The Year of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Ibrahim would nod, and encourage her to write on these matters, and also to collect the best of the poems she had in her possession, into an anthology like Yun Zhu's 'Correct Beginnings', recently published in Nanjing. 'As she says herself in her introduction,' Ibrahim pointed out, Foreach one I have recorded, there must be ten thousand I have omitted." And how many of those ten thousand were more revealing than hers, more dangerous than hers?'

  'Nine thousand and nine hundred,' Kang replied, though she loved Yun Zhu's anthology very much.

  So she began to organize an anthology, and Ibrahim helped by asking his colleagues back in the interior, and to the west and south, to send any women's poems they could obtain. Over time this process grew, like rice in the pot, until whole rooms of their new compound were filled with stacks of paper, carefully marked by Kang as to author, province, dynasty and the like. She spent most of her time on this work, and appeared completely absorbed in it.

  Once she came to Ibrahim with a sheet of paper. 'Listen,' she said, voice low and serious. 'It's by a Dai Lanying, and called, "On the Night Before Giving Birth to My First Child".' She read: Onthe night before I first gave birth

  The ghost of the old monk Bai Appeared before me. He said,

  With your permission, Lady, I will come back As your child. In that moment I knew reincarnation was real. I said,

  What have you been, what kind of person are you Thus to replace the soul already in me?

  He said, I have been yours before I've followed you through all the ages Trying to make you happy. Let me in And I will try again. – Kang looked at Ibrahim, who nodded. 'It must have happened to her as it happened to us,' he said. 'Those are the moments that teach us something greater is going on.'

  When she took breaks from her labours as an anthologist, Kang Tongbi also spent a fair number of her afternoons out in the streets of Lanzhou. This was something new. She took a servant girl, and two of the biggest servant men in their employ, heavy bearded Muslim men who wore short curved swords in their belts, and she walked the streets, the riverbank strand, the pathetic city square and the dusty markets around it, and the promenade on top of the city wall that surrounded the old part of town, giving a good view over the south shore of the river. She bought several different kinds of 'butterfly shoes' as they were called, which fitted her delicate little feet and yet extended out beyond them, to make the appearance of normal feet, and – depending on their design and materials – provide her with some extra support and balance. She would buy any butterfly shoes she found in the market that had a different design to those she already owned. None of them seemed to Pao to help her walking very much – she was still slow, with her usual short and crimping gait. But she preferred walking to being carried, even though the town was bare and dusty, and either too hot or too cold, and always windy. She walked observing everything very closely as she made her slow way along.

  'Why have you given up sedan chairs?' Pao complained one day as they trudged home.

  Kang only said, 'I read this morning, "Great principles are as weighty as a thousand years. This floating life is as light as a grain of rice. – 'Not to me.'

  'At least you have good feet.'

  'It's not true. They're big but they hurt anyway. I can't believe you won't take the chair.'

  'You have to have dreams, Pao.'

  'Well, I don't know. As my mother used to say, "A painted rice cake doesn't satisfy hunger. – 'The monk Dogen heard that expression, and replied by saying, "Without painted hunger you never become a true person. – Every year for the spring equinoctial festivals of Buddhism and Islam, they made a trip out to Qinghai Lake, and stood on the shore of the great bluegreen sea to renew their commitment to life, burning incense and paper money, and praying each in their own way. Exhilarated by the sights of the journey, Kang would return to Lanzhou and throw herself into her various projects with tremendous intensity. Before, in Hangzhou, her ceaseless activity had been a wonder to the servants; now it was a terror. Every day she filled with what normal people would do in a week.

  Ibrahim meanwhile continued to work away at his great reconciliation of the two religions, colliding now in Gansu right before their eyes. The Gansu Corridor was the great pass between the east and west halves of the world, and the long caravans of camels that had headed cast to Shaanxi or west to the Pamirs since time immemorial were now joined by immense trains of oxen hauled wagons, coming mostly from the west, but also from the east. Muslim and Chinese alike settled in the region, and Ibrahim talked to the leaders of the various factions, and collected texts and read them, and sent letters to scholars all over the world, and wrote his books for many hours every day. Kang helped him in this work, as he helped her in hers, but as the months passed, and they saw the increasing conflict in the region, her help more and more took the form of criticism, of pressure on his ideas – as he sometimes pointed out, when he felt a little tired or defensive.

