1636: The China Venture

by Eric Flint

  A tear tracked across her cheek. “I asked you to come here as a friend, and perhaps a lover…not as a client.”

  Mike reached over and wiped it away. “I don’t consider you to be a lesser person than me because you were forced into prostitution. If you do not treat me as a client, I will not treat you as a courtesan. We can be friends. And fellow scholars. And…lovers.”

  “I’d like that,” she replied.

  * * *

  Mike decided that he needed to talk to someone about Liu Rushi. First, he quizzed Fang Yizhi about Liu Rushi, her relationship with Chen Zilong, and the situation of women in Chinese society in general. He learned much but felt that he also wanted the perspective of a fellow up-timer. And Martina, at least, had actually met Liu Rushi, so he confided in her. He told her about Liu Rushi’s descent into prostitution and her attempt to escape it with the aid of the scholar Chen Zilong. “Not to be confused with our nautical friend, Zheng Zhilong,” he added.

  Martina nodded. “I must say, I find Chinese names hard to keep straight.”

  “Almost as bad as Laura and Lauren, or Mark and Martin, or Alyssa and Melissa,” said Mike, who smiled fleetingly. “But what do you think I should do, Martina? I really, really like her. She isn’t just gorgeous; she’s really very smart. And half the reason my aunt and uncle went along with my going on the USE mission was so I could meet a Chinese girl.”

  “I am not sure they had a courtesan in mind.”

  “Heck, Martina, I am not sure that they quite realized how tough it is to meet young women, here and now. If Romeo and Juliet had lived in Beijing, rather than Verona, Romeo probably wouldn’t even have seen Juliet, let alone serenaded her. From what Yizhi has told me, unmarried women of his class spend most of their time in the inner quarters, like Muslim women. If they leave, it’s in a palanquin, to go visit a temple, or other women. There are no masked balls.”

  “Judith and I have made lady friends who are a bit more adventurous than that,” said Martina. “They have had outings together to scenic spots, like West Lake, or traveled to other towns with their husbands or brothers or sons. They even visit the courtesan boats!”

  “Your married lady friends. The unmarried ones are more sheltered. Anyway, from what she tells me, she is seventeen. I was born in 1980, so I am twenty-five now. This poet Chen Zilong; he’s a friend of Fang Yizhi’s, and is three years older than him. I am in between them in age.”

  “I certainly have not suggested that age is a barrier,” said Martina.

  “Well, as to the other thing, look at Gretchen Richter and Jeff Higgins.”

  “Yes, but Jeff was a ‘Ring orphan,’ like Eric Garlow.”

  “Then what about Diane Jackson? I don’t know her well, but from veiled remarks my uncle has made, I think she was some kind of bar hostess or worse in Vietnam.”

  “She’s a generation older than me, and my family’s not UMWA, so I don’t know,” said Martina. “But as I see it, you have three issues. First, and forgive me for having to mention it, is she just interested in you as long as you have money to spend on her? Surely, her madam would want her to take you for everything she can get, and then dump you.”

  As Mike began to protest, Martina cut him off. “I know, you think it’s true romance. It’s surely her job to so persuade every one of her clients.”

  “I am not an idiot, Martina. But I have spoken with Fang Yizhi, who is friends with her last lover, Chen Zilong, and Yizhi says that she didn’t make big financial demands of Zilong. Except, that is, for wanting him to buy her as a concubine. But she wasn’t asking for jewelry one week and silk the next week.”

  Martina shrugged. “All right, let’s assume that’s the case. But even if she is genuinely interested in you, and not a gold digger, can you afford to buy out her contract? You can’t just elope with her on the next ship back to Europe and create a legal and possibly diplomatic crisis for the USE embassy.”

  “I am working on that,” said Mike. “I have a couple of ideas.”

  “And finally, can she adjust to life in Europe, if you did legally take her home with you? Remember, she’d be both an Asian among Europeans and a member of a dishonorable trade by both Asian and European standards.”

  “Well, she doesn’t have to adjust to life in Europe. Just in Grantville, which is something of a special case.”

