Knowledge Is Pleasure: Florence Ayscough in Shanghai

Afterword

Florence Ayscough wrote long illustrated essays about two places in Shanghai. One was her home at Penang Road; the other was one of her ‘favourite haunts’. This wasn’t the illustrious Astor House Hotel, or the Country Club in its eleven acres of gracious gardens, or Stehlneek’s Gallery, or the Race Club, or anywhere along the Bund with its sweep of showcase architecture. It was the City God Temple in the Old City. She first lectured on the City God Temple to the Royal Asiatic Society in London in January 1924, and published the text that year in the Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. An expanded version illustrated by Lucille Douglass is included in A Chinese Mirror. The Temple had been of almost no interest to Europeans, and as a place of popular religion dedicated to the spirit of the City Magistrate Qin Yubo—a deity charged with the protection of the city’s inhabitants—was largely ignored by Chinese scholars who dismissed it as ‘fit for women and the ignorant’. But Ayscough found it the most exuberant place in Shanghai, constantly thronged with people for whom religious expression was a natural part of life. Lacking texts in English, she turned to Nung Chu who, bemused but acquiescent, helped her Afterword ‘Here all is alive’1 140 Afterword hunt down Chinese sources to explain the history of the Temple and the nature of this form of popular/Daoist belief. Her essay in A Chinese Mirror is part scholarship, part revelry in the sensuous world of incense clouds, gleaming effigies, silver ingots flashing in the furnace, scarlet-clothed children, and processing penitents with weights hooked to their skin. In 1922, just before Ayscough left Shanghai, a fire raged through the Temple, necessitating a major renovation. While she was in St. Andrews in 1924 another fire threatened the Temple; at the time of writing A Chinese Mirror she didn’t know whether it still existed. But the Temple had experienced many vicissitudes over its long history, and it survived fire and the Japanese invasion of the city. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, it became a Daoist centre. Shut from the start of the Cultural Revolution, it reopened in 1994. When the Ho Ho twins invented the abacus, did they imagine it would be used for the accounting of souls? It hangs, enormous, over the entrance to the Temple courtyard, just as Ayscough saw it a century ago. Not that it is a dampener to the spirits of supplicants today. Crowds surge around the brazier, bowing and offering incense. Waves of heat blow arcs of smoke into smarting eyes. Ash rises and settles in smuts on the dresses of immaculately clad children. An attendant tells a woman to stop smoking. It is a magnanimous place of plenty; Qin Yubo shares his Temple with other deities and the halls of each are piled with the most succulent fruits of the season; peaches, lychees, melons, grapes and tomatoes, as well as offerings that know no season: CDs and White Rabbit candy. In front of the God of Wealth a woman is folding boat-shaped paper ingots with the same deft movements of fingers that Ayscough found so graceful. A boy of maybe eight is nudged to kneel in front of the God of Literature, appealing for a 141 Afterword good school performance next year. He resists, for a moment, then abashed and obedient in the way eight-year-olds are, drops to his knees. The adults around him roar with laughter. Flanking the route to Qin Yubo’s inner courtyard are statues of the worthy citizens who had pledged themselves to him as attendants . When Ayscough saw them their robes were dim and their hair beards full of dust and ash. Now they gleam with fresh paint. Beyond them in the courtyard silver yuan coins spin through the air and glisten between the roof tiles. Here are Qin Yubo, his wife, and his parents. They are wooed and adored, and coins thud into the offertory boxes in front of them. Three waggles of clasped hands, and a bow. Waggle, waggle, waggle, bow. Everyone knows these gestures, which in other places would seem an unbroken link with the past, but here must have been faintly remembered, or perhaps reinvented. And then, a rain of coins. Satisfaction. A young Daoist priest is playing...