  Kang was remorseless, in her usual way. 'Look,' she would say, 'you can't just talk your way out of these problems. Differences are differences! Look here, your Wang Daiyu, a most inventive thinker, takes great trouble to equate the Five Pillars of the Islamic Faith with the Five Virtues of Confucianism.'

  'That's right,' Ibrahim said. 'They combine to make the Five Constants, as he calls them, true everywhere and for everyone, unchanging. Creed in Islam is Confucius's benevolence, or ren. Charity is yi, or righteousness. Prayer is li, propriety, fasting is shi, knowledge. And pilgrimage is xin, faith in humankind.'

  Kang threw her hands up. 'Listen to what you are saying! These concepts have almost nothing to do with each other! Charity is not righteousness, not at all! Fasting is not knowledge! And so it is no surprise to find that your teacher from the interior, Liu Zhi, identifies the same Five Pillars of Islam not with the Five Virtues, but with the Five Relationships, the Wugang not the Wuchang! And he too has to twist the words, the concepts, beyond all recognition to make the correspondences between the two groups fit. Two different sets of bad results! If you pursue the same course they did, then anything can be matched to anything.'

  Ibrahim pursed his lips, looking displeased, but he did not contradict her. Instead he said, 'Liu Zhi made a distinction between the two ways, as well as finding their similarities. For him, the Way of heaven, tiando, is best expressed by Islam, the Way of Humanity, rendao, by Confucianism. Thus the Quran is the sacred book, but the Analects express the principles fundamental to all humans.'

  Kang shook her head again. 'Maybe so, but the mandarins of the interior will never believe that the sacred Book of Heaven came from Tiangfang. How could they, when only China matters to them? The Middle Kingdom, halfway between heaven and earth; the Dragon Throne, home of the Jade Emperor – the rest of the world is simply the place of barbarians, and could not possibly be the origin of something as important as the sacred book of Heaven. Meanwhile, turning to your shaikhs and caliphs in the west, how can they ever accept the Chinese, who do not believe at all in their one god? This is the most important aspect of their faith!' And she muttered, 'As if there could ever only be one god.'

  Again Ibrahim looked troubled. But he insisted: 'The fundamental way is the same. And with the empire extending westwards, and more Muslims coming east, there simply must be some kind of synthesis. We will not be able to get along without it.'

  Kang shrugged. 'Maybe so. But you cannot mix oil and vinegar.'

  'Ideas are not chemicals. Or, they are like the Daoists' mercury and sulphur, combining to make every kind of thing.'

  'Please don't tell me you plan to become an alchemist.'

  'No. Only in the realm of ideas, where the great transmutation remains to be made. After all, look at what the alchemists have accomplished in the world of matter. All the new machines, the new things…'

  'Rock is much more malleable than ideas.'

  'I hope not. You must admit, there have been other great collisions of civilizations before, making a synthetic culture. In India, for instance, Islam invaders conquered a
very ancient Hindu civilization, and the two have often been at war since, but the prophet Nanak brought the values of the two together, and that is the Sikhs, who believe in Allah and karma, in reincarnation and in divine judgment. He found the harmony beneath the discord, and now the Sikhs are among the most powerful groups in India. Indeed, India's best hope, given all its wars and troubles. We need something like that here.'

  Kang nodded. 'But maybe we have it already. Maybe it has been here all along, before Mohammed or Confucius, in the form of Buddhism.'

  Ibrahim frowned, and Kang laughed her short unhumorous laugh. She was teasing him while at the same time she was serious, a combination very common in her dealings with her new husband.

  'You must admit, the material is at hand. There are more Buddhists out here in these wastelands than anywhere else.'

  He muttered something about Lanka and Burma.

  'Yes yes,' she said. 'Also Tibet, Mongolia, the Annamese, the Thais and Malays. Always they are there, you notice, in the border zone between China and Islam. Already there. And the teachings are very fundamental. The most fundamental of all.'

