Color: A Natural History of the Palette (36 page)

The book came out in 1607, and later became a popular stage play. It featured shepherds and shepherdesses frolicking sexily around the pastures of the Auvergne, with the main man a peasant called Celadon who wore a pale green suit with swirling green ribbons. He plotted for hundreds of pages to win his beloved, and never quite got her: which is perhaps hardly surprising, given his embarrassing dress sense. However, the color, if not the ribbons, became instantly trendy, and suddenly all of Paris was dressed
à la celadon
. Delicate Chinese porcelain became tremendously fashionable in Europe later in the seventeenth century and, by coincidence, or perhaps not, some of it was this popular color.

Even through the pollution, I could see the rebuilt Famen pagoda from several kilometers away. In its time it must have been a wonder, a thirteen-story skyscraper dominating the landscape. What we were seeing was not the original Tang design. The pagoda that Yizong visited was only four stories high and made of wood. This brick one was first designed in the sixteenth century Ming dynasty, but fortunately for modern scholarship it did not last the millennia its architects probably intended. For years it was China’s version of the Tower of Pisa—leaning more and more dramatically. Then, in a rainstorm in 1981, half of the tower slipped to the ground. The collapse killed no one but excited everyone. Because once the rubble was cleared, builders found a hidden door to a secret passageway, and the archaeologists were brought in from Xi’an to investigate.

When Yizong’s son Xizong brought the finger home in 874, the Tang dynasty, which had been going since 618, was beginning to look rocky. In terms of art, its early delicacy had turned to baroque decadence. In terms of politics, by the late ninth century the peasants were becoming angry at rampant corruption on the part of the eunuchs—who had had a stranglehold on many of the positions of power and influence in the Chinese court since the time of the first emperor in 221 B.C.—and heavy taxation by everyone who could get away with it. The Tang would fall fully in 907, leading to the anarchy of the Five Dynasties, but already in 874 everyone—except perhaps the eunuchs—saw that change was imminent. A violent uprising fourteen years earlier had already given the peasants confidence, and another rebellion was brewing in the east, which would be successful. When the finger bone was returned in a great incense-filled ceremony, it was done very publicly. “Men and women gathered, and the spectacle was one of unprecedented splendor,” it was reported in contemporary annals. And then it was quietly wrapped up and, along with that valuable haul of offerings from the palace, sealed in the secret tunnel to hide it from the upstarts. The Tangs were good at tombs, and this place—in the depths of the foundations of the Famen pagoda—was particularly well concealed.

And yet how could it have been forgotten? Peasant memories are long—when the Terracotta Army was discovered a couple of hundred kilometers away in 1978 it emerged that the local people had known all along that the clay soldiers were there, guarding the hills from beneath the earth. And it seems impossible that in the sixteenth century, when the original wooden structure of Famen was pulled down and the brick pagoda built in its place, nobody even noticed the little stone door in the foundations. Especially when rumors of a treasure trove had been whispered round the temple for centuries. There must have been a deliberate cover-up on the part of the monastery heads, although I find it as great a mystery as mysterious-colored celadon that in those twelve hundred years no abbot of Famen even sneaked a look inside, to see what he had in his cellar.

In 1939 a team of builders sent in to shore up the foundations actually saw the secret door. But the Japanese army was massing on the borders of China, and the men made a pledge not to tell anyone. They kept their promise through the war, through the Chinese Revolution of 1949, and then through the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. It was not until the 1980s that China really felt ready to celebrate its history again. And it was then, conveniently, that the secret of Famen was rediscovered.

Today visitors can see the real chamber through an ugly aluminium-framed window, as well as a full-scale replica of it in the museum next door. The model tunnel has one side covered in glass, rather like a gerbil nest in a TV nature program. But it makes it easy to imagine what the archaeologists would have seen as they first removed the thick metal padlock and pushed open the heavy blackened stone doors, one day in April 1987.

The first things to greet the team—led by Professor Han Wei of the Shaanxi Archaeological Research Institute—were two wonderful guardian lions, with green fingernails and red cartoon-animal spots. At first, looking into the gloom, the archaeologists would almost certainly have been disappointed: apart from the lions the chamber was plain. No treasures, just some black Tang dynasty tiling. Had someone been there before them? they would have wondered. Was there nothing left for them to discover?

