China

by Edward Rutherfurd

  * * *

  —

  The rest of my childhood was quite boring. There were certainly none of the finer things of life. Not that our village was cut off from the world. It was only four miles across the fields to the Grand Canal that runs up from the coast to Beijing; and I often used to walk over there to watch the ships.

  On its way north from the port, sections of the Grand Canal are actually the Peiho River—though in places the muddy banks of the old stream have been so packed into mud walls that they look more like a canal than a river. The final stretch into Beijing is all man-made, however, and it goes through several locks. Beside the first of these locks, there’s a little inn where the boatmen often pause for refreshment and gossip with the innkeeper.

  I used to love to go to that lock. For some reason I felt drawn to it. They say that we Chinese mastered the art of building them a thousand years ago. Or maybe earlier, for the oldest canals go back to the Han dynasty, twenty centuries ago.

  The main cargo was grain, but all sorts of other goods went by. And though they were usually in crates, I’d sometimes get a glimpse of a bale of silk or a great standing jar of painted porcelain. I used to dream of being on those ships, you can be sure.

  Anyway, I was standing by the lock when I heard a conversation that made a great impression on me.

  A merchant and his son—a boy of about my own age—were on the side of the canal, stretching their legs while their vessel went through. “You may not like it,” I heard the merchant say to his son, “but you must study all the same. You can’t get anywhere in life if you don’t learn how to read and write. It’s the key to everything.”

  I’d never heard that it was so important before. There were a few people in our village who knew how to read and write, but none of the poor men like my father could. So it didn’t take me long to make the connection. If I wanted the finer things of life, I had to learn to read.

  From that day I pestered my father to find me a teacher. There was one old man who gave lessons to the half-dozen sons of the richer peasants and master craftsmen; but teachers have to be paid, so that was no good. If you want to make money, I thought, you need a teacher; but to hire a teacher, you need money. There didn’t seem a way out of that conundrum.

  Then my father had a good idea. He went to see the old man and asked if he would accept payment in kind for those lessons. The old man certainly didn’t want any of my father’s carpentry.

  “What I really need is a pair of leather boots, like the Manchu wear, for the winter. Do you think you could make those for me?”

  “Certainly,” said my father. “I’ll make you the best leather boots you ever saw.” So it was agreed.

  When he got home, he asked my mother, “Can you make a pair of leather boots?” Because making shoes was really a woman’s occupation.

  “I have no idea how to do such a thing,” she replied.

  “Oh well then, I’ll just have to do it myself,” said my father. He was quite cheerful about it. So I started on my lessons.

  Most of the boys went to be taught by the old man because they had to. But I loved the lessons. Before long I could recognize about two hundred characters. As for writing, I soon got the hang of the basic brushstrokes that you have to learn to construct each character. The old man wouldn’t let his pupils be careless and make the strokes quickly, which most boys want to, because they’re thoughtless and impatient. But I thought the brushstrokes were beautiful. For me, each stroke belonged to the finer things in life. I wanted to linger on every one of them. And I think the old man saw this, because sometimes he would talk to me. He had a funny way of talking because he hadn’t any teeth, but once you got used to it he was quite easy to understand.

  “Writing is like playing a musical instrument, you know,” he said. ‘‘It takes enormous practice and attention to the rules. A bad hand is painful to look at. It exhibits all the stupidity and vulgarity of the writer. But a fine hand is a pleasure to see. Scholars can identify the great masters by their hand, which we do not only look at but study. For that calligraphy is the pure emanation of the writer’s soul.”

  “So the scholars work very hard to express their souls,” I said.

  “Oh no,” he replied. “In fact, quite the reverse. They study the character as if it were a landscape, practice it endlessly, always trying to express the thing they see before them. Gradually they lose their sense of self entirely. It’s the Tao, if you like. Their soul, as we like to say, is something they are not conscious of at all. It’s a sort of nothingness. Every attempt to describe it, funnily enough, destroys it.” He smiled. “Even I, a poor old man in a village with a few stupid pupils, understand this—a little at least.”

  “I don’t understand what you are saying at all,” I said. I wasn’t being rude. I just didn’t know what he meant. It didn’t sound like the finer things of life to me.

  “I know,” he answered. “Perhaps you will one day.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “No, not really,” he told me. “But one never knows.” He seemed to find this funny.

  I did love the characters, though, and within weeks I could write quite a few in a manner that seemed to satisfy him.

  The problem was the boots. My father had been able to get the leather from the workshop where he was employed at that time. And my mother had found him cloth and other things. But of course, he’d never made a pair of boots in his life. “It turns out,” he told my mother, “that it’s quite difficult.”

  “You’d better get help,” my mother said. There was a shoemaker in the next village, and my mother knew her and went to ask her. But it didn’t do any good: The shoemaker said my father had no business making boots, and she wouldn’t help at all.

  “Not to worry,” my father said. “I’ll get the hang of it.”

  And finally he presented the old man with the boots, which seemed to fit all right. This was the early autumn season, and so my lessons continued. But then winter came. And one cold, wet morning, the old man came around to our house, very angry, and called out to my father so all the neighbors could hear: “Look at these boots. They’re letting in all the water, and my feet are freezing.”

