazels

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guira
Further to the mondegreen, the mountweazel is also a fine creation—a bogus entry deliberately inserted in a reference work.

While I was editing the “China” entries for the New Grove dictionary of music and musicians, I tried in vain to persuade the powers-that-be that a vast civilisation with a continuous history of thousands of years might just deserve as much coverage as a composer who lived for thirty-five years (Mozart; see also here). Anyway, what with all the labrynthine complexities of the Grove style “Bible” (see e.g. here), one needs the occasional light relief (cf. the popular “composer or pasta?” quiz); and Grove now has a competition for spoof entries.

The 2016 winner was Caroline Potter:

Musical Cheesegrater
(Fr. râpe à fromage musicale; It. grattugia musicale)
A percussion instrument that enjoyed a brief vogue in Rome and Paris in the 1910s and early 1920s. In the Hornbostel-Sachs classification the instrument is reckoned as a friction idiophone. Of metal construction, it typically has four sides, each with raised perforations of a particular size. The player strokes one or more of the sides with a metal implement, producing a distinctive rasping sound. A rare rotating variant, where a perforated barrel is turned using a crankhandle to create friction against metal tangents, survives in the Musée de la Musique in Paris. The musical cheesegrater is cited in a posthumously published appendix to Luigi Russolo’s celebrated manifesto L’Arte dei rumori in the fourth category of his sound classification (screeches, creaks, rumbles, buzzes, crackles, scrapes). Its best-known use is in Maurice Ravel’s opera L’enfant et les sortilèges (1924), where it is rubbed with a triangle beater.

The musical cheesegrater was employed by Italian Futurist composers and associates of the Dada movement in Paris, and its popularity and decline mirrors the fortunes of these artistic groupings. The manuscript of Erik Satie’s Rabelais-themed Trois petites pièces montées (1919) features the instrument rubbed with a hard cheese, though scholars disagree whether Satie intended this to be a percussion instrument or part of a projected staging. Edgard Varèse showed enthusiasm for the musical cheesegrater during a dinner with Russolo; it appears in sketches for Amériques (1918-21), but not in the final version. Recent academic research in gastromusicology has revived interest in the instrument.

I’m gratified by the reference to the numinous Sachs–Hornbostel organological taxonomy, even if a whole host of stranger instruments appear there. So it’s of little consequence that just such an instrument is indeed used in several world traditions, such as the guiro/güira of merengue. Indeed, it brings to mind “our” very own washboard.

If it’s pithy organology you need, there’s also the vuvuzela. See also The shagbut, minikin, and Flemish clacket.

Notes from Beijing, 2

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Further to my post on the Beishida ethnographers, and my seemingly underwhelming maxim that

If you want to study Chinese culture, China’s a good place to do it,

in between my lectures at Beishida in March I sallied forth (cf. Cheeseshop sketch) to show my film at People’s University and Peking University for two fine scholars from whom I also have much to learn: Cao Xinyu (left) and Wang Mingming.

Wang Mingming https://stephenjones.blog/2018/06/13/notes-from-beijing-2/

Cao Xinyu
I’ve already mentioned Cao Xinyu 曹新宇 (b.1973) in a previous post (just updated). Professor of the Qing History Research Institute in the History department of People’s University (Renda), he’s a most supportive teacher—and for me he has the added cachet of being a scion of Yanggao, home of my Daoist master Li Manshan! Talking of Renda, I was happy to tell Cao Xinyu of Li Manshan’s ingenuous repunctuation of 中国人大代表 (here, under 2nd moon 28th).

Sectarian activity is an important aspect of the picture of religious life in China, both in imperial and modern times—indeed right now. Cao Xinyu combines detailed textual research on the imperial ancestry of sectarian groups and fieldwork on their modern fortunes. In addition to his series of books on sectarian history, notably the Way of Yellow Heaven, you can also read astute articles such as this survey.

1958 fanguan

In a salient reminder of Maoist history, we had lunch at the Russian restaurant “1958” on the People’s University campus, opened in 2013 (with how much irony, I can’t fathom) to commemorate the Russian experts then at the university—shortly before they were all expelled.

For a fine recent initiative of Cao Xinyu, see here.

Wang Mingming
Just up the road at Peking University is the eminent anthropologist Wang Mingming 王铭铭 (b.1962). [1] He’s a native of Quanzhou in Minnan (south Fujian), whose ever-vibrant ritual culture (temple fairs, Daoist ritual, nanyin, and so on) has always informed his research.

From 1981 he studied archaeology in Xiamen University, going on to embrace anthropology as it was incorporated into the department there. He came to London in 1987 to study for a PhD in anthropology at SOAS; this was also the start of a long and fruitful collaboration with the great Stephan Feuchtwang. He returned to China in 1994 to make his base at Peking University, becoming a full professor there in 1997.

With Stephan he wrote the fine book Grassroots charisma: four local leaders in China (2002) on the linking of religion and politics in two villages in Quanzhou and north Taiwan. Wang’s historical anthropology of the city of Quanzhou, Empire and Local Worlds, was published in English in 2009.

His article on the Fazhugong festival makes an introduction to the tenor of his work:

  • “Lingyande ‘yichan’ ” 灵验的“遗产” [Efficacious “heritage”], in Guo Yuhua (ed.) Yishi yu shehui bianqian 仪式与社会变迁 [Ritual and social change] (Beijing: Shehuikexue wenxian cbs, 1999).

Like Guo Yuhua (his fellow anthropologist at Tsinghua next door), he combines detailed ethnography with a thorough grasp of theory. As Stephan writes:

Through numerous publications, books he has written, series he has edited, journals he has founded, and through his teaching of postgraduate and doctoral students, he has been dedicated to the re-formation of anthropology in China as an academic discipline, not as an aid to programs of development and of government, nor as simply an import from English-language social and cultural anthropology, but as an anthropology coming from China that can and does have something to say to a larger anthropology.

His theoretical mission to re-historicize anthropology over a long time-frame, and in a global context, may be seen in

  • “To learn from the ancestors or to borrow from the foreigners: China’s self-identity as a modern civilisation”, Critique of anthropology 34.4 (2014).

as well as

  • “Minzuzhi: yizhong guangyi renwen guanxixuede jieding” 民族志：一种广义人文关系学的界定 [Ethnography: a redefinition from the perspective of extended human relations], Xueshu yuekan 47.3 (2015).

Among his recent projects, he has directed analytical fieldwork on the ritual life of Hui’an county in Minnan:

  • Wang Mingming et al., “Dili yu shehui shiyezhongde minjian wenhua: Huidong Xiaozuo kaocha” 地理与社会视野中的民间文化——惠东小岞考察 [Folk culture from the viewpoint of geography and society: survey of Xiaozuo, east Hui’an], Minsu yanjiu 2017.2,

Wang’s diachronic approach has much to teach us (including scholars of ritual and music) about changing local societies through imperial, Maoist, and reform eras, not least on their relations with the state and “cultural” authorities. In utter contrast with the reified salvage-based “living fossil” flapdoodle of the “heritage” authorities, such study is based both on thorough fieldwork and on detailed research into sources since the late imperial era.

I can’t help noticing that Peking University has changed somewhat since my last sojourn there thirty-two years ago. In Wang Mingming’s interaction with his students he has a wonderful informal style; he clearly makes a fine fieldworker. Both he and Cao Xinyu encourage their students to think; at both events—and in the pub afterwards—I relished their lively exchanges.

[1] Many of Wang Mingming’s articles are collected on the aisixiang site here. For an English introduction, watch this 2008 interview with Alan Macfarlane, transcribed here; and Stephan Feuchtwang and Michael Rowlands, “Some Chinese directions in anthropology”, Anthropological quarterly 83.4 (2010).

Deviating from behavioural norms

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Deviation

In Paris with the Li family Daoists, 2017. For a Dublin diversion, see here.

Under my fetish for taxonomy, the new subhead for humour under the WAM category contains many orchestral stories.

As Stephen Cottrell observes, they may often be subsumed under what Merriam calls the musician’s “licence to depart from behavioural norms”.

Many, indeed, relate to maestro-baiting (see also conducting tag), like John Wilbraham‘s celebrated comments.

Several stories go in pairs, like

And there’s an indecent wealth of Matthew Passion stories, such as Mein Gott.

Spreading the net wider, for instances of deviant behaviour

See also The gig.

Of course, it’s not only performers who may have license to depart from behavioural norms, as is clear from the career of Bumbling Boris.

Wacky indexing, continued

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index

Following my post on The joys of indexing, the erudite Hannibal Taubes has taken time out from his intrepid explorations of Chinese village temples to alert me to the fine subject index of A Stuffed owl: an anthology of bad verse, edited by D.B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee (1930).

It’s a fine collection anyway, from which few major British poets are exempt:

 He suddenly dropt dead of heart-disease—Tennyson

 Forgive my transports on a theme like this
I cannot bear a French metropolis—Johnson

 Salubrious hinds the festive dance explore—John Nichols

This piteous news so much it shocked her
She quite forgot to send the doctor—Wordsworth

If there is no such anthology for Tang poetry, then someone should compile one forthwith.

Indexes for such works, like Lexicon of musical invective or, um, Bazza pulls it off, can take on a life of their own:

Beethoven, light thrown on his ancestry, xv; his shaky octave-playing, 6

Byron, believed to be a poet, 235; his low character, 236; his career sketched in a few bold strokes 236–7

England, small but well-known, 200; emphatically undegenerate, 202

Italy, not recommended to tourists, 125; examples of what goes on there, 204, 219, 221

Liverpool, rapture experienced at, 196

For another unlikely index, see here.

Classical erudition

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baozi jiaozi

On the “Four Classics and Five Scriptures” (sishu wujing 四书五经), I’ve already cited the fine saying (At home with a master Daoist, n.1)

孔子孟子包子饺子，都学过了！
“Confucius, Mencius, various dumpling shapes, I’ve studied them all!”

So it’s good to see another old favourite at the end of a conversation between Ai Weiwei and Liao Yiwu, no less:

老装孙子 laozhuang sunzi,

which is a common expression for “always playing the fool” (cf. the more recent, and rather different, zhuang B). But it can also be handily pressed into service when satirizing one’s supposed education in the classics, subtly revising the zhuang character to 庄—the Daoist sages Laozi and Zhuangzi (Lao–Zhuang), followed by the ancient military strategist Sunzi.

Breaks the ice at parties, in the words of Monty Python.

The corpse walker

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Corpse walker

Always interested in alternative, local accounts of modern Chinese history, I much admire The corpse walker by Liao Yiwu 廖亦武 (English translation 2008, from originals published in 2002).

Subtitled Real-life stories, China from the bottom up, it contains over two dozen vignettes of lives neglected in the official history (subaltern studies, on which more soon). As the Foreword says, “hustlers and drifters, outlaws and street performers, the officially renegade and the physically handicapped”—but more than that, ordinary peasants, cadres, labourers, all kinds of people whose lives have been serially buffeted by the adversities of a capricious system. [1]

Their life stories are micro-histories shedding light on the abuses of Maoism (campaigns, famine) and the corruption and immorality of the reforms. The book makes salient reading for those interested not only in modern history, but in ritual and music.

Building on Liao’s early experience as a collector of folk music, the interviews (mostly based around Liao’s home of Chengdu) make valuable material for scholars of religion. Many folk ritual specialists appear—an elderly fengshui master, an ancient abbot, a mortician.

Supernatural beliefs also play a role in the distressing story of a leper and his wife, as well as that of a peasant who—in 1985!—declared himself emperor of an independent kingdom in his Sichuan hometown. The latter story, with rich historical antecedents, also relates to the birth-control policy.

Musicians also feature prominently, like ritual singers and wind players, a blind erhu player and a street pop singer. Visiting composer Wang Xilin, Liao learns of his tribulations under Maoism and more recently in trying to commemorate its victims. And he chats with a father who lost his son in the 1989 protests, as well as a fellow-inmate imprisoned (like Liao himself) in the aftermath.

Tiananmen inmates

Liao Yiwu (front row, 2nd from right) with fellow inmates imprisoned after 1989 protests. Sichuan 1992.

The vignettes are also effective because they are genuine dialogues—Liao is very much a “participant observer“. He doesn’t merely ask questions, his own comments are perceptive too, sometimes disputing conservative views. Among several prison interviews is one with a trafficker, guilty of selling women from his home province of Sichuan to desperate men in Gansu. As he defends himself with a series of shocking justifications like “rebalancing the yin and yang“, Liao’s ability to empathize is thankfully limited.

This is just such a cast as the fieldworker meets in the course of documenting society, and the stories have much to tell us about both Maoist and reform eras.

So far I’ve only read it in translation, though some details make me curious to read the Chinese version. For instance, in the very opening vignette a shawm player who migrated from Henan to Sichuan also takes on the role of funeral wailing—a combination that I hadn’t heard of in either province. Again, his recollections make a salient history of ritual change.

The manuscript was smuggled out by exiled author Kang Zhengguo, whose own memoir Confessions: an innocent life in Communist China is an important ethnography of subaltern life in Shaanxi under Maoism and since.

Since going into exile himself, Liao Yiwu is prolific both in documenting his own former tribulations within the system and in speaking out on behalf of those still enduring discrimination in China (Twitter: @liaoyiwu1 ). For Ian Johnson’s 2011 interview, see here; for a 2016 interview, here. Note also Tiananmen: bullets and opium.

[1] Such collections of interviews have a noble history since the 1980s, such as Chinese lives (Zhang Xinxin and Sang Ye, 1987), China candid: the people on the People’s Republic (Sang Ye, 2006), China witness (Xinran, 2009), and Chinese characters: profiles of fast-changing lives in a fast-changing land (ed. Angilee Shah and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, 2012). For scholarly discussion, see Guo Yuhua. For comparisons with the USSR under Stalin, see here.

Subheadings

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invecticon

From the index to Lexicon of musical invective.

The eagle-eyed may already have noticed that I’m just embarking on a rather desperate attempt to subhead my highly unwieldy categories in the sidebar. So far I’ve made paltry subdivisions for gender, language, Li family, ritual, and WAM, though these too invite sub-subheadings.

I’d love to do this for the tags too, some of which are hardly less voluminous (film, heritage, Maoism, and so on—see my notional sub-headings for Chinese jokes), but so far I haven’t found a visually coherent way. So for now it’s DIY. There’s always the search box, as well as the cute internal links in blue.

More from the great Viv Albertine

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Viv 2

The title of Viv Albertine‘s brilliant memoir Clothes clothes clothes music music music boys boys boys derives from her mum’s despairing litany of her daughter’s tastes as a teenager. In her new book To throw away unopened her mum takes centre stage. Structured around a shocking flashpoint, it’s at once harrowing and inspiring. *

Always brutally honest in her account, as daughter, sister, and mother in a matriarchal setup Viv Albertine both comes to terms with anger and makes a compelling case for  it.

One of the reasons why feminism took such a strong hold in my mind, and in the minds of many girls of my generation, is that we were brought up by repressed and dissatisfied women who had grown into adulthood during the war, learned new skills, tasted independence, and then had to dissolve back into their dark-brown homes and watch from behind their ironing boards as the swinging sixties unfolded.

On the saccharine brainwashing of pop songs:

Society had the same dreary old expectations of us girls as always: to be attractive, smile, acquiesce to men, search for romantic love and become supportive wives. […] Such an effective way to keep girls and women down and render us ineffective.

I managed to fight off the dogmas of patriarchy, organized religion, capitalism, class deference and respect for authority easily enough. How come I fell at the last fence and impaled myself on the railings of romance?

Where’s the advert on TV telling you to call a freefone number if you’ve been mis-sold, not a pension, but a belief system? My religion turned out to be bogus. I’m still unpicking those decades of conditioning that were stitched, or rather sung, into my brain.

A review can hardly encapsulate her psychological nuance in dissecting the demons of dysfunctional family life. The contrary scenario of a comfortable middle-class family leading contented idyllic lives over the generations is not only less compelling, but it must be rare—even illusory.

Along the way the book also contains valuable social history. She’s good on the disjunctures of urban life, and the unlikely pleasures of its architecture. In her youth, living near the Hornsey Gas Holder No. 1, she appreciates its elegance while comparing it to a Lowry painting in winter.

Like Annie Proulx and Ciaran Carson, she effectively evokes the texture of daily life with long lists of mundane objects, with vignettes on topics like the history of the Craven A cigarettes that her mum smoked. As for the Queen Mother, “No wonder she looks good for her age, she’s never had to carry four pounds of potatoes home.”

Modifying our image of punk history, on a US tour with the Slits in the 70s she looks forward to homely letters from her mum. Even recently, embarking on a weekend away with yet another feckless partner, her detailed inventory of preparations and packing, while hardly exceptional (“just to feel comfortable”), is still sobering—”If men lived in a society that expected them to put that amount of work into a date, they wouldn’t bother dating.”

Reading this traumatic family history, it’s intriguing to return to Clothes clothes clothes music music music boys boys boys. Everyone (including men) should read these books!

* While this blog, rashly or mercifully, does venture way beyond Daoist ritual, an encomium from me may not seem the most likely addition to the many rave reviews of the book (e.g. here)—but it’s all ethnography, unpacking the messy complexities of people’s real lives…

Bonking in Chinese

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or
Tut-tut, a boo-boo

Victor Mair’s posts on the languagelog site are always worth reading. He’s just done a wonderful one on seemingly impenetrable Chinese sentences with the same character repeated numerous times—not unlike our own “Buffalo buffalo…” and “had had had had…” constructions.

This reminds me of a similar anecdote from rural Shaanxi, where the word bu is used to mean “bonk”, along with the duplicated form bubu “bonkety-bonk”. * It remains to be seen if the character 不 (“not”) is correct—the written forms of such dialectal terms are often hard to ascertain—but I’ll give the story in the version transcribed by my Beijing colleague.

This doesn’t quite work in English, but from a rough translation you can appreciate the linguistic beauty of the original (I’ve underlined the pinyin where they’re using bu in the, um, technical sense):

A woman wonders why his brother’s wife still hasn’t got pregnant two years after their marriage. She doesn’t quite know how to ask, so one day while they’re sewing in the courtyard, she asks her sister-in-law:

嫂，你跟俺哥不吗
Sao, ni gen an ge bu ma?
Sister-in-law, do you do it with my bro?

不不
Bubu!
Sure, all the time!

不不咋还不呢
Bubu, za haibu ne?
If you’re at it all the time, how come there’s nothing?

不不还不呢，不不不不就更不了吗
Bubu hai bu ne, bububu bujiu geng bulema?
We’re at it all the time, again and again—bonking away, that means we go at it even more, innit!

I think I’ve got that right—in that last line she bangs on with the form bububu. Hmm, there may be room for alternative interpretations, as in the Confucian classics. Of course, to avoid boo-boos, much is clarified by hearing it aloud, with suitable stresses.

Indeed, reduplication, as in Rossini’s “stupefaction ensembles“, has all the more resonance for stammerers like me.

I like the personal reception histories of jokes. Just as I remember Pete McCarthy telling me his jazz bass solo joke on tour in the USA c2001, my Chinese fieldwork companions told me this one in Yanggao (north Shanxi, not Shaanxi!) back in 1991, as we were on the way to Greater Antan village to find the great Li Qing performing the Pardon ritual!

 

* The expression is not included in this fine list of terms and pronunciations in Shaanxi dialect—which also has some jokes.
I choose “bonk” both for its initial consonant and its relative gentility; this quaint UK usage enjoyed a rather brief heyday in my youth, supplanted in popular affection by “shag” and then…
For any “non-nationals” (as Myles had it) unfamiliar with these terms, Barry Humphries helpfully provides a wealth of colourful (if reprehensibly phallocentric—tut tut, one might say) Oz synonyms, also of their time, in the glossaries of his Barry Mackenzie books—such as “dip the wick”, “bury the pork sword”, and “exercise the ferret”.

