Free Once on a Moonless Night by Dai Sijie Page A

the Empires collapse. Was it pure coincidence? The combination of several negative events? Or simply the inevitable consequence, foretold by Confucian law, of Tongzhi’s illegal succession by Guangxu? The latter grew up in turn, took power, initiated political and economic reforms and was eventually brought down by his aunt Cixi and imprisoned on an islet in the middle of the lake within the Forbidden City. He died aged thirty-seven, in 1908, also childless. The ultimate mystery was that Cixi, unable to resist her own impulses, installed another child emperor on the throne, only to die the following day. Two years later the dynasty was overthrown and replaced by the Republic. A new era dawned.
    “In 1975,” Tumchooq told me, “a hundred years after Guangxu was appointed as heir, I read a book which was banned at the time, called The Secret Biography of Cixi . It was given to me by Ma, an old friend from primary school, who’d moved away to Sichuan just before the Cultural Revolution to join his parents, who were both doctors. We hadn’t seen each other for about ten years and I didn’t actually recognise him straight away. He was sitting on the ground outside my house. I thought he was a beggar at first, because he was so thin and dirty and raggedy. The State had sent him off to some mountain in Sichuan for seven years to be re-educated by so-called revolutionary peasants. Poor as he was, he’d come to give me that book. I could have cried. He’d travelled by train—but like a vagrant, without a ticket—for three days and three nights. No one else in the world would have done that for me. I’m sure they wouldn’t. He’d found the book on the black market and swapped it for another banned book, the second volume of Jean-Christophe , a French novel translated by Fu Lei. His favourite novel. I remember asking him what he’d done with the first volume. ‘I gave it to a doctor who did some important stuff for a girlfriend’—‘What sort of stuff?’—‘An abortion.’ Silence. ‘Your girlfriend?’—‘No, Luo’s, a friend who was sent to be re-educated in the same village as me.’ Ma had other friends besides me. Lots of friends. He always did, wherever he went. People being re-educated, locals, prisoners, thieves, tramps, girls, boys, young, old. I didn’t. I’m lonely as a red-haired horse. My life, no, let’s say the chapter on friendship, began with Ma and he’s still the only protagonist.
    “The Secret Biography of Cixi was published in 1948, six years before I was born. It’s a minor historical masterpiece written by Tang Li, a professor at Peking University. I think of him as a geographer devoting the best years of his life, if not his whole life, to studying a river, following it all the way up to its source, in a boat or on foot, stopping every now and then and pursuing a tributary, however small and remote and insignificant it may be, so that eventually he knows the river by heart the way a lover knows his partner’s body. It’s the only decent book with a few well-documented pages about the life of Seventy-one.”
    Tumchooq lent me that book, which took me on a journey through the vast labyrinth that is an imperial family, a dynasty. Limited until then to school history books, I felt with every page I turned that I was finally getting somewhere in my understanding of China.
    I was impressed, among other things, by the family tree drawn up by the author in the chapter about the illegitimacy of Tongzhi’s succession by Guangxu. A representation as clear and precise as an anatomical illustration with all the ramifications of blood vessels, veins and prolific, converging arteries. By following one of these branches I found the name Zai Lan, followed by the word “Seventy-one” in brackets, born to one of the great lineages of direct imperial descent which ended two generations after him.
    There is no doubt Cixi knew every detail of this genealogy by heart, the author pointed out. She