  “I’ll fix them,” said my father.

  “No, you won’t,” the old man shouted. “If you knew what you were doing they wouldn’t be leaking in the first place. I’m not getting chilblains so that your son can learn to read and write.”

  So that was the end of my lessons. I wanted to try to earn money myself to pay for the lessons, but whenever I did, my mother told me the family needed it. My father seemed to be depressed, and my mother told me not to talk to him about the lessons anymore, because it made him unhappy.

  But I didn’t give up. If I saw a sign anywhere—in a temple, for instance—I’d copy it down on any scrap of paper I could find and try to work out what it meant. As you know, most of our Chinese characters are made up of little pictures of elements—a man, a house, the sun, water, and so forth—that combined together produce a meaning. As the years went by, I got to figure out a lot of them. But whenever I couldn’t, I’d go to my old master and ask him. The first time I did this he was rather angry. But when I told him what I thought a particular character meant and why, he burst out laughing and explained it. And after that, if he saw me in the village street, he’d call out, “Have you a new character for me?” Sometimes I guessed quite difficult meanings correctly, and once he looked at what I’d written and remarked: “Your writing isn’t all that bad, considering you have no idea what you’re doing.” I was so proud that he said that to me. But he still wouldn’t teach me because I couldn’t pay.

  * * *

  —

  When I was fourteen years old, a message came from the Taoist monastery that Grandfather’s Elder Brother was dying, so my father and I walked back to Beijing. We found him in his house with one of th
e monks looking after him, and I could see that he must be close to the end. The monks had the coffin already in the house, as you’re supposed to do before someone dies. I looked around to make sure there wasn’t a mirror on any of the walls. I knew that if you saw a coffin in a mirror it means someone else in the family is going to die, and I didn’t want it to be me. I don’t believe Grandfather’s Elder Brother had a mirror, actually. He’d have thought it was superfluous. But if there was one, the monks had removed it.

  He looked so frail and tiny. I remembered what he’d told me about how to die by starving oneself, but the monk assured me that the old man was still taking food and liquid. “He’s just very old,” he said.

  When Grandfather’s Elder Brother saw me, he managed a weak smile and tried to raise his hand. So I held it, and I could just feel him give my hand a little squeeze. Then he saw my father.

  “All gone,” he whispered. “All gone.” Though whether he was talking about his life or the fact that all the money was used up, I wasn’t sure. He didn’t say anything after that. He seemed to be dozing. During the night he was restless for a while; then he was still. He slipped away just before dawn.

  He had no children to organize the funeral, of course. Fortunately the monks said that the old man had given them enough money to take care of the funeral, and they arranged everything, which was just as well, as I don’t think my father would have been a lot of use. They gave him a poor man’s wake—only three days instead of seven. But honestly that was enough.

  Everything was in proper order. They placed a small gong on the left of the doorway and hung a white cloth from the lintel. They wrapped the old man’s body in a blue sheet, laid a yellow napkin over his face, and put him in the coffin. We set up a little altar at the foot of the coffin. My father stood a white candle on it, and the monks placed an incense burner there. We all wore white. The monks also left a little box near the door so that people could leave contributions for the cost of the burial.

  I was amazed by how many friends Grandfather’s Elder Brother had. Everyone from the nearby streets seemed to know him. While the monks chanted the prayers, these friends all came by. People are supposed to make a lot of noise to show their grief, but he was so old and he’d gone so peacefully that it didn’t seem appropriate somehow. People just came in and told us nice stories about him, talking about what a kind and simple nature he had and that sort of thing. There was plenty for everybody to eat. The monks had seen to that, too.

  That night some of the local men came and played card games like mah-jong with my father to help him keep awake through the vigil. If they hadn’t, I’m sure he would have disgraced us by falling asleep instead of standing guard over the body. I felt sorry for him, mind you, with all the walking he’d had to do and no inheritance to claim at the end of it all.

  I was allowed to sleep a few hours, though.

  The second day went all right except for two things. First, a little boy came into the yard wearing a red shirt—which as everyone knows is a fine color for a wedding, but terribly bad luck at a funeral. He didn’t get through the door, though, so the monks said it didn’t count. I hoped they were right. Sometimes, when I think about the way our lives developed, I’ve wondered if that little boy brought us all bad luck after all. But there’s no way of telling, really, is there?

  In the afternoon, my father and the priest went through Grandfather’s Elder Brother’s chest. He had only a few clothes. You know it’s the custom to burn the clothes of the dead, and the monks had already burned the shreds he had on when he died. So now they took the other clothes to burn them, too. But my father kept rummaging around in the chest looking for some money, and when he found none, he got quite upset. I thought this was a bit unfeeling of him; but I’d forgotten that you’re supposed to give a little bit of money wrapped in paper to each guest at a funeral. And my poor father was upset because he was ashamed he hadn’t got any money to give. When the priest realized that, he told us the old man had already taken care of it, and sure enough the presents appeared at the right time. Whether Grandfather’s Elder Brother had really made these provisions, I don’t know. He might have. He was quite thorough.

