Sherlock Holmes and The Nine-Dragon Sigil

by Tim Symonds

  Today I had my second encounter with a local Chinese Military garrison. The instructor conducting the foot drill did a fair job manoeuvring the men from an eight-wide route-march formation to two-wide for passing back and forth through the garrison’s gates and narrow passages without losing time or cohesion.

  I am coming across a stumbling-block in my attempt to map populations on the way. The Chinese do not know how many families there are in their villages, nor does any Chinaman wish to know. When I ask, I receive the reply, ‘a few hundreds’, or even ‘not a few’. But a fixed and definite number? No.

  November 22. I spent the morning at my third local garrison. A motto inscribed over the gate, translated as ‘A multitude of stars, a small cloud’. My interpreter said it meant just as a small cloud can cover many stars, a small body of resolute men can defeat a large army. Certainly not the eighty men of this garrison, I reflected. The fort had been sited in exactly the wrong position. The field of fire was poor. Ditto the arrangements for storage of ammunition, water and supplies. The parapets were not bullet-proofed. There was little head-cover. Even where it was provided it was conspicuous. There was no provision for extinguishing fires. The walls were loopholed but lacked dummy loopholes to draw away enemy fire. Overhead cover (to keep out splinters of shells) consisted of earth hardly 3 inches thick, rather than 9 to 12 inches.

  The general bannerman is from the peasantry and hence as superstitious as all of the class. Many of them hold the belief that by carrying rolled-up pieces of papers with certain magical inscriptions into battle they will be protected by spirits from harm, and their eyes, finger-tips or nostrils will emit lethal lights, and by magic block the foreigners’ gun-barrels.

  Marginal note: some weeks after I recorded this, Yuán confronted the bannermen’s belief in magic powers by assembling a corps of his provincial garrison and ordering a firing squad to shoot at them. The protective ‘lethal light’ meant to emanate from the corps’ nostrils and finger-tips failed to make its presence known to the firing squad. A number of the bannermen fell dead. The survivors, including the wounded, were sent to all the outlying garrisons to tell the grim tale.

  November 24. The weather is cold. At the higher altitude oxygen levels are commensurately low. I have taken to wearing an extra thick coat and several layers of clothing, gloves, hat, long underwear and water resistant boots with good traction.

  The predominant affliction among the bannermen is sore feet, the subject of much banter but in battle fatal to the infantry. At each garrison I instruct the men to bathe their feet in water coloured a bright pink with Condy’s crystals and give them a promise to ask the High Command to issue stout roomy boots and woollen foot cloths or stockings for marching in the snow. My words caused barely-suppressed laughter. Evidently the soldiers think the boots and foot cloths would be yet another source of income for their officers well before they got pulled on the ordinary soldiers’ feet.

  Towards Tibet the garrisons are manned by some 70 despondent Muhamadan soldiers seeing out their lives in desolate isolation. There is a total lack of technological preparedness. The forts are made of mud, dilapidated, protected only by a few old cast-iron guns which would look more in place in the Tower of London museum. The men spend their time in pastry cooking, bird-raising and cricket fighting and tending their diminutive plots of cabbages, turnips, onions and tobacco.

  As to building a strong fighting force, a New Army, China’s need is most certainly desperate. Learning is esteemed. Soldiering is despised. The line between mercenary and parasitic soldier and out-and-out bandit is hard to draw. The lack of surgeons remains critical. There are not more than three competent field-surgeons in the entire Chinese Army. The lack of understanding of triage is evident everywhere. The remedies prescribed for common illnesses such as scurvy, malaria, and smallpox are more likely to kill than cure. I shall suggest a home and hospital for aged and unwell soldiers like the Hôpital des Invalides in Paris which can also house a medical training school.

  December 1. We have spent several days bivouacking with no sign of our own species other than stone fireplaces in old encampments. When the nomads strike camp to get to lower levels for the winter months or to move their grazing-ground, the fireplace is left behind, ready for when they return the next season.

