Dynasty

by Elegant, Robert;

  “All prices,” Harry added. “Most people don’t know rising rents are as much to blame, though the drought makes everything worse. Did you hear the Buddhists are praying for rain, a ten-day nonstop prayer?”

  “Look on the bright side,” Sir Jonathan advised. “The rats are coming out.”

  “That’s hardly the bright side!” Mary was severe.

  “It is for some people,” Sir Jonathan riposted. “The rats are coming out because food is getting short. Some coolies are making a nice living from the bounty of two cents a rat-tail. There’s dark talk of tails smuggled from Canton. No way to tell a Hong Kong rat-tail from a Canton rat-tail, and no bounty in Canton.”

  Mary rose. She normally enjoyed Sir Jonathan in his satirical vein, but their customary morning conference was deteriorating into the masculine equivalent of backfence gossip. Besides, she wanted to check the latest invoices of silk shipments. The telephone’s shrill bell halted her at the door.

  Sir Jonathan spoke briefly in staccato Cantonese. When he replaced the bell-shaped receiver in its forked bracket, his face was momentarily grave.

  “That was Tung Wah Hospitals. They report twice the normal number of fever cases for this time of year. Just admitted a new lot. Probably just springtime fever a little worse than usual. Not to worry.”

  Hong Kong’s 440,000 Chinese and 12,000 foreign inhabitants were not easily dismayed by fear of epidemics in the early summer of 1909. There would have been no Hong Kong if the pioneers of both races—who, seventy-odd years earlier, settled the island that Lord Palmerston, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, dismissed as “a barren and pestilential rock” —had not stoically endured intermittent decimation. Hong Kong would not have grown if their successors had valued survival above profits. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, when epidemiology and bacteriology were making immense strides, the typical Hong Kong dweller simply ignored the threat of disease.

  Besides, malaria, which Sir Jonathan called by the Colony’s customary euphemism, “springtime fever,” was rarely fatal. Fevers and chills usually racked victims for three to four days, debilitating, but not killing. The Europeans treated those symptoms with quinine and gin; the Chinese preferred measured doses of opium, their specific against most bodily ills.

  Cholera, “blackwater fever,” was more virulent, its course swift and usually fatal. Western doctors prescribed rest and fluids, while Chinese doctors drew upon the race’s three-thousand-year-old pharmacopeia for remedies that ranged from snake’s gall and powdered bat’s liver to cooling herbs.

  The center of European habitation had early shifted to the less pestilential Mid-Levels and The Peak from the marshland that was called Happy Valley as a propitiary invocation because of its many cemeteries. Thereafter, the incidence of cholera in the foreign community declined sharply. Nonetheless, marble headstones in Happy Valley recorded the reverent acceptance of the blackwater death by men and women in their twenties—as well as the ascent of innocent infant souls. Confined by their poverty to the lowlands, the poor Chinese who made up the bulk of the population died by the hundreds and were buried in mass graves. When the blackwater fever raged, merchant and naval ships canceled all shoreleave, while ten to twenty soldiers dropped on parade each day. Themselves virtually immune, the taipans on The Peak bore the deaths of European juniors and Chinese coolies with pious equanimity. The Chinese, the taipans consoled themselves, accepted their fates with stoic resignation.

  One disease, however, terrified all Hong Kong’s inhabitants. The Europeans called it the Black Death, and the Chinese Ta Wen, the Great Heat, or the “forty-eight-hour disease” because its implacable course from the first symptoms to death with a fever of 107° was so swift.

  Plague had been endemic since the beginning. Though there had been no major outbreak since 1894, the Great Heat normally carried off more than a thousand persons a year. The bounty on rat-tails was the Government’s half-hearted concession to the new theory that rats carried the disease, although the Chief Medical Officer of Health scoffed at that theory. “It’s more likely that rats catch plague from human beings than vice versa,” he asserted. “Should we put a bounty on human heads to protect the poor rats?”

