Table Of ContentOsbert Sit,vell
Escape with Me!
An Oriental Sketch-book
ESCAPE
WITH ME!
AN ORIENTAL
SKETCH-BOOK
BY
OSBERT SITWELL
LONDON
MACMILLAN & CO. LTD
1 939
TO MY FRIENDS
HAROLD ACTON
C. M. McDONALD
AND
LAURENCE SICKMAN
COPYRl'G~
P:R.XN'TED J:N GREAT BJEU:TAJ:N
BY a. &: a. CLARJC, LJ:MJ:TED, EDJ:NBOR.GH
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
IT
should be unnecessary now to have to state how pro
found a gratitude, for the preservation and opening out of
Angkor, all lovers of beauty must owe to the French authori
ties in Cambodia, or how much is due, in particular, to Dr.
Marchal and Monsieur Victor Goloube:ff for their investiga
tions, and for the art with which they have been executed.
In the writing of Chapter V, I am much indebted
to Monsieur Goloubeff for the benefit of his conversa
tion during my visit to Angkor, and to Dr. Marchal,
whose Guide Archeologi'lue I have frequently consulted.
For the historical facts concerning Greater India, I must,
in addition, make my acknowledgements to Dr. Quaritch
Wales, the author of Towards Angkor (Harrap & Co.,
1937), which I have several times occasion to quote.
I owe a personal debt, which I should like here to
acknowledge, to my friends Mr. Harold Acton, Mr. C. M.
McDonald and Mr. Laurence Sickman-to whom I
dedicate this book-for their kindness to me in Peking.
But for the benefit of their familiarity with the city and
with Chinese customs, and without their thoughtfulness, I
should have seen little either of Peking or of the Chinese.
I must also gratefully proclaim my obligation to Dr.
Derk Bodde for his translation of Tun Lich'en's Annual
Customs and Festwal.s in Peking (Henri Vetch, Peking,
1936. In China, $9 : abroad, 13s. 6d. : in United States,
$4-50); to Mr. Robert W. Swallow for his SidJligkts on
Pelcing Life (China Booksellers Ltd., Peking, 1927) ; and
to my friend Mr. L. C. Arlington and Mr. William Lewisohn
V
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
for their very delightful joint guide-book, In Search ofO ld
Peking (Henri Vetch, Peking, 1935). Miss Corrinne Lamb's
The Chinese Festive Board (Henri Vetch, Peking, 1935)
was of much assistance to me in the writing of the pages on
Chinese food.
I must, further, thank those responsible for permitting
me to publish the various beautiful photographs which
accompany the text. In particular, I wish to make the
most appreciative acknowledgements to that distinguished
painter of Chinese life, Mr. Thomas Handforth, for allow
ing me to reproduce several photographs of Peking scenes,
which are only less exquisite than his drawings, and to
Dr. Gustav Ecke for his remarkable photograph of the
effigy of Kang T'ieh, the Eunuch General. I should
perhaps mention here that the end papers are reproduced
from a fragment of the Empress Dowager's favourite wall
paper, which she employed often, both for the decoration
of rooms in her palaces and for the papering of the cano
pied royal barges on the Imperial lakes.
OSBERT SITWELL
vi
PREFACE
THE
volume which you now open, Gentle Reader, is
above all, in the phraseology of the day, escapist-or so,
at least, I hope and trust, being pre-First-World-War by
nature and by my age, pre-slump by disposition, and so a
citizen of no mean city. I journeyed to China, for example,
very largely to escape from Europe, but more especially in
order to see China, and the wonderful beauty of the system
of life it incorporated, before this should perish; I did not go
there to observe the form taken by the Social Struggle ( though
one could not help seeing the increasing grip in those days
of the communist creed upon all the younger and more
intelligent students of the Universities ; a result of despair,
of the hopeless position in which China patently found
herself), nor out of pure love of wandering, nor, alas I in
response to a request from my publishers to write a strong
left-wing book about that country. Though I have long
carried on a private, one-man campaign against stupidity,
and the brutality and greed which are two of its symptoms,
I am no soldier of a cause militant. The volume that has
resulted, therefore, is intended for amusement, for a record
and description, and was not created with instruction for its
purpose. It is proudly free of any political aim (o r any
aim at all, I might say, except that of getting itself written) :
though this is not to pretend that I have not my prejudices,
or will not vent them, but to confess that these, if innumer
able, vary, except in one or two directions where they have
grown permanent, from day to day. Moreover, when they
are political, they remain plain, wicked prejudices, without
vii
PREFACE
any need of justification or of being transmuted into
virtuous aims.
The world, I know, is full of wickedness and folly
( though more, I still believe, of the latter than of the
former - indeed, the greatest instance of it ever so far
recorded in history has taken place in my own lifetime):
but I have not for the moment the time, though often the
inclination, to_ set it right. The chief duty confronting
every author was - and still is - to use his eyes, to record
what he sees, and what, because of them, he feels. Much of
beauty and of merit yet remains in the old world ; let those
who are blind to it prepare the new. (Who can regret
sincerely that Holbein failed to give up his art in order to take
a prominent part in the religious controversies of his day,
that Botticelli, Michelangelo and Titian did not spend their
time crusading on behalf of a United Italy, that Cezanne,
by refusing to fight in the Franco-Prussian War, so skilfully
avoided wasting a year or two, or that Watteau and
F ragonard refrained from throwing down their paint
brushes so that they might prepare for the revolutionary
struggle that lay ahead ?) In consequence, this is neither a
communist book about Iceland or the Faroe Islands, nor
a fascist volume about Spain. It is, in the main, concerned
with China and Indo-China, and the journey thither: but
I shall again essay, as on former occasions, to use the travel
book as a vehicle of a special kind, giving, in addition to the
pages concerned with his present voyage, something of the
passing thoughts and reflections, as well as memories, of
the traveller ; further, I claim the right once more, as in
former volumes which dealt with countries nearer home,
to alight at random, as from the air, at any point con
venient to me in space or history, and to be allowed to use
viii
PREFACE
the widest range of comparison for the enforcement of a
visual image.