  Martina started to say something, then apparently thought better of it. “Just be careful, Mike. Doctor Carvalhal can help a lady through a pregnancy, but I don’t think he can mend a broken heart.”

  * * *

  The exhibition hall door opened, causing a bell to ring. Martina looked up to see who it was, and beckoned to the visitor. “Liu Rushi! You came back.”

  Liu Rushi bowed. “A thousand apologies for my hasty departure the other day.”

  “It’s not a problem.” Martina tensed slightly. “So, Mike says that you’re a calligrapher and a painter?”

  “Among other things,” said Liu Rushi.

  “I have heard about the other things,” said Martina.

  “Is that a problem?” asked Liu Rushi.

  “Not if you are honest with, and kind to, Mike.”

  “I am. I will be. I promise. The Gods of Heaven and Earth know what is in my heart. If I am false to him, may Heaven and the people of the Earth both strike me dead.”

  “Well…” Martina was at temporary loss for words. “I don’t want you stricken dead; I just don’t want Mike to suffer a broken heart. Been there, done that. But let’s set that aside for now. I did have something to ask you. And show you. We have seen lots of bookshops here in Hangzhou. It’s obvious that China mass-produces books. Is there a market, you think, for a new way to make copies very quickly?”

  “Perhaps. If it is sufficiently superior to wood block printing.”

  “Then let me show you how a duplicating machine works, I think you’ll find it interesting. Let me see…” Martina rummaged around a bit.

  “Here’s a waxed mulberry paper stencil. It’s not as good as waxed silk, but it’s cheaper, and good enough for demonstration purposes. The basic idea of a stencil is that you write on it so you remove the wax, and then when ink is applied it goes through the unwaxed spots of the stencil and prints onto the paper.”

  “I understand,” said Liu Rushi. “We don’t use it for printing on paper nowadays, but there is an old technique for printing on fabric in which you first prick out the pattern on a thick paper with needles, then cover the fabric with the perforated paper and apply the ink.”

  “Is that so?” said Martina. “Well, we have something better than needles for doing the pricking.” She held out a stylus with a wooden handle and an L-shaped metal extension. The bar of the “L” was perpendicular to the handle, and served as the spindle for a metal wheel, the size of a millet seed, with many teeth.

  “Please use this Cyclostyle stylus to cut the stencil. Try characters of different sizes so we can compare how they came out. And simple drawings. Be sure you press hard enough to remove the wax. Oh, and don’t write too close to the edge of the stencil.”

  Liu Rushi held the wheel of the stylus up close to her eye. “This is very fine work; it must be quite expensive to make.”

  “We have our ways.” Martina gestured toward the stencil. “Ready to give it a try?”

  Unlike a westerner with a pen, Liu Rushi held the stylus perfectly perpendicular to the page. She pinched the stylus about a third of the way down between thumb and index finger, and the middle more loosely between the middle and ring fingers. The two pairs of fingers formed a cross, so the pen could be moved in any direction over the page.

  The first thing Liu Rushi drew was a large character.

  Martina recognized it; it was a yong, which meant “forever.”

  “Why did you pick that one?” she asked.

  “It contains all of the major strokes.”

  Liu Rushi frowned.

  Martina studied Liu Rushi’s handiwork, without seeing anything that would exp
lain Liu Rushi’s sour expression. “What’s wrong?”

  “There are three problems with your stylus,” the Chinese woman answered. “First, the wheel is offset slightly from the axis of the stylus, so I am drawing just a bit off where I expect to be. I supposed I would get used to that after a while. Second, it’s hard to see the result; they are just little pinpricks, and thus to properly line up a series of characters.”

  “We have a workaround,” Martina told her. “It’s called a pantograph. You could draw with a regular inked pen and the movement would be echoed by the stylus.”

  “Finally,” said Liu Rushi, “it’s much inferior to the brush I use for calligraphy—a Húbi brush from Shanlian.”

  “Why is that?”

  “A Shanlian brush has three different kinds of hair: yellow weasel, goat and rabbit. Each type of hair provides a different stroke. I can’t vary the thickness of the stroke with this gadget. The characters won’t look artistic.”

