Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (55 page)

Received opinion in the West has often suggested that Chinese aesthetics reached an apex in the late Song and early Ming dynasties, declined through the early Qing, and then reached a nadir post-Qianlong. The quality of the craftsmanship at the Juanqinzhai sometimes exceeds the quality of the taste, as opulence upstages subtlety. Many Western connoisseurs prefer Chinese monochrome and minimalism, and some feel that even work from the reign of the Yongzheng Emperor, Qianlong’s father, is more refined than this. But Qianlong represents the full efflorescence of Qing taste, and many contemporary Chinese revel in riotous pattern and golden enamel, preferring such exuberance to austere discipline. “If Qianlong were alive today,” one scholar said, “he would be wearing Versace.” At a time when Westerners are “discovering” Victorian architecture and
midcentury modernism, Qing monuments should be valued before they are past saving.

In 1998, I went to see the Garden of the Palace of Established Happiness in the Forbidden City, which was then being rebuilt in part under the aegis of the delightfully named Happy Harun. That garden, roughly contemporaneous with the Juanqinzhai, had burned down in 1923 and was being reconstructed on the basis of images and the surviving plinths of buildings. One of the workers there described how the Chinese minister of culture had come to visit the work and had said, “All the wooden structures are beautiful, but the stone is in terrible condition and should be replaced.” The worker explained that the stone was what survived of the original buildings, and that it was being conserved accordingly. The minister of culture said, “Would you wear a new suit with old shoes?”

That attitude meant that the restoration teams for the Juanqinzhai had their work cut out for them: shifting the sensibility of reconstruction to one of conservation. To complicate matters further, the techniques used in the Juanqinzhai were so refined as to be beyond the skills of living craftsmen. For example, the building made some use of a stiffened, lacquered gauze for which the technique is lost (though the same technique was used in Han dynasty shoes and Song dynasty hats); we can reproduce its appearance, but not the thing itself. The World Monuments Fund introduced the protocols through which scientific technique and microscopy could help determine most of the original processes used to achieve an effect or finish; this allowed for those processes, often involving many layers of ornament, to be reproduced with precision. The conservation of the Juanqinzhai has had to blend Eastern and Western concepts, aesthetics, techniques, and materials, as the original building and grounds did. Long-lost crafts had to be reinvented and relearned, then squared with modern technologies. It took science to understand the vanished techniques and science to reconceive them, though the execution was a matter of extraordinary finesse.

In upscaling miniature techniques, Qianlong’s craftsmen had devised new sublayers to support them. Conservators accustomed to working on small objects had to figure out how to expand restoration
practices they developed for snuffboxes and other small works of art to be viable on large architectural surfaces. The governors of southern provinces were contacted in a quest to locate skilled artisans, who came from Anhui, west of Nanjing, and Zhejiang, south of Shanghai. The conservators working on the project felt that the paper used in the restoration should be of Chinese manufacture, so an expert papermaker from England came to train Chinese workers in a technique originally invented in China. All of the work had to be done within the walls of the Forbidden City to avoid the risk of sending out an original and getting back a masterful copy. Partly on the basis of experience its faculty gained on this international collaboration, Tsinghua University’s Cultural Heritage Conservation Center now offers a postgraduate degree in Architectural Conservation for Wood Structures and Historic Interiors and Furniture. This is the first advanced degree available in the conservation of historic Chinese interiors and wood furniture.

The garden and its structures, built so an emperor could play at being a hermit-philosopher, do not show how he lived, given that he never lived there. Rather, they show how he thought: it is how he wanted paradise to look. It is an essay about the end of life, a musing on what it means to grow old. In its immoderate poetry, luxurious appointments, and baroque austerity, it expresses the ambiguities of power and detachment. Marie Antoinette was given to simulating ingenuousness with her shepherdess’s crook at her Hameau in Versailles about the same time the Qianlong Emperor was building the retirement garden, but what seems like affectation in her points to a genuine idealism in him. On the cloisonné plaque that hung in the Juanqinzhai are the emperor’s words: “Purity and order in the mind on tens of thousands of issues are to be held in one heart.” An emperor’s life entails the chaos of an unruly realm; the retirement garden was to be the place where so complicated a life could be made lucid, yet remain undiminished.

