1636: The China Venture

by Eric Flint

  He heard a polite cough behind him; it was old Xudong. Yizhi was happy to see that Xudong had stopped at one of the shops outside the station and bought the necessary writing stock. As Yizhi had previously ordered, Xudong had gotten a large stack of scratch paper, and also three booklets of white answer sheets, each with twenty-two red lines. Each line would hold twenty-five characters. Each booklet would be used at one of the three exam sessions.

  Fang Yizhi sat down to fill out the identifying information on the cover. Name and age were easy, of course: Fang Yizhi, twenty-two years old. But what, he wondered, should he put down as his identifying physical characteristics?

  “Brown eyes, black hair,” he wrote. “Pale complexion. No beard.”

  “Put down ‘very long legs,’ sir.”

  “Xudong, please don’t look over my shoulder.” Then he sighed and wrote, “Tall.”

  Yizhi handed the folders over to the clerk, who gave him a receipt. Yizhi would not see the answer booklets again until the day of the exam.

  Eighth Day (September 10, 1633)

  “Boom!” The sharp report of a cannon being fired overwrote the vague murmur of people and carts in the street outside Yizhi’s lodging. Here in Nanjing, with its great walls and large garrison, there was no reason to fear that it heralded a bandit attack or a pirate raid. It was the midnight cannon, the first call to proceed to the examination compound. Yizhi had tried to sleep as best he could the day before, because he knew that he wouldn’t get much sleep this day.

  He was just finished dressing when the second call came, two shots in quick succession. Half an hour had passed. He left his lodging, Xudong trudging behind him, carrying Yizhi’s writing materials, chamber pot, food, padded sleeping quilt, oilcloth screen, candles and other necessities.

  They passed the Old Court, as the locals called the brothel facing the Jiangnan Examination Hall, and crossed the Qinhuai Canal separating the two. Even at this hour, there were a few pleasure boats out, and Yizhi could hear the strumming of a zither. They passed through three stone gates, arriving at last at the Great Gate, the actual entrance to the compound.

  Here, in the great courtyard fronting the gate, the candidates were gathered, grouped by home district. Yizhi, being from Tongcheng, had been told to line up with the third group, marked by a pole from which three lanterns were hung.

  The size of the crowd was already considerable. Here in Nanjing, there were perhaps five or ten thousand candidates.

  Boom, boom, boom. It was now one in the morning, and the Great Gate slowly opened. There was no surge of candidates toward it, because the roll call was still in progress. With time to kill, Yizhi spoke to some of the other members of his group. As he expected, most of them were of the gentry class. Of the remainder, almost all came from merchant families. In theory, a farmer or artisan could take the examination, but few could afford the time taken away from earning a living for the years necessary to master the examination topics.

  At last, every member of the third group had been verified, and a minor official led them through the gate.

  Just in front of the gate, Xudong passed the bundles to Yizhi; servants were not allowed inside the compound. “Good luck, sir!”

  Yizhi had barely shouldered the burden before he had to set it down again. Four soldiers surrounded Yizhi, searching him for contraband. After they searched his person, they examined his belongings with equal thoroughness, even slitting open dumplings in the hope of finding something. A soldier who found even a piece of paper with writing on it, however innocuous, would receive a reward of three ounces of silver. At last, they waved him on to an inspector, who grudgingly issued him an entry certificate.

  At the next gate, there was a second inspection. If any illegal items were found here, the inspector who had passed Yizhi at the first checkpoint would be punished. Next came the Dragon Gate, the entrance to the actual examination area. This opened onto a broad avenue, stretching far to the right and left, with numerous watchtowers.

  From that avenue, lanes led to the actual examination cells. Each lane was marked, in order, with a character from the sixth-century Primer of One Thousand Characters. That, of course, was the very first poem Yizhi and his fellow candidates had read as children; “Heaven and Earth, Dark and Yellow…” it began.

  A soldier led a group of twenty candidates, including Yizhi, to their lane, and pointed out the large earthenware jars of fresh water that stood to one side of the entrance. Here, the candidates would collect drinking water (or water to put out a fire, if a candidate working at night by candlelight fell asleep and set fire to his cell).

