In the Eyes of Stone Lions

I love stone lions, whether those guarding the old imperial palace in Beijing or those in the gallery of the Taipei Botanical Garden. To my mind stone lions, like dragons, are symbols of China, embodying wealth, good fortune and majesty.

Stone lions are commonplace in Taiwan and the mainland, but it is amazing how often you come across them in Europe too. Modern Chinese supermarkets and luxury restaurants in France invariably sport a pair of them at the entrance. As a Chinese trademark, foreigners tend to associate stone lions with China.

What amazes me is the way Chinese stone lions crop up just where you might least expect to see them.

My first unexpected encounter with stone lions was at Chantilly, France. Here there are two imperial chateaux, part of the larger of which has been turned into a museum. Every visitor is greeted by a pair of stone lions gazing at them with bell-like eyeballs and open jaws. They are beautifully sculpted in semi-reclining pose, but the thought that struck me was--how on earth did they get transported over here?

My next encounter occurred in the garden of fountains at the chateau of Fontainebleau. The stone lions here were surprisingly tall, fully half man-size together with the plinth.

With open mouths and curly manes, these too were appealing in their majesty. But instead of guarding the entrance to the chateau they were set at the door of an oriental museum which seemed to be permanently closed, leaving the neglected lions to my glance alone.

The third time? That was in the chateau at Vierzon.

The fourth time . . . . well, they just keep on cropping up unexpectedly. The last occasion was when I passed through Chambord, a small town in the Loire Valley famous for its magnificent Renaissance imperial hunting lodge. This time the stone lion wasn't in the chateau but at a private farmhouse in the country. What thoughts have passed in its over the centuries as it gazed down with bulbous eyes over the war-ravaged plains of France?

These lions are fine statuary, and despite weathering caused by exposure to the European climate the sculptor's verve is still evident. As I look upon their worn and pitted surfaces I often wonder what the sculptor must have felt as he wielded the mallet in some gloomy atelier, his youth slowly turning to old age as his life and work blended into a single whole, free of all regret.

But how did they come to these foreign parts?

I don't know! I don't want to know! I couldn't bear to know!

Behind every piece of cultural flotsam lies a story of helplessness, just as many Chinese have been compelled to wander resignedly through the world, making a home from home wherever they came to rest.

Once, passing through a small country town in Belgium, I was invited to a cup of coffee by a young Chinese woman and asked her how she came to be living there. What had brought her to this out of the way place? She declined to answer, but only tossed her head and shot back another question in fluent Mandarin: "Isn't it enough that we encountered one another here?" Again, this time at Barrow in northernmost Alaska, another pretty Chinese girl said to me: "Don't ask me how I came to settle here, we Chinese people are stuck with our past!"

. . . . It's happened too many times, I'm numb. Different stories, same theme. Sheer helplessness.

An historian has established that the stone lions were taken out of China all trussed up, heavy as they were, as stone ballast for ships. Of course they were trussed up after some defeat, such as that inflicted on the Ch'ing dynasty by the Joint Expeditionary Force. But what about her? Him? Me?

The sea laps against everywhere in the world, including us Chinese. The beautiful sea, beautiful waves, beautiful illusions and talented Chinese have combined to carve out many a brilliant future in the world. In the eastern or western hemisphere, north or south, in New York, London, Paris, Melbourne . . . . you can see stone lions with their staring bulbous eyes, and there you will see Chinese people.

People say the next century will be the Chinese century. Such is my trust, but seeing the waves of China lap against foreign shores my sense of resignation deepens. How resigned too the stone lion's bulging eyes, gazing upon the modern history of the Chinese people, and his own.

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(photo by Arthur Cheng)