 

 

 

 

Lee Morgan

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Lee Morgan
To follow Fats Navarro, Chet Baker (here and here) and Clifford Brown, it’s worth adding Lee Morgan (1938–72) to our list of great jazz trumpeters (NB also trumpet tag). He was shot dead by his wife at Slug’s Saloon when he was only 33, before he could finish himself off with heroin—on which, do listen to this fine programme on the Lexington Narcotics Farm.

Trumpet chart

First, to pursue the theme of lineages, I remember Clifford (1958):

Still with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, among stiff competition, here he is with Wayne Shorter playing A night in Tunisia in 1959 (even the percussion intro is amazing):

Another ballad, from 1958:

And just listen to him with Coltrane in Blue train (1957)!

Here’s a video from 1961:

With Wayne Shorter again (1965):

Oh all right then, here’s The sidewinder (1963):

More musical criticism

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Does anyone know who the composer in this story was?

Someone took a composer to hear an early British performance of Parsifal.* Asked what he thought of it, he replied,

“Well, it’s like the Brahms Requiem, only without the jokes.”

I have it down for some dour, ideally northern, English composer.

 

* The first staged performance was at Covent Garden on 2nd Februrary 1914.

 

Tampopo

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Tampopo

Tampopo (Juzo itami, 1985), “the first ramen western”, is one of the all-time great genre-defying films.

It’s a profound, exuberant, nuanced meditation on food, sex, dedication, and life, with a succession of wonderful personalities led by truckdriver Gorō as he helps widowed Tampopo to perfect the noodles (“sincere, but lacking in character”) that she serves in her struggling little restaurant. Here’s a trailer:

Every single scene is beautifully crafted, but vignettes include

  • the French restaurant scene
  • an etiquette class for women on how to eat spaghetti properly.
  • the hobo scene (shades of Steinbeck’s Tortilla flat and Sweet Thursday, and indeed Hanshan), moving from veneration of the master to slapstick, and sequeing into
  • the most erotic scene ever. Breaking an egg will never be the same again (nor, for that matter, will the Mahler Adagietto—throughout, the choice of music is brilliant).

egg

Posts on Japanese culture rounded up here.

Jesus jokes

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Last supper

Call me irreverent (cf. The sermon, and We are miserable sinners), but Jesus jokes can be entertaining. There’s a plethora of websites, so here I’ll stick to some of my more niche favourites. Even last-supper jokes are a whole sub-genre—here’s an audio variant:

For a feminist version, click here.

Apart from his brilliant anagram tales, my talented friend Nick, living in Lisbon, has a nice little number going with football reports featuring Jesus, coach of Sporting (as the team is ingenuously called). Among pithy headlines that Nick has spotted are

Jesus pays homage to his Father

and the brilliant

Jesus is very happy with his eleven

(Judas clearly relegated to the bench there—hinting he wants a transfer).

Despite his health travails, Nick has managed to update me. Receiving a head-butt à la Zidane,

Jesus wants out fast

and helpfully (Pontius Pilate please note) *

Jesus is willing to be flexible in negotiations

Note also Nick’s sequel, Jesus of Benfica.

Such is the warm British welcome for foreigners [only joking] that we can play this game too. Moving onto the Brazil forward, I enjoyed this Guardian headline** that appeared but briefly online—all the more apt since it was Holy Week:

Jesus restores some pride after thrashing

When he took a penalty for Man City against Burnley goalkeeper Nick Pope:

Pope saves from Jesus

and one always waits for this one to come up:

Jesus hits woodwork

This one is no less classic for being fabricated:

Jesus saves—but Rooney scores from the rebound

JesusAs to Arsenal’s young star, I’m keen to get this headline in early:

Jesus Set to Make Comeback at Easter

Indeed, he shone on Easter Day, despite some, um, close marking from Liverpool:

Jesus Easter
Getty images.

Jesus Takes a Beating but Rises Again for Easter (cf. this article, and my sequel)

And the celebrated Victorian tombstone:

He fell asleep in Jesus
     to which has been added
and woke up in a siding in Crewe

Gay comedians naturally warm to the theme. Simon Amstell (Help, p.80):

I’m not an atheist. I’m a big fan of Jesus Christ, there’s nobody more thin and vulnerable than Jesus Christ.

And David Sedaris (for whom see also here, and here):

And he always has a fantastic body, shown at its best on the cross, which—face it—was practically designed to make a man’s stomach and shoulders look good.

Not to be outdone, Beatrice Dalle is available for seminars on the history of religion:

I love Christ because he invented bondage.

No trawl through the archives would be complete without Family guy, where Jesus is a regular Special Guest Star, such as:

I must confess [sic] that there are already several related posts on this blog—Chumleys vinegar, more from Alan Bennett (WWJD, feet, and the Christmas card), the Matthew Passion incident, and so on. If you consult the latter post, we can all end with a resounding chorus of Always look on the bright side of life. For “blasphemy”, see also Patricia Lockwood.

In my defence, Daoist jokes are also a niche source of entertainment, like the train deity (also featuring Moses) or the “switch off the light” story. [Call that a defence?—Ed.]

* Pilate plays a cameo role in my post on Laozi.

** For another fine Guardian football headline, see here; for Daoist football and gender, here.

Rameau

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Rameau

Nearly ready to try out using the bow.

We should celebrate the wonderful regional diversity of European folk cultures, notably their musics—Ireland, Romania, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and so on. But styles are just as varied within WAM (Biber, Nielsen, Janáček…).

Even among the great composers born in the 1680s, apart from Bach and Handel, let’s not forget Rameau—an early flowering of the distinctive voice of French music, leading on to Berlioz, Ravel, Debussy, and Messiaen (not to mention Germaine Tailleferre and Lili Boulanger). If we’re conditioned by some notional one-size-fits-all baroque style, it’s most rewarding to immerse oneself in Rameau’s whole sound world—the rhythms, the harmonies, the melodic contours and ornaments, the instrumental timbres…

Perhaps we can hear “Tristes apprêts” from Castor et Pollux as a French companion to the Buxtehude Klaglied or When I am laid in earth—not to mention the hymns of mourning of the Li family Daoists. Among several fine renditions, here’s Sabine Devieilhe, backed by soulful bassoons:

Tristes apprêts, pâles flambeaux,
Jour plus affreux que les ténèbres,
Astres lugubres des tombeaux,
Non, je ne verrai plus que vos clartés funèbres.
Toi, qui vois mon cœur éperdu,
Père du Jour! ô Soleil! ô mon Père!
Je ne veux plus d’un bien que Castor a perdu,
Et je renonce à ta lumière.

Rameau Athens

Rameau in Athens, 1981-ish.

In my early days as a barocker I did some Rameau opera for Lina Lalandi, but alas I began working with John Eliot Gardiner just too late to take part in his ground-breaking performances.

Rameau dance

His 2007 Prom was enchanting (pre-echoes of Ravel?). The very first piece I had heard him conducting live (those funky bassoons again!) was the Entrée pour les Muses of Les Boréades (from 18.09)—further enriched here by magical (suspended!) staging, wonderfully at ease with modernity in HIP performance:

Rameau’s operas alone are a rich canon to explore.

On visiting a hermit

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Hermit

In the preface to my book In search of the folk Daoists of north China I updated an ancient topos:

The “search” of my title is partly inspired by a popular genre of Tang-dynasty poetry, wherein the poet embarks on an arduous climb in search of the abstruse wisdom of a mountain recluse—only he isn’t in. Typical Tang titles include “On seeking the hermit of West Mountain and not finding him” 尋西山隱者不遇 [English version here].

Now mountain recluses, with their archetypal long white beards, are definitely not the type of Daoist I am looking for here—”pacing the void” that is rural north China, my search is for ordinary peasants who perform rituals among the people; and the arduousness of the journey is more likely to entail getting stuck in endless traffic jams behind coal-lorries, and enduring banquets with cadres in unsightly modern county-towns apparently bereft of all tradition. So the concept still has a certain resonance; in the immortal words of Alan Bennett’s clergyman, “Some of us think life’s a little bit like that, don’t we?”

Talking of seeking Tang hermits, I think of Gary Snyder‘s translations of the Cold Mountain poems.

In a fine post on “the Facebook of the 7th century”, the splendidly named Randi Hacker sparks classroom engagement by introducing his students to Tang poems written by men who had come to visit other men who were not, alas, at home—status updates, indeed:

Some of the more convoluted and humorous titles of Tang occasional poems from the “Sorry to Have Missed You” category:

  • Going to Visit Censor Wang on My Day Off and Not Finding Him Home
  • Walking in the Hills and Looking for the Recluse, But Finding Him Not In
  • Spending the Night in Reverend Ye’s Mountain Chamber. I was expecting the senior Mr Ding, but he did not come
  • Answering the Poem Left by Mr Su, Nominally of the Bureau of Forestry, When He Stopped by My Villa at Lan-tian.

I love the “Nominally” in that last one. I might add my own yet-unpublished

  • On Visiting the Hunyuan Bureau of Culture, Only to Find a Bunch of Sozzled Apparatchiks who wouldn’t know what Culture was if it Bit them on the Bum.

This will also chime in with the intrepid explorations of Hannibal Taubes in search of decrepit village temples—often either locked, or their precious Ming-dynasty murals plundered or covered over in cement.

Then there are my own Tang pastiches, as well as Faqu 2 and Faqu tutu…

At least on our recent fruitless search for the Dragon King temple in Jinjiazhuang we were compensated by a chat with the splendid hereditary yinyang Zhang Nan.

Cf. Miles Davis’s quest for Charlie Parker in 1944.

Victoria Wood

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Vic

We’re by no means short of tributes to the late lamented Victoria Wood, but Rebecca Front’s new two-part radio series is particularly insightful. Like Alan Bennett, her whole output is an exploration of English social mores and a  celebration of the language.

She was no “mere” comedian, but here I’ll just offer a personal selection—embarras de richesse, you may say (for more, see here):

“Honestly, who has sex on Christmas morning?”
“The Dalai Lama!”
“Well he must peel his sprouts the night before.”

I’ve loved you since the first minute you gave me extra gravy.

“Does she like Spain?”
“Well, she likes the majesty and grandeur of the landscape, but she’s not too keen on the bacon.”

Welcome to Music For Posh People—the game that takes all the enjoyment out of listening to music.

I can’t seem to find

… but I can offer you a banquette in the lower circle.

Meanwhile for the sinologist… for me, with my constant agonizing over the differences between ritual culture in north and south China, this tiny clip, from her “stable”, epitomizes the dichotomy, and gets me every time.

No silver here

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Cidi wuyin

Sinologists will know this one, but it’s rather fine, and can come in handy every so often.

Zhang the Third is worried someone will steal his hard-earned 300 taels of silver, so he puts it in a box and buries it in the earth near his house. But he’s still worried someone might dig it up—so just to be sure, he writes a note on the nearby wall:

此地无银三百两 Cidi wuyin sanbailiang
Here there is no silver, 300 taels

His neighbour Wang the Second comes along and sees the note. As he digs up the silver and takes it off, worried that Zhang might suspect him, he too writes a note:

隔壁王二不曾偷
It wasn’t Wang the Second next door that nicked it

Time for a cute kids’ cartoon (cf. here):

Good behaviour

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DL

Dalai Lama aged 4, at Kumbum monastery, Amdo.

I once attended a talk in London by someone who had returned from an audience with a young boy in Qinghai identified as a “living Buddha”.* Her eminently English dénouement was worthy of Roni Ancona:

“And do you know what was so wonderful about him? He was so well-behaved!”

* * *

I’m sure you know the famous stories about how the young Dalai Lama was identified—not least the false teeth, which I cite it here in his interview with Jeremy Paxman, if only to contrast his encounter with Burlesque-only:

I read somewhere a story about you finding a pair of false teeth that had been lost which had belonged to the previous Lama. Is that right? Do you remember that at all?

One day I insisted I want to go to the room of the previous Dalai Lama and then I insist to open one box. And finally they found one with the teeth. Then I said “This is mine”. This was what my mother told me! I can’t remember.

Only the Dalai Lama can compete with the infectious laugh of Keith Richards—and there’s another pairing you don’t hear a lot…

See also Paths for the reluctant guru.

*A time-honoured Tibetan system to which the atheist CCP, opposing superstition, resolutely subscribes.

Armchair ethnography: Chiswick

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Chiswick old map

Why bother traipsing halfway around the world to hang out in poor dusty Chinese villages, I hear you ask, when my home “village” of Chiswick offers such rich potential for local history?! OK, it’s not noted for its Daoist ritual; its cosy church fêtes can’t quite compete with the bustle of Chinese temple fairs; and doubtless any séances held there were rather different from those of the Yanggao spirit mediums—but still. For flamenco in Chiswick, click here; and for my culture shock on returning from China, here.

In that latter post I cite Nigel Barley‘s classic The innocent anthropologist, and talking of armchair ethnography, in a chapter bearing the fine title “Honi soit qui Malinowski” he has some wise words qualifying the demonising of missionaries:

It was something of a betrayal of anthropological principles even to be talking to missionaries: anthropologists have been obsessed with keeping themselves free of this taint since Malinowski, self-styled inventor of fieldwork, first issued his impassioned cry to the ethnographer to get off the mission veranda and go out into the villages. Still, I would be on my guard against the devil’s wiles and might save myself much time by talking to people who had actually lived in Dowayoland.

To my great surprise, I was received with much warmth. Far from being rampant cultural imperialists, I found the missionaries—except for one or two of the old school—to be extremely diffident about imposing their own views.

Evoking some fine work by missionaries in China such as Grootaers, he notes:

It was surprising how much work was being done on the local cultures and languages, translation work, pure linguistic research and attempts to adapt liturgy to local symbolic idiom; my own research would have been quite impossible without the mission’s support.

“Ethnomusicology at home” has an impressive tradition too: from Ruth Finnegan’s The hidden musicians (on the exotic musical rituals of the tribes of Milton Keynes) to wise analyses of WAM by Nettl, Kingsbury, and Cottrell, as well as Blair Tindall’s Mozart in the jungle.

* * *

I’ve already noted the leaning pillarbox of Chiswick. The Chiswick timeline project provides fine material on the area’s changing topography with artwork and maps (albeit not by Artisan the Sixth or Li Manshan), also now adorning the archway by Turnham Green station. Would that such material were available for Li Manshan’s village of Upper Liangyuan! This is just the kind of community project that can be achieved in a bourgeois enclave, even as desperate families are being incinerated a mere stone’s throw away in North Kensington.

This advertisement from 1882 (“Annual death rate under 6 per thousand”) is particularly drôle, evoking flawed campaigns like that for Chumleys vinegar:

healthy Chiswick

“Come and live in Chiswick, your statistical chance of survival is relatively high”.

Blake

Peter Blake, Chiswick Empire Theatre, 2017. I hardly need point out the Sgt Pepper link.

* * *

painting of pool

John Lavery (1856-1941), Chiswick Baths, 1929.

Even without getting onto Chiswick House, or Bedford Park and its fine architecture in the Dutch style, I’m intrigued to learn about the history of my regular swimming pool (see also here), the New Chiswick Pool—like the “old” and “new” musics of the Tang dynasty, and the stile nuovo of 17th-century Italian music, it was new when they chose the name. [1]

Chiswick Baths opened in Edensor road in 1910:

With their innovative architecture—including the double-decker changing cabins—and risqué mixed bathing sessions, this watery west London meeting place was a prototype for the classic art deco lidos, promoting freedom, frolicking and fun [a Chiswick variant on fado, football, and Fátima].

You can watch charming clips here, from 1924 and 1927 (“California hasn’t a monopoly of bathing belles or the latest in beach costumes”)—and many more on that site.

No matter what doom and gloom was going on elsewhere in the country [Phew–Ed.], the flighty, sprightly, bright young bathers of Chiswick’s “inland seaside” could be found embracing a sense of gay abandon.

Just as with Daoist ritual in Yanggao, it’s safe to say that Things ain’t what they used to be.

But by 1981, the council found the lido (as it had become known) too expensive to maintain, and it was closed, amidst considerable—if perhaps genteel—protest. Half of the site became home to the Moldovian Embassy (“Not a lot of people know that”), while by 1991 the New Chiswick Pool was opened on the other half.

So that’s the background of my regular swimming pool; it’s closed for repairs at the moment, so it’ll be even newer soon (with or without the gay abandon).

In case you haven’t spotted my fictional address at the foot of the home page, I rather like it:

Priory of the Azure Cloud Bottle* within the Belvedere of Tenuous Obscurity, Chiswick
京西微玄觀內碧雲罐庵

*Azure Cloud Bottle: Bombay Sapphire

[1] See Picken and Nickson, Music from the Tang court 7, ch.3; for stile nuovo, among much analysis, I’m dead keen on Susan McClary, Feminine endings, ch.2.

Learning the lingo

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Sedaris

I’ve noted the unlikely connection between Li Manshan and David Sedaris.  Both are fine humorists, but the latter takes language-learning to the cleaners with his essay “Easy, Tiger” in Let’s explore diabetes with owls. As with Daoist ritual or any text expressed through performance, Sedaris’s literary ouevre works best if you read it in his endearingly whiny voice (for more on public speaking, see here, here, and here).

On trips to Japan, rather than adopting the sinister Teach yourself Japanese (which would be right up his street) he makes progress with the aid of the Pimsleur language program [sic]. But

instead of being provided with building blocks that would allow you to construct a sentence of your own, you’re left with using the hundreds and thousands of sentences that you have memorized. That means waiting for a particular situation to arise in order to comment on it; either that, or becoming one of those weird non-sequitur people, the kind who, when asked a question about paint color, answer, “There is a bank in front of the train station,” or “Mrs Yamada Ito has been playing tennis for fifteen years.”

BTW, the ability to adapt by using building blocks is just what Indian musical training provides. In WAM we don’t even memorise hundreds and thousands of sentences, we depend on reading them out of the score. FFS…

One of the things I like about Tokyo is the constant reinforcement everyone gets for trying. “You are very skilled at Japanese,” everyone keeps telling me. I know people are just being polite, but it spurs me on, just as I hoped to be spurred on in Germany. To this end, I’ve added a second audio program, one by a man named Michael Thomas, who works with a couple of students, male and female. At the start, he explains that German and English are closely related and thus have a lot in common. In one language the verb is “to come”, and in the other it’s “kommen“. English “to give” is German “geben“. Boston’s “That is good” is Berlin’s “Das ist gut“. It’s an excellent way to start and leaves the listener thinking, Hey, ich kann do dis.

My own German vocabulary extends only as far as the Matthew Passion, blut, ellenbogen [Wozzeck], and plötzlich—none of which are very handy when you’re trying to buy toothpaste—but I know it will expand exponentially once I get to grips with Nina Hagen and Ute Lemper. Evoking my own inept flailings, Sedaris comments,

People taught me all sorts of words, but the only ones that stuck were “Kaiserschnitt” which means “cesarean section”, and “Lebenabschnittspartner“. This doesn’t translate to “lover” or “life partner” but rather, to “the person I am with today”, the implication being that things change, and you are keeping your options open.
[…]
There’s no discord in Pimsleur’s Japan, but its Germany is a moody and often savage place. […] It’s a program [still sic] full of odd sentence combinations. “We don’t live here. We want mineral water” implies that if the couple did live in this particular town they’d be getting drunk like everyone else. Another standout is “Der Wein ist zu teuer und Sie sprechen zu schnell” (“The wine is too expensive and you talk too fast”). The response to this would be “”Anything else, Herr Asshole?” But of course they don’t teach you that.

