China Seas

by John Harris

  ‘We’re not afraid of the Chinese, Edward,’ Willie pointed out.

  ‘Then you ought to be, Father. There are millions of them and only hundreds of you. They’ve only to notice that if they all pull together they could chase you out with ease. The whole set-up could collapse about your ears.’

  It was difficult to accept what Edward said, because life in Shanghai, even in the concession ports upriver, was still easy, with the Europeans well protected from the raucous life of the Chinese by their money, their Sikh policemen, their patrolling gunboats, their parks, their splendid houses, their banks and their businesses. But, thinking about it clearly, it was obvious that things were different. The Russian concessions along the Yangtze had gone and there was something now the Chinese had never seen before, white men – Russians – begging in their streets, and white women prostituting themselves for money.

  There was still a civil war going on in China, but no one took much notice of it any more because it didn’t seem to interfere with business, and after all, it had been going on ever since 1911, when the Manchus had departed. Mostly it consisted only of ragged soldiers marching about the country, killing, raping, looting anything, but careful always to leave the Europeans alone.

  The political situation couldn’t be explained, because you couldn’t explain chaos. Occasionally, they attempted for some visitor from Europe, but there was no outlining the tortuous moves of the generals whose only real ambition – certainly not to protect or defend their country – was to amass a fortune without being assassinated or captured.

  A ghost of a movement was clanking its chains in Peking, but no one took any notice of it because in Canton in the south another government passed bills and made laws without reference to the one in the north. Both had appointed generals to run their provinces and left them to raise their own armies, but the only regular form of income for both was the Customs Service run by the British. And that money went to pay off the indemnities caused by the Boxer Rising, so that in the end nobody was any better off, while the generals supplemented their meagre salaries by raising taxes, which they pocketed themselves, and, holding out promises of high pay and no fighting, recruited an army of discontented coolies, starving labourers and criminals. When pay fell into arrears and the general ran short of money, a little harrying of the countryside was indulged in and, if things became too difficult, just as the army was on the point of mutiny the general slipped away to safety with his fortune, while is men, who still had their weapons, became nothing more than uniformed bandits.

  There were few battles, usually when some general had had too much samshui at dinner or when someone became over-ambitious. Normally emissaries met opposing emissaries and, after a few hours’ bargaining to discover which general had the biggest following and the most guns, one army retired, leaving the city it had ruled to its successor. The new troops marched in, merchants were milked dry, a few people were beheaded, a few struggling women were dragged away and the new regime established itself. Cities were always changing hands, but it made no difference. Every general was the same as the one he succeeded and the foreign powers stayed clear of the mess unless their nationals found themselves in danger, when a gunboat would appear, a few shots would be fired, a party of sailors, gaitered and festooned with bandoliers of ammunition, would be landed, and the uproar subsided.

  On top of all this were all of China’s natural sorrows – famine, droughts, epidemics and floods. But still the long-suffering peasants, illiterate, superstitious, uneducated, using crude ploughs and the flails their father had used, went on working at their tiny plots, hoarding human excrement which they ladled on their plants in the spring, eating the produce of the soil and returning to it their bodily waste, raising their families, celebrating when there was something to celebrate, and always remaining on the verge of starvation.

  This, however, was also not the problem of the Europeans who, believing that all the Chinese were idle and worthless, indulged in vast vulgarity while ignoring the exquisite jade, embroideries and porcelain China had to offer. For most of them Abigail felt only contempt.

  ‘The Chinese were wearing satin,’ she pointed out, ‘when the British were still wearing woad and when there was no one in America except Indians.’

