1913: The first and second generation in China – Dr David Dixon Muir and family (grandmother Catherine on top row right)

1988: Second, third, fourth and fifth generations: Grandmother Catherine, mother Anne, brother Piers, wife Fumei, children Alexander and Clio

2007: Second and fifth generation: 93 year old Great Aunt Ben and daughter Clio at the Astor House Hotel, Tientsin

2008: Fourth and fifth generation: wife Hong Ying and daughter Sybil

Friday, May 24, 7:30pm

40/50rmb

The Chinese translation of Adam Williams’s novel set in China’s turbulent warlord period of the 1920s, The Emperor’s Bones, hit the number one spot on China’s biggest on-line bookseller, Dang Dang Wang’s New Fiction list. For a foreign novel in translation to become top of the charts in China is rare enough, and this is probably the first time that a foreign historical novel about China itself has achieved it. Controversially, Williams’s Chinese publisher wrote on the cover: “A period of Chinese history that no Chinese writer has ever directly faced, and now it’s been written by a foreign author…”

Is there such a thing as the ownership of a country’s history? What are we fictionalizing in historical fiction? How much do the politics or cultural mores of our own times interpret what happened before? Are there certain topics that are too close for us to see objectively and so need the perspective of an outsider? Novelists Adam Williams, Hong Ying, Chan Koonchung and Jiang Fang Zhou have all tackled China’s history in different ways through their writing. This expert panel looks at how Chinese and foreign novelists approach such a daunting task…

At a seminar and press conference held at the China Club, Beijing, today, several eminent academics, critics, writers and essayists gathered at to discuss Adam Williams’s historical novel about China, The Emperor’s Bones, published in China by Phoenix Books last week and still in the top 10 of Dang Dang Wang’s bestselling list. Williams is also believed to be the first foreign historical novelist writing about China to be published in China since Pearl Buck in the 1930s.

Among those speaking were:

• Qiu Huadong (moderating) , a poet and writer and Chief Editor of the People’s Literature Magazine
• Professor Chen Xiaoming and Professor Zhang Yiwu, professors of literature at Peking University
• Li Jianjun, professor at the Literature Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
• The polymath, Zhi An, one of the most well known critics and essayists outside academia
• Xie Xizhang, a critic and biographer who has recently written an acclaimed life of one of the top reformers in the 1920s (the period of The Emperor’s Bones)
• The novelist, Cui Manli

Attending were journalists from Beijing’s main newspapers and literary magazines. The critics’ comments were recorded and will be made the subject of articles in literary journals.

The event was attended by Joanna Burke, Cultural Minister and Director of the British Council in China.

Qian Long’s Bones

Quite pleasing to hear that for the whole day Qian Long’s Bones – the Chinese version of The Emperor’s Bones – was No 1 in the new novels category on Dang Dang Wang, China’s home grown Amazon.com. It’s just been pipped to second place, but that’s no shame because I’m being told by Chinese editor friends that very few foreign fiction writers make top ten in China. Only ones they could think of was Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Martel’s Life of Pi.

It’s early days. I’m having my first big press conference on 14th May.

The Emperor’s Bones – 乾隆的骨头

The Emperor’s Bones is now published in Chinese and is OUT NOW in bookshops all over China.

Click here to buy on Amazon.cn

If there had been a tutelary spirit of our journey through Sicily and Puglia it must have been the great Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, Frederick II, who lived from 1195 to 1250. Reigning from the age of 3, his achievements were as diverse as keeping a menagerie of exotic animals, winning a Crusade to become King of Jerusalem and writing the most authoritative book on hawking in the Middle Ages. He was brought up in cosmopolitan Palermo and his thoughts were influenced as much by Muslims as Christians. He certainly developed his love of science from his Arab teachers and all his life he was a patron of art and learning. They defined the splendour of his court.