  Even the Europeans considered the plague an unalterable act of God and therefore did not cavil at the learned doctor’s opinion. After the great epidemic of 1894, sanitary laws had for the first time been imposed upon the skeptical Colony, but their harsh provisions were self-defeating. The Sanitary Board was reluctant to order the razing of premises suspected of harboring plague. Those buildings were, after all, property, and Hong Kong’s moral code was based upon the inviolable sacredness of private property. The law courts safeguarded property by dispensing fierce justice: two hundred strokes with heavy bamboo canes for petty theft and hanging for grand larceny. Upon those infrequent occasions when punishment was actually imposed for violating the sanitary laws, a fine of HK$50 neither deterred blatant offenders nor encouraged the law-abiding.

  “The business of Hong Kong is making money, not coddling Celestials or half-baked medical theorizing.” Thus spoke Samuel Chivers, Deputy Colonial Secretary for sixteen years, who had first landed in Hong Kong as a boatswain’s mate deserting a broad-beamed East Indiaman. The plutocrats of the Hong Kong Club toasted his further exhortation: “The faint-hearted can clear out. I’ll put my trust in God and two bottles of claret a day.”

  Some Britons did not share Sam Chivers’s robust faith in the Lord and the grape. Two hospitals cared for European civilians, and the red-brick British Military Hospital had been built on Bowen Road in the 1870s after the generals belatedly recognized that it was more economical to preserve the lives of seasoned soldiers than to train recruits. The Chinese-financed Tung Wah Society, which ran schools and hospitals, eschewed the demonstrably dubious benefits of Western medicine for the ancient Chinese therapy that was demonstrably efficacious —except, of course, when the Will of Heaven decreed otherwise.

  European doctors and missionaries railed against the “rank superstition” of traditional Chinese diagnoses and remedies. They laughed at Chinese doctors’ restricting their examinations to taking “the five pulses” of fully clothed female patients who indicated the sites of their pain on carved ivory figurines more remarkable for anatomical restraint than anatomical accuracy. With morbid glee, they retold the story of nineteen-year-old Ah Poe, one of the first five Chinese student-nurses enrolled under the formidable Mrs. MacDonald, sometime matron of Charing Cross Hospital. The young lady had withdrawn, saying “I can’t be happy in a place where people are always dying.” Mrs. MacDonald had tartly countered: “Poor Ah Poe will never be happy. Where can she find a place where people do not die?”

  Despite such railery, Hilary Metcalfe noted, Tung Wah had a much better recovery rate than the European hospitals, particularly for plague patients. He bluffly informed the British medical fraternity that the traditional Chinese pharmacopeia was not only the world’s oldest, but still its most extensive. Herbal doctors and acupuncturists, he added, had for three millennia maintained the Chinese race in rude health, as attested by its vigorous proliferation. Moreover, Tung Wah treated fifty times as many patients as did the three European hospitals.

  The first warning was sounded by Tung Wah on May 16, 1909. Three days earlier Sir Jonathan had observed comfortably that Hong Kong was in for nothing worse than a slight increase in the number of normal “springtime fever” cases after Tung Wah reported admission of thirty-one patients in one morning.

  On the first day, those patients displayed the classic symptoms of malaria: fevers, chills, acute headaches, dizziness, and dehydration from constant vomiting and diarrhea. On the second day, the staff was alarmed by two portents: forty-two new patients with the same symptoms were admitted; and a young doctor found globular swellings in the left groin and the right armpit of a delirious coolie.

  The doctor was equipped with the cumulative wisdom of his professional ancestors. Their meticulous annals recorded not
only the Great Plague that killed thirteen million throughout China in 1380 and the epidemic that swept Eurasia and forced Attila the Hun to retreat from Italy in A.D. 452. Outbreaks of almost equal virulence had been recorded as early as the third century B.C. and as recently as 1866. But the Chinese doctors ventured no definite diagnosis until the third day, when sixty-eight patients were admitted. The wards were already so crowded that new patients lay on straw mats in the aisles between long rows of wooden bed platforms.