  “But Mike Song said that the characters used in woodblock printing were simpler.”

  The corners of Liu Rushi’s mouth drew apart ever so slightly. “Mike is correct. Still, even in jiangti, the ‘workman style’ developed in the Song dynasty, there are thick vertical strokes, and thin horizontal strokes, with triangles at the end of the latter.”

  Martina held up her hand. “Wait. Mike gave us a sample of what he called ‘East Asian sans serif’; he said that’s what would be best to do on a stencil.” She pulled out a printed sheet and handed it to Liu Rushi. It was a passage from the Thousand Character Classic.

  Liu Rushi wrinkled her nose. “Ugly. All of the strokes are the same thickness, there are fewer curves, and no decorative flourishes. But yes, it is readable, and I can use your device to write characters in this style.”

  She started cutting the stencil.

  “Please draw something, too, if you can,” Martina added. “The best I can manage are stick figures.”

  Liu Rushi did so, and handed the cut stencil to Martina. Her expression was dubious. “Well, it’s an experiment.” She wrote on the stencil and handed it back to Martina. “Now what?”

  Martina pulled out a hinged wooden frame. The right part was solid, and had a metal tablet affixed to it, and the left had a rectangular opening. She laid an ordinary sheet of paper over the metal tablet, placed the cut stencil on top, and then closed the frame. The left frame, now on top, held down the papers. She took out an ink pad and a roller, inked the roller, and then ran the roller several times up and down over the cut stencil, which was exposed through the opening in the upper frame.

  Martina opened up the frame, and pulled off the stencil. “See!”

  “It printed!” she declared, and grinned.

  “Yep. The roller squeezes the ink up through the prick holes in the stencil and onto the paper. So, why don’t you insert another blank sheet and try the whole process yourself.”

  Liu Rushi did so, and inspected the second copy. “Not bad, actually! Not really the equal of a woodblock print, but you needn’t be a carver to make it. How many copies can you make from one stencil?”

  “It depends on the quality of the stencil material, and how careful the operator is, but several hundred, I think.”

  Liu Rushi sighed. “That’s not a lot. From a pearwood block, you can pull off several thousand copies before you need to make repairs.”

  “Yes, but how long does it take to carve a pearwood block?” Martina retorted.

  “A carver can cut a hundred characters in a day, and you might have ten columns of characters and twenty characters per column. So, two days for a full block.”

  “That quickly?” Martina raised her eyebrows. “It’s not that I doubt you, but how do you know this?”

  “Many of my clients have had literary pretensions,” Liu Rushi replied, “and they have spoken to me about the printing industry. Mostly complaining about how many errors the carvers make, you understand. Perhaps wishing that the offenders would be struck by lightning, as one reputedly was after he introduced errors into a medical prescription.”

  Martina laughed. “Still, Mike says that he can cut a stencil at about half the speed that he can write out Chinese the ordinary way. And we timed him writing out Chinese, and two hundred characters took him something like fifteen minutes. So he could do thirty-two duplicate stencils if he spent eight hours at it. And even if each one was good for only a hundred copies, that would be thirty-two hundred copies from one day’s work, which would be competitive with a wood block.”

  Liu Rushi shook her head again. “Yes, in speed, but with all those duplicates there’d be more opportunity for errors to creep in.”

  “Hmm. Maybe. We are still experimenting back home with different wax and paper combinations and we hope to achieve a thousand copies per stencil. We can certainly cut two stencils faster than a carver can carve one block! But until then…” It was Martina’s turn to sigh. “Well, I guess we can use it to print our own advertising flyers.”

  “I think…I think your most likely customers are scholars themselves. Someone who wants to distribute a work, but not in sufficient number of copies to warrant carving wood blocks. Or I should say, hiring a carver to do the carving; it takes several years to learn the skill.”

  Martina nodded. “I hear you. What sort of works?”

  “Oh, family histories perhaps. Collections of poems, songs, jokes, riddles, and stories by a literatus who has only a local reputation.”