But then they would have seen a doorway at the end, with a fierce Door God carved in bas-relief protecting it. And after carefully working out the locking mechanism and shining their torches through into the second chamber, they must have gasped. In front of them a dusty sea of red and orange brocaded silks flowed toward a small stone stupa. Behind it was another chamber, and behind that was a hidden cupboard. Everywhere in this Aladdin’s cave there were boxes and bags, from which filigree gold, blue Persian glass and my modest green bowls poured out lustily.

And most importantly for historians there were two black stone steles, on which the entire inventory was carved. If they had not found these stones, then they would never have agreed that this was
mi se
. Up until that very moment, scholars had believed
mi se
was basically Tang exportware-with-attitude. After all, in terms of how it is made and what it is made of, it is pretty much like any other prized celadonware. But by the end of the Tang dynasty
mi se
came with such a wonderful marketing campaign—“Secret green-ware only fit for a king”—that it sold for high prices. This inventory at Famen put back the beginnings of
mi se
by at least thirty years. And it caused people to reassess exactly what it was used for, as well as what it looked like. Perhaps it really
did
start off as being meant only for emperors.

To call the chambers beneath Famen pagoda an “underground palace,” as they are described in the local literature, is a grandiose claim. This is actually just a small tunnel, 21 meters long, accessed by doors less than a meter high. An adult would have to stoop to get in there, although in fact, when the archaeologists realized what they had found, some of them would probably have wanted to kneel. If not for Buddhist reasons then for the secular reason that they were present at one of the greatest Chinese archaeological discoveries of the late twentieth century. Second only perhaps to those terracotta warriors.

But there was a complication, which I will call the Mystery of the Three Extra Fingers, and I include it because—with its emphasis on mystery—it ultimately helped me understand what the “secret green” story was about. In 845—twenty-nine years before the treasure was hidden—Yizong’s first cousin, Emperor Wuzong, had ordered a persecution of Buddhists. The Famen abbot had realized he had to take steps to save the finger relic from this rampaging Daoist ruler. So he created three decoys and ordered fine containers to be created for them. The craftsmen made him exquisite Chinese boxes, which, like Russian dolls, opened up to reveal ever-smaller boxes inside.

When the chamber was closed three decades later, it was decided that all the “relics” and not just the real one should be included, as an additional precaution. Looking at these three fake fingers today, it is clear the abbot may have been acting in haste when he chose them. Two of them don’t look very human, and one is as thick as a pig’s knuckle. The most convincing decoy was placed in the very last chamber in the most elaborate eight-box combination, while the “real” one was in a five-box set in the third chamber, trying to appear less important.

In a small official pamphlet I found an unforgettable account of the discovery. “In order to verify whether it is the finger relics of sakyamuni [Buddha] or not, [Professor] Han licked it after having got the permission. What a wonderful lick!” In the same pamphlet the secret chinaware was singled out as exquisite, “especially for its gob, belly and bottom.” With that additional information I simply had to find the porcelain and see it for myself. But where was it?

The way Famen is presented today to its millions of visitors has fascinating parallels with the cosmology of the Tang monks who hid away their treasures so efficiently by creating fakes and decoys and secret boxes, and enclosing them in four chambers. Today’s Famen museum has, perhaps unintentionally, done something similar. The treasures are spread out over four separate halls, which are full of replicas mixed up with genuine objects. After each corner I turned I hoped to find my celadon, yet I was distracted by boxes and models of boxes, fake tea-ware, pretend gold, as well as by all the real treasures—bronze Buddhas and amber beasts, crystal pillows and a set of crimson silks embroidered with gold thread spun thinner than human hair.

By now it was past five; the temple would close soon and I had seen many wonders, but not the ones I was searching for. I reached what I thought was the last room, and still no secret celadon. I joked that it was living up to its name of “mysterious,” but in truth I was getting worried. “There is another hall,” said the attendant, and pointed to the far side of the courtyard, to a door I had not seen before. I showed my ticket and went in. There, on the other side of a room full of 121 precious gold and silver objects, were seven pieces of green pottery. A local documentary crew was filming one piece, a little bottle. The director had persuaded the security guards, in their army-like khaki uniforms, to hold up a big red cloth behind it. They looked for all the world as if they were in a People’s Revolution dance drama.

