Final essay

NINETEEN

THE SPIRITUAL VOID

“Mao Badge Fever” struck China in the summer of 1966, when the Shanghai United Badge Factory produced a simple aluminum pin—a half inch in diameter, bearing the face of the Chairman. The Cultural Revolution was gathering, and the badges were a sensation. Within weeks, they were in production nationwide; men, women, and children were pinning them above their hearts as testaments to devotion, the more badges the better, spilling down their chests and across their arms.

The Chairman was pictured facing forward or in profile, but never to the right, which was the counterrevolutionary direction. There were badges that glowed in the dark and badges made from U.S. fighter planes downed in Vietnam. The inscriptions hailed the Chairman as the “Messiah of the Working People” and the “Great Savior” and the “Red Sun in Our Hearts.”

The Cultural Revolution was Mao’s final play for power. After the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward, his rivals had pushed him aside, so Mao unleashed China’s youth to “bombard the headquarters.” It gave him a new aura: “Let Mao Zedong’s thought control everything,” the media declared, and people confessed their sins at the foot of his statues. His Little Red Book of quotations became known for mysterious powers: the state press reported that the book had enabled a team of surgeons to remove a ninety- nine-pound tumor; it had helped workers in Shanghai raise the sinking city by three-quarters of an inch.

Mao’s touch acquired otherworldly significance: when a Pakistani delegation gave Mao a basket of mangoes in 1968, he regifted them to workers, who wept and placed them on altars; crowds lined up and bowed before the fruit. A mango was flown to Shanghai on a chartered plane, so that

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workers such as Wang Xiaoping could see it. “What is a ‘mango’? Nobody knew,” she recalled in an essay. “Knowledgeable people said it was a fruit of extreme rarity, like Mushrooms of Immortality.” When the mangoes spoiled, they were preserved in formaldehyde, and plastic replicas were created. A village dentist who observed that one of the mangoes resembled a sweet potato was tried for malicious slander and executed.

At the very moment that Mao was becoming a god, his believers were dismantling China’s ancient infrastructure of faith. Karl Marx had considered religion an “illusory happiness” incompatible with the struggle for socialism, and the People’s Daily called upon the young to “Smash the Four Olds”—old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Red Guards demolished temples and smashed sacred objects in a surge of violence that the scholars Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer describe as the “most thorough destruction of all forms of religious life in Chinese and, perhaps, human history.” In some cases, the deification of Mao and the destruction of his enemies became indistinguishable. The Little Red Book was used as a “demon-exposing mirror” that could unmask “class enemies,” and in two provinces, the fervor descended into cannibalism: class enemies were disemboweled, and their organs were consumed at communal banquets.

By 1969 the cult of Mao was out of control and threatening China’s future. The death toll was rising, temples were in ruins, and even the badges had become a problem: China was manufacturing so many of them (between two and five billion in all) that they were diverting aluminum from industrial production. Mao finally ended the craze by saying the metal had to be used to “make airplanes to protect the nation.”

After the Chairman died in 1976, collectors and speculators saw a profit- making opportunity, and they accumulated badges as an investment. But the trade was so lucrative that the badge market was swamped with counterfeits. The talismans became a commodity, and I found them buried in the bric-a- brac at the Beijing flea markets. Online, factories now sold them in bulk for seven cents apiece.

Mao’s Cultural Revolution destroyed China’s old belief systems, but Deng’s economic revolution could not rebuild them. The relentless pursuit of fortune had relieved the deprivation in China’s past, but it had failed to define the ultimate purpose of the nation and the individual. The truth now lay in plain view: the Communist Party presided over a land of untamed capitalism,

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graft, and rampant inequality. In sprinting ahead, China had bounded past whatever barriers once held back the forces of corruption and moral disregard. There was a hole in Chinese life that people named the jingshen kongxu—“the spiritual void”—and something was going to fill it.

* * *

In the winter of 2010 we moved into a small brick house on Guoxue Hutong —the Alley of National Studies. It was a grand title for a dead-end street so narrow and crooked that two cars couldn’t pass at the same time. In the spring, it narrowed further when the neighborhood card game took up residence on the shady side of the street.

