Chusan
Page 20
In April, when the fields are in bloom, the whole country seems tinged with gold, and the fragrance which fills the air, particularly after an April shower, is delightful…. Chusan in spring is one of the most beautiful islands in the world. It reminds the Englishman of his own native land. In the mornings the grass sparkles with dew, the air is cool and refreshing, the birds are singing in every bush, and flowers are hanging in graceful festoons from the trees and hedges. [14]
Springtime in Chusan is just as lovely today. The climate, Fortune discovered, nurtured an abundance of beautiful plants that would thrive back in England. In the torrid south, azaleas confined themselves to cool mountaintops, but here in Zhejiang they grew wild on the lowest slopes:
Few can form any idea of the gorgeous and striking beauty of these azalea-clad mountains, where, on every side, as far as the vision extends, the eye rests on masses of flowers of dazzling brightness and surpassing beauty. Nor is it the azalea alone which claims our admiration; clematises, wild roses, the honeysuckles, the Glycine and a hundred others mingle their flowers with them.
Great shell-burst splashes of quivering bamboo reminded Fortune of the young larch forests back home. The long waxy leaves of the Chinese bayberry drew the eye toward the clumps of juicy red fruit at their centre. Groves of kumquat bushes speckled the green hillsides with orange during the season. For trees there were the ubiquitous fir and pine, and the wind-tortured cypresses and junipers ever to be found crowding around the graves of the wealthy like stooping mourners. He painstakingly dug up specimens of scented lilac daphnes, of buddleia with its long, purple spikes, of the most eye-catching of rose-coloured weigelas found growing in the garden of a mandarin near Tinghae, of peonies, clematis, honeysuckle, japonica, hibiscus and more, and sent them all back to London.
When Robert Fortune turned his eye-glass toward the details of everyday life on the island he found two cultures tentatively exploring one another — if Chusan’s social fabric was not of Chinese warp and British weft, perhaps it resembled a little an oriental silk sparsely decorated with Western embroidery. For a start, the inhabitants of this place struck one as a ‘quiet and inoffensive race, always civil and obliging.’ Like the flora of their island home they were mercifully different from the Chinese of Canton, whom outsiders found avaricious and xenophobic. British government, thought Fortune, was keeping the inevitable bad elements amongst them in check. The proximity of a large British garrison had geared much of the island’s agricultural production toward supplying its needs, and the city markets were filled daily with fruit and vegetables, with fowl and oxen. A great variety of fish was landed — sole, mullet, pomfret, seer fish, mandarin fish, mackerel, sea trout and more. From the interior came wild game, hog-deer, and the many species of birds Edward Cree found so delicious. Before the British landed, the islanders (who had no access to firearms, these being forbidden to all but soldiers) had left the wildfowl in peace, artificially hatching and raising all the ducks and geese they required. But now the hills swarmed with trappers who harvested their bounty to feed the hungry foreigners. Tartar sheep were imported from the mainland, thrived, and ended up on British dining tables. The Chinese quickly learned that Europeans preferred baked bread to steamed buns, and brick-built ovens sprang up to meet the demand. Several pastry shops opened up, selling sweetmeats. Bespoke tailors set up near the wharves. Curio shops sold mass-produced souvenirs for officers and their wives to impress family and friends back home — gods carved in wood or stone, incense burners, bronzes, dragons and kirins, porcelains, paintings, silks and satins, endless fans, and the most elaborate and beautiful embroidery fashioned into scarves and aprons in quite the style of an English lady. Reading the descriptions of Tinghae in 1843, it is impossible not to picture the alleyways around the popular Chinese tourist sights of our own day. These shopkeepers had the confidence to extend credit to these valued customers, and each of them thought it de rigueur to have an English shop-sign above his door, chosen under advice from the men who formed their clientele: ‘Stultz, tailor, from London’, read one, ‘Buckmaster, tailor to the army and navy’ another, ‘Dominie Dobbs the grocer’, ‘Squire Sam, porcelain merchant’, ‘Tailor to Her Most Graceful Majesty Queen Victoria and His Royal Highness Prince Albert, by appointment’. ‘Ici on parle Français’ was one unlikely boast. Testimonials from customers were in great demand, many of them florid to the point of ridicule and clearly the result of an escalating joke played on the poor Chinese. They, ever suspicious, would forever be showing them to other customers for advice, and so ever more extravagant touches would be added by way of correction. [15]
