China

by Edward Rutherfurd

  “We can, but we can’t,” the Mongolian answered. “I spoke to the army council while you were gone. They won’t risk anything at night. But we can attack in the morning.”

  “The Taiping may have gone by then, sir,” Guanji protested.

  “Probably.”

  “Then my mission was for nothing.”

  “Don’t say that. You had your moment of truth.” He smiled. “And you may have killed a senior Taiping officer.”

  “Thanks to the woman,” Guanji reminded him.

  “If you’re going to be a general,” said Genghis, “you’d better learn something. Never miss a chance to claim a victory for yourself. It’s the only thing people want to hear.”

  “I’ll remember that, sir. Though I doubt I’ll ever be a general.”

  “Why not? You’ve proved that you possess the one thing a general needs.”

  “Really, sir? What’s that?”

  The Mongolian grinned and put a little snuff on the back of his hand. “Luck.”

  * * *

  ◦

  It was in August of that year that the bespectacled General Li and his Taiping army finally came to Shanghai. They were confident of success.

  During the last six months, all the clever plans of General Li had worked. The feint up to Hangzhou had fooled the emperor’s men entirely. The huge detachment of the Southern Grand Battalion that had gone to relieve Hangzhou had left the remaining army outside Nanjing severely weakened. Slipping back from Hangzhou by night marches, the Taiping had taken the emperor’s men completely by surprise and devastated them.

  Even better—and this General Li had not foreseen—the Southern Grand Battalion troops, having discovered their mistake, didn’t race back to Nanjing to see if they could save the situation. When they discovered that even the rear guard of the Taiping had given them the slip in the night, they went into Hangzhou and looted the town. Raped, killed, and pillaged their own side—Han Chinese and Manchu alike. Not a way to make the emperor’s government popular with his people.

  Hangzhou had been a success for General Li, no question. Except for one sadness. He’d lost his best commander. Nio.

  Well, not quite lost him. Badly wounded, arresting a spy. His men wouldn’t leave him for dead. They’d carried his body back and brought him with them out of the town that night. Then carried him all the way back to Nanjing.

  He should have died, with the great wound that he had. But Nio was tough.

  And so General Li, his commander, had made it his personal mission to bring Nio back to life.

  For many weeks, Nio had lain in the Heavenly Kingdom, being tended by the best physicians the city had. His wound had slowly healed without infection. But he was very weak. He couldn’t walk. He didn’t even seem to want to talk. He just lay on his bed like a pale ghost.

  And General Li wasn’t having it. If Nio had lost heart, then he was going to get it back for him. “You know,” he remarked as he sat by Nio’s bed one day, “everything’s going our way. Lord Elgin has arrived in Hong Kong. He’ll certainly have got the message you left. And he’s on the way to Beijing with eighteen thousand men. Even if he doesn’t join forces with us yet, he’s going to humiliate the emperor. That’s what we need. Meanwhile, I’m going to strike up to Shanghai. Do exactly what we planned. The garrison’s not large. The barbarians will stand aside. We’ll take the port, buy those iron ships, and this rotting old empire will fall to bits. Would you like to see that?”

  He stared through his glasses at Nio’s face and thought he detected a faint smile. “I’ll tell you what,” he cried, “I’ll bring you with me to Shanghai. You can watch us take the place. That’ll put heart into you. We’ll enter Shanghai together.”

  And so it was that, on a sunny August day, Nio was brought on a stretcher, with General Li’s Taiping army, to the walls of Shanghai.

  * * *

  —

  “Put him in a chair,” said General Li. “Let him watch.” The day was not too hot. “A little sun will do him good.” He put an orderly in charge of him. “Put a hat on him if the sun’s too much.”

  “Yes, sir,” the orderly said.

  General Li had taken every precaution. Though he had no doubt that the message would have been given to the foreign communities months ago, by the British authorities at Hong Kong, he had caused fresh instructions to be printed in both Chinese and English and delivered to the gates of the foreign concessions this very last night. They knew they had only to put yellow flags on their buildings and they would not be harmed. He wasn’t even going to enter the foreign quarters for the time being. Just the old Chinese fort.

  And there it was, in plain view. A modest enclosure near the broad water’s edge.

  Would the Chinese troops even fight? Not if they had any sense.

  So with their red-and-yellow banners streaming, to the sound of gongs and drums, the Taiping troops marched towards the gate of the old Chinese fort. The wall of the British concession lay on one side of them. It was only eight or ten feet high.

  The Chinese defenders of the old fort had thrown up an emplacement for cannon in front of their gates. But Chinese gunnery held few fears for the seasoned Taiping troops. They’d probably fire a token volley and give up.

  General Li went forward with his men. He glanced back once, towards Nio in his chair. When Nio saw Shanghai as a Taiping port; when he witnessed the foreign merchants living cheerfully under the rule of their Taiping fellow Christians; above all, when those iron ships, which would smash the Manchu forces and bring the emperor down, were moored off the Shanghai waterfront, then Nio would come back into the land of the living.