The Alley of National Studies—surrounded by noisy boulevards, north of the Forbidden City—was a remnant of old Beijing that had fended off demolition because it was wedged between two treasures: the Lama Temple (Beijing’s largest Tibetan monastery) and the Confucius Temple (a seven- hundred-year-old shrine to China’s most important philosopher). These were surrounded by the city’s largest concentration of fortune-tellers, and together they made the neighborhood the most spiritually alive patch of the capital. It had the feel of a chaotic open-air market stocked with not products but creeds.

The name of the alley came from its location: “National Studies” referred to the mix of philosophy, history, and politics at the core of Chinese culture. Defining exactly what this entailed—which history should be taught, which ideas were valid—was fraught, but generations of Chinese thinkers had dreamed of finding the strongest recipe to insulate China from the pressures of Westernization. Liang Qichao, the foremost intellectual of the early twentieth century, called for promoting the “essence of the country,” and in recent years, Chinese leaders had recommitted themselves to this idea, in the hope of fastening the remnants of socialism to deeper roots in Chinese culture. They were unnerved by the spread of Western political values, and like the philosophy student Tang Jie, they reembraced the Chinese classics as a defense. A banner went up declaring our neighborhood THE HOLY LAND OF NATIONAL STUDIES.

Our alley had no stores or bars or restaurants. It was only a hundred yards off the main road, Yonghegong Dajie, but the dead end and the old houses

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made it feel like a village encircled by a city of nineteen million people. One neighbor kept a rooster to greet the dawn. Another took his exercise by snapping a bullwhip in the morning air. We lived in close proximity to one another; at my desk, I listened for the moment, each night, when my neighbor, a widow named Jin Baozhu, fired up her stove at exactly 6:00 p.m.; at 6:05, the hiss of hot oil; at 6:15, dinner.

In its seclusion, life in the alley had an improvisational quality; at Chinese New Year, a neighbor invited us over for fireworks, which were not, strictly speaking, legal. One year they tipped over and fired a rocket into the crowd. Two months later, Mrs. Jin decided to knock down her house and rebuild it with a few extra feet of space that she absorbed from open land. I didn’t mind —she needed it; her place was tiny—but my landlord was incensed. He accused her of “stealing sunlight” and filed a lawsuit. They couldn’t agree on who owned what, in part because people had seized so much from each other during the Cultural Revolution.

Not far from our front door, an official bulletin board was set aside for “Anti-Cult Warnings and Education.” Large Chinese characters across the top read, BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR CULTS. BUILD HARMONY. With so much spiritual activity in the neighborhood, the government kept a wary eye on it, because it worried about groups that competed for loyalty and devotion. When the spiritual movement Falun Gong emerged in China in the 1990s, and appealed for greater rights and recognition, the Party declared it a cult and rounded up its members in a crackdown that has continued ever since. One poster was headed COUNTERING FALUN GONG’S DAILY PLOTS TO CAUSE TROUBLE AND DESTRUCTION. It said that cults “use computer networks to create and spread rumors that throw social order into disorder.” I never heard anyone in the neighborhood talk about joining a cult, but if I did, there was a poster explaining how to respond: DON’T LISTEN, DON’T READ, DON’T SHARE, AND DON’T JOIN.

Outsiders often saw the Chinese as pragmatists with little time for faith, but for thousands of years the country had been knitted together by beliefs and rituals. At one point, Beijing had more temples than any other city in Asia. Daoism and Buddhism flourished alongside a range of indigenous deities: scholars prayed to the God of Literature, the sick appealed to the God of Rheumatism, and artillerymen worshipped the God of Cannons. Beijing attracted pilgrims from thousands of miles away, some of whom made their

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way by prostrating flat on the ground with every step, like inchworms. After the Cultural Revolution subsided, Chinese scholars were gradually

permitted to reinterpret Marx’s belief that religion was “the opiate of the masses,” and they argued that he was referring to religion in the Germany of his day, not religion itself. By then, China was pursuing material satisfaction, and people found that it could satisfy only some of their yearnings; on the existential questions—meaning, self-cultivation, life itself—it was a dead end. Now and then, a surge of patriotism provided a form and direction to people’s lives, but it was, as the Japanese author Haruki Murakami wrote of the nationalism in his own country, “like cheap liquor”: “It gets you drunk after only a few shots and makes you hysterical,” he wrote, “but after your drunken rampage you are left with nothing but an awful headache the next morning.”

