QI The Book of the Dead

abused by the infamous Red Guards. She drew up the ‘Kill Culture’ manifesto and in 1966 took over as head of the ‘Revolution Small Group’ responsible for ensuring that the only books, paintings and films available in China were for propaganda purposes. Jiang herself had a hand in producing the handful of films available. The Revolution Small Group even banned the piano, denouncing it as the most dangerous of all Western instruments.
    In her heyday, Jiang – or Madame Mao, as the Western media dubbed her – behaved like the Chairman’s empress-in-waiting: an unsavoury combination of paranoia, excess and hypochondria. She made sure that people who knew about her past were imprisoned or killed. While Chinese peasants struggled in appalling poverty, she would instruct warships to cruise up and down rivers so she could practise her hobby of photography, and roads were built specifically for her to visit beauty spots. Though the masses were fed a bland diet of Maoist propaganda, she busily imported Western films ( The Sound of Music was her favourite).
    Life with Madame was a nightmare. Her rooms had to be kept an exact 21.5 °C in winter and exactly 26 °C in summer. She had an intense fear of strangers and of unexpected sounds, and lived in constant terror of assassination. Servants were jailed for phantom indiscretions. Her nerves were so bad she took three lots of sleeping pills every night, ordering her staff to remove all birds and cicadas from around her house so they wouldn’t disturb her. Servants had to walk with arms aloft and legs apart in case she heard their clothes rustling. At one point, she heard of a technique for promoting youth and vigour that involved transfusionsof the blood from healthy young men. She put dozens of guards through a physical check-up before choosing the best for her ‘new programme’. Fortunately for them, Mao got wind of her plans and put a stop to them – on health grounds: she might be opening herself to infection.
    In this grotesque atmosphere, where even her only child’s nurse was thrown into prison and tortured for attempting to poison her mistress (Jiang had succumbed to a nasty bout of diarrhoea), the role of her pet monkey is clear. It was absolutely loyal, never answered back and yet was capable of capricious acts of violence. Like Mrs Coulter’s sinister golden monkey-daemon in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy , Jiang’s monkey was her constant companion, dressed in silk and fed the finest food. She took particular pleasure in setting it on people as they strolled through her orchid garden in Canton, laughing at their discomfort as it leapt onto their heads and shoulders and savagely punishing anyone who didn’t make a fuss of the beast. Men, she once remarked, contributed nothing more to history than ‘a drop of sperm’. Monkeys seemed preferable by far as companions.
    For all her delusions of grandeur, it seems unlikely that Mao ever seriously considered this spoiled borderline psychotic as his successor. He had used her remorselessly to engineer a culture of fear but, towards the end of his life, she was reduced to asking his girlfriends to put in a good word for her. Within weeks of Chairman Mao’s death in 1976, Madame Mao and the rest of the Gang of Four were arrested in a bloodless coup. Her trial in 1980 was televised each night and attracted huge audiences. She was convicted of ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’ and sentenced to death, although this was later commuted to life imprisonment. Jiang hanged herself in a hospital bathroom in 1991.

    Her passing went unmourned: even her daughter refused to write to the authorities and request her release (this occasioned one of Jiang’s last outbursts, throwing a watermelon on the ground and accusing her daughter of being ‘heartless’). As the living personification of the brutal persecutions and mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, almost no one in China has ever been more despised. Mao himself captured her self-inflicted isolation: ‘Few people suit her taste – only one: she herself.’ The fate of her monkey is not recorded.

     
    The high-water mark for the monkey as domestic pet was reached in Victorian England. The spoils of empire included a regular stream of outlandish wildlife arriving to swell the households of the moneyed classes, and monkeys, despite (or maybe because of) Darwin’s efforts, became must-have accessories. Arthur Henry Patterson’s 1888 Notes on Pet