  The thought pleased General Li very much.

  It was just at that moment that the firing began. First, a salvo from the cannon by the gates. A deadly salvo of grapeshot that ripped great red gashes in the lines of fluttering yellow flags.

  General Li frowned. Those did not sound like Chinese cannon.

  A perfectly directed second salvo, canister shot this time, punched through the advancing Taiping column.

  Those were British guns and gunners. Li was sure of it. What were they doing there?

  Before he could even work it out, all along the British concession wall appeared lines of men armed with modern British rifles pouring in a terrible fusillade onto the Taiping flank. Now firing started from the Chinese fortress wall as well. Flintlocks mostly. But when they did hit, they did awful damage.

  The Taiping troops were so astonished that they stopped. They’d been given strict instructions to respect the British, who were on their side. Even cunning General Li stopped and stared in horror.

  “Retreat!” he ordered. They were sitting ducks where they were. Few of the men heard the command. They hesitated. Another volley of canister shot from the cannon battery. The British were pouring in their fire from the walls. Shots were coming from the other concessions, too.

  The Taiping troops, realizing they were in a horrible trap, began to fall back. General Li fell back with them.

  But why had the British turned suddenly into enemies? It made no sense. They were making war on the emperor, too. Was there something they still didn’t like about the Taiping version of Christianity? Nothing wrong with it as far as General Li knew. Was this to do with opium? Had they cut a deal with the emperor?

  He had no idea. But he must regroup the men and call off the assault. That was the first thing. He must save his men.

  For the next half hour he had no time to think of anything else.

  Neither the British nor the Chinese came out from behind their walls. That was something. He was able to draw up his men at a safe distance.

  But if he did not know how or why, one thing was certain: The game had changed. All his hopes and plans were in ruins. And those of the Heavenly King.

  And of Nio, of course.

/>   Nio. Was he still sitting in his chair, out in front of them, now? Had they retreated past him?

  They had.

  At least none of the British had tried a shot at him from their walls.

  But when General Li came to Nio, he saw that his best commander was very far away by now, in another place entirely, leaving, in death, a look of inexpressible sadness on his face.

  You can imagine how I felt. Mr. Liu was a head eunuch in charge of the palace household. He had the power. I had none. And he was going to destroy me.

  He didn’t waste any time.

  The next morning, when I arrived for work at the eunuchs’ quarters and went to my mentor, he told me, “I’m sorry, but I’m not your mentor anymore. You’re to report to the laundry next door.”

  The laundry was a big rectangular workroom, with vats you could have drowned in. Along one side there were the mangles and the racks where the clothes were hung to dry. Apart from a faint scent of pine resin from the wooden scrubbing boards, the space was pervaded by the acrid smell of lye laundry soap. The eunuch in charge was a tall man who looked as if he’d had the life scrubbed out of him long ago. And I remember looking around and thinking, This is going to be so boring.

  But I needn’t have worried about that.

  “The orders have been changed,” the laundryman said. He pointed to a shriveled old eunuch in blue cotton overalls—none too clean, I might add—standing by the door. “You’re to go with him,” he told me.

  * * *

  —

  “You can call me Stinker,” the old man said. “Most people do.” He looked at me curiously. “What was your crime?”

  “Does it matter?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “But usually people get sent to work with me for a month, to punish them for something. And I was just told you’ll be working with me for the rest of your life. So I wondered what you could have done.”

  “There’s plenty of time to tell you,” I said. “Where are we going?”

  “Up to the kitchens,” he answered.

  The eunuchs’ quarters were tucked away in the corner of the southern wall, just below the side gate. The kitchens were all the way up in the northwestern corner. So we had to walk the entire length of the Forbidden City to reach them.

  Our path took us by long alleyways, past the walls of all kinds of enclosures: the Garden of Benevolent Tranquility, the Palace of Longevity and Health, the Pavilion of Rain and Flowers.

  There were gardens and alleys into which we could look. Once we passed a small, rather dark alley. “What’s in there?” I asked.

  “A ghost,” Stinker told me. “She’s been haunting that alley for three hundred years, and she can be really mean. People avoid it.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I won’t go in there, then.”

  The kitchens occupied a long range of buildings inside the northern wall. Nearby gateways gave access to the courtyards of the imperial quarters.

  “Welcome to your new home,” said Stinker.

  “Are we going to cook?” I asked.

  “No. We are in charge of the garbage,” he replied.

  * * *

  —

  The Forbidden City’s plumbing arrangements were impressive. The drinking water was brought through pipes and channels that went all the way out to the Jade Spring in the Western Hills. It was healthy and sweet to the taste.

  The sewage system dated back centuries, to the start of the Ming dynasty, with tunnels deep underground where streams carried the waste away.

  So every morning, the junior eunuchs took the chamber pots and emptied them into these deep drains, and that took care of that business.

  But the solid waste from the kitchens was another matter. It all had to be carried away by carters, who could come as far as the Forbidden City’s western gate, but not enter. The eunuchs had to bring the kitchen waste to them in handcarts, and this was normally done every other day.

