Sherlock Holmes and The Nine-Dragon Sigil

by Tim Symonds

  As a result the attempted reforms were short-lived. Conservative forces forcefully rallied behind the Empress Dowager. With the army on her side, she carried out a successful coup d’état and for several years kept the Emperor imprisoned in his lake palace.

  Royal Army Medical Corps. As Watson would have known, it was in 1898 that a single Army Medical Corps was created. In the Boer wars and WW1 and WW2, the Corps dealt with 14 million casualties, and was awarded many medals, including 14 Victoria Crosses (two with Bars).

  Field Service Pocket Book. Watson’s references are based on a later edition lent to me by Major General John Moore-Bick. The 1914 edition is especially interesting because it summarises the state of the British Army at the outbreak of the Great War. On Watson’s long journey to Kashgar and Peking he would have read a contemporary copy, on war establishments, system of command in the field, and summaries covering ciphers, construction of trenches, setting up firing positions, even the construction of emergency railway stations.

  Hippocratic Oath. Historically taken by physicians, one of the most widely known of Greek medical texts. In its original form, it required a new physician to swear, by a number of healing gods, to uphold specific ethical standards.

  Aeroscope film camera. Patented in England in 1910 by the Polish inventor Kazimierz Prószyński, the Aeroscope was the first successful hand-held operated film camera. It was powered by compressed air pumped into the camera with a simple hand pump, similar to the one used for bicycle tyres. This made it possible to film hand-held in most difficult circumstances, notably from early airplanes.

  The camera came into its own on the battlefield during the Great War. Several cameramen died filming from the front lines and because of this the innocent Aeroscope got the nickname ‘camera of death’.

  British Empire. Where I speak of the time the British Empire comes to its end was from a piece in the New Statesman, 18 March 2016, by Jeremy Seabrook, titled ‘The World Of Yesterday’.

  Boxers. The violent anti-foreign, anti-Christian uprising in China towards the end of the Ch’ing dynasty between 1899 and 1901. Although women were not allowed to join the Boxer units, they formed their own groups, the Red Lanterns. Popular local lore reported that the women were able to fly, walk on water, set Christians’ homes on fire, and stop foreign guns, powers which even the Boxer men themselves did not claim.

  North China Daily News. Founded as the weekly North-China Herald in 1850. A daily edition commenced publication in 1864 as the North China Daily News. The newspaper was an influential force in Shanghai and throughout China until 1951.

  Seismographs. In 132 AD, Zhang Heng, a scientist in the Eastern Han Dynasty, invented the seismograph to detect the cardinal direction of earthquakes that struck hundreds of miles away - the earliest instrument in the world for forecasting and reporting the movement of an earthquake. Zhang’s seismoscope was a giant bronze vessel, resembling a samovar almost 6 feet in diameter.

  Sigil. An inscribed or painted symbol or occult sign considered to have magical power. The ‘g’ is pronounced like a ‘j’. In Chinese feng shui, the most famous sigil is the Sigil of Zuan Kong which holds within it the movement of the Flying Stars.

  Mumbo Jumbo (sometimes mumbo-jumbo). English term for confusing or meaningless language. Nowadays often used to express humorous criticism of middle-management and civil-service doublespeak. It may also refer to practices based on superstition, rituals intended to cause confusion, or languages the speaker does not understand.

  Jordan. A chamber pot. Popular slang for a chamber-pot used to urinate in at night without having to resort to a trip to the outside toilet (or worse). Origin obscure but possibly from the similarity of urine flasks to the little containers of sacred Jordan water brought back from the Holy Land by mediaeval pilgrims.

  China gunboats. Shallow-draught gunboats designed to patrol rivers.

  Il faut être le plus malin. One must be the more cunning.

  Orbis alius. In Celtic mythology, the Otherworld is the realm of the dead and the home of the deities and other powerful spirits.

  Amen. ‘So be it’. Originally from Hebrew ‘āmēn’: truth.

  Dyed-in-the-wool. Thoroughgoing. Unchanging in a particular belief or opinion.

  Committee of Imperial Defence. Watson reported to this Committee. Although there’s evidence of British intelligence organisations collecting foreign intelligence and intercepting messages as far back as the 15th Century, Britain’s modern history of espionage really began in 1909.