For a trip to China he reaches the “Romance” and “Getting closer” sections of the Lonely planet phrasebook:

A line that might have been written especially for me: “Don’t worry, I’ll do it myself.”
Oddly, the writers haven’t included “Leave the light on,” a must if you want to actually say any of these things.

Sedaris doesn’t see politeness in foreign languages as much of a problem, recalling the phrasebooks of his youth,

where the Ugly American was still alive and kicking people. “I didn’t order this!” he raged in Greek and Spanish. “Think you can cheat me, do you?” “Go away or I’ll call the police”.

In my own ancient German phrasebook I’m still very taken by the script suggested by the sequence

“The chambermaid never comes when I ring.”
“Are you the chambermaid?”

And while we’re about it, don’t miss the classic “Look!” story.

I also look forward to a phrasebook of Yanggao dialect—for me, better late than never. For impressionistically-translated Italian guidebooks, see Towers and wells.

See also Language learning: a roundup.

* * *

Doubtless I will chortle further over David Sedaris on this blog, but meanwhile (still in Let’s explore diabetes with owls) I note an intriguing parallel with the choristers’ famous kangaroo story (in “Laugh Kookaburra”):

It was around this time that we finally entered the bush. Hugh pointed out the window at a still lump of dirty fur lying beside a fallen tree, and Pat caroled, “Roadkill!” Then she pulled over so we could take a closer look. […] We walked toward the body and saw that it was a… what, exactly? “A teenage kangaroo?”
“A wallaby,” Pat corrected me. […]
“Hugh,” I called, “come here and look at the wallaby.”
It’s his belief that in marveling at a dead animal on the roadside, you may as well have killed it yourself—not accidentally but on purpose, cackling, most likely, as you ran it down. Therefore he stayed in the car.
“It’s your loss,” I called.

Saga and Sofia

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*UPDATED! Watch the last clip below only if you’ve seen the whole of the final series!*

We can now bask in a fourth series of The bridge on BBC2, more noir than ever.* It’s one of the great dramas “like ever“.

I realized it’s obligatory for TV cops to be damaged, but it remains a mystery to me how Saga could get, and keep, a job that demands such skills of personal interaction, at least a feigning of empathy (contrast the equally magnificent Sofie Gråbøl in The killing—no less troubled, but not hampered by Asperger’s).

This interview with the divine Sofia Helin is one of the best bits of acting since Klaus Kinski playing himself, as she transforms her personality at the flick of a switch:

And we can relish many more interviews with her on youtube too.

This clip is a tad niche, but her diction is a revealing aspect of Saga’s personality:

And a drôle, not to say macabre, language lesson:

To imbibe the passion the series generates, try Twitter #THEBRIDGE4, and the BTL comments under the Guardian recaps.

But don’t take my word for it—here’s a critique of an earlier series from Philomena Cunk, where she explains the technicalities of foreign languages:

The theme tune complements the mood. Its lyrics have defeated most people—here are some fine mondegreens:

BTW, I note that the timbre of the singer is akin to that of Henrik’s voice!

*Watch the clip below only after you’ve seen the whole of the final series!*

Here’s a tribute to the Saga–Henrik relationship:

For more soundscapes of Nordic noir, see here.

 

*Meanwhile if you have a month to spare right now, the first three series are also available! Not to mention The killing…

China: commemorating trauma

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Ditch

Just as I was lamenting the lack of public acknowledgement of the crimes of Maoism—by comparison with countries where regime change has enabled such necessary commemoration (see e.g. my posts on Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Hildi, Gitta Sereny, the work of Philippe Sands, the GDR, and the Salazar regime)—the new Wang Bing 王兵 documentary Dead souls, just shown at Cannes, is a timely reminder of his brave work and that of other documentarists and journalists, not to mention their interviewees, survivors of the late-1950s’ labour-camp system and the kin of its victims (see also this interview). Comparisons with the Soviet Gulag are inevitable (e.g. Kolyma, Solovki, The whisperers).

Case-studies of the system can be found both in factual reports and in novels by authors such as Zhang Xianliang and Yan Lianke. Research on the notorious Jiabiangou camp in Gansu has an estimable history (note also Sparks). Wang Bing’s project goes back to meeting He Fengming in 1995 (herself a Gansu camp survivor), whose husband died at Jiabiangou—resulting in Wang’s 2007 film Fengming: a Chinese memoir (here, with Spanish and Italian subtitles; also interview), shown at Cannes that year. From 2003 Zhao Xu 赵旭 began publishing his research on Jiabiangou, Fengxue Jiabiangou 风雪夹边沟. From 1997 Yang Xianhui 杨显惠 was visiting former inmates, and in 2003 he published his collection Woman From Shanghai: tales of survival from a Chinese labor camp (English translation 2009). As Wang Bing began dramatizing these stories in a narrative film, he met more survivors from Jiabiangou, and The ditch was premiered in 2010—a deeply distressing watch (here with French subtitles):

And then, even before Wang’s latest documentary was released, the great activist film-maker Ai Xiaoming 艾晓明 (b.1953, another Beishida alumna later based in Guangzhou: following Ian Johnson’s interview, note his important book Sparks; for another interview, click here) filmed her six-hour Jiabiangou elegy: life and death of the rightists (2017)—in five parts, starting here:

The interviewees note the general desperation of the inmates’ families and the local population, themselves struggling to find anything edible. Yang Jisheng, whose book Tombstone is an important source on the great famine of the time, points out the political background in Gansu (for the famine and Wu Wenguang’s Memory project, click here; for the works of Frank Dikötter, here).

Wang Bing’s Dead souls is even longer, at 496 minutes—here are three clips:

* * *

That latter excerpt leads me to a subsidiary point about ritual and ritual soundscape, about suffering, and people’s lives—and in this case the suffering that we can, and must, document is that of the Maoist years.

My film Notes from the yellow earth (DVD with Ritual and music of north China, vol.2: Shaanbei) contains a lengthy sequence (§B) from a similar funeral—filmed in a village which indeed has its own traumatic memories. One might hear the playing of such shawm bands as merely “mournful”—indeed, that’s why younger urban dwellers are reluctant to hear them, associating the sound with death. And of course the style and repertoire of these bands took shape long before Maoism, based on earlier historical suffering. But we can only hear “early music” with our own modern ears…

Yangjiagou band, 1999

So in the context of Wang Bing’s film the bleakness of the soundscape really hits home, suggesting how very visceral is the way that the style evokes the trauma of ruined lives and painful memory—slow, with wailing timbre and the “blue” scale of jiadiao, the two shawms in stark unison occasionally splintering into octave heterophony. For similarly anguished shawm playing, cf. playlist, tracks 5 and 6 (commentary here). For anyone still struggling, despite my best efforts, to comprehend the relevance of shawm bands, Wang Bing’s scene should be compulsory viewing. Similarly, since I often note the importance of Daoist ritual in Gansu, the camps there might form one aspect of our accounts of ritual life there.

As I noted in my post on the famine, this is just the kind of memory that the rosy patriotic nostalgia and reifications of the Intangible Cultural Heritage project are designed to erase.

* * *

As a recent review notes:

It’s not as if the prisoners had been caught red-handed in plotting the downfall of the Chinese Communist Party. Nearly all of the interviewees insist they are loyal, patriotic party members, with some saying they were indicted for a small critical comment against a supervisor or splashing tears on a portrait of Mao. One interviewee recalls hearing how leading cadres were sending people off to “re-education” by random, just to prove Mao’s view that 5 percent of society is composed of “bad elements.”

Amidst a shameful wall of official silence, both Ai Xiaoming and Wang Bing, along with their interviewees, were subjected to harrassment while filming. It may seem nugatory to observe that technically the editing and structuring of their films is highly accomplished.

And these are just a few of many hundred such camps, with their countless victims. No less harrowing is a film by Xie Yihui 谢贻卉 on juvenile labourers in a Sichuan camp:

The independent film-making of Ai Xiaoming and Hu Jie plays a major role in Ian Johnson’s recent book Sparks.

* * *

The simultaneous national famine, subject of a growing body of research, deserves a separate post, but meanwhile, here’s an impressive documentary:

* * *

Like “the German soul”, suffering in China isn’t timeless: it is embodied in the lives and deaths of real people in real time. People dying since I began fieldwork in the 1980s all had traumatic histories; at the grave their memories, and those of their families, are covered over merely in dry earth, ritual specialists only performing a token exorcism that doesn’t obviate the need for a deeper accommodation with the past.

Arguments for maintaining the stability of the state, avoiding chaos, are paltry compared to the duty to commemorate, to learn from history—for Europe, UK, anywhere in the world. Just a couple of examples: the destruction of the Summer Palace by British troops, and the 1937 Nanjing massacre. We should all owe loyalty to truth, to people; in China it’s an ethical duty, not least in the tradition of filial piety.

And all this may remind us how important it is to seek beyond the sanitized representation of “Chinese folk music”, or indeed Daoist ritual, both in China and abroad. The people shown in these documentaries are just those who anyone doing research in China will encounter—whether working on social or cultural life (for a classic ethnography of commemorating Maoism through the fortunes of a Confucian temple in Gansu, see here). The stories of suffering, however distressing, need telling (cf. Memory, music, and society).

A Nazi legacy

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*UPDATED!*

EW street

While visiting Sachsenhausen recently I was reading Philippe Sands’ brilliant book East West street. In my post on Sands’ splendid Private Passions I mentioned his film What our fathers did: a Nazi legacy, based on his extraordinary journey with the sons of two Nazi criminals who took utterly different stances on their fathers—essential viewing:

East West street is a kind of detective story, as Sands breaks through the silence to unearth gripping personal accounts developing from the remarkable Lviv (Lemberg) connection of two architects of mass murder (Hans Frank and Otto von Wächter—both, ironically, lawyers); of two legal scholars who developed a means of prosecuting it (Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin); and of the author’s own decimated family. Sands’ grandfather Leon Buchholz was almost the sole survivor from his entire extended family, making his home in Paris—and since he never talked about it, Sands had to do a vast amount of research.

Leon

Leon Buchholz (1904–97).

This also makes a good way of describing the debate (formulated at the Nuremberg trials) over how to define genocide and crimes against humanity, group and individual responsibility, which Sands is exceptionally well qualified to explain.

“Social inequalities coursed through Lemberg’s streets, built on foundations of xenophobia, racism, group identity and conflict”. In Ukraine he also visits the brave display at a museum in Zólkiew, where over three thousand Jewish inhabitants were murdered; here, by contrast to the memorial sites in Germany, the complexities of history are still highly sensitive. The film broaches the 2014 Ukraine unrest, and its complex links to the Nazi background.

Sands notes Britain’s objection to US President Wilson’s 1919 proposal to protect minorities, “fearful that similar rights would then be granted to other groups, including American negroes, Southern Irish, Flemings and Catalans”.(72)

After Lauterpacht sought refuge in England, arriving in Grimsby in 1923 with his musician wife Rachel, Sands notes his conservative views on gender: “individual rights for some, but not for the mother or the wife”. (83)

The stories of other characters are moving too, like that of Elsie Tilney, who brought Sands’ mother from Vienna to Paris in summer 1939 (117–36). He visits Lauterpacht’s niece Inka Katz, who in 1942, aged 12, witnessed the arrival of Hans Frank in Lemberg, saw her parents snatched away, and survived only by going into hiding and entering a convent:

Seventy years on, she retained a sense of discomfort. One woman, coming to terms with a feeling that somehow she had abandoned her group to save herself.” (102–4)

The Matthew Passion, which Sands chose in his Private passions, was a touchstone shared, with bitter irony, by both Lauterpacht and Frank (106, 302). The words of Frank’s devoted wife are chilling:

“He is an artist, a great artist, with a pure and delicate soul. Only such an artist as he can rule over Poland.” (223)

Sands even finds lyrics to a song by Richard Strauss in honour of Frank—the score “disappeared”, no doubt for good reasons of reputation. (253)

Otto von Wächter’s son Horst takes a similarly disturbing tack:

“My father was a good man, a liberal who did his best. Others would have been worse.” (242–6)

Conversely, Niklas Frank is justly proud of his utter repudiation of his own father (“what a beautiful castle—full of criminals”). It’s this impasse that forms the core of Sands’ film.

As Sands pores over family photo albums with Horst,

I was transported back seventy years to the heart of an appalling regime. But Horst was looking at these images with a different eye from mine. I see a man who’s probably been responsible for the killing of tens of thousands of Jews and Poles. Horst looks at the same photographs and he sees a beloved father playing with the children, and he’s thinking that  was family life.

As Sands and Niklas confront Horst—“friendly, warm, talkative”—with more and more documents proving the involvement of his father in mass extermination, their conversation deepens. In one of the most excruciating scenes in the film—in the very room where Hans Frank proudly announced the Grosse Aktion to enthusiastic applause from Horst’s father—Horst keeps wriggling out of all the evidence with which Sands confronts him. He always manages to find a way to sanitize the material, only able to describe it as “unpleasant” or “tragic”. (248–51)

Nazi legacy trio

While they all get on remarkably well, Sands can’t help revealing his exasperation:

Horst fills me with despair. I cannot accept that approach. It’s not just the lawyer in me, concerned with how one treats evidence, it’s much more personal than that: when I hear him speak of his father’s good character and actions, I hear him to be justifying the killing of my grandfather’s entire family.

Further to tourism,

In the midst of the killing, and still worrying about his marriage, Frank managed to find the time to implement another bright idea: he invited the famous Baedeker publishing company to produce a travel guide for the General Government to encourage visitors. Baedeker hoped the book might “convey” an impression of the tremendous work of organization and construction accomplished by Frank. […] The visitor would benefit from great improvements the province and cities having “acquired a different appearance”, German culture and architecture once more accessible. Maps and city plans were modernized, names Germanized, all in accordance with Frank’s decrees. […] A million or more Jews had been erased. (246–7)

Sands moves onto the capture of Frank and the Nuremberg trials, with the harrowing testimony of witnesses like Samuel Rajman (303–5). Frank appears to show more regret than most of the defendants, declaring “A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased” (308–11); but, as with Fritz Stangl, his position remained elusive to the end (357–8).

The final section of the book discusses the judgement—indeed judgement itself. A vignette from Rebecca West, who took time off from attending the trials to visit a nearby village, meeting a German woman who

launched into a litany of complaints about the Nazis. They had posted foreign workers near the village, “two thousand wretched cannibals, scum of the earth, Russians, Balks, Balts, Slavs”. This women was interested in the trial, didn’t object to it, but she did so wish they hadn’t appointed a Jew as chief prosecutor. Pressed to explain, the woman identified David Maxwell Fyfe as the offending individual. When Rebecca West protested the error, the woman responded curtly, “Who would call his son David, but a Jew?” (367)

Niklas Frank, then 7, remembers the day his father was taken to the gallows. He finds his repentant display at the trial insincere, noting that he later recanted his “confession”.

Frank dead“I am opposed to the death penalty,” he said without emotion, “except for my father.” […] “He was a criminal.”

He takes out a faded photo of his father taken a few minutes after the hanging. “Every day I look at this. To remind me, to make sure that he is dead.”
As Sands notes, denial remains common today. In a telling scene near the end of the film, the three visit a neo-Nazi commemorative rally in Ukraine (accompanied by a folkloristic ensemble, I note), where Horst and Niklas—sons of mass murderers—are warmly welcomed. Worldwide, the need for truth remains constant, urgent.

* * *

Sands is no less compelling on radio. In his major recent ten-part series Intrigue: the ratline on BBC Radio 4, by contrast with Frank’s well-documented fate, he gives a disturbing update on the murky post-war story of Otto von Wächter. He provides ample recaps (as in the chilling title of episode 3, “A lot going on in Lemberg”), with the aid of the “parallel universe” of the memoirs of Wächter’s beloved wife Charlotte. With much further forensic sleuthing he goes on to investigate Wächter’s mysterious fate in Italy, as the role of the Catholic church in helping Nazi fugitives evade justice leads to a extraordinary story of espionage. And still Horst seeks to defend his father’s reputation. For the book, see here.

Jottings from Lisbon 2

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In this post I begin to educate myself on the Salazar regime—framed by more on the changing history and image of fado.

Fado 1910

José Malhoa, Fado, 1910.

Back in Lisbon last week after my visit this time last year, I reacquainted myself with the delectable Colete Salva-Vidas and her three daughters, notably the errant Aterragem (see my linguistic fantasy here)—and now, I find, yet another on the way, Proxima Paragem (“next stop”, between you and me). I’m tickled that the door sign for “Pull” is Puxe—putting foreigners off the scent, like changing the signposts in wartime Britain? I would like “pullover” to be puxesobre, “pushover”.

To console me that my visits never seem to coincide with a festival of traditional Alentejan choirs, my friend Nick took me to the wonderful Casa Alentejo. Cunningly disguised as a Western Union office, you’d never guess at the riches inside—a Moorish courtyard, frescos, tiles, and a little double stage: a true gem (if not aterragem).

* * *

While my first loyalty is to the complexity and intensity of flamenco cante jondo, it’s always good to explore fado—and it’s high time for me to understand a bit more about its social and political background. This may be old hat for world music groupies, but perhaps it’s of a certain relevance for my sinophile readers; and quite aside from the tourist angle, there seems a genuine enthusiasm among the current fadistas. [1]

The Museo do Fado (including sound archive here, and biographies here) makes a useful introduction. Evoking several other genres (flamenco, rebetika, tango, and so on), the early history of fado was one of delinquency and transgression (cf. Deviating from behavioural norms). Indeed, that’s still very much the ethos of shawm bands in rural China. As a useful 2007 article on fado comments:

When a Portuguese writer described the fado in 1926 as “a song of rogues, a hymn to crime, an ode to vice, an encouragement to moral depravity, an unhealthy emanation from the centres of corruption, from the infamous habitations of the scum of society”, he identified a set of associations that a new generation of fadistas wear like a badge of honour.

Musicians often wore bright tattoos, in red on the singer’s chest or between his thumb and fingers, with markings of “anchors, ships, guitars, flowers, animals, pierced or joined hearts, the cross, the five sores of Christ [YAY], other love, religious, fantasy signs or inscriptions”.

Fadistas 1873

Pinheiro, Fadistas, 1873.

But later a political stigma replaced the old social one:

For some, it’s a sound forever tarnished by its association with fascism. After the fall of the dictatorship in 1974, many on the Portuguese left saw the fado as something shameful. It was seen, at best, as a conservative outlet for national misery, at worst as an authorised voice for Catholic fascism.

Salazar himself considered that fado “sapped all energy from the soul and led to inertia” (on which grounds he might have been a big Sex Pistols fan). In 1927 he passed a law regulating it, depriving it of much of its improvisation and spontaneity—which sounds like what the Party has long tried but failed to do in China. Under Salazar fado wasn’t used as propaganda, but it was neutered. Flamenco, while no less commodified, has retained a more earthy aspect.

Fado‘s links with Brazil and Africa are also worth pursuing.

* * *

Following my visits to Sachsenhausen and Stasi memorial sites in Berlin, it seemed suitable to give myself a basic education on the Salazar regime and its sinister PIDE security forces. By contrast with the grim surroundings of the Stasi museum in Berlin, the Aljube museum (Museum of resistance and liberation; also useful introduction here) occupies a picturesque site overlooking the sea, suitably opposite the Sé cathedral—as if to remind us of the role of the church in supporting the regime.

family

Portugal was one of the poorest countries in Europe. In 1920, 66% of the population was illiterate. Infant mortality rates only decreased belatedly:

1926: 45%
1974: 37%
2011:   3%.

kids

The Estado Novo endured for forty years, from 1933 until 1974. It was in this period that Portugal became encapsulated by “the three Fs”: fado, football, and Fátima. Bread and circuses, perhaps: for the opposition, a formula for national alienation. One might add a fourth F: fear (see also The struggle against Mussolini).