  The only time my father lost his composure was that moment after they put the lid on the coffin, when the senior family member has to take a hammer and drive in the nail that holds the lid down. But my father made a mess of it and the nail bent, and even the Taoist priest looked angry. My father just threw the hammer down and cried, “I can’t do anything right!” Then he picked the hammer up and gave it to me, saying, “You’d better do it. He liked you better than me.” Then he started crying, which wasn’t a very good idea.

  Apart from that, everything went off all right. When we came to take the coffin to the slope where the old man was to be buried, I was allowed to be one of the bearers, which pleased me very much, because it’s an honor that brings good luck. There were two little bridges along the way where we crossed streams, and each time my father was careful to tell the corpse in the coffin that we were passing over water. So he got that right. After the burial and the prayers, we all went back to the house. The next day the monks put a little sign by the entrance of the house with red writing on it, to tell the old man’s ghost that this was his house. Why do we think that ghosts will get lost on their way home? I wonder. The idea is that the ghost will find its way home by the seventh day, and people often put powder across the threshold hoping that the ghost will disturb it in passing, so they’ll know it got safely back. Not that there’s much you can do about it, I suppose, if it didn’t. I don’t know if the monks put any powder across the threshold. We started for home the same day as the burial.

  I remember wondering if anyone would really care whether a poor man’s ghost got home or not.

  Father was quite depressed on the way back, but I wasn’t. “The old man lived just the way he wanted,” I said to cheer him up, “and he even died when he meant to, as well.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” my father replied. “It’s more than you can say for most people.” But he didn’t look any happier.

  * * *

  —

  Actually, Grandfather’s Elder Brother chose a good time to die. Because it was only months after we buried him that the Taiping appeared on the horizon.

  One thing about living where we did, we always got all the news. In the back of beyond, up in the mountain villages, an emperor can die in the Forbidden City, and they may not hear about it for years. But we were only a day’s walk from Beijing. And because we were almost on the Grand Canal, there was constant news coming up from the port as well. The canal lock-keepers always knew everything.

  The Taiping came up from the remote southwest. By the time they swept along the Yangtze River, they were like an invading Mongol horde, besieging towns and fighting huge battles with the emperor’s troops. Nobody knows how many people were killed at that time.

  It’s amazing how people can just disappear and be forgotten after a single generation.

  In any case, they kept advancing along the Yangtze, and more and more people joined them as they went. Of course, they were still a thousand miles away from us. And the hill country along the Yangtze has always seemed like another world to people on the great northern plains. So we just told ourselves not to worry.

  Until they took Nanjing.

  It happened so suddenly. One month they were deep in the Yangtze valley; then before we knew it, they’d raced hundreds of miles north, almost to the Yangtze delta, and had come to the walls of Nanjing.

  Nanjing may be six hundred miles away, but it’s linked by the waterway of the Grand Canal that runs all the way to Beijing. We’d often see cargo vessels that had begun their journey in Nanjing. We felt as if the rebels were on our doorstep.

  No one had believed the Taiping could take Nanjing—a huge walled city like that. Yet it fell in no time, and they killed every Manc
hu family in the place.

  And now the old Ming capital, the sacred City of the Purple Mountain, which controlled the whole Yangtze valley and half the river trade of China, was in the hands of these shaggy-haired vagrants, who told the world that it was the capital of their Heavenly Kingdom. And the emperor couldn’t do a thing about it.

  I wonder how Grandfather’s Elder Brother, for all his serenity, would have felt about that. Would he have been so philosophical then? That’s what I mean when I say he died at the right time.

  * * *

  —

  Well, having set up their Heavenly Kingdom, the Taiping stayed there for a while. And I had to get on with my life.

  I was fifteen, so naturally I was anxious to find steady employment. I wanted to learn a craft, but there were only a few craftsmen in our village, and they had sons of their own to employ. Besides, they weren’t anxious to employ me, because they didn’t have much respect for my father.

  It was my mother who came to the rescue. She was friendly with another woman in the village where the bootmaker lived, who was married to quite an important man who made lacquer goods, which were sold in Beijing and to foreign merchants down at the coast as well. My mother told me to go to this lady and her husband, and perhaps something would come of it.

  But I didn’t do that. Not at first.

  One sees it all the time: People being asked to give jobs to young fellows they don’t really need or want. Then they have to think of tactful ways of saying no, without giving offense. So I decided on another plan.

  First, I told my mother that I wasn’t interested. She was quite upset, but that couldn’t be helped. Then, a few days later, I walked to the next village to take a look at the lacquer workshop.

  The works consisted of a broad yard with open sheds on one side and closed sheds on the other. The open sheds had bamboo blinds that could be rolled down if the breeze blew in too much dust. But there was no wind that day, so the men were sitting at a long table in the open shed, because most craftsmen prefer to work by natural light. There was nothing to stop people entering the yard, so I went in, chose a place opposite a thin, sad-looking man with thinning hair who seemed to be engaged in the simplest task—applying a layer of lacquer to a plain wooden tray—and began to watch.