By the time we settled in the neighborhood, China was in the midst of a full-fledged revival. The “spiritual void” was now being filled, as one study put it, by a “religious universe, exploding centrifugally in all directions.” People did not trust the institutions around them: the Party was ravaged by hypocrisy; the press was crippled by bribery and censorship; the big companies were known for patronage and nepotism. People were placing their faith elsewhere. In the poorest reaches of the countryside, temples were reopening and offering a mix of Daoism, Buddhism, and the folk religions. There were now sixty to eighty million Christians, a community as large as the Communist Party. I met Pentecostal judges and Baha’i tycoons.

Faced with so many options, some people hedged with a bit of spiritual promiscuity: before the school exams each spring, I watched Chinese parents stream past the gates of the Lama Temple to pray for good scores. Then they crossed the street to pray at the Confucius Temple, and some finished the afternoon at a Catholic Church, just in case.

Some of the fastest-growing groups blended religion, business, and self- improvement. I attended the meeting of an organization called “Top Human,” which recruited ambitious men and women to sell “inspirational marketing” products that help you “see into your psychology.” Local papers asked if it was a “spiritual marketing” program or, perhaps, a “religion.” Eventually the government shut it down, and the founders went to jail, reportedly on charges of tax evasion.

Over the years, I’d followed the stories of those on the hunt for fortune

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after so many years of poverty. And I’d traveled the country to meet truth- tellers of one kind or another. But the longer I stayed in China, the more I sought to understand the changes that were harder to glimpse—the quests for meaning. Nothing had caused more upheaval in the last hundred years of Chinese history than the battle over what to believe. I wanted to know what life was like for men and women trying to decide what mattered most, and I didn’t have to look far. In the bookstores of my neighborhood, the Chinese titles included A Guidebook for the Soul and What Do We Live For? From my front door, I could walk to every point on the compass and find a different answer.

* * *

Due east of the Alley of National Studies was the Lama Temple, a spectacular complex of brightly painted wood-and-stone pavilions wreathed in the smoke of incense. It was one of the world’s most important Tibetan monasteries and, to the Chinese government, one of the most sensitive places in the city. Beijing had once been close to Tibetan Buddhism; emperors had kept thousands of monks in the capital to pray for protection of the empire. But the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, fled China in 1959 after rejecting the Communist Party’s claims to his homeland and trekking over the mountains to India. In exile, he won the Nobel Peace Prize and helped turn Tibetans, in the words of his friend Robert Thurman, a Columbia University professor and former monk, into the “the baby seals of the human-rights movement.” Just as Pope John Paul II had been an icon of opposition to the Soviet empire, the Dalai Lama became the face of resistance to Chinese rule. After the uprising in Tibet in the spring of 2008, Chinese leaders accused the Dalai Lama of fomenting unrest. He denied any involvement, but they considered him a “wolf in monk’s clothing” intent on “splitting the motherland.”

There were always police in uniform and plain clothes around the temple, which was a curious sight because most of the visitors were not Tibetans; most were prosperous young Chinese couples who came to burn incense and pray for a healthy baby. For many of them, Tibet was China’s glamorous Wild West, a chic destination associated with spirituality and rugged individualism. “When I’m in Tibet,” a young Chinese rock musician told me,

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“I can be free.” I knew a number of Han Chinese adherents of Tibetan Buddhism,

including a private-equity investor named Lin, who wore Buddhist beads on one wrist and a Swiss watch on the other. He struggled to reconcile his faith with the government’s warnings about the Dalai Lama. “When I was learning from my Tibetan teachers, I used to ask them, ‘Are you Chinese or Tibetan? Are you going to use my money to buy weapons?’” he said. He had dabbled in psychology and spiritualism, and settled on the Tibetan variety of Buddhism because it felt purer than the Chinese variety, which had been merged with elements of Daoism and other traditions. Of the Dalai Lama, he said, “He’s written about sixty books, and I’ve probably read thirty of them.”

