The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure

by Adam Williams

  She noticed that Arthur Topps was looking at her with wide-eyed curiosity.

  ‘Yes, Mr Topps,’ she said brightly, ‘my husband and I were talking about Helen Frances—Mrs Cabot. Did you have a chance to spend much time with her in England?’

  ‘Alas, not very long. She gave me lunch when I called at her aunt’s cottage in Sussex, and I met her daughter too. It was a marvellous afternoon. We talked about so many things. Her father and his work here. The sights I should see. And—and so much else. She was very kind to me.’ He paused. ‘She’s—she’s a lovely person, isn’t she?’ He blushed.

  Nellie smiled. ‘Aye, she is lovely. A rare bloom. Rather too exotic, perhaps, for an ordinary suburban garden. But I see that you sensed that for yourself, didn’t you, Mr Topps?’ She laughed at his confusion. ‘Oh, Mr Topps. How I am embarrassing you! You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you, and why should you? But you have brought us very happy news today, from a dear friend.’

  ‘Mrs Airton, may I ask you a question? Who is Mr Manners?’

  Nellie exchanged a quick glance with her husband, who raised an eyebrow and quietly spooned some vegetables into his bowl. For a moment she looked at Arthur severely, but her eyes had a smile in them when she replied, ‘Ah, Mr Topps, what a question! Who indeed is Mr Manners? I think that is something we would all like to know, perhaps he himself most of all, poor dear. We’ll find a time to sit down together, I promise you, and I’ll tell you all the old stories, but not on your first day in Shishan. You have many other more exciting things to do and see, and Mr Lu sitting over there so quietly is itching to take you away. Now, would you like some more rice before you go? Or some vegetables? Or some tea? No? Then I’ll ask only one thing of you. I want your word that you’ll come back and visit us—often, do you hear? Good luck in Shishan, young man,’ she said, offering him her hand.

  Dr Airton also stretched out a hand to him as he passed. For such a frail-looking man the handshake was strong and firm. ‘Good luck, my boy,’ he said. ‘Godspeed.’

  * * *

  Lu Jincai and Arthur Topps continued their journey. They spoke about the alkali plant, which Lu Jincai had rebuilt with his own money after the Boxers had sacked it. He brought Arthur up to date on their growing business with Tsitsihar and other towns in the region. Arthur told him about the new processes that Babbit and Brenner would like to introduce.

  They turned a corner of the road and there before him were the walls of the city, rising like a fairy-story castle out of the plain and topped by a great turreted gate that might have come out of a medieval romance.

  ‘Shishan,’ said Lu Jincai, unnecessarily.

  ‘It’s—it’s beautiful,’ murmured Arthur.

  They had to dismount from the cart for it to be inspected by the Russian soldiers. Arthur gazed above him at the swallows that were flying about their nests on the battlements.

  He heard a strange mewing sound from his left and, looking down, saw a beggar sitting with his back to the city wall. It was a blind man, with a shaved head. He wore the robes of a Buddhist priest. The white, sightless eyes seemed to be contemplating him eerily. A little boy, accompanying the priest, held out a wooden bowl. Embarrassed, Arthur patted his pockets for a coin.

  As it clicked into the bowl, he heard Lu Jincai calling him. The inspection was over. Forgetting the beggar, he climbed back on to the cart, and next minute he was looking up at the great portcullis that hung over his head.

  With growing excitement, Arthur Topps entered Shishan. He felt that he was starting a new chapter in his life—the beginning of a great adventure.

  Afterword

  When I began to write this romance about the Boxer Rebellion I had very much in mind my own family antecedents in China. I would not be alive today if my great-grandfather, a Scottish medical missionary, had not managed to flee through the northern gate of the city of Changchun while the Boxers were coming in through the southern gate. If the Boxers had caught him in the city, he would almost certainly have been killed, and my grandmother would never have been born.

  Since those days one or other member of my family has always been involved with China, either as doctors, railwaymen or businessmen. I was born in Hong Kong, my mother in Qinhuangdao, her mother in Changchun. I grew up on the Peak among the taipans in Hong Kong. For the last eighteen years I have been living and working in Peking (Beijing) employed by one of the oldest China trading houses.