Many of the Chinese having dealings with the British seem to have understood a little English, plus a smattering of Malay and Indian words (a large part of the field force throughout the occupation remained sepoys). In a Babel of tongues, they classed foreigners as mandalee, siensang or a-say, depending on rank. A mandalee (an attempt at ‘mandarin’, which is a Portuguese rather than a Chinese word) might be bulla bulla or chotta chotta — the islanders’ best approximation of ‘big’ and ‘small’ in Bengali. Siensang, used to address merchants, was the local equivalent of ‘mister’. A-say was used for everybody else, a misunderstanding that apparently arose from the Chinese hearing the English hail one another with the words ‘I say!’ and taking it to be a form of address. The British in turn called the Chinese fokee, a Cantonese term meaning ‘friend’ or ‘boss’, the name one might use these days to fetch a waiter. It would have meant nothing to the Wu speakers of Chusan, who presumably thought it an English word. In the markets, Robert Fortune reported, there grew up an onomatopoeic vocabulary of animal names: boo for cow, kake for chicken, his-wak goose and kwak duck, though why simply pointing did not do, heaven only knows. [16]
Between lengthy peregrinations across eastern and southern China, Fortune visited his favourite Chusan archipelago on many occasions through 1843 and into the following year. As the heat of summer waned he headed back to Hong Kong. When he sailed for home on the John Cooper there travelled with him glazed Wardian cases filled with quite the most beautiful plants from Chusan, whose descendants ornament our gardens today.
Doctor Alexander Grant of the Bengal Medical Service, a correspondent of the Times newspaper back in London during his time on Chusan, was another man who found himself just as fascinated with his island home as was Fortune. With his Westmoreland Regiment now facing only light duties, with plenty of fresh meat and (now that they were in proper barracks) no undue exposure to the elements, throughout 1843 Dr Grant had plenty of spare time to devote to his hobby, a systematic study of Chinese husbandry. The time had been ripe for a reappraisal of the subject: following the theories of continental polemicists such as Voltaire, writers like the French economist François Quesnay (he too had never visited China) had insisted that there was no uncultivated land near Chinese towns, nor even trees, hedges or ditches for fear that the smallest plot of soil would be wasted. Hills and mountains, he said, were cultivated to their very summits, an image of fertility, while China’s towns were kept clean by the practice of collecting refuse to fertilise the land. Quesnay’s descriptions had become such a cliché that the British had been perplexed to find on invading Chusan that much of the island was covered with scrub. Far from living in an agrarian utopia, it swiftly became apparent that the Chinese were quaintly medieval and inefficient in these matters, that they relied for irrigation upon man-powered waterwheels, and were insistent that the time-honoured ways of planting, transplanting, weeding, reaping and threshing were not to be altered. More objectionable to British sensibilities, the islanders insisted upon leaving coffins unburied on the hillsides, with bones and skulls left strewn about the place by wild animals, and rotten lids forever a trap for unwary feet. One officer wrote of his days spent wandering the hills, that:
in the tenanted graves which curiosity induced us to open, the body appeared dressed as in life, the pipe and tobacco lay on the breast, and loaves and rice at the unconscious
head. [17]
After a decade of major advances in sanitation back home, Britons could not fathom the islanders’ irrational attachment to such traditions over advances in public health. Knowing from experience that malaria was linked to stagnant paddy, still they refused to raise wheat instead. Sir Henry Pottinger had tried and failed to convince Tinghae’s farmers of the benefits of dry cereals, though he in his turn had failed to appreciate the central — even mythic — role that rice played in the imperial Chinese system. The inquisitive Dr Grant, however, not satisfied with merely sniping at the Chinese from the sidelines, trekked across the island with his notebook to record age-old practices that aimed to eke every last drop of worth from the soil. [18]
Chinese agriculture proved to be different in many and unexpected ways from how it was portrayed in Europe. To begin with, their lives bound to the turning of the year, farmers divided each of the four seasons into six fifteen-day periods called qi, and each qi into three hou of five-days each. The cycles of rural life closely followed the predictable path of those twenty-four annual qi, whose names like ancient mnemonics encapsulated two millennia of observations — Winter Solstice, Slight Cold, Great Cold, Start of Spring, Rainwater, Insects Awake, Spring Equinox…. Come the qi of Clarity and Brightness in early April, the island’s rice fields were ploughed up. Flooded using hand-powered chain-pumps, the mud of the seed-beds was raked until, as smooth as a billiard table, exactly one inch of water lay on them. Rice seeds that had been steeping in water and urine were now sown in nursery beds. By the middle of the month, the fields were being manured with a mixture of cow dung, fermented night soil, and slurry dredged from the canals (it had been this lethal concoction that Burrell’s men had been obliged to drink after the invasion of 1840). The green seedlings pushed through the water of their nurseries during the qi of Grain Rains, and when in early May they reached six inches the back-breaking task of transplanting could begin. Having set the seedlings in bunches one foot apart in their flooded fields, the farmers’ attention turned to other crops.