We were at an outdoor café in Beijing, and another friend at the table—a restaurateur who happened to be a Communist Party member—gave a theatrical gasp and said, “He is brave for saying that.” Lin rolled his eyes, and I got the sense that he enjoyed the audacity that accompanied his faith. “I think the Dalai Lama is not actually a Tibetan separatist,” Lin said. “If he were, Tibet would have been out of control by now.”

Radiating, in all directions, from the Lama Temple were blocks of tiny storefronts occupied by feng shui consultants, blind soothsayers, and “name- givers,” who could reveal, for the right price, the most auspicious name for a baby or a new business. After decades underground, the fortune-telling business was out in the open—and booming. So much about success and failure in China hinged on mysterious factors, on hidden relationships and invisible deals, that people were eager to seek a divine advantage.

The soothsayers advertised their services with signs in the windows: PREDICT THE POLITICAL AND FINANCIAL FUTURE; EVALUATE THE PROSPECTS OF MARRIAGE; IMPROVE A SCORE ON THE COLLEGE-ENTRANCE EXAM. More advanced procedures were available upon request, including, as one sign put it, THE RESOLUTION OF SPELLS, ETCETERA. The shop that belonged to Shang Degang always reminded me of an obstetrician’s office; it was papered with photos of smiling clients where the snapshots of thriving kids would be. “This young lady, Peng Yuan, was a nobody when she came to Beijing,” he told me one afternoon, tapping a finger on the picture of a woman who had a tense smile and red cheeks. “Now she’s a cosmetologist, and she’s friends with many famous people.” In the photo, she was holding something green and flat. “I made that jade plate for her, and it turned her fortune around.”

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Master Shang’s office was cluttered with not-so-ancient books such as Wall Street Feng Shui, and his services mixed Buddhism, Daoism, and a smidgen of hocus-pocus. But his sales pitch hinged mostly on a connection to history: he identified himself as a descendent of Shang Kexi, an ancient general, and on his desk, he kept a leather-bound copy of the Shang family tree, which was four inches thick. It impressed his clients because so many of those family trees were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Clients who could never know the details of their own history found some comfort in knowing his. His sign promised SUPERNATURAL SERVICES ONCE AVAILABLE ONLY TO THE UPPER CLASS.

For all Mao’s efforts, folk religion still thrived in every corner of life. The first autumn after we moved in, I heard the sound of scratching and digging in the ceiling above my desk. I didn’t mind, but after a few weeks my office began to smell a bit like a zoo. Through the window one night, I saw a furry blond creature dart up the tree and disappear into a hole in the roof. I mentioned it to my neighbor Huang Wenyi, and he smiled.

“That’s a weasel,” he said. “You should be happy!” A weasel, he said, was a sign of imminent wealth, as were hedgehogs, snakes, foxes, and rats. Since those species hung around tombs, they were believed to bear the souls of ancestors. “Don’t mess with it,” Huang said. I mentioned the animal to our housekeeper, Auntie Ma, and she said sternly, “Don’t hit it. Never a hit a weasel.”

But the smell over my desk was making it difficult to work. Something had to be done. A few days later, I was standing in the courtyard with an exterminator named Han Changdong. I described what I’d seen. He nodded reassuringly. “That’s a weasel,” he said. “You’re a very lucky man.”

“But you’re in the business of extermination,” I said. Han shrugged and said, “Chinese people would consider it very auspicious

to have a weasel move into a house.” As more of the city turned to concrete, Han said, the last wild animals were crowding into the alleys in search of wood and straw. He fished around in his bag of tools. “In my hometown, you’d burn an offering of thanks to the God of Wealth. But this situation is different. We’ll sort it out.” From his bag, he produced a container of rat poison, which didn’t make me feel very good.

“Wait,” I said. “Is this a bad idea—spiritually speaking?” Han considered the question, and said, “You should be fine because

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you’re a foreigner and you don’t believe in this.” I wasn’t sure what I believed anymore. But it was too late anyway; Han

was already stuffing handfuls of pink rat poison into the holes in the roof. He said his work was covered by a one-year money-back guarantee. “If the weasel comes back, call me,” he said.