  Stinker’s job, therefore, was to collect the scraps, bones, entrails, carcasses, slops, blood, dirt, and any other waste from the kitchen workers, put it in barrels, cart the barrels to the gate, and keep the kitchen area clean. Every ten days or so, he also had to clean out the barrels. That, of course, is how he got his name.

  The worst thing for me, that first day, was when Stinker told me: “As it happens, today’s the day we clean out the barrels. We always strip naked for that,” he added. I didn’t want to. I was still embarrassed about being a eunuch. Some people imagine being castrated makes you look like a woman, but it really doesn’t. No matter how well the operation’s been done, it’s not a pretty sight.

  “Why?” I wailed.

  “Because by the time we’re done, if we’re wearing our overalls, the laundry can never get the stink out of them. And even if they could, they don’t want to handle them.”

  I have to say they were right. It took hours to scrub and wash down those barrels and somehow get the smell out of the wood. When we were done and had cleaned the handcarts as well, we washed ourselves with laundry soap and scrubbing brushes—especially our pigtails, you can imagine. Then we put on the clean overalls we’d been given in the morning, stacked the clean barrels in the storeroom, lit the incense burners to fumigate them during the night, and closed the door. We took the dirty overalls we’d worn during the day to the laundry and then went home.

  * * *

  —

  There was a delicious smell coming from the kitchen when I got home. Someone had paid my father for running errands by giving him a duck to roast. Rose had been preparing a little feast all afternoon: Beijing duck, noodles, stir-fry vegetables, dumplings.

  So I played with my little children, and then they were put to bed while my father and I sat down to our meal.

  “It’s a pleasure to see how much you love your little boy,” my father said to me quietly.

  “I do,” I admitted.

  “One day he will thank you for saving his life,” he went on. “He’ll understand the sacrifices you’ve made.”

  “I hope so,” I said. But I was thinking that, the way things were going, my son mightn’t have much to thank me for. As for my sacrifices, it looked as if they’d all been for nothing.

  The night before, I hadn’t told my family anything about my troubles, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell them anything now. I suppose I was just praying that something would turn up to end the nightmare I was in.

  “So did anything good happen today?” he wanted to know. “Did you make any friends?”

  “Yes,” I said. “An old palace servant. He told me all sorts of things about the palace, going back to the Ming dynasty.”

  “That’s good,” he agreed. “You should always listen to old people. They know so much. What did you do today?”

  “Well, actually,” I said, “we worked in the emperor’s kitchen.”

  “You saw the emperor?”

  “Oh no.” I laughed. He nodded as though he understood, but he looked impressed. “Don’t go boasting to the neighbors,” I said. “We don’t want anyone to know what I do.”

  “Of course not,” he said.

  After the meal, we all went to bed. My parents and our children all slept on the kang in the main room, but Rose and I had a tiny room to one side that was more private. When I lay beside her, I felt such a surge of gratitude and affection, I wished there was more I could do for her; but at least I could caress her. And she had just started moaning softly with pleasure when suddenly she stopped and sat up.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “There’s a smell,” she said, and she wrinkled up her nose. “Ugh,” she said, “it’s your hands. They smell like garbage.”

  “There was an accident at the palace,” I told her. “We had to clean it up.”

  “Oh,” she said. And she turned her back to me, whic
h wasn’t very nice, but I couldn’t blame her when I thought of the barrels she must be smelling. So I just lay there feeling ashamed and wondered what I could do.

  The next time we cleaned the barrels, I scrubbed my fingers over and under my nails until they almost bled. Rose didn’t say anything more that night.

  My fingers soon got so raw that I had to bandage them. Next I started wearing leather gloves. The gloves smelled terrible, but they helped a bit.

  The next time I was paid, of course, I got only the bare minimum, which was a pittance, and when I brought it home, my father took me to one side and asked me, “Is that really all you got?” And I said, “Things will get better. We just have to be patient.” But the truth was, I had no idea how to get anything more.

  * * *

  —

  Since I had been sent to work with Old Stinker, I had never set eyes on Mr. Chen. I could understand it. He’d been humiliated. There was nothing he could do. I was just an embarrassment to him, and I daresay he wished everyone would forget he had anything to do with me.

  But I was growing so desperate that I decided to go see him all the same. After all, he knew everything there was to know about the palace. Perhaps together we could think of some way out of the mess I was in. So I went to his house one evening and knocked at the big door on the street. A servant appeared and took my name. But then he came back and said that his master wasn’t there; then he closed the door in my face.

  I wasn’t surprised. But I wasn’t giving up, either. The next day I managed to get away early and I waited by the corner of the street. And after a while, sure enough, I saw him coming.

  He wasn’t at all pleased to see me, I can tell you, but I stuck to him like glue, and I could see that he was afraid I’d make a scene, so he hurried me into his house just to get me out of people’s sight.

  “I can’t do anything for you,” he said. “If I’d realized Mr. Liu hated me so much, I’d never have helped you in the first place. But I didn’t.”