Sherlock Holmes and The Nine-Dragon Sigil

by Tim Symonds

  In his last moments when he could no longer speak, while the Empress Dowager Cixi, his wife Lung Yu and his Lustrous Concubine stood by the bed, his index finger began to turn in a continuous circle which, in Chinese Calligraphy being ‘Yuán’, ‘fingered’ the General he believed was a sworn enemy who would certainly have been executed if the Emperor had survived the Empress Dowager. As the bedside party watched, the circling finger faltered, then failed to move. The Emperor had embarked on the journey to the Nine Springs.

  The Empress Dowager of China. Cixi, also Tz’u-hsi, also called Xitaihou, or Xiaoqin Xianhuanghou, byname Empress Dowager. After ruling China for nearly fifty years, she suffered a severe stroke. She lingered a while and died in the afternoon of November 15 1908, shortly before her seventy-third birthday, one day after the Kuang-hsü Emperor.

  After lunch and a substantial helping of her favourite crab-apples with clotted cream, the Dowager Empress fainted and was carried to her apartments, dressed in her Robes of Longevity. It is widely believed she ordered the poisoning of her nephew, sensing her own death was imminent. At the end of her life, her personal jewellery vault held 3,000 ebony boxes of jewels.

  Cixi was a towering presence over the Chinese empire for almost half a century. Under her, the ancient country attained virtually all the attributes of a modern state: industries, railways, electricity, the telegraph and an army and navy with up-to-date weaponry. She abolished gruesome punishments like ‘death by a thousand cuts’ and called for an end to foot-binding. On her death she was buried in splendour, covered in diamonds.

  Cixi’s legacy: after reading dozens of accounts written between the 1890s and the present, the summary I find most convincing is from Jung Chang’s biography ‘Empress Dowager Cixi, The Concubine Who Launched Modern China’, published in 2014. She writes ‘Empress Dowager Cixi’s legacy was manifold and towering. Under her leadership the country began to acquire virtually all the attributes of a modern state: railways, electricity, telegraph, telephones, Western medicine, a modern-style army and navy, and modern ways of conducting foreign trade and diplomacy... She was a giant but not a saint. Being the absolute ruler of one-third of the world’s population and the product of medieval China, she was capable of immense ruthlessness... For all her faults she was no despot. In terms of ground-breaking achievements, political sincerity and personal courage, Empress Dowager Cixi set a standard that has barely been matched... one cannot but admire this amazing stateswoman, flawed though she was.’

  The American novelist Pearl S. Buck wrote in her novel ‘Imperial Woman’, ‘...the peasants and the small-town people revered her. Decades after she was dead I came upon villages in the inlands of China where the people thought she still lived and were frightened when they heard she was dead. “Who will care for us now?” they cried.’

  In 1928, revolutionaries dynamited her tomb and looted it while desecrating her body.

  General Yuán Shì-kai’s end. Four years after the Empress Dowager’s and the Kuang-hsü Emperor’s death, Yuán supported a self-serving grassroots Yuán-For-Emperor Association. A disreputable petition campaign made it ‘impossible’ for him to refuse the mandate of Heaven. In December 1915 Yuán accepted the Throne and three weeks later the new Dynasty commenced under the reign name Hung-hsien (or Hongxian).

  It was not long before celestial displeasure manifested itself. Faced with widespread opposition, the Hongxian Emperor’s prestige became irreparably damaged. Yunnan’s military governor, Cai E, rebelled, launching the National Protection War. 83 days later, towards the end of March 1916, Yuán abandoned the crown.

  In less than three months, obese and generally unwashed, Yuán died, aged only 56. The official cause was uremic poisoning. Yuán’s remains were moved to his home province and placed in a large mausoleum. In 1928, the tomb was looted by Feng Yuxiang’s Guominjun soldiers during the Northern Expedition.

  Perhaps only Mycroft Holmes understood from the start that Yuán Shì-kai was more than a man of panache and wit who handled foreigners with unusual skill. The General and Viceroy was clever, competent and followed through. At the same time he led a full private life, with a harem full of concubines and at least thirty legitimate offspring. He built a well-deserved reputation as a military commander and Army moderniser, expanding his Northern Army to six full Divisions by 1905.

