My Splendid Concubine

by Lofthouse, Lloyd

  Kuan-wen replied, “If your regulations of trade are implemented along the Yangtze, you will ruin me and every governor in China. We have done business this way for centuries, and you cannot change that.”

  “I’m not doing this for me or for any of the foreign powers,” Robert replied. “I’m doing this for China. The Dynasty needs those duties from trade to survive. You will have to adjust your life accordingly. I have looked at the numbers. You will survive.”

  The governor dismissed him.

  Robert and his bannermen were assigned a small house built against the city’s wall. Each day, surrounded by his guards, he went daily to request an audience. The governor refused to meet again.

  It was tense when the governor’s soldiers came to evict Robert from the city. The confrontation took place in the courtyard in front of the small, dusty house in a corner of the city. After Robert refused to leave, Chinese soldiers on the wall started throwing their trash on the house and pissing on it. The urine stench was strong. The servants that had been there when he arrived fled. Each morning, the twelve bannermen cleaned the mess. Prince Kung had ordered them to stay glued to him. They even watched him shit, which was something Robert didn’t enjoy.

  Prince Kung had been adamant. “Do not let him out of your sight.” Robert knew the price. If he died, these men were to die with him. For a moment, he regretted his decision to confront Kuan-wen.

  Several days later, the Chinese soldiers returned. This time Kuan-wen was with them. The governor’s men crowded into the small courtyard and surrounded Robert’s small troop.

  It was an impasse. The pale yellow uniforms of the Manchu bannermen were like an impenetrable shield surrounding him.

  Kuan-wen yelled at his general to drive Robert and his guards from the city. “Do what I have ordered or I will have you beheaded?”

  The Manchu officer in charge of Robert’s guards glanced at him and saw the determination on his face. Then he marched over and stood in front of Robert. Bracing his legs, he rested a hand on the hilt of his sword and glared at the Chinese general as if he were daring him to make the first move. It was a tense moment. Robert knew that the Manchu bannermen had a higher status than the city’s Chinese garrison did. However, would it be enough?

  The Chinese general demanded that Robert and his guards leave the city.

  The Manchu officer did not budge.

  The Chinese general glanced at the governor. The look on the general’s face said, “What do I do now?”

  The governor threatened to have his soldiers attack. Robert feared that this was going to end in a slaughter. The governor would have the bodies tossed into the river and lie about how they died. He’d say it had been a gang of robbers.

  Robert had to do something. He pushed his way between his guards and confronted the governor. He lowered his voice so only Kuan-wen could hear. “Do you want this trouble that will threaten the existence of your family? I’m here on the imperial court’s behalf to open an office in your city and collect duties from foreign merchants. If you insist on making a problem, I’ll have no choice but to report to Prince Kung.”

  “Prince Kung is not the emperor,” the governor replied. “He cannot tell me what to do. The emperor appointed me. He is who I answer to.”

  “You are correct. Prince Kung does not rule the emperor. However, until Emperor Tung-Chih comes of age, Prince Kung and the Dowager Empresses rule China in Tung-Chih’s name.”

  The expression on Kuan-wen’s face froze. “Tung-Chih is not the emperor,” he said. His voice faltered. “Emperor Hsien Feng is.”

  “You haven’t heard?” Robert replied, shocked. He then realized the truth. Of course, he hadn’t. Kuan-wen’s province was nearly cut off from the rest of China by Taiping armies.

  “Emperor Hsien Feng is dead,” Robert said, “and Prime Minister Su Shun has lost his head.”

  The muscles in Kuan-wen’s face turned to putty. “Emperor Hsien Feng is dead!” he said, “and Su Shun lost his head.” He looked dazed.

  Robert mentally kicked himself. He knew that Su Shun had appointed Kuan-wen. If he had been aware that Kuan-wen hadn’t known of Su Shun’s death, this affair might have been concluded days ago. “Yes,” he said, “and Hsien Feng’s six-year-old son, Tung-Chih, sits on the throne. His regents hold the power.”