Lisbon 1939

Lisbon 1939.

The Aljube had a long history as a prison. On the eve of the Estado Novo it held “women of ill repute, and incorrigible women accused of serious crimes”. Indeed, under Salazar, the exhibition mentions the general exploitation of women:

Women like Maria Lamas, Maria Isabel Aboim Inglês, Virginia Moura and Maria Machado initiated a new specific approach to the female condition and especially of the until then “invisible” condition of the women.

In a country where feminism was a late starter, this positioning would fertilize the cultural soil, in which would grow what is considered the first Portuguese feminist manifesto, As Novas Cartas Portuguesas [The new Portuguese charters], the publication (and apprehension) of which would leads its three authors, Maria Teresa Horta, Maria Velho da Costa, and Isabel Barreno, to be criminally persecuted in 1972.

Under the dictatorship the Aljube became a political prison. The museum outlines the use of torture, the role of informers (bufos, “squealers”), the resistance, and the exile of prisoners to penal colonies in the Azores, Madeira, East Timor. Many died of starvation and disease in Tarrafal camp in Cape Verde. The third floor covers the anticolonial struggle, as well as the 1974 Carnation revolution.

The exhibition documents the collaboration of the PIDE with the Italian secret police and the Gestapo—going on to note that the CIA helped train the PIDE from 1957.

One thorn in the flesh of the regime, harrassed by the PIDE, was the musician José “Zeca” Afonso (1929–87):

I’m sure a lot more tourists walk past than enter the Aljube museum, which is sad—but of course it takes a particular mentality to travel the globe in search of atrocity sites. Despite all the evidence of human suffering, not least during my own pampered youth, I’m not here (today, at least) to rant against tourism—the whole image of the Med (sun, sea, and in this case Sé) and idyllic island resorts—or indeed to carp at the human capacity for enjoying life.

Criminal states have operated all over the world, and continue to do so. In places like Germany and Portugal, where regimes have changed, lessons may be learned in the public domain; in China, still very little.

* * *

The new generation of fadistas are said to have shaken off the link with fascism, but it never fitted neatly into the discourses of either right or left. Moreover, it now seems largely rhetorical for fadistas to pride themselves on its history as an “ode to vice, an encouragement to moral depravity from the scum of society”. The clubs have been becoming gentrified for over a century, the atmosphere genteel (or what the Chinese would call “cultured”)—and even I can’t fault it for that.

So what better way of spending the night before Eurovision than to relish fado at a venue I hadn’t visited before: the Associação do Fado Casto in Rua São Mamede. Among all the fado joints in the Alfama, it’s rather off the beaten track, and suitably untrumpeted from the outside. The atmosphere is great, with groups of family and friends enjoying fine food amidst evocative memorabilia.

As to the fado, performed in sets of three songs, while the pluckers noodle away whimsically,  the intimate intensity of saudade as the singer enters is immediately touching. I heard fine sets from Matilde Cid (YouTube topic), accompanied by Antonio Duarte and João Filipe:

Matilde

I also just found out about the great Carminho, falling helplessly in love with this early clip of her singing Fado of the hours in Carlos Saura’s 2007 film (longer sequence here):

I used to cry for not seeing you,
And now that I see you, I cry

Chorava por te não ver,
por te ver eu choro agora,
mas choro só por querer,
querer ver-te a toda a hora.

Passa o tempo de corrida,
quando falas eu te escuto,
nas horas da nossa vida,
cada hora é um minuto.

Deixa-te estar a meu lado,
e não mais te vás embora,
para meu coração coitado
viver na vida uma hora.

This has leapt into my list of all-time Great World Songs. Incidentally, many fados make use of the plangent minor key, but this is a good instance of how saudade can be amply achieved without it.

I’m somewhat resistant to Big Stars (at least in “world music“), but I can hardly sign off without paying homage to the saudade of Amália Rodrigues:

For more links, see Tony Klein’s comment below. For flamenco under Franco, and more on gender, see here.

[1] While we await a translation of Rui Vieira Nery, Para uma história do fado, for one detailed study in English see Paul Vernon, A history of the Portuguese fado; see also James Patrick Félix, Folk or fake: the notion of authenticity in Portuguese fado, here. For a general introduction to fado in the wider context of Portuguese music, with discography, see The Rough guide to world music, pp.309–23; fado also features regularly in Songlines magazine.

Lili Boulanger

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Boulangers

Yet another fine addition to BBC Radio 3’s coverage of female composers: the great Lili Boulanger (1893–1918) (immortalized on the excellent T-shirt)—click here, part of a website well worth exploring.

Dying terribly young, Lili was eclipsed by her equally brilliant older sister Nadia (1887–1979), herself one of the great influences on WAM music-making in modern times (see here, and for a festival in 2021, here). And of course I’ve written many posts on French music in the form of Ravel and Messiaen.

“Not a lot of people know this”, but I recorded Lili’s pieces (or even morceaux) for violin and piano with Susan Tomes on one of those disc thingies around 1974, while we were at Cambridge. Here’s a 1930 recording of the Nocturne with Nadia accompanying Yvonne Astruc:

Even in our Cambridge days, At A Time When It Was Neither Profitable Nor Popular, we were all much taken by Du fond de l’abîme:

Note Nick Robertson’s magnificent anagram fantasy on Lili Boulanger, Nubile gorilla. And for my own fantasy on Nadia’s pupils, click here.

Boullanger plaque

Forms of address

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*Not suitable for those of a sensitive disposition!*
[Red rag to a bull—Ed.]

This is one of the classic stories in our Fieldworkers’ joke manual, always coming to mind whenever some formal meeting prompts Chinese people to address me with the honorific nin 您 for “you” rather than the standard ni 你 (for a fine discussion, see here).

Dating from 1980s’ Beijing, the crucial pronouns of the story translate much less naturally into English than into other European languages, which still preserve the distinction between informal singular and honorific plural forms of the word for “you”:

So there’s this factory worker riding his rusty old bike home after his shift, trundling along in a daze. All of a sudden a big shiny Mercedes casually turns right just in front of him [as they do], and with no time to screech to a halt, the worker’s bike bumps into the gleaming car. As the chauffeur stops to inspect the damage, the furious worker leans over into the car and shouts,

“Your mother’s cunt!”
[Ni malegebi!]*

On behalf of the high-ranking Party apparatchik seated in the back, the chauffeur comes back with,

“Hey, comrade! How dare you speak so disrespectfully—don’t you realize there’s a VIP National Leader sitting in the back?”

Feigning an apology, the worker exclaims politely,

“Oh, I’m sooo sorry— I should have said, ‘Your esteemed… mother’s cunt!’
[Nin malegebi!]”

BJ bikes

Getty Images.

In Italian the variants might go “La fica di tua madre” and “La fica di vostra madre” (cf. the vocabulary of Burlesque-only—Oh, and La vaca t’ha fat, also featuring posh car…).

On an Academy of Ancient Music tour of the States around 2002, a couple of my mates enjoyed the story, and wanted to hear me telling it in the original Chinese. Rodolfo, amazing fiddle player from Brazil, thought it would work well in Brazilian-Portuguese, so I talked him through it in English, and one evening after a gig in Nebraska, as the band was gathered in an unsalubrious pub, he did a near-simultaneous Brazilian-Portuguese translation while I told the Chinese version—which, beautifully, had ’em rolling in the aisles. It’s Not the Joke, it’s the Way you Tell it.

Among my Chinese mates this story is such a classic topos that now if I want to swear at one of them, all I have to do is mutter, “NIN…”

*For Miles, Keef, and Listen with motherfucker, see here. For some reason, Chinese bi is a tad less offensive than its English equivalent: see here. For the c-word in English, click here.

Notes from Beijing, 1: some fine ethnographers

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On my recent trip to China, I was having such a great time with Li Manshan in rural Yanggao [1] that I was somewhat reluctant to take the train back to Beijing—but thanks to encounters with some fine scholars (and home-made Italian cakes) I soon acclimatized. For me to observe

If you want to study Chinese culture, China’s a good place to do it,

may not be quite as fatuous as it sounds—given the hangover from the old image of Red Guards and the new one of a cultural desert watered only by Xi Jinping Thought, both perpetuated by Western sinologists.

I’ll outline the work of these scholars in turn, beginning with my main host, the ethnographer Ju Xi 鞠熙 (b.1981), of the Department of Anthropology and Ethnology at Beishida—or Beijing Normal University, as it is quaintly known (now, to invite me to talk at an Abnormal university, that I might understand). With great imagination, she invited me to show my film as part of a series of talks in which I could reflect on fieldwork and rural ritual amidst social change, focusing on my two long-term projects: the Li family Daoists and the ritual association of South Gaoluo.

Ju Xi group

Ju Xi with ritual leaders, Daohui village, Zhejiang 2017.

Quite apart from making an articulate and supportive moderator to my talks, Ju Xi’s own research is distinguished. With Marianne Bujard, she has long been involved in a major collaborative project with the EFEO in Paris (four of eleven volumes published so far! And a fifth here, new in 2020):

  • Epigraphy and oral sources of Peking temples: a social history of an imperial capital.

In addition to a succession of fine works on old Beijing like that of Susan Naquin, all this makes an important complement to research on its ritual life, including the Zhihua temple.

Ju Xi 1

Ju Xi’s wisdom was encapsulated at an unpromising one-day conference in March, which she transformed with a succinct and brilliant speech explaining the significance of local religion in current rural China—that should be compulsory reading for cultural pundits and cadres at all levels:

Criticizing the recent interpretations of “secularization” (compared with imperial China) and “revival” (compared with the Maoist era), both of which portray Chinese religion as somewhat isolated from society, Ju Xi observed that local religion is not merely a “spiritual creation” or “cultural heritage”—it’s a kind of cultural resource and social power which can play active roles in contemporary rural society.

She outlined the role of local religion in ecological conservation, building techniques, and handicraft taboos, and pointed out its tight social structure, close interpersonal and reciprocal relationships—a valuable resource for today’s poorly-organized rural society. She stressed the importance of temple fairs, pilgrimages, ancestor worship, ritual associations, and clan organizations, noting the “grassroots charisma” of ritual specialists. She explained local religion as practical strategy, and observes how peasants are now availing themselves of the mask of “intangible heritage” to express their own requirements and views, making local religion a new pivot of cultural identity.

Thus local religion should be seen as an important basis upon which the peasants can construct their social order, organize their social relationships, take part in social practices, and articulate their own life styles. It makes an essential pattern through which multiple actors in rural society can express their own requirements.

 Ju Xi’s students are most fortunate.

* * *

Beishida has a noble tradition of folklorists, including Dong Xiaoping 董晓萍 (b.1950), herself a pupil of the great Zhong Jingwen 钟敬文 (1903–2002). Among Dong Xiaoping’s books are

  • Tianye minsuzhi 田野民俗志 [Folklore ethnography] (Beijing Shifan daxue cbs, 2003),

and a slim but useful tome with David Arkush (欧达伟),

  • Huabei minjian wenhua 华北民间文化 [Folk culture of north China] (Hebei jiaoyu cbs, 1995).

In English Dong Xiaoping’s acuity may be admired in a short review in Overmyer, Ethnography in China today, pp.343–67.

* * *

CZA

Chen Zi’ai.

At Beishida I was also delighted to meet Chen Zi’ai 陈子艾 (b.1933), part of an illustrious generation of scholars whose academic careers might have been more fruitful but for the vagaries of Maoism. A native of Hunan, her experience of local Daoism there and in Jiangxi has left her with a deep impression. She is a contributor to the lengthy series of publications on Hunan Daoism edited by Alain Arrault.

In a lengthy and mesmerizing impromptu speech after my second presentation, Chen Zi’ai touched candidly on crucial aspects of research on religious behaviour in the PRC, observing the riches of the topic as a window on folk culture, by contrast with the incongruity of her generation’s ideological indoctrination; and the more recent benefits of Chinese–foreign collaboration on such projects.

* * *

Such research on folk religion and temple fairs builds on an influential volume edited by

  • Guo Yuhua 郭于华, Yishi yu shehui bianqian 仪式与社会变迁 [Ritual and social change] (2000),

and the work of Zhao Shiyu 赵世瑜, notably his 2002 book

  • Kuanghuan yu richang: Ming–Qing shiqide miaohui yu minjian wenhua 狂欢与日常——明清时期的庙会与民间文化 (2002).

Another Beishida scholar is Xiao Fang 萧放, co-editor with Zhang Bo 张勃 of another book discussing temple fairs around Beijing, including Miaofengshan:

  • Chengshi, wenben, shenghuo: Beijing suishi wenxian yu suishi jieri yanjiu 城市，文本，生活: 北京岁时文献与岁时节日研究 (Zhongguo shehui kexue cbs, 2017),

* * *

YYY

Yue Yongyi, 2002.

Yet another brilliant fieldworker and ethnographer at Beishida is Yue Yongyi 岳永逸 (b.1972), who has a prolific list of publications based on his fieldwork in rural Hebei.

His detailed work on the Miaofengshan temple fair

  • Zhongguo jieri zhi: Miaofengshan miaohui 中国节日志: 妙峰山庙会 (Beijing: Guangming ribao cbs, 2012)

complements the ongoing research of Ian Johnson. Like Ian, he too reflects on more recent changes, such as tourism and the Intangible Cultural Heritage. [2]

Other Hebei temple fairs on which Yue Yongyi has published include two in Zhaoxian county—on the Dragon Placard Association (longpaihui) of Fanzhuang village: [3]

  • “Xiangcun miaohuide duochong xushi: dui Huabei Fanzhuang longpaihuide minsuxuezhuyi yanjiu” 乡村庙会的多重叙事: 对华北范庄龙牌会的民俗学主义研究 [Multivocal discourses in a rural temple fair: a folkloristic study of the Dragon Placard Association in Fanzhuang, north China], Minsu quyi 147 (2005), pp.101–60;
  • (with Cai Jiaqi 蔡加琪) “Miaohuide feiyihua, xuejie shuxie ji zhongguo minsuxue: longpaihui yanjiu sanshinian” 庙会的非遗化、学界书写及中国民俗学: 龙牌会研究三十年 [The heritage-ization of temple fairs, academic writing and Chinese ethnography: thirty years of research on the Dragon Placard Association], Minzu wenxue yanjiu 35 (2017.6), pp.36–52;

and on the temple fair to the Water temple goddess in Changxin village:

  • “Dui shenghuo kongjiande guishu yu chongzheng: Changxin Shuici niangniang miaohui” 对生活空间的规束与重整: 常新水祠娘娘庙会 [Restriction and regeneration of living space: the festival of the Water temple goddess in Changxin village], Minsu quyi 143 (2004).

Most notable is his detailed work on the temple fair of Cangyanshan in Jingxing county—which we may add to our bibliography on south Hebei:

  • Zhongguo jieri zhi: Cangyanshan miaohui 中国节日志: 苍岩山庙会 (Beijing: Guangming ribao cbs, 2016).

Like Yue’s book on Miaofengshan, it contains detailed subheadings on temples, gods, ritual associations and other performers, activities, and artefacts, with rich material on spirit mediums (xiangtou, cf. north Shanxi) as well as on the sectarian creator goddess Wusheng laomu (widely found in Hebei, e.g. in Xushui and Yixian counties) and (in the case of Cangyanshan) Third Princess (sanhuang gu 三黄姑).

WSLM

Wusheng laomu statue, Cangyanshan.

In English, note his

  • “The nation-state, the contract responsibility system, and the economy of temple incense: the politics and economics of a temple festival on a landscaped holy mountain”, Rural China 13 (2016), pp.240–87,

which also includes a useful bibliography. More general, but no less thoughtful, are his books

  • Xinghao: xiangtude luoji yu miaohui 行好: 乡土的逻辑与庙会 (Hangzhou: Zhejiang daxue cbs, 2014)
  • Chaoshan: miaohuide ju yu san, yingshechu minjiande shenghuo yu xinyang 朝山: 庙会的聚与散, 映射出民间的生活与信仰 (Beijing daxue cbs, 2017).
  • Jutou sanchi you shenming: manbu xiangye miaohui 举头三尺有神明——漫步乡野庙会 (Shandong wenyi cbs, 2018).

With his rich experience, Yue Yongyi made a fine discussant in our unlikely one-day panel at Beishida.

* * *

All these fieldsites provide rich material for ethnographers, even if they share a paucity of complex liturgical sequences such as those I generally find. My encounters with these scholars make a welcome change from the insidious infiltration of romanticized “living fossil” ICH flummery into music studies. Given the understandable dominance of research on religious activity in south China, they also form a community of scholars working on changing ritual life in north China (see also Goossaert article cited here).

While I entirely recognize the ongoing erosion of rights under the current regime, the current Chinese academic scene is far from emasculated. Fine scholars like these, undaunted, continue to seek the truth about modern history, at a great remove from the supposed brainwashing from Xi Jinping Thought trumpeted in the Chinese and foreign media. This theme continues in my following posts on the Beijing scene (here and here).

[1] See my series of posts starting on 14th March 2018, summarized here.

[2] Another recent book on the incense associations of Beijing is Zhang Qingren 张青仁, Xingxiang zouhui: Beijing xianghuide puxi yu shengtai 行香走会: 北京香会的谱系与生态 (Beijing: Zhongyang minzu daxue cbs, 2016).

[3] For earlier refs., see my In search of the folk Daoists of north China, p.8 n.14.

Inspiration: women’s football

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WFA

How wonderful to see the Women’s FA Cup Final on BBC1, showing that progress continues despite misogynistic reactions around the globe. The schoolgirls who, this time last year, wrote those brilliant letters to the FA (“We aren’t brainless Barbie dolls”) will be delighted—not a pink fluffy football in sight.

Among numerous posts under the gender tag, see e.g. “Little Miss Mozart“; Vera and Doris; Cunk on femininism; You don’t own me; and how men moved the goalposts for women’s football in medieval China.

“I dunno, they’ll be demanding control over their own bodies next”.

A selection of recent posts

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Ten Kings detail https://stephenjones.blog/2018/04/04/god-images-old-and-new-1/

To help navigate through a plethora of recent posts, this is just a selection of some of the more substantial ones:

Sachsenhausen https://stephenjones.blog/2018/04/27/sachsenhausen/
GDR 2 https://stephenjones.blog/2018/05/02/gdr-2/


For more, click on MY BLOG in the top menu and scroll down…

Another Daoist debate

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Gansu ritual

Following the Daoist ritual to bless a football team, another intriguing debate has just arisen on the place of Daoist ritual in society under a notionally secular and atheist regime. [1]

In Minqin county in the north of Wuwei municipality in Gansu province, an exorcistic Daoist ritual was performed recently at the inauguration of the construction site of an experimental thorium reactor of the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Though the ritual was commissioned by the local construction team, two employees from the institute were promptly sacked and placed under CCP investigation for having failed to stop the contractors, thus “deviating from the scientific spirit”.

Rituals for “moving the earth” are commonly performed all over China. This one was conducted by a single local priest depicting talismans and burning yellow paper memorials, as a sheep was slaughtered (lingsheng 领牲). In the brief video, at some distance one can see an altar table, around which a shawm band stands to play.

