Silhouettes of Peking Read online

  Silhouettes Of Peking

  ISBN-13: 978-988-19090-4-6

  © 2010 Earnshaw Books

  Originally published by China Booksellers Ltd. Peking 1926

  HISTORY / Asia / China

  EB038

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in material form, by any means, whether graphic, electronic, mechanical or other, including photocopying or information storage, in whole or in part. May not be used to prepare other publications without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information contact [email protected]

  Published by Earnshaw Books Ltd. (Hong Kong)

  FOREWORD

  THE AUTHORS

  IN 1926 the expatriate community in China was bracing itself for an uncertain future. The previous year British policemen in Shanghai had shot several students protesting against imperialism. Commerce was still suffering from the subsequent general strike. Now China was in a state of civil war. From Canton, the ‘Northern Expedition’, an army consisting of Nationalists and Communists, was advancing towards Wuhan, easily smashing the warlord forces ranged against them. Nobody was clear as to what the Nationalist leader, General Chiang Kai-shek, wanted, but they feared the worst. With his Russian advisers, Galen and Borodin, he was thought to be as Red as his paymaster Stalin. Western interests seemed threatened. The International Concession in Shanghai was taking all precautions. Its boulevards began to sprout barbed wire and sandbags as British troops patrolled the streets.

  It was therefore a welcome diversion in this charged up atmosphere when the small Peking publishing house, China Booksellers, produced a slim novel, rumored to be wickedly salacious and gorgeously illustrated by the popular Shanghai artist and cartoonist, Sapajou. The biggest surprise, however, was that one of the authors of this scandalous sensation was the Minister of the French Legation in Peking, the seasoned diplomat, Le Comte Damien de Martel. The foreign community forgot their troubles and scattered off to the beach resorts in Tsingtao and Peitaiho, copies of Silhouettes of Peking in their hand luggage.

  What they read was sheer escapism. The delicious roman took them away from the louring tensions of the revolutionary 1920s, back a decade to the early days of the Chinese Republic. In their minds that had been a golden age, the China many dreamed of when they took the steamer from Europe. Nobody then was threatened by warlords or Bolsheviks. An amenable military strongman, Yuan Shikai, listened respectfully to the top-hatted representatives of the Powers, who in their leisure moments lived a luxurious existence, dining, racing and picnicking among the picturesque ruins of a romantic Imperial China.

  The novel was also exquisitely decadent, and not just a little risqué (very French, of course). Tongues must have been wagging, wondering quite who the very respectable French Minister was basing his characters upon (everybody would have known he was Chargé d’Affaires in Peking in 1916, the period in which the story was set).

  There was also something of a mystery. Who was the co-author, L. de Hoyer? The older scions in the banking community, relishing their inside knowledge, would have gauged the right moment at the dinner table to reveal his identity: Léon Viktorovich de Hoyer, yes, that’s right, Baron de Hoyer – the notorious Russian financier, Peking head of the Banque Russo-Chinoise, whose devious reputation had earned him the sobriquet, “Intrigue personified as a man.”1 Eight years earlier, his public feud with Damien de Martel had rocked the diplomatic and business community in Peking, and only ended when the Count, using the influence of the French Government, had secured de Hoyer’s dismissal from China. They were, and probably still were, the bitterest of enemies.

  “So how was it they collaborated on a novel?” the puzzled audience would have asked.

  “Ah, that is the mystery, and the tragedy,” the banker would have sighed. “Did you not know? They were once the greatest of friends.”

