Darkly the ridges of the Hsi-shan marched inland from the coast. A long way from the golden coast rose the mass of the Tu-shan, only reluctantly, as if they might desert it, leaving the flowerstrewn hills to lie beside the yellow-grey water. In the bright air lines shimmered beyond and above the mountains. They were the peaks of the Pien-wai; they were oscillations, resembling the eyebrows of a woman.
It was evening on the Gulf of Pei-Chihli.
The sea beat higher and brighter on the rocky shore. The warm turbid waves carved grooves in the sand around the little junks on the beach. During long harsh hours the sun’s rays had lashed the water; now they rebounded. The sea had covered itself in an armour which, it is said, is the back of the P’eng bird. When the P’eng rises up and flies to the southern seas, his scaly body stretches millions of miles and his gigantic wings are able to propel the clouds. A soft haze glided over the surface, gathered loose and thick like cotton wool. The sun’s rays draped themselves in loose folds of mist. Moments before a round furnace in the sky had roared forth heat; now the fire was sintered over. A misty shade had suddenly been placed over the world. Things swelled into one another.
The shouts of the harbour workers came muffled from the Customs House. Beside the harbour lay the old town of Shanhaikwan. House shouldered house. Low broad mud huts in narrow alleys, slender wooden structures, ponderous warehouses and pawnshops, a few brightly painted temples, memorial arches, government yamens.
The streets grew quieter as darkness gathered. Mist fell like a wedge between the passers by, the merchants, peddlars, street hawkers. In the Oxmarket, a wide space in Tso-fu Street, fat glossy beasts lowed and flicked their tails at the bluebottles that flew up from the hoof high dung. The drovers, five of them, sat in a shabby teashop. Fat Chang squatted crosslegged outside by the door, on the ground. He strummed a bigbellied mandolin, a yüeh-ch’in, they sang the response, a coarse peasant song. Two old knife grinders were making their way up the long street. Their little barrows scarcely rattled in the soft muck. On a street they simultaneously took the ching-kuei from around their necks, the Maidens’ Terror, brass plates five spans wide threaded on a string. They pulled the wooden handle; a jangling like shattered panes. The elder whistled mournfully and stood on one leg. He had a blue cloth tied over his right ear. They walked on opposite sides along the housefronts, cocked their ears, came back. Then they pushed their barrows onwards, trailing behind a water cart. They shouted a few words to the water carrier but he did not turn round. At the Oxmarket they stopped. The grinders upended their barrows. The water carrier stepped from the shafts, swinging his arms. He spat into his hands, rubbed them together. He stumped into the teas hop ahead of the others, joined in the peasant song loudly from the doorway.
The mist hung impenetrable from curving roofs. A light drizzle fell. From the eastern part of the town, the shop quarter, walking slowly through the streets came young Chao Lao-hsü and Han Yung-kuang. They held elegant gardenias, with which they pointed laughing. They told each other the thick mist was just the thing for flirting and catching girls. Delicate Lao-hsü, only son of General Chao Hui, walked in front with the dancing, springy, careful gait that jugglers use when they juggle on bamboo poles. He wore a bright blue damask undergarment, a dark overgown with the finest embroidery on the wide sleeves and shiny collar. There were lotus blossoms with dragoneyed fish, white flower stems that ended swelling in the goggle eyes of fish. His shoes were painted green and blue with thornapple blossom.
Lao-hsü turned from time to time to warn his friend of a puddle, revealing to him a childish, fineformed face. It was not so strongly Manchu as Yung-kuang’s: he had slanted, flickering eyes in a long face, cheekbones jutting out sharply, thin lips. It was more softly contoured, the eyes more rounded, but their laugh was the same: soft, trilling, beginning like a cough. They were still laughing about their sedan chairs, which were waiting in front of a shop in Wei-ai Street, while to the astonishment of the shopkeeper they climbed a ladder over the courtyard wall into the neighbouring yard through the shoemaker’s workshop into a parallel street, merrily pulling and jostling each other. The mud in the streets was deep. The beautiful white felt of their shoes was soon brown. On their backs, on their queues crusts of mud stuck, thrown up by runners and carriers who appeared suddenly through the mist and ran frantically from them. But their pleasure was unclouded. If a shuffling of slippers, the tripping of a girl’s feet made itself noticeable at a gate, at a window, behind a lattice, Lao-hsü would whip an inlaid dagger from his sleeve and spring forward.
