Sherlock Holmes and The Nine-Dragon Sigil

by Tim Symonds

  These hooligans say they are the vanguard, but the vanguard of what? I ask you, is there one word from them concerning reverence for parents, or the cultivation of virtue and respect for the nine canons of rightful conduct? No! Is there one word from any of them as to the observance of ceremony, as to duty, integrity and a proper sense of shame, the four cardinal principles of our nation? No! It shows a will most incorrect to heaven. They would foster an indiscriminate assimilation of foreign things in their place, put new wine into old skins. Their polemics and warnings consume an enormous amount of rice paper.

  What do they care for the Canons of the Sages, they who mock the virtues of loyalty and filial piety?’

  She swung an arm down as though stabbing at the invisible enemy.

  ‘They are demonic soldiers who fight for darkness against the light. I pray the God of Thunderbolts strikes them dead.’

  Her voice deepened with scorn.

  ‘They proclaim the Ch’ing body has expired, that it’s time for the soul of the Manchu to hie back whence it came. Yet it is they, not we, who are the ne’er-do-wells. They drive the tiger out by the front while the wolf is admitted by the back. Like thieves hating their masters they spin intrigues to close our eyes and ears, to fetter our hands and feet, to cloud our mind.

  These visionaries, these Modernists! They are like the poem of the six blind men of Indostan - one grasped the elephant’s trunk, another the tusk, another the ear, others a leg, belly and tail. And what was the result?’

  To my amazement, in a high pitch she began to recite from the poem, turning her eyes to the sky.

  ‘And so these men of Indostan

  Disputed loud and long,

  Each in his own opinion

  Exceeding stiff and strong,

  Though each was partly in the right,

  And all were in the wrong!’

  In a harsh voice she continued, ‘Dr. Watson, you may say my emotion is out of proportion but I cannot find it in myself to say a kind word about them. Even bees and ants know how to obey and follow. And what, you may ask, has led to this deplorable state of affairs, this degradation of our Dynasty’s reputation? I shall tell you. When the Kuang-hsü Emperor was very young I was implored by all to stay in the High Court, to share the reins of power with the Emperor. A Coalition Throne. For as long as he lived, Imperial authority and responsibilities should be shared between the Emperor, the princes and ministers, and me. I assented reluctantly. I would put off a happy and peaceful retirement.

  But our nation’s strength was being eroded by this arrangement. Peking lost the willingness and ability to rule actively. Instead the Coalition Throne merely attended to the daily Court routine. It behaved like the ant who cannot see the size of the sky.

  We became divided into the ti-tang - the Emperor’s faction - and the hou-tang - my faction. We mired ourselves in precedents and antiquated rules instead of exploring policy possibilities. We ourselves undermined and depleted the very essence of leadership. Everything was referred to board ministers and ad hoc court conferences for discussion. This delegation of power reached as far down as the ‘shu-li’, the low-ranking clerical staff. Their whims in turn shaped the Throne’s deliberations. The Emperor, whenever he saw my back turned, connived to open the avenue of opinion to the lowest and humblest of our people when he is no more than an imperial apprentice aspiring to the master’s supremacy. It was a shirking of responsibility on the part of the Imperial decision-makers.

  This was never the way of the Ch’ing Dynasty. I ask you, Dr. Watson, if you had run your affairs that way, with so many cliques and parties and factions, would England have conquered a quarter of the world from your tiny island, penetrated with your guns far into Africa and South America and now our territories, and forced your trade upon us? Wouldn’t your Good Queen Bess turn in her grave at the very thought? China too has only been respected as an equal by the peoples of the West during those periods when she is under the sway of a Dynasty able to compel the allegiance of all sections of the country. Over Canton as much as Peking. South of the Yellow River as well as north of the river.’

  I looked around. To my surprise, so attentive had I been to the torrent of words, I realized we had quit the Palace and were now outside in a beautiful garden.

  Suddenly a direct question came my way.

  ‘Dr. Watson, my entourage observed you speaking in lowered tones with His Imperial Majesty. May I ask what you discussed?’

