1636- the China Venture

by Eric Flint

  “The photographs that are in shades of a single color were made by me, using special papers that are made in Grantville and in places where the teachers of Grantville have come. I can show you how to use those papers to make art.”

  “Can you also show us how to make the papers?” asked Yizhi.

  Judith shook her head. “I am afraid not, but our trading company, we call it SEAC, will be selling the papers, and you can buy samples in the Hall of Mementos—the gift shop.”

  “I am anxious to make some photographs,” said Weiyi. “Let us begin.”

  “Follow me,” said Judith, and she led them into the Hall of Seeing. It was dark and they blinked as their eyes adjusted.

  “You call this the ‘Hall of Seeing,’ but I am next to blind right now,” joked Yizhi.

  “My apologies,” said Judith. “So, the art of photography is first, that of forming an image by causing the light to strike a light-sensitive surface, and second, fixing that image in a permanent form. This room is dark so that stray light doesn’t affect the image.”

  Judith began simply by having them help her make a cyanotype photogram of Yizhi’s hand. Then she showed them a camera obscura. As she explained how it worked, Yizhi started fidgeting.

  “Did you have something to say, Scholar Yizhi?”

  “Yes, yes. This ‘camera obscura,’ it was explained by Mozi two thousand years ago. He said that light travels in straight lines from its source and that is why the projected image is upside down.”

  “Don’t forget Dream Pool Essays,” admonished Weiyi.

  “Thank you, Auntie. In that book, only six centuries ago, Shen Kuo also wrote about the device.”

  “Yes,” said Judith, “the Chinese invented it first, but about four decades ago the European Giambattista della Porta thought of replacing the pinhole with a biconvex lens. As a result, he obtained a brighter, sharper image. As far as I know, that has not yet been done in China. Am I right?”

  Weiyi looked at Yizhi.

  After a long pause, he said, “I don’t think so. Burning lenses were made long ago, out of glass, rock crystal, and even ice. Physicians once used them to ignite moxa without hurting the patient. And scholars have used them to magnify tiny text.

  “That said, the production of lenses in China is very small. Only a few people have spectacles, and those are mostly imported from the Muslim lands, or from your people across the sea. You have a pair, don’t you, Auntie?”

  “I do, for reading. I can show you.” She reached into her sleeve—her sleeves were very capacious and thus doubled as a purse—and pulled out spectacles. “See!”

  These were not, Judith saw, spectacles of the twentieth-century-American kind. Rather, they were two monoculars that were hooked together.

  “Very interesting,” said Judith. “So, the Americans, the people of Grantville, brought us the combination of the concept of a lensed camera obscura and the photosensitive material. My camera, which they made, uses a lens to focus light on the material, which is on a plate. Let me show you.”

  She took out her camera and pointed out the lens and plate holder. She also showed them a developed plate and the contact prints she had made from it. Her camera plates were about six by eight inches, so the contact prints were, too.

  * * *

  After Judith’s demonstration, Yizhi and Weiyi continued to explore the exhibition and stopped at last at the gift shop, where they bought a kaleidoscope, a portable camera obscura intended for artists to use in the field, and some cyanotype contact print paper.

  Just before they left, Mike Song told them, “We will be staging a balloon ascent outside the city walls in two days. Look for us beyond the Qingchun Gate, between the outer moat and the Zhe River.”

  “What is a balloon?”

  Mike smiled. “It’s a device for going up into the sky and coming back down safely. Come see it, and we’ll explain how it works. Bring your friends.”

  Chapter 28

  Field outside Hangzhou city walls

  The USE balloon, securely tethered by several large anchors, loomed above the spectators. Boehlen was the pilot this time, and he had taken up Sun Lin, a friend of Fang Yizhi who had married Yizhi’s younger sister. Jim Saluzzo, as captain of the ground crew, was monitoring the tethers and the weather conditions, and Mike Song was working the crowd.

  Fang Yizhi and his friend Yang Tingshu had watched the ascent.