(Please click on thumbnails below to scroll through the galleries in this post:)

Altogether he built more than 200 castles in Italy and Sicily, so many that every time we saw a castle we joked in the car: “Who built that one then?” Answer in chorus: “Frederick II”. (In Egypt of course one can do the same with statues of Pharaohs. They all seem to be of Rameses II). Throughout our journey we felt Frederick’s presence, no more so than today, when we drove inland and then up a perfect conical mountain and found on the top a castle, which was an exact octagon. Besides its eerie architectural precision there was something very strange about it. The building seemed to be the embodiment of a mystical or mathematical code. Not only the outer keep but each of the rooms inside, as well as the central courtyard, were octagons. Yet it was not all symmetrical. Perplexingly some of the floor levels were misaligned. The numbers of windows were not in sequence. In something so deliberately architectured one felt these flaws must have had a meaning. Of course an octagon is a symbol of the perfection of God, hence eight sided baptisteries which are common throughout mediaeval Europe, but there seemed to be something more arcane here. We were in the realm of Umberto Eco, whose model for his monastery in ‘The Name of the Rose” may have been modelled on Castel del Monte.

Frederick was also a great church builder. One of the most beautiful of his churches we came across was in Trani, an ancient port within view of Castel del Monte. We rejoiced in the spareness of its Romanesque architecture – a great contrast to the fussy Baroque that had somewhat repelled us on our way through Lecce the day before. Like the castle on the hill, there was something perfect and pure about this church that stood alone on the waterfront facing the vastness of the sea.

Laurence Browne, our companion on our travels since Bari, got into conversation with the very knowledgeable lady in the tourist information office, a former English speaking guide. She told him that the Trani Cathedral had also been covered in Baroque decoration but it had been stripped back to its original form by order of the Cultural Ministry in the 1950s. Laurence remarked that this was a very enlightened thing to have done. “You say that because you’re English,” she replied., “English have a love of empty churches. That doesn’t mean that every Italian feels the same.”

“Oh surely…” said Laurence.

“Surely nothing,” she said. “Here you are, admiring Frederick II. Tell me, what did you know of Frederick II before you came here?”

“Not much,” he admitted shamefacedly. “He’s not really taught in English schools.”

“So there you are. What can you tell me about what was his original architecture? In Italy it is different. We see Frederick II as a father of our country.” She put her hands on her hips. “All right, where are you going now?”

“The Gargano,” muttered Laurence. “To visit Padre Pio…”

“Padre Pio? Ha, that’s very Italian of you.” She gave him a sardonic glance. “But you’ll take time to go to the Foresta Umbra too, yes? To have a picnic perhaps?”

“As it happens, we were thinking of visiting the national park…Yes, why not?… maybe, we will.”

“Of course you will. It’s woods. You are English. You like woods and nature.” She shrugged dismissively and went back to sorting her brochures.

We left, bruised.

Monte San Angelo and San Giovanni Rotondo, the Gargano Peninsula, Puglia

As we approached the spur of Italy’s boot – the jutting spit that breaks the straight line of Eastern Italy’s long coast, geologically a bit of Dalmatia that got attached in some pre-Pleiostine age and therefore, some say, not really part of Italy – I put my foot on the brake to slow down for a roundabout. An empty plastic Coca-Cola bottle suddenly slipped between my feet and the brakes and I suddenly found I was accelerating. The car flew out of control and it took a few alarming seconds to right the situation. Shortly afterwards, when we were well into the Gargano peninsula we found ourselves climbing precipitous mountain roads in the waning light and soon were lost in a dark forest. The hotel in Vieste, when we eventually arrived there, was not what we had expected…

So began a chain of small accidents and misfortunes that dogged us all the time we were in the Gargano area, Nothing in itself was that serious – a sense of claustrophobia in a church, mislaid equipment, lost or broken telephones – but it added to a sense of weirdness, and we all felt lighter hearted when we left two days later.