  China’s mountain ranges and most of the roads are impassable due to lack of upkeep. The spread of modern wireless telegraph communication between garrisons is essential. It can take two weeks to get a message from one command post to another using messengers on foot or carrier pigeons. Even Yuán Shì-kai’s yamen in Tientsin is not yet connected by telegraph and telephone with the Imperial palaces and the various barracks.

  Our caravan has been following a stream full of great boulders. I am paying an extortionate 5d a mile for each of the mules or riding horses (and sometimes yaks) under the command of their own muleteers, plus two taels of silver per mule or horse for their fodder consisting mostly of beans. One of the ponies has gone lame.

  Today I captured a scene with the Aeroscope whilst crossing an unbridged river about 200 feet wide, muddy, with a strong current. The ferry consisted of a half-dozen coracles made from interwoven bamboo and waterproofed with resin and coconut oil, and paddled by one or two men. The animals swam. After each journey the boats had to be pulled a half-mile upstream, to float back to the other side.

  December 3. Wonderful to hear the King’s English spoken again (albeit with a Scottish accent). We are camped near a pair of medical missionaries, recent arrivals in a strange land. They are full of Christianity and antiseptics. Mrs. Macpherson from Inverness is like one of Rossetti’s pale and emaciated beauties. The couple are only just beginning to realize they have arrived in a land of demons, goblins, evil spirits of rivers and mountains, apparitions, magic, ghosts and mysterious occurrences. One of their boys is a Tibetan educated at Rugby School. His belief in Drought ghosts, the returning spirits of men who were consumed by carnal lust in life, and in death create hot, dry winds, is undiminished.

  With a regal disdain for Feng-shui, the Macphersons have plumped for a site to build a church and establish an orphanage and do their Deity’s work, with plenty of the Creator’s finest waterfowl nearby - wild duck, partridges and pheasants. The orphanage lies empty. Being certain that our missionaries gouge out eyes and grind up human bones for medicine, ditto human hearts, the Chinese are not going to be tricked into placing children in the missionaries’ care. Witnesses abound who swear they’ve come across Christian cemeteries full of newly-buried bodies lacking eyes and hearts.

  In reality many children are blind or deformed long before their impoverished rural parents offer them to the Catholics and Protestants to save the entire family from starving. If it’s sheer quantity of souls they want, the missionaries would reap a far larger harvest if they took their tracts to the kitchens of Paris, or London’s Chinese laundries. However, appeals ‘for our missionaries converting the heathen Chinese’ seemed to be a wonderful fundraiser back home. The Chinese in China will do more to heathenise the English than the English to Christianise them, despite - or because of - all our missions.

  China may not be in need of our Bible but is in urgent need of our science. If the Macphersons insist on remaining in China they can do more good through medicine. The filaria worm is hard at work where-ever I go. As many as a third of the soldiery have large scrotal tumours. Not much is known about the life-cycle of the worm which causes these. I suspect there is an intermediate host, the mosquito perhaps.

  A Japanese has billeted himself on the missionaries for the night. He confided he is engaged in an exhaustive topographical survey of the Celestial Chinese Empire. There is, he said (slightly in his cups), an interesting rumour doing the rounds that General Yuán has received permission to establish three new divisions. There will soon be a shortage of ponies because the New Army is purchasing 6,000 of the beasts and offering £3 per mount.


  Without establishing an Army Veterinary School Yuán will lose half to injury and disease even before the first skirmish comes along.

  December 7. Two days ago the Tibetan muleteer I engaged for a journey along an unfrequented route developed a severe form of malignant malaria known as ‘chang chih’. Inspite of intra-muscular injections of quinine he died just before sundown this evening. A mile back we passed a small plot of land used by Chinese traders as a cemetery. I shall pay to bury him there and continue my journey.

