"You can't ask for a discount on the emperor's meal," said the man at the other end of the telephone. He was clearly annoyed.
Why can't I? After all, you get a discount on almost everything in China. But I let it pass. After all, I have set my heart on spending a night at Wei Zhongxian's courtyard house, no matter what the price of the meal.
And to be fair to the man at the reception, I have got the "winter discount" for staying at the bedroom in which the most powerful, if also the most infamous, eunuch in Chinese history slept - 400 years ago. I am given the suite for 600 yuan ($87.7), half of its summer price. Obviously, they still think things to do with emperors shouldn't be put up for a bargain; eunuchs are a different matter.
It's a chance discovery. I had just walked out, along with two colleagues, from a dinner at the restaurant a few meters away, which has earned its fame as "China's first private business". Walking down Cuihua Hutong, a sleepy, dimly-lit alley north of glitzy Wangfujing, I was struck by the ornate gate of a courtyard house.
"What's this," I ask my colleagues. "It's Wei Zhongxian's house," says one of them, after scrutinizing the inscriptions on the gate. "He was the most powerful man toward the end of the Ming Dynasty in the 1620s, more powerful than even the emperor. He was the head of the secret police, had thousands of people killed and made a huge fortune by stealing from the imperial coffers. He was executed in 1627 by Emperor Chongzhen. Some say he committed suicide to avoid execution. They run the place as a hotel now."
We walk through the gate into the courtyard. Mostly dark and deserted except for a handful of the staff, it looks steeped in history, the air of decadence palpable all around. "Since the days of Wei Zhongxian (1568-1627), it has been home to other celebrities, including Rui Lin, a well-known official in the Qing Dynasty, and a vice-president of the Republic of China, Li Yuanhong, in 1912. Now it belongs to the China Democracy League. Some say the place is haunted."
Back home that night, I look up the ubiquitous Lonely Planet and am filled with the excitement of a minor exploration. The tell-all guidebook has a note on "Power of Eunuchs" in the chapter on Beijing and does mention Wei Zhongxian. But it doesn't tell you where his mansion is. It's a moment of triumph and I can't wait to savor it with a night at the place.
But I have to wait. Next weekend, I'm off to Nanjing, where I visit the park and the memorial for Zheng He (1371-1433), the "good eunuch" of Chinese history, who led as many as seven naval expeditions to more than 30 countries in Asia and Africa carrying goodwill messages from the emperor.
It's the house of the "bad eunuch", though, that takes hold of my fancy. The time comes the following weekend. With a change of clothes and a copy of Pearl S Buck's The Good Earth, which I'd been re-reading after almost 30 years, in my knapsack, I arrive at Wei Zhongxian's house one evening, accompanied by a Chinese friend.
The place, opened as a hotel only last March, has seven rooms, whose prices range from 300 to 1,200 yuan ($43.9-175.5) in summer, but I'm the lone boarder this cold winter night.
The lady manager shows me around and finally opens the door to the eunuch's bedroom at the end of the corridor. I step into what obviously was a sitting area. The red carpet on the wooden floor is faded, even torn in places. The sofa, the chairs and the wooden partition that divides the sitting area from the bedroom are all ornately carved. On the wall facing the sofa is a large, round-shaped gilt-covered wooden panel showing a scene from the imperial court.
I know it's all latter-day refurbishment. Still, the furniture adds to the quaint atmosphere. The most evocative is the bed, heavily carved and hung with a silk curtain. Beyond the tiny bedroom a door opens to a modern bathroom with the W.C. and the shower separated by a curtain.
Outside the room one of the two courtyard gardens has an eerie look, with the trees shorn of leaves and the stone decorations standing in ominous silence. In summer, I'm told, the gardens come alive with open-air parties.
The real attempt to recreate history is in the dining hall, where the gilt shines from two heavy, ornate "thrones" placed along two sides of the wall not far from the oval-shaped dinner table on which porcelain cups and dishes lie alongside brass holders of decorated chopsticks.
On one "throne" are kept robes and crowns for the emperor and the empress. Guests are expected to humor themselves by putting them on. I do something better. Egged on by my Chinese friend, the manager helps me put on the emperor's robe and then wears the empress' one herself. Half a dozen shots on my camera capture the moment, the lady visibly blushing in a few of them.
"Now, tell me about the emperor's meal," I tell the manager. She hands me the menu, all in Chinese except for the prices. The cheapest costs 399 yuan ($58.4) per person and the most expensive, 19,999 yuan ($2,925). With no boarder except myself at this time of the year, I suspect, the meals would probably be brought from some restaurant around the hutong.
It'd be wiser to give the emperor's meal a miss, I decide. But what's special about the 19,999-yuan meal? "It gives you the bear's paw," says the manager. She knows - and I know - that nobody has it, for the simple reason that you can't kill bears any more.
But the bear's paw does bring a thrill. One of my favorite ghost stories is W W Jacob's The Monkey's Paw. So is this a hint of things I can encounter at night?
We go out for a late dinner. Around 11, my friend leaves and I shut the door of my room. It isn't a night I'm supposed to go to bed early.
I open The Good Earth where I last closed it - O-lan lying in her deathbed - and then put it away to write a few lines in my diary. There's a knock on the door around midnight and I hear a man saying something in Chinese.
"Who's that?" I ask. Silence, and then I hear footsteps on the corridor outside. Possibly the night guard who must be surprised to see the lights on in Wei Zhongxian's room and then is told there's a foreigner staying there for the night.
An hour later, I switch off the lights and creep into the bed. Nothing much happens, except for a thumping on a wall somewhere which wakes me up at around 4 in the morning.
As I prepare to leave the next morning after a breakfast of tea, fried eggs and two slices of bread, I open a drawer in one corner of the room. Along with some cutlery, it contains a couple of business cards. I read the names - Patrick O Gottschalk, secretary of commerce and trade, Commonwealth of Virginia, Richmond, USA; Svandis R Pollard, receptionist to the Governor, Commonwealth of Virginia, Gene Balley, president, Fredericksburg Regional Alliance, Virginia.
So there have been others before me. But they couldn't have spent a night here, I tell myself. I put my card in the bunch - hoping for others in future to know of my rendezvous at the eunuch's historic house that lies hidden in a quiet old Beijing alley.
(China Daily February 19, 2009)
