China Revealed
by Basil Pao
Weidenfeld & Nicholson, HK$425
The subtitle of Basil Pao's epic China Revealed doesn't bode well for anyone with Middle Kingdom fatigue. With the overwrought promise of 'A Portrait of the Rising Dragon' comes the threat of teeming hordes of hyperbolic observations, statements of the obvious, and bad puns bastardising the Great Wall, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and all the rest.
What follows in the next 384 pages then is a pleasant surprise. China Revealed is an intimate, thrilling, and thoroughly original exploration of what China is today and the author's place in his nation, most immediately through superb photographs but, no less importantly, through Pao's engaging prose, in which he deftly weaves his life-story-thus-far with both the history of his ancestral homeland and a travelogue with some first-class reportage. It's a testament to Pao's many talents that he keeps it all seamless and fresh.
Pao's blending of narrative flow and historical detail is captivating. It's illuminating to recall that during the Cultural Revolution the cost of a rail ticket to anywhere in China was a Red Guard armband, a Mao badge and a copy of Mao's Little Red Book, but astonishing to learn that when, as a young child, the last emperor of China, Puyi, complained of the stuffiness of the imperial court, his father, the prince regent Chun, countered with the unwittingly prophetic words: 'It'll all be soon over'. How do we learn of this nugget? Pao recounts playing Chun's one-line role in the 1987 biopic The Last Emperor.