  Kuan-wen deflated like a balloon and appeared to age as Robert watched.

  “Open your office,” the governor said. He turned and walked away muttering to himself. “I did not know. I did not know.”

  “And you will not collect duties from the foreign merchants,” Robert said to the governor’s back. “You understand that, don’t you?”

  Kuan-wen turned. “I do,” he said. Obviously, this man had just lost a lot of face, and having so many of his Chinese soldiers witness his loss made it worse.

  Robert’s agents came out of hiding, and the office opened that week.

  Robert met with little resistance during the remainder of his trip. He took the boat east toward the ocean and changed to a ship to sail along the coast.

  A few weeks later, as he rode with his bodyguards into sight of the city walls of Fuzhou, the capital of the Fujian province, a small, slight man dressed in a brilliant blue and green silk robe wearing his official headgear with its tassel and feather stood alone in the open city gate. Robert dismounted and nodded to the governor of Fujian, who nodded deeper to honor Hart.

  That was a big change considering that at Su Shun’s orders a few years earlier, this governor had refused to open his center gate to receive Britain’s ambassador.

  By the end of December, Robert established offices in five of China’s major ports. In January, he sailed north. During the voyage, he wrote detailed plans to open offices in five more ports.

  Robert had traveled thousands of miles and was exhausted. When he stopped in Shanghai for a few days to rest, he stayed at the Imperial Maritime Customs building. It had been built in 1857, and looked like a Chinese temple. He hadn’t heard from Guan-jiah or Ayaou for weeks. He wondered when they would be moving to Shanghai and hoped there would be mail waiting when he reached Peking.

  A few days later, a pack of English merchants arrived and demanded that Robert see them. He had been expecting something like this and wasn’t surprised. “Show them in,” he said to his clerk.

  “We believe you should grant us favors and special treatment,” the spokesperson said. The rest mumbled support as they stood on one side of his desk glaring at him. Robert remained seated. “We will do nothing of the sort,” he replied. “My people have been directed to tax everyone the same.”

  “You cannot do this, Hart.” The leader of the group almost shouted. He was a fat man with a red, puffy face, and his stomach strained the buttons on his jacket. As his chest swelled in anger, one of the buttons popped off and rolled across the floor. The more anger that he displayed, the calmer Robert became.

  “You are British,” the merchant said. “How can you do this to us? We have families to care for. We expect you to cooperate.”

  Robert replied, “Every merchant from every country that trades in China will be treated the same. That includes merchants from Britain. If you do not like that, I suggest you take your demands to Peking or London.”

  These fat merchants were not going to be allowed to become wealthier by cheating the Chinese of what little they had left. Compared to the average Chinese, these men would still be wealthy. They just wouldn’t get rich as fast. He hated greedy people and resolved not to give an inch.

  They departed his office in a huff. “You will hear from us again, Hart. We will ruin you.”

  It would take months to resolve the fiasco with the English merchants, who banded together and went to court in England to put pressure on Robert to give them special dispensations over other nations.

  Robert refused and used every contact he had developed in England to state his case. In the end, he won. The English merchants had to pay like every nation that traded in China.
Robert was sure that when these English merchants were in a pub, they would be throwing darts at his effigy.

  Robert returned to Peking to endless meetings at the Yamen. A stack of letters from Ayaou waited, but he had no time to read them. He was aware that if it were not for his crushing schedule, he would have felt as lonely as he had in Canton when he had lived there without Ayaou during the Arrow War.

  Robert’s workdays often ran twenty hours. He slept between midnight and four in the morning and would be in his office before dawn. He was too tired to even dream about Ayaou.

  When he wasn’t in meetings, he was composing drafts telling the Manchu ministers what he was learning from his agents throughout China. In addition, he had to write follow-up reports when there were changes and revisions.

  He was also involved in the details of establishing the piloting service and harbor regulations. These were sensitive issues. He had to hire harbor pilots for each port. For the sake of China’s national defense, the imperial government wanted him to hire only Chinese pilots.