He had bought it in a nearby town ten days before, when an itinerant Peking opera troupe was performing the old play “The Temple of the Eight Chao’s”. He had watched the pranks of Fei-te Kung, the ravisher of maidens, with delight. From his seat, to the terror of the women, he set off a rocket which he aimed right across the theatre, so that a general sneezing and spitting began. But during the prelude to the final scene, where the cocksure hero is robbed of his weapon by a crude female trick, he stood up noisily with his friend and pushed along the narrow row of benches out of the theatre, considered first whether it wasn’t more appropriate to rob the bonze outside the theatre of an ornamental sword, then for a hundred taels and without bargaining bought his old inlaid sleeve dagger. “We shouldn’t lower ourselves to the tradesman’s level of these Chinese,” he said to Yung-kuang, as without a word he handed the huge sum to the stupefied bonze. They teased him: he was holding the sword in his hand like a boy his new plaything. Again and again he laid it lovingly across both arms, showed and concealed fine engravings on the handle, wondered if he shouldn’t have it consecrated by a priest of Wu-ti, god of war.
They turned towards the poor western part of town, so as to arrive at the river and the flowerboats, and the pretty singing of pretty women.
They had scarcely stepped into Tso-fu Street when a broadshouldered Chinese by the wall of the ivory carvers’ clubhouse looked them closely in the face. He had a carrying pole on his shoulder, sank back again to the wall. He followed them.
They walked faster. The rain was heavier now, and it was growing darker. Lao-hsü’s merriment was increasing. He grabbed the hands of a serving girl who was on her way at this late hour to buy ointments from an old herb woman for her mistresses; no one was to know that these ladies obtained their rouge and ointments from a disreputable woman. The little thing, muffled up to the eyes, was so frightened she could not cry out or run away when a hand grasped her waist, a short sword danced in front of her face. The empty ointment jar dropped to the ground. Lao-hsü looked stern, like a policeman; he pulled her along, and Yung-kuang followed close behind grotesquely grimacing.
The coolie put his pole flat on the ground. He glided past them in the mist, in the darkness, knocked on a house door: three double knocks, then twice with the palm. A boy in a red cap opened it. Behind him stood a tall man, naked to the waist, scarred. As the coolie whispered to him he pulled over his thin arms with movements quick as lightning a long gown that was hanging at the hearth to dry. With great strides both were outside. They left the door open.
Finally Yung-kuang could go no farther for laughing. As Lao-hsü was explaining solemnly to the girl that in this time of unrest any Chinese who stuck his dirty nose outside the door after sunset without first plugging his nostrils was liable, according to a prefectural decree, to a summary sentence of three weeks in the cangue, two figures fell on them out of the gloom, hit them over the head with wooden clubs, threw them to the ground, chased away the girl. They cut off their queues with short knives, removed their shoes, ripped from their gowns the embroidered insignia showing membership of the eight Manchu Banners. They dragged the two boys, senseless in the churned up filth of the street, into the doorway of a ruined house and propped them against the half open door. On the foreheads of the two motionless youths they drew in mud the sign of the five evil demons. Lao-hsü’s bloody head lolled all the while on his left shoulder. They shoved his arms together and laid the magnificent sleeve dagger across them. Hu, the tall man, strode across the Oxmarket to the teahouse. The two old knife grinders came back sleepily with him; they smiled and rocked their heads. Three melon sellers and a salt boiler jostled for a look. They exchanged greetings, sighed. The salt boiler spat on the still body with the sleeve dagger. The coolie, an old, serious face, fingered the long, gaping wound on Lao-hsü’s head, then rested the lolling skull on his left arm as he knelt beside the boy and with quivering lips poured a healing draught from a little gourd flask that had stood for a hundred sutras on an altar table.
There was movement in the street. Muffled the night watchman’s drum beat between the houses. They vanished behind the door. The young night watchman whistled a chirpy tune. The dull light from the round lantern that he carried before him on a long pole slid over the still bodies. Muffled his drum echoed across the wide market place.
The men behind the door separated, after the coolie had told them the name of his family and where he lived, and had invited them to honour him soon with a visit to his miserable hovel.
