1636: The China Venture

by Eric Flint

  Father Aleni paused. “I think not. Since you sinned in thought and not deed, your sin was private and may be handled privately. There is a Chinese proverb: ‘It is better not to dig up dead dogs and chickens.’ You have confessed, through me, to God; your conscience should be clear, there is no need to trouble your husband and endanger your marriage.”

  She sighed with relief.

  Received in the Office of Transmission

  Imperial City

  Beijing

  Your Majesty’s slave, Xiong Wencan, governor of your province of Fujian, upon his knees addresses the throne. Looking upward, he implores the glances of your Sacred Majesty upon this memorial, reverently prepared, concerning a new group of barbarians that call themselves “Americans.”

  There are three young men and a young woman. They have come to the blessed shores of the Middle Kingdom in two ships of the ordinary red-haired barbarian type, save that these ships are equipped with cannon that, according to your slave the admiral Zheng Zhilong, can destroy another ship with a single shot, the shot exploding like a firework.

  Moreover, he reports that they have a device by which they can ascend into the heavens and return, and that they indeed took him into the sky on this device. Indeed, he adds they also claim to have skill in predicting celestial events, greater even than that of the priests from the West who worship the “Lord of Heaven.”

  Remarkably, they came already being able to speak somewhat our language, as do even some of the red-hairs who accompany them.

  My officers have questioned some of these red-hairs, who confided that the “Americans” arrived in the distant, savage land the red-hairs call “Germany” in a mysterious way. Unfortunately, none of the red-hairs actually witnessed this arrival.

  I have been advised that the Americans wish to kowtow before the throne and present Your Majesty with gifts, and exchange ideas with the scholars of the Middle Kingdom. However, they admit that they have not previously enjoyed the blessing of being a tributary state to the Middle Kingdom, with an appointed schedule for paying tribute, and thus Your Majesty’s permission is needed for them to proceed.

  The admiral Zheng Zhilong urges that we take advantage of the southwest monsoon, which is strongest in the summer, to send them on to Hangzhou, from which they can be sent on to Beijing at any time of the year that it should it please Your Majesty. If they linger here too long, travel to your illustrious capital will become difficult.

  Prostrate, your slave prays Your Majesty to announce your pleasure concerning the advice and recommendations contained in this memorial.

  * * *

  The response took the form of a copy of the report, with a brief annotation in vermilion ink:

  Noted. Let them proceed to Hangzhou but do not send them yet to Beijing. Advise Prefect of Hangzhou to observe and report.

  Chapter 27

  After their dramatic victory at Fengyang, the bandits had descended southward to the Yangtze River. The government forces blocked them from any further advance toward Nanjing, and the bandits turned upriver, taking a few towns and threatening others, including Luzhou, Tongcheng and Anqing.

  By May, however, they were no longer an immediate threat to Tongcheng. The Dashing King and the Dashing General were in Shanxi, and the Yellow Tiger in Henan.

  By June, some of the gentry who had fled Tongcheng immediately after the autumn uprising had filtered back. The returnees were mostly men, and mostly younger men at that, but at least there was a semblance of normalcy.

  * * *

  “It is good to have you back,” Fang Kongzhao said to one of them, “but…why are you back? We still hear rumors of bands of bandits roving about the province, you know.”

  The returnee, Zhang Bingyi, shrugged. “I heard in Nanjing from a friend in the Ministry of War that the main bandit armies are now back in Shanxi and Henan.” Those provinces lay to the north and west of Nan-Zhili.

  “That’s good to know,” said Kongzhao. “We’re a bit behind on news here in Tongcheng, as you know. But I am sure there are still a few bands in Nan-Zhili. Even a band numbering a few thousand can take a smaller town, and if several such groups worked together, a city could fall into their clutches.

  “And there are food shortages. The countryside is quite at the mercy of even the smallest bands, so many fields have been untended.”

  “And the food shortages cause more peasants to turn to banditry,” said Kongzhao. “Did you enjoy your forced holiday in Nanjing?”