It was not as if we were not suspecting something like this. Perhaps we had been hoping for it. Laurence and I had attended a Synchronicity Conference near Siena the year before and it was after that we had promised ourselves a trip to the tomb of Padre Pio. We had no idea what to expect. Perhaps we were looking for a Numen, the spiritual energy that one sometimes senses in places of ancient worship, or in those associated with shamen.

Certainly, everything we knew of Padre Pio’s life had been strange, with indications that he might indeed have been possessed or was possessed by a spiritual force. Italy’s St Francis of the 20th century, he was a mild-mannered, greybearded monk who suffered the Stigmata throughout his life. He was also reputed to be able to bilocate – curing the sick in one town when he was known to be in another. There are apparently well attested reports that US bomber pilots during WW2 were on every mission prevented from dropping their loads on Padre Pio’s home town of San Giovanni Rotondo by a ‘flying monk’ floating in front of their cockpits and stretching out his wounded palms. And of course there is the love that approached adulation he inspired in tens of thousands of Christian worshippers throughout the world. He died in 1968, is now sainted and perhaps the best loved figure in the Roman Catholic Church. San Giovanni Rotondo is a place of pilgrimage. Padre Pio’s image can be found in shops, restaurants and homes in my village of Force in Le Marche and all over the rest of the country. Like St Catherine of Siena his body has not corrupted.

Curiously, it was the latter fact that most interested Laurence because he had read that the Gargano is located on one of the world’s most famous ley lines, the so-called Apollo Line, that stretches from the Skelligs off Southern Ireland, through Mont San Michel in Britanny, through Siena, Gargano, Delphi, ultimately to Megiddo (or Armageddon) in Israel. There are several saints along this route whose bodies have been found to be incorruptible. Also there is the coincidental association with St Michael (Monte San Angelo and Mont St Michel). Certainly, before Padre Pio came along, the spiritual event most associated with the Gargano region was the appearance of the angel St Michael to a Bishop Laurence in a grotto on top of a mountain in the 5th Century AD. The Grotto is still there, deep under a Romanesque church in the centre of the town of Monte San Angelo that grew up around it (complete with castle built by Frederick II). A long tunnel takes one down to the shrine. In the cave where the angel manifested, men and women pray passionately and silently kneeling against the altar rails behind which a rather fearsome white statue of St Michael with burning sword hangs over them. The silence is heavy, almost oppressive, unlike in any other Roman Catholic shrine. If there is a Numen there, it is a very forceful one.

In contrast, the great church and hospital complex that has been built over the coffin of St Pio in nearby San Giovanni Rotondo is benign and peaceful. It is also a museum to clearly a humble and most loveable man – there are many photos and recreations of the simple rooms in which he lived his life of pain and discomfort (there is some stress on the bandages that he had to change every few hours to cover the wounds of his Stigmata).

One wonders why the Vatican, for most of his life, tried to repress the news of his miracles. Was perhaps the real thing – a holy man with a direct relationship to God – too unpredictable and uncontrollable, thus dangerous, for the established Church? Laurence and I did notice the rather ostentatious presence of photographs of that other recently made saint, Pope John Paul II all over the Padre Pio shrine, with heavy endorsements of course, as well as from the present Pope. If this had been the People’s Republic of China – Heaven forfend the parallel – I might have thought this smacked of the Communist authorities bringing the myth of a maverick and popular Revolutionary into line with Party orthodoxy, back into the safety of the fold, as it were. But I am neither Catholic nor Communist so cannot tell.

We left Gargano loaded with enormous loaves of bread, local cheeses and wines. We had eaten in good restaurants, found a charming hotel, and enjoyed ourselves as tourists here as much as anywhere else in Puglia.