A fine rain was still falling. In the main streets the lamplighters went about, climbed their hand ladders and lit the oil lamps in front of the houses of the rich merchants, the doctors and midwives. Songs and gongbeats blared from many shops. A rumbling and distant thunder came from the Hsi-shan. Beyond the harbour where the dark warm sea stirred, strumming came from a little vegetable patch behind a fisherman’s hut. The sound from the longnecked bottle-shaped p’ip’a was now loud, now carried scarcely ten paces. A man’s uncertain highpitched voice sang in an unfathomable rhythm, wandering among the same few notes:
The bat flits at the east gate.
The pale rain pours down on the plum trees. A shrill wind will soon rise.
Why does the squirrel seek sweet fruit
By night, while the pale rain pours down?
Old Chao Hui paced to the upper window of his house.
The second night watch was already past.
He had been waiting for young Lao-hsü.
The house stood alone behind the town on the northwestern Magnolia Slopes. In the darkness it stood out harshly, as narrow and tall as a lance. He had not built himself one of those miserable Manchu dwellings with flat roof and walls of mud, like his northern ancestors from the River of the Black Dragon. As General vested by the Emperor with a special commission and authority in a turbulent province he lived in splendour under the tall trunks of the elms and the whiterimmed spruce. Before him the tangle of alleys, the huge empty squares, the meandering streets feeling their way to the harbour. His house lay high enough to afford a view of the sea, if it were not for the triumphal arch at the end of Han-pen Street, that ancient edifice erected in the time of Chu Yuan-chang to commemorate some securing of the border against the Mongols. Four smooth pillars, straddled high up by broad crossbeams, supported stepped cornices. On each step crouched stone phoenixes; each beam bore reliefs and boastful inscriptions. Whoever passed through the wide central arch of the monumental p’ai-lou could read on every frieze about that grand old victory on the Northeast Frontier.
Chao Hui laughed as he looked. They rejoiced over that ancient victory—and wore shaven heads in their own land, the mark of the Manchu, despite the presence of their tutelary ancestors. Deeply embedded in the Chinese earth in front of the house two wooden flagpoles reared threateningly; from fine, ornately perforated flagbaskets hung white pennants with the insignia of the Banner Lord. A low green wooden fence enclosed the house, whose two storeys, a red and gold upper floor over a bluewashed ground floor, were decked with an immense, overornate roof. Above the door, between two paper-covered windows an engraved tablet hung, with the inscription: Righteousness and the Pure Dynasty. The blind upper floor was painted gold and red, and was straddled by roof spars that flashed gold and red, the side beams ending in dragonheads. Monstrous lions squatted big as children on the balustrade around the upper floor. They snapped with twisted mouths, bit their long, itchy poodle ears, they growled and curled pointed tongues, they flopped lazily on their sides and nuzzled their fur.
And inside at the open balcony door lean, restless Chao Hui stood, lightly dressed in black, trying to penetrate the mist. Prized by his troops, his clan, an object of jealousy among the courtiers, the intriguing eunuchs. Here he was in this northern province, and knew he had been sent here to be got swiftly out of the way.
He had grown too big for them the day he was awarded the title Guardian of a Gate of Peking, the day the Emperor had come bearing a cup of tea to welcome him at the door of the Summer Palace. His glittering eyes darted over the walls of the room. The entire study was surrounded by a fantastic hunt. A broad relief carved in black wood covered the low walls. In the dim oil light figures flickered in ghostly life. Horses and carts, warriors between colossal wheels and targets as tall as horses. They continued from wall to wall with fluttering banners in uninterrupted procession, rode over a kneeling man who was touching a cloud-soaring Buddha’s head. Demons like dragonflies flew round a tree. A yard-long phoenix swished down; behind it a groaning man swam with the tail and fins of a fish, trying to grab the phoenix; there was wave after wave of dragons and men and genies.
The terrible things of the last few years rose before him.
He had marched four times against the Dzungars, had helped to exterminate them. The Emperor granted every last man who took part in that bloodbath a homecoming; they had to go as settlers to the New Frontier. Some thousands declined the opportunity. Chao Hui on the advice of the Emperor took them on as a standing army for the suppression of internal unrest.
These were the core of Chao Hui’s troops, his horde: the incendiary ravagers of Ili. Now they were camped across the province of Chihli that seethed with rebellion. They were posted before the gates of the Northern Residence.