  Their guide then motioned them to their cells, each of which was numbered. Here, they would stay until the tenth day of the month, the end of the first of three examination sessions. As Yizhi walked down his lane, the smell of the public latrine, at the far end of the lane, became stronger. Yizhi was thankful that his cell was no more than halfway down.

  Yizhi looked over his cell, which was unprepossessing. It had brick walls, a wood roof, and a packed dirt floor. The only furniture in the room were three boards; there were holes in the walls for inserting the boards so one would serve as his seat; the second as his desk; and a third as a shelf on which to place his ink stone, ink, brushes, water pitcher, and so forth. The cell was even smaller than the house that Yizhi had rented when he last stayed in Nanjing—that one Yizhi had nicknamed “Room for my Knees” as, when he sat on the bed with his legs hanging over the edge, his knees nearly touched the wall. The cell had no door, but Yizhi could hang a curtain across it, if he wished.

  Yizhi sighed, laid his bedding on the seat board, and tried to fall asleep. It wasn’t easy, as his body was longer than the seat board. He tried drawing his legs up, but it was disconcerting to have either his knees or his feet hanging over the edge. At last he lay down on the floor on the cell’s diagonal, using two staggered boards to create a base of sorts. He couldn’t help but wonder whether finding a way to get a good night’s sleep was part of the test.

  Shortly before sunrise, he was awakened. “Papers!” demanded the man who had just entered the cell.

  Yizhi handed over his entry certificate and county credentials. “Are there more candidates than usual this year?” he asked politely.

  “Speak only to answer my questions,” snapped the clerk. Outside the examination compound, he would bow his head if Yizhi, a sheng-yuan, passed, but here he had authority over Yizhi.

  The clerk pulled out Yizhi’s answer books, and carefully compared the information on the entry certificate to that on the books. He stamped the answer books with the symbol tuĭ—checked—without this mark, Yizhi couldn’t turn in his answers.

  Yizhi reached out for the answer books but the clerk pulled them abruptly out of his reach. Instead, he handed Yizhi another form. “Sign this receipt!” he barked.

  Yizhi did so, and handed the signed receipt over. And at least received the precious answer books.

  Now Yizhi had to await the arrival of an assistant examiner with the actual questions for this session. He found himself arranging and rearranging his writing instruments. The physical effort, however small, was a welcome distraction.

  The assistant examiner arrived, pushing aside the curtain Yizhi had hung. “So, does the prisoner have any last words before the sentence is carried out?” he joked.

  Yizhi wasn’t amused, but knew better than to complain. He took the problem sheet, and looked it over. It bore several questions, as well as the seal of the assistant examiner. The questions were, of course, on the Four Books: the Analects of Confucius, the Mengzi of Mencius, Zisi’s Doctrine of the Mean, and Confucius and Zengzi’s Great Learning. He also had to compose a poem of a particular kind.

  “You have until the tenth day,” the official reminded him.

  Yizhi roughed out his answers to the first two questions, then set his papers aside to get some sleep. He was abruptly awakened by the sound of screaming. He stumbled blearily to the door of his cell, and pulled
back the screen. He looked up and down the lane, but saw no sign of anyone in trouble, so he went back to sleep.

  * * *

  The next morning, a guard came by to check Yizhi’s entry permit again. The administration wanted to make sure that no substitution had been made in the course of the night.

  This guard checked the description on the entry permit closely, and then wished Yizhi well.

  “Wait,” said Yizhi. “What was that disturbance last night?”

  “Oh, that,” said the guard. “One of the candidates was visited by the ghost of some girl he had wronged. When we came into his cell, he was screaming, ‘Forgive me! Forgive me!’”

  “Really? Did any of you see the ghost?”

  “Not I. But you know the saying, ‘In the examination hall, wrongs will be righted; those aggrieved will take revenge.’”

  “Was he kicked out of the examination for bad moral character?”