  Yuán’s control of the New Army, China’s most powerful military force, made him a seminal figure; as a consequence he was courted by both the Ch’ing and the republicans. He was also a man of exceptional cunning and brutality - a Captain Ahab figure, and like Ahab he suffered terrible consequences from unbridled ambition.

  Glossary

  The snarling dragon on the front cover can be seen on the Nine-Dragon Wall at the Forbidden City, Peking. It was built in 1771 and is located in front of the Palace of Tranquil Longevity. Such walls were typically found in Imperial Chinese palaces and gardens as a way to block outsiders’ view.

  A friend, Mike Lacey, owns a beautiful Chinese bowl. He writes: ‘The label says ‘The bowl is decorated with phoenixes (fung-hwang) and with paeonies upon a yellow ground. The mark on the bowl is Kwang-shiu. This bowl is reputed to have been removed from a royal palace in Pekin at the time of the Boxer Rising. In China the fung-hwang is the symbol of the Empress and the paeony is called kwa-wang, King of Flowers’.’

  Chinese people’s names. Modern Chinese names consist of a surname (known as xing) which comes first, followed by a personal name (míng). Therefore Yuán is the General’s family name, and Shì-kai his first name. Prior to the 20th century, educated Chinese also utilized a ‘courtesy name’ or ‘style name’ (zì) by which they were known among those outside of family and closest friends.

  The Forbidden City. The common English usage ‘the Forbidden City’ is a translation of the Chinese name Zijin Cheng, literally ‘Purple Forbidden City’. By law all mortar used in building had to be dyed purple. Zi, meaning purple, refers to the North Star which in ancient China was called the Ziwei Star, and in traditional Chinese astrology was the heavenly abode of the Celestial Emperor.

  The City was a mirror image of the celestial realm of the Jade Emperor or Heavenly Ancestor and his court, said to rule over the universe. Through the use of numerology, divination and geomancy the city’s architecture aimed at harmonising the forces of Heaven, Man and Earth to guarantee dynastic stability and the prosperity of the realm.

  Mandarin. This is an exceptionally tricky language for Europeans, especially because it and many closely-related Chinese languages have contour tone systems (that is, not just relative pitch between syllables, but also pitch contours - like a little melody within the syllable). Only given Sherlock Holmes’s extraordinary ability to learn new languages is it conceivable he learnt a good deal with an initial 6 weeks’ formal instruction at the London School of Practical Chinese and continued instruction aboard the ship to India, plus the weeks tracking down Watson to that railway stop.

  The Mutoscope was an early motion picture device, patented in 1894. Like Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, it did not project on a screen and provided viewing to only one person at a time. The popular ‘What The Butler Saw’ was a short sequence portraying a woman partially undressing in her bedroom, as if some voyeuristic servant was watching through a keyhole.

  The Japanese Threat. General Yuán and the Empress Dowager were right to fear their predatory neighbour Japan. 30 years later, in 1937, Japan invaded China. Widely known as the Pacific War, infamous for its cruelties, the Second Sino-Japanese War was the largest Asian war in the 20th century. Between 10 and 25 million Chinese civilians and over 4 million Chinese and Japanese military personnel died from war-related violence and famine.

  Jingoism. Patriotism in the form of aggressive foreign policy - e.g. Britain expressing a pugnacious attitude toward the Russian ‘bear’ in the 1870s. The term originated in Britain’s music-halls as a verse:

 
We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do

  We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too

  We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true

  The Russians shall not have Con-stan-ti-nople.

  Savoy opera. A style of comic operetta which developed in England in the late 19th century. W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan (‘The Mikado’ etc) were the original and most successful practitioners. The name derives from London’s Savoy Theatre which impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte built to house the Gilbert and Sullivan pieces.

  Maxim Gun. A terrifyingly effective recoil-operated machine gun invented by Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim in 1883. ‘The weapon most associated with the British imperial conquest.’

  The ‘sing-song’ trade. Often the word for prostitution though in China used for young women serving the customers at table during theatre performances.