Rebellion was rippling through this province, through Shantung, across Liaotung, and the burrowing worm could not be crushed. It smouldered in many hundreds of villages and towns. And no enemy showed itself! His horde were yawning. His patrons in the Ministry, high officials in the Ping-pu, wanted him drowned here, as his estates had drowned in the Great River, down in the Lower Reaches. He wanted to hurl himself, a scourge, a violence, upon the unruly populace, teach them as they prayed to Buddha and read their sutras the religion of the halberd, the prayer of the long rod. They should all be burned to ashes.
The mist lay thick enough to cut on the black town. Sailors’ songs rose from it like breathing. From the forest came the scream of a wild goose and the tumult of several geese squabbling. They quietened down; one continued scolding for a time.
The lean mandarin with the grey drooping moustache hunched in fury in his black silk gown. He wrenched the long chain of glass beads that he wore around his neck, threw it clattering across the table. It rolled and slid hesitantly to the floor. Mindful suddenly of the Son of Heaven he dropped to press his forehead to the floor.
He went to the gong that hung in a fourlegged stand near the southern wall of the room, rapped quickly with his knuckles twice. Tai-tsung, the old house slave, the “Little Father without a tongue”, knelt in the doorway. The young folk had still not returned to the palace. He looked uncertainly beyond his lord, who stalked from balcony door to his low couch and from the couch to the balcony door. The mist had thickened very early; the young illuminary hadn’t been long in this disreputable den of fisherfolk; might he have lost his way. The mandarin’s laugh was like his son’s: beginning with a cough, then pealing, then a throaty cooing. “Do you intend to join a jugglers’ guild in this disreputable den of fisherfolk? Have you ever seen the streets of Liu-yu? A street goes over roofs, fences, walls, through yards and cellars. Within three days Lao-hsü had his bearings.”
Tai-tsung did not rise, raked his stringy beard, sighed and followed his lord with tragic eyes. “Will the favourite of Wu-ti not send after the young illuminary?”—“The flowerboats are an hour away,” and Chao Hui laughed again.
“I was so bold as to send to the flowerboats two hours ago, and ask. The resplendent Lao is not amusing himself there. He went into a shop in Wei-ai Street with the inestimable Yung-kuang. Their chairs came home without them. But they were in Tso-fu Street, in the dark. The young radiances were in very high spirits.”
“And went off to the flowerboats.”
“They aren’t at the flowerboats,” the old man murmured obstinately, picking the pacing general’s glass bead chain from the floor.
Chao stood in front of him, knocked him on the back of the head with his fist. “What do you want with me, you bag of shit? What are you doing down there?”—“It’s dangerous in the town, Excellency. He is the son of a righteous but severe general. He can’t come home. He is being held.”—“Out!” roared Chao Hui, his eyes flashing.
Half an hour later a quite unfamiliar sound hummed through the palace. Two soft deep gongbeats, very close to the house, ghostly, as if a great wounded bird had stroked the metal with its wings as it sank. It was the gong out in the northern side hall, placed there since the start of the troubles for public use in emergencies. Only in dangerous places and times did leading officials set up a public alarm gong before their yamens. Three servants—a cook and two sedan bearers—and the Little Father too ran at each other’s heels through the back door. Suddenly they stopped. To all of them at once came the fearful thought that it was not the house gong but the alarm gong, the northern one. As they stared at each other and ran about excitedly, two figures with paper lanterns were already whispering in the hall, two of the general’s people, barelegged, pointing animatedly at the damp ground between them. Nobody near the gong. No sign. Only a man’s footprint, broadsoled, on the ground. A lengthy whispering began among the six in the windy hall. Anxiously they glanced about to see if the general was corning, but the house was quiet. He was sleeping. They stayed hidden in the shrubbery behind the northern gong.
The two bearers were already on their backs, the little old man with the white beard snored squatting, when a very soft, almost vibrationless note sounded, then a full plaintive beat. Something white was still falling under the gong as the first bearer ran up. Before he could look at it, old Tai-tsung grabbed it from his hand. On the paper were the words: Tso-fu Street. Beneath them the characters for Sun and Moon: the sign of the rebels. In all stealth they woke Chao Hui’s twenty bodyguards in the rear apartments. Silently, barefoot, halberds in hand, they raced down into the black town. Before them four lanterns swayed on long bamboo poles.