  December 8. After this morning’s burial I embarked on a river journey. Aboard I read American author Mark Twain’s memoir Life On The Mississippi, his years as a steamboat pilot before the American Civil War. I was amazed when he referred to thumb-printing criminals based on the uniqueness of this human ‘calling-card’. The memoir was published in 1883. If our own Scotland Yard had taken note they may have arrested the fiendish murderer Jack the Ripper. Between August and November 1888 the bloodthirsty monster left hand-prints all over the settings of his terrible mutilations in London’s East End. Some speculate his handiwork with a scalpel meant he must have trained as a surgeon, perhaps in the British Army. I doubt the military aspect. Most of us commissioned in medical departments of the British and Indian Services were probably not as skilled as The Ripper. In my final year at Netley no-one won the £20 which came with the Montefiore Medal for Military Surgery, competing for which of us could amputate a leg in less than 30 seconds.

  December10. Within a week I should get to _______, the most strategic fortress in the entire region.

  December 11. Insect world particularly active today. Climbed for a solid twelve hours towards a pass through peaks snow-covered all year round. Legs swollen and painful. A case of physician heal thyself. A good rest would do it but I must press on.

  Near the summit a little templehewn out of the stone hung some twenty feet above the track. The priests mount to their perch by perilous steps chipped out of the face of the mountainside. To my amazement we were overtaken by a long string of two-humped tawny camels and mules wearing tinkling bells, laden for the most part with tea for Kalgan and Kiakhta.

  Today I was able to give the Aeroscope camera another ‘outing’ in recording a cultural curiosity. Cowrie shells are brought in from Burmah and India. They are valued at 50 to the Chinese tael. The unmarried girls wear them, the shells being looked upon as a kind of dowry. I gave two of the girls our empty biscuit tins in return for a short sequence with the Aeroscope wearing their cowrie headdresses. Extremes of temperature have had no deleterious effect on the camera’s mechanism. It has managed well in the coldest mountain passes where it can drop to 20 below zero, but also handles the steamiest river valleys. What effect these changes of temperature will have on the film I can’t tell. I have now used two reels, leaving two to go.

  December 16. I am entering Han territory - China proper, separate from the Manchu homelands of the north. The poorer classes have to work hard for their daily bowl of rice and cabbage. Women as well as the men smoke. This seems to be almost their only luxury.

  There is a poetical name for the bound feet of Chinese women - golden lilies.

  December 22. My long journey through Biblical wildernesses in search of garrisons unheard of since the Silk Roads began is nearing an end. This is my last night in the south-western Province of Sichuan. A vast basin is surrounded by the Himalayas to the west, the Qin Mountains to the north, and mountainous areas of Yunnan to the south.

  The village garrison I inspected today was gratifyingly attentive. I later heard that General Yuán had anticipated my arrival and sent the militia their seven months’ outstanding pay.

  December 27. Relief that the Christians’ holiest day of the year has come and gone. The past few days have been emotional, remembering Christmases spent with my dear late wife and before that as a child with my parents.

  I have now met up with General Yuán at Hsiao-chan, between Tientsin and Peking. There are ten corps here, consisting of heavy artillery, rapid-fire gun and reserves. The arms and equipment are far from standard. Just as much as they need a National Medical Corps they need an Office of Military Supplies. The state of un-readiness is palpable. Organization and logistics are inadequate, officer training deficient, and corruption widespread.

  There is a general reluctance to adopt western training techniques. The bannermen would be more at ease with lead-weighted hammers, fighting iron, halberds, mauls, poleaxes and falcon-beaks than modern ordnance. A number of the troops are expert in unarmed combat, followers of the fighting monks of the Shaolin Temple who, when denied weaponry to defend themselves, turned their ‘feet into spears and the fist to a mace’. They hold that mastery lies in the cultivation of the ‘Qi’, the life force flowing along the meridians of the body.

  Unfortunately - as the British found in the recent South African wars - the opportunity for hand to hand combat (even with feet for spears) went out of fashion with the arrival of the German bolt action Mauser and especially the Maxim machine gun, the recoil-operated weapon most associated with British imperial conquest.

  Over lunch, in jovial mood, the General confided he lives as much as possible according to the precepts of the Chinese general Sun Zi, military strategist and philosopher, alive some 1,500 years ago. I considered this claim extremely unlikely. Sun Zi counselled ‘The General must be the first in the toils and fatigues of the army. In the heat of the summer he does not shade himself under a parasol, nor in the cold of winter don thick clothing. He waits until the army’s wells have been dug before he drinks, until the army’s food is cooked before he eats, until the army’s fortifications have been completed before he himself takes shelter.’