  This is not a family history. Far from it. My beloved grandmother would be rolling over in her grave at the suggestion that any of the dreadful characters I have created bear any resemblance to her own dear mama and papa—although I have taken the liberty of giving my central missionary character a passion for Wild West shockers, which, in our family lore was my Presbyterian great-grandfather’s one indulgence, and I have awarded him a medal for his work in the plague. I have had handed down to me just such a medal—the Order of the Golden Dragon—awarded to my own great-grandfather in the closing years of the Qing Dynasty. It is the size of a saucer with glistening yellow scales, and holding it in one’s hand, one feels a strange affinity with a vanished world: cruel and corrupt, magnificent and mysterious.

  My city of Shishan is invented, but the type of things that happen there did occur in other parts of China. In 1900 there was a massacre of more than seventy missionaries in the city of Taiyuanfu in Shanxi Province. My former classics teacher, Hamish Aird, gave me letters from his great uncle, one of the victims, written from confinement in the uneasy days before the mass beheading. They are extraordinarily moving testaments of human courage and Christian acceptance of martyrdom. I have drawn on these to colour my own story, and one day last summer Hamish and I made a pilgrimage to the ground in front of the yamen in Taiyuan where his great-uncle died. By an extraordinary irony, we discovered that my Chinese wife’s great-grandfather had been an official in Taiyuanfu at the time, and probably attended the executions. While Hamish was still staying with us, we had a dramatic game of Murder in the Dark with my children, when my wife, Fumei, became convinced that Hamish would use the opportunity of the darkness to wreak his revenge on her for the crime her family had committed against his a hundred years before!

  When western people talk about the Boxer Rebellion most people think of the siege of the Legations. Anyone who has seen the movie Fifty-five Days at Peking will remember the aplomb with which David Niven, Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner held off the devil hordes. There have been some excellent histories of the siege, the best in my view still being Peter Fleming’s The Siege At Peking published in 1959, although a number of new works came out to coincide with the anniversary year of 2000, including Diana Preston’s The Boxer Rebellion, Henry Keown-Boyd’s The Fists of Righteous Harmony, a collection of contemporary accounts China 1900: The Eyewitnesses Speak and, most interesting of all, the publishing of Sir Claude MacDonald’s own report of the siege and other Foreign Office papers and telegrams of the time in the collection The Siege of the Peking Embassy in 1900, edited by Tim Coates. The contemporary accounts that occasionally find their way into print are well worth reading. I particularly recommend Polly Condit Smith’s Behind the Scenes in Peking (written under the pseudonym Mary Hooker) and B. L. Simpson’s Indiscreet Letters From Peking (again written under a pseudonym, B. L. Putnam Weale). The latter book is so scurrilous and the author so odious that I have been unable to resist making B. L. Simpson a character in this novel.

  Yet all these accounts relate primarily to the siege and foreigners’ heroics, which play a relatively small part in my story. I was more interested in the Boxers themselves. How could such a bizarre movement come about? And what was happening in the vast Chinese countryside? After all, anyone who has lived in such an inward-looking country as China knows that the occasional bouts of antiforeign xenophobia are usually impelled by internal dynamics that often only incidentally have anything to do with the foreigners who are the ostensible cause, and that in any violent eruption here the main victims are usual
ly Chinese persecuted by other Chinese. The official view of the Chinese Communist Party is that the Boxers were proto-revolutionaries who were motivated by patriotic fervour and a nationalistic desire to protect the motherland. This has not always been the Chinese judgement, as Paul A. Cohen shows in his magnificent study of the historiography of the rebellion, A History in Three Keys. In the years just after the rebellion, Chinese writings about the events expressed horror at the superstition and the darker, animist side of their psyche that had been unleashed with such violent results. Some modern Chinese historians (and even senior Communist Party officials, if one talks to them privately) are now studying how this fundamentalist peasant movement, which in its origins was actually apolitical (as Joseph W. Esherick reveals in his brilliant study The Origins of the Boxer Uprising) were manipulated and subverted for the interests of factions in the Imperial Court. Is there any relevance in the Boxer explosion to the Chinese politics of today? Well, the serious reaction by the Chinese government to what many people in the West would see as a harmless mystical cult, the Falonggong, surely shows some fear of the animistic fundamentalism that many centuries of Confucian civilisation have not yet managed to eliminate, and which, if manipulated, might be turned to political ends. It was fundamentalist movements such as these that in historical times, destroyed dynasties (the White Lotus, the Yellow Turbans, the Taipings). Perhaps in 1900 the manipulators in the Imperial Court were right to turn the powerful forces unleashed in the countryside against the foreigners: the anger of these martial artists could just have easily been turned on them. As it was, the decrepit, corrupt Qing dynasty lasted only another eleven years before it was overthrown in the Nationalist revolution of Sun Yat-sen. The Mandate of Heaven was already being removed from their weakening grasp.

