The bat-human-cherub-bird
(Painted creature in the Forbidden City: Beijing, China)
Of all the paintings in the whole of the Forbidden City, this is the one that stood out for me. There must be tens of thousands of individual paintings of landscapes, people scenes, animals, buildings, flowers, trees, yet this is the one I felt compelled to photograph. What a strange beast – part beaked bat, part chubby cherub, resulting in a rather alarming figure with muscular, almost human legs furnished with talons and one raised eyebrow. He is quite horrible, all in all, yet he was more interesting to me than the scores of landscape paintings – possibly in part because all these scenes were based on those in ancient Suzhou. I have seen many of these magical garden scenes myself, so of course a ‘bat cherub’ would be far more arresting and novel.
This is just one painting, but perhaps you could imagine a long wooden corridor with each ceiling strut painted in a similar way. All of them had this colour scheme, framing the central image in greens, reds and blues. He captured my imagination – I could easily imagine coming up with a character as equally awkward and bizarre myself, his short, plump arms not even reaching to the end of his (seemingly) useless wings and his expression; more bored than terrifying or reverent. Yet another strange element of China I have discovered for myself.
– Today Rosie is in the UK, having a warm-up Chinese lesson –
你好。
you go on learning chinese? you will be back????