  Dr. Watson’s Army pension. His ‘wound pension’ from being invalided out of the army after the Battle of Maiwand was 11/6d (Eleven shillings and sixpence) per month. In modern terms the income value of that sum would be about GBP£350 or US$400, probably a subsistence amount at best.

  The Ch’ing hairstyle. The men wore a long pigtail and the front of the scalp was shaven. The style was originally enforced in 1645 on all citizens of the Empire as a test of loyalty to the conquering Dynasty by the Manchu Regent Dorgo. Tens of thousands of people who did resist were massacred. This started the hairstyle seen in motion pictures on the Ch’ing Empire. This style was humiliating to the conquered Han but helped the new Ch’ing Dynasty to identify resisters. It was advised, ‘To keep the hair, you lose the head; to keep your head, you cut the hair’.

  The Mandate of Heaven. Great natural disasters in the last 50 years of the Ch’ing dynasty contributed to weakening its authority. The pattern was interpreted as a sign the Dynasty had lost the Mandate of Heaven. One of the world’s biggest natural disasters in history occurred in 1887 when the Yellow River flooded. It is thought that between 1 to 2 million people died. The River flooded again in 1898. The Yangtze River flooded in 1911, and about 100,000 died. In 1879 a magnitude 8 Gansu Earthquake killed about 22,000 people. The Northern Chinese Famine of 1876–1879 killed about 10% of the population (equal to about 10 million people) of several northern provinces. Despite Peking being sited in Chihli, the Capital Province, the little aid provided by the Ch’ing government made the people even more discontented with the Dynasty.

  The Yellow Peril (also Yellow Terror and Yellow Spectre). In 1895, after a dream in which he saw the Buddha riding a dragon and threatening to invade Europe, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II invented the phrase Yellow Peril in an effort to interest the other European empires in the perils they faced in their invasions of China.

  Full-blown paranoia was whipped up by the London Daily Express newspaper. Articles screamed in large headlines: ‘Yellow Peril in London’, ‘Vast Syndicate of Vice with its Criminal Master’, and ‘A Chinese syndicate, backed by millions of money and powerful, if mysterious, influences, is at work in the East End of London.’

  Dr. Fu-Manchu. With the fear of the Yellow Peril, a new fictional supervillain appeared. By 1911 a novelist using the pseudonym Sax Rohmer cashed in with ‘The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu’. Fu-Manchu disdains guns or explosives, preferring dacoits, thuggees, and members of other secret societies as his agents armed with knives, or using “pythons and cobras ... fungi and my tiny allies, the bacilli ... my black spiders” and other peculiar animals or natural chemical weapons.

  Old China Hands. At some point historians may return to a question that has never been fully examined - the riddle of why China never became another British India, one more jigsaw piece in Britain’s already-immense Empire. The answer may lie in the already gigantic extent of Empire in 1900 and because the great Trading Houses of Jardine, Matheson & Company and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank and the Old China Hands never convinced British Governments or the people of Britain that the national importance of suzerainty over China was a crucial aim, not just for straight-forward commercial advantage and avarice.

  If British Prime Ministers of the period - the Marquess of Salisbury and Arthur Balfour - had determined a take-over of China, there rises one of the great ‘Ifs’ of history - would the Communist Revolution ever have taken place?

  ‘The Great Game’: the phrase describing the strategic rivalry and conflict between London and St. Petersburg for supremacy in Central Asia. The term is usually attributed to Captain Arthur Conolly (1807–1842), an intelligence officer of the British East India Company’s 6th Bengal Light Cavalry. It was introduced to a wider public by Rudyard Kipling in ‘Kim’ which first appeared in serial form in 1900.

  The Russian Empire’s expansion into Central Asia threatened to over-run the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the British Empire - India. Surprising to recall now, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century it was a common assumption in Europe that the next great war - the ‘inevitable war’ - was going to be the final showdown between Britain and Russia. Relations between the two powers continued to be strained until they allied against the Central Powers in World War I.

  Mexican Army Cipher Wheel. The device credited to Holmes was in real life invented by the Mexican Army and remained in use up to the end of World War One.