  “No,” said the guard. “The gates are not opened until the tenth day. Why, if the spirit had frightened him to death, we would have had to toss his body over the wall.” He spat into a corner. “But given his state of mind, he will surely spill ink on his paper, or smudge his writing, or write a character sloppily; that will disqualify him.”

  After the guard left, Yizhi wondered what to make of the incident. Had the man seen a ghost? Or was he just troubled by a guilty conscience? Well, thinking about the matter any further wasn’t going to get Yizhi any closer to finishing his answer. He reviewed what he had written on the scratch paper, and then wrote out fair copies in his answer booklet, taking his time. He, at least, would not have any writing mishaps!

  Yizhi slept soundly on the ninth day, his sleep unmarred by ghostly visitations (real or imaginary), and he turned in his answers early on the tenth day.

  Chapter 2

  October 1633

  Woods near town of Grantville

  Within the Ring of Fire

  “Almost there,” said Jason Cheng.

  His wife, Jennie Lee Cheng, nodded.

  This stretch of woods was owned by Marshall Kitt, Jason’s partner in Kitt and Cheng Engineering. The Mennonite farmers he had leased some of his land to tended to stay out of the forest, save when they needed to cut firewood, and anyway they knew that the Chengs had permission to go there.

  Even though it was well into the morning, it was dark here under the trees. The yellow poplar reached as high as a hundred and fifty feet tall, and the black walnut wasn’t much shorter.

  Jason stopped when they came to a small stream, and motioned that his family should head upslope.

  “This is looking good,” said Jason. “See, we have some ferns here, and some wild ginger—do you want some, Jennie Lee? And over there I see jack-in-the-pulpit.”

  “It looks like poison ivy,” said Mike Song, one of their nephews.

  “Somewhat,” Jason admitted. “It’s okay to touch it, but don’t eat it; it’s poisonous.”

  “Hey, I just found some ginseng!” shouted Jason Junior.

  His father and mother bent down to look.

  “And so you did,” said Jennie Lee. “It’s just a two-pronger, though, so we’ll leave it be this year.”

  Jason Senior reached down to feel the soil. He grabbed a sample and squeezed it. It stuck to his skin. “Huh, a little too moist here. Let’s head a little bit away from the stream, and see if we do better.” He chalked an arrow on a tree so they could find their way back.

  After a few minutes, they found a substantial patch of ginseng, with a mix of seedlings and one-, two-, three- and four-prongers.

  “So, Mike, do you know how to tell the age of a ginseng plant?”

  Mike Song shook his head. “I’m a city boy, remember. When I came to the States, I lived in downtown Raleigh, and then I went to school in Pittsburgh.”

  “So did I,” said his older brother Danny, “and I know.”

  “Well, you moved out here, to the boonies, after you met Ashley. That gave you a head start.”

  Danny shrugged. “Chances are that you’re going to marry a country girl, too, younger brother. Given that we’re now in rural Germany. Anyway, you look at the neck of the plant, and count the stem scars. If the plant has four stem scars, then it’s five years old. That’s the minimum legal age for harvesting ginseng.”

  “Under West Virginia law, so who cares now that we’re in Thuringia?” asked Mike.

  “Mike’s right!” said Jason Junior.

  “I care,” said Jason Senior. “The point is to make sure that there will still be ginseng a few years from now. We take plants that are at least five years old and have at least three prongs.”

  “And have red berries,” Jennie Lee added.

  “That’s right. And after we dig out the root, we squeeze the seeds out of the berries and plant them nearby.”

  “Hey, Mike, you’re a ginseng virgin,” teased Danny. “Do you want me to show you how to spade the plant out?”

  “It’s not exactly rocket science,” said Mike, grabbing a needle-nose spade and driving it into the ground a few inches from where the stem emerged.

  “Too close,” said Jennie Lee. “About six inches is right.”

  Mike corrected his error, and the others started harvesting roots themselves. When they collected what they thought was a fair haul, leaving a few mature plants behind since they were the most efficient seed producers, they retraced their steps. As they did, Jason Senior carefully washed off the chalk arrow.

