Jingshan Park

(Leaf 58) – Reflection

 

Wherever I go in the world, I always like to seek out beautiful parks and gardens. This is a prose poem, or prose sketch, which I wrote, recording everything that I could see and hear, one very warm and slightly smoggy summer’s evening, while sitting by myself in Jingshan Park, close to the northern gate of the Palace Museum (where I was then working), in Beijing. The Museum (housed in the former Imperial Palace) is perhaps more commonly known as ‘the Forbidden City.’

 

 

By the Curling Dragon Juniper*, the warm fragrances of water and dust rising from the level flat grey paving stones and the lush green grass of the lawns. The patient minutes turning slowly into hours, as a gardener makes his slow and steady way along the green, around each tree and patch of rockery; the water always flowing, as his feet shuffle minutely along the edges of these flat, even paths. Black cap jays with calamine feathers and long, azure tails, dropping from branches to the grass, hopping from tree root to tree root, before a wingspread drift to another point just a few yards away. Black and white woodpeckers displacing one another from each tree trunk in relay-fashion, one to the next, to the next, to the next. Brown sparrows in dusty flutters, fast moving and bobbed, skittering through the air from these low branches to other low branches, and then other branches yet. The constant shuffle of feet over paving stones, level flat and grey; people drifting alone, in pairs, or parties. An occasional voice raising in a small snatch of song; little, brightly-coloured birds carried in a bamboo cages. A little squirrel disappears into a small stand of short bamboo, nose alert, poking and snuffling, here and there. The golden sun in a warm, pink haze. The milky heaviness of the sky. The warm air, sweltering into evening dusk. A small girl, standing on roller skates, looking up gives two sharp, gleeful screams to the squirrel she has chased up a tree. Before launching off, and rolling at pace across the level flat grey paving stones which sound and echo with xylophonic chimes. Gliding gracefully along on her skates; coming to a sudden stop, halted by her hands – palms held out in front, flat before her waist – when they meet the unmoving crown of her mother’s head as mother sits inclined, leaning forward, seated on a bench, busily re-tying the sprung-undone laces of her shoe. Snaffle and chack, snaffle and chack; chack-chack-chack-chack! – Fanning two silken feather tails, the black cap jays, take to the air between the tall pillar-like trees of Jingshan Park, where Chongzhen** came to make his final amends under Heaven.

 

6^th June 2006

Jingshan Park, Beijing.

 

Notes:

*The Curling Dragon Juniper was so named (c.1543) because it marks the final resting place of Curling Dragon (or Hoary Brows), the Emperor Jiajing’s favourite and most faithful cat.

**Emperor Chongzhen (1611-1644), the last Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, who took his own life (either by hanging or strangling himself) near the Meishan, a small hill in present day Jingshan Park, close to the Imperial Palace, more commonly known today as ‘the Forbidden City.’

 

All photographs by Tim Chamberlain (2006 & 2007)