No time to see the gold, I thought, walking straight through. But I was promptly walked straight back again—by the director. “Please . . . look at the gold,” he urged. So obediently, for the TV cameras, I reenacted a Western tourist’s fascination for shiny things, admiring the gold alms bowls (which celadon bowls were in the process of replacing during the late Tang) and the earliest-known imperial tea set. And then, at last, I was allowed to return and see my pottery bowls.

They were brownish and plainish and—as I had feared—their beauty did not instantly strike me. In fact, with the exception of the pretty faceted bottle that the film-maker had concentrated on, they were not even particularly delicate. I suspected I might be there for some time, puzzling out the secret of their beauty. Part of me wanted to be looking at a different kind of secret-color porcelain, a later one, and perhaps even more tantalizing. In 960 A.D. the Songs ended the torment of the Five Dynasties and they stayed on Chinese thrones for more than three hundred years. They had abandoned
mi se
completely—the last time they even referred to it was in 1068 in the
Encyclopaedia of Song Institutions
—and one explanation is because they had found themselves an even more interesting porcelain to speculate about. It was called Chai-ware and was named after the tenth-century emperor Shizong (whose family name was Chai), who was an enlightened man, sharing his time between planning to reunite China and enjoying art. One day he summoned the respected master of a local kiln to the palace. “What can I make for you?” the potter asked. The emperor replied with a line of poetry: “When the storm has passed, the blue sky peeps through a break in the clouds.”

The man went back to his oven in the mountains, and created something astonishing. Poets later described this porcelain as being “blue as the sky, bright as a mirror, thin as paper and as resonant as a musical stone.” It is a mesmerizing description. But in fact, and unfortunately, there are no known or even suspected examples of this porcelain. Some scholars have even suggested that the mysterious blue-ware was a gigantic hoax, perpetuated through the centuries by earnest historians copying the details of it unquestioningly from each other. But I wonder whether there might be a slightly different explanation. After all, the very idea of this blue pottery is so breathtakingly beautiful that it really should exist, even if it doesn’t. It is almost as if, by the simple act of describing it, writers can wish it into being.
³

But the pieces in Famen were not blue, and they were probably too thick to be as resonant as a musical stone. Several pieces were even spotted with brown stains, and I remembered a conversation I had with Rosemary Scott. When she first heard in the late 1980s that
mi se
had been identified for certain, “we were all terribly excited: it’s such a romantic story, and how often do you find a ninth-century inventory with its objects?” But when she first saw some of the pieces, she was a little disappointed. “I looked at them and they still had the marks of the paper they had been wrapped in, little traces all over, and I remember thinking why haven’t they removed it?” Then she realized that this was the finest paper available at the time, and it may have cost more than the pots. “It was the equivalent of enfolding them in silk,” she said. One of the bowls I saw at Famen still bore the blotchy depiction of a young woman with flowers in her hair—a print that had rubbed off from the paper. Ms. Scott’s explanation for
mi se
’s popularity stemmed partly from the Chinese tendency to mythologize art, in order to appreciate it better. “The Chinese love the idea of secrecy, it makes things seem more exciting,” she said. She also pointed out that the word for secrecy in Chinese is ambiguous. As well as secret it can also mean “reserved,” or “held back” for the royal family.

The Famen
mi se
comes from the Shanglinhu kiln in the mountains of Zhejiang province south of Shanghai, where both the clay and the workmanship are considered particularly fine.
⁴
“In the chilly autumn day, thousands of procelain pieces as green as peaks appear from the kilns,” wrote Tang dynasty poet Lu Guimeng, in
mi se
lines that so intrigued later scholars, and which perhaps gave a clue as to what this celadon was about. The color comes from a small amount of iron: the more iron the more green,
⁵
and this ware is particularly iron heavy. Most celadons are made from a glaze with about 2 percent iron;
mi se
has about 3 percent. Anything higher than 6 percent is black, and was not appreciated until much later in Chinese history.