China

by Edward Rutherfurd

  All these things Shi-Rong discreetly reported to Lin. But one thing puzzled him, and finally he ventured to ask the marquis: “Are you sure, Excellency, that the emperor will actually grant the British these concessions?”

  “The art of being a negotiator is not only to persuade your adversary to see your master’s point of view,” the marquis explained. “It may also be to persuade your master to be reasonable. If I can show both sides that progress is being made, I can broker an agreement.”

  “And if not?”

  “The policy of loose rein can lead to two outcomes. One may convert the adversary to sweet reason. But failing that, we lull them into a sense of security, and when their guard is down, we strike.”

  “So the emperor expects you to convert the British or…”

  “Destroy them.”

  “Can we do so, Excellency?”

  “Patience, Jiang,” the marquis said. “Patience.”

  The following morning they prepared a memorandum to the emperor to bring him up to date with the British talks. “They’ve really nowhere to go,” the marquis cheerfully wrote to the emperor. “A concession or two from us, and we shall wear them down.”

  The next afternoon, a curt note came from Elliot. He had waited long enough. British trading must be allowed to resume at once, and he wanted several ports opened to them up the coast as well.

  “What shall we do?” asked Shi-Rong.

  The marquis smiled. “There is nothing better to engender good feeling than a banquet,” he replied. “Send him word that I should like to discuss matters very soon, and I am making preparations for a feast we can all enjoy.”

  But days went by, and Elliot did not reply.

  * * *

  —

  At first they didn’t see the Nemesis. It was hidden behind some sailing ships. Shi-Rong was standing beside old Admiral Guan, on a small hill just upriver, from which they had an excellent view of the first two forts between which the British ships must pass.

  Shi-Rong glanced up at the admiral’s face. How splendid the old man was. Even the British sailors admired Guan, he’d heard, for his gallantry. “Some of our local peasants think the admiral’s descended from the Chinese war god,” he’d told the marquis. “He looks the part,” the marquis had agreed.

  The marquis had been taken aback, a week into January 1841 as the barbarians reckoned it, when Elliot, having lost patience, had suddenly appeared with his fleet and made straight for the mouth of the Pearl River. But by the time Shi-Rong asked if he might go to join the admiral to see the action, the new governor had quite recovered himself. “The pirates can do nothing against the forts,” he said. “The admiral’s battle plan is excellent. The British will be begging for terms by tomorrow.”

  Now, looking through his brass telescope at the approaching British ships, Shi-Rong remarked to the admiral: “You have prepared a trap for them.”

  “I try to learn from my mistakes,” Guan replied. “So tell me what I’ve done.”

  “In the first place, you’ve run a big chain under the water, at the upstream end of the forts. The British won’t be able to see it, but it’ll catch them while our battery cannon pound them to bits.”

  “Good. What else?”

  “You’ve kept a fleet of war junks up here. But I imagine they’re out of range of the British guns.”

  “A tempting target, if the British could come close enough. But they can’t.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Shallows. Even if the British finally get past the chain and head towards my ships, they’ll enter shallow water, and there they will run aground.”

  “Clever.” And Shi-Rong was just thinking how lucky he was to be there when he saw something strange. Two of the leading British ships were peeling apart to reveal, astern of them, a vessel unlike any other he had seen. It had a funnel belching smoke of some kind where the central mast should have been. On either side of the ship were huge paddle wheels. And strangest of all, the entire vessel appeared to be made of iron. “What in the world is that?” he cried, and handed his spyglass to the admiral.

  Guan gazed through the telescope in silence. “I don’t know,” he said at last.

  This was the Nemesis.

  * * *

  —

  The iron ship didn’t make the first move, but one of the two warships in front of it. Sailing into the entrance of the river, it passed in front of the guns of the nearest fort. At once a cannon roared. Then another, then a third. The first two cannonballs fell just short; the third clipped her rigging. She took no notice at all. Again and again the Chinese cannon fired. Most of the shots now went over the British vessel. Just before reaching the hidden chain, having established the range of the fixed Chinese cannon, and as if to say, “Thank you very much,” the ship neatly put about.

  “I think the British must know about the chain,” said Shi-Rong.

  This was hardly surprising. There were at least a hundred unemployed watermen in the gulf who would gladly have told them for a silver dollar.

  Now the other wooden warship took up a safe position farther downstream and fired a trial shot. “It’s shooting at the fort,” the admiral exclaimed in astonishment.

  The first ship also fired a trial shot. Both, from their different angles, were aimed at one corner of the battery’s granite wall. At their second attempt, the gunners of both ships found their mark. The granite wall was not breached, but Shi-Rong could see that it was damaged.

  And then the bombardment began. Steadily, taking their time, with well-trained accuracy, the British smashed the gun embrasures one by one. Other ships, including the iron Nemesis, joined in. More than once—Shi-Rong wasn’t sure from which ship they came—mortar shells were lobbed over the walls into the battery, where they exploded with devastating effect.