  From the sale of the things she had acquired, she was now a wealthy woman in her own right, because her antiques business had always been kept separate from Willie’s trading and shipping enterprises, and she had picked up a new fortune from the Russian refugees who were still managing to find their way to Shanghai with the treasures they hoped would finance their new way of life. There were minute gold and jewelled models by Fabergé, enamel, gold and agate miniatures of antique furniture, minute Weisweiler writing tables, models of John Bull or the Tsar, and animals and birds of all kinds. Aware of how much depended on what she gave, she always offered good prices, but she still made enormous profits when the articles were shown by Brassard or appeared in New York, Paris and Rome. Noticing her bank balance, it worried Willie at times that she would suddenly decide she had had enough and walk out on him.

  The thought left him shivering because life without her seemed impossible. Yet, though she never hinted that she knew, he was certain she was well aware of what had happened between him and Nadya Alexsandrovna.

  The thought of Nadya brought a new unhappiness at the memory of what he had left her to face. On their last night together she had clung to him, her eyes wet with tears, but had continued to assert that she could have no place in his life in Shanghai.

  ‘That’s another life,’ she had insisted. ‘It’s a world away from mine.’

  After she had left him aboard the ship, the worry had continued to torment him. The Red Army had been near Vladivostok by that time and there were hundreds of Russians lining the dockside begging to be taken aboard ships. Those who could afford it had paid their passage. Those who couldn’t were offering their few treasures in exchange for a ticket, and aristocratic girls were willing to marry rough sailors for a passage to safety.

  The ship had not sailed at once and every day he had scanned the quayside in the hope that Nadya would appear asking to accompany him, that some message would come on board, begging his help. But nothing did, and in the end he had fished out one of his cards and sent it to her. ‘If you need me, here I am,’ he wrote, and, putting it in an envelope, had addressed it to the office of A N Kourganov and got Brassard to give it to one of the officers to post on one of his last visits to the shipping office ashore. He had never heard from her since, had no knowledge whether the card had arrived. He was aware of missing her dreadfully yet when he looked at Abigail he was relieved that an uncertain and dishonest period of his life was over.

  The end of the war had brought a boom in business and with ex-enemy ships still to be picked up for a song, the Sarth Line had expanded enormously. Willie made no attempt to compete with the big lines and never grew too ambitious, restricting his activities to trade through the China Seas, to Java, the Philippines, India and the Dutch East Indies.

  Slowly it dawned on him he had become a rich man and that Sarth’s had taken their place among the great names, so that Gerald Honeyford was suddenly pleased to acknowledge him.

  Governed by its own municipal council, with its own police, its own Customs authorities, its own volunteer force, Shanghai continued to grow, with plate-glass windows in its shops and skyscrapers built after the fashion of America which it liked to ape. Near the British Consulate on the bund was the Shanghai Club, with what was claimed to be the longest bar in the world. The taipans, the owners and managers of the big hongs, stood at one end, the minor executives at the other. Not sure where he fitted, Willie always chose the middle.

  Despite the fact that business was good, it involved harder work, however, because, as Edward had noticed, there was a scarcely veiled hostility towards the Europeans from the Chinese these days. Once, it had only been directed toward the Japanese, whose ruthlessness and greed had snatched so muc
h Chinese territory, but now the hatred included all foreigners, and a new name had suddenly appeared in the south – a young general called Chiang K’Ai-Shek, a disciple of Sun Yat-Sen, who had become the head of the army of the Canton governments and was preaching fervent nationalism.

  No one took much notice, because no one could ever imagine China becoming sufficiently co-ordinated to become a threat. After all, the country still had two governments and neither had an efficient army, though Russian instructors, made available by Moscow, were doing their best to give some semblance of efficiency to Chiang’s troops.

  But things were changing and, tired of being pestered by the warlords, a group of Chinese businessmen responded by forming their own volunteer defence corps of mercenaries.

  They included Chinese, Czechs, Russians, British, French and Germans, and the Shanghai Banking Corporation, aware that it could help its investments and the investments of its customers, encouraged them.

  ‘It won’t work,’ Willie told Gerald Honeyford. ‘You’re wasting your money.’