Now and then water splashed as they ran through puddles. The wooden drums of the night watchmen sounded now near, now farther off. The streets were steps leading down. Across the sinister Oxmarket they ran, into Tso-fu Street. They felt their way from house to house. The lanterns hovered over every doorway. Finally the soldiers banged on doorposts with their halberds, woke the startled, shouting inhabitants, who came rushing out. Rapid words were being exchanged when from the last house but one before the market a long whistle came. Then several piercing whistles. Against the half open doors of an empty, tumbledown house two bloody sacks were leaning, from which shoeless human feet projected. When a soldier and Tai-tsung pulled up the coarse matting two men were sitting there motionless on the threshold, breathing shallowly, queueless heads sunk on their chests. The sign of the five evil demons on their foreheads. On the crossed arms of one—neck and half the face thick-crusted with blood—a superb sleeve dagger.
They thronged into the stinking house. Rats scuttled big as cats over the front yard, over the steps, through the empty rooms with their collapsed roof beams. On the strawstrewn k’ang, lying on its side, a dead dog mouldered.
Tai-tsung, knees trembling with cold, stood in the doorway. He let the lantern drop, howled as he knelt and rubbed Lao-hsü’s hands.
The whole street gathered round. As knowledge spread of who it was that lay here the men lifted their hands, the women cried out in fear. They brought water and powdered whitecake, washed the wounds, dusted them.
The soldiers had quickly got hold of two public sedan chairs.
The bearers jostled each other in their haste. On the way Lao-hsü awoke, asked Tai-tsung where he was. The old man comforted him. In front of the palace he whimpered for his knife. Louder than the alarm gong the clear boyish voice resounded through the sleeping house: “Who’s got my knife? Yung-kuang! Yung-kuang! Give me the dagger. Your dagger!”
Upstairs Chao Hui’s gong squalled.
Tai-Tsung was astonished next morning at his master’s calm. Chao asked, as the slave soaped and shaved his head, where they had found Lao-hsü. He had asked five times already. At great length and with many fanciful details the man crouching behind him told the tale. He skipped over the deplorable situation in which they had found the wounded boys. He patted the gleaming skull with tissue paper. Chao tossed about on his couch, raised himself with cracking joints onto his elbows, looked the old man, who shrank respectfully back, in the face. Who did he suspect, then? He grunted in his deep bass voice. Was Lao-hsü’s breast badge intact, with its Banner device? And when Tai-tsung coloured Chao roared, “Did they leave him his pigtail?” A friendly, hefty slap on the old man’s hunched shoulders, then Chao Hui stretched.
His little eyes again wandered restlessly about the room. They bored, excavated.
A little servant girl slipped through the door. The grieving Hai-t’ang would be glad to speak with Old Master. He followed the girl at once, through the hall of twelve green pillars that served as a reception room, into the women’s quarters that lay towards the woods. Hai-t’ang was not in her room, nor on the balcony with her daughter. But a cheerful lively girl gave the hastening man a deep ch’ing-an on the gong and chanted: The grieving Mistress was grinding medicines by the young illuminary’s brick bed.
Wordlessly they retraced their steps across the Turfan carpets. Hai-t’ang was crouching on a yellow rush mat beside the k’ang on which Lao-hsü lay delirious. Two Chinese servants, old fat women, sat beside her holding umbrella, fan. A full face: the straight cut fringe of the Cantonese women on her yellowish-white powdered forehead. Red beauty spots over thickly drawn eyebrows. Her eyes were large and almond shaped, almost round. Only when she smiled did they narrow to slits, lines. Irises a satiny brown-black, swimming in little bluetinged whites. The eyes dwelt naked, lidless, in their roomy sockets; the short stiff lashes stood out like thorns above them. The nose was set flat on its broad low bridge, though it ended in a fine surprising upturn. The nostrils as they breathed were incomparably tender and soulful. Brownish-yellow skin of a wilful dullness lay smooth on the soft, well proportioned body, over the roundness of her expressive face, about the very small, broad hands whose well-turned fingers wore silver sheaths over the long nails. When the blood flowed into Hai-t’ang’s face the skin took on a tender olive green hue.
She bowed to Chao Hui, put down the wooden red lacquered bowl in which she had been working with a thinstemmed pestle, took the paper fan from the servant. With his principal wife Chao Hui, unlike other husbands, did not speak of children, the household, relatives. From the first years of their marriage young Hai-t’ang had won a place beside him. He had in those days been fortunate to use her influence with her father, Huang Tzu-tung, governor of Anhui; his promotion was rapid. In the Lower Reaches, south of the little town of Hsinghua, they acquired large fertile estates on the Chulou canal. Even now the literati there on Mussel Canal under the warm southern sky sang of Hai-t’ang’s intelligence and sweetness, of her refined learning, also of her untamability.
