The next train goes to Yangzhou, but this is still not completely coincidental, because the choice is swayed not merely by the plaintive haste of ‘away from here!’ but also by an idea born of despair that if here in Nanjing this early May eternity is so dreadful, then they should not proceed with exaggerated and preliminary caution but immediately try their luck with the opposite extreme, so they try the city of salt merchants, in the one-time economic and cultural centre of South China, at the meeting place of the Yangtze and the Grand Canal,[23] in the memorable flower garden of the Sui,[24] the Tang[25] and the Song dynasties, they try to uncover something that is alive, a few tiny intact fragments will be enough, a few tiny fragments where the light of the spirit of classical culture might have shone across the centuries, where scholars, painters, poets, calligraphers, gardeners and architects, where the ‘Yangzhou pinghua’,[26] the popular storytellers of the street, where the most exquisitely refined figures of Chinese erudition, its bulwarks, supporters and beneficiaries, Ouyang Xiu,[27] Su Dongpo[28] or the saint of Buddhists and the Japanese, Jianzhen,[29] came upon a place and found a home in such a memorable fashion. And it cannot be said that they don’t find anything, not even considering that here everything is also in ruins and the wretchedness is the same as in Nanjing, no, exactly the opposite is the case, in Yangzhou, in the city of canals and bridges, the first thing that strikes them is that unmistakable scent of the wealth of New China, of recent wealth, where they have to hunt out the places of memory of former times but where they are also confused, although at first they think of it as a kind of beneficial relief, as the conspicuously huge mass of places of former renown practically topples onto them, because in the first hours, as in a friend’s car — made available to them with the inconspicuous assistance of Tang Xiaodu — they traverse the city from one end to the other, the feeling arises that surely here everything still remains from the sought-after past: even if cordoned off, in a sense, into a ghetto by the new, modern world, the Wenfeng Ta,[30] its original form a thousand years old, and rebuilt towards the end of the Ming dynasty, still remains; the seven-storey brick pagoda, now covered with graffiti, and maybe a little too far to the south from today’s city centre but formally serving as an emblem of the city, still remains; the Shisong Si[31] — once the memorial shrine for Shi Kefa,[32] the heroic commander who fought against the Manchus — now the City Museum and maintained with uncommon beauty, still remains; and the famous gardens too: the He Yuan, the Ge Yuan and the Xi Yuan[33] all remain, and they rush from the Daming Si temple,[34] from the beloved Jianzhen monastery to the recently excavated graves dating back to the Han era,[35] they dash from the Shou Xihu, the smaller West Lake[36] to the Tang-era city wall-remains, from the Guanyin temple to the Ouyang memorial temple,[37] so that the first hours — right until mid-afternoon — are filled with this running around, with this unexpected joy; it’s still here, says Stein to the interpreter, this is still here, and this, and this, they take themselves all over, here and there, in the car arranged from Beijing, so that, after twilight has set in, it begins to be obvious: in the back seat of the car, they are becoming quieter and quieter, that is, they begin to go back again, in order to thoroughly examine the places of these renowned monuments, and they begin everything anew, and they go everywhere now, and Stein feels that there is some problem, there is some problem with these well-preserved gardens, with these neatly ordered temple buildings, there is some problem with the Daming Si, something is not right with the Ouyang temple, with the bank of the Xihu glimpsed only from afar, with the so-called White Stupa,[38] with the Tang-city walls, with the Guanyin temple, there is some kind of problem with all of old Yangzhou, Stein finally is able to state that evening in the hotel room, from which, by the middle of the night merely one bare sentence rattles around in his brain: there is a problem with Yangzhou, by the middle of the night this is what remains from the unclouded happiness of arrival; because of the anxiety — why can’t he figure out what has to be figured out here? — he can’t fall asleep. It still hasn’t been determined, and they say nothing, but in the morning, when he and the interpreter look at each other over breakfast, both are thinking the same thing: that what is to come will not simply be the following day, nor even the next, in Yangzhou but perhaps the last, thinks Stein, and they begin everything again, but differently, not running