  “So, who should we talk to in order to sell the machines? And, of course, the pricker, the stencils, the ink and the ink pads.” The ink was just soot in quick-drying linseed oil, and the ink pads just cotton, but Martina knew better than to tell the Chinese how easy it would be to duplicate them.

  Liu Rushi frowned. “I can talk to my clients. Show them the stencil and the prints, if you loan them to me. See if they know someone who’s interested.”

  “You know, if you can actually make the sale on our behalf, I can pay you a commission,” said Martina. “Or if you prefer, you can buy the machines, paper and ink, and sell them yourself—outside Hangzhou, that is, or after we leave town.”

  “For now, I would prefer the former. I have acted as a chung-jen, a ‘person between,’ for my artist and literary friends. I promote their work, or I approach them on behalf of a prospective purchaser who does not know them personally. This sounds similar enough.”

  “I would be most grateful,” said Martina.

  The two ladies parted on good terms.

  Chapter 33

  There had been a certain amount of ticklish negotiation concerning where the Rode Draak and the Groen Feniks were anchored. The two ships hadn’t come all the way up the Qiantang River to the city docks, as the Rode Draak drew too much water for that to be safe, but rather had stopped in nearby Shaoxing, a canal town to the southeast. But the port authorities were understandably nervous about a vessel as powerful as the Rode Draak being even that close to Hangzhou. Captain Lyell, and for that matter, Peter Minuit and Aratun the Armenian, were equally nervous about offloading their silver in a strange country where thieves (and thieving officials) might abound.

  If they did offload it, they wanted it to be under armed guard. And the authorities were even more twitchy about having armed foreigners in the city.

  The resolution, brokered by Zheng Zhilong, was that the silver was carefully counted, a receipt was given, and most of it was transferred under Chinese guard, along with other cargo, to a stout rented warehouse in Hangzhou. Certain local merchants gave bond assuring the safety of the silver, and provided the outside guards. The visitors provided the locks, stiffened the warehouse defenses at their own expense, and could have foreign armed guards inside the warehouse.

  Once the silver was used to buy silk, the silk could be stored in the same warehouse, or distributed among several. Zheng Zhilong recommended the latter to reduce the risk of losing everything if there was a fire.

  The Rode Draak, with some silver still on board as
a reserve, was taken by Captain Lyell to Zhoushan Island with most of its officers and crew. Like Guangzhou, Xiamen and Ningbo, it had occasionally received visits from western traders. Zhoushan Island lay at the entrance to Hangzhou Bay, roughly one hundred twenty miles from Hangzhou City.

  Eric Garlow figured that Zheng Zhilong thought that the principle of “out of sight, out of mind” applied. The mandarins in Hangzhou wouldn’t care what happened in Zhoushan. And if, Heaven forbid, there was some unfortunate incident involving the ship or crew in Zhoushan, it would be easier and cheaper for Zheng Zhilong to buy off the local officials and settle the matter.

  Because of the winds in Hangzhou Bay at this time of year, the move took a good ten days; whereas in November the trip would have taken less than a day. But the authorities weren’t willing to let the Rode Draak dock in Shaoxing that long.

  Eric had also tried to get the authorities to let the Rode Draak dock at Ganpu, on the head of the bay, on the north side by the Changshan River, or even Ningbo on the south. They were somewhat closer and could be reached by land as well as by sea. He was unsuccessful, but the less threatening Groen Feniks was allowed to remain in Shaoxing.

  He wasn’t really surprised by the position taken by the Chinese government. In truth, it was a great concession to have even the smaller ship be as close to Hangzhou as Shaoxing. The Portuguese from Macao were not allowed to anchor so close to Canton, and their ships were generally not as well armed as the Groen Feniks, much less the Rode Draak.

  * * *

  The American ginseng brought by Mike Song had been selling in Hangzhou at a slight discount relative to ginseng from the border region between China and Korea. Then a rumor spread through the city of Hangzhou that the American ginseng was found only high in the mountains, where it had been grown by immortals, and that the American ginseng hunters had to travel to their fields in balloons. The price of the American ginseng tripled.