  Cryptography. The earliest known text containing components of cryptography was found on the tomb of an Egyptian nobleman. Around 1900 BCE Khnumhotep’s scribe drew his master’s life in his tomb, using a number of unusual symbols to obscure the meaning of the inscriptions. This method of encryption is an example of a substitution cipher, any system which substitutes one symbol or character for another, in Khnumhotep’s case probably used to preserve the sacred nature of religious rituals from the common people.

  George Macartney. The real-life Macartney was the son of a Scottish father and Chinese mother. British Agent, then Consul-General in Kashgar for 28 years - his entire career as a diplomat - officially he lived in this backwater to look after the needs of a small British Indian community, mainly traders and money-lenders.

  In reality he had a quite incredibly important task, intelligence-gathering, to keep watch on Tsarist machinations on the front lines of the two rival Empires and safeguard British India from Russian predation. He was knighted in 1913. In 1931 his wife Lady Catherine Macartney published ‘An English Lady In Chinese Turkestan’, a good read.

  The Silk Roads. Today’s China for both commercial and geopolitical reasons is opening up the ancient Silk Roads once more. An article titled ‘The Silk Roads Rise Again’ appeared in the New Statesman 23-29 October 2015 by Peter Frankopan, including some interesting background: ‘The term ‘Silk Roads’, or Seidenstraße, was coined in 1877 by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen. It denoted the mesh of cities, oases and routes criss-crossing Asia, linking the Pacific with the Mediterranean, and the Red Sea, Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean with Russia, Scandinavia and Europe. Along these networks the world’s great religions rose and spread.’

  Crows and the Chinese. In Chinese mythology, the world originally had 10 suns either spiritually embodied as 10 crows and/or carried by 10 crows; when all 10 decided to rise at once, the effect was devastating to crops, so the gods sent their greatest archer Houyi to shoot down nine crows and spare only one.

  Crows are almost universally maligned and for no good reason. They are now believed to be as intelligent as a seven-year-old human, the only non-primate species known to make tools such as prodding sticks and hooks which they use to pick out grubs from awkward places. A recent study showed crows worked out how to obtain floating food rewards by dropping heavy objects into water-filled tubes. They must have watched Archimedes of Syracuse at work.

  Although the Empress-Dowager may not have carried out her threat to eliminate the crow from her Empire, fifty years later Mao Zedong ordered the Great Sparrow Campaign known
officially as the Four Pests Campaign. The four pests to be eliminated were rats, flies, mosquitoes, and a bird, the sparrow. The masses of China were mobilized. Citizens took to banging pots and pans or beating drums to scare the birds from landing, forcing them to fly until they fell from the sky in exhaustion. Sparrow nests were torn down, eggs were broken, and nestlings killed. Other birds were also shot down from the sky, resulting in the near-extinction of birds in China.

  As can happen when humankind engages in a great assault on Nature, things didn’t work out well. By April 1960, Chinese leaders realized sparrows eat a large amount of insects, as well as grains. Instead of increasing rice yields, crops were substantially lower. Mao ordered the end of the campaign against sparrows, replacing them with a different enemy, bed bugs, in the ongoing campaign against the Four Pests. It was too late. With no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by the Great Leap Forward, including widespread deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides.

  in articulo mortis: at the point of death. Used naturally by Dr. Watson from his medical experience.

  Basenji. Breed of hunting dog from stock originating in central Africa. The Basenji produces an unusual yodel-like sound due to the shape of its larynx. This trait gives the Basenji the nickname ‘soundless dog’.

  Life-preserver. Chiefly British usage. A hand-weapon such as a cosh or blackjack.

  100 Days of Reform. In 1898, the young Kuang-hsü Emperor suddenly initiated an all-out attempt at renovating the Chinese state and social system. He issued more than 40 edicts in quick succession which would have transformed every aspect of Chinese society. The old civil service examination system based on the Chinese Classics was ordered abolished. A new system of national schools and colleges was established. Western industry, medicine, science, commerce, and patent systems were promoted and adopted. Government administration was revamped. The law code was changed, the military was reformed, and corruption attacked. The attack on corruption, the army, and the traditional educational system threatened long-entrenched and privileged classes.