  “I didn’t know they’d do this,” Admiral Guan said humbly. Shi-Rong could see there were tears in his eyes. But there was nothing the admiral could do. Not now.

  Nor was there anything Guan could do when boatloads of British marines pulled rapidly ashore, ran around the sides of the forts, and fell upon their defenders from above. It was a massacre.

  They destroyed the fort on the opposite side of the big river in the same way. Then they smashed the pilings that held the great chain across the river and began to move upstream towards the war junks.

  “They cannot reach them,” the admiral cried out. “They cannot!” And he would have been right—if all the British ships were made of wood.

  But now, as Shi-Rong watched in horror, the Nemesis came into her own. Like a metal monster from another world—a world of iron gods, where even the winds that filled the sails of ships counted for nothing—the Nemesis could ignore the riverbed, too. For the iron ship’s draft was so shallow that it passed clean over the underwater sandbanks as it headed straight for the war junks moored helplessly ahead.

  And then, like a dragon breathing flame, it sent out a thunderbolt.

  Neither Shi-Rong nor the admiral had even seen a Congreve rocket. They had no idea such a thing existed: a rocket carrying explosives. When a Congreve rocket hit its target, it produced an explosion that made the most powerful mortar shell look like a firecracker. And fate had decided that the first rocket the Nemesis fired that day should find the war junk’s magazine.

  The shock of the explosion was so great that even standing on their vantage point onshore, Shi-Rong and the admiral were literally blown off their feet. When the smoke cleared, there was nothing left to see of the war junk or its crew. Hull, masts, and men were all gone, atomized. In the place where they had been, there was just a gap.

  And it was while Shi-Rong was staring openmouthed at this vision from a new world that two runners came racing across the hillside towards him.

  “Mr. Jiang,” one of them called. “You’re to come with us to Beijing
at once.”

  “Beijing? What do you mean? Who says so?”

  “The emperor.”

  “The emperor? Why? Are you sure? I’ll have to prepare.”

  “You do not understand,” one of the men cried. “The emperor wants you at once. You’re to leave with us right now. Immediately!”

  * * *

  —

  When Genghis Khan had designed the imperial postal service that his heirs had brought to China, his edicts were carried across the vast empty plains of Eurasia by Mongol messengers. The toughest horsemen who ever lived, they rode night and day without stopping, their bodies tightly bound in cloth to hold them in one piece, throwing themselves onto fresh horses at each staging post, often riding several days without sleeping, before handing over their letter to the next rider in the great relay.

  In the southern parts of China, these arrangements had been modified to suit the terrain. Through the lush valleys of rice paddies and in the mountain passes, runners might carry the emperor’s letters. But the principle was the same.

  And Shi-Rong was to be treated like a piece of urgent mail.

  At first, when he left Guangzhou, swift runners carried him in a bamboo litter. That wasn’t so bad, except that at each staging post, where new runners were provided, the litter did not rest for longer than it took Shi-Rong to attend to the calls of nature. If he was given a little food, he had to eat it on the road. Day and night he traveled, sleeping as best he could in the litter while it swayed and jerked its way along. Soon he was wretchedly stiff and short of sleep.

  And cold. For the mild January weather of the southern Gulf of Canton was a world away from the bitter cold of the northern plains into which they were traveling. After three days winter clothes were found for him at one of the staging posts. With relief, he put on soft fur-trimmed leather boots, a long, padded Manchu coat, and a thick felt Manchu hat. Initially these kept out the cold. But a damp snow was falling as they went through the mountain passes, and the snow seemed to cling to him, waiting to seep into any tiny crevice it could find.

  It was after they’d crossed into China’s northern plains, however, that his torture really began. For now he was expected to ride.

  The temperature was now below freezing. The breeze cut into his face like a knife. The ground was hard as iron. The horizon seemed endless. And the Mongol horsemen expected him to keep up with them.

  He’d been used to riding since he was a boy. But not long journeys like this. Mongol horsemen covered a hundred and fifty miles in a day. They told him he was slowing them down. By the end of the first day he was badly saddle-sore.

  The next day he was in agony and bleeding, and so tired that he twice fell off his horse. When he complained at the next staging post, the official in charge told him: “We were ordered to bring you with all possible speed.”

  “Did they say,” he asked, “that they wanted me alive?”

  He was allowed to sleep three hours, and when he awoke, he found they had rigged up a sort of hammock for him between two packhorses, into which he was strapped and covered with blankets. This way the couriers could continue their journey day and night, transferring his hammock to fresh horses at the staging posts, and he could sleep or not as he liked.

  Finally, after thirteen days of ceaseless travel, haggard, bruised, sore in every joint, with a vicious rash that made him wince when he sat, Shi-Rong saw the mighty walls and towers of Beijing ahead in the distance and knew that this part of his ordeal was about to end.

  But what new ordeal lay ahead of him? That was the question. For he still did not know why he was here.