Some may be content to seize on the story to demonize the CCP (which is fair enough, as far as it goes). But again, just as with the Daoist ritual for the football match, what is more notable is the intelligent rebuttals of the po-faced official stance that are already appearing online and in the media—if not yet on a par with the protests that greeted the Pingyi funeral clampdown. Most authoritative essays come from the brilliant Tao Jin, and on WeChat here; doubtless there will be more. A critique from a leading Daoist priest, marred by introducing a confused angle of indigenous and foreign religions, has evaporated from the void.

So it’s another storm in a teacup. Local rituals are performed all over China (including, magnificently, Shanghai). The problem here was merely that the CCP shouldn’t be seen to be promoting “superstition”—so it’s a healthy sign that the online community rallies round to observe that by the CCP’s own terms it’s no longer considered as such, and to stress the depth of “Daoist culture” that the Party itself now propounds. The authorities’ kneejerk reaction can only entrench people’s “belief” in the laws on religious freedom. The popular message is clearly: don’t mess with the Traditional Culture of the Chinese Peoples!

It’s also a reminder that Gansu must be one of the most fertile sites for research on household Daoist ritual!

[1] See this from Sixth tone, with a brief video clip (why on earth (sic) did someone deem the video footage acceptable but not the original audio?!); and a follow-up expounding the issues clearly:

I also fear that Taoist conservatives—the kind who head up the country’s religious associations—will grow tired of reacting to public suspicion with openness and warmth, and will instead try to defend Taoism from a purely nationalist standpoint. As China’s sole homegrown religion, Taoism is fertile ground to be claimed by hyper-patriotic revivalists of traditional Chinese culture. It is essential that Taoists remain level-headed and oppose radical and exclusionary political attitudes.

For other comments, see e.g. here, here, and here.

Life in the GDR, 2

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Notes from Berlin, 2

In Berlin a couple of weeks ago, apart from my visit to Sachsenhausen I was keen to explore the city’s GDR history, moving on into the 1950s and beyond—the Stasi memorial sites (as the Rough guide notes) making a potent antidote to the trendy Ostalgie of Trabi kitsch. Here my experience of China, learning to empathize with “sufferers” there (Guo Yuhua, after Bourdieu), feels all the more relevant.

To limber up I took the U-Bahn to Alex, which I can’t presume to call by such a familiar name.

Alexanderplatz: the Weltzeituhr and Fernsehturm (1969), with the 13th-century Marienkirche—not leaning towers, more an innocent trompe-l’oeil of my camera…

My splendid host Ian Johnson (whose own writings are a must-read on both China and Germany) made a fine guide for a trip along the remnants of the wall, Checkpoint Charlie and so on.

Berlin divided 1945

We passed the Staatsoper, where I performed Elektra in 1980. How shamefully little I knew then, and how limited was my curiosity. Throughout my recent visit to Berlin it finally hits me how very pampered our lives have been compared to the painful decisions that our German contemporaries constantly had to make.

Do click on these links, from a fine series of short films tracing the timeline of the Wall:

Meanwhile Timothy Garton Ash was beginning his long acquaintance with the regime.

Stasi memorial sites
I visited both the Stasi prison and the Stasi museum. Though they’re not so far apart in the Lichtenburg district, I wouldn’t advise trying to do both in one day—the prison tour is excellent, and even by spending the rest of the day there I still only saw a small part of its exhibits. While the museum is less taxing than the prison, its location has retained a more suitably grim, bleak, forbidding air. As in Sachsenshausen, it’s wonderful that these sites are so busy, with many school parties—though I didn’t see any Chinese tour groups among them…

1953 poster

Just a few months before I was born, the major popular uprising of 17th June 1953 throughout the GDR (wiki, and a wealth of online sites, notably here), documented in both exhibitions, is far less known abroad than Budapest 1956 and Prague 1968. Needless to say, the popular uprisings of June 1989 in China are not so called there.

Studying the exhibits of perpetrators and victims, one continues to deplore the appalling ethical morass caused by Nazism—what a terrible price to pay throughout the following decades. Again, what would we have done?

Guides

Some of the eyewitnesses guiding visitors around the site.

At the Stasi prison (Gedenkstätte memorial) of Hohenschönhausen (formerly a Soviet special camp) the team of wonderful tour guides includes many former inmates; though our guide that day wasn’t among them, he gave us passionate articulate reminders of how crucially important it is to learn lessons amidst the current erosion of crucial rights worldwide.

Klier

Freya Klier and Stephan Krawczyk.

There were many strands to the counter-culture in literature and music. Icons of the resistance in the arts became figureheads, like singer-songwriters Wolf Biermann (b.1936, exiled in 1976) and Bettina Wegner (b.1947); Bärbel Bohley (1945–2010), whose 1978 painting Nude makes a striking image in the prison; performers Freya Klier (b.1950) and Stephan Krawczyk (b.1955); and Jürgen Fuchs (1950–99). For subversive film in the GDR, see here.

But just as moving in the prison is the series of mugshots of ordinary people making a stand, trying to escape, or just caught up in the maelstrom.

Lives 2

Lives 5

Lives 7

Lives 1

Lives 3

Lives 4

Lives 6

However much I admire our own posturing counter-cultural heroes, all this can only make them seem bland and smug. Sure, the punk movement in London, New York, and so on was important—more so than my life in early music, anyway, though that was also new (“original”!). But apart from getting abused in the Daily Mail, the punk life in the UK hardly involved such serious risks. For the GDR punks, [1] the “fascist regime” casually snarled by the Sex pistols would have had a far deeper resonance (cf. punk in Madrid, and jazz in Poland).

Stasi terms

who is who

The Stasi museum also has exhibits on the vast network of IM informants—including punks. The Stasi even managed to recruit two of them in the band Die Firma—“it is not known whether they both knew each other’s secret”. Of course, the “decision” to inform, framed by self-preservation or desperation, and with whatever degree of apathy, was itself no simple matter.

punk straight

Die Firma, with Tatjana Besson, 1988.

Here they are live in 1988:

Punks

wedding

Wedding at Jena, 1983: the couple’s friend was informing on them,

But the most basic routine parts of growing up were fraught with anxiety.

kindergarten

Alternative kindergarten, Prenzlauer Berg 1980–83.

school 1988

“Learning differently”, evening school 1988.

The Christian resistance was another crucial focus right through to the 1989 Montag demos that brought the whole system down. The pastor Oskar Brüsewitz burned himself to death in protest in August 1976—just as I was spending an idyllic summer after graduating (cf. Alan Bennett’s wry comment).
Pastor

Also explored at the museum is the psychology of the Stasi employees.

Stasi comments

The whole second floor of the museum preserves the offices of Erich Mielke, head of this whole hideous edifice. It’s a riot of beige and formica (cf. Deutschland 89, scenes of which were filmed there). Mielke’s diagram of the layout for his breakfast is a masterpiece of pedantry—of which, I have to say, my father would have approved.

Mielke breakfast

The diagram has now been cannily immortalized in a mouse-pad, one of the few concessions to modernity in the museum’s suitably antiquated little bookshop—Is Nothing Sacred?

As throughout the socialist bloc (including China), for bitter relief, jokes always made a subversive outlet.

The museum also tellingly depicts the scramble of people all over the east to limit the destruction of Stasi files after November 1989.

* * *

It’s little consolation to reflect that the GDR was surely exceptional in its degree of surveillance, even in East Europe. And in such a vast and predominantly agrarian country as China, for all the horrors of Maoism, and the current intrusive mission, “the mountains are high, the emperor is distant”.

Again it’s worth citing Timothy Garton Ash:

Precisely because German lawmakers and judges know what it was like to live in a Stasi state, and before that in a Nazi one, they have guarded these things more jealously than we, the British, who have taken them for granted. You value health more when you have been sick.
I say again: of course Britain is not a Stasi state. We have democratically elected representatives, independent judges and a free press, through whom and with whom these excesses can be rolled back. But if the Stasi now serves as a warning ghost, scaring us into action, it will have done some good after all.

And again, I both recoil at this horror that was perpetuated right through my naïve youth, and admire the German determination to document it for future generations.

[1] Among a wealth of coverage of punk in the GDR, see e.g.
https://www.dw.com/en/you-should-be-gassed-what-it-meant-to-be-punk-in-east-germany/a-51163866
https://www.europavox.com/news/anarchy-e-u-east-german-punk/
https://www.jugendopposition.de/themen/145334/too-much-future-punk-in-der-ddr
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p056srhr
http://punkintheddr.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/post-1-ost-punkszene.html?view=sidebar
For the 1988 documentary Whisper & SHOUT, see here.

Indian singing at the BM

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*For a roundup of posts on raga, with a general introduction, see here!*

Bihag

Bihag, ragamala. Yale University Art Gallery.

After some time immersed in the rich harmonies of Mahler 10, it made a nice contrast for me to bask in the purity of monophonic Hindustani music in the Indian gallery of the British Museum. With the arhat at the other (Chinese) end of the gallery gazing on serenely from afar, Kaushiki Chakraborty sang with the lucidity and intensity characteristic of the style, accompanied by tabla and harmonium (the latter, alas, only intermittently suggestive of the bandoneon—call me old-fashioned, but you still can’t beat the sarangi).

She began with a khayal in the late-evening rāg Maru Bihag—whose relation with rāg Yaman (and Yaman Kalyan) is a subtlety to be explored by the aficionado. But even for the less attuned ear it’s worth homing in on the basic vocabulary of raga: the pitch relationships, always expounded most clearly in the opening alap.

To simplify absurdly the ascending and descending scales, and the choices of phrases within them, Ms Chakraborty’s version of the rāg featured Ni and Ma prominently, using an ascending scale of

Ni  Re  Ga  Ma  Dha  Ni

—feeding on the tension with the tonic drone of Sa, as in many ragas. The natural-fourth degree ma is introduced as a subsidiary theme (Ni Ga ma, or Sa ma, and Ga ma Ga), and later a sustained Pa also features. Here’s a version she sang in 2017:

Here’s a rendition by the great Nikhil Banerjee on sitar:

And for a version on shehnai, see Raga for winds.

Mahler 10

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*For an introduction to my whole series on Mahler, with links, click here!*

After returning from an exhilarating day with the Zhihua temple at the BM, I caught S-Simon Rattle‘s overwhelming Mahler 10 with the reborn LSO on BBC Radio 3.

Here’s the opening Adagio from the concert—BTW, yet another illustration of the benefits of conducting from memory:

And here’s the complete 1980 recording with Simon (“as he was then”—before he was awarded the impediment) conducting the Bournemouth symphony orchestra:

 

Only half-written before Mahler died in 1911, the work was hardly performed until Deryck Cooke’s completed version became popular in the 1960s. Though I got to know it not so long after, it’s ages since I immersed myself in it.

Under Mahler’s own torments the music often splinters, exemplifying the later devastation of European culture. In context (from 17.24 in the video, 16.15 on the 1980 version) the Scream chord of the Adagio is truly horrifying, presaged by huge nightmarish clashing granite slabs of sound, linked by a terrifying high sustained trumpet note, and followed by a screeching top D from the violins:

Mahler 10 scream

Now I don’t generally go in for this kind of thing,* but after my recent visit to Sachsenhausen one might hear that short episode (under two minutes) as a graphic condensed soundscape foretelling the torments of Europe from c1930 to 1945—like deathbed episodes flashing past (timings as on the 1980 audio recording):

  • 16.15 the descent into hell begins
  • 16.44 rise of Nazism
  • 17.06 brief moment of false hope (Weimar cabaret): desperate “Maybe we’ll be all right”
  • 17.25 Kristallnacht; invasions of Poland and Russia
  • 17.37 the concentration camp system
  • 17.50 the horrors of the camps are finally revealed.

Of course, you can ignore all that, and just hear it as a cumulative drama of agony.

LHJ 456 Kings detail

A Chinese parallel? Detail from painting of the Ten Kings of the Underworld, north Shanxi.

Here’s Bernstein conducting the Adagio (with the Vienna Phil still uncontaminated by women…)

* * *

An ominous opening to the Finale—inspired, according to Alma, by hearing from afar the funeral of a heroic fireman in New York [1]—leads into an exquisite flute solo (from 53.57 on Rattle’s recording) and sustained string lines (with more of those climactic struggling quintuplets, e.g. from 1.11.51) almost recalling the finale of the 3rd symphony. Despite interruptions from the funeral drum and the Scream, the mood is more serene, less desolate than his other late works.

Mahler 10 end

In last week’s LSO version the violins (and violas?!) made their final searing leap on the G string!!! [My Mahlerian exclamation marks].

M10 end

The Barshai version of the symphony is also much praised:

(for a discerning series of photos to accompany the finale, see here)

* * *

Mahler’s “late” works are such a comprehensive series of farewells (Abschied) that it’s always strange to realize that he died at the age of 50. What would have become of him, and his music, had he lived into the 1940s?

Not so late, but perhaps most moving of all, is Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen—with a final violin leap similar to that at the end of the 10th symphony, only pianissimo.

[1] For accessible accounts of Mahler’s last years, the 1907 New York funeral, and the history of Deryck Cooke’s version, see Lebrecht, Why Mahler?, pp.171–223, 275–9. Here’s Alma’s recollection of the funeral (Gustav Mahler: memories and letters, p.135):

Marie Uchatius, a young art-student, paid me a visit one day in the Hotel Majestic. Hearing a confused noise, we leaned out of the window and saw a long procession in the broad street along the side of Central Park. It was the funeral cortege of a fireman, of whose heroic death we had read in the newspaper. The chief mourners were almost immediately beneath us when the procession halted, and the master of ceremonies stepped forward and gave a short address. From our eleventh floor window we could only guess what he said. There was a brief pause and then a roll of muffled drums, followed by a dead silence. The procession then moved forward and all was over.

The scene brought tears to my eyes and I looked anxiously at Mahler’s window. But he too was leaning out and his face was streaming with tears. The brief roll of the muffled drums impressed him so deeply that he used it in the Tenth Symphony.

 

* Imputing verbal programmes to musical detail, I mean: the whole point of music is that it expresses things that can’t be expressed in words. Even novelists—who do use words!—find this irritating; I can’t find a source or precise quote, but as I recall, when asked “What were you trying to say in this book?”—one frustrated novelist replied, “I was ‘trying’ to say exactly what I did say.” (Martin Amis, would be my guess. Anyone?)

Bearing witness 2: Sachsenhausen

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Notes from Berlin, 1

Appell

Roll-call at Sachsenhausen, February 1941.

Screening my film in Berlin last week gave me the chance to explore a city that I hardly knew. It seems timely to negotiate a new place, a new transport network—I was beginning to feel that I can only find my way from my house to Li Manshan’s village.

Rather than some anodyne heritage flapdoodle à la chinoise, here I’ll introduce Sachsenhausen concentration camp, with a sequel on Stasi sites in Berlin itself.

* * *

Having been so moved by Sarah Helm’s harrowing book on Ravensbrück, I had hoped to get there, but with limited time Sachsenhausen (cf. wiki and many more detailed sites) is more accessible, and anyway demands a whole day (and I’m acutely aware that we can be suitably horrified by our day-trip and then come home to friends for a nice plate of pasta with wine.)

At the same time, it’s deeply inspiring to see not only how well documented such sites are (including the Stasi memorials) but also how busy they are—the grounds are constantly full of school groups receiving the most important education.

All such camps saw prolonged use, both before the war (Oranienburg concentration camp started operating in 1933, moving to Sachenhausen in 1936) but also long after, under Soviet (indeed allied) and GDR regimes.

* * *

I visited Sachenhausen last Friday—which happened to be Hitler’s birthday, occasion for a repellent Nazi festival in parts of eastern Germany.

To arrive by train at Oranienburg station is itself disturbing, thinking of how the inmates reached the camp. One of the most hideous accounts at the site tells how in September 1939 the rabid inhabitants of the town abused 534 Polish Jews as they marched to incarceration and death—though they had been duped that the arrivals were themselves murderers, one suspects this wasn’t an exceptional case (Wachsmann, KL [definitive source on the camp system], p.230).

In the barracks I was taken aback by the sitting toilets and washrooms—of course, inmates were highly vulnerable in these places, often being brutally beaten to death there, so it’s hardly relevant to contrast the primitive conditions at Chinese laogai camps, or ordinary Chinese homes.

Inmates (from all over Europe, and Russia) included political prisoners, Jews, homosexuals, and “antisocials”. In autumn 1941 alone over 10,000 Russian prisoners of war were executed at the camp. But individual lives play an important role both in the exhibitions and online, such as Dutch resistance fighter Ab Nicolaas (who later became a clown), or the German Sinto Walter Winter.

camp mouth organ

As Helm describes harrowingly for Ravensbrück, even the twice-daily Appell roll-call (see photo at head of article) was purgatory.

The infirmary exhibitions are substantial too, including sections on medical experiments on young Jews and the reunion of survivors fifty years later; and on the camp brothel.

Brothel

Among the most disturbing exhibitions is in the watch tower, on the relations of locals with the camp and the SS—“What would we have done?” again. The SS were billeted in town, with their own bands, taking part in street parties. People recalled how as kids they were handed out balloons and lollies by the SS.

Tarantella

“Tarantella for German soldiers”—SS officers attending a folklore festival on Capri, alleged to be the Blockführers of Sachsenhausen who had been shooters in the 1941 Russenaktion.

 

Death march and “Liberation”, 1945.

After the war
Then on to the display about the Soviet camp 1945–50, just as gruesome—12,000 of 60,000 prisoners died there. Here too the documenting of individuals is sobering, such as the meticulous diarist Günter Sack, and Stella Kübler-Isaakson, a Jewish spy for the Nazis who was imprisoned here from 1946 to 1956 (see Peter Wyden, Stella, reviewed here and here).

The Soviet Special Camp was closed in 1950, but not all of the prisoners were set free. The majority of the prisoners sentenced by the Soviet military tribunal were sent to East German prisons. Some of the internees were tried during the Waldheimer cases in the GDR, and Soviet prisoners were deported to camps in the USSR.

The site’s GDR history (see here, with sequel here) provokes thought too. There are exhibits, including films, of the first commemoration in 1955, with GDR citizens touring the camp; after 1961, as the memorial calendar became more busy, it became a site of “anti-fascist education” even as the repression continued. From 1976 couples even visited on their wedding day—not a simple case of indoctrination, but often related to the sufferings of their parents at the camp.

At the same time (as the catalogue describes), the state appropriation of the memorial for its own purposes was gradually subverted; peace movements, church groups, citizens’ initiatives, and “excluded groups” began chipping away at the GDR’s “monopoly on heroism”.

Again, you can choose if you can bear to watch films like this:

* * *

How such catastrophic moral failure occurred remains imponderable—so much for the German Soul. As Neil MacGregor asks,

How did the great humanising traditions of German history—Dürer, Luther’s Bible, Bach, the Enlightenment, Goethe’s Faust, the Bauhaus, and much, much more—fail to avert this total ethical collapse?

It does indeed seem a bit late for me to take all this to heart now. I can’t claim that if I’d have trodden a different path if I’d been exposed to all this history in my teens, but still. And at least now with my work on China I’m not churning out the patriotic agenda of the glories of Han­–Tang music, or merely collecting happy folk ditties: it’s all political.

Until recently it might have felt a blessing to be English, not to have been beset by such agonizing dilemmas—yet another “What would we have done?”. But how admirable the Germans have become since the 1990s: not only do they put us to shame in their response to the migration crisis, but further to have set up this network of memorial sites—whereas in Britain there are many who not only consider themselves separate from Europe but still have the hubris to protest the exposing of the crimes of our own imperialism, denying the lessons of history.