  Looking through the scanty records today, much remains hypothetical, but some facts are clear. When the Comte de Martel took up his posting in Peking in 1913, de Hoyer would have been high on his list of important contacts. And we can assume there was immediate rapport. Partly it was a matter of class. Both men were aristocrats (de Hoyer of Baltic nobility and de Martel of ancient knightly lineage) and they were also senior civil servants used to moving in the highest circles. De Martel’s diplomatic career had taken him to Petrograd before coming to Peking. In all probability he would already have heard of de Hoyer who had once worked in the Russian Finance Ministry. He would certainly have come across the Banque Russo-Asiatique (the BRA, Russia’s largest bank and the parent of the Banque Russo-Chinoise). The BRA was in fact a vital French interest, for although it was an arm of the Russian Government, actually a third of its capital investment came from France. In China its role was political as much as it was commercial: the subsidiary run by de Hoyer was the sole stockholder of the Russian-controlled China Eastern Railway and one of the three Custodian banks for customs revenues.2 It was a vehicle for Russian imperial penetration, and also for that of France, a commercial fig leaf for both countries’ colonial ambitions. So it was not surprising that in the small Peking community, the two men saw a lot of each other: the French diplomat and the man who handled France’s investments were drawn together as much for professional reasons as social.

  More importantly, they shared a similar temperament and interests outside their work. They were intellectuals, fascinated by China’s history and politics, and also, particularly in de Hoyer’s case, the philosophy of the East.3 Above all they were men of the world, in their mid-thirties, attracted by material wealth and beautiful women, practised in the fashionable dalliances and intrigues of their class. And at some point, probably in 1916 or 1917, they decided to collaborate to write Silhouettes of Peking. They wrote in French, of course, the first language of Frenchmen, diplomats and Russian aristocrats, as well as the perfect medium for fin de siècle sensuality and exoticism.

  Perhaps they intended to publish, perhaps only to circulate the manuscript among their friends. Whatever their intentions, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia changed both their lives and delayed publication for a decade. It also destroyed their friendship.

  When the Bolsheviks confiscated all the Tsarist banks in early 1918, the BRA was left only with its assets abroad, and most of these were in China. Bureaucrats in the Quai d’Orsay in Paris suddenly saw an opportunity. Following the confiscations inside Russia, most of the capital left to the BRA was French – in China this amounted to three quarters of the capital stock. For the more aggressively imperialist among them – and de Martel was one of these – it seemed only right that since the bulk of the money was theirs they should control the assets, including the China Eastern Railway. Russians of the old regime, however, like de Hoyer, believed that what had been kept out of the hands of the Bolsheviks should remain in theirs. De Hoyer’s business ethics, and those of his boss in the BRA, the plutocrat Putilov (by now in exile in Shanghai), may have been questionable (it was rumored that they both had made fortunes out of war speculation before the revolution), but for all his flaws de Hoyer seems to have been moved by patriotism. It took the form of negotiating behind de Martel’s back with the Chinese Government to establish a new ownership of the Railway with a board consisting entirely of Russians, cutting out the French. For good measure, he also negotiated with the Japanese and the Americans. De Martel, who felt betrayed by his old friend, used his Government influence to have de Hoyer sacked. Putilov accepted the loss of his right-hand man because the codicil was that the French Government would compromise on a wholly Russian board. In other words, though de Martel had his rev
enge on de Hoyer, France lost the railway. Martel had been pursuing “personal policies,” was Putilov’s cynical quip.4

  The friends-turned-enemies left Peking at about the same time – de Hoyer to Harbin where he continued to intrigue, de Martel to promotion and a glittering foreign office career. 1919 found him in the Caucasus as Allied High Commissioner in Siberia during the Civil War (he was later to be demonised in the Bolshevik ballet ‘The Siege of Perekop’) and the following year he became Minister in Riga, capital of Latvia. He arrived back in Peking as Minister in 1924, ironically to preside over the final collapse of the BRA (in the end the Peking Government did what was sensible, preferring to deal no longer with the White Russians, handing over the China Eastern Railway to the Bolsheviks despite the manoeuvrings of de Hoyer, who remained a thorn in France’s side until the very end).