  “I really do not understand why you are impressed by this barbarian contraption,” said Yang Tingshu. “It is plainly nothing more than a large version of a sky lantern.”

  He turned to Mike Song. “Since your family has reportedly lived outside China for many generations, I am not sure whether you have had a proper classical education. Were you aware that in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, General Zhuge Liang, sometimes known as Kongming, used them for military communications in the service of the kingdom of Shu?”

  “That’s an interesting point you raise,” Mike replied tactfully. “Just who are you?”

  Yang Tingshu introduced himself merely as a teacher from Suzhou, who had come to Hangzhou at Fang Yizhi’s behest to see the USE balloon.

  “He is too modest,” said Yizhi. “He took first place in the national examinations in 1631. He declined to accept the very prestigious position he had been offered by the government, and he is willing to teach the sons of merchants, artisans and farmers, and not just those of the gentry. He intends to visit your Glorious Exhibition, and if he likes what he sees, he will tell his students to go there, too.”

  “For which we thank you,” said Mike. “As for the sky lanterns, when I was growing up, we had a lantern festival each year, and the sky lanterns were called Kongming lanterns,” said Mike Song. “And I read the Romance of Three Kingdoms in school, but I was never sure how much of it was real history and how much was just made up.”

  “I agree that the principle is the same,” said Fang Yizhi, “but there are significant differences. First, look at the material. It is not oiled rice paper, as in a tian deng, but rather an oiled silk of some kind. Secondly, the burner produces more flame and burns for far longer. And finally, it has been fourteen centuries since Kongming campaigned against Cao Wei, and in all that time, no one has built a sky lantern that could carry a man aloft. So these foreigners have taken the art of flying to new heights.”

  “We can do better than this,” said Mike. “There is a special kind of air we call hydrogen that is released when a metal like zinc or iron is reacted with acid or steam. It has a much greater capacity to rise than does even hot air. If we filled the balloon with it, the balloon could carry three times as much. We have a second balloon that is designed for hydrogen operations; it has valves, whereas this balloon has an open throat to accommodate the burner.”

  “The balloon is coming down,” said Yizhi. “And that’s another point, Teacher Yang, we can send a tian deng up, but we have no control over when it comes down.”

  “Tell me, Scholar Song,” said Yang Tingshu. “What would happen if you didn’t have it tied down with the rope? Would it go higher?”

  “It could go much higher,” said Mike, “so high that you might have difficulty breathing, as if you were in the highest mountains. But eventually it would cool and descend to the ground—not necessarily gently enough for safety. Also, it wouldn’t stay in one place; it would be carried by the wind, and the only way you could steer is by ascending or descending.”

  “How would that help?” asked Tingshu.

  “At different heights, the wind blows from different directions.”

  “Yes, that makes sense,” said Yizhi. “I have seen clouds that were obviously at different heights move in different directions, but I hadn’t really thought about what that signified until now.”

  Tingshu shrugged.

  By now, Boehlen and Sun Lin had landed, and the ground crew had tied down the balloon and helped them out of the basket.

  “Are you going to fly this second balloon of yours?�
� asked Fang Yizhi.

  “In due course,” said Jim Saluzzo, who had just joined them. “First, we want your people to get accustomed to the hot air balloon, which, as Mike may have told you already, has similarities to your traditional sky lantern. And then we can arrange to produce hydrogen at a suitably isolated site, and fill the second balloon there.”

  “Why isolated?”

  Jim explained, “The catch is that some mixtures of hydrogen and air will burn, even explode. So you must be careful how you make the hydrogen, how you fill the balloon, and what you do when you are aloft.

  “When I took chemistry in college, the instructor filled a rubber party balloon—that’s a stretchable bag perhaps the size of one of your sky lanterns—about one-third with hydrogen and the rest with air, and tied it to a clamp stand. He then warned us all to cover our ears—he was already wearing ear protectors—and took a lit candle on a long tong and touched it to the balloon. It exploded!”

  Mike nodded. “When we work with a new crew, the first thing we do before we take them out into the field is create a small amount of hydrogen and set it on fire. So they treat the hydrogen with proper respect. No smoking anywhere nearby!