  For the background of missionaries in China and their sufferings far away from Peking when the Boxer madness overwhelmed them I have drawn on contemporary books such as Fire and Sword in Shansi, which, published in 1902, is an exhaustive account of the many ‘martyrdoms’ that took place two years before; Dougald Christie’s Thirty Years in Moukden is a fascinating memoir of a medical missionary’s life in north China. (Another family link is there as well: Dr Christie and my great-grandfather set up the Moukden Medical School together in 1912); the Christian epic A Thousand Miles of Miracle by A. E. Glover, and many others. I have dug deep into Nat Brandt’s moving history of the Oberlin missionaries, Massacre in Shansi. For the details of Frank Delamere’s alkali-making processes I have drawn on Patrick Brodie’s history of ICI’s early years in China, Crescent over Cathay. Frank’s company, Babbit and Brenner, is a thinly disguised version of ICI’s Brunner Monde (and again there are family links: my grandmother’s second husband, R. D. L. Gordon, worked in China for ICI for thirty years.) For the activities within the Palace of Heavenly Pleasure I have read with much entertainment the extraordinary sex manuals that date back two thousand years and which Robert van Gulik introduced to the world in his magnum opus, Sexual Life in Ancient China.

  Most of the events that take place in this novel, however, despite the historical context, in which they happen are pure fiction. In the balance between fact versus adventure and romance I have come down firmly on the side of the latter, hopefully for the enjoyment of the reader, certainly for my own.

  I have many people to thank: my wife and children for allowing me to hide away in my study on weekends and public holidays, thus forgoing many enjoyable jaunts and picnics to the Great Wall. I fear that I have been an inattentive father these last five years. I would like to thank Humphrey Hawksley, Philip Snow and David Mahon for their constant encouragement and advice, and Peter Batey, who has sat patiently through readings of each chapter, giving me valuable advice on, for example, how to control a Mongolian horse or what would be on the menu at the Legation picnic, or how to decorate a Chinese railway carriage. I would like to thank Clinton Dines and Patrick Holt for their expert advice on how to drive a steam train, and Section Chief Yang of the Camel Camp section of the Liaoning Railways for allowing me to stand on the footplates. Thanks to Dr Simon Helan for letting me know how I might go about saving a shot Mandarin. I am grateful to Professor Wang Yi for his insights into the animism of the Boxers. My thanks to T. C. Tang for first teaching me Chinese and to His Holiness Professor Thomas Lin Yun for enlivening Chinese lessons with red herrings about the art of feng shui and Chinese mysticism. Finally I would like to thank Araminta Whitley, my agent, and Peta Nightingale, my editor, for their firm advice, and Carolyn Mays and Hodder and Stoughton, my publishers.

  Adam Charles Newmarch Williams, Beijing, May 2002

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

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  THE PALACE OF HEAVENLY PLEASURE. Copyright © 2003 by Adam Williams. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  ISBN 0-312-31566-X

  EAN 978-0312-31566-5

  First published in Great Britain by Hodder and Stoughton, a division of Hodder Headline

  First U.S. Edition: December 2004

  eISBN 9781466872271

  First eBook edition: April 2014