City of Lingering Splendor: A Frank Account of Old Peking's Exotic Pleasures

by John Blofeld

In his early twenties, John Blofeld spent what he describes as "three exquisitely happy years" in Peking during the era of the last emperor, when the breathtaking greatness of China's ancient traditions was still everywhere evident. Arriving in 1934, he found a city imbued with the atmosphere of the recent imperial past and haunted by the powerful spirit of the late Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi. He entered a world of magnificent palaces and temples of the Forbidden City, of lotus-covered lakes and lush pleasure-gardens, of bustling bazaars and peaceful bathhouses, and of "flower houses" with their beautiful young courtesans versed in the arts of pleasing men. With a novelists' command of detail and dialogue, Blofeld vividly re-creates the magic of these years and conveys to the reader his appreciation and nostalgia for a way of life long vanished.

Genres: History, China, Memoir, Travel, Nonfiction, Asia

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

John Eaton Calthorpe Blofeld (M.A., Literature, University of Cambridge, 1946) wrote on Asian thought and religion, especially Taoism and Chinese Buddhism. During WWII, he working in counterintelligence for the British Embassy in Chongqing (Chungking), China, as a cultural attaché. In the 1950s, he studied with Dudjom Rinpoche and other Nyingma teachers in Darjeeling, India. He later mentored Red Pine in his translation work.

Reviews

[Tocotin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I paid a lot for this book – 3000 yen is not to be sneezed at, as Lady Glencora would say – but it was so worth it! The author, a future Buddhist/Taoist scholar, describes his early years spent in pre-Second World War Peking, or rather in Peking between the end of the Qing dynasty and the Japanese occupation:

“I earned my living by lecturing a few hours a week at one of the many universities and by giving private lessons in English. I have deliberately said little about these rice-bowl-filling activities, because in those days I always thought of myself as a student rather than a teacher and because the system of education had by then become so standardized as to have nothing uniquely Pekingese about it.”

This is one of the first sentences of the book, and it gives, I think, a fair taste of what is to follow – an ode to the charms of the old Peking, with its places of inequality, filth and despair eliminated entirely from the narrative, or seen from a great distance, all told in an amusing, elegant style and with a relative humility. Relative, because directed mostly towards venerable Manchu aristocrats, Taoist, Buddhist or Confucian scholars, or university professors. Women appear rarely, and if they do, they’re either servants or courtesans – the refined gentlemen have only limited use for them, and educated women are the worst, you see:

“Better no women at all than university girls. […] Either they will be like frightened sparrows placating a hawk by chirping “Yes, yes, you are right” the whole day through, or they will be learned females throwing the platitudes we have taught them back in our faces. They might even turn out to be serious and want to discuss politics or social welfare! […] By girls, if you will allow me to be explicit, I mean girls – charming children who care for nothing in the world beyond making themselves decorative and amusing.”

Then again, the guy who is speaking is going to try a bit of rape in this chapter (“Singing-girls among the Pine-trees”), so it might be that Blofeld is subtly showing his disagreement with his views. It’s really difficult to say where he stands, because he behaves outrageously towards Jade Flute, a courtesan he’s fallen in love with, and then fallen out of love:

“Something much more memorable was to happen to me at the end of that day. Towards midnight, I paid what might have been my fourth or fifth post-nuptial visit to Jade Flute. Upon the night of our coming together I had experienced a bliss seen even at the time as being of too high an order ever to be completely recapturable; but nothing had happened since to make me suspect that I loved her with less than ‘all my heart’. Yet, upon this night, the golden dream was so perceptibly tarnished as to shock me into perceiving that it might presently fade altogether; that Jade Flute, from being queen of goddesses, might again appear to me as an ordinary girl, always to be thought of with affection, but less certainly always to be adored. […] I was already faced with a dim realization that ignorance, inexperience and childish romanticism had combined to lure me into passing off a long-suppressed yearning of the loins as a true yearning of the heart, thus mistaking swiftly withering autumn leaves for the purest gold!”

I was prepared to despise the narrator long after the book was finished, even as I appreciated his frankness – but then the last chapters came, in which he returns to Peking after the Japanese have left, and meets his gentlemen friends. They throw a party in his honor, then propose all the members visit the willow-lanes (as the brothels are called in the book), if the moon is behind the clouds. The narrator opposes – he doesn’t want to go. He has just taken a Chinese wife and even though he knows that he might expect some tolerance, he’s afraid of her. This I liked. (I learned afterwards that Blofeld was indeed very much in awe of his wife Chang Mei-fang.)