I also hope that one day in China there will be meticulously documented sites like this, to commemorate the self-inflicted disasters of its own modern history (cf. this post). Mind you, talking of memorials, here’s one in the southern USA.

In all these places—Germany, China, the USA, and so on—such traumatic histories are an essential aspect of the cultural soundscapes that we so blithely celebrate. Including the Chinese ritual soundscape. And Britain?

For Mahler’s prophesy, see here. For the first gulag in Soviet Russia, see here.

* * *

Returning to civilisation, on my walk from the S-Bahn at Jungfernheide I would pass charming door statuettes over the entrances to pre-War apartment blocks in Herschelstraße and Fabriciustraße (for shutter catches in Venice, see here; for the accordion, see here). Ordinary domestic life… I wonder what happened to the inhabitants.

 

Three baldies and a mouth-organ

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*UPDATED with links to posts on the Zhihua temple and related topics!*

dav

Early in 1986, only a couple of days after my first arrival in Beijing, hearing the former monks of the Zhihua temple 智化寺 on a cold but beautifully sunny winter’s day was an experience that changed my life—and their ritual soundscape still entrances me:

Musicologist He Changlin astutely took me to a Buddhist temple to ask a group of elderly former monks to play their shengguan music for us. That sound will always stay with me. The soulful guanzi, the darting dizi, the sturdy sheng, the halo of the yunluo piercing the bright Beijing sky above the green-and-yellow roof-tiles of the temple. […] It was only hearing the temple musicians that directed me irresistibly to living traditions. I began to neglect ancient history…
[adapted from my Plucking the winds, p.185]

While I go to great lengths to stress that the Zhihua temple is only the tip of the iceberg—for ritual life both within Beijing and all over north China—the soundscape of its shengguan remains a classic source. There are no “living fossils”, and the temple itself has long ceased to function as a ritual site; but the present group performs with majestic authority, led by Hu Qingxue, about whom I must write in more detail—he’s not only an amazing guanzi player, but a fine vocal liturgist, and he’s just as hooked on exploring ritual groups in the countryside as I am.

In the photo above, the reason our demeanour is somewhat less solemn than that of the transcendent arhat is because Hu Qingxue had just suggested the caption which forms the title of this post—and, incidentally, of my latest Hollywood blockbuster. * The old sheng mouth-organ was my gift to him: it had been a gift to me in the early 1990s from a village ritual association that no longer used it, and since he’s an avid hoarder and repairer of sheng, it surely belongs in his fantastic collection.

chat with HQX

There’s always so much to learn from Hu Qingxue.

It was delightful to present the group at the British Museum again on Monday. In our pre-concert discussion (with subtle prompting from Jessica Harrison-Hall, curator of the BM’s Chinese collection) I was glad to introduce the social background and wider ritual context, as well as research by a succession of fine Chinese scholars; and with the musicians, to illustrate how the skeletal notes of the gongche solfeggio score are progressively ornamented, first by singing the score in unison and then by taking up the instruments to further decorate that version in heterophony.

For someone who was brought up in a poor Hebei village, Hu Qingxue has learned to recopy the temple’s old scores rather finely:

Qingjiang yin score

Qingjiang yin, copied by Hu Qingxue.

Having learned from my tours with the Li family Daoists, I’ve now worked out a much-improved programme with the Zhihua temple too. While the shengguan ensemble is always most captivating for audiences, we now include all three elements in the ritual soundscape, chui-da-nian—in reverse order of importance: wind ensemble, percussion, and vocal liturgy.

Thus the programme began with Cymbals to Open the Altar (Kaitan bo 開壇鈸), featuring the hocketing alternation of the nao and bo large cymbals that you can explore in my film on Li Manshan. It continues with the vocal hymn Yangzhi jingshui 楊枝淨水 in praise of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, also used near the beginning of a ritual—here accompanied by the melodic instruments. Then they demonstrate the process of ornamenting the skeletal notes of the score with the melody Qingjiang yin 清江引 (see photo above). After the captivating suite Jin–Wu–Shan (Jinzi jing 金字經—Wusheng fo 五聲佛—Gandongshan 感動山!) and Haiqing na tian’e 海青拿天鵝, the programme ends by reminding us of the primacy of vocal liturgy, with the a cappella hymn Qingjing fashen fo 清靜法身佛, accompanied only by the percussion.

As I am wont to observe, the blend of timbres of the shengguan instrumentation is the most perfect combo ever, alongside the jazz quintet… And the free-tempo alap-like introductions are just magical.

This overlaps with my blogposts, but here’s the full version of my programme notes:

Music of the Zhihua temple
Stephen Jones

A world away from the modern conservatoire style that now dominates the media, this music belongs as a kind of aural filigree interlaced within the vocal liturgy and percussion of lengthy rituals for funerals and temple fairs among local communities. To experience it in the concert hall or museum is a compromise, of course. It is one of many genres still performed today in a continuous tradition since the Ming—several types of regional opera, the nanguan ballads of Fujian, the music of the ubiquitous rural shawm bands, the elite qin zither.

The Zhihua temple has become a byword for the melodic instrumental music used until the 1950s as part of rituals in Beijing—mainly funerals, notably the nocturnal yankou ritual to feed the hungry ghosts. The monks of many minor temples in the hutong alleys of north and east Beijing, both Buddhist and Daoist, were available to come together to perform this music.

Built as the private temple of the court eunuch Wang Zhen in 1443, the Zhihua temple is one of the only wooden structures from the Ming dynasty to remain intact in Beijing.  After Wang Zhen was executed in 1449, the monks became part of the ritual life of the wider community, with twenty-six generations down to the 1940s.

Since then the tradition has struggled to survive. After 1949 the monks were laicised, so by 1953 when the Zhihua temple music first gained its reputation among music scholars, with influential studies from the qin zither master Zha Fuxi and the great musicologist Yang Yinliu, the monks were no longer performing rituals. Through the 1980s, as ritual life was restoring throughout the countryside, and even in cities like Shanghai, scholars like Ling Haicheng and Yuan Jingfang began attempts to revive the Beijing style, collecting the surviving former monks together.

Though the style remains the most exquisite rendition of a widespread repertoire, it is now mainly further afield that we can hear it in its ritual context—in the countryside south of the capital among amateur associations that learnt from temple monks, and among household ritual groups all over north China. The present performers hail from the poor village of Qujiaying, whose ritual association was first discovered in 1986. They were recruited while in their teens to study in the Zhihua temple with the elderly former monks, notably Benxing (1923–2009). But worthy attempts by cultural cadres have proved unable to maintain the classic Beijing style without the firm ritual base of local community support that remains common elsewhere in China.

While the more elite temple rituals use only vocal liturgy accompanied by ritual percussion, melodic instrumental music has long been commonly added for rituals among the folk. Throughout north China this takes the form of the exquisite shengguan chamber ensemble, which coalesced around the Ming. The instruments play in heterophony, each decorating the bare bones of the nuclear melody differently; the plaintive guanzi oboe leads, the sheng mouth-organ maintaining a continuous wall of sound, decorated by the halo of the yunluo (ten pitched gongs mounted in a frame) and darting ornaments from the dizi flute.

The repertoire of classic labeled melodies, combined in strict sequences in lengthy suites, was also coming together in the Ming. Since then, a kind of solfeggio called gongche has been commonly used to notate the outlines of the melodies of instrumental ensembles. Scores from several Beijing temples, of which the earliest now preserved is the 1694 score of the Zhihua temple, use a rare antique script that resembles those known from Tang and Song sources. But the bare bones of the score give few clues to the magic of performance; having learnt to sing in unison an already highly ornamented version of the nuclear melody, the performers then further decorate it in mesmerising heterophony on the instruments. The style is exceptionally slow and solemn, the free-tempo preludes especially magical. But we have to imagine it as a decoration within the whole liturgy of the complex rituals that are still common elsewhere in China.

Further reading

  • Stephen Jones, Folk music of China: living instrumental traditions, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995 (paperback edition with CD, 1998).
  • Stephen Jones, Plucking the winds: lives of village musicians in old and new China, Leiden: CHIME Foundation, 2004 (with CD).
  • Stephen Jones, In search of the folk Daoists of north China, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010 (Appendix 1).
  • Yuan Jingfang, Zhongguo fojiao jing yinyue yanjiu [The Buddhist capital music of China], Beijing: Zongjiao wenhua chubanshe, 2012.
  • Chang Renchun, Hongbai xishi: jiujing hunsang lisu [Wedding and funeral customs of old Beijing], Beijing: Beijing Yanshan chubanshe, 1993.

You can hear an excerpt from Yang Yinliu’s legendary 1953 recording on #14 in the audio gallery (scrolling way down in the sidebar), with commentary here.

Other articles on this blog:

And for conceptual background,

On the Qujiaying connection:

which leads onto the Hebei village associations and further afield (under Local ritual, including Ritual groups of suburban Beijing and Tianjin: a folk Buddhist group, as well as a whole series on Gaoluo village).

See also Ritual artisans in 1950s’ Beijing.

* * *

The Zhihua temple events were part of a fine ongoing series at the British Museum (see also here) that also included flamenco (cf. my series starting here), Indian music, Japanese gagaku, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Cage, and Strauss’s overwhelming Metamorphosen.

And what should await me on my return home than a live broadcast of Mahler 10 with S-Simon Rattle. Without this lying xenophobic government, London could be wonderful.

* Cf. the alternative title for my film on Li Manshan: Four funerals and a funeral.

Two geniuses

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MANCHESTER, ENGLAND – SEPTEMBER 23: Arsene Wenger, manager of Arsenal looks on ahead of the Barclays Premier League match between Manchester City and Arsenal at Etihad Stadium on September 23, 2012 in Manchester, England. (Photo by Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)

It’s all very well me swanning off to China (see flurry of posts since 14th March) and Germany, but one has to keep up with the domestic news. OK, the Windrush affair is shameful, but on a lighter note:

  • The imminent departure of Arsène Wenger from Arsenal has finally produced the tributes he deserves (for his classy send-off, see here). Football will never see his like again. And if you haven’t noticed my post on Daoist football, then DO!
  • And meanwhile in the snooker, the gorgeous and inspired Ronnie is back in action!!! I’m getting this in early (his next match is on Friday), as one never knows, but beholding him is always a thing of magic. Whether or not he progresses further, here’s my occasional reminder that you just have to watch his 147 maximum break from 1997—I will accept no excuses.

And I have another episode of Cunk in Britain to catch up on too!

Operetta in extremis

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Tillion

Anne Sebba‘s book Les Parisiennes is high on my reading list. Meanwhile, it’s good to hear her on Private passions paying homage to the great ethnologist Germaine Tillion, who somehow composed the operetta Le Verfügbar aux Enfers while incarcerated in the hell of Ravensbrück (see link in Bearing witness)—a spoof of Orpheus in the underworld, an attempt to help prisoners “resist by laughing”. Here’s a revival from 2011:

A salutary link with the Ten Kings of the Underworld?

Enfers

The cult of Elder Hu

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* Yet another in a series of vignettes (starting here) from my recent stay with the wonderful Li Manshan (for similar excursions, see here and here). *

Hutu statues

Altar to Great Lord Hudu, Lower Liangyuan temple 2018.

My time with Li Manshan last month also gave me the chance to renew my acquaintance with Elder Hu, most intriguing of local deities in the region.

Surveying “cultic buildings” just northeast of Yanggao in the troubled 1940s, the intrepid Belgian missionary Willem Grootaers drew attention to a local cult of the deity Hutu 胡突 or Hudu 胡都, aka Elder Hu (Hulaoye, Huye, Hushen 胡老爺, 胡爺, 胡神) or even Dragon Hu (Hulong 胡龍). His temples are often known as Hushen miao 胡神廟. See

  • Willem A. Grootaers, “The Hutu god of Wanch’üan, a problem of method in folklore”, Studia Serica VII (Chengdu, 1948), pp.41–53. [1]

Around the Xuanhua region Grootaers and his Chinese assistants found fourteen temples devoted to Elder Hu, as well as six more with tablets in the temples of other gods; as a lateral image in Dragon King temples he appeared sixteen times.

I have already published brief introductions to the cult in Yanggao. [2]

In south China one often find “cults,” in the common sense of groups (whether voluntary or ascriptive) devoted to a particular deified local territorial personage. Much work on southern Daoism is complemented by studies of such gods. One finds some cults in north China too, although they are more often to “national” deities. Such groups may or may not include ritual specialists performing complex sequences of ritual and liturgy.

But one important regional deity whom people in north Shanxi and northwest Hebei do worship is Elder Hu. Perhaps an ancient general, his proper name Hutu (or Hudu) may be Mongol. Closely related to the Dragon King deities, he too is thought to have power over rain and the elements. In Upper Liangyuan there was a statue of him in the Temple to the Three Pure Ones (my book, pp.46–9), but in Yanggao the main sites for his worship, still today, are the temples of Zhenmenbu (for recent images from Hannibal Taubes, see here), Xujiayuan, and Lower Liangyuan. Here I introduce the latter two.

Xujiayuan
The Xujiayuan temple (formally named Temple of Clear Clouds Qingyun si 清雲寺, though as usual it is commonly identified simply by the name of the village) is part of a network of early temples lining the border north of the county-town, just beneath the remains of the Great Wall. From our 2003 notes:

In the main temple the three god statues (from left to right) were Pineapple Tree King God (Boluoshuwang fo, responsible for water), Watery Heaven God (Shuitian fo, one of the Heavenly Officers tianguan), and Elder Hu (Hulaoye, responsible for rain, not water in general). On either side of Elder Hu were small dragon statuettes. There was also a portable statuette to Elder Hu to be taken on procession.

XJY 03 clothing statue 1

Clothing a god statue, Xujiayuan 7th-moon temple fair 2003.

The various local legends about Elder Hu are not consistent. Xujiayuan villagers said that his old home was Hujia village quite far further east in Tianzhen county (see map below), so the village always donates to the Xujiayuan temple fair (in 2003 they gave 300 yuan). According to the temple’s abbot Miaoyun, Elder Hu was an ancient general called Hutu; the common people erected a temple to him after he was wrongfully executed by an emperor and the climate went awry (xingfeng zuolang 興風作浪).

Several online sources on the temple claim that Elder Hu was a grand court official called Hu Tu 胡秃 [sic] in the Warring States period. Unjustly executed, his soul wouldn’t disperse, whereupon The Jade Emperor enfieoffed him as a god. In the early Tang dynasty, during natural disasters in the 6th year of the Zhenguan era (632 CE), Elder Hu rescued the populace by scattering buckwheat, and they built a temple to him in thanks.

Most village temples in the region are unstaffed, but the Xujiayuan temple had about eight resident Buddhist monks when we visited in 2003. The main day for the temple fair is 7th moon 3rd; it begins on the 1st and finishes on the 4th. This is a most vibrant event, with many stalls, and an opera troupe, shawm bands, and the temple’s own monks all performing an impressive nocturnal yankou ritual (see the DVD Doing Things with my book Ritual and music: shawm bands of Shanxi, §B5).

Another major ritual of Xujiayuan is the rain procession on 5th moon 18th, bearing aloft the statuette of Elder Hu. The temple is the centre of a parish (she 社) of twelve villages (still known as “brigades”—note the casual elision of imperial and Maoist vocabulary), although by 2003 it was mainly the four nearby village that were taking part actively. Elder Hu “deputes the dragons” (fenglong 封龍) to release rain.

Lower Liangyuan
Today on the plain southeast of Yanggao county-town, with no temples still standing in Upper Liangyuan, the most important temple in the area is in the sister village of Lower Liangyuan just north. Its formal name is Temple of Efficacious Source (Lingyuan si 靈源寺).

XLY 03 temple name

7th-moon temple fair 2003.

The survival of the temple is due in large measure to the sprightly Yuan Xiwen 袁喜文 (b.1934!), still blessed with a youthful spirit within the body of a fit 50-year-old.

Yuan Xiwen 2013

Yuan Xiwen, 2013.

Serving as a brigade accountant and cadre under Maoism, he did what he could to protect the temple, and led the revival of its temple fair upon the 1980s’ reforms. He has recently compiled a detailed genealogy of thirteen generations of the Yuan lineage (my film, from 57.46). Local society depends on men with such charisma.

The village has long had a larger population than Upper Liangyuan (1,120 in 1948, 1,805 in 1990, according to the county gazetteer), although since then it continues to suffer from the inevitable drift to the cities.

Back in 2013 we strolled over there to find Yuan Xiwen sitting in lotus posture on the kang in his bare house. He too told us a charming local legend about Elder Hu, detailed enough to have a certain authentic value:

Dragon Hu came from Jiaocheng village, southwest of Datong. [3] He held the post of looking after the cabinet official (geyuan 閣員) Wang Qiu 王囚 in Shandong province. Wang agreed to his request to return home for a visit to his old home. So Dragon Hu began the journey home, riding the clouds (jiayun 駕雲) from Shandong to Jiaocheng. Once he reached north Shanxi, he passed through “nine dragon mouths” (jiu longkou) in all.
[For villages marked * below I know of active temples today; the others remain to be explored. The legend doesn’t track his earlier progress from Shandong—however did we manage before satnav?!].

At Wayaokou (Tianzhen county) there was a heavy downpour; he rode on through Zhendagou 镇大沟 (?), Zhenmenbu*, and Xujiayuan*, where he rested his horse (yinma 飲馬). Continuing his journey south, he rested his horse again at Liujiaquan, then at Lower Liangyuan* at midday, then on to Tailiang 太梁 (?) [which, said Yuan Xiwen, still had a decrepit old temple to him], to Lower Shenjing (?), and one other village which escaped me.

Throughout Dragon Hu’s progress, all the places he passed through were beset by hailstones. The Heavenly God (Tianshen) was angry, and made him pay a forfeit. So Dragon Hu pinched three ears of wheat into the shape of a shuttle, creating what is now buckwheat…

There’s clearly a lot more fieldwork to be done here—but how exciting it may be for someone to pursue!

Towards a modern history of the temple
Yuan Xiwen recalled the village’s last rain procession, and temple fair, before Liberation. In the 7th moon of 1947 some three hundred villagers went on procession to the Xujiayuan temple, with big drums, gujiang shawm bands, and banners bearing the characters “Silence!” (sujing 肅靜), both there and back. From 1st to 3rd they stayed at Xujiayuan, returning on the 4th, holding their own temple fair from 5th to 7th.

The temple only had around a dozen mu of land; it was common land, not “owned”, and anyway there were no resident clerics, only one shabby temple keeper. This was surely typical—far from the great temple estates further south.

As collectivization escalated, the temple buildings were taken over by the Supply and Marketing Co-op (Gongxiao she 供销社). The god statues were taken away in 1956, to a little shrine in between the Lower and Upper villages; people still worshipped surreptitiously before them. The temple was only assaulted in 1966 at the opening of the Cultural Revolution; the murals were further damaged while it was used as a classroom. It was not until 1987 that Yuan Xiwen was able to lead the first temple fair there after the revival.

The modern religious history of this and other villages is closely related to the fates of sectarian groups. Though village temples were public sites, they made a natural base for sects like the Way of Yellow Heaven and the Way of Nine Palaces. [4] By the 1940s Lower Liangyuan was a hotbed of such groups. After the Yiguan dao sect was introduced to Yanggao in the 1940s, 200 of the 240 households in Lower Liangyuan are said to have belonged. While the villagers’ more public religious activities were somewhat separate, the sectarian persecutions of the early 1950s inevitably affected their spirits. Still, the sects survived underground until reviving along with more public ritual behaviour from the 1980s.

