"East Is East".(travel in China)(Travel narrative)

Byline: ANDRA LEON TALLEY

When Bernard Arnault invited 380 guests to a sit-down dinner in Beijing to celebrate the exhibit "Christian Dior and Chinese Artists" at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art last November, yours truly flew across three continents for a drive-by. The highlights by night were of the social kind: having dinner beside Charlize Theron, Dior J'adore icon, and the house's creative director, John Galliano. Arriving at 5:00 A.M. on a Saturday morning, Theron had flown in from Los Angeles with her gold embroidered Dior hourglass dress (300 hours to make by hand! Fittings in L.A. supervised by the atelier's head tailor, Raffaele Ilardo !). Upon landing, she wanted to head straight from the airport to the Great Wall, but waited until 9:00 a.m. to make the hour-plus drive and take a self-portrait on a rare empty stretch of the wall. We shared our tourist treks over bottled water and glasses of champagne in the club lounge of the Grand Hyatt Beijing.

"All I wanted to buy was a toy panda for my very, very old dog, Denver. He is deaf in one ear," Theron told me as I related my visit to the Treasure Hall of the Forbidden Citythe more than 8,700-room Imperial Palace of the Ming and Qing dynasties, built between 1406 and 1420where an urn in carved jade, mounted on a stand that simulates waves (a sign of prosperity and longevity in China), was the size of a Jacuzzi tub. When told of Concubine Zhen, who was drowned in a well on the orders of the Empress Dowager, Theron wanted to know more about the decadent-emperor lifestyle, including that of Pu Yi, the subject of Bernardo Bertolucci 's great epic The Last Emperor.

At midnight, Theron, Galliano, and I toured the now-empty exhibit hall of the UCCA, a former industrial complex, for a second time. I discovered a Dior couture dress titled Grand Ball, from the 1949 spring/summer collection, that had all the delicious froth of a layered peplum of cotton organdy, edged in lace, in that special French pink with hints of gray and blue. I told Galliano he should revisit it for his next summer collection. A great masterpiece of the art of delicate dressmaking, it is as easy as an apron for a barbecue but as glorious as anything for a summer dance under the Paris moonlight. We continued winding ourselves around the controversial Giant No. 3: Zhang Huan 's gigantic sculpture of a pregnant figure, with a person on its back made from recycled cowskins and huge metal staples. An acquisition of M. Arnault for his private collection, the fifteen-foot-high Giant was the most talked-about work of the 22 artists invited to exhibit their vision of Dior for this show. Ditto for Zhang's portraits of Christian Dior painted in ashes collected by assistants from more than 20 temples.

Back at the Grand Hyatt, we were going to head up to the lounge for cocoa until we all realized we had flights to New York the next day. My last drive-by: one hour into the rural countryside on Sunday morning. Women were riding home with freshly chopped wood tied to the backs of old bicycles. The open-air market had the largest fresh leeks I've ever seen. In one square, men were playing a game involving makeshift bricks and plastic streamers. In the middle of a forest, a bride and groom were having their photograph taken. There was even time for excellent Peking ...