The ceiling was silent again. Two weeks later, the scratching returned— stronger this time. The aroma was intense—the smell of revenge, I thought— but I never again called Han the exterminator for his money-back guarantee. Instead I bought an electric fan to air out my office, and I learned to live with the weasel above.

* * *

Of all the neighbors, none was closer to us than the Confucius Temple; it shared a wall with our kitchen. The shrine was one of the city’s most tranquil places, a secluded compound built in 1302, with ancient trees and a tall wooden pavilion that loomed above our house like a conscience. In the mornings, I brought a cup of coffee outside and listened to the wake-up sounds next door: the brush of a broom across the flagstones, the squeak of a faucet, the hectoring of the magpies overhead.

It was a small miracle that the temple had survived at all. Thousands of shrines across the country once existed to venerate Confucius, the philosopher and politician who was born in the sixth century B.C.E. He acquired a place in Chinese history akin to that of Socrates in the West, in part because his ideology encouraged order and loyalty. “There is government,” Confucius said, “when the prince is prince, and the minister is minister; when the father is father, and the son is son.” Confucius linked morality to the strength of the state: “He who exercises government by means of virtue may be compared to the North Star, which holds its place while all other stars turn around it.” Chairman Mao believed in “permanent revolution,” and when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, he exhorted young Red Guards to “Smash the Four Olds”: old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Zealots denounced Confucius for fostering “bad elements, rightists, monsters, and freaks,” and one of Mao’s lieutenants gave the approval to dig up his grave. Hundreds of temples were destroyed. By the 1980s, Confucianism was so maligned that the historian Ying-shih Yu called

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it a “wandering soul.” One morning in September 2010, I heard a loudspeaker crackle to life

inside the temple walls. It was followed by the sound of a heavy bell, then drums and a flute, and a narrator reciting passages from the classics. The performance lasted twenty minutes, and then it was repeated an hour later, and an hour after that, and again the next day. The wandering soul, in one form or another, had been stirring. Beginning in the eighties, when it became clear that something would eventually fill the “spiritual void,” the Party was determined to have a hand in filling it. The old proletarian virtues (revolution, class consciousness) were obsolete. The leaders needed a new moral vocabulary suited to the Party in Power, a way to link themselves to the glories of their ancient civilization. China needed a morality and a politics for the New Middle-Income Stratum. The Party was intrigued by the renaissance of Confucius among Chinese communities in Singapore and Taiwan. He was, after all, an indigenous moral icon, firmly embedded in China’s “national studies.” In Beijing, Confucius was rehabilitated.

The government opened more than four hundred “Confucius Institutes” around the world to teach Mandarin language and history. (Abroad, scholars complained that the Confucius Institutes stifled discussion of controversial issues such as Tibet and Taiwan.) Proponents of the Confucian revival argued that it would defend China from Western “egoist philosophy,” and they had taken to comparing the city of Qufu, the philosopher’s hometown, to Jerusalem. Near the cave where Confucius was said to have been born, a five- hundred-million-dollar museum-and-park complex began construction; plans called for a statue of Confucius that would be nearly as tall as the Statue of Liberty. In its marketing, Qufu called itself “the Holy City of the Orient.” In 2012, it received 4.4 million visitors, surpassing the number of people who visited Israel. The Chinese Association for the Study of Confucius unveiled new traditions, including encouraging couples to renew their wedding vows in front of a statue of the sage. To give him a fresher image, historians unveiled what they called a “standardized” portrait: a kindly old man in a Chinese robe, with his hands crossed at his chest.

Universities unveiled high-priced courses for entrepreneurs who sought “commercial wisdom” in the classics. National Studies Web, a site devoted to Confucian thought, went public on the Shenzhen stock exchange, and some enterprising Confucians launched the International Confucius Festival,

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sponsored by a Confucius-themed wine company, in which thousands of people filled a local stadium in his hometown, giant balloons floated overhead bearing the names of ancient scholars, and a Korean pop star in an abbreviated outfit delivered a rock performance.

Just as America’s conservative movement in the 1960s had capitalized on the yearning for a postliberal retreat to morality and nobility, China’s classical revival drew on a nostalgic image of what it meant to be Chinese. It conjured images of a simpler past, recorded in the idealized stories of ancient Chinese history, of noble knights and honest rulers who acted with moral clarity and purpose. Young nationalists such as Tang Jie organized events in which they visited the Confucius Temple dressed in classical scholars’ robes and reenacted rituals that most people had long forgotten, if they knew them at all.