  The coolie died on the evening of the third day, mercifully carried off by respiratory arrest. In addition to the buboes in his groin and armpit, Tung Wah’s Chief Medical Superintendent noted with alarm the dusky-blue tinge of his skin. After examining some twenty patients with similar symptoms, the Superintendent concluded that he was dealing with a probable epidemic of the Great Heat Disease. Distrusting the newly installed telephone, he dispatched by messenger to Sir Jonathan a note brushed in fine calligraphy on rice-paper and couched in impeccable classical Chinese. But Sir Jonathan himself employed the telephone to relay the information to the Colonial Secretariat.

  Acting Colonial Secretary Samuel Chivers was conferring with his solicitors. He had with difficulty been persuaded to lodge a suit for libel against the editor of The China Mail, rather than carry out his threat upon first reading the report of his alliance with all the pirates of the South China Sea: “I’ll give that damned inky wretch a damned fine hiding with my riding crop.”

  The effective prime minister of the Colony, since his superior, the Colonial Secretary, was on leave, Chivers was more than normally irascible. He fueled his righteous anger by increasing his customary intake of two bottles of claret a day to five bottles supplemented with tumblers of neat brandy.

  Replacing the telephone’s hand set, he snorted his contempt for the diagnoses of “chink witch-doctors.” He was not concerned about “some damned funny disease among the Celestials, probably from their disgusting food and habits.” Besides, no European had been afflicted. He swore he’d be damned if he’d run to His Excellency the Governor with “vague, crazy rumors started by a bunch of half-baked chink quacks and passed on by that half-breed rascal Sekloong.” Sam Chivers dismissed the danger from his muddled consciousness with the words: “I tell you there’s no plague. That horse won’t run.”

  That pronouncement was the most spectacular misjudgment of a career almost as notable for sweeping errors as for grandiose peculation. His cronies at the Hong Kong Club were soon to change his nickname from “Two-Bottle Sam” to “No-Horse Sam.” The new nickname was later to force him to leave the Colony, though he might otherwise have weathered even his most spectacular error. After pursuing the hapless editor through the Hong Kong Courts, Sam Chivers was finally to take his case to the Privy Council in London, which awarded him derisory damages of one penny. In a memorable obiter dictum, one learned Law Lord remarked: “The horse to which the appellant referred, the pestilence, was anything but a nonstarter. In the event, it galloped as rapidly and as devastatingly as its precursor among the mounts of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

  It did. By May 30, some two weeks after Tung Wah’s first warning, Governor Sir Frederick Lugard was compelled to disregard Sam Chivers’s complacent counsel. Eight hundred and twelve cases had already been reported, 463 fatal, and even the Chief Medical Officer of Health acknowledged that the figures “erred on the low side.” Though fourteen Eurasians and two Europeans were infected, the Chinese were the chief sufferers, and the Chinese were notoriously reluctant to entrust their kinsmen to any hospital, even Tung Wah. Most invalids, they felt, entered hospital to die, not to recover. They were equally reluctant to report deaths at home, since they feared that intrusive Sanitary Law Inspectors would order their houses fumigated or even destroyed.

  The Governor convened an emergency meeting of senior civil servants and community leaders on May 31. He already feared that the epidemic might prove as virulent as the pestilence of 1894 when 100,000 died in Canton and almost half that number in Hong Kong itself. Since the forceful Sir Frederick Lugard had served extensively in Africa, he firmly believed that the superstitious natives would always seek to deceive him. Although similarity between the primitive tribes of West Africa and the heirs of the world’s oldest civilization was obscure to less forth-rightly vigorous minds, Sir Frederick was, in this case, quite right. Several hundred additional cases, more than half fatal, had been concealed.