  “We can teach you how to produce hydrogen, since you just need a metal like iron or zinc, and either steam or acid as the hydrogen source. But I would strongly suggest that if you want to experiment with it, you start small, with little bags like your sky lanterns.”

  Sun Lin and Boehlen were working their way over to Yizhi, Mike and Jim. They were making slow going, as they accepted the congratulations of the onlookers.

  “Did you see me up in the sky, Yizhi? I could see as a bird sees!” yelled Sun Lin.

  “And you didn’t even have to flap your arms,” Yizhi drily acknowledged.

  “If you want to send a man in the air, there’s no need to make a giant sky lantern,” said Yang Tingshu. “According to the Book of Sui, a thousand years ago the emperor Wenxuan executed prisoners by fastening large kites to their persons and then making them jump off the Tower of the Golden Phoenix.”

  Yizhi laughed. “That’s all well and good, but what if you wanted to have the man survive the experience?”

  “Indeed, it can be done,” said Doctor Boehlen. “In Grantville, I read that a man named Samuel Franklin Cody developed winged box kites that carried a pilot to a height of two thousand feet. And the pilot was able to glide to a safe landing. Based on my reading, I have developed plans for building such a kite—”

  “Excuse me, Doctor, but do you think it’s safe to make another flight in the balloon?”

  “Be my guest,” said Boehlen.

  “All right,” said Mike. He raised his voice. “Who would like to come up with me next?”

  “I would,” said a lad in scholar’s robes.

  “Okay, and what’s your name?”

  “You may call me Liu Rushi. And…is it possible for your balloon to fly any higher?”

  “As we were telling these gentleman, without a tether, it would go higher, but it would go where the wind blew. We call that ‘free ballooning.’”

  “You don’t have a longer tether?”

  “We do,” said Jim. “We got a thousand-footer from Admiral Zheng, and we strain-tested it with opposing horses the other day. However, we just have the one. For safety’s sake, we’d want another two. If the wind built up, it could put a lot of strain on a single tether, and if the tether broke, you’d find yourself free ballooning, unintentionally.”

  “Have you piloted a free balloon before?” asked Liu Rushi.

  “Well, Mike has. He’s the balloonist, not me.”

  Mike added, “Yes, a few times. With Marlon Pridmore in the basket, ready to take over if I made a mistake. But I didn’t.”

  “Well, then I’m willing to take the chance that the long tether breaks,” said Liu Rushi. “There’s no wind at all now. And at this time of year, if a wind does pick up, it’s much more likely to blow us inland than out to sea.” This was true enough; even though it was southwest monsoon season, here at Hangzhou the monsoon was weaker and the winds were more irregular than further south.

  “Okay, I admit I’d like to see the balloon go higher anyway. And you’re right, this is a good day for the long tether, and it is over an inch thick. Let me get it out and attached. It will take a few minutes.” Jim hurried off. “Get back, get back!” he yelled at the spectators, who had crowded close to the balloon. “We’re setting up for another flight, and we need room!” The ground crew joined him, cajoling the onlookers out of harm’s way.

  “Do you live in Hangzhou?” asked Mike.

  “In Suzhou, actually, but I come here to visit friends sometimes,” said Liu Rushi. Yang Tingshu frowned, but didn’t speak.

  * * *

  Fang Yizhi and Yang Tingshu watched as Jim Saluzzo, Mike Song and the ground crew changed over the tethers and prepared the balloon for a new launch. Liu Rushi, at Jim’s invitation, helped the ground crew hold down the basket.

  “There’s something strange about that gentleman…” said Yizhi.

  “Gentleman? That’s the courtesan Liu Yin,” said Tingshu. “Known for her poetry and painting, as well as her other skills. Often attends gatherings of scholars, dressed as a man. When she does so, she calls herself Liu Shi or Liu Rushi.”