Once the mustard had blossomed in a splash of yellow, the mustard fields were planted with sweetcorn seedlings. The mustard seed was dried and winnowed. As May rolled over into June, a succession of foods came into season. British officers found that the peas their Chinese cooks served up to them were replaced by green beans. There was anxiety during the qi of Grain Fills over a drought that threatened the rice crop, though the same dry spell saw the wheat and barley harvested and winnowed. The countryside was dotted with sheaves of drying straw; roadsides and cottage gardens were full of fine cucumbers and melons; the aubergines bore a lustrous purple tinge. As the canals dried up and the soil of the paddy began to crack, though, the farmers prayed for rain, ‘the aged and experienced anxiously scanning the setting sun for the indications of the blessed shower.’ It worked, and the heavens opened for three days. Come the arrival of Slight Heat, the streams and canals were again full.
July of 1843 was just as sultry as when the British had first landed three years earlier. As the last of the wheat, barley and mustard was got in, the bare fields were turned over to the next crop of rice and vegetables. Young boys would set about weeding the paddy, pulling each up by the roots before burying it to rot down at the foot of the rice plant it had tried to usurp. From dawn to dusk they scrabbled in the mud, bent double. But the main occupation in summer was tending the fruits and vegetables. The aubergines, cucumbers, melons and pumpkins were plump and juicy, the sweetcorn and millet were in seed, and the sorghum promised to make good samshoo. Tinghae’s markets were filled with apples and pears, peaches and plums.
Through Autumn Begins and Limit of Heat in the month of August, the reaping and threshing of the first rice crop overlapped with the weeding and irrigating of the next. Tender lettuces and hot chillies appeared on British dining tables. A typhoon damaged farmhouses early the next month, but the harvest went on regardless. It was a fine time to be at mess, with sweet potatoes, limes, chestnuts and walnuts making an appearance in town. The last plantings of the first rice crop were brought in, making way for more wheat, mustard and other vegetables. A second typhoon struck the island during the qi of Autumn Equinox, on the second anniversary of Pottinger’s invasion. The low-lying valleys were flooded, trees were uprooted, houses lost their roofs, and bridges were swept away. The whole western part of the island, in fact, was a sheet of water out of which the hills now rose as islands. Over one hundred Chinese drowned, but still the survivors doggedly gathered in the harvest once the waters had subsided. Clover was planted for brewing into a nitrogen-rich fertiliser, and the cotton the villagers grew to make their clothes was picked. By the end of a tumultuous month the second rice crop was being reaped and threshed. Fields of soy were ripening, the turnips were fat, clumps of radishes were ready for digging up on the hillsides. [19]
The face of the island by Slight Snow in late November was very different to its summer appearance. Most of the paddy had been drained and ploughed and farms were cropped with mustard, clover, wheat, barley and beans. With the second rice crop now harvested, labour was directed toward digging up the last of the sweet potatoes and drying the soy. Clover formed a thick, green carpet over the vale of Tinghae. The drying floors and roofs of the island were tinged from a distance with pink, as slices of sweet potato dried in the cool air. As Great Snow dusted the peaks, the temperature fell and the canals froze over. The brushwood covering the hills was cut for fuel. The sight of the farmers trudging out to tend the ancestral tombs brought home an important truth about China: now that work was less pressing, the rotten coffins were being rethatched, the overgrown grass on the grave mounds cut back. The tombs might look to outsiders as though they had been forsaken, but on this island men were laid to rest in the company of their ancestors, on land they had cultivated with their own hands: ‘Hence springs one powerful cause of the cherished fondness of a Chinese for the place of his birth,’ observed Grant, ‘and his unwillingness ever to forsake it.’ Little wonder, then, that Chusan’s gentry never gave up hopes of returning once the British were gone.