  The question only remained: why, in 1926, did de Martel go ahead with the publication of a book in which his name was associated with that of his enemy?5 It seems on the face of it strange that there could have been reconciliation after such a bitter feud. On the other hand, perhaps all the savage feelings engendered by the long wars and controversies that followed the Revolution had burned themselves out among those involved, leaving only remorse and regret? Perhaps de Martel had heard that de Hoyer, like many White Russians, had fallen on hard times and thought that income from a youthful oeuvre might help him. One likes to think that it was generosity rather than vanity that impelled de Martel to go to print. The truth is we don’t know. Nor do we know whether it was de Hoyer’s initiative or that of de Martel that caused the book to be published. The fact that the illustrator was a Russian artist, Georgi Avksentievich Sapojnikoff, better known as Sapajou, who was famous between the Wars as the political cartoonist on Shanghai’s North-China Daily News and North-China Herald,6 may have been the result of a connection with his fellow Russian, de Hoyer. Alternatively, Sapajou may have been an acquaintance of de Martel’s (senior diplomats then as now cultivated celebrities and opinion makers in the societies in which they were posted). Or the publisher may have commissioned him. Again we don’t know.

  We do have quite a bit of information about the later professional life of Damien de Martel, because he was much mentioned in newspapers. We see him taking a French gunboat from Tsingtao to Hankow in 1928 where he praised the Nationalist Revolution and offered France’s support to Chiang Kai-shek (the civil war hadn’t ended but everybody could see which way the wind was blowing). In 1930 (just before leaving China to become Ambassador in Japan) he delivered a strong ‘Note’ to the Chinese Government stating that France would oppose the unilateral abrogation of ‘Extrality’7 (this time he apparently failed to see which way the wind was blowing). He ended his career as High Commissioner of French Mandated Syria. He was respected for his strong stance against terrorists but the problems he faced were intractable and he left in 1939 amid political chaos, dying of a heart attack in Paris a few months later.

  Léon de Hoyer also died in Paris in 1939. He had spent his last few years writing, one suspects in poverty, a bitter exile since the Japanese had exerted control over Harbin in 1931. He spent much of his time thinking of his lost Tsarist homeland and wondering where things first went wrong. He put his thoughts into a 500-page novel, called Les Précurseurs, about nihilists in Russia in the 1860s, but he did not live to see it published. It did not remain in print long.

  Ironically, despite their turbulent lives and the momentous political events in which they were involved, all that remains to remember either of these men is the 200-page divertissement they wrote together, in their converted Chinese courtyard houses decorated with Turkish divans and Chinese curios, or at a summer bungalow in Shanhaikuan or Peitaiho, during their happy years working together in Peking.

  THE NOVEL

  Silhouettes of Peking is one of a remarkable number of excellent novels written in the early years of the twentieth century by expatriates living in Peking. Authors were aesthetes like Sir Harold Acton,8 diplomats like Daniele Varè,9 travelers like W. Somerset Maugham,10 and ‘spouses’ like Anne Bridge.11 It is from these novels, as well as the memoirs of Sir Reginald Johnston,12 John Blofeld13 and George Kates,14 and guidebooks like Nagel and Juliet Bredon’s Peking, that we draw our very vivid portrait of the rarefied life these privileged foreigners experienced. If there is one word that always is repeated it is “magic”. Silhouettes of Peking takes an honorable place in the pantheon but stands out for one particular reason. While most of these books were written for an English-speaking readership, Silhouettes was originally written in French, and its sensibility is Gallic, from its first page on.

  Early in Silhouettes a diplomat, Baron de Beaurelois, calls on the hero (or perhaps more appropriately anti-hero), the intellectual Maugrais, in his exquisitely decorated Peking apartment. Maugrais greets him in a ‘negligée’ (the characters in this roman are forever getting into and out of native dress for their opium smoking or amours, or merely to indulge their ennui). The Baron, it transpires, has been sent by his wife, the beautiful Blanche, to lure Maugrais to dinner. Maugrais knows (although the cuckold husband apparently doesn’t) that she will attempt to seduce him, but he suspects that another siren will be there – Madame de Beaurelois’s competitor, the dazzling Mrs Brixton, wife of an American diplomat, who also wants Maugrais as a trophy. Of the two, she is the deadlier, because she is alluring – diabolically so – and Maugrais is determined not to fall into either of their traps…

  Such is the decadent picture the two authors draw of expatriate life in China’s capital in the years after the 1911 revolution, a society of glittering birds of passage on three- or four-year postings in which they may indulge themselves in all the pleasures that a grand and mysterious civilization in decline has to offer. The ‘smart set’ as they call themselves, are forever vying with each other to throw the grandest banquet or to collect the rarest antique; riding their ponies to ruined palaces for soirées or picnics; or commandeering ancient temples at the seaside resort of Shanhaikuan to indulge their adulterous affairs.