The Confucian revival found a market. The biggest surprise best seller of recent years was a collection of Confucian lectures delivered by Yu Dan, a telegenic professor of media studies who served as a political adviser to the Party. She wrote, “To assess a country’s true strength and prosperity, you can’t simply look at GNP growth and not look at the inner experience of each ordinary person: Does he feel safe? Is he happy?” Skeptics mocked it as Chicken Soup for the Confucian Soul, but Yu became the second-highest- paid author in the country.

A few days after I heard the sounds inside the temple, it convened a celebration of Confucius’s birthday for the first time since the Communists came to power in 1949. The event featured speeches by government officials and professors, and a group of children recited passages. I figured that this would probably signal the end of the musical performance—but, in fact, the show played on, and it acquired a regular schedule: every hour, ten to six, seven days a week, rain or shine. The sound echoed off the walls of the Alley of National Studies, and what had begun as a novelty gradually wore grooves into the minds of my neighbors. “I hear it in my head at night,” Huang told me one afternoon. “It’s like I’ve been on a boat all day and I can still feel the rocking.”

His face brightened with an idea. “You should go tell them to turn down the volume.”

“Why me?” I asked. “Because you’re a foreigner. They’ll pay attention to you.”

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I wasn’t sure I wanted the kind of attention that comes from complaining about China’s most famous philosopher. But I was curious about the show, and I arranged to visit the head of the temple, a man named Wu Zhiyou. He was not what I expected; Wu looked less like a theologian than an actor who’d play the kindly father in a Chinese soap opera: in his midfifties, he had a large, handsome face, a perfect pair of dimples in his cheeks, and a resonant voice that sounded somehow familiar. Before being posted to run the temple, Wu had spent most of his career in the research office of the city’s Propaganda Department, and he had a mind for marketing. Of the performance, he said, “This show has attracted people from all levels of society—Chinese and foreigners, men and women, well-educated and less- educated, experts and ordinary people.”

I asked if he was very involved in the production. “I’m the chief designer!” he said, eyes shining. “I oversaw every detail. Even the narrator’s voice is mine.”

The show had been conceived under demanding circumstances, he said. Confucius had been gone for more than two thousand years, but Wu had been given only a month to organize the performance. He hired a composer, recruited dancers from a local art school, and selected lines from the classics to give it some shape. “You need ups and downs and a climax,” he said, “just like a movie or a play. If it’s too bland, it would never work.”

I got the sense that Wu was savoring the chance to bring Confucius to the stage. “In junior middle school, I was always the student leader of the propaganda section of the student council. I love reading aloud and music and art.” In his spare time he still did cross-talk comedy routines, the Chinese version of stand-up. Wu, it seemed to me, had succeeded in making the Confucius Temple into his own community theater. He had plans for the future. “We’re building a new set that will have ceramic statues of the seventy-two disciples. And we need more lighting. Then, maybe, I can say it is complete.”

Wu checked his watch. He wanted me to catch the three o’clock show. Before I left, he gave me a book on the history of the temple, and said, “After you read this book, your questions will no longer be questions.”

The stage was in front of a pavilion on the north side of the compound. It had been fitted with stage lights. The cast consisted of sixteen young men and women in scholars’ robes; each song-and-dance routine was named for a line

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from the classics, and they took an upbeat interpretation: “Happiness” was based on the line “Good fortune lies within bad; bad fortune lies within good,” and the stage version omitted the ominous half. The finale, “Harmony,” linked Confucius and the Communist Party. A pamphlet explained that it conveyed the “harmonious ideology and harmonious society of the ancient people, which will have a positive influence on the construction of modern harmonious society.”

* * *

I read the book that the temple director gave me, and the details about ancient events impressed me: It recorded who planted which trees seven hundred years ago, and it contained lively portraits of people from the temple’s history in a section called “Anecdotes of Elites.” But the book was conspicuously silent on some matters, including the years between 1905 and 1981. In the official history of the Confucius Temple, most of the twentieth century was blank.