  With the growth of Germany’s naval and military strength and the Kaiser’s expanding colonisation, particularly in Africa and the Pacific, the British government was increasingly concerned about the threat to its own Empire. In July 1909 they established a Secret Service Bureau, split into Home and Foreign Sections.

  Criminalistics. When Holmes coined the word ‘criminalistics’ circa 1904 he was well ahead of his time. It only came into widespread use around 1945 to describe the science dealing with the detection of crime and the apprehension of criminals.

  Railway glasses. Their use by train passengers stemmed from the fact that the early railway carriages were open to the sky. By the mid Victorian period this was no longer the case, but railway spectacles continued to be used by rail workers, either for travelling on the locomotive or when working on the track. Even then the Edwardian period would be a bit late though Holmes might have discovered an old pair in a drawer somewhere.

  Suffragists. Members or supporters of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies campaigning for women’s right to vote. Different from the suffragettes, they eschewed violence in favour of advocacy. For example, in February 1907 Millicent Fawcett co-led what became known as the Mud March. Over 3,000 women marched in a public procession through the muddy streets of London, peacefully demonstrating their support for women’s suffrage.

  Dawn Redwood. Taxodiaceae (Redwood family). Watson was well aware of the search for exotic plants for the Edwardian garden. One of the most exciting discoveries in the plant world in the mid-20th Century was the deciduous conifer, the Dawn Redwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides, in China. The trees were hitherto only known from fossil evidence dating back 100 million years, and thought to have been extinct for 5 million years.

  Taels. A unit of weight and by extension a currency. In general the silver tael weighed around 40 grams. General Yuán paid Watson a fee of nine thousand taels. At the time this would have equalled around 900 British pounds. In today’s purchasing power that would be about £100,000 British pounds or roughly US$135,000. Plenty to bet with at the Gatwick Races.

  Orbate. Every Emperor of China feared dying ‘orbate’ - i.e. childless, without heir or descendant to perform the vital ceremonies at the deceased ruler’s shrine.

  Bastinado. A beating. The instrument employed was a thick cane, cloven in two, and several feet long, made of bamboo, a hard, strong, and heavy wood. The lower part is as broad as a hand, the upper smooth and small for ease of handling.

  Limehouse is a once-poverty-stricken district in east London located 3.9 miles (6.3 km) east of Charing Cross. A large Chinese community developed there, established by the crews of merchantmen in the opium and tea trades, particularly Han Chinese. The area achieved notoriety for opium dens in the late 19th century, often featured in pulp fiction works by such authors as Sax Rohmer.

  Meurtres à l’anglaise. Murders English-style. Watson is being witty. Although the terrible late-Victorian Jack the Ripper murders have never been solved (nor, surprisingly, investigated by Sherlock Holmes), Victorian Britain was no more inclined to shooting, stabbing, throttling, poisoning and serial killers than any other society.

  ‘Nine Springs.’ Holmes had learnt about Chinese beliefs well. ‘Nine Springs’ (also ‘Yellow Springs’) is the Chinese poetical term for the abode of the dead beneath the earth.

  Shishaqui
ta. The name of the Emperor’s steam-launch came from one built in 1906 at my favourite old (now defunct) boat-building yards Abdela & Mitchell in Gloucestershire where some speculate the famous ‘African Queen’ of the Hollywood movie was constructed around 1912. For cognoscenti of such bits of Britain’s history I gave Shishaquita the power source used in real life in the Abdela & Mitchell boat Angela, namely a high pressure single cylinder engine.

  English Idioms

  An idiom is ... a group of words established in general usage with a meaning you can’t take straight from the words themselves, for example, English speakers say someone is ‘pulling my leg’. To pull someone’s leg means to tease them by telling them something untrue.

  Or, ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’ means ‘stay quiet, avoid restarting a conflict’.

  Because it arises from a society over perhaps centuries an idiom may be incomprehensible in straight translation. As in all languages, there are some thousands of idioms in English. Here are ones used in Sherlock Holmes And The Nine-Dragon Sigil:

  ‘What’s it got to do with the price of tea in China?’ Expression denoting an irrelevance or non sequitur in the current discussion.

  ‘When the chips are down’. At the final, critical moment; when things really get difficult, when no more choices can be made. This idiom may have derived from the card-game poker, and may not have come into widespread use until the 1930s.