But even though we could not quite put our finger on any notable spiritual power source or mysterious synchronicity, in fact anything that didn’t smack of ordinary Italy, it is a fact that we did find the Foresta Umbra dark and sinister – we did NOT wish to loiter over a picnic there – and there was this other disturbing occurrence that we were having accidents and breaking things, which did all add up to an indefinable impression that this Gargano was a very strange place indeed. Perhaps it was the raw faith we had witnessed in the silent worshippers round Saint Michael, and in the industry of pilgrimage that has grown up around Padre Pio. It is strong meat for comfortable agnostics. (I can hear the voice of the information lady in Trani: “You English!”)

Syracuse is the most princely of cities in Sicily, where we would choose to stay if ever we had a month or two to learn Italian. There is nowhere more charming than the island of Ortygia. Besides its grand hotels and marinas, its castle on the spit, its quiet squares, fine churches and dignified palazzos, it has world class restaurants and even a fountain which is home to the water nymph Arethusa (who fled here from the advances of the river god Alpheus). And every stone drips with history. There are the remains of temples to Apollo and Diana, and an ancient bathhouse where at least one Byzantine emperor, Constans II, was assassinated. In a strange forest of grottos and caves there is a superb Greek theatre where Aeschylus put on some of his plays (‘The Persians’ was being performed again at a festival when we were there). There is a fine museum where many of Archimedes inventions have been reconstructed from his designs – and those are just the classical sites.

(Please click on thumbnails below to scroll through the galleries in this post:)

Dominating all, however, is the grand harbour, which still retains its shape from classical times. I was advised by the historian Philip Snow to bring a copy of ‘The Peloponnesian War’ with me, because Thucydides outlines in terms as fresh as the current affairs of today the course of Athens’ doomed Sicilian Expedition of 415-413 BC in which the veteran general Nicias and the controversial statesman Alcibiades sought the submission of Syracuse as a possible first step of bringing the whole of Sicily into their Empire. From the resort hotels on the other side of the bay one can trace on the opposite shoreline the events described in the book and envision as if one were watching the television news the disastrous course of a war which turned out to be Athens’ Stalingrad or Afghanistan. In this harbour the greatest Greek expeditionary force that ever set sail was utterly destroyed, nearly every man in the expedition was killed or enslaved, and Nicias himself (Alcibiades had by then turned sides) was in the words of the historian “butchered”. I have always thought when reading “The Peloponnesian War” that it mirrors the politics of the present. One recognizes the same hubris, the same folly and wishful thinking, the same arrogance and over reach and ultimately the same shortcomings of democracy. The calm blue water of Syracuse’s harbour should have been a permanent and chilling lesson for the Powers of today when planning their Middle Eastern and Central Asian excursions during the last decade.

Taormina, Sicilia 22nd-24th June

There was a film festival on in Taormina which slightly disrupted our plans and added to the crowds, but it was fine to sit by the pool in Angela’s Hotel, high up on the cliff under the Norman fort and look down over the bay and across the way to Etna which smoked placidly and scenically through our stay. A good place to ‘chillax’, certainly difficult to match in terms of picturesqueness (though the unspoilt solitude that charmed the travelers of the 18th and 19th century is gone – by 1900, according to one contemporary and very disillusioned habitué of the Timeo hotel, who objected to the yachts of royalty spoiling the view of the harbour – though the view seemed fine enough to us when we stopped by its terrace to have a good but expensive cocktail among the beautiful people). What I did find a rather poignant irony is that this modern pleasure resort (a lot of people who visit Sicily only come for Taormina) was, in the 8th Century BC the first place in Sicily to be colonized by the Greeks. Remains of Naxos can be seen in the neighboring bay, where the cheaper tourist hotels are located. We went for a swim there, on a pebbly beach that once upon a time would have been excellent for beaching Homer’s dark prowed ships.

Bari , Puglia, 24th June

After an eight hour drive from Messina, we spent an evening in Bari eating mussels in a fish restaurant by the pier, while the locals watched Italy playing England in a football match. A television had been set up outside too and here the young boys and girls of the neighbourhood loitered through the game, not so interested in the play it seemed, but anticipating the rave though the streets on their motor bikes after victory was declared. They got their victory and the night became very noisy.