  “That’s wise,” said Ashley. “A few years ago, over in Fairmont, there was a big to-do about ginseng-napping.”

  “Is that a word?” asked Danny.

  Ashley made a face at him. “I shouldn’t have married a city slicker from Raleigh.”

  “Well, it’s just a precaution,” said Jason Senior. “The ginseng seems to have gotten more abundant since the Ring of Fire, so I think there’s been less harvesting, legal or otherwise. We lost the Asian market, so that discouraged harvesting for sale, and the refugees are leery of it.”

  Ashley nodded. “I think because it reminds them of mandrake root, which is poisonous. And associated with witchcraft.”

  “It’s too bad we have no trade with China,” said Jason Senior. “It’s been scarce there for centuries; I bet it would sell as well there as cloves and nutmeg do in Europe.”

  “We’ll dry most of the roots,” said Jennie Lee. “But I’ll use a bit of it fresh, to make herbal tea.” She added in a whisper, “For just the two of us.” Fresh root was considered more potent than the dried form, and one of the traditional Chinese uses of ginseng was as an aphrodisiac.

  “An excellent idea,” he whispered back.

  Grantville

  As Jesuit Fathers Athanasius Kircher and Larry Mazzare walked down Clarksburg Street past the Grantville Public Library, on their way back to St. Mary’s, they saw the four Chengs coming out of the library: Jason, Jennie Lee, Diane, and Jason Junior, all carrying books. They loaded them into the baskets on their bikes and rode off.

  Father Kircher stopped and watched them as they edged into the traffic, a confused mélange of pedestrians, horsemen, cyclists and the occasional car or bus. Clarksburg Street was busy these days, with all the down-timers that had come into the boomtown of Grantville, and the public library was itself something of a draw.

  “That Chinese family, I know they aren’t Catholic. They are what, Methodist? Baptist? Church of Christ?”

  “I don’t know them well,” said Larry. “But I think they are some kind of Evangelicals. Jason Cheng is in partnership with Marshall Kitt, who’s Presbyterian. They have an engineering firm. At least two of their employees belong to our flock, Bautista Cabrera and Adina Abodeely. So I know the Chengs through them. And I think I have talked about engines with Jason Cheng; he’s a mechanical engineer. But that was a long time ago, and we didn’t talk about religion at all.” He looked at his watch. “We’d best be heading back now.”

  Larry Mazzare didn’t need to ask why Father K
ircher was interested in the Chengs. As soon as Kircher was assigned to Grantville, Mazzare had read Kircher’s biographies in the up-time encyclopedias; they revealed that he published a book on China in old time line 1667.

  The two priests walked passed the middle school and turned down Furbee, quickly arriving at St. Mary’s. The church’s best feature, Father Kircher thought, were the two bell towers that flanked the entrance. The lower stories were of stone constructions; the bell level was white painted wood, and above it there was a verdigris dome, surmounted by a golden ball and cross. The green of the domes contrasted nicely with the red of the roof over the nave.

  As they walked up the stairs to the main entrance of the church, Father Kircher confided, “In 1629, I asked to be a missionary in China. But my superiors in the Society of Jesus were of the opinion that my calling lay elsewhere. At the University of Avignon, and then at the Collegio Romano.”

  Larry Mazzare grabbed hold of the door ring and gave it a firm pull. As the door swung open, he turned to Kircher and said, “Are you still planning to write a book about China?”

  “I am indeed. I have been studying what Grantville has on the subject, and I am trying to combine it with contemporary accounts in the Society files. Still, it is all a secondhand experience. How I wish I could sail to Macao, take the Ambassador’s Road up to Beijing, and join my brethren at the Astronomical Bureau there. To teach the Chinese to see God by understanding his handiwork in the sky above us!”

  They entered the church and headed toward the back. “What is this ‘Ambassador’s Road’ you speak of?” asked Larry.

  “You go up one of the tributaries of the Pearl River, and then across the Nan Mountains by the Meiguan,” Kircher explained. “The ‘Plum Pass,’ you would say in English.”