  To strike paydirt. In California’s gold rush of 1849, to strike paydirt was to dig until you hit dirt that would pay - soil with gold in it. Idiomatically, to find something valuable, e.g. a scholar who makes a valuable discovery may say s/he has struck pay dirt.

  To do a bunk (informal). Make a hurried or furtive departure or escape.

  At daggers drawn. If two people (two countries, etc.) are at daggers drawn, they are in a state of extreme unfriendliness and do not trust each other.

  ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’. Shakespeare in ‘Hamlet’ wittily has the garrulous Lord Polonius state: ‘Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief...’ yet he usually went on and on (and on).

  The Quick and the Dead. Archaic and biblical - ‘quick’ means ‘alive’ or ‘living’, not ‘speedy’.

  Take the bull by the horns. To confront a problem head-on and deal with it openly. Based on the idea that holding a bull by its horns is both a brave and direct action.

  Horns of a dilemma. Unable to decide between two things because either could bring bad results.

  Be caught with your pants/trousers down. To be discovered doing something that you did not want other people to know about.

  The More Obscure Words and Phrases

  Mantle (from mantellum, the Latin term for a cloak). Type of loose garment usually worn over indoor clothing to serve the same purpose as an overcoat. Technically, the term describes a long, loose cape-like cloak worn from the 12th to the 16th century by both sexes, although by the 19th century it was used to describe any loose-fitting, shaped outer garment similar to a cape. For example, the dolman, a 19th-century cape-like woman’s garment with partial sleeves is often described as a mantle.

  Anon. In a little while. Soon.

  Persnickety. Giving a lot of attention to minor or unimportant details.

  “Et tu, Brute?” Latin phrase meaning “You too, Brutus?”, purportedly the last words of the Roman dictator Julius Caesar to his friend Marcus Brutus at the moment of Caesar’s assassination. The quotation is widely used in English-speaking world to signify an unexpected betrayal by a person, especially a friend.

  In train. A process or event happening or starting to happen.

  Peradventure: uncertainty or doubt as to whether something is the case.

  Background Reading

  ‘The Last Empress, The She-Dragon of China’, by Keith Laidler. John Wiley & Sons. 2003. A very engaging run through a most extraordinary period in China’s long history.

  ‘From Yunnan-Fu to Peking Along The Tibetan And Mongolian Borders’, by H. Gordon Thompson. The Geographic Journal. January 1926.

  ‘Dragon Lady, The Life And Legend of the Last Empress of China’, by Sterling Seagrave. Vintage Books 1992.

  ‘The Mystery of 31 New Inn’, by R. Austin Freeman. A lesser-known British detective-story ‘rival’ to Arthur Conan Doyle. Many of R.A.F’s Dr. Thorndyke stories employ genuine, if arcane, points of scientific knowledge, from tropical medicine, metallurgy and toxicology.

  ‘With The Empress Dowager of China’, by Katherine A. Carl. First published 1906. An American paintress’s eye on the wonders of the Imperial Court in ‘see-no-evil’ vein but charming and filled with meticulous observations such as the Imperial legend of the Double Dragon and the Flaming Pearl.

  ‘The Much Maligned Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi’. Modern Asian Studies 13:2 (1979), 177-196.

  Comparative study of territoriality and habitat use in syntopic Jungle Crow (Corvus macrorhynchos) and Carrion Crow (C. corone). Hajime Matsubara. Also seehttps://corvidresearch.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/corvid-of-the-month-the-jungle-crow/

  ‘Conjuring Asia. Magic, Orientalism And The Making Of The Modern World.’ Chris Goto-Jones. Cambridge University Press 2016. Excellent chapter on Chinese magic.

  Professor Sue Fawn Chung, University of Nevada. Dissertation quoted in ‘The Image of the Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi’, in ‘Reform in Nineteenth Century China’, eds. Paul Cohen and John Schrecker, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976, and ‘The Much Maligned Empress Dowager Tz’u-hsi’, Modern Asian Studies 13:2 (1979).

  ‘The Diaries Of Sir Ernest Satow, British Envoy In Peking (1904-1906)’. Volume Two.

  ‘An English Lady In Chinese Turkestan’, by Lady Catherine Macartney. First published by Ernest Benn, 1931.

  ‘The Land Of The Blue Gown’, by Alicia E. Neva Little. First published 1902. Travels of a doughty anti-foot-binding campaigner, a mistress of description.

