The shops all along Yingze Street were doing brisk business, and Li had to bump and jostle his way through the crowds to make progress east. No one else seemed to be in a hurry. The pace of life here was much slower than he was used to in Beijing. He passed the crowded Tianlong shopping mall and the Shanxi Chinese Communist Party headquarters before reaching the government buildings on the east side of the Yingze bridge. The area had been completely redeveloped, modern buildings rising all around from the rubble of the old. There was a vast open space in front of the main building, much of which was taken up by a parking lot. He climbed the steps into the main hall.
It took about an hour, being passed from desk to desk, department to department, before he was finally directed to the citizens’ registry office at Taiyuan City Hall on Xingjian Road. Here Li found another formidable group of buildings, older, built in the European style, and fronted by a huge courtyard. This time he tracked down the registry office quite quickly and found himself opposite an elderly lady with short, silvered hair on the other side of the counter. She was like a throwback from another era, in her blue cotton Mao suit and black slippers encasing tiny feet. But she smiled at him welcomingly enough and asked what she could do to help. ‘Ah, yes,’ she said when he told her, ‘the Wutaishan Orphanage. It was on the south side of the city, within sight of the Yongzuo Temple.’
‘You mean the Double-pagoda Temple?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You said, was. Does that mean it’s moved?’
‘Oh, no,’ said the old lady. ‘It’s still there. What’s left of it. The place burned to the ground about thirty years ago. They never rebuilt on the site, and the remains of it are still visible. Although it’s pretty much overgrown now.’ She tilted her head and looked at him curiously. ‘I’ve had quite a few enquiries about the place over the years. Mainly from people who grew up in it, wondering what happened. Not so many now, though.’
‘What did happen?’ Li asked.
‘No one knows. It just went up in flames one night. They got all the children out safely, but by the time the fire fighters got there it was too late to save it. An old building, you see. Mostly built of wood. It was all over in an hour.’
Li said, ‘What about the records? All the kids who passed through the orphanage over the years. Presumably you still have that information on file here?’
The old lady shook her head sadly. ‘I’m afraid not,’ she said. ‘In those days all the records were kept at the orphanage itself. Everything was handwritten then. I know, because I was working here all those years ago when the place went up in flames. All our records were handwritten, too. We still have them in the basement. Unfortunately, the records at Wutaishan were destroyed along with everything else. The only thing that burns faster than wood is paper.’ She scratched her head. ‘A great shame. Generations of kids, their history lost forever. And the orphanage was the only family they ever had.’
Li felt himself slipping into a trough of despair. If the orphanage was gone, its records destroyed, there was no way to prove that Cao Xu was not who he said he was. Clearly he had covered his tracks well.
‘What’s your interest?’ the old lady asked, scrutinising him shrewdly.
Li decided to take a chance. ‘I’m a police officer from Beijing,’ he said. ‘We’re investigating the history of someone who grew up in the orphanage.’
The old lady smiled. ‘I thought as much,’ she said. ‘I can always tell a policeman. You’re too big to be anything else. And too confident.’ She paused to think. ‘When did this person leave the orphanage?’
Li shrugged. ‘I don’t know exactly.’
‘Approximately, then.’
‘I should think he would have been around sixteen or seventeen. Maybe even eighteen. He was born in 1948, which would mean somewhere between 1967 and 1969.’
The old lady thought for a long time. ‘Old Mister Meng would have been there around that time.’
‘Mister Meng?’ Li asked.
She came out of her reverie. ‘Yes. He cleans the hall, and the public record office when it shuts at five. He worked as an odd-job man at the orphanage from the mid-fifties until it burned down in the early seventies. There was some speculation at the time about whether he might have been responsible for the fire. But I don’t think so. It was just idle chatter. He’s worked as a cleaner for the municipality ever since. Retired now, of course. But still doing an hour a day for the extra cash.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘If you come back in a couple of hours, you’ll be able to talk to him if you want.’
It was a short taxi ride to the southeast corner of Taiyuan City, but the twin towers of the Double-pagoda Temple were visible almost as soon as they left the city centre. The taxi driver was a chatty type, engaging Li in reluctant conversation. Was this his first trip to Taiyuan City? What did he think of it? Where was he from? Did he want to take a detour to the Yongzuo Temple? Li declined the offer, to the driver’s obvious disappointment. He began to tell Li its history. ‘The towers were built in the Ming dynasty,’ he said. ‘Under the Emperor Waili. They are fifty-three metres high. Thirteen storeys of brick and stone.’
Li looked at the towers as they circled them on the ring road. They were awe-inspiring this close up, octagonal structures, tapering to a point at the top, aiming straight up to the heavens. It was little wonder that they had been chosen as the visual symbol of the city. In past centuries, when the buildings of the town were no more than one storey high, it must have been possible to see them for miles.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to stop?’ the driver said. ‘You can see the tablets of the famous calligraphers, Wang Xizhi, Yan Zhenqing and Su Dongpo.’
‘Sounds like something I really shouldn’t miss,’ Li said. ‘Next time.’
The driver shrugged. ‘As you like.’
The Wutaishan Orphanage was on the old road heading south out of town toward the great expanse of paddy fields on the Shanxi plain. There were rows of brick-built workers’ houses in among groves of bamboo and eucalyptus, great bundles of dried corn stalks stacked at the roadside. The original wall still stood around a large area of garden, now overgrown and gone to seed. Rusted wrought-iron gates hung open on buckled hinges. Li asked the driver to wait for him and wandered into the grounds. It had obviously become a dumping ground for overspill refuse from the surrounding houses, filled with the carcasses of long dead cars and bicycles. Among the tangling overgrowth, you could still make out the foundations of the original complex of single-storey buildings which had made up the orphanage. The thorns of wild roses caught on Li’s trousers as he tramped down the growth and made his way to the heart of the site where the main building had stood. Some charred stumps of wooden uprights could still be found poking through the undergrowth. Blackened bricks scattered around where they had fallen when the walls collapsed. He tried to imagine how it must have been, flames reaching into the night sky, the crackle of burning wood, the screams of the children as they were ushered out into the dark to stand at a safe distance and watch the only home they had known vanish in the smoke.