  “I suppose,” said Bingyi. “The intellectual and cultural life is certainly superior to here. But many refugees from the northwest provinces have fled there, so prices for food and housing have skyrocketed.”

  “Fled there? Not to Beijing?”

  “The Jurchen and their Mongol allies invaded again last summer, you know. Took Bao’anzhou; threatened Datong. And people haven’t forgotten the invasion of six winters ago, either. They came close to taking Beijing, and looted Zunhua, Yongping and Luanzhou.”

  Bingyi shrugged. “With problems everywhere, returning to Tongcheng seemed the least evil. At least here I can see to the safety of the family property.”

  “And your children?”

  “I left them in Nanjing. Perhaps in a few months, if Tongcheng remains peaceful, I will call for them. What of your family?”

  “I, too, am following a wait-and-see strategy,” said Kongzhao. “In the meantime, I would like your help in getting Tongcheng’s defenses in order. The bandit armies move three times as fast as the government troops, and can strike anywhere at any time. There is no guarantee that the soldiers will come in time if we call for them.”

  “And who wants government troops in their town, anyway?” said Bingyi. “The bandits are a coarse comb; the soldiers are a fine comb.”

  Year of the Pig, Sixth Month (July 14–August 12, 1635)

  Nanjing

  “Wait!” cried Fang Weiyi. She, her nephew Yizhi, and his wife had just come to an intersection in a market area of the huge city of Nanjing, and even though Yizhi was just a few feet away, she had to shout to be heard over the traffic noise.

  “Nephew, your wife and I”—here she motioned to the young woman in question, standing next to her—“are country girls. Nanjing is fine for a visit once a year, but living here is driving us crazy. There are just too many people, too close together. I think it is time for us to go back to Tongcheng.”

  Fang Yizhi bowed to his wife and his Aunt Weiyi. “I am so sorry, ladies, but my father gave strict instructions that you were to stay away from Tongcheng until the bandit threat abated.”

  “Yizhi, do you see how many gray hairs I have?” demanded Weiyi, tapping her head. “There’s a gray hair for every year that there were reports of bandits somewhere. We can’t let our lives be ruled by fear of bandits. And Tongcheng has a wall to protect itself.”

  “And Nanjing is not completely safe anyway,” Yizhi’s wife added. “Didn’t pirates attack it once?”

  “Well, yes,” said Yizhi. “Eighty years ago. But even though they fought better than our own troops, they were repelled. I agree that no place is completely safe, but Nanjing has more troops and stouter walls than Tongcheng.”

  “It is also more of a target,” said Weiyi.

  “Ladies, if the opportunity ever arises for you to have a strong military escort there and back, I will take you home to visit Tongcheng at least. But in the meantime, enjoy the city life.”

  “Well… How about we move south to Hangzhou? That way we can visit with friends we haven’t seen for a while.”

  Yizhi sighed. “All right. I’ll make the arrangements, and let Father know.”

  Rented building

  Hangzhou

  The sign above the entrance read, Glorious Exhibition of Marvels of the Uttermost West. Fang Yizhi pulled open the main door, and he and his aunt stepped into the entryway. It had the traditional spirit wall a few feet inside, which screened the building’s courtyard from street view when the doors were open. Th
at also meant that evil forces could not penetrate deeper into the house as they only traveled in straight lines.

  Aunt Weiyi pointed out that there was artwork of a strange kind hanging on the spirit wall.

  “Pictures of the ‘uttermost west’?” Yizhi asked.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” said Weiyi. “The people in the pictures are certainly not Han and the architecture is outlandish.”

  “The style is also very alien,” said Yizhi. “The artist seems more interested in capturing every detail of the occasion than in expressing the essence of the scene.”

  “I agree,” said Weiyi, who was an accomplished artist. “Nor do I see paint or pen strokes, and there are colors I have not seen in a painting before.”

  They walked around the spirit wall and emerged into the courtyard. This was a long rectangle, perpendicular to the entryway. Opposite the entryway was the traditional reception hall, open to the courtyard, but roofed. Untraditionally, there was a counter that stretched across the width of the reception hall with a young Chinese man standing behind it. Above the counter were signs reading Hall of Mementos and Information.