During my time in China, I had learned to expect renderings of history that felt like the drop-outs in an audio recording, when the music goes silent and resumes as if nothing happened. Some of those edits were ordained from above: the Party barred people from discussing the crackdown at Tiananmen or the famine of the Great Leap Forward because it had never repudiated or accepted responsibility for them, nor had it dealt with the question of what changes might prevent their happening again. For a long time, ordinary Chinese were willing to aid in the forgetting, not only because they were poor and determined to get on with their lives, but also because many had been victims at some moments and perpetrators at others.

But there were other books about the Confucius Temple, and these filled in the blanks—especially about the night of August 23, 1966. It was the opening weeks of the Cultural Revolution, and the order to “Smash the Four Olds” had devolved into a violent assault on authority of all kinds. That night, a group of Red Guards summoned one of China’s most famous writers, Lao She, to the front gate of the Confucius Temple.

He was sixty-seven years old and one of China’s best hopes for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He had grown up not far from there, in poverty, the son of an imperial guard who died in battle against foreign armies. In 1924 he went

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to London and stayed for five years, living near Bloomsbury and reading Conrad and Joyce. He wore khakis because he couldn’t afford tweeds. In 1939 he published Rickshaw Boy, about an honest, independent-minded young rickshaw puller whose encounters with injustice turn him into, in Lao She’s words, a “degenerate, selfish, hapless product of a sick society.” Lao She became to Beijing what Victor Hugo was to Paris: the city’s quintessential writer. The Party named him a “People’s Artist.” He resented being asked to produce propaganda, but, like many, he was a loyal servant who poured criticism on his fellow writers when they fell out with the Party.

Now he was the target. A group of Red Guards—mostly schoolgirls between thirteen and sixteen years old—pushed him through the gates of the temple and forced him to kneel on the flagstones beside a bonfire, surrounded by other writers and artists under attack. His accusers denounced him for his links to the West. They shouted, “Down with the anti-Party elements!” and used leather belts with heavy brass buckles to whip the old men and women before them. Lao She was bleeding from his head, but he stayed conscious. For three hours this went on, until, at last, he was brought to a police station, where his wife retrieved him.

The next morning, Lao She rose early and walked northwest from his home to a quiet pond called the Lake of Great Peace. He read poetry and wrote until the sun had set. Then he took off his shirt and draped it over a tree branch. He loaded his pockets with stones and walked into the lake.

When his body was discovered the next day, his son, Shu Yi, was summoned to collect it. The police had found his father’s clothes, his cane, his glasses, and his pen, as well as a sheaf of papers that he had left behind. The official ruling on his death explained that Lao She had “isolated himself from the people.” Since he was a “counterrevolutionary,” he was not allowed to be given a proper burial. In the end, his widow and children loaded his spectacles and his pen into a casket and buried it.

I wondered about the son, Shu Yi, who had gone to retrieve his father’s body. He would be in his seventies now, older than his father was when he died. I asked around and discovered that he lived only a few minutes’ walk from my house. He invited me over. His apartment was cluttered with books and scrolls and paintings in a way that reminded me of the fortune-teller’s shop. Shu had white hair and a heavy, kind face. As we talked, a soft breeze blew in the window from a nearby canal. I asked if he had ever learned more

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about his father’s state of mind at the end. “It’s hard to know exactly, but I think his death was his final act of

struggle,” he said. He went on: “Many years later, I came upon an article called ‘Poets,’ which he had written in 1941”—a quarter-century before he died. “He wrote, ‘Poets are a strange crowd. When everyone else is happy, the poets can say things that are discouraging. When everyone else is sorrowful, the poets can laugh and dance. But when the nation is in danger, they must drown themselves, and let their deaths be a warning in the name of truth.’”

This sacrifice was a tradition in China, dating to the third century B.C.E., when the poet Qu Yuan drowned himself in protest against corruption. Shu Yi told me, “By doing so, they are fighting back, telling others what the truth really is.” His father, he said, “would rather break than bend.”

After I met Shu Yi, I went back to see Wu Zhiyou, the head of the temple, and I asked him about the story of the writer’s final night. He gave a short sigh and said, “It’s true. During the Cultural Revolution, there were struggle sessions here. Afterward, Lao She went home and threw himself in the lake. This can be described as a historical fact.”