  It took several frustrating months to learn that none of the Chinese pilots was any good since they hadn’t been professionally trained.

  “If I hire any of these men and a foreign ship is wrecked, whose face will suffer?” he said to Wen-hsiang, hoping the minister would speak for him inside the Forbidden City, the one place Robert wasn’t allowed to visit since it was closed to all foreigners.

  “It won’t be mine,” Robert said. “It will belong to those ministers demanding I hire people that are not qualified. My recommendation that we do not hire these people will be part of the imperial record. I am not going to lose face over this.”

  It didn’t take long before he was allowed to hire foreign pilots.

  Only then did he find time to read and spent an evening going through Ayaou letters. Near the end, she said that Guan-jiah was arranging the move to Shanghai. They should be there to greet him when he returned from Peking.

  He read the stack again and was pleased to discover that his little girl was sleeping through the night. Ayaou said Anna was getting into everything. She had to be watched all the time to make sure she didn’t hurt herself and Fooyen had her hands full. Robert chuckled at the image.

  Soon, Anna would be three. He wanted to be home when she celebrated her birthday.

  A few weeks later, Robert was on his way to Shanghai, and he had no idea if Ayaou would be there. He had to do something about improving the mail service in China. The challenge was finding the time. There was so much to do.

  He fears vanished when he arrived in Shanghai to find Guan-jiah waiting in a sampan to greet him as the ship dropped anchor.

  How had the eunuch known?

  “Master,” Guan-jiah said, “I found a suitable house inside the walled portion of the Chinese city as you instructed.”

  He wanted to take Guan-jiah in his arms and hug him but didn’t. After all, now that he was Inspector General, he had an image to uphold.

  Guan-jiah took charge moving the luggage to the new house.

  The layout and size of the house was similar to the one in Canton. The difference was in the light since there were many windows. It made the rooms pleasant, especially during sunny days, as Robert would discover. The shadows of trees projected on the floors through the glass made the atmosphere exuberant.

  When he stepped inside the house for the first time, Ayaou was sitting on a bench prim and proper with her back held straight as a board. She was dressed in white silk pants and blouse. Her hair had been combed to a high gloss and braded in one long strand down her back. This revealed her pixy ears and long neck, two things he’d always admired and loved to smother with kisses.

  Fooyen stood to the side and was holding Anna. Robert took a step toward his daughter. Looking shy, Anna stuck a thumb in her mouth and hid her face against Fooyen’s chest.

  “I have been gone too long,” he said. “She’s forgotten who I am.” He was disappointed. With a sinking feeling, he realized how much he had loved to hear her call him Ba Ba.

  Fooyen brought Anna to Robert, and said, “You cannot forget who your father is.” She thrust Anna toward him, but the child twisted away and the thumb stayed in her mouth as she whimpered.

  “Give her time to remember you,” Ayaou said. “Take Anna to her room.” Fooyen took the child and left.

  “No one will bother you, Master,” Guan-jiah said, before the eunuch hurried deeper into the house.

  Robert had been so busy working endless days and nights, he’d forgotten Ayaou’s beauty. Tears filled his eyes and he went down on one knee to rest his head on her lap.

  Seconds later, her fingers arrived to explore his face and hair. Part of him yearned for their old life in Ningpo when he had been a lowly interpreter for the British.

  Her eyes glowed and her body advertised its excitement.

  “Show me the bed,” he said. Once they were upstairs behind a closed and locked door, he pulled Ayaou into his arms while his hands explored her body and savored the smooth, inviting warmth of her skin.

  Ayaou was pregnant before the end of January 1862.

  Chapter 47

  For most of 1862, Robert was on the move along China’s coast and rivers. He felt like a migrating bird when he returned to Peking. Since he traveled on an armed, imperial junk with a large crew, pirates left them alone.

  He was so busy that he had only a few minutes each day for letter writing when he managed to jot off brief notes to Ayaou.

  “This is horribly lonely work,” he said in one midnight letter. “Some nights, I consider quitting so I can come home to stay, but those are foolish thoughts.