He sat down on a stool by the brick bed. They spoke long and earnestly, conversing in pure kuan-hua, which the servants did not understand. Anger coloured Hai-t’ang’s cheeks; the large fan whisked in her left hand. “For as long as the Great Dyke has stood along the Yangtze the villainous rabble has not dared such a deed. And shall not again treat our precious child so. We helped restrain the Huang-ho, Chao, China’s Sorrow. The wild swans shall not fly again across this land before the hooves of our swiftest horses have overtaken the murderers, trampled them.”
Such was the import of their long, fierce discussion. While Hai-t’ang, beside herself with grief, rocked back and forth and clapped her little soft hands. While she grasped the dangling sleeves of the Tartar, in whose eyes the pupils grew wide with a thrilling, hungry passion.
The male residents of Tso-fu Street were punished with twenty blows of the long rod, the neighbourhood night watchman was thrown into gaol, the district intendant of police dismissed.
Chao Hui summoned the town’s Prefect. For two days he pleaded sickness. When the general’s courier came on the evening of the second day with orders either to appear or to appoint a personal representative and then in view of the continuing grave situation in the province to resign his office, the Taot’ai acceded. Obedience was bitter to him. As Prefect of the town he was subordinate to the Viceroy of Chihli; only in the previous month had an Imperial decree been issued, empowering the specially appointed general Chao Hui to require in quite exceptional cases that civil officials of the rank of Fut’ai and above should report directly to him.
In the temple of the town god, behind the altar, was the god’s bedchamber, his bed and clothes. A second bed stood in the sparsely furnished room opposite the adytum. This was provided for senior officials of the town and district, when before deciding on important matters they wished to obtain advice from the Lord of the Walls and Moats, the great wise god. Before journeying to Chao’s camp Tang Shao-yi undertook his temple sleep.
Riders pranced in the van, runners cried their piercing “Make way for the Taot’ai!”, oncoming sedan chairs were forced to the side, carts overturned. The bearers had steady shoulders: a rhythmic, sure pace carried the mandarin’s green palanquin in the fresh morning out from the city wall. Outside the city yellow dust blew from the plain, and not far away the strong square ramparts of the camp rose, barely distinguishable from the earth. The yokeshaped gate. Fearsome little soldiers in blue jackets shot arrows at hanging mice, strolled in the rectilinear streets of the camp, juggled on staves held steady by others. In the centre of the camp on a high building a red pennant with white characters fluttered: Yamen of the General Officer Commanding. A runner carried the Prefect’s long red visiting card into the building; the bearers half set their load down in the courtyard. Then the runner beckoned. The palanquin stood in deep sand before the door. The large, corpulent mandarin in his official robes, at his belt a fan and embroidered tobacco pouch with flint and steel, slowly climbed out and slowly mounted the two steps to Chao Hui’s yamen. Chao came to meet him. They exchanged greetings with endless flourishings of the fists, up and down. The door of the yamen remained open.
In the open room Chao Hui sat opposite his guest. The teacups in front of them remained covered. Coolly the Taot’ai regarded the slender Tartar, whose cheekbones stood out a burning red, whose little moustaches hung over thin lips, whose catblack eyes glittered; who took a couple of pulls on the silvermounted mouthpiece of the waterpipe. Water gurgled.
Each spoke with intense interest of the other’s family. It was perhaps coincidence that the general’s silver hand tapped ceaselessly on the table: the Imperial hand, three fingers extended, the sign of judicial authority. Very soon the general alluded to his guest’s indisposition, which he much regretted. When the Taot’ai, leaning on the table, asked after Lao-hsü’s condition Chao, grasping the silver mouthpiece, asked louder what intelligence the town authorities had obtained relating to the rebels; whether the sects had been uncovered, and the emissaries who agitated in the town; what gatherings within the town boundaries had been raided during the past few weeks.
Tang Shao-yi smiled complaisantly. Several had been apprehended at sutra-reading, but as a rule insurrectionaries went about their business in secret and weren’t as easy to catch as rampaging cattle, barbarian hordes, perambulating youths. If it were all so easy, the Governor General and the Fut’ai would not have needed to request help from the Son of Heaven, from the most successful general in many a year. They exchanged bows.