I asked him why the temple’s written history made no mention of it. He struggled to find an answer, and I braced for a bit of propaganda. But then Wu said something that surprised me. “It’s too sad,” he said simply. “It makes people too sad. I think it’s best not to include this in books. It’s factual, it’s history, but it was not because of the temple. It was because of the time. It doesn’t belong in the records of the Confucius Temple.”

I understood his point, but it felt incomplete. Lao She was beaten in the temple because it was a place of learning, of ideas, of history; the permission to attack one of China’s most famous novelists was, like so much of the Cultural Revolution, the permission to attack what it meant to be Chinese, and in the decades since then the Party and the people had never reconciled all that they lost in those moments. Even if someone wanted to mark the site where Beijing’s greatest chronicler ended his life, it would be difficult; the Lake of Great Peace was filled in decades ago, during an extension of the subway system. I often marveled at how much people in China had managed to put behind them: revolution, war, poverty, and the upheavals of the present. My neighbor Huang Wenyi lived next door with his mother, who was eighty-eight. When I once asked her if she had old photos of the family,

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she said, “They were burned during the Cultural Revolution.” And then she laughed, the particular hollow Chinese laugh reserved for awful things.

* * *

Every day, groups of civil servants from the hinterlands, and students from around the city, were turning up at the Confucius Temple to get a tour and take in the show. I watched a young guide with a ponytail face a group of middle-aged Chinese women. She held her hands out before her. “This is the gesture for paying respects to Confucius,” she said. Her visitors did their best to copy her. For many people in China, I realized, the gaps in history had made Confucius a stranger.

In that vacuum, some people were eager to put the philosopher to more useful political purposes. After Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize, a group of Chinese nationalists organized what they called the “Confucius Peace Prize,” and awarded it, the next year, to Vladimir Putin for bringing “safety and stability to Russia.” A group of Confucian scholars denounced a plan to build a large Christian church in Confucius’s hometown, writing, “We beseech you to respect this sacred land of Chinese culture.”

Others were growing weary of this version of Confucius. The insistence on harmony seemed to leave little room for a politics of negotiation, for an honest clash of ideas. Li Ling, a Peking University professor, took aim at what he called the “manufactured Confucius,” and wrote, “The real Confucius, the one who actually lived, was neither a sage nor a king … He had no power or status—only morality and learning—and dared to criticize the power elite of his day. He traveled around lobbying for his policies, racking his brains to help the rulers of his day with their problems, always trying to convince them to give up evil ways and be more righteous … He was tormented, obsessed, and driven to roam, pleading for his ideas, more like a homeless dog than a sage. This was the real Confucius.”

When the author published this, he was denounced by Confucians as a “prophet of doomsday.” One of his defenders was Liu Xiaobo. Before he went to prison, Liu warned of a mood in which “Confucianism was venerated and all other schools of thought were banned.” Instead of invoking Confucius, Liu wrote, intellectuals should be venerating “independence of thought and autonomy of person.”

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Chinese people came to the Holy Land of National Studies on a quest for some kind of moral continuity. But it rarely ended their search. The Party, to maintain its hold over history, offered a caricature of Confucius. Generations of Chinese had grown up being told to condemn China’s ethical and philosophical traditions, only to find that the Party was now abruptly resurrecting them, without granting permission to discuss what had happened in the interim. A neighborhood devoted to protecting the “essence of the country” only seemed to reinforce the reality that there was no single “essence” anymore.

There were signs that liberal intellectuals were not the only ones losing patience with such a forceful embrace of Confucius. In January 2011 a giant statue of the wise man appeared beside Tiananmen Square, the first new addition to such a sensitive spot since Mao’s mausoleum was erected a generation ago. Philosophers and political scientists wondered if this meant a change in the Party platform. But then, it was gone. In the middle of the night, three months after it arrived, the statue was moved to a low-profile location in the courtyard of a museum. Why? It remained a mystery: the Central Propaganda Department banned any discussion of it. People were left to joke that Confucius, the itinerant teacher from Shandong Province, had been caught trying to live in Beijing without the proper permit.

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