Free Once on a Moonless Night by Dai Sijie Page B

knew, her clan knew, the Court knew that when Tongzhi died the only legitimate heir by his relationship and degree of descent was Zai Lan, the dowager empress’s favourite great-nephew. But in Cixi’s eyes he had a fatal flaw: he was thirteen years old, nine years older than Guangxu.
    Nine years! She must have counted those nine years again and again. As the author of the biography related, during the first weeks of mourning for her son, she spent days on end calculating, weighing up the pros and cons, wandering like a ghost through the huge gardens of her palace in the middle of the night. Sometimes she was so exhausted that she asked to be carried by her great eunuch, Li Lianying, so that she could continue her nocturnal walk all the way to the Pavilion of Silk Worms, a luxurious place she adored, lit by flickering lantern flames. She would sit between the racks waiting for inspiration as she watched one of the countless caterpillars metamorphose into a beautiful moth. She eventually made up her mind, choosing the other child to reign, because, although illegal, he would guarantee her nine more years’ enjoyment of the absolute pleasure of being Her Majesty the Master of China. More’s the pity!
No one would have believed [wrote the historian] that the thirteen-year-old adolescent, Cixi’s great-nephew, would be able to recover from such frustration: on the threshold of an earthly paradise, within reach of the throne borne by dragons, he was thrown out. All the politicians, of aristocratic descent or otherwise, thought he was lost. His family was disgraced. No one ever stopped outside their residence to the west of the Pavilion of Peace, not any more, no prestigious visitors in palanquins, no nobles in carriages, once so numerous they created bottlenecks and their drivers argued for space with local porters. The cacophony of noise and shouts fell silent. The Court intendant stopped sending generous or at least symbolic gifts to mark special occasions. When, at the age of sixteen, he married the daughter of a low-ranking administrator, the ceremony was held in his quarters in a low-ceilinged, all but deserted room. At about this time he started visiting instructors in the art of the pipa (a sort of Chinese lute). They gradually put him back on his feet and one of them—a blind man who was both a musician and a soothsayer and whose word was respected as an oracle by the population of Peking as well as in the realm of martial arts—predicted his future, a prediction that remained confidential with the exception of one sentence: “The flame of your life will be extinguished at the age of seventy-one.” From that day Zai Lan adopted this number as a nickname, as if trying to master his own destiny. A neutral nickname with no social or political complexion, but sufficiently mysterious for some to perceive it as a code name for a clandestine anti-Western organisation which would go on to be a driving force in the Boxer Rising years later.
As well as for the pipa , Seventy-one earned a tremendous reputation in the art of falconry; each of his eagles, bred from pure royal strains, wore a bell attached to one foot, and this would ring even when the bird was invisible, flying one or two hundred metres above Peking. He used his own money to publish a work called The Art of Falconry , written in delicious rhyming verse in the same style as nomadic songs. Always respecting the rules of alliteration (according to which the two or four lines constituting each rhyme have to begin with the same sound), he guides us one step at a time through a vast field: he examines the vitreous body of the eagles eye with a magnifying glass, analyses their sight and the colour changes in their feathers, studies the best places to train and fly them, the influence of meteorological conditions and warm and cold airstreams, gives details of their diet, which must not include pork, and explains how to prepare meat for them, including how it must be