  As I was leaving, the General said, ‘Oh, Dr. Watson, I must thank you for suggesting a copy of Wisden’s Almanack for my sons at Sherborne. I bought a copy at that bookshop in Brighton. It was greatly appreciated - the young tigers are becoming little Englishmen already.’

  January 3, 1907. Today’s meeting with Yuán was instructive. We inspected one of the better-equipped corps. The General insisted I ride alongside him decked out in borrowed plumed helmet, fringed epaulettes and white gloves like the Duke of Wellington. I shall recommend switching his present Army saddles to the British steel-arched cavalry saddle.

  The General’s military re-organisation in the north is well under way. The cavalry is equipped with both Mausers and lances, and artillery with six-gun batteries (one to six-pounders), as well as Maxim machine-guns. Yuán’s discipline is extreme. He reacts in only two ways to subordinates. He promotes them or beheads them. There is still a problem with officers embezzling the troops’ wages or paying them in bad coin, and both men and officers smoking opium (the best quality supplied from British India). The penalty for opium-smoking in Yuán’s army is the loss of one ear for a first offence, death for the second.

  Yuán knows the prospect of money and status is a great incentive to the northern troops. He is instituting a system of battle rewards in which a person awarded the highest medal, class 1, would also be entitled to a sum of 3,000 Mexican dollars annually, for life, in addition to his normal salary. The lesser class 11 medal would carry an annual bonus of 2,000 dollars, down to class V with 250 dollars.

  These are substantial sums. Even the lowest category - 250 Mexican dollars –will enable a soldier’s family to live comfortably for twelve months.

  That evening I penned the following recommendations in a preamble to my report: ‘The Chinese make capital soldiers if they are well commanded. Fresh recruitment should replace most of the present bannermen. It should be among men 20 to 25 years of age, more than 5 feet tall, able to lift up 100lbs and to walk 6 miles an hour, and free from the opium habit. Former miners should be welcome. It should not be top-heavy with placemen officers. Nor should recruits expect to bring wives, children and camp-followers for the ride.’

  My recommendations included
the following ratios: 1 general (General Yuán); 5 colonels; 25 captains; 125 lieutenants; 500 sergeants; 2,500 corporals; 10,000 infantry.

  Tomorrow I leave for Chichou.

  January 7. Yuán invited me to divert from my planned route and meet him at the Military Academy at Tientsin. Yesterday I observed several sessions, one conducted by a Prussian by the name of von Somebody-or-other (‘Knipping’?) and a Norwegian whose name I can’t pronounce. The engineering school training is excellent - fortification, bridge-building, ordnance, repair, surveying, mine-laying and telegraph detachments up to European standard. Diversity of guns and small arms still a great defect.

  At one point the General leaned across to me and whispered, ‘I hope all this is in time. Portents on every hand suggest the Dynasty has not much longer to run. The Imperial House must arouse itself from its coma, revitalize the Empire.’

  January 10. My duties came to an end today after attending the New Army’s full-scale manœuvres. About 80,000 men in the field. The General was on horseback, decked out in fringed epaulettes, white gloves and plumed helmet like a Grand Marshal in some comic operetta. On the whole I do not yet consider the force is formidable. A Division of European troops could overthrow it between breakfast and lunch.

  I shall spend some time on my report before setting off for Peking.

  Chapter VII

  I Reach Peking

  Peach blossoms heralded the start of a new season when at last Peking appeared in the distance. My conveyance would enter the city by the Ch’ien-Men Gate, squeezing between clumps of the five thousand camels entering and leaving the citadel each day. I looked forward to catching up with Holmes and exchanging our news. Had he discovered anything of a plot against the Empress Dowager Cixi or her nephew, the ‘Son of Heaven’?

  I stared forward as the walls came nearer. The Chinese believe good spirits cross space at a height of 100 feet. No building, not even the Drum Tower, approaches this height for fear of obstructing the spirit entities and turning their goodwill to wrath.