  “It grieves me that I am missing every achievement Anna makes. I wasn’t there when she started to sleep nights. I missed seeing her learn to crawl, walk, and eat on her own. I feel that I am failing as a father.

  “Then I think if I quit, who would replace me? Moreover, would that person have China’s interests at heart? Whenever I make a decision, I always think of what is best for China. I want you to know that it is through you that I have learned to love your country.

  “China is like another concubine, and she’s in trouble. I cannot abandon her.”

  He sealed the letter in an envelope with hot wax then rested his head on his crossed arms and cried. He missed both his families, the one in Ireland and the other in Shanghai. While tears streamed down his cheeks, he started to laugh and that soon turned to hiccups.

  It was ironic. Here he was with two loving families. He had eleven brothers and sisters and both of his parents still lived. He had Ayaou and Anna with another child on the way. He had friends in every major coastal and river port in China. He was a rich and important man, yet he was feeling sorry for himself.

  That night, Shao-mei visited him in his dreams. In the morning, he had a pounding headache and struggled with depression all day.

  Along with his developing skills for solving problems between the foreign powers and China, he was gaining a reputation for keeping secrets.

  This reputation started late one afternoon in Peking when Minister Wen-hsiang approached Robert while he was strolling in the Yamen’s garden.

  They walked together as the minister confided that he had a nephew who was addicted to opium. The minister’s first wife and her sister, the boy’s mother, were agonizing over it. Wen-hsiang didn’t know what to do.

  “How old is your nephew?” Robert asked, feeling a twinge of guilt from his years working with Captain Patridge. He hoped he could help Wen-hsiang somehow. Maybe this would be a way to atone for those sins.

  “Nineteen. He has two wives and three children. Do you know what we should do to help him?”

  Robert found it strange that the minister felt he might know of a solution. On the other hand, it made sense. After all, Westerners were responsible for the addiction. “Send him to an isolated monastery in the Yellow Mountains in Anhui province. That way, he will be as far from opium as possible.”

  Several
weeks later, after another trip along China’s coast, Robert was back in Peking working at the Yamen. Wen-hsiang asked, “Did you tell anyone about my nephew?” It was well after dark and everyone else had gone.

  “Are you talking about the nephew addicted to opium?”

  The minister nodded.

  “I told no one,” Robert replied.

  “It never occurred to me that you would not talk to anyone about it,” Wen-hsiang said. “I thought it best to live with the gossip instead of hearing my wife and her sister crying over the boy all the time.”

  Robert held a thumb and finger to his lips and made as if he were buttoning them. “I hate gossip,” he said. “When you sought my advice, I was honored that you saw me as someone you could confide in. How is your nephew?”

  “He is hidden away in the Yellow Mountains suffering. I have been told he sweats and screams and vomits and cannot eat. We also hired an acupuncturist to help with the healing process.”

  They had stopped working. Robert went to the stove where a teapot was simmering. He poured two cups. “Tell whoever is watching your nephew to make sure he doesn’t swallow his tongue. They should tie him to the bed, so he does not fall and hurt himself. Recovering from an opium addiction is difficult.”

  Wen-hsiang accepted the offered tea and sipped. “Be careful, it is hot,” he said, and blew on the tea. “There is nothing to worry about. Besides the acupuncturist, there is a trusted doctor, who has several servants keeping watch so my nephew does not come to harm.”

  “I’m glad to hear that. I’m sure he will be fine.” Robert finished the strong, bitter cup of black tea and returned to the report he was working on.

  “Your advice on how to catch the Forbidden City thief was also correct,” Wen-hsiang said a few minutes later. “We followed your instructions carefully.”

  Robert was surprised. He had forgotten that incident and had heard nothing for months. He put his pen down. “Did you catch this burglar?” He crossed his arms on the desktop and leaned forward. “I’m interested to hear the outcome.”

  “One of the child spies found the jewel merchant that was buying the stolen items just as you described. We offered another valuable piece of imperial jewelry as bait. After the jeweler bought that, the children took care that the jeweler would not know they were watching.