  I knew her Chief Eunuch had caught only the last part of my conversation with the Emperor.

  I replied, ‘His Majesty wanted to know more about Sir Sherlock’s famous cases. I recommended The Hound of The Baskervilles. I had my copy delivered to him that same evening.’

  ‘I see,’ came the reply.

  For a moment she was silent, brooding. Then she pointed at a magnificent lotus pond, about an acre in extent.

  ‘If I am taken away, how long do you think that will remain?’

  She spoke witheringly.

  ‘What do they care for beauty? Within a month they would turn that pond into a paddy-field. Soon these secluded paths would be covered by mallow-weeds and wild oatgrass. And those flower beds. Return tomorrow and turn your film camera on them so the world will have something to remember them by - within a week of my death they would become cabbage patches.’

  She pointed at a distant edifice.

  ‘I have something to show you over there, at the Hall of Bathed Virtue. My porters will take you there. I shall join you within the hour.’

  Chapter IX

  I am Shown the Giant Jade Seismograph

  The Empress Dowager arrived precisely on time. She had changed her headdress. It was an exquisite example of Chinese decoration, the small phoenixes emerging from the surface representing Royalty while countless pearls and gemstones marked her as the highest-ranking woman in Chinese society.

  We entered the Hall of Martial Valour complex and were led by the Empress Dowager’s jaunty new favourite Pekingese ‘Hailo’ past a bronze seated figure of Zhenwu, the Supreme Emperor of the Dark Heaven, into the Hall of Bathed Virtue. The room was tiled, with the well, boiler and pipes of a Turkish-style bathing facility, lit by enormous candles of walrus fat and owl-shaped lamps containing sufficient oil of dolphins to keep the wick alight for two hundred years. Wrought enamelled vases held bouquets of jewelled flowers. Sculpted images were scattered around the room, some in straw capes and bamboo hats, others in full armour. One wore the garb of a Confucian student. Disconcertingly one of a row of nine medium-sized grey parrots on a long perch just inside the entrance blinked at me. I had assumed from their rigidity and silence they were made of clay.

  I was brought to a glass-fronted cupboard filled with objects accumulated over several Dynasties. ‘The Cabinet of Resurrectionism,’ the Empress Dowager told me. The upper shelf held a Short Snouted Seahorse tooth, a Woolly mammoth thoracic vertebra, a large coprolite of a carnivorous dinosaur discovered by a Professor Xu Xing, purportedly from the recently-named Tyrannosaurus rex, and a Chinese bronze astronomical mirror, cast around the centre with 12 shallow discs surrounded by an eight-pointed circle representing the periods of the solar year.

  The Empress Dowager pointed to the far end of the Hall, at an immense block of ornamental rock about five feet in height. The elaborately carved circumference depicted jade being transported from its native mountains.

  ‘That’s what I’ve brought you here to show you,’ she said, inviting me forward. ‘The eunuchs call it the Magic Mirror.’

  The ‘magic mirror’ was a cistern full to the brim with water, with a golden cup and chain attached. She waved her hand over the placid surface, alarming some dozen golden fish expecting to be fed.

  ‘Nobody except me dares enter here,’ she remarked. ‘Not because I have so commanded but because of this water-bowl.’
/>   A six-inch long fingernail tapped at the jade sides.

  ‘The people say it is the haunt of Erlang Shen,’ she continued, ‘the god with a truth-seeing eye in the middle of his forehead. The people say I only have to oblige someone to drink the Water of Truth and he cannot help confessing. Even the threat of being brought here has elicited confessions. Others believe it is watched over by a ghost we call Yuán gui, the spirit of a person who died a wrongful death. They say the Emperor Xianfeng, my deceased husband whose bowl this was, was held face-down in the water and drowned. Such ghosts roam the world of the living as depressed and restless spirits, constantly seeking to have their grievances redressed.’

  She dipped the gold drinking vessel into the water and handed it to me.

  ‘I see by your silence this must be nonsense to you. You in the West are losing your belief in spirits. What do you suppose I really use it for?’

