Accumulated elegance

To an ignorant outsider who can only read the English translations, the Chinese seem to love poetic, beautiful, enigmatic titles.

All the palaces and pavilions in the Forbidden City have deliciously elegant names which have been changed and changed again by a succession of emperors; from mental cultivation to appreciating flowers to supreme harmony to joyful longevity.

It’s easy to imagine the emperors and their consorts doing little else but dream up these phrases as they sat in their Pavilion of Bestowing Wine, composing poetry and placing wine cups to float in the stone channel created specially for this purpose (‘A kind of drinking game’, I overhear a tour guide tell her faithful flock).

Of course the city is designed to awe as a representation of complete power, and awe it does. But there is so much attention to beauty, to entertainment, to time-wasting.

The artfully tumbled honeycomb rocks of the gardens are labeled ‘Perilous Hills.’ Such is the overall sonorous tone of the city, it takes me a little while to realise this is not another Imperial flight of fancy, but the modern museum’s version of ‘steep slope’ or ‘unsafe surface’.

These phrases and titles are not confined to historic sites. North west of the city, where new housing compounds for the rich are going up everywhere, the names are Merlin Champagne Town, Shine City, Dragon Bay.

One building site promises ‘Customised propitious clouds for festival lover’. The fences around another site, depicting vast kitschy mansions amid blue lakes, announce that ‘Ultimate virtue is just like water; it is ultimate beauty’.

Is it a quote from a Chinese poet? It seems lovely but meaningless to me, associated at least with super-expensive and exclusive real estate.

But I suppose that’s exactly what for 500 years the Forbidden City was – the most absolutely exclusive real estate in the Middle Kingdom.

Putting hell in order

Like oversized dollshouse rooms, or panoramas in old-fashioned museums, the chambers of hell are laid out in Daoist temples in an incredibly literal depiction of spiritual progress.

Daoist Hell, first established as a replica of mortal feudal government, is a huge bureaucratic machine. There are departments recording and overseeing every possible aspect of life and afterlife, doling out rewards and punishments according to strict measurements of virtue and wickedness.

There seems little space for imagination, for luck – but probably that’s the point; perhaps ordinary people found life under the feudal Emperors too painfully lacking in impartial legal justice, and longed for infallible fairness in the next life.

It’s clearly a highly sophisticated social and religious system, but these endless careful divisions and brightly-painted graphic scenes somehow remind me of my childhood universe, of hours spent rearranging my dollshouse rooms, writing lists of things I wanted, putting my coloured pencils in rainbow order.

here’s a selection of hellish departments from the Dongyue temple in Beijing. Which one do you feel you belong in?

Department of Signing Documents
Department for Determining Individual Destiny
Department of Confiscating Unwarranted Property
Plague Performing Department
Department for Implementing Fifteen Kinds of Violent Death
Department of Raingods
Department for Demons and Monsters
Unjust Death Department
Department for Preservation of Wilderness (ahead of its time)

Department of Betrayal
Department for Bestowing Happiness
Egg Birth Department (‘..to warn people that if they fail to do good deeds they will become low class flying birds in their next birth and will have to go on pecking at food to stay alive’)
Toxicant Department
Department for Resurrection
Department in Charge of Suffering and Distress
Department of Instant Rewards and Retribution
Department of Pity and Sympathy
Department for Accumulating Justified Wealth
Water Birth Department (not a maternity ward ahead of its time, but overseeing punishment for inadequate behaviour in this life by birth in the next as a fish)

Door God Department
Department for Controlling Evil Spirits
Department for Suppressing Schemes
Department for Wandering Ghosts
Flying Birds Department
Department of Petty Officials
Execution Department (‘The executioner’s block of the nether world’)
Final Indictment Department
Death and Life Department