  Honeyford blustered and jeered at Willie’s doubts, but Willie proved to be right. Chiang K’Ai-Shek was too quick for the volunteers and, seizing a consignment of weapons for them, he ordered cadets from the military academy he had established at Whampoa to disperse the defence corps. The rapidity with which they did so indicated how small a threat it had been.

  Edward was now well established in his duties aboard the gunboat Ant, which spent most of its time swinging at anchor at the China Merchants’ Wharf. Occasionally the ship, shaped like a flat iron with twin propellers in tunnels and three huge rudders to make it easy to steer in shallow water, moved upriver, resplendent in its blinding paint and scrubbed woodwork. She carried two six-inch guns dating from 1898 and of a type never seen outside a museum or a gunnery school, and the ritual before it left was always to slip down to the APC wharves below the harbour to refuel and then spend the night at Woosung, where the officers obtained cartridges for shooting the snipe they expected to meet on the lakes on the journey upstream.

  Edward loved the life, ecstatic about the distant ranges of mountains and the vast surging Yangtze and its fleets of junks, tugs and river steamers with their tiers of crowded decks.

  ‘It’s when you anchor at sunset,’ he said. ‘The breeze drops, the heat hangs over you like a blanket, and you lounge on deck, dripping with sweat, too hot even to make conversation. But then the sun goes down and the twilight comes and the landscape disappears into a sort of mysterious purple.’

  His sister Polly eyed him adoringly, the elder brother who was serving his country in uniform. Alongside her was a young American boy, Elliott Wissermann, whose father ran Wissermann’s in Shanghai and at Yangpo. He had a heavy crush on Polly and, as she watched her adored elder brother, never taking her eyes off him, Wissermann never took his eyes off Polly. Willie caught Abigail’s eye and she gave him a quiet pleased smile. Things were working out well for them.

  Later that evening, Thomas brought home a Chinese friend of his, a handsome young man called Chou with a shock of black hair and heavy eyebrows. He came from the province of Kiangsu, and spoke good French, English and German because, after schooling at Tientsin, he had studied in those countries after leaving the Nankai University.

  These days Thomas looked almost more Chinese than the Chinese themselves, thin and tall with a long nose that made him look vaguely Manchu. He had studied at the university, jeered at Willie’s beliefs and Edward’s stiff naval patriotism, and was currently escorting a small Chinese girl called Chan Fan-Su, whose name when she appeared at the house with him was usually inverted to Fan-Su Chan or Fanny for ease.

  Chou’s father had been a minor mandarin, but he could see no sense in the present system of government, and while in Tientsin had put out a news-sheet outlining his beliefs. He admitted being involved in the mass boycott of Japanese goods in Shanghai three years before when a strike in support of the students had brought the city to a standstill.

  ‘There can be no answer for China,’ he insisted, ‘except the sort of unity the Communists can give. If necessary we must use force to achieve it.’

  To an old Shanghailander like Willie, this was blasphemy and he had seen enough of Communism in Russia to loathe the thought of it. But he thrust aside his prejudices and tried to be reasonable. He was talking to an educated young man whom he recognised as holding the future of China, and he tried hard to see a point of view he couldn’t really accept at any price.

  ‘I thought the Chinese were taught to look on soldiers as being in the same category as robbers,’ he said.

  Chou smiled. ‘That is why our army was a thing of laughter,’ he admitted. ‘It was never the ambition of a Chinese to be a military leader. We were proud to produce intellectuals, literature, art treasures and merchants. Nowadays, however, it is different. We are learning that to have pride we must first be masters of our own souls and for that we need soldiers.’

  ‘What about the Kuomintang? Won’t Chiang’s party get in the way?’

  Chou’s smile widened. ‘We shall ally ourselves with them, because we can use their organisation to advance our cause.’

  ‘Won’t it be harmful to your Party’s independence?’

  ‘Last year,’ Chou pointed out quietly, ‘the strike we organised among the workers of the Peking–Hankow railway was ruthlessly stamped out by the warlord in control there. It seemed convincing evidence to us of the need to find allies. We believe in China for the Chinese. It will take time – too much of China belongs to other nations – but it will come. If I were you I would consider making your plans ahead.’