  Yizhi and Weiyi walked over to speak to him. “How were the pictures hanging on the Zhàobì made?” Weiyi asked. “And where?”

  “Those are photographs of Europe and America,” he said. His intonation was oddly stilted and the accent not one Yizhi had ever heard before. “The best person to ask about them would be Judith Leyster, but she hasn’t come in yet. Why don’t you start looking through the exhibits, and I will send her to you when she arrives.”

  “Where should we start?” Yizhi asked. “And what is your name?”

  “I am Teacher Song,” the man said. “You may call me ‘Mike.’ It doesn’t mean anything in Chinese, but it is what my friends in Europe call me. As to where to start, that depends on your interests. At the east and west ends of the courtyard there are stairs, but the upper floor is closed to visitors. On this floor, there are a total of eight halls, four to the north and four to the south. Right now, only the Halls of Lightning, Seeing and Mechanism are open. They are marked as such.”

  “Lightning?” asked Yizhi. “Shen Kuo expressed doubt that people would ever know why an ordinary fire burns things of vegetable origin before it melts things of metal, but when lightning struck a house, the metal objects can be melted but the wood was unharmed. Do you know the answer?”

  “Yes, I do,” said Mike Song. “Lightning is not fire, even though it can start a fire. It is a form of what we call ‘electricity.’ Perhaps you should start with the Hall of Electricity.”

  Weiyi shrugged. “Fine with me. But don’t forget to send Judith Leyster to find us.”

  Yizhi and Weiyi found and entered the Hall of Lightning, and another foreigner was standing there. He was dressed like a scholar, in a blue robe with white trim, and a black hat. On the robe there was a square cloth sewn on, with a design representing an unfamiliar bird upon it. Yizhi supposed that it was the equivalent of mandarin rank badge—a crane denoted one of the first rank, a golden pheasant one of the second rank, and so on—and that the foreigner was an official of some kind in his own government.

  “Hello, I am Saluzzo James, welcome to the Hall of Lightning. Would you like to see a ‘far-speaker’? It can be used to talk to someone in another room or even further away, as long as you both have far-speakers and they are properly connected.”

  Yizhi nodded.

  “Well, then, we have two in this room, one on the left and the other on the right. Would you and your—” Jim paused.

  “Aunt,” said Weiyi.

  “You and your aunt like to try to use them to speak to each other?”

  Yizhi looked at Weiyi, and received a fractional nod. “Yes.”

  “Splendid. Let me use the one on the left to explain things to both of you, and then you can split up and talk by far-speaker.”

  Yizhi and Weiyi followed Mike and stood in front of the machine in question. The far-speaker was in a large corner closet, with an open door. The machine featured three boxes mounted on a long vertical wood backing. The upper box had a two-pronged hook on the left side and a crank on the right. A long brass object, a cylinder flared at one end, was hanging on the hook and was attached by a cord at the narrow end to another part of the device. And on the face of the upper box, near the top, were two brass hemispheres.

  The middle box was smaller, and had some sort of circular structure in the middle. Finally, the lower box had a sloped roof.

  “This is booth one of this phone network,” said Jim. He tapped the object hanging on the hook. “We call this the receiver. You use it to hear what the other person is saying.” Then he tapped the other conical object. “We call this the microphone, which you use to speak.” Finally he tapped one of the two hemispheres, and it gave off a dull metallic ring. “And this is the incoming call bell, or clapper.

  “So, take the receiver off the hook and put it to your ear. Yes, like that. Now, let me go to the far-speaker in Booth Two and I’ll call you.” Jim went to the other phone, which was in a second corner closet, and started turning the crank on the right side of his phone.

  The bell on Yizhi’s phone started ringing without anyone touching it. Yizhi fought back an urge to run. What if the spirits bound in the phone box escaped? Were they dangerous, or just musically inclined?

  “See, my far-speaker is telling yours that there’s an incoming call by causing its clapper to ring,” Jim explained.