here and there and all over the place but going to what is considered the most captivating garden in Yangzhou, they go to the He Yuan, and they stay there for hours, they stroll along the garden paths, they admire again the dazzlingly refined beauty of the pavilions, as the light glints on the tiny panes of glass of the glittering windows set like gems in the deep burgundy wooden structures, curved and polished with the sensitivity of lace-work, and they gaze at the lake in the garden, they observe the whole of it, and they try to understand what is missing here, because something is missing, this is glaring, but neither Stein, nor the interpreter, can figure out what it is, so it doesn’t even occur to them to return to the Daming Si, then to the Guanyin temple and finally to the garden of the City Museum, the beautiful pavilions of the former Shisong Si — because they now are determined to avoid everything which they discovered last night to be false, fraudulent, fake, not original, rubbish, just a bad copy — it doesn’t even occur to them to go back again to the Daming Si, to the Ouyang temple, to the Jianzhen Memorial or to the Xihu, it doesn’t even occur to them to go back to the White Stupa, to the remains of the Tang-city walls or the so-called recreational park in Wenchang Street,[39] built where a Taoist temple used to stand, no, they decisively avoid drawing conclusions from the tourist spectacles, newly built in the spirit of the coarsest enterprise, out of crude mercantile interests and camouflaged as authentic: they only seek out again the places that seem real, but the puzzlement, particularly within Stein, increases, and in the end, by early afternoon, they do not move away from the red facade of the City Museum, the amiable driver of the friend’s car doesn’t understand what’s going on, so they send him off with a thank you, remaining by themselves in front of the museum, on the banks of the canal, and they begin to stroll along the banks of the canal, because they decide that this is the most beautiful, as this little narrow-bedded canal winding here and there just flows towards the west, it begins to rain, soon there are no people around them, on the two sides of the banks, beneath the swaying grasses and the plum trees and the linden trees and the wild chestnuts, they encounter not a living soul on the narrow walkway, just a dead dog, as the rainwater slowly washes, soaks through the carcass, they walk for about 400 or 500 metres, then they turn back, and walk those 400 or 500 metres again — stepping over the sodden dog cadaver again — to the museum, and it is clear by then that the interpreter would like to get out of the rain which is now falling more steadily, and of course it’s getting chillier again, but Stein still cannot bear to do so, because he would like to find out what is missing here, to finally discover, well, what is the problem with Yangzhou — and he is certain that it can only happen here, here on the narrow banks of the canal, but he is mistaken, because nothing comes to him, well, then, later on the bus, he thinks to himself, then they take the taxi to the bus station, later on, when they are leaving, and they look back, and they see Yangzhou, then, in that moment of farewell, it will occur, he thinks — but no, nothing like that happens at all, no kind of clarity comes to Stein, evening arrives, they poke at the map again, and they say: Let the next stop be the unknown Zhenjiang, and they get onto a bus, and they set off, and Stein looks back, but nothing — there is Yangzhou behind him, the famous city of salt merchants, the centuries-old centre of art, but nothing is happening in his head, because he has to wait for something to happen in this inert idiotic head of his, he has to wait until Yangzhou has disappeared completely from sight, because all this — as to when and where — was prescribed in advance, because it was all prescribed that as he sits there in the rearmost seat, and gazes out of the bus’ grimy window onto the dark highway, and thinks back upon Yangzhou, it has all been prescribed, he must wait for this precise moment of thinking back, because then he thinks back, and he understands that Yangzhou, well, that wasn’t even it, that Yangzhou doesn’t exist any more, we were not in Yangzhou, he realizes, and he takes out his little notebook, which he bought in Beijing for 8 maos,[40] in order to note down more the important events to come, and on that page where Yangzhou is written he crosses out the word with his pen and, after thinking a little, crosses out the date above that, he crosses it out with force, so that it cannot be seen, so that it will never again be possible to decipher from the contours of the pen strokes that Yangzhou had been written there nor 2002, and 7 May and 8 May.