  I had seen similar though far less ornate water-tanks in India, made from simple sheets of lead.

  ‘To cool the hall in summer?’ I offered.

  ‘You were present at the Battle of Maiwand, isn’t that so?’ she asked,

  ‘I was, yes,’ I replied.

  I was surprised the Empress Dowager had heard of the battle. It took place in the summer of 1880 to the west of Kandahar. The wound I received from a muzzle-loading Jezail bullet at that terrible event forced a monumental change in my life.

  ‘How many cavalry did your enemy possess?’ the Empress Dowager pursued.

  I replied, ‘Three thousand.’

  ‘And the ground shook long before they were upon you?’ my host continued.

  I nodded.

  ‘Yes. The ground shook as though a great earthquake was taking place right under the mountains around us.’

  Her finger dipped into the still water in the jade cistern. Tiny circles radiated from it.

  ‘For my birthday celebrations five years ago,’ she continued, ‘I had ten thousand Manchu horsemen conduct a mock battle against each other at the West Gate. The vibration of the water in the Magic Mirror informed me within seconds of the start. At that same moment an outrider was dispatched to inform me. Even by the most direct route, at full tilt, it took him twenty minutes.’

  She went on, ‘Just before that an enemy invaded the city. I had to flee this Palace. I was lucky not to have been killed. A look-alike was designated to sit on my throne ready to commit suicide to confuse the attackers, dressed in clothes and jewellery identical to mine. She had no time to do so. That twenty minutes would have given her time to swallow the opium and me adequate time to make my get-away.’

  We had known in Europe for some years that horizontal pendulums can detect waves from large earthquakes halfway around the world within 12 to 17 seconds. Far from being the well-spring of mysterious voices from the Other World or the lair of a Truth god, the jade cistern was a gigantic seismograph.

  She held up her hands, fingers up stretched.

  ‘The Imperial Bodyguard was composed of the Regiment of the Divine Mechanism, and the Tiger Spirit Regiment - both Manchu Regiments - but I knew neither was likely to make a stand against a determined enemy. I cut off my long nails. I fled without most of my jewels. My soothsayers tell me one day another enemy will return to the outskirts of the city in the night, ready to charge the moment the sun comes up. I come here to feed the fish and study the Magic Mirror’s surface every day at dawn, the time an attack would start. The vibrations will give me just enough warning to get away.’

  I put the golden cup back on the cistern.

  ‘Now tell me, Dr Watson,’ the Empress Dowager asked, pointing at the water, ‘has Sir Sherlock found any sign of a plot against me? You have drunk from the pool of Erlang Shen. You are compelled to tell the truth!’

  ‘I can tell you without peradventure, Madame,’ I replied, with a slight bow, ‘neither Sir Sherlock nor I have found any sign whatsoever of a plot against Your Imperial Majesty.’

  ‘What about the Emperor?’

  ‘Nor against the Emperor, I assure you,’ I replied. ‘In fact, with your permission we plan to leave your country soon. Sir Sherlock becomes easily bored when he doesn’t have a gripping case in hand. He thinks it’s time he returned to tend to his bees.’

  We were turning to leave when a dust-covered apparatus to one side of the hall came to my attention, a cast-iron penny arcade machine.

  ‘I say,’ I burst out at the familiar object, ‘isn’t that a ...’

  ‘It’s a...’. The Empress Dowager hesitated, forming the unusual word carefully. ‘Mu-to-scope.’

  I was familiar with the Mutoscope from youthful visits to seaside piers. Drop a penny in the slot and spin a handle which turned a wheel carrying up to 680 photographic prints in a flip-book. Each photograph was in full view until it was pushed forward by the force of the flicker-cards compressed behind it.

  With a noticeable frisson she added, ‘We call it the lantern of fright. It can make people appear or disappear. It projects spooky images that look like apparitions. That’s why it has been left here. No-one dares go near it, not even to destroy it.’