  ‘He had a bloody nerve,’ Willie said indignantly as they prepared for bed.

  To his surprise, Abigail was unruffled. ‘He’s right, of course,’ she said.

  She was occupied with packing for one of her occasional trips to San Francisco and there were suitcases and trunks in the corner of the bedroom. From time to time she crossed the Pacific on business and, since the end of the war, her trips had become more frequent because the Russian revolution had brought into her hands almost more treasures than she could handle.

  ‘Europe can’t hold the reins in China for ever,’ she went on. ‘Whether they like it or not, the Chinese are being dragged into the twentieth century. We’re teaching them how to manufacture things, how to run things, and there’s bound to come a time when they’ll know they can do without us.’

  ‘And then what?’ Willie was standing with his shirt in his hands, staring at her.

  ‘And then we shall have to leave.’

  ‘How will we know?’

  Abigail smiled. ‘I think it will become fairly clear,’ she said.

  Worried a little, thoughtful and concerned, Willie asked a few questions at the Shanghai Club. Honeyford laughed at his fears.

  ‘Rubbish,’ he said. ‘The Chinks haven’t the know-how to run their country.’

  ‘They’re learning,’ Willie said.

  ‘It would take generations.’

  Suddenly Willie wondered if it would.

  The following day, he saw his wife aboard a Glen Line ship. Polly was going with her because Abigail had always felt, in that shrewd way she had that she had never inherited from her narrow background in America, that Shanghai was too loud, too noisy, to be the only city in the world for her daughter to know. Because of the war, neither Thomas nor Polly had been to school in England and they had grown up knowing only the background of what was one of the brashest cities in the world and the people who lived in it – many of them uncertain of their background, insecure and loud-voiced. But Polly had accompanied her often to India to pick up antiques, and then on to Egypt and to Rome and Paris, and this time it was her intention to show her the west coast of America and take the trans-continental train to New York. It might be good policy, she felt secretly, if Elliott Wissermann were interested in her.

  They drank champagne in the cabin and Willie beamed as the load of flowers he had order
ed arrived. Standing on the quay as the ship departed, he waved cheerfully. He hated seeing Abigail disappear. She had been alongside him for over twenty years and he hated it when she went on one of her trips or when he himself had to leave her for the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, India, South Africa, or any other country where he did business.

  Her disappearance left him feeling bereft and, calling in the Club, he recovered a little among the noisy crowd taking pre-lunch drinks. Henry Moberley was there as usual, but he was subdued these days. Though Wishart’s were struggling on, it only required a crisis – and crises could arrive in China at any moment – for its slender resources to be swallowed up and the firm to disappear. Willie hadn’t seen Emmeline for a long time, but he knew she was still around because Abigail occasionally brought news of her and her name occasionally appeared in the business papers.

  Returning to his office, he sat at his desk, staring into space. What Abigail had said had struck home. She was shrewd and able and a good businesswoman and if she had seen the light perhaps he was foolish not to do the same.

  As he brooded, George Kee appeared to inform him that the Lady Roberts had put in an appearance with a cargo of Indian coal. None of the British wanted Indian coal, but the Chinese manufacturers, trying to do things on the cheap, always welcomed it.

  ‘Sometimes,’ Willie said, ‘I forget we’ve still got that old tub. I’m surprised she hasn’t sunk. What does she cost us, George?’

  ‘Probably more than she’s worth, sir.’

  ‘Perhaps we ought to get rid of her. Perhaps one of the Chinese merchants will buy her. That’s where all old ships seem to end up. Let’s think about it.’

  As Kee turned away, Willie called him back and told him to sit down.

  ‘George,’ he said soberly. ‘Have you got any money?’

  ‘A little sir.’ Kee smiled. ‘I’ve put some away.’