Il Convento della S Maria di Constantinopolo, Marittima di Diso, Puglia, 25th June

This must be the most luxurious and certainly the most interesting and beautifully appointed bed-and-breakfast in Italy, with the finest cuisine and the most charming hosts. It is a world in itself, full of curios and comforts, though if one can escape the kind hospitality, the towns around are fascinating, particularly Otranto, and there are beaches within half an hour’s drive where the water is as clear and turquoise as anywhere in Southeast Asia or the Caribbean. Lord MacAlpine is creating on the grounds of the convent a magnificent garden, which one day will perhaps become one of the sights of Southern Italy.

We did in fact make excursions to both Otranto and the beach. The Cathedral in Otranto is famous for its magnificent flooring which in primitive mediaeval mosaic depicts the tree of life. More curious is a side chapel where the skulls and bones of 800 martyrs are displayed in another more grisly mosaic behind glass. The story goes that the city was taken by the famous Turkish corsair, Barbarossa, in 1537. Eight hundred of the inhabitants survived the initial slaughter and were offered their lives if they converted to Islam. All refused so they were beheaded. The executioner was impressed by their faith and after fulfilling his duty said that he would like to be a Christian too, and he was therefore beheaded as well – but I could not ascertain if his head is among the 800 skulls that now stare down at us.

Masseria Il Frantoio, Ostuni, Puglia, 26th June

The best thing about this Masseria (or walled farming community compound, now a well run and comfortable hotel) are the acres of olive groves it owns. We were driven over the grounds by Giuseppe, an Englishman who works for the Masseria. Most of the trees were hundreds of years old, and their thick trunks and branches were twisted and contorted, sometimes in very life-like positions, while the silver leaves shivered diaphanously. One can imagine how the ancient Greeks evolved their idea of Dryads, or tree nymphs. They seemed to be dancing all around us.

To be continued…

Driving south from Rome in the late afternoon we stopped in ancient Capua. A ruined amphitheatre dominates the centre of this run down Campanian village, otherwise distinguished only by a prison. New Capua, with its domed cathedral, is a haughty distance away. The original Capua, however, was immortalized in Livy as the city whose luxury sapped the fighting quality of Hannibal’s troops. It was also from here that Spartacus led his revolt of gladiators in 73 BC. Presumably the training school run by Peter Ustinov in the 1950s Kubrick movie and John Hannah in the more recent TV series ‘Blood and Sand’ was somewhere close to the very well preserved amphitheatre. We took delight in imagining our hero battling in this very arena. Perhaps it was on these sands that Kirk Douglas in the movie was forced to kill his best friend in front of a laughing crowd, thus sowing in his mind the first seeds of rebellion. Naturally my daughter and I launched furiously into a sword fight, which we resumed at sunset on the deck of our boat as it steamed out of Naples.

(Please click on thumbnails below to scroll through the galleries in this post:)

We should by rights be reacting to amphitheatres with horror. They were built as places of blood and slaughter solely for popular entertainment – but there is no denying their beauty, especially in the slanting decline of a summer day. It is a good thing that in cities like Verona and Macerata, amphitheatres are now venues for opera, and closer to my home in Le Marche the little wooded glade that was once the coliseum of ancient Urbs Saglia has become the stage for Greek plays – nature and art combining together to heal the traumas of the past.

Erice, Sicilia 17th June

Abandoning Palermo as soon as we disembarked we made our way west via pristine beaches on the northwest of the island to the mountain top town of Erice. This was the ancient Eryx, famous all over the world for its temple to Venus Ericina (Aphrodite in her incarnation of ‘impure love’, goddess of prostitutes). For hundreds of years pilgrims (men and women) flocked here from all over the Roman Empire. The shrine that gleamed from its high rock (the temple could be seen by mariners from miles out to sea) was torn down and replaced by a Saracen fort (one wonders if the devout Muslim garrisons ever knew of the dark and erotic ceremonies that once took place on the rock where they were praying). Later, next to the Saracen fort, the Normans constructed a fine castle of the crusader style, as well as Romanesque churches in Erice’s narrow streets and squares.

