FLORA & FAUNA

EXHIBITION

the egret has bounced back. An expanding European population has sent parties of winter visitors to prospect habitats on Britain’s southern coasts over the past twenty years, and this has led in turn to pairing and breeding. Cocker points out that in the very hour of their destruction, egrets were, paradoxically, sowing the seeds of a conservation imperative. Their slaughter, and that of other herons, to ornament ladies’ headgear led to the founding of the RSPB. In indignant response to such carnage for purely decorative purposes, in 1889 in Didsbury a pioneering group of women founded the Society for the Protection of Birds. Within fifteen years it gained a royal warrant. Thus was born what is now the largest non-government wildlife organisation in Europe, with more than a million members. Not all tales of visiting species have had such happy endings. The ruddy duck, an introduced North American species, is now one of the most pleasant sights on British lakes with its electric-blue bill, rounded chestnut body and, seemingly, perpetually cheerful countenance. Thanks to its interbreeding with the kindred white-headed duck of Spain, and the resulting formation of hybrids, it is under sentence of death in this country. At the request of the Spanish authorities, the RSPB has undertaken to eliminate the British population through a programme of shooting. As Cocker demonstrates, quoting indignant letters, this is one of the most fiercely debated ‘conservation’ issues of modern times. Charges of ethnic cleansing are levelled at the purists by those who point to frequent interbreeding between cognate species – tufted duck, scaup, pochard – in the wild. And the thought of the collateral damage to other waterfowl, as marksmen blaze away at ruddies on nature reserves, is one to chill the blood. A completely different tempo drives To See Every Bird on Earth, by Dan Koeppel (Michael Joseph 278pp £14.99). It beats to the pulse of the twitcher (in America the ‘lister’) – here the author’s father, who in the wake of his marriage breakdown is helped by his son to achieve the 7,000 species necessary for qualification as a ‘high lister’. Birdwatching as neurosis? Certainly this frenetic search through the continents of the world in the pursuit of sheer numbers appears to substitute species-crunching for a genuine love of wild things. The Bedside Book of Birds by the Canadian Graeme Gibson (Bloomsbury 384pp £20) is an eclectic miscellany, handsomely illustrated with images ranging from classic European and American bird paintings to Aztec ceramics and Assyrian bas-reliefs. It approaches its subject through literary and scientific extracts from all ages: quotations from the Venerable Bede and the fourteenth century Peterborough Bestiary rub shoulders with Gilbert White of Selborne and Darwin’s Origin of Species. A book for dipping into. To order these books, see order form on page 78

J ONATHAN M IRSKY Being a Ruler Is Difficult…

C HINA : T HE T HREE E MPERORS , 1662–1795

★

Edited by Evelyn S Rawski and Jessica Rawson (Royal Academy of Arts 494pp £25.95) 12 November 2005 – 17 April 2006

C ANTHEREHAVE been another emperor during the last 2,500 years of Chinese history who had himself painted ladling human manure onto a rice paddy? Yongzheng (1678–1735) did. Most royal portraits, like those in the Royal Academy’s exhibition ‘The Three Emperors’, were intended to awe. In more informal pictures the emperors pursued tigers, galloped horses through the mountains, and received grovelling subjects. Only Yongzheng ladled shit. One of the most eccentric emperors in Chinese history (he reigned from 1722 to 1735), Yongzheng was sandwiched between two of the greatest: his famous father, Kangxi (reigned 1662–1722 ), and his yet more famous son, Qianlong (reigned 1736–95). He is described, in Regina Krahl’s short but informative essay in the exhibition’s splendid catalogue, as publicly cruel, distant, and ruthless, although privately humorous, sardonic, and whimsical. But here is how he revealed himself in a pair of scrolls. On their green gold-flecked silk, Yongzheng wrote, in his elegant hand, a poetic couplet, the kind that makes Chinese connoisseurs sigh: ‘Bamboo shadows criss-cross the window – the moon must have risen. The scents of flowers waft indoors – spring must have come.’ It deserves a sigh, not least for the perfectly chosen characters which translation cannot capture. But what reveals the man is cut into the tiny red seals, pressed precisely onto the silk with exquisitely cut stones: ‘Being a ruler is difficult. Perturbed day and night.’ Indeed. In 1728 came news of a challenge to Yongzheng’s power so alarming that he spent much of the rest of his life dealing with it. This was an attempted rebellion, in an empire most of whose 200 million inhabitants despised and feared the Manchus who had conquered them in 1644. Yongzheng put down that rebellion. He then spent a year writing a refutation of the charges against him contained in rebellious pamphlets, and made hundreds of copies so that all his subjects, down to ‘the poorest villages and meanest homes’, could read his judgement and the revelations of his inner thoughts. He denied he was a greedy usurper and refuted the accusation (common in

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006