  Ibrahim sighed. 'You will have to teach me.'

  She nodded, pleased.

  In that year, the forty third year of the reign of the Qianlong Emperor, an influx of Muslim families greater than ever before came in from the west on the old Silk Road, speaking all manner of languages and including women and children, and even animals. Whole villages and towns had emptied and their occupants headed east, apparently, driven by intensifying wars between the Iranians, Afghans and Kazakhs, and the civil wars of Fulan. Most of the new arrivals were Shiites, Ibrahim said, but there were many other kinds of Muslims as well, Naqshabandis, Wahhabis, different kinds of sufis… As Ibrahim tried to explain it to Kang, she pursed her lips in disapproval. 'Islam is as broken as a vase dropped on the floor.'

  Later, seeing the violent reaction to the newcomers from the Muslims already ensconced in Gansu, she said, 'It's like throwing oil on a fire. They will end up all killing each other.'

  She did not sound particularly distressed. Shih was again asking to study in a jahriya qong, claiming that his desire to convert to Islam had returned, which she was sure represented only laziness at his studies, and an urge to rebellion that was troubling in one so young. Meanwhile she had had ample opportunity to observe Muslim women in Lanzhou, and while before she had often complained that Chinese women were oppressed by men, she now declared that Muslim women had it far worse. 'Look at that,' she said to Ibrahim one day on their riverside verandah. 'They are hidden like goddesses behind their veils, but treated like cows. You can marry as many as you like of them, and so none of them have any family protection. And there's not a single one of them who can read. It's disgraceful.'

  'Chinese men take concubines,' Ibrahim pointed out.

  'Nowhere is it a good thing to be a woman,' Kang replied irritably. 'But concubines are not wives, they don't have the same family rights.'

  'So things are only better in China if you are married.'

  'This is true everywhere. But not to be able to read, even the daughters of the rich and educated men! To be cut off from literature, to be unable to write letters to your birth family…'

  This was something Kang never did, but Ibrahim did not mention that. He only shook his head.

  'It was far worse for women before Mohammed brought Islam to the world.'

  'That says very little. How bad it must have been before, and that was over a thousand years ago, correct? What barbarians they must have been. By then Chinese women had enjoyed two thousand years of secure privileges.'

  Ibrahim was frowning at this, looking down. He did not reply.

  All over Lanzhou they saw signs of change. The iron mines of Xinjiang fuelled the foundries being built upstream and down from the town, and the new influx of potential foundry workers made possible many more expansions, in ironworks and construction more generally. One of the main products of these foundries was cannon, and so the town garrison was beefed up, the Green Standard Chinese guards supplemented by Manchu horsemen. The foundries were under permanent order to sell all their guns to the Qianlong, so that the weaponry flowed only east towards the interior. As most of the workers were Muslim – and dirty work it was – quite a few guns made their way west in defiance of the imperial edict. This caused more military surveillance, larger garrisons of Chinese, more Manchu banners, and increased friction between local workers and the Qing garrison. It was not a situation that could last.

  The longer term residents could only watch things degenerate. There was nothing any one individual could do. Ibrahim continued to work for a good relationship between the hui and the Emperor, but this made him enemies among the new arrivals, intent on revival and jihad.

  In the midst of all this trouble, Kang told Pao one day that she found herself to be pregnant. Pao was shocked, and Kang herself appeared to be stunned.

  'An abortion might be arranged,' Pao whispered, looking the other way.

  Kang politely declined. 'I will have to be an old mother. You must help me.'

  'Oh we will, I will.'

  Ibrahim too was surprised by the news, but he adjusted quickly. 'It will be good to see a child come of our union. Like our books, but alive.'

  'It might be a daughter.'

  'If Allah wills it, who am I to object?'

  Kang studied his face closely, then nodded and went away.

  Now she seldom went out into the streets, and then only by day, and in a chair. After dark it would be too dangerous in any case. No respectable people remained out after dark now, only gangs of young men, often drunk, jahriya or Khafiya or neither, though usually it was the jahriyas spoiling for a fight. The babblers versus the deafmutes, as Kang said contemptuously.

