He takes it all in his stride, a man seemingly completely at ease with it all.
‘This must be the best time of your life,’ I ask him.
He smiles and shakes his head.
‘Not yet.’
He has a big garden to look after in his house outside Lijiang, and an autobiography to complete. Most of all, I suspect, he relishes his role as satirist, court jester, respected subversive. All the things he was sent to the tin mines for are now not only expected of him, but officially sanctioned.
He chuckles as he tells me that he had 22 American congressmen at the show the other night. After the orchestra had played a particularly quiet and soothing number, he asked the audience if they’d thought that was peaceful.
There was general agreement and appreciative applause, to which he responded, ‘Then why not play it on the border with Israel and Palestine?’
‘Very big applause,’ he says, ‘but not from the congressmen.’
Before going to see his show in the evening, Basil and I eat a bowl of delicious pork crackling washed down with Mekong River Beer beneath the bending, canal-side willows at our new favourite eatery, Old Stone Bridge Snacks (Basil admits it loses a bit in translation). Tour groups are still out, plodding submissively over the bridge, eyes glazed and heads lolling. After we’ve eaten, I buy a collection of old photographs of Lijiang from a stall opposite and notice four of Namu’s books on a lower shelf.
From the heroine of the Mosuo, to the hero of the Naxi. Xuan Ke and the orchestra are performing at eight and the queues are already forming. The narrow entrance of the Concert Hall leads to a courtyard converted into a galleried auditorium. Cherry-red lacquer dominates and Chinese lanterns are hung about. Baskets of carnations, dahlias and roses are set out along the front of the stage, and on the back wall there is a colourful mural of black-necked cranes in flight. Above the stage, and in sharp contrast to the swirls of red and gold decoration, is a sombre display of black and white photographs of faces, some blurred, some blank and expressionless like prison photos or police IDs.
Which is probably what they are, for these are all members of the original Naxi orchestra, who have either died or disappeared.
The present orchestra take their places, with the most elderly members, venerable and white-bearded like a troupe of former emperors, being led on by young women in Naxi costume. Xuan Ke makes an inconspicuous entrance, slipping quietly on from the wings to stand at a microphone at stage right. He’s wearing a long blue robe, like a priest’s soutane, whose simplicity makes him stand out from the dazzling brocades and silks of the older musicians behind him.
He clearly enjoys being at the microphone and addresses the audience in a mixture of Mandarin, Naxi and English, milking the laughs skilfully, in all three languages. I can see the schoolteacher in him as the orchestra sit patiently through a leisurely monologue that touches on all sorts of pet peeves. He makes sure we know that the Naxi Orchestra still needs help. It receives no financial support from the government. And he sounds a warning. Here on the Chinese borderlands, where Han and Tibetan meet, ‘the music and musicians are in big danger.’
Young people change their minds faster and faster, going for Karaoke, rock ‘n’ roll and what he calls ‘nonsense lyrics’.
At this point his voice rises and the teacher becomes preacher.
‘The music,’ he declaims, with arm raised heavenwards, ‘is disappearing in the shadow of the Himalaya!’
By now, I’m sure I’m not the only one in the audience thinking that the chief threat to Naxi music might be Xuan Ke’s monologues. It’s at least 15 minutes into the programme before bow is laid to string or stick to drum but, when it comes, the music, a piece written by the Tang Dynasty Emperor Li Hu over 1000 years ago, is fascinating and unusual, featuring early versions of familiar instruments, lutes, three-string violins and cymbals, accompanied by high soprano vocals.
The only wrong note is the jarring ring of a mobile behind me. Not only is it not turned off but the man proceeds to have a series of long conversations into it, quite oblivious to whatever’s happening on stage.
The next song is 750 years old and was written, as Xuan Ke announces cheerfully, ‘to express hatred of Kublai Khan’.
After this, he does a whacky impression of Pavarotti jerking manically about to reinforce a point about how even serious music in China has become infected with insidious pop star mannerisms.
The concert is brought to an end with a spare and soulful, if a little anti-climactic, bamboo flute solo, played by one of four young women who have also sung quite exquisitely.
At the end I try to get to Xuan Ke to congratulate him and thank him for our day together, but he’s almost invisible between a wall of young female fans. And smiling happily.
Day Eighty Six : Lijiang
Our hotel is impressively located high up on the cusp of the new and old towns, a short, energetic walk from Lion Hill, which is considered the highest point in Lijiang. This is not strictly correct, as on the top of the hill stands a pagoda over 100 feet high, which claims to be the tallest wooden building in China. It’s not old and has been put up to pull in the tourists, who, like us, feel duty-bound to walk up every one of the steps that climb steeply through five spacious floors. The view you expect to be rewarded with is quite disappointing, as someone’s planted a girdle of conifers near the base of the pagoda that successfully masks much of the ink-black tiled rooftops of old Lijiang.
The designers have attempted to decorate the interior of the pagoda in local style, which includes several symbols in dongba, the old language of the Naxi.
Despite the best efforts to introduce a pan-Chinese orthodoxy during Mao’s years, a rich and diverse cultural life has survived in the mountains of Yunnan. The Dongba, a Naxi word meaning not just ‘the scriptures’ but those who interpret them, are important guardians of the old traditions. They have their own cultural centre in Lijiang, where the 30 of them still alive work on translation of the old Naxi texts. Part shaman, part priest, the Dongbas also perform ceremonies and rituals based on the Bon religion, which pre-dated Buddhism in Tibet. In Forgotten Kingdom Peter Goullart describes his horrified fascination as he watched Dongbas dancing themselves into a semi-trance to reawaken the spirits of two young lovers who had killed themselves in a suicide pact.
‘Just for an instant…we all felt that the lovers had returned… I thought at first the impression was entirely mine: but with a burst of weeping the two families prostrated themselves as one man before the little altar. The guests looked startled. Nothing was seen and the impression was gone in a flash. But they had been there and everyone knew it.’
Later in the day, we witness a Dongba at work a few miles outside Lijiang. When the last light of day has faded on the ice turrets of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain behind him, he begins the ceremony. He’s a sprightly old man, who I’m alarmed to find is only five years older than me, dressed in a long, mandarin-style, red robe and embroidered waistcoat with an amulet hanging from a cord around his neck. Wound round his head is a red cap with a headdress of five pointed leaves. He holds a drum in one hand and cymbals in the other, and, after striking the drum, he sets about purifying the area where the ceremony is to take place, which is unclean because of our presence here. With a handful of burning branches he moves around the courtyard and then the garden, chanting and passing the smoking branches over arches, walls and, finally, over all our equipment. Then, with ever-accelerating speed and more frenetic chanting, he races to the door of the building, runs out and with shouted imprecations hurls the branches away, casting out all the bad spirits he’s collected from within the compound.