Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams [70]
The view across the immensity of Tiananmen Square from here is extraordinary. It is like looking across a plain from the side of a mountain. In political terms the view is more astounding yet, encompassing as it does a nation that comprises almost one-quarter of the population of this planet. All of the history of China is symbolically focused here, at this very point, and it is hard, as you stand there, not to be transfixed by the power of it. It is hard, also, not to be profoundly moved by the vision of the peasant from Shao-Shan who seized that power in the name of the people and whom the people still revere, in spite of the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution, as the father of their nation.
And while we were standing on this spot, the spot where Mao stood when he proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the music we were having played at us by the public address system was first “Viva Espana” and then the “Theme from Hawaii Five-O.”
It was hard to avoid the feeling that somebody, somewhere, was missing the point. I couldn’t even be sure that it wasn’t me.
We flew to Shanghai the next day and began to think about the dolphins toward which we were slowly edging our way across China. We went to think about them in the bar of the Peace Hotel. This turned out not to be a good place to think because you couldn’t hear yourself doing it, but we wanted to see the place anyway.
The Peace Hotel is a spectacular remnant of the days when Shanghai was one of the most glamorous and cosmopolitan ports in the world. In the Thirties the hotel was known as the Cathay, and was the most sumptuous place in town. This was where people came to glitter at one another. In one of its suites Noël Coward wrote a draft of Private Lives.
Now the paint is peeling, the lobby is dark and draughty, the posters advertising the World Famous Peace Hotel Jazz Band are written in felt tip and Scotch-taped onto the paneling, but the ghost of the Cathay’s former grandeur still lurks high up among the dusty chandeliers, wondering what’s been going on for the last forty years.
The bar was a dark, low-ceilinged room just off the lobby. The World Famous Peace Hotel Jazz Band was out for the evening, but a deputy band was playing in their place. The promise is that this is one of the only places in the world where you will still hear the music of the Thirties played as it was played, where it was played. Maybe the World Famous combo keeps the promise, but their deputies did not. They banged their way through endless repetitions of “Edelweiss,” “Greensleeves,” and “Auld Lang Syne,” interspersed with the occasional bash at “New York, New York,” “Chicago,” and “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
There were two odd things about this. First of all, this wasn’t just for the tourists. This was the music we heard everywhere in China, particularly the first three titles: on the radio, in shops, in taxis, in trains, in the great ferries that steam continually up and down the Yangtze. Usually it was played by Richard Clayderman. For anyone who has ever wondered who in the world buys Richard Clayderman records, it’s the Chinese, and there are a billion of them.
The other odd thing was that music was clearly completely foreign to them. Well, obviously it was foreign music, so that’s not altogether surprising, but it was as if they were playing from a phrase book. Every extempore flourish the trumpeter added, every extra fill on the drums, were all crashingly and horribly wrong. I suppose that Indians must have felt this hearing George Harrison playing the sitar in the Sixties, but then,