There is a moment in his classic on statuary that can’t help but make today’s reader recoil. It is when after Chao, one of the Chinese men on his expedition, exclaims on first sighting a memorial pillar they had been seeking. Segalen describes the scene: “Because of this, Chou-ma-fu had earned the right to have his picture taken alongside the pillars of P’ing-yang. Although modern Chinese individuals are deliberately missing from most of our drawings about ancient China, here the Chinese man is “giving an idea of size,” his left hand resting familiarly on the P’ing-yang buttress pillar on the right.” Turning to look at the facing page in the book, the reader sees a slim yet strong man in work-clothes standing gazing at the camera, his hand on the carved stone giving the impression he had been told to hold it there, and has kept his hand there for the awkward period of the long exposure.

It could have been exactly this, that Segalen in his monomania was failing to realize the disquieting fact that almost none can find their own face in the blurred crowd of History.

Between what that man’s frozen features cannot express and Segalen’s yearning for encounter there is a disconnection. Again the poet Yang Lian, centuries later, captures what falls between two people when one cannot see the other, when one of them, like Segalen, is searching fruitlessly for his face in the mirror of another’s face: “You are afraid to wonder: why do people always draw faces? Who are you without your face? If you ripped off that layer of skin you call your face, could you still find yourself? As you listen to others crying perhaps it is only this body of yours, claimed by no-one, that is crying. You have always been someone else, crying over a page torn off by a blank sheet of paper.”

It could have been exactly this, that Segalen in his monomania was failing to realize the disquieting fact that almost none can find their own face in the blurred crowd of History.

Yet there is always the chance of a future encounter.

On my last day in Chengdu, having followed the course of Segalen’s expeditions, as much subconsciously as consciously, as if lead through a county of ruin by a foreign ghost, I found that in a shadowy mausoleum inside an artificial hill there was, indeed, a sculptured portrait of an ancient emperor. Segalen would have been disappointed again. It was of an era later than the Han and the figure of Wang Jian wasn’t life-size, being only eighty-six centimetres tall. This first, small portrait of an Emperor, discovered five decades after Segalen’s death, is akin to a dream-image of one’s Self. The face, with a high-ridged, almost hooked nose and recessed eyes, could be my own. Staring closely at the Emperor, a man, a mere man several eras removed from today, was like peering into that image we all must have of ourselves after our pending death, that face to whom we speak when we look in the mirror while mouthing another’s poem, not unlike this one by Segalen: “O Faceless one, do not leave me whom / you inhabit: // Since I have not been able to chase you away or / to have you, accept my secret homage.”