Yet Segalen was aware that there was a tradition of face-to-face encounter that he was overlooking. While not as old as the Han, nor in-the-round — Segalen persisted in the particularly Greco-Roman expectation that sculptures should be seen from all angles! — the monumental Buddhist art of China is merely, grudgingly, given a chapter in his book on the ancient sculpture, though at every opportunity he remarks on the Buddhist sculptures’ failure, that it owes too much to the sculpture of Central Asia, that it is inevitably derived from a Greco-Roman tradition, and that the sculptures are not even beautiful! Longing as usual for the purity and strength of the Han, he states that for “the second time we have been looking for a human face — so elusive, so unavailable until now — and there is no denying that here we have an abundance of human faces, but we are quickly satiated: we see the same face everywhere, always the same eyes, the same forehead, the same smiles with no hint of laughter…”

It is as if Segalen is caught on one side of a mirror through which he wishes to pass. He sees his reflection — after all Buddhism is about the illusionistic world — though fails to recognize the ambiguity of his Self, the impersonality of Being.

Then, in an anger born of frustration, he admits that after looking at hundreds of these Buddhist faces he “wished for the terrifying, unknown, areligious face of a human being in the days of the Han — or the thick lips and suffering eyes of the trampled Hsiung-nu.”

We can imagine Segalen, enflamed by face after face after face of beatitude, wanting to take a hammer to them himself. In confronting the proliferation of Buddhist faces he reveals his failure to imagine himself as Chinese, which is what he hopes to do in most of his literary writing, especially in his best poems. It is a failure Vadime Elisseeff (1918-2002), scholar and director of Musée Cernuschi in Paris, elucidates in an afterword to the American edition of the book on the statuary. That Segalen denies the contribution Buddhism made to Chinese culture causes Elisseff to ask, “Could we ostracize Christianity from our Western culture and from our arts simply because it was born in the East?”

It is as if Segalen is caught on one side of a mirror through which he wishes to pass. He sees his reflection — after all Buddhism is about the illusionistic world — though fails to recognize the ambiguity of his Self, the impersonality of Being. There is a mania latent in his pursuit of the Han portrait, an unsettling devotion to only one order of encounter.

Were he to find a Han face and see himself in it, wouldn’t he become like Mao during the Cultural Revolution, the only Person looking out over a sea of men and women working endlessly for their right to be who they are, to earn their own presence, their own faces? Wouldn’t he be in that moment like the Emperor, as is described in those opening pages of René Leys, “Lord of the Sun and Son of Heaven… the victim appointed for the last four thousand years as intercessory sacrifice between Heaven and people on earth”?

Segalen arrived in Chengdu still with some hope after the partial success of his discovery. He had also another reason to imagine that he might find his Grail for the reason that Edouard Chavannes, who had taught him in Paris and to whom he regularly sent letters reporting on his progress, had found mention of a statue of Confucius in a “hall of offerings” at the chambers of Wen Weng. From the records Chavannes had even been able to provide a description of the ancient teacher seated flanked by significant historical figures and his seventy two disciples. Segalen easily located the site, but found that a prefectural school stood in its place. In a perverse irony — as if to torment him — on the second door after the entrance of the newer building there was an inscription put up “the day before yesterday,” declaring it to be the Stone Chamber of Wen Weng.

Perhaps it was better that he didn’t find that the face he was looking for was that of Confucius, someone who Segalen, in his idealizing of empires, warriors and poets, may have felt possessed neither the reality nor the transcendent power he’d hoped to find. Of course, seen from the first decade of the twenty-first century, Segalen’s fixation on a face from the period when China was first unified, first great, can seem “doomed to failure,” inevitably only an encounter with an absence, at best the shadow-play of an European expecting to find himself Emperor on the other side of the great wall that is the Chinese Mirror.

When Segalen had opportunities to encounter the face of the China of his time he turned away, preferring the dream of an imperial past to the revolutionary present, at least once seeing the lives of contemporary peasants, the future revolutionaries, as “worms that wriggle and seethe in the dung-heap or the tapeworms that infest the gut.”