  Indeed, it was intra Muslim battling that caused the first great disaster of the troubles, or so Ibrahim judged. Hearing of the fighting between jahriya and Khafiya, a banner arrived with a high Qing official,

  A banner: a horse detachment of up to a thousand men.

  Xirizhu, who joined Yang Shiji, the town's prefect. Ibrahim came back from a meeting with these men deeply troubled.

  'They, don't understand,' he said. 'They talk about insurrection, but no one out here is thinking of the great enterprise, how could they be?

  We are so far from the interior that people out here barely know what China is. It is only local quarrelling, but they come out here thinking they are bound for real war.'

  The great enterprise: dynastic replacement.

  Despite Ibrahim's reassurances, the new officials had Ma Mingxin arrested. Ibrahim shook his head gloomily. Then the new banners marched out into the countryside to the west. They met with the Salar jahriya chief, Su Forty three, at Baizhuangzi. The Salars had concealed their weapons, and they claimed to be adherents of the Old Teaching. Hearing this, Xinzhu announced to them he intended to eliminate the New Teaching, and Su's men promptly attacked the company and stabbed both Xinzhu and Yang Shiji to death.

  When the news of this violence got back to Lanzhou with the Manchu horsemen who had managed to escape the assault, Ibrahim groaned with frustration and anger. 'Now it really is insurrection,' he said. 'Under Qing law, it will go very bad for all concerned. How could they be so stupid?'

  A large force arrived soon thereafter, and was attacked by Su Forty three's band; and after that, more imperial troops arrived. In response Su Forty three and an army of two thousand men attacked Hezhou, then crossed the river on pifaci and camped right outside Lanzhou itself. All of a sudden they were indeed in a war.

  Pilaci: hide rafts that for centuries had allowed people to cross the Yellow, Wei and Tao Rivers.

  The Qing authorities who had survived the jahriya ambush had Ma Mingxin shown on the town walls, and his followers cried out to see his chains, and prostrated themselves, crying 'Shaikh! Shaikh!' audibly from across the river and from the hilltops overlooking the town. Having thus identified the rebels' leader definitively, t
he authorities had him hauled down off the wall and beheaded.

  When the jahriya learned what had happened they were frantic for revenge. They had no equipment for a proper siege of Lanzhou, so they built a fort on a nearby hill, and began systematically to attack any movement into or out of the city walls. The Qing officials in Beijing were informed of the harassment, and they reacted angrily to this assault on a provincial capital, and sent out imperial Commissioner Agui, one of the Qianlong's senior military governors, to pacify the region.

  This he failed to do, and life in Lanzhou grew lean and cold. Finally Agui sent Hushen, his chief military officer, back to Beijing, and when he came back out with new imperial orders, he called up a very large armed militia of Gansu Tibetans, also Alashan Mongols, and all the men from the other Green Standard garrisons in the region. Such ferocious huge men now walked the streets of the town that it seemed it was only a big barracks. 'It's an old Han technique,' Ibrahim said with some bitterness. 'Pit the non Hans against each other out on the frontier, and let them kill each other.'

  Thus reinforced, Agui was able to cut off the water supply from the jahriyas' hilltop fort across the river, and the tables were turned; besieger became besieged, as in a game of go. At the end of three months, word came into town that the final battle had occurred, and Su Forty three and every single one of his thousands of men had been killed.

  Ibrahim was gloomy at this news. 'That won't be the end of it. They'll want revenge for Ma Mingxin, and for those men. The more the jahriya are put down, the more young Muslim men will turn to them. The oppression itself makes the rebellion!'

  'It's like the soul stealing craze,' Kang noted.

  Ibrahim nodded, and redoubled his efforts on his books. It was as though if he could only reconcile the two civilizations on paper, the bloody battles happening all around them would come to an end. So he wrote many hours each day, ignoring the meals set on his table by the servants. His conversations with Kang were extensions of his day's thought; and conversely, what his wife said to him in these conversa tions was often quickly incorporated into his books. No one else's opin ions were so important to him. Kang would curse the young Muslim fighters, and say, 'You Muslims are too religious, to kill and die as you are doing, and all for such puny differences in dogma, it's crazy!'