I should add that (as far as I know) there is no separate “cult” of sectarians worshipping Elder Hu, nor  any scriptures to him.

March 2018
Over the years I’ve often passed by the temple—for instance when the Treasuries are burned before it during funerals (my film, from 1.03.56). But it’s been ages since I took a close look at the interior, so Li Manshan calls up the wonderful Yuan Xiwen and we stroll over there. They’re in the middle of a meeting of the clansmen—his younger brother is there. I’d have learned more about the temple images if Yuan had come to the temple with us, but he’s too busy with his family. Later Li Manshan tells me the temple committee had recently lost the temple’s old divination list, [5] and how rumours flew around about an inside job—until they found it again.

XLY list main

Divination list, 1882 (Guangxu 8th year).

The villagers don’t seem to know of any surviving steles—though after our discoveries in the Upper village, there may still be room for exploration in nearby ditches.

The temple has belatedly been taken under the wings of the county Bureau of Cultural Preservation, and (judging from my 2003 photos) some of its old murals seem to have been retouched. Though they clearly date from the late Qing (not the Ming, as the temple minders airily claimed), their beauty is rare in Yanggao villages—by contrast with the amazing wealth of such murals in nearby Yuxian.

XLY 03 outside

The front complex during the 7th-moon temple fair, 2003.


XLY temple exterior

March 2018.

The interior complex
Inside the temple the main complex facing south onto the courtyard now has two rooms: a central hall to the Dragon Kings, and an east room to Elder Hu.

Rear block from courtyard

View of main rooms from courtyard.

The main altar of the central hall has statues of six dragon gods before a mural of the Jade Mother of the Five Dragons (Yulong shengmu 玉龍聖母):

Rear central room central gods

Central hall, 2018.


XLY Rear central mural 2003

Jade Mother of the Five Dragons, 2003.

On the rear wall, to the west and east of these central images, are further murals to the mythical emperors Yao, Shun, and Yu:

Elder Hu https://stephenjones.blog/2018/04/20/elder-hu/

My 2003 photos of the above:

Further murals adorn the side walls—for the River God (heshen 河神) to the west, Efficacious Immortal (lingxian 靈仙) to the east (I think):

Rear hall central west wall

Central hall, mural on west side wall.

To the east of this central hall is the room to Hutu (photo at top of article). To one side of the main altar is a small portable statuette for processions, carried in a palanquin that rests by the west wall:

The side walls bear murals depicting the progress of Hutu through his domain:

Hutu west wall mural

Outside, to the west of the rear complex an old pillar capital survives (for much, much more, cf. Hannibal’s photos from nearby Hunyuan, and Yangyuan):

Rear block exterior west carving

The front complex
At the main entrance of the complex is a central room to Śakyamuni, flanked by his attendants Mañjuśrī (Wenshu) and Samantabhadra (Puxian). To its west is a room to Dizang and the Ten Kings:

Dizang statues

The west and east side walls bear Ten Kings murals repainted since the 1980s—here are two details:

Dizang west wall Kings

Dizang east wall murals

For even more recent images from Hannibal Taubes, see here.

* * *

But in the end I want to return to real human beings. As disembodied “cultural relics” these images may have no particular artistic merit; however numinous they may be, they’re still silent and static. In between the common fates of falling apart or becoming museums, temples are for living people, for interaction under changing social conditions; their gatherings are full of life, “hot and noisy“.

I can’t help thinking back to August 1992, my second visit to Li Manshan’s father the great Li Qing, when I even attended a funeral he led at Lower Liangyuan—alas, I had only just missed the village’s 7th-moon temple fair! Li Qing told me that two Daoist bands took part (later the temple committee only invited one). All his colleagues, with whom he had been performing rituals since the 1930s, would have taken part, like Li Yuanmao, Li Zengguang, Kang Ren, and so on.

After the 1980s’ revival I suspect they didn’t restore a fuller sequence of the jiao 醮 Offering, for whose segments Li Qing had recently recopied ritual manuals (I doubt they chanted any of the jing scriptures, for instance)—but still, their ritual programme may have been rather more complex than it later became (my book, pp.237–43). For Hoisting the Pennant, did they sing the hymn Yuyin 玉音 at the central pole? And how I would have loved to witness their Communicating the Lanterns; by the time I attended it at the temple fair in 2003, Li Qing was no more, and his pupils were less than familiar with the ritual.

XLY yangfan 03

7th-moon temple fair 2003, Hoisting the Pennant: the final chase. Front left, on nao cymbals: Erqing, shortly before he was lured away to become a migrant labourer. Photo: Wu Fan.

* * *

So this little introduction to Elder Hu gives you an idea of what we were up to before our brief yet charming encounter with the local constabulary on the walk home to the Upper village.

[1] Part of an extraordinary series that also includes

  • “Les Temples Villageois de la Region au Sud-est de Ta-t’ong (Chansi Nord), leurs Inscriptions et leur Histoire”, Folklore Studies 4 (Beijing 1945), pp.161–212.
  • with Li Shih-yü and Chang Chi-wen, “Temples and history of Wan-ch’üan (Chahar); the geographical method applied to folklore”, Monumenta Serica 13 (1948), pp.209–316 (for Hutu, see pp.272–274).
  • with Li Shih-yü and Chang Chi-wen, “Rural temples around Hsüan-Hua (South Chahar), their iconography and their history”, Folklore studies 10.1 (1951), pp.1–116.
  • with Li Shih-yü and Wang Fu-shih, The sanctuaries in a north-China city: a complete survey of the cultic buildings in the city of Hsuan-hua (Chahar) (Mélanges Chinois et Bouddhiques vol. 26), Bruxelles: Institut Belge des Hautes Études Chinoises, 1995 (for Hutu, see pp.7–9, 70­–73, 109–10).

[2] Ritual and music of north China: shawm bands in Shanxi, pp.73–84; Daoist priests of the Li family, pp.49–50; Wu Fan provides further detail (Yinyang, gujiang, pp.61–71, 150–59).

[3] Yuan Xiwen said it was in Shanyin county, which it isn’t now—but anyway, judging by the logic of the route, and the limited radius of the cult, not the county considerably further south.

[4] See Yanggao xianzhi, pp.610–15; Zhao Jiazhu, Zhongguo huidaomen shiliao jicheng, pp.159–62. The Yiguan dao was a particular scapegoat; though in some respects inquisitors were quite meticulous, I suspect the name served as an umbrella term, a rallying-call for persecution. The campaigns of the early 1950s are a growing theme of research.

[5] Cf. Wu Fan, Yinyang, gujiang, pp.280–85.

Zhihua temple group in London!

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ZHS BM

Following the 2014 performance of the Zhihua temple group at the British Museum, I’m looking forward to their repeat visit this coming Monday! I’ve just added it to the events calendar in the sidebar.

In addition to the haunting shengguan wind ensemble, we’ve now incorporated vocal liturgy as well as percussion items with large cymbals into the programme, to give a flavour of the whole ritual soundscape.

Do try and come along, both to the concert and the chat beforehand. For more on the programme, and a list of sources, see here.

ZHS 1992

The Qujiaying recruits, and me, learning from former monk Benxing, summer 1992.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trading classics

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I heard these two stories independently, one in England, one in Italy, but they belong to the same family [like we do—note for the UKIPs].

A beggar waits at the lights every day for cars to stop so he can ask drivers to spare some change. When a chauffeured Rolls Royce purrs to a halt, he shuffles over and taps on the rear window. As the monocled boss presses a button, the window winds down silently; taking a scornful glance at the beggar, he remarks,

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be—William Shakespeare.”

He winds up the window and the car glides off, leaving the beggar disgruntled.

Same thing next day—he spots the Rolls Royce again, and shuffles over. As the boss wearily winds down his window, the beggar responds suavely,

“Cunt—D.H. Lawrence.”

I now find this was recounted by the great George Mikes in English humour for beginners (1980).

And here’s a variant from Mantua—birthplace of Virgil, need I add:

There’s this little guy in his clapped-out old Fiat Cinquecento, putting his foot down on a dual carriageway in town to try and beat a gleaming Mercedes. Indeed he clatters up to the lights ahead, but as he frantically revs up there the Mercedes glides up smoothly alongside. The posh driver glances over at the sweating pleb and observes suavely,

“Chi va piano, va sano e va lontano—Esopo.”
[The race is not to the swift—Aesop]*

As the lights turn green, the Mercedes purrs off and the little guy in his Fiat chugs along in hot pursuit. Putting his foot down again he does manage to overtake, but once more he has to screech to a halt at the next red light, and the Mercedes glides up again. This time the Fiat driver leans over and shouts,

“La vaca t’ha fat!—Virgilio.”
[You were made by a cow!—Virgil]

The different punchlines (the latter in Mantuan dialect, note) and their imputed sources each have their distinctive charm. Another one to file under International Cultural Exchange…

*Pedant’s corner: This is the driver’s attribution, of course: it does indeed resemble Aesop’s tale of the tortoise and the hare, but it’s actually an unattributed proverb zzzzz.

Posted from Berlin. But not so you’d know.

At home with a master Daoist

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As weird holidays go, this is pretty weird…

To supplement my various articles on particular themes (a ghost village, a funeral, the murals of Artisan the Sixth, Elder Hu, In search of temples, and so on), this diary records the more domestic side of my recent trip chez Li Manshan—like my notes on our French tour last May, the kind of thing one hardly finds in inscrutable accounts of hallowed Daoist ritual.

As I land in Beijing, pausing only to catch up with my wonderful hosts Matt and Dom and to buy a SIM card, I take the midnight train to Yanggao—smashing my personal best time for Fastest Ever Escape From Beijing. You may like to begin by reading my updated description of my first couple of days there.

Catching up
Despite improved transport and smartphones, progress seems superficial. This is still another world from the skyscrapers and Party congresses touted by the international media. Like anywhere else in the world, indeed. And it’s hard to see evidence of greater repression—people are well used to it.

Li Manshan’s home village of Upper Liangyuan still has some over six hundred dwellers, which counts as a lot round here; but it seems forlorn, stagnant. It’s ever clearer that the rural population is “left behind”—elderly people sitting outside awaiting their turn. Litter remains an intractable problem, blighting what might almost be an idyllic landscape.

Having been worked off his feet for many years, now that Li Manshan is in his 70s he’s giving way to Li Bin, who’s busier than ever. Li Bin has three funerals to do today, one a solo attendance at the grave (“smashing the bowl”, “without scriptures”) for a Catholic family, who still need the procedures for the date and siting of the burial. On the 17th (or rather the 2nd, chu’er—I soon get used to the lunar calendar) he has to smash two more bowls.

So now Li Manshan only works nearby—decorating coffins, doing grave-sitings and visits to determine the date for burials, as well as the occasional funeral. Soon after I arrive he zooms off on his motor-bike to Yangguantun to decorate a coffin. I’m happy to try and sleep off my journey from London.

doggie

Visitors are always announced by a barking dog, like a doorbell. The Lis have a new doggie, rarely off its tether by its kennel in the courtyard. It’s frozen. When I tell Li Manshan’s wife (busy making funerary headgear) about our poncey UK winter gilets for dogs, she shrugs, “He’s fine, he’s got fur ain’t ‘e?!”

LMS wife sewing

Li Manshan’s (only) disciple Wang Ding returns from a funeral to unload the decorations for the soul hall, now improved and more convenient. Renting out this equipment to funeral families is another source of income for Li Manshan. Giving Wang Ding a hand, I tell him I wrote a little post about him after our little French tour last year; he hasn’t got internet, so he will look at my blog at Golden Noble’s place. He can speak pretty good Yangpu, but even after all these years I find their dialect as tough as ever.

I hardly bother to wear my glasses any more—like clarinetist Jack Brymer, who when rehearsing a contemporary piece would wear his for the first five minutes, and then only keep them on if he thought it was worth it…

The domestic routine
Li Manshan’s first tasks on rising are to fold the bedding, take out the chamber pot, fetch kindling for the kitchen stove and our little stove in the west room, and boil water. He does his bit with the housework: sweeping, mopping, stoking the stove, preparing water—though he leaves most of the cooking to his wife. The little coal stove is cute and effective, but mafan. At last I learn that the central foyer is called tangdi 堂地. Both living rooms are equipped with a low wooden table, actually rather handsome but covered in plastic, to place on the kang, used for meals and writing. Plastic rules OK—and a jolly good thing too.

meal

Our diet consists mainly of baozi dumplings, [1] noodles, crêpes, mushrooms, eggs, bits of meat, meatballs, doufu, cabbage, nuts. Sometimes our meals evoke the classic film Yellow Earth—indelible image of the fieldworker overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of poverty and traditional culture. But we giggle a lot too.

Again Li Manshan stresses how much he prefers country life. I soon get used again to its basic routines, not least visits to the latrine in the southwest corner of the courtyard—taking paper (The Thoughts of Uncle Xi would be useful, but it’s not to hand/arse), and a torch if dark, to balance on a ledge; adjusting trousers, squatting (not getting any easier)…

Amazingly, for my visit in autumn 2013 Li Manshan modified his old latrine, building a little roofed pier (so to speak) over a floor on pillars projecting from the spacious pit. Like the world, it was built in seven days. After designing it on paper, he borrowed 230 bricks, as well as stone slabs, tiles, and so on, from neighbours; then he got down and dirty over a week at the height of summer. I felt embarrassed, but he pointed out that it would be good for them too.

We refer to it as The London Embassy (Lundun dashiguan, pronounced like “Taking turns to squat in the big shithouse”). The great Beijing cultural pundit Tian Qing even bestowed his illustrious calligraphy on Li Manshan, albeit in the more polite version.

So (thanks to me) the latrine is pretty comfortable, but it makes a suitable image to imagine the poverty of the olden days (including the Maoist era—a sobering contrast with the bright propaganda posters of the time): the old and infirm trudging to an open pit in the snow, with no paper, no sanitary products, no torches in the dark.

I’m so pampered, compared to Li Manshan’s lifetime “enduring suffering” (shouku 受苦). From my book (pp.132–3):

Shoulders unable to carry, hands unable to grasp, soft and sensitive skin…

Coming across this phrase in 2013 as I made inept attempts to help Li Manshan with the autumn harvest, I thought it might have been coined to parody my efforts. Rather, it’s a standard expression used to describe the travails of urban “educated youth” in performing physical labour after being sent down from the cities to the countryside in the Cultural Revolution to “learn from the peasants”. The experience was a rude shock for such groups all over China; brought up in relatively comfortable urban schools to believe in the benefits of socialism, and often protected from understanding the tribulations of their own parents, they were now confronted not just by the harshness of physical labour, but by medieval poverty.

Li Manshan is thrilled with my little gift of a set of UK coins, working out which is which. He proudly offers me a black banana, white and tasty on the inside, but decides to eat it himself; we have a giggle over glossy modernized bananas (cf. “banana republic, but minus the bananas”). His wife passes the time by playing “matching pairs”, a kind of dominoes. A female friend of hers drops by for a chat. They’re all very humorous, beneath a somewhat dour exterior. Li Manshan and his wife seem like counsellors.

In reply to villagers’ curious enquiries about how many kids I have, Li Manshan is now in the habit of replying wu, which they hear as “five” 五 but in his creative head means “none” 无. This surprisingly shuts them up—I worry about having to embroider stories about their careers, my numerous grandkids, and so on, but no. Anyway, Li Manshan would be up for this. He observes that since my surname is Zhong 钟 (Clock), my son might be named Biao 表 (watch).

We share a nice supper of noodles, and more dumplings. The CCTV evening news is on as wallpaper [Breaking news! CCP holds meeting! Xi Jinping still in power! Old gits in suits dead bored!]. It’s ignored until the weather forecast comes on, but Li Manshan loves the nature programmes.

“Wotcha doing when you get back to Beijing?”, he goes.
“I’m going to be giving lectures (jiangke)…”
His local dialect, or his lively mind, instantly converts this to jieka “stammering”:
“Old Jonesy, you don’t have to go back to Beijing to stammer—you can just keep on stammering away here!”

I manage both.

Writing
Though Li Manshan is doing fewer funerals these days, he has always got ritual paperwork to do—whether it’s writing talismans, shaping paper for funerary artefacts, or writing mottos for the soul hall (our film, from 10.41;  Daoist priests of the Li family, pp.194–200).

He’s bought big reams of thick paper from Yangyuan county. He recalls that when Li Qing recopied the ritual manuals in the early 1980s, mazhi hemp paper was available from the Supply and Marketing Co-op.

One day our siesta is disturbed by a group coming to ask Li Manshan to “determine the date”. After seeing them off he spends the rest of the afternoon writing several dozen sets of four-character funerary diaolian mottos for the soul hall (my film, from 10.43)—enough for a couple of months. Again he recalls how Li Qing used to write them in the scripture hall for each particular funeral. I devise a new game: arranging the squares in a different order to make a popular phrase or saying. For starters, how about 東方妙，西方福 (“oriental mysticism is all very well, but things are kinda cushy over here”).

A trip into town
One morning we call up the wonderful Li Jin to arrange a nice quiet lunch in town, just the three of us. Li Manshan’s wife chooses a posh shirt and jacket for him.

In 1953, when he was 8 sui, Li Manshan walked into town with his auntie to see the big xiangong parade there. Now we walk up to the main road to catch the No.2 bus into town; it arrives soon, a mere 3 kuai each, taking under half an hour—fun, and good to be independent. I go to have my head shaved at my favourite barbershop, and we meet up with Li Jin at Li Bin’s funeral shop. But then Li Manshan’s (much) younger brother Third Tiger shows up too, and he drives us in his posh car to a posh restaurant (attached to a posh hotel) up a little hutong, with no sign (which is always a good, um, sign)—we’re the only customers. But then entrepreneur Ye Lin (another old mate, formerly head of the Bureau of Culture) arrives too, and Li Bin; so altogether it’s less of a quiet meal than I hoped.

lunch LJ LB LMS

lunch Sanhu

Third Tiger has brought a case of Chilean 2011 Cabernet Sauvignon from Central Valley, a gift from a friend. We polish it off, though later the ganbei toasting seems a bit unsuitable…

Third Tiger had been looking forward to early retirement from his important state job—even claiming in my film (from 55.23) that he’d like to get back to Daoist ritual—but it won’t be happening any time soon. He’s done well as a Party cadre, his only flaw being that he can’t really hold his drink—this should surely be the first question on the application form:

How much baijiu liquor can you knock back before you fall over?

Inevitably Third Tiger foots the bill. I remind my companions of the donkey joke—I’m inadvertently “cadging a free meal wherever I go” again…

After lunch, Li Bin takes us on a fruitless visit to the Cultural Preservation Bureau to learn that the compilation of Yanggao temple steles is still not published. Then we drop in on a shop up the road to sort out a standoff between my camera and my Mac; the guy is even more pissed than me, but does a fine job. We exchange cigarettes, and he refuses any money.

Li Bin is happy to take us home to Upper Liangyuan, and on the way we drop in on the grandson of the great Li Peisen at his funeral shop, to see if he can show us the three manuals not in Li Qing’s collection, which I didn’t copy. He and his wife seem affable, but he can’t find them. It’s hard to know if he’s being cagey: he does show Li Manshan Li Peisen’s thick Yuqie yankou volume, so maybe he really can’t find the others. I ask him, without much hope, to call Li Bin if he does find them. Li Manshan cares more about this than I do.

I’ve also been wondering if the related Wang lineage in Baideng has any ritual manuals we haven’t seen, but when Li Manshan calls up Wang Fei there, he says they have no more than him.

More Heritage flapdoodle
Next to the main sign above his funerary shop, Li Bin has optimistically put up a new sign: “Hengshan Daoist Music, Training Base”.