  ‘The Last Of The Empresses’, by Daniele Varè. John Murray, 1936. Subtitled ‘and the passing from the Old China to the New’.

  ‘Foreign Devils On The Silk Road’, by Peter Hopkirk. Oxford University Press, 1984.

  ‘Crime’s Strangest Cases’, by Peter Seddon. Anova Books Company 2012.

  ‘Yuán Shih-k’ai’, by Jerome Ch’en. Stanford University Press 1961.

  ‘Chinese Shakespeares’, by Alexander C. Y. Huang. A history of Shakespeare in China. Columbia University Press New York.

  ‘To-Morrow In The East’, by Douglas Story. George Bell & Sons, 1907 (reproduced by Bibliolife).

  ‘The Great Game’, by Peter Hopkirk. Oxford University Press, 1991.

  ‘The Forbidden City’, by Geremie R. Barme. Profile Books, 2008.

  ‘Treason By The Book’, by Jonathan Spence. Penguin Books, 2006.

  ‘Two Years In The Forbidden City’, by Princess Der Ling.

  ‘Hermit Of Peking’, by Hugh Trevor-Roper. Alfred A. Knoff, inc. 1977. An entertaining account of the life of a quite extraordinary rapscallion sinologist, Sir Edmund Backhouse.

  ‘The Crime Laboratory’, by Paul L. Kirk and Lowell W. Bradford. Charles C. Thomas. 2nd printing 1972.

  ‘The Real Sherlock Holmes’, by Joe Riggs. Subtitled, ‘The mysterious methods and curious history of a true mental specialist’. Andrews UK, revised 2012.

  ‘The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics’. James O’Brien. Oxford University Press, 2013. Holmes as a pioneer of forensics.

  ‘Poisonous Plants in Great Britain’, by Frederick Gillam. Wooden Books Ltd. 2008. Neat little book, not to be used for unusual kitchen recipes.

  ‘Bird Sense, What It’s Like To Be A Bird’, by Professor Tim Birkhead. Bloomsbury, 2012.

  ‘Sherlock Holmes: Father of Scientific Crime and Detection’, by Stanton O. Berg.
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology Vol. 61 Issue 3. 1970.

  ‘Toxicology in the Sherlockian Canon’, paper delivered in 2000 by Steven Seifert, Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center, Tucson, Arizona.

  ‘A Mosaic Of The Hundred Days’, by Luke S. K. Kwong. Council On East Asian Studies, Harvard. 1984.

  ‘The Opium War’, by Julia Lovell. Picador 2011. Includes a truly astonishing account of the causes of the first Opium War.

  ‘Shakespeare and Democracy’, by Gabriel Chanan, ‘The Self-Renewing Politics of a Global Playwright. Troubador 2015. Gabriel Chanan argues that even though the Bard could know nothing of modern democracy, he played a fundamental role in building the culture that underlies it.

  ‘My Life In Magic’, Howard Thurston. 1929.

  ‘Conjuring Asia. Magic Orientalism and the Making of the Modern World.’ Chris Goto-Jones. Cambridge University Press. 2016.

  ‘Changing Clothes in China’, by Antonia Finnane. 2007. Excellent reference for details on how elite men’s fashion changed at the start of the 20th Century.

  ‘My Dear Holmes, a Study In Sherlock’, by Gavin Brend. George Allen & Unwin, 1951.

  Acknowledgements

  My Thanks To...

  my Publisher Steve Emecz of MX Publishing who has done more to keep the spirit of Sherlock Holmes alive and kicking than anyone else in the world.

  Mike’s Reviews: some reviewers grasp immediately how I like to take my readers away to those now distant days when the sun shone warmly over England and never set on her vast Empire, when good King Edward V11,‘the Peacemaker’, was seated on the throne. Goodreads’ American reviewer ‘Mike’ is one of those. He described my Sherlock Holmes And The Mystery of Einstein’s Daughter as follows: ‘Excitingly and surprisingly, yes, a true Sherlock does live today, but he’s not on TV but instead in the pages of this book. Tim Symonds has taken the detective and Dr. Watson and brought them only into the 1900s instead of the 21st Century, giving them a most-intriguing mystery to solve: the story of Albert Einstein’s secret daughter...Yet getting the details all just-so is only one key to writing quality historical fiction: the other part of the game is making the narrative engaging, and Symonds passes that test with flying colors, too.