  They took him to an official guesthouse just outside the Forbidden City. He was allowed to bathe, was given clean clothes, and was fed. The mandarin in charge was polite, but Shi-Rong noticed that there was a guard at the outer gate of the house. Whether he would have been stopped if he tried to go for a walk, he didn’t try to find out. He was told that someone from the palace would come to prepare him in the morning. In the meantime, he’d better get some sleep.

  And he was about to turn in when his door opened and, to his great surprise, he found himself face-to-face with old Mr. Wen, his former tutor. “Mr. Wen! Master.” Shi-Rong bowed low to the old scholar. “This is such an honor. But how did you know I was here? Or that I was coming?”

  “We have all been expecting you,” said Mr. Wen.

  “We?”

  “The lord Lin has many friends and admirers in Beijing. I am proud to be one of them. You do not know why you are here?”

  “I know the emperor sent for me, honored teacher. But I don’t know why.”

  “Let me explain, then. Ever since he was dismissed, the lord Lin has been writing to his friends here, especially myself. And we have busied ourselves in his cause. We know you have been working for the marquis and reporting to Lin, and that the marquis has been undoing all the good work that the lord Lin—and you yourself—had accomplished. And that the marquis has made promises to the British without authorization. Frankly, some of us here even wonder if the barbarians are bribing him.”

  “I don’t think so, honored teacher.”

  “Be that as it may,” Mr. Wen continued, “it does no harm to the lord Lin’s cause if such things are whispered.”

  Shi-Rong frowned. He was quite surprised to discover the old scholar could stoop to this kind of deviousness. Mr. Wen saw it, but was quite unabashed.

  “Our words have reached the emperor. He likes the marquis, but he fears that he’s misleading him. He wants to find out what is really going on with these barbarians down in Guangzhou. When the lord Lin wrote that you would be the perfect person to give the court an honest account of what is really happening, we were able to arrange that this suggestion was placed before the emperor.”

  “I see.”

  “You must be pleased to have the chance to repay the lord Lin for his many kindnesses to you.”

  “Mr. Wen, do you believe that Lin could be reinstated?”

  “No. The emperor would lose face. But he could be saved punishment.”

  “What am I to do?”

  “Tell the truth. It’s simple. The marquis has disobeyed the emperor, and he’s running our defenses down.” Mr. Wen paused. “On my way here,” he continued, “I heard a rumor that we’ve just suffered a big defeat in Guangzhou. Do you know anything about that?”

  “It’s true.”

  “There you are, then. This is the marquis’s fault.”

  “It may not be as simple as that,” said Shi-Rong wearily.

  “Just remember where your loyalty lies,” said Mr. Wen, and left.

  * * *

  —

  A palace eunuch of about his own age came to collect him in the morning. He tut-tutted over Shi-Rong’s condition, treated his saddle sores with ointment, and dressed him in the correct court dress for his modest rank.

  “Now you must listen very carefully,” he said, “because etiquette is everything. It can mean success or failure. Even life or death. I am going to tell you everything you need to know—exactly how to enter the emperor’s presence, how to kowtow to him, and how to speak to him.”

  So Shi-Rong did his best to concentrate as the eunuch told him all that he must do. But the truth was that he heard only half of it.

  Then the eunuch led him through huge red gold-studded gates into the Forbidden City, across its vast spaces, and into the golden-roofed palace in the sky where the Son of Heaven dwelt.

  The private audience room wasn’t nearly as big as he’d imagined, hardly larger than the central hall in his father’s house. It contained a throne on which the emperor sat. Shi-Rong was conscious of several officials flanking the throne, but he wasn’t sure how many, because his eyes were cast down.

  As required, he knelt and bowed down, carefully touching his head on the floor three times. Having slowl
y risen to his feet, he knelt down and did the same thing again. Again he rose to his feet, and for the third time knelt and knocked his head on the ground three times more. This was the kowtow of the three kneelings and nine head knockings, the ultimate show of respect.

  But having done this, he suddenly realized that he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to do next. Was he supposed to rise? Or if not, should he look up at the emperor when he answered questions or keep his eyes on the floor? He knew that when the emperor traveled in his yellow carriage, no one was allowed to look at him, upon pain of death. So he decided to play it safe and remain prostrate, facing the floor, until they told him to do otherwise.

  They didn’t.

  “Is it true that the marquis has told the barbarians we will pay them five million dollars for the opium confiscated by Commissioner Lin?” It was one of the officials who addressed him.

  “This slave declares that it is true,” he answered respectfully.

  “Why did you disband the patrol boats?” The same official.

  “It was this slave who set up and organized the patrol boats for Governor Lin. Then I was ordered by the marquis to disband them.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “He told this slave that it was to show the barbarians that we could be their friends, not their enemies.”

  “Did the marquis tell the barbarians that they could have access to other ports besides Guangzhou?”

  “He indicated that it could be discussed.”

  “Did he say they could have the island of Hong Kong?”

  “This slave heard him say that such a thing could not even be discussed.”