The recent occurrences, Chao continued, his expression hard, demonstrated the impudence and audacity of the insurgents. He intended to report to Ch’ien-lung and propose that in any troubled district the streets where political crimes were committed or insurgents arrested should be burned. He would further recommend that for some months the old system of mutual clan supervision should be reintroduced throughout the province, and the ten mutually responsible households punished together. The attentive Tang could not find words to express his amazement. “Your Excellency observed during your felicitous time in Anhui how difficult it is to contain the raging waters of the Great River. The conspirators and sectarians are seeping through the foundations of our defenceless houses.”
“A man is not water. A man can die.”
“The power of the glorious Emperor K’ang-hsi has acquired Tibet for the blackhaired sons of Han. The land of Tibet is far away. Its abundant passes are beyond the horizon. No army is plundering its stolid populace, as Your Excellency intends to I plunder here. Go with your horde to Tibet. I know Chihli. It is peaceful—without soldiers.”
“Tang Shao-yi has never been in Tibet. He does not know the pestilence of that land. In Lhasa, in Tashilunpo the pestilence walks in yellow robes and red priest-girdle through the streets and wears precious jade rings on its fingers. They take the copper cash from a man’s pockets and the brain from his skull. They walk through the streets. Here they seep under our houses.”
“Our land is peaceful, Excellency. It can accommodate many priests. Not fifty years have passed since Chihli and Shansi suffered a drought of many months, the wells dried up, the cattle died in droves. The father of Ch’ien-lung, sublime Yung-cheng, now throned in Heaven, found only steppe in the rich provinces. No army stood then outside Yingp’ing, outside Shanhaikwan. No peasants fled their villages for fear of soldiers. In Peking the Emperor went to the Altar of Heaven and addressed a petition to Shangti; processions chanted in every province. And it rained! People thought the age of Yao and Shun had returned. But that sort of wisdom, perhaps, seems ridiculous to more elevated minds.”
Since Chao said nothing, just stared at him unblinking, he continued coolly to give rein to his education. He spoke of the mythical ancient, Shen Nung, born in an age of fishermen and hunters; he taught agriculture, sampled the taste of herbs, mixed medicines, so that even now he was held in great esteem among doctors, greater perhaps even than Ts’ang Chieh.
Wordlessly the general clapped his hands. The waterpipe that a servant brought he thrust behind him with a brusque movement of the arm, pointed to a large scroll on a small corner table. Controlling his voice he read out the latest Imperial edict:
When in any district unruly persons declare themselves to be divine or Buddhas and purport to found a heretical religion or sprinkle themselves with water imbued with virtuous or magical powers, or when they seduce the populace with clandestine religious practices and collect money among themselves, then, even if no danger of a breach of the peace is occasioned, the sub-prefect of the district who neglects to proceed to that place and arrest the criminals shall be demoted by two ranks in the Civil List. And the Prefect shall be demoted by one rank.
He did not continue. Tang Shao-yi had thrust out his broad chin and assumed a challenging smile. Chao laid down the scroll.
“The Imperial edict that Your Excellency has done me the honour to read out does not apply to me. For me, miserable lizard, another decree applies. The law against heresy. Your Excellency will understand.”
But he seemed not to understand.
“The old law that hangs on every wall. I mean that law. Your insignificant servant, Excellency, will speak slowly and dearly. Your insignificant servant stands in the place of those insurgents who are to be cut into pieces, whose wives and daughters are to be sent to Ili whose graves are to be filled with rubble. Your insignificant servant grants his protection to all who fall foul of this law. It is the particular pleasure and the unbounded delight of the most obedient slave who cowers before you to succour and shelter those who come athwart Your Excellency’s measures. And happily athwart.”
The table with the covered teacups between Chao Hui and Tang Shao-yi rattled. Both had stood up.
The general, whose eyes were starting from their sockets, growled, “I’ll have you bound and laid in the dust.”
“At Your Excellency’s command. We are at war. This poor northern province has no greater wish than to live in a state of war with the murderers of Ili. Those who dwell meekly within the four seas pray and obey the laws. Let only the Imperial hand not be raised. What Your Excellency and this clod of yellow have to discuss has nothing to do with the glorious Son of Heaven.”