Travel + Leisure
, November 2008

Disaster tourism is a dubious trade in taking people to see vanishing places before they are lost—though the hope is that letting people see them will inspire those people to fight to save them. Antarctica is acutely vulnerable. As huge pieces of it melt and the temperature of the sea changes, the world’s ecosystems are thrown into crisis. It is always more shocking to see a great man fall than a lesser one; that is why we read the tragedies of history so closely, and why the heroes in Shakespeare are so often kings. Antarctica is a mighty emperor about to dissolve.

I
t would have been worth noting, when my husband and I signed up for the
Nimrod
Centennial Expedition to Antarctica, that Sir Ernest Shackleton’s pole-seeking
Nimrod
expedition had been a failure, and that venturing south under his name might be tempting fate. But we were trying to do only what he had accomplished—in fact, only part of what he had accomplished—and not what he had aspired to do. With a hundred years of technological advancement, we anticipated that we would easily reach the hut he had built at the edge of the Ross Sea, meant to last one winter a century ago but still standing, testament to his high standards and to a climate hostile even to the microorganisms that cause rot.

Before we launched at 4:00 p.m. on New Year’s Day 2008 from the same berth in Lyttelton, New Zealand, that Shackleton had used at the same hour on January 1, 1908, we were blessed in the Anglican church where Shackleton’s party had prayed and sang the hymn they had sung, with its Cassandra refrain, “O hear us when we cry to Thee / For those in peril on the sea.” A substantial public had gathered, including descendants of Shackleton’s crew. A brass band played; Samoyeds whose forebears had pulled Shackleton’s sledges barked as the crowd waved us off; and we were escorted to sea by the very tugboat that had pulled the
Nimrod
.

Tied onto the upper-deck railing of our vessel, a small banner—the sort a laundromat might use to announce its grand opening—read
SPIRIT OF ENDERBY
, in accordance with our voyage’s promotional material. Gigantic Cyrillic letters on the hull, by contrast, proclaimed the boat as
PROFESSOR KHROMOV
, as did the lifeboats, the maps, and the equipment on board; we entered and left ports as
Professor Khromov
because that was in fact the name of the ship.
Spirit of Enderby
was a flight of the enthusiastic imagination of Rodney Russ, owner of Heritage Expeditions and our trip leader. The same advance material had referred to a “refurbished Russian ice-class ship.” The word
refurbished
had suggested rather more intervention than the installation of industrial blue carpet throughout a Soviet research vessel from 1983—but we had not come for opulent cabins, and the Spartan accommodations seemed, then, to be part of the macho bravado of our enterprise.

The first attraction on our monthlong itinerary, two days later, was the Snares, some of the sparse scatter of subantarctic islands between New Zealand and Antarctica. The Snares pulse with such dense birdlife that every path disrupts nesting or breeding grounds, so we toured in Zodiacs and saw the charming endemic crested penguins. Back on board, my partner, John, and I mingled with the other forty-six passengers, including two other Americans, one Canadian, one guy from Costa Rica, and a smattering of New Zealanders, Australians, white Zimbabweans and Namibians, and Brits. Sailing onward, we ran into forty-foot swells, which made me feel like a washcloth endlessly stuck in a tumble dryer; the
Professor Khromov
’s ice capacities,
we learned, meant a loss of stability in rough seas. We figured out how to wedge our possessions so that the sound of laptops smashing into cameras was muted by sweaters and thermal underwear. Even in the relative safety of your cabin, your head would at times ram into one end of your bunk, compressing the neck, then your feet would ram into the other and compress the knees. I had hoped to lose weight, not height, during an athletic adventure in challenging climates.