  She continued, ‘It’s said that in evil hands it can make Dynasties fall and create new ones to take their place. In the hands of bad people...’ again, with a shudder, she spelt out the syllables carefully, ‘...Mu-to-scopes can bring the spirits of people long dead back to life. It tortures them by obliging them to repeat again and again and again, in exact detail, actions they undertook in life.’

  She pointed to a pile of flicker-books on a small table at the Mutoscope’s side.

  ‘Those boxes. If you don’t believe me,’ she said imperiously, ‘take a look for yourself!’

  I took one and placed it in the machine. Our late great Queen Victoria and other dignitaries were drawing up in a carriage outside a grand building. A young woman came down the steps to present the Empress of India with a bouquet of flowers.

  ‘You see why people fear that contraption!’ exclaimed the Empress Dowager. ‘The bouquet of flowers - is alive! Yet we know they must long since have lost their bloom and returned to the earth. Your Queen - alive! But you and I know she died six years ago. She would now be mere bones yet that box has captured her soul. It can make her draw up in that carriage again and again, for ever. How can she go to the after-life when her soul has been trapped in this infernal machine!’

  ‘Madame,’ I replied, sensing an opportunity to relieve the tedium of the remaining evenings, ‘Sir Sherlock and I would appreciate the opportunity to view the rest of these boxes. Is there a chance...?’

  ‘The contraption will be delivered to your rooms,’ came the response, ‘together with a hammer. When you have finished destroy it. No one in all Peking dares to raise a hand against it - even at my command.’

  At the exit, as though recognising we were speaking English, the nine parrots opened their black bills and in unison - in English - squawked ‘Hear And Obey!’

  ***

  Back at my rooms I picked up the copy of ‘Alice In Wonderland’ and flipped through the pages. Mycroft Holmes had underlined several of the Red Queen’s dramatic exclamations to a startled Alice.

  The first was, ‘In the wrong hands, you’d be surprised what magic can do.’

  This was followed by ‘How would you like to have your head hacked off?’

  And lastly, ‘There’s no use trying,’ Alice said; ‘one can’t believe impossible things.’ ‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

  ***

  The following morning my medical services were called upon in a most unexpected way, not at the make-shift clinic among the clocks but at the Emperor’s Palace. I dropped in on Holmes to te
ll him about it. Although it was by now mid-day my comrade was still in his purple dressing-gown, seated cross-legged on a hard, flat cushion covering a kang, a long rectangular fireproof brick structure the height of a bed. A small writing-table had appeared, equipped with ‘the Four Treasures’: a bamboo-and-sheep-hair brush-pen, a compact black ink-stick, a pile of white blotting-paper and an ink-stone. Ancient Egypt was engaging his interest. Not content with learning the six fiendishly difficult types of Chinese logographs, the book he held indicated he was now deep into the Coptic script.

  A hand appeared from one side of the book waving me to a sofa.

  ‘I trust your morning has been of interest?’ I ventured.

  He continued to attend to matters Coptic.

  With a soupçon of self-importance I said, ‘Certainly mine has been of great interest. I have just returned from treating a patient.’

  ‘Indeed?’ came the muffled reply. ‘How unusual for a medical doctor. Did you know that Coptic and Demotic Egyptian are grammatically closely related to Late Egyptian?’

  ‘A rather important patient,’ I retaliated.

  I waited a moment or two.

  ‘My patient,’ I added, ‘was the ninth Ch’ing emperor to rule over China.’

  My comrade managed another ‘Indeed?’ without a sideways or downward movement of the book.

  ‘Yes, the Kuang-hsü Emperor himself,’ I continued.

  The book moved sideways a fraction.

  ‘I deduce,’ Holmes responded, ‘you intend to throw aside all concern for your Royal patient’s confidentiality. Given the undeniable truth of the Watson family byword, that ‘brevity is the soul of wit’, I shall ask for what ailment?’

  ‘A broken eardrum,’ I replied. ‘Suffered only this morning. Aboard his steam launch. Luckily my otoscope survived the long journey here. I’ve patched up the ear with cotton-wool and a bandage and told him to rest for a few days.’