HSDYT shop placard

This pie-in-the-sky still has precisely no takers, but Li Bin remains involved in a mysterious project with the county Bureau of Culture. We all laugh at the emptiness of the title—but it acts like a protective talisman, a kind of insurance policy.

Pacing the Void: Old Lord Li gets online
Like me, Li Manshan got his first smartphone after returning from France last year. He can read WeChat messages, but hasn’t cared to try and get online—yet. I think he can do it. Actually, WeChat doesn’t seem such a big deal here—sure, the younger people are on it, but the main way of communicating is just phoning. So there.

Getting online with my Mac thanks to the wifi of Li Manshan’s cool shepherd neighbour, I show him the charming TV version of The Dream of the Red Chamber with child actors. He loved reading the novel in the 1980s.

I give him a guided tour of my blog, starting with the posts I wrote about our French tour last year (e.g. here), my tribute to his carpentry skills, and the trio on Women of Yanggao (starting here). We look further at the ritual paintings in Li Peisen’s collection, which leads us to seek murals by Artisan the Sixth.

Then I introduce him to my other world, telling him about Yuan Quanyou, Hildi, and the 80th-birthday party for the great Stephan Feuchtwang where Rowan and I played Bach on erhu and sanxian—after listening to the recording there (now also sounding a bit crap), I try to attone by playing him Sun Huang’s astounding Saint-Saens (or Sage Mulberry, as he’s known in China), but he’s underwhelmed—the conservatoire erhu is of even less relevance to him than to me. And he’s none too clear about the qin zither, despite painting it regularly on coffins (my film, from 18.30).

LMS huacai

Li Manshan decorates a coffin, 2013. Top: qin zither.

I tell him again about the adorable crazy Natasha, showing him my tribute to her—it was he who helped me regain the will to live after her death in 2013.

Over the next few days Old Lord Li becomes ever more scholarly, devouring the new book on the modern history of the county (only up to 1949, alas!), the gazetteer, and all the online stuff I show him. (You may note that he has reverted to his old hat—was the baseball cap he wore in France a haute-couture choice to impress the laowai?!)

He gets into Ming reign-periods online. I show him the Baidu article on the 1449 Tumu incident (very near Yanggao), making the link with the disgraced palace eunuch Wang Zhen and the Zhihua temple. As he gets hooked on some pre-Tang story in the county gazetteer, I turn the tables on him, commenting “I dunno about that, I wasn’t even born then!”

As he gets used to scrolling on my Mac keypad, I show him the blurb for the Chinese introduction to the already-voluminous Daojiao yishi congshu series, which he reads carefully. When I show him Hannibal Taubes’ amazing site, he thinks that Yanggao temple murals are not so well preserved as those of Yuxian—but I suspect it could also be that Hannibal is really on the case.

I tell Li Manshan of the useful saying “When the rites are lost, seek throughout the countryside”, which is always a succinct way of explaining what we’re doing traipsing around poor villages.

On my blog he’s interested to pore over ritual manuals from other areas. I find an online text for the pseudo-Sanskrit mantra Pu’an zhou, which they never sang, only played on shengguan. When we listen to my recording of Ma yulang with the Gaoluo ritual association (playlist # 10, with commentary here), he’s shocked at how crap they are! I explain that they’re an amateur group, not like our occupational Daoists working together daily. But he’s curious to learn if the melody is similar to their version, a question I haven’t yet addressed.

We discuss the Kangxi yun section in the hymn volume that Li Qing recopied in 1980—I’ve often wondered what it’s doing there, as part of a series of shuowen solo recitations formerly used for the shanggong Presenting Offerings ritual segment. It was actually written not by the Kangxi emperor but by his father Shunzhi. The version copied by Li Qing is a variant.

Kangxi yunAs we read up further, we now speculate that since Kangxi saw the poem on a visit to Wutaishan, and as Buddhist ritual manuals do contain poems, it could have got into one such manual there; spreading further north, it might thence have got into Daoist manuals too—which, after all, contain plenty of Buddhist elements (my book, e.g. p.226).

I wonder if the title Kangxi yun is distinctive to the Li family. If Li Fu copied it from the manuals of his master in Jinjiazhuang, it wouldn’t have been at all old when it was copied by the Zhang family Daoists there. More work for a historian there… Li Manshan buries himself in the Baidu articles on Shunzhi’s mother and Nurhaci.

He knows nothing of Trump, Syria, or the Ukraine famine. While envying him his blissful ignorance, I embark on a political education session; he reads avidly when I show him the relevant Baidu articles. The article on the Ukraine famine looks rather good—though one can hardly expect Baidu to compare it to the Chinese famine following the Great Leap Backward.

After returning from a brief trip to Waterdrop 滴滴水 village with Li Bin, I check the 1948 and 1990 population statistics (first two columns below) in the county gazetteer, but they seem incongruous. Old Lord Li inspects the table for the whole of Zhangguantun district and deftly corrects them. Clever guy!

renkou edits

Born at a different time in another place, Li Manshan might have become a university professor.

2nd moon 28th
As yet another idée fixe in Airplane goes, “Looks like I picked the wrong day to” get my head shaved—it’s really rather cold. Li Manshan kept reading till late last night. We stay home for a study day. He fields another “determining the date” request by phone.

Before midday a couple comes for a prescription about her illness. They’ve come all the way from Datong county, learning of his reputation on the grapevine. Sure, people may also consult mediums, and of course hospitals—the latter terribly expensive, but as Li Manshan observes, their best bet.

LMS krz

The mood is serious as ever when the wife throws the coins and Li Manshan writes down the results. They watch him work it all out, in silence; then she asks questions, the conversation deepening. Li Manshan feels his role (often) is to console them, to lend moral support. As he later tells me, in fact the prescription looks ominous, and mostly he trusts the coins, but he can’t tell them “You’ve had it”, can he? They persuade the couple to stay for lunch (baozi dumplings, cabbage and doufu, onions), washed down at the end with water from the pot. It’s a friendly and sincere scene. They only paid him with five cigarettes, and Li Manshan was fine with that.

Li Manshan’s siesta is devoted to further reading, and he’s only just nodded off when another guy comes for a prescription.

Another great supper: thick-sliced noodles with eggs, dunking meatballs in the broth. Li Manshan glances over at the news, nudging me—some Party bigwig is being interviewed, the caption reading:

中国人大代表 Zhongguo Renda daibiao
Representative of the Chinese People’s Congress,

which he brilliantly converts from three binomes into

中国人，大代表 Zhongguoren dadabiao
Chinese bloke, big cheese.

We fall about laughing. I just love the way this man’s mind works! The following week I’m showing my film at People’s University in Beijing, which is also abbreviated as Renda—so I manage to press the expression into service there.

I clean my teeth in the courtyard, enjoying using my fancy electric Rabbits Don’t Shit, sorry I mean toothbrush (its first outing in China). Since Li Manshan always shoves a fag in my gob as soon as I get back anyway, I beat him to the draw. Whenever I spot an unfamiliar brand, I ask him, “Landlord? Poor peasant?”

3rd moon 1st (chuyi)—which, I note guiltily, is Saturday.

courtyard in snow

Right: sunflower stalks stored for use in making funerary treasuries.

OOH it’s snowing! I’ve been hoping to go in search of more Daoists to Yingxian county with Li Bin and bright young Taiyuan ethnographer Liu Yan, but my carefully laid plans come to nought; the motorways are closed. Li Manshan sweeps the pathway to the latrine, then zooms off back to Yangguantun to smash the bowl in a simple burial for the poor family there. When he decorated the coffin on 2nd moon 25th it was the fourth (not third) day after the death. He explains that there’s no difference between rich and poor in determining the date: it may turn out that poor families also have to store the coffin for over twenty days.

I discreetly perform much-needed ablutions. Li Manshan comes home frozen, unable to see through the snowstorm on his motor-bike. Gradually it eases up.

I show him my photos of the funeral I attended yesterday. He’s always been a laissez-faire leader, but even he draws the line at Wu Mei playing drum while on his mobile. We get a riff going:

“Maybe he was following the drum patterns online?!” he jokes.
“Oh yeah, right—I always felt sorry the so-called Hengshan Daoist Music Ensemble because they were too poor to afford music stands, but now they can read from their mobiles! You’re dead keen on ‘development’, aren’t you?!”—referencing the rose-tinted cliché common in online articles about him.
“Naughty disciple!”
“Naughty master! 青出于蓝。。。”

Wang Ding turns up on his dinky sanlun truck and we help him unload more altar decorations into the south room of the courtyard, redecorated as the village Training Base of the so-called Hengshan Daoist Music Ensemble—and thus, like its town counterpart, entirely unused.

3rd moon 2nd (Sunday, known as libai ba, eighth day of the week, as on their electronic wall-clock)
Foggy at first, gradually the sun comes out. For the first time Li Manshan worries about his cough, and resolves to quit smoking—which, impressively, he manages for nearly a whole hour. Actually he’s not smoking as much as in the old days when he was busy doing funerals with the band.

Having taken a siesta after our fascinating excursion to find murals by Artisan the Sixth, I go outside to clean my teeth, but yet again my oral hygiene is thwarted by the arrival of “Fag Devil” Li Sheng, who insistently shoves another fag in my gob. Typical…

I keep up with Tweety McTangerine’s latest lunacies by consulting the Guardian online. But I dissolve in fits of laughter at Stewart Lee’s latest offering there.

3rd moon 3rd
At 7am a guy comes to discuss some work. At 8.20 the formidable wife of an old friend of Li Qing’s comes to moan about her son’s marital problems. Li Manshan is courteous, but considers her “crazy”. I understand virtually nothing, but eventually she makes an effort with me as she pours out her grievances, slapping me regularly on the arm. Village poverty and problems seem intractable, despite advances and propaganda. The only solution touted is thorough urbanization, bringing its own worrying prospects.

Li Manshan isn’t feeling too well, but he takes a break from making paper artefacts to accompany me on a visit to the temple to Elder Hu in the Lower village.

3rd moon 4th
On our last day together, after returning from an intriguing trip to Jinjiazhuang, Old Lord Li suddenly thinks of the slow hymn Eternal Homage (Yong guiyi 永皈依), and we have a nice session on it. It’s one of his favourites, but they rarely use it, and now he can’t remember the opening. He can’t read cipher notation, only gongche solfeggio, so he gets me to sing it from Li Qing’s cipher-notation score. Their more recent green volume has gongche solfeggio underneath too, so he can just about follow it once I get him going.

Yong guiyi textSo Li Manshan gets to record me singing a piece I barely know, but I never get to record him. Anyway he always sets off from a really low pitch, so the result tends to sound a bit like Tibetan chanting. When the band sings a cappella hymns for funerals, Golden Noble has a good ear for starting off on a pitch suitable for the range.

In the version they learned, the first section ends after Fo you Niepan shi 佛有涅槃时. Li Qing’s cipher-notation score isn’t divided into sections, but their more recent green volume is. The latter uses the degree shang 上 as do—including the shengguan suites, which I find strange. Li Manshan is fine once he gets through the opening phrase.

Yong guiyi jianpu

We take a siesta before my journey back to Beijing, but soon wake up. Absurdly, he now asks me to transpose Li Qing’s cipher-notation score of the major shengguan melody Yaozhang into gongche solfeggio. Without thinking to consult the precious photos of Li Derong’s old score (which Li Manshan no longer has) I wrongly assume that it would use the early shengguan system with he 合 as do, but hey. After singing it for him as he records it on his phone, I explain to him that he’ll need earphones to play it back…

Li Bin has another busy day today, having to do two reburials as well as decorating a coffin, so I’ll take a cab to the station. This no longer feels so distant. Li Manshan insists on coming along to see me off, and we leave before 4, dropping his wife off at Baideng township for a hairdo. He refuses to let me pay for the cab. My total expenses for nine inspiring days in Yanggao came to 24 kuai—just over £2.

We take the ring road, passing loads of new high-rises, and bid each other a fond farewell. The station is virtually empty, and the train isn’t busy either.

Back in Beijing, I feel like a country bumpkin. Showing my film three times over the next week, I’m happy to make Li Manshan a big star there. After the last screening I call him up to report, and to wish him well before I go back to London.

[1] As in the poseur’s celebrated line (Fieldworkers’ joke manual No.37), useful when someone asks if you know any classical Chinese:

[smugly] “I studied the Four Classics and Five Scriptures—Confucius, Mencius, various dumpling shapes, I’ve studied them all!”
Wo xuedeshi sishu wujing—Kongzi Mengzi baozi jiaozi, dou xueguole!
我学的是四书五经。孔子孟子包子饺子，都学过了！

Oh well, it’s funny in Chinese—Trust Me I’m a Doctor (there goes another 200 kuai).
Similar story here!

Rectifying names: an update

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I’ve just made an update (click here) to my rant about the so-called “Hengshan [sic] Daoist Music [sic] Ensemble [sic]”, the inadvertently comic/tragic title with which the Li family Daoists have been lumbered in the Chinese media and the Intangible Cultural Heritage flummery.

As a cautionary tale, I’ve now translated a poster (happily gathering dust) entitled “Thirteenth Five-Year Guideline for the Innovation and Development of Hengshan Daoist Music”—entirely alien to the culture to which Daoist ritual belongs.

HSDYT rules

Along with Edible, intangible, dodgy, a good starting point to explore my many posts querying the whole ICH system…

Upcoming film screening in Berlin!

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Hot on the heels of three stimulating showings in Beijing of my film Li Manshan: portrait of a folk Daoist, I’ve just added details to the Calendar (in sidebar) of the upcoming Berlin Konfuzius Institut screening on 19th April, moderated by none other than the celebrated Ian Johnson—whose own book (which he will be introducing there on the 16th) contains vignettes on the Li family.

These events are always lively—do spread the word!

Berlin film

In search of temples—and another Daoist lineage

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* This is the latest in a series of vignettes (starting here) from my recent stay with
the wonderful Li Manshan (for similar excursions, see here and here) *

Jinzhuang LWM

“Nothing to see here—move along please.”

The still-extant main gateway, main hall, and music tower date from the Ming and Qing, occupying 800 square metres. The main hall is three rooms wide, two rooms deep, with single eaves and a “hard-mountain” vaulted roof 单檐硬山顶. Most of the murals have been covered over in mud, and some are exposed to the elements.

That’s the enticing account in the 1993 Yanggao county gazetteer article on the Dragon King temple (Longwang miao) of Jinjiazhuang village, west of Li Manshan’s home in Upper Liangyuan. [1] Even if the temple was now in poor repair, I was keen to see it. Besides, I’ve always meant to make a pilgrimage to this village, where Li Manshan’s ancestor Li Fu began learning Daoist ritual in the 18th century (see Daoist priests of the Li family, pp.71–3).

Over the years, whenever I ask Li Manshan about the temple, he merely shrugs—nothing left there, he says (and he should know). Still, now that he’s getting ever deeper into local history, I finally show him the passage in the gazetteer, and he quite sees why I’m curious, deciding that we should make a trip over to Jinjiazhuang the next day.

On my last morning with Li Manshan he is already up and busy when I wake at 6. After breakfast he fields yet another call asking him for a burial date (my book, pp.186–9), and then he asks his nice cab-driving neighbour to take us over to Jinjiazhuang in his posh new car, bought last year. Unusually, our driver can even talk standard Chinese—though when he and Li Manshan talk among themselves it might as well be Swahili.

Heading northwest, we reach Jinjiazhuang soon after passing under an elevated section of the new high-speed train line. First we check out the Temple to the Perfect Warrior (Zhenwu miao)—small but perfectly formed, in a typical elevated position (cf. Hannibal Taubes’s photo from nearby Yuxian) in what is now the middle of the village. [2]

Jinzhuang ZWM

A friendly woman fetches the keys for us to take a look inside. The interior has recently-made statues and murals, and seems to be “in use”—though of course, such temples are too small to hold temple fairs.

(left) central altar: The Perfect Warrior flanked by attendants;
(right) mural on the east wall, with the Great Lords of the Three Primes.

This affords me scant consolation for finding not the slightest trace of the famous Dragon King Temple; nor, indeed, of the Temple to the Perfect Warrior in Upper Liangyuan (cf. Li Manshan’s map of his village, and our film, from 8.18).

SLY ZWM site

Another reason why Hannibal Taubes is jolly clever: derelict site of the Temple to the Perfect Warrior in Upper Liangyuan. My photo, 2018.

Then to the site of the celebrated Dragon King Temple, which now turns out to be a drab concrete plaza (see photo at top of page). Even more distressingly, the temple was still standing until twenty years ago; so at least the county gazetteer wasn’t making it up. We meet an old guy who recalls it, and had seen an old stele, long vanished—but he’s illiterate, so he had no idea what it said.

What I don’t get is this. OK, the temple had probably been becoming more and more decrepit for many decades, but if it merited an entry in the 1993 county gazetteer (which not even the Lower Liangyuan temple did, for instance), then why would they demolish it in 1998? By then the county authorities should even have been nominating it for preservation; but even if not, you might think the villagers themselves would see its value (whether for their own culture or—if they had a modicum of canny foresight—as a tourist attraction). But I recall how in Upper Liangyuan no-one cared much about our discovery of the two old steles there (my book, pp.46–9): as young people leave, these villages have long lacked a sense of community, and there is little concern for old buildings.

Another Daoist lineage
While we’re chatting with locals at the magnificent Ming temple—or rather, drab concrete plaza—the village yinyang Zhang Nan (b.1956) shows up, and invites us over to his clean and spacious house for a chat. He’s great; of course Li Manshan has known him for ages, and as usual gets along well with him; our driver is good company too. On our way home they comment that Zhang has a slight stammer; I was so busy stammering myself that I didn’t even notice.

Zhang Nan and LMS

Zhang Nan with Li Manshan.

The Zhang lineage moved here from Hongtong in the early Ming, like the Lis (my book, pp.70–71) and so many others all over north China. Zhang Nan knows of seven generations of yinyang before him (as ever, note the alternation of single and double given names):

  • 1st generation: Lianzhu 連珠
  • 2nd generation: Kui 奎
  • 3rd generation: Wenbing 文炳
  • 4th generation: Bi 弼
  • 5th generation: Deheng 德恆
  • 6th generation: Mei 美
  • 7th generation: Jincheng 進成
  • 8th generation: Nan 楠

Right down to his grandfather, all his forebears performed Daoist ritual, but his father only did kanrizi divination, as does Zhang Nan himself. With more time we might have elicited further names from earlier generations—brothers, cousins, and other disciples.

Assuming that Li Fu (first of nine generations in our Li family of Upper Liangyuan) would have learned ritual from a Daoist family that already had a tradition of at least a few generations, then “first-generation” Zhang Lianzhu must have had still earlier Daoist forebears. So this would make the Zhangs of Jinjiazhuang the longest Daoist lineage that we know of in Yanggao. And where did they learn?!

Though short of revelatory, our excursion to Jinjiazhuang made a good way to spend my last day with Li Manshan—not entirely a wild goose chase.

[1] The gazetteer entry appears not under Temples (miaoyu 庙宇) but under the “Ancient architecture” (gu jianzhu 古建筑) section of Cultural artefacts (wenwu 文物, pp.475–6)—a section that includes the Temple to Elder Hu at Xujiayuan but, strangely, not its sister temple at Lower Liangyuan (see The cult of Elder Hu).
[2] Cf. Willem A. Grootaers, “The hagiography of the Chinese god Chen-wu (The transmission of rural traditions in Chahar)”, Folklore studies 11.2 (1952), pp.139-181, and perceptive updates from Hannibal Taubes.