No, the wife is not Jade Flute, but if the narration is to be believed, her story has a happy end. They meet in the (shortly) liberated Peking, and it have a long hearty talk. Jade Flute has a new life now. Upon being asked whether she loved the narrator, she says:

“‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she answered carelessly. ‘Perhaps I did. I think I loved everyone who was nice to me. Even the hateful ones had to be made to think I loved them. I couldn’t always manage that, though I tried hard – after that first time. With virgins, it’s different. They are frightened when their turn comes, but they never seem to find a nice man. If a man is nice, he wouldn’t demand a virgin, you see.”

Why do I suspect the narrator might have confabulated a little? Well, there is one moment when he puts into the mouth of an otherwise very sophisticated Chinese gentleman certain words about Chin P’ing Mei, which made me suspicious – the gentleman would have known the book in question way better than that.

But I do want to see Peking. The descriptions are wonderful. I so want to see Peking now.

[Isham Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Classic account of the hidden side of 1930s Beijing by a famous British scholar of China.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most enjoyable memoirs I have ever read.

[Maddie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had no idea when I picked up this book that I had such a pleasant experience in store for me. Beginning in 1934, a young man in his twenties spends "three exquisitely happy years" in a China at the edge of the abyss. Japan had already invaded Manchuria and made no secrets of its intentions of further conquest. The shaky Chinese Republic was ruled out of Nanking; and Peking was still full of memories of the old Dowager Empress, the last of her line.
The streets of Peking were full of Confucian scholars, aging palace eunuchs, adepts of Taoism and Buddhism, starving White Russian refugees, 14-year-old opium addicts, and gentle courtesans and flute girls. Blofeld threw himself headfirst into this world which was on the point of being snuffed out forever. Most memorable are the White Russian hermaphrodite Shura and the Rasputin-like Father Vassily; the decorous Buddhist scholar Dr Chang; Yang Taoshih, the Taoist sage, and his friend known only as the Peach Garden Hermit; the lovely courtesan Jade Flute; and the mysterious Pao, who elopes with a young girl intended for a Japanese colonel.

After Blofeld leaves for a trip to England, the Japanese finally invade. There are two bittersweet chapters at the end where Blofeld revisits the scenes of his youth after 1945. His fragile Peking of the 1930s is now poised between a growingly thuggish Kuomintang secret police and the great unknown of Mao Tse-tung's Eighth Route Army.

Blofeld's Dr Chang says it all: "Decay is inherent in all things, as Shakyamuni Buddha bade us always remember. Death swallows all that has been born; rebirth or re-creation follow in their turn, as spring follows winter. Things rise and wane in unceasing flux."

If the name John Blofeld means anything to you, you've probably been consulting the I Ching. Blofeld wrote a popular translation to the Chinese oracle at a time when the only other version available in English was Richard Wilhelm's groundbreaking but somewhat turgid text.
"City of Lingering Splendor" is an autobiographical travelogue, one of the best ever written. Dedicated to ' the hermits, scholars, youths and courtesans who inspired these pages ' it's a love letter to Peking and the breathtaking greatness of an ancient civilisation at its twilight, about to be extinguished.

While remote jungles still offer anthropologists the chance to chew the fat with stone age peoples, the romantics among us are simply out of luck. Until someone invents a working time machine, Ancient Egypt is gone forever along with Homer's Greece and Imperial Rome.

But in 1934 it was still possible to travel back in time. Back to Old China, to a culture that had remained virtually untouched for thousands of years---and chew Peking Duck with Taoist sages. . .

CITY OF LINGERING SPLENDOUR is recommended to all sentient beings who were ever young once and are now faced with a confused welter of possibilities, none of which seem particularly appetizing.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing and fascinating look at the last glimpse of 1940s Beijing before the old imperial culture was swept away by the Communist Revolution. Blofeld is clearly attuned to Daoism, Buddhism, and Lamaism and the thoughts systems of old China.

He is part of a circle that includes David Kidd "Peking Story" and Alex Kerr "Lost Japan". I wish Blofeld wrote more.

[Douglas Penick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A wonderful book of great charm and sadness