  “I haven’t heard of her.…”

  “She used to call herself Yang Ai”—Yizhi of course knew that “Ai” meant “love”—“but changed her name to Liu Yin—‘Liu the Hermit’—after Chen Zilong broke up with her.”

  “Chen Zilong! The poet from Songjiang?” In the twentieth century, Songjiang was a sleepy suburb of Shanghai, but at this time, Songjiang was a famous cultural center, and Shanghai a rustic market town and seaport.

  Tingshu nodded. “Of course, that’s his formal name. He’s calling himself ‘Wozi’ these days.” The name Wozi meant “the Croucher.”

  “I know him! We met four years ago in Nanjing, and we visited Hangzhou together the next year. I haven’t seen him since then, however. I spent some time back home in Tongcheng after the provincial exams.”

  “Well, I don’t know when they met, but they were living together in Xu Wujing’s Southern Villa in the spring and I think perhaps as late as June this year. Wujing was very smug about having arranged the little mandarin duck nest.”

  “So, what went wrong?” The question was not as strange at this point in time as it would have been half a century earlier or later. This was the heyday, at least in sophisticated Jiangnan, of the cult of qing, of romantic love. It permitted a scholar-official to take a courtesan as a concubine, making her part of his family.

  “It was supposed to be kept secret from your friend’s wife, but these secrets have a way of getting out. She blamed Liu Yin for her husband’s failure to pass the national exam—”

  “But that was the year before!” The national examinations were held in April, every three years.

  “He had already been visiting her houseboat periodically for several years, I believe. And this past year, he stopped studying the classics and just wrote love poems to her. His wife was furious and insisted that he give Liu Yin up. He refused at first, but then she enlisted the support of his grandmother and his stepmother, and, well, what could he do? A grandson must respect his grandmother’s wishes, after all.”

  Yizhi realized there was more to it than that. Wozi had been engaged when he was only eleven years old to his current wife, the eldest daughter of an eminent and wealthy official. His own father had died almost a decade ago, and he was dependent on her family to support his studies. And while he had passed the provincial examination, this was his second failed attempt to pass the national examination. He couldn’t afford to offend his wife’s family under the circumstances.

  “How do you know all this?” Yizhi demanded.

  “I heard it from Xu Wujing,” said Tingshu. “He’s thinking of changing the names and writing an opera about it for his troupe to perform.”

  “Not i
n Hangzhou or Suzhou, I hope! Everyone will figure out who it’s about.”

  Chapter 29

  “How high up are we now?” asked Liu Rushi.

  Mike looked at the rope holding them more or less in place. “About eight hundred fifty feet, I believe. The tether is dyed every hundred feet.”

  “I thought you said that it was a thousand feet long.”

  “It is, but I am giving us a safety margin. An updraft could develop, or I could misjudge a burn, and we find ourselves climbing fast before I could compensate. And if I let us go to the end of the tether, and we developed positive buoyancy, we’d strain the rope. I don’t want to break the tether and drift away from Hangzhou. Especially if a southwest wind develops; we’d head out to sea.

  “I don’t think I have come across your name before,” said Mike. “What does it mean?” The name “Liu Rushi,” if just spoken, was ambiguous; depending on the choice of characters. The sounds could mean “thus,” “as things really are,” or “Confucian scholar.”

  “Give me your hand,” said Liu Rushi.

  He offered it to Rushi, palm upward, who drew the characters for “Confucian scholar” upon it. His palm tingled and he colored. While he had friends in school who were gay, that was definitely not his own inclination, and he was surprised and embarrassed by his reaction to Rushi.

  He looked down to hide his expression, and saw Liu Rushi’s feet peeking out from under Rushi’s robes.

  They were very small feet. Feet that were obviously the product of foot-binding.

  “You’re a girl,” he said dumbly.

  “So I have been informed,” said Rushi archly. “In fact, I used to go by the name Yunchuan, so it’s only appropriate that I ascend into the heavens, don’t you agree?” That name meant “Cloud Beauty.” “But for now, please treat me as a fellow scholar.”

  She leaned out over the side of the basket. “It’s amazing how far we can see.”