JOHN SIMPSON

The morning was dark and cold. I woke early and looked around, wondering where I was. It took me a moment or two: I was in a traditional hotel in the Chinese city of Xi’an, the imperial capital during the Tang dynasty, 1,400 years ago.

It wasn’t luxurious. The bed consisted of a few blankets on a wooden board, and there were no curtains. But it was clean, furnished in the traditional fashion, and to someone interested in Chinese history, it was magnificent – no matter how cold it was.

I dressed hurriedly. I was making a documentary about modern China, not the Tang dynasty, and we had people to interview. But my producer, a gentle and discerning man, knew I couldn’t come to Xi’an and see just a little of it.

The air was sharp and acrid. People in warm, padded jackets pushed past me on their way to work. The cars hooted at me as I strode across the square near the South Gate. Xi’an still has its magnificent city walls and many of its ancient buildings. The developers have been at work, as they have throughout China, but Xi’an’s beauty has been better protected from vandalism.

It was on just such a corner as this in July 756 that the poet and court official Du Fu bumped into a forlorn prince of the royal house, just after a rebel army had captured Xi’an. The emperor, Xuanzong, and a small group of people closest to him, had escaped through the West Gate in the direction of Sichuan. The prince, abandoned, had been living rough in the nearby park. Du Fu recognised the prince and had immense pity for him, but didn’t dare help him. He stood with him for a nervous moment, giving useless advice, then hurried off guiltily.

I reached the narrow streets of the writers’ quarter, where the shops sell blocks of ink and huge brushes, and found the shop that had been recommended to me. I enjoy talking to Chinese antiquities dealers; some are crooks, some are honest and some are scholars, much like antiquities dealers anywhere. The best are usually a mixture of all three. This dealer was one of them.

At first he tried to sell me a couple of obvious fakes, then moved on to the better fakes. And when we had got through that stage, he showed me some items that might have been real. Good antiquities from the graves of the wealthy around Xi’an tend to go straight to Beijing or Hong Kong, but he had one or two quite good pottery figures, which might possibly have been genuine.

Since I was in Xi’an, I felt I must take home the figure of a court lady. Like the ancient Egyptians, wealthy Chinese had clay images of their possessions and retainers buried with them, hence, of course, the terracotta warriors. Court ladies, six or seven inches high, are some of the finest of these figures.

In 756, when the great rebellion broke out, Emperor Xuanzong, a good and effective ruler, had been on the throne for half a century. But he had fallen under the spell of a beautiful dancer, Yang Guifei. Yang set the standard of beauty in China for more than a century, and her serene, chubby looks can be found on a million clay figures from the time. The one I bought was pretty unremarkable, but at least it came from Xi’an, from roughly the time Yang dominated court life there. Or so I choose to believe.