“Are you, T’ang Shao-yi, Taot’ai of Shanhaikwan, in league or in collusion with the insurgents? Perhaps the words of my renowned senior lack clarity.”
The Taot’ai was a head taller than the military mandarin opposite him. Sunlight fell sharply through the open door into the room, over the Taot’ai’s back into the elaborately bony face of Chao Hui, this face gnawed by blizzards, whose small ears with their shallow folds had admitted more death screams than those of any other man of his time. The one-eyed peacock feather on his round cap shimmered greenly in the light.
T’ang Shao-yi, instead of answering the question, asked if in his mulish ignorance he might make a proposal.
“The honorable general was sent here by the Emperor with special authority. In a few weeks the Emperor will possibly travel to his summer palace in Jehol, or to the tombs at Mukden. Before the Emperor passes through the province it must be at peace.”
“Continue!”
“The dwarf before you would not dare to make a proposition. There is only one solution known to this dwarf.” T’ang, uninvited, sat down again. Slowly the general too bent his knees.
“And that is—for Your Excellency to come over to us.”
The two men looked blindly into each other’s little eyes, searched out facial lines. Through Chao’s brain there swept suddenly a bleak, helpless feeling; his brain swam in it, slithered as in a tub of greasy, filthy washing water.
“If Your Excellency does not pacify the province in the next few months, at least provisionally, you will lose what remains of your estates in the Lower Reaches, will yourself be dismissed, your glorious ancestors demoted. If you think of saving yourself, all will fall out as you wish. The insurrectionaries have infiltrated almost every family and many of the guilds. It is impossible to search them out, since there are as many havens for them as roofs in the town. The train of events is easy to predict. The hatred of the peaceable masses for the murderous horde that has been set here under your command is growing constantly. The insurrectionaries are gaining adherents. The war-likin contributions are becoming insupportable, the tax revenues of the civil power are diminishing. Let your troops commit just a few more atrocities against citizens, and this province and Shantung and Shansi as well will erupt in rebellion. They will be beaten down five times. Other armies will come, other generals. But the war will—drag on for months.”
Now the Tartar understood the wily mandarin. His thoughts cohered again. Carefully he probed the size of the losses in tax revenue suffered by the civil power, last month, the month before that. Now, as he approached the core of the matter, he marvelled at the sureness with which the Taot’ai had kept a grip on his thoughts, like a lathe its iron bar. And how the artful man had deceived and nearly, nearly seduced him.
Chao Hui suggested, tentatively, turning over half the likin proceeds to the town. But T’ang declined in tones of delight, suggested that the tax might be increased a trifle for certain guilds and a third of the resulting revenue be allowed to flow to the civil power, in furtherance of Imperial commands for the suppression of rebellion. Civil and military could then at last work hand in hand. Also, in view of the considerable deficit in the town treasury, it was desirable to levy on the rich merchants a special, not too heavy, tax, proportionate to their means, in the name of the General Plenipotentiary, for three or perhaps four months. Some arbitrary portion of this tax could usefully be put to increasing the strength of the town police.
Chao Hui agreed, with a few minor diminutions, to the Taot’ai’s proposals.
T’ang grinned ceaselessly. He asked time and again: However could they have misunderstood each other? It was certain the town would now be at peace, with new resources flowing to the authorities. This intolerable discord between magistrate and military had (so he was reliably informed) already driven several town officials into the arms of the rebels.
They smiled at each other, bowed countless times towards each other, showed their yellow teeth.
Chao Hui felt a little dizzy. Red and green spots danced before his eyes.
They lifted the covers of their teacups, drank tea from the plantations near Swatow. Chao accompanied his expansive guest quickly down the two steps to his palanquin.
Inside he let his head fall, heavy and reeling, onto the table. With his hot forehead he kneaded the red scroll, the Imperial edict of the previous week.
That evening the Taot’ai sent to his house two valuable sceptres, two ju-yis in white jade with finely carved birds and flowers, on the endplates verses by Ch’ien-lung.
Chao Hui’s emissaries next morning carried into the town magistracy a screen consisting of twelve porcelain leaves; the leaves were wonderfully painted with cherry blossom and longnecked birds; finest underglazing in cobalt blue.
Hai-t’ang asked whether T’ang Shao-yi had been sent packing, and these were presents for the new Taot’ai. Chao Hui turned his head away.