Enderby Island, the first shore stop, stayed mercifully fixed in one place, as islands tend to do. The entire landmass is covered in scrub: forests of flowering shrubs; other thick, prickly plants that cling to the cold, hard earth; and a variety of tufted grasses that were beautiful to view and hard to navigate. We saw a stupefying array of birds, including skuas, several species of albatross, and the occasional yellow-eyed penguin. We came across Hooker’s sea lions everywhere, and you could see why they were called lions: they were the size of refrigerators, with ruffed collars, and if you came too close to them—as you sometimes did given all the undergrowth—they would lift up their heads and roar. Something about their decision to skip the beach and plop themselves in the thickets was surreal, as though they were trying to trick you into believing that they were properly land animals. They would periodically raise themselves up on their four flippers and walk laboriously across the grass, ponderous and deliberate as old donkeys.

More rough seas led us two days later to Macquarie Island, a nature reserve with a small research station that allows only a few hundred visitors a year. Its shoreline is carpeted in wildlife: royal, king, gentoo, and rockhopper penguins, as well as elephant seals. The penguins gather around you curiously, and if you hold out a hand to one of the royals, he will nibble on your finger. Using their flipper-like wings primarily to gesticulate, nodding back and forth to each other as they ran around, the penguins looked like commuters milling about Grand Central before their departure track has been announced, some of them molting like elderly women in moth-eaten fur coats. More than two hundred thousand breeding pairs of king penguins live at one end of the island, packed in conditions that make
Tokyo look roomy. The seals tended to plop on top of one another, forming the sort of pyramids that high school cheerleaders perfected in the 1950s. The young ones had inconceivably sweet faces with huge, liquid eyes; the older males had long, knobby, trunk-like noses, wobbling and battle scarred.

We had passed through the Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties of latitude, a circumpolar storm belt, and now we were ready for the protracted crossing of the Southern Ocean, where no substantial landmasses slow the winds whipping around the globe. Rodney held a competition to guess when we’d see the first iceberg; the ship’s bird expert counted off species at sea; and the immanence of the seventh continent was great in us. Shackleton attracts Gurdjieff-like devotion, and the ship was awash in experts on polar exploration. The waves gradually gave up the bright, rough quality they’d had in the subantarctic; the water grew thick and sluggish, almost like the muscles of a slow-moving colossus rippling under taut skin. On January 12, we found ourselves in a jigsaw puzzle of floating pack ice, the dark lines of the water sketching through snow-dusted shards like a great black spiderweb.

The ice fragments measured up to twenty feet across, in shapes that suggested an eagle, a Volkswagen Beetle, an emoticon, a relief map of Spain. Most climates have sunlight and shadow or else a neutral gray, but here we found an amplified, shadowless ice-white like a strobe. Some of the older ice wore an apron of turquoise just below the waterline, and a few of the icebergs had refracted pockets of cerulean. Elsewhere, much of what is beautiful can be seen in a glance, but what strikes the visitor to this area is the hostile, exquisite, primitive vastness of it, which you can interpret only by entering it. The world ends in ice. Russian crewmen stood at the prow looking out for thick obstructions, and the first mate directed us accordingly to port or starboard; the captain reviewed navigational charts from the bridge. The boat would ride up a little on the finer, floating ice, then the weight of the hull would bear down and the ice would crack open. Late that afternoon, we were all called onto the foredeck for mulled wine as we crossed the Antarctic Circle.

Heading south at about 180 degrees longitude, where seasonal currents usually facilitate passage through the Ross Sea, we entered
the endless daylight of the antarctic high summer, and we stayed up that night and the next, many of us, until 2:30 a.m. to take it in. The morning that followed, January 14, we woke to bad news. At a “briefing” in the airless lecture room in the ship’s bowels, Rodney announced that the pack ice was thicker than expected, and that we had turned around at 3:00 a.m. to retrace our course so we could attempt to reenter the ice farther east. “The boat could have made it through the way we were going,” he said to us, “but we face a hundred and fifty miles of pack ice and were going just three knots.” My rudimentary math showed that this meant it would have taken us two more days to get through, and I wondered about the wisdom of losing a day going backward, but lack of experience rendered me mute. Dmitri, the captain, spoke next. “This boat not icebroker,” he said in his affectingly poor English. “This ice too much.”

Someone voiced our collective fear: “Is there a chance of our not getting through at all?”