From Wang Shixiang to Craig Clunas

Photo (as below): Kossen Ho.

Having featured both Ming Maestros in my tribute to Wang Shixiang’s wife Yuan Quanyou, here’s Craig with a charming reminiscence:

Random Gatherings of the Era of Lockdown 鎖閉野獲編 , or

Collected Discourses from the Potato-Planting Studio 種薯齋叢說: An Extract

In 1983 I organised a visit to London by the great art historian and Chinese furniture scholar Wang Shixiang 王世襄 (1914–2009); I had translated a piece by him. and we had first met in Beijing in the early 1980s. The trip was done on a shoestring, and it pains me to think how spartan was the Imperial College London student hostel I booked him into, though he would never have complained—he had after all done years and years in cadre school. One of the grandest of London’s dealers in Chinese art took us to a posh lunch; it was a measure of Mr Wang’s cosmopolitan youth that he ordered cheese for afters. He ate half, and asked the waiter to wrap the rest (presumably for his breakfast, which I had not provided). As the beginnings of a sneer formed on the waiter’s face, it being that kind of restaurant, one of the grandest of London’s dealers in Chinese art gave him a very ferocious look that eloquently said, “This gentleman is my guest. I eat here often. Wrap his cheese”.

One night Mr Wang came for supper to our North London house, where our extremely skittish and semi-feral cat Lexham went straight towards him (Lexham usually shunned strangers) and settled purring in his lap; that was when I learned that “to purr” in Chinese is nianjing 念经, literally “recite the sutras”. Mr Wang also took me with him one Sunday afternoon to visit Ling Shuhua 凌叔华 (1904–90), by then an elderly lady; my memory is of a very small flat, perhaps even a basement, in somewhere like Swiss Cottage. They practised calligraphy together, and I still have the bucolic poem he wrote for me on that occasion, one of a set of verses on pig-rearing he had composed in the cadre school; it has subsequently been to Beijing and back for an exhibition of his much-admired hand. I quite failed to realise at the time just how significant a figure in modern Chinese culture Ling Shuhua was—”modernist writer and painter”, lover of Julian Bell (1908–37), correspondent of Virginia Woolf (1882–1941).

I have many things to thank Mr Wang for, including my name. We were never—unlike many people I know who studied elsewhere—given “proper” Chinese names by our teachers at the Cambridge Faculty of Oriental Studies. At Beijing Languages Institute in 1974–5 I had been Keliege (可列格 , occasionally 克列格) a simple attempt at a phonologically Chinese transcription of “Craig”. Returning to Cambridge I made myself into Ke Liege 柯列格, substituting a character that was at least a viable Chinese surname. When Wang Shixiang saw this, he said “Huh, Too ugly!” (嗯! 太难看!) and made me into Ke Lüge 柯律格, which is who I have been ever since, and what it says on the covers of the Chinese translations of my books. I can invoke Mr Wang’s authority when people query it. (It was Steve Jones who once pointed out to me that one plausible implication of the meaning of Lüge 律格 was “Tight-arsed”, which we both agreed was about right.) [1]

1] Note from SJ: see here for the diverse ramifications of my own Chinese name. For our time at Cambridge, and Craig’s early studies in China, click here. In 2014, he worked on the splendid British Museum exhibition “Ming: 50 years that changed China” (see his co-authored catalogue, and the conference proceedings), giving us the pretext to invite the musicians of the Zhihua temple for the first of two visits.

Craig’s embarrassment about the spartan conditions deemed acceptable by British hosts may strike a chord with other academics. I recall with chagrin the visit of two eminent colleagues from the Beijing Music Research Institute to the National Sound Archive in 1993 on a project to copy the precious early recordings by Yang Yinliu that they had managed to bring with them.

Like Wang Shixiang, my Chinese friends were billeted in a meagre student hostel; but surely our first lunch on this illustrious International Cultural Exchange required some kind of banquet. Instead our hosts sent out for miserable supermarket sandwiches (one each), which we munched absent-mindedly as we continued working. Again, my Chinese colleagues took such privations in good part, as I joked shamefacedly about the “waters deep, fires raging” (shuishen huore 水深火热) of the capitalist world.