Moreover, the book that follows is approached, all
through, from the visual and sensual angles, rather than
from those of knowledge and learning : I hope, for example,
effectively to describe Angkor, but I shall not endeavour
to tell you the history of its kings, the details of its religious
and social systems, or to dwell upon the conditions of the
slaves who built the temples ; that must be left to those
who, by the work of a lifetime, have qualified themselves
to attempt it. Further, though I have seen nearly all the
important monuments of Angkor and its district, I shall
only concern myself with the few that were more significant
to me than any others. . .. Again, with China, my judg
ments and impressions may, for all I know, be more
chinoiserie than Chinese, for I cannot - nor in any case
would I - divest myself of Western ideas and of the
culture which, such of it as I possess, comes from the shores
of the Mediterranean, and not from those of the China Seas.
And so I remain a traveller, overcome with wonder at
strange sights and events, but often, I dare say, not fully
grasping their cause or implication. My understanding is
that of the eye ; my only sure claim, to know and appreciate
both beauty and character when I meet them.
But, nevertheless, while confessedly I am no sinologue,
I grew, inevitably, to comprehend certain facts about China
and Chinese life which are almost impossible to understand
without visiting the country. Yet it is of Peking that I
shall attempt, when the moment comes, to write, not of
China, except in so far as Peking represents China : (I
shall, too, continue to call it Peking, and neither Pekin nor
the modern Peiping, for it is as Peking that I have always
ix
PREFACE
thought of it since I first read its magic name in childhood
upon the programme of a pantomime). Even then, so vast
is the subject that I shall only choose to write of those things
which I feel I know, or of which I may have seen a unique
aspect. I shall talk of the loolc. of the Forbidden City (and
try to communicate it to the reader), more than of its
history, of which I know little : because its aspect must be
more familiar to me than to most Europeans, since, until a
comparatively short time ago, only an ambassador could
enter it, and even he was supposed to spend most of his
time in kowtowing and prostrating himself before the
Emperor, rather than in observing the things round him.
Whereas, during the four months in which I lived in this
city, I think no single day passed except I wandered at
least once in some part of the Palace, sometimes only for
twenty minutes, sometimes for hours, and I have seen it in
winter and summer, under rain and sun and snow. And
the Forbidden City is the heart of that metropolis I came
to know and love, in similarly watching its aspect change
through the seasons from winter to full summer. On
arrival there, all save the Forbidden City seemed a bare,
Breughel-like world of brown lanes, squat and narrow, of
ribbed brown roofs, and of tall, naked trees posing their
neat but web-like intricacies above them against a deep
blue sky (a cept when a dust-storm whirled down from the
Gobi Desert, carrying its load a thousand feet in the air,
overcasting the sun with a thin yellow cloud, and insinuating
a fine layer of sand upon every chair and table, and even
between the pages of my notebooks), and of figures in
padded blue robes, or patched blue canvas, and crowned,
many of them, with triptychal fur hats that framed faces
in a new way : when I left, it was a sighing, young summer
X
PREFACE
forest, the gardens were full of blossoms and on the stone
paving stood plants, moulded to the fashion of the trees on
a Chinese wallpaper, and large earthenware bowls of
goggling goldfish, engaged in their eternal skirt-dance of
:Bowing fins and veils, while figures in the thinnest· silk
gowns fanned themselves beneath the tender, quivering
shadow of young l~ves. I stayed there long enough, in
fact, to appreciate, where this city is concerned, the truth
of what Dr. Derk Bodde says so eloquently in a preface to
his translation of Lich'en's Annual Customs and Festivals in
Peld.ng.1 "Indeed," he writes, "what the translator has
felt most strongly in making this translation, and what he
hopes his readers will feel, is the sentiment . . . of the
essential oneness and harmony of man with the universe.
It is a sentiment which permeates much of the greatest
Chinese art and poetry, for in the Chinese, as perhaps in
no other people, has been developed a keen consciousness
and awareness of the movement and rhythm of nature, as
evidenced in the yearly rotation of the seasons. It is an
awareness which has made them deliberately subordinate
their own activities to that of the forces of nature, so that,
as we read this book, we find such things as their foods, the
clothes which they put on, and the lighting and taking away
of their winter fires, all following in their times a course as
rigid as that of the birds in their several migrations." •••
(This periodicity, so truly observed, is perhaps due in part to
the reliability of the calendar, that is to say, of the climate
itself; for it is possible to predict the exact day of the
second, and most severe, snowfall, of the beginning of the
1 Annual Customs anJ Futivals in Pelcing as recorded in the Yen-cliing Sui
slulw:lii by Tun Lich'en, translated and annotated by Dr. Derk Bodde. (Henri
Vetch, Peking, 1936.) This is a fascinating book, to which I shall many times
have occasion to refer in the course of these pages.
xi