  Maugrais describes his circle sardonically:

  Peking is a city of officials, slightly formal and perhaps a trifle snobbish, but anyway clean-minded and agreeable to frequent. It is a casual and temporary agglomeration of people who have seen the world, have stayed in Paris and London; passed through Florence and Athens, played with politics in Petrograd or with finance in America; people who have crossed all the seas, made collections in the East and made love in Venice…but it is above everything else, a city that has given birth to a special type of human being…the Peking silhouette.

  The silhouette image of the title touches what is perhaps the main theme of the novel. Despite their brilliance, foreigners are doomed only to touch the surface of a society which they can but imperfectly understand. Ultimately their exquisite and hedonistic life is artificial and unsatisfying.

  There are very few actual Chinese in these pages except the ubiquitous ‘boys’ and mafoos who serve the smart set, and the peasants they encounter on the roads on their outings. The Chinese they do socialize with are senior members of the government who have undergone various degrees of westernization. Yet ‘China’ – or rather the Orientalized and Romantic version of it they choose to conjure – is in fact the most insidious temptress of them all, and perhaps the central character in this story.

  As the novel progresses we see Maugrais and some of the other foreigners struggling with the enigma of being a cosmopolitan living in an ancient and alien culture, which is at the same time a well of both dark depravity and spiritual wisdom. And there is a choice to be made between innocence and evil. The American, Mrs Brixton, is a predator but her power and sensuality seem to draw their force from the irresistible melancholy in the beauty around them. Picnicking in the ruins of an imperial palace, the Wan Hai Lo, the party is told of the doomed and tragic love affair between the Emperor Qian Long and the Uighur princess, Xiang Fei (the Fragrant Concubine). It is a tale that dri
ps with the gloomy romance of Galland’s Arabian Nights. It is in this corruptive atmosphere that Mrs Brixton snares her victim, igniting a love that “flames like Lucifer himself come straight from Hell.”

  Millions of stars twinkled in the dark and solemn sky, speaking to each other through the infinite space in a mute luminous language of flashes of light. They called up the memory of ages buried in the unfathomable mystery of the past and announced the coming of centuries of unrelenting time…And all appeal from Here Below was unanswered. No sound reached the bottomless pit where for countless years human pain and misery had been swallowed up, where oceans of blood and floods of tears will be shed until the end of time…Lying on the grass his eyes fixed on the dark firmament, Maugrais was now quite still and the immensity of his love soared in communion with the infinite.

  It is of course inevitable that Maugrais comes to repent what he sees later as his fall, and perhaps also inevitable that the book ends on a quest for something spiritual. After all that’s what all the Buddhas and Guanyins that the smart set collect actually represent – and the 1910s, post Theosophy, Gurdjieff and Diaghelev, were indeed a time when ‘the ancient wisdom of the East’ was getting a fashionable vogue.

  But the book is saved from pretentiousness, and its occasional passages of purple prose do not ultimately offend, because one suspects a certain degree of outrageousness was built into the authors’ intentions from the start.

  For there is a deliberate element of self-mockery about Silhouettes of Peking. We know only a little about the authors but what we do shows them to have been of exactly the class and profession of the characters in their novel. One suspects that Le Comte de Martel and the Baron de Hoyer were indulging themselves in a grand jeu d’ésprit, an entertainment for their friends in the diplomatic corps whom they had known in Peking in the days before and during the First World War, and who were almost certainly intended to recognize themselves in the fictional representations, partly celebrating, partly satirizing the fabulous life they had lived.