The ash of the burned brushwood was mixed with animal dung and human waste to provide fertiliser for the coming season. The British feasted on fish, on oysters, cockles and mussels, on the deer, duck, teal and pheasants which were so plentiful. With the crops gathered in and the fields frost-hardened, the Chinese prepared their houses for the coming year. The temples were filled with devotional offerings; in every home from the richest villa to the meanest hut a table was laid out with food. As attention turned away from the fields, this was a popular time to marry: wedding processions were commonplace, and their cacophonies filled the wintry streets with colour and noise. All year, the islanders had been busy from first light to nightfall. Their villages had been kept cheerful and neat. No men had lounged about; no idle women had gossiped in the streets like they would back home. Britain, Dr Grant felt, had plenty to learn from such careful husbandry, such tireless industry. There was much to be gained by adopting Chinese irrigation techniques and a system of fertilising the land where little was ever wasted. [20]
Dr Grant — he was not ashamed to admit it — felt admiration for the Chusanese. It was an admission that would have been scoffed at just a few years before. Gützlaff too, in one of his regular Chinese Reports to his sponsors, mused that:
the moment, when the Chinese maintain the freedom of trade with other nations, and find themselves able to move to other countries with wife and family, will be an epoch-making time in world history, and America as well as Europe and the islands of Australia will soon have to consider the enormity of the event. [21]
Even Captain Pears, whose early impressions of the Chinese had been of detestable, filthy beasts, was later moved to confide in his journal that he could not look upon the Chinese coast without feeling a probability, a certainty even, that a fine and powerful nation would yet be established there. He longed for a thousand of the fearless sailors he had watched outrun a British warship de
spite its firepower, to cut their pigtails off and to make of them the finest battalion in the world. Even the Chinese themselves did not have this much faith in their global potential. [22]
Others who passed through British Chusan were similarly fascinated by the minutiae of life there and recorded what they saw. Far from staying forever unseen behind closed doors, as had been the West’s general impression of Chinese womanhood, Tinghae’s ladies could be seen in numbers on the city streets, teetering along on their tiny bound feet. Tinghae even had its fashionable beau monde, who would promenade in their white stockings, brown silk pantaloons and green jerkins woven upon the silk looms of Suzhou, their heads shaved and pigtails braided with the utmost care and tied with a silk ribbon. On their feet would be a pair of the upturned wooden pattens so beloved of Chinoiserie illustrators (how delightful, that one aspect of that willow-pattern world turned out to be true). In hands from which protruded fingernails of several inches they might hold a light walking cane, or a paper parasol if they feared becoming tanned like a common peasant. The clothes of those farmers, by contrast, were rude, the same for both sexes, woven from a fibrous, nettle-like hemp and dyed blue with wild knot-grass. [23]
So much was clear to onlookers who sauntered about Tinghae, visited the markets, or stood amongst the chattering crowds to watch the rope-dancers, the jugglers, or the local version of Punch and Judy, for the conspicuous aspects of town life impinged on all but the most disinterested of foreigners. Even inquisitive observers like Alexander Grant and Edward Cree, unable to understand Wu dialect, could go little deeper than record what they could observe as bystanders. To these men — and to the rest of the field force even more so — it seemed the Chinese celebrated their New Year simply with the deafening reports of firecrackers and the clanging of gongs. A fortnight later they traipsed through the streets with lamps held out on sticks. Weddings were advertised with the echoing rasp of reeded bamboo pipes. Funerals were singular for the islanders’ white mourning habits and the sheer size of the coffins. The gods were comically clothed in satins and, with undulating paper dragons leading the way, were paraded about the town on sedan chairs. But nobody could say why. When Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to China, tried once to give an account of Chinese religious practice he found it so bound up with every aspect of life that, exasperated, he cut himself short and commented only that ‘the details would be endless.’ So it had been since before the time of Christ, and so it remained until more than a century later and the coming of Communism. [24]