  “How does it do that?”

  “It uses electricity. What you might call, ‘trapped lightning.’”

  Yizhi wasn’t sure that he preferred this explanation to bound spirits.

  “The electricity is generated in the bottom box, in what we call a Danielle cell battery. How that works is something to explain another time. The electricity travels along a copper wire connecting the two far-speakers. Just like lightning, this electricity prefers to travel inside metals, and its favorite metal is copper.

  “Right now it’s running into a coil of wire that’s behind your clappers. The electricity is turned on and off. When it’s on, it causes the coil to act like a lodestone and attract the metal of the clapper, and when it’s off, the clapper springs back to its resting place. So that makes the ringing sound. Now, keep your ear next to the receiver.”

  Jim picked up the receiver on the other phone and put his mouth to the transmitter on its middle box. “What hath Confucius wrought?” he asked.

  Yizhi jumped away from his phone as if the bolt of lightning he had feared had just struck a nearby tree. Fortunately, he let go of the receiver before doing so.

  “There’s nothing supernatural going on,” Mike reassured him. “Just a greater knowledge of how the universe works. The sound is impressed on the trapped lightning by the transmitter here”—he tapped the middle box of Yizhi’s phone—“a bit the way hitting the surface of a lake impresses ripples on the water. And the receiver senses the ripples in the lightning and converts them back into sound.

  “Now you try saying something to me. I am going to go into the closet and close the door behind me, so I can’t hear you directly, only by way of the far-speakers. After you speak, knock on the closet door and ask me to repeat what you said.”

  The door closed with a thud. Yizhi edged back to his phone and put his mouth to the transmitter. “It takes two hands to clap,” he declared. A moment later, Mike came out of the right-hand closet and repeated Yizhi’s words.

  “Madam, would you like to speak to your nephew via lightning?” He gestured toward the right-hand phone. “Just do what I did.”

  Fang Weiyi bowed to him and put her mouth by the transmitter of the right-hand phone. “Well, Yizhi, this is something we don’t have in Tongcheng.”

  Yizhi poked his head out of the left-hand closet, and asked Mike, “What happens if we both speak at the same time?”

  “If you both have the receivers to your ears, you will hear each other simultaneously, but it may be
confusing. But if you wait to speak until the other person has obviously paused, you will avoid that.”

  Yizhi and Weiyi used the phones for a few more minutes. At last, Yizhi asked his aunt, “Ready to see another wonder?”

  They left the phone booths and went looking for Jim. “What else can you show us?” Yizhi asked.

  “We have several exhibits concerning how to make electricity. There are Danielle cells, which are what we use inside the far-speakers. They work by a chemical reaction. They’re very useful, but not really interesting to look at. We also have a Traeger bicycle generator—”

  There was a cough behind them. “A thousand apologies,” said Mike, “but our guests asked to be told when Judith Leyster arrived. She is in the Hall of Seeing, awaiting you.”

  “We best go there now,” said Weiyi. “We can come back here later.”

  Mike led them to another hall, this one on the same side of the courtyard as the reception hall. A young woman was standing there. She was wearing a red velvet dress and a black bodice, with the magenta of her sleeves visible. The most distinctive feature of her attire was the large white ruff, which made it appear that her head was being served on a platter.

  “I am Judith Leyster. ‘Leyster’ is my family name, and ‘Judith’ is my personal name. I am an artist from the Netherlands, and I am on the staff of the mission of the United States of Europe to the Empire of China. I heard that you were looking for me.”

  “We were,” said Weiyi. “I am Fang Weiyi and this is my nephew Yizhi. What can you tell us about the pictures we saw when we entered the building? Where were they painted, and how?”

  “They weren’t painted at all,” Judith said. “They are ‘photographs,’ a word which means ‘drawn with light’ in an ancient language of Europe. They are made through a combination of the optical and alchemical arts, guided of course, by the sensibility of the artist. The ones in multiple colors were made in Grantville before an event we call the Ring of Fire. I am not equipped to make that kind of photograph.