A different sort of pilgrim comes today – tourists wishing to see the impressive fortifications and monuments and to try the spaghetti al sarde in Erice’s restaurants, and in winter come the medical conventions and such like, who find being above the clouds conducive to clear, scientific thought. Times and Erice have changed. Nevertheless, this precipitous mountain with its godlike view does still retain some of the aura of ancient mysteries. And like the clouds floating over the panorama below, one feels wafted by the diverse filaments that wove the historical tapestry of the island – Sicel, Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Arab, Norman. The old castles still look over the plain to Trapani, which was once a Carthaginian colony; it’s now a stronghold of the Mafia. In the words of Ovid, who might even have come to the Venus Ericina temple (it was his sort of thing): Omnia mutantur, nihil interit.

Palermo, Sicilia 18th June

The Americans with their bombers and the Mafia they re-installed did a thorough job of keeping Sicily’s grand old lady of a capital in a state of genteel poverty and decay for half a century. The city is still pockmarked by WW2 bombsites and worse the cheap Mafia housing has spread all over the plain like weeds. It is tragic, because once, under the Arabs and Normans, Palermo was a world capital, a paradise of gardens and hunting parks, later the glittering court of the Emperor Frederick II, who was called “stupor mundi” – the wonder of the world. It has taken continuous resolve and extraordinary levels of bravery on the part of Italian officials to fight the corrupt malaise that for years throttled Palermo, and there is still a long way to go (we saw some of the poverty and hopelessness in the queues of parents and sick children locked out of the emergency ward of the Children’s Hospital – strict triage applies, unless one has a back door …). But over the last decade the fine monuments have been gradually emerging in splendour again: glorious Monreale on its hilltop, the Duomo, the exquisite Cappella Palatina with its golden mosaics and stunning Cristo Pancreator, the Norman hunting lodges and the remains of Lampedusa’s fin de siècle grandeur- the theatres, the faded palazzos (some of that lifestyle lingers in the breakfast room of the Hotel Centrale) as well as the great ornamental fountains and statues, now clean and white again in the bright light, their soot and shabbiness washed away. Perhaps we came closest to the old Palermo in the puppet shows, in which knights and Saracens, exquisitely carved and coloured, clomp through the traditional epics of the troubadours in a delightful romp of art, magic, history and tragedy – with it goes without saying a healthy dose of irrepressible, earthy Sicilian humour to anchor us to the ground.

(All Palermo photos by Hong Ying)

Selinunte, Sicilia 19th June

The central highlands of Sicily are one great wheat field interspersed with strange gigantic rocks that look as if they have fallen from space. Sometimes a lonely Norman castle looks down from a crag, but for hours one drives through emptiness. Despite the fertile soil and abundant crops, here is a gaunt beauty, tinged of course with sadness, because for most of Rome’s history these same fields were worked until they died by slaves who had been brought from every corner of the empire to ensure the supply of grain to the Eternal City. It is a relief to see the blue sea again on the south of the island – not that this coast was spared cruelties over the ages, even in the days of the Greek colonies that first brought civilization and trade to the island – for they also brought war. Syracuse, its greatest pride, was the home of the scientist and philosopher, Archimedes. It was also the city of Greece’s worst tyrant, Dionysius, who preyed on his neighbours with more viciousness than any invader. Yet the little that remains of those old colonies are magnificent. I cannot think of an architectural site in Greece or Turkey that matches Selinunte for lonely grandeur, grace and melancholy.

Villa Piazza Armerina, Sicilia, 20th June

Well preserved mosaics in the Roman villa at Piazza Armerina provide an interesting diversion on the road to Syracuse.

To be continued…