  Among those summoned to the green-curtained conference room of Government House were the relatively subdued Acting Colonial Secretary Sam Chivers; the Commander, British Forces; the Chief Inspector of Police; the Chief Medical Officer of Health; and the Financial Secretary. The last represented the administration’s primary concern, the Crown Colony’s commercial well-being. Maintaining public order was the secondmost concern, while public health was third in priority.

  Sir Frederick had also summoned Richard Wheatley, who spoke for the business community as taipan of the chief hong, and Sir Jonathan Sekloong, Chairman of the Tung Wah Society. Since the problem lay with the Chinese, the Governor had also invited two younger men: Robert Hotung, assistant comprador of Jardine, Matheson; and Mosing Way, vice-chairman of the East Asiatic Bank. Both spoke English well.

  Two other participants so enraged No-Horse Sam Chivers that his ruddy complexion flushed choleric purple. The first was Dr. George Parker, a twenty-four-year-old American who was making a name in Shanghai for his research into tropical diseases. He espoused the much derided theory that the plague bacillus, Pasteurella pestis, identified simultaneously fifteen years earlier by a Japanese and a Swiss scientist, was spread by rats. No-Horse Sam was apoplectic when his bloodshot eyes fell upon Mary Sekloong, demure in a high-necked gray-pongee dress.

  Mary had been invited because she was Honorary Secretary of the Ladies’ Benevolent Society, founded two decades earlier to “succor deserving, unfortunate Europeans and Eurasians.” Though she had no idea what she could contribute, the Governor’s aide-de-camp had been pressing. Sir Frederick was convinced that females were particularly qualified by nature to cope with illness, and he had been warned that the Chinese females would prove particularly troublesome. Mary Sekloong was virtually unique, not merely in speaking both English and Cantonese, but in possessing entrée into both European and Chinese circles.

  “Mrs. Sekloong and Gentlemen.” Sir Frederick’s peremptory Sand-hurst accent was strained through his extravagant mustaches. “We appear to have a problem on our hands. I’d welcome suggestions.”

  He allowed the swelling voices to compete for a full minute before himself asking pointed questions. Not a patient man, he was, nonetheless, particularly attentive to the Financial Secretary and to Dr. George Parker.

  Volubly supported by Richard Wheatley, the Financial Secretary argued against proclaiming an emergency.

  “It could ruin business,” he summed up. “Remember what happened in ’94. Your Excellency, we must, whatever the cost, not declare Hong Kong an infected port. If we warn off shipping, our trade will suffer a blow from which it may not recover for years.”

  “See what we can do, Financial Secretary.” Sir Frederick was brusque in his contempt for money-grubbing civilians. “See what we can do. But what happens to your trade if people start dying by the thousands? Not quite good for business, eh?”

  The Governor was surprisingly courteous to Dr. Parker, though the casual young American omitted the formal respect the British tendered to the King’s personal representative.

  “Rats, you say, Dr. Parker?” he asked. “But how do the rats convey this what-d’you-call-it to humans?”

  “Bacillus Pasteurella pestis, Governor,” Dr. Parker replied in a soft Virginia drawl, “isolated by Kitazato and Yersin in 1894. My microscope’s found it in all blood specimens from the victims.”

  “That’s interesting, Dr. Parker,” the Governor rejoined. “Great scientific interest, I’m sure. I’ve got the highest respect for you scientific johnnies. But how do th
e rats carry this bacillus of yours? Does it fly through the air?”

  “We’re not sure, Governor,” Parker answered, “though some scientists believe it’s the fleas on the rats.”

  “Well, what do we do then?” Sir Frederick asked rhetorically. “Get rid of the rats, I suppose.”

  “And cleanse the infected premises, Your Excellency.” The Chief Medical Officer spoke for the first time, having judged it impolitic to refute the American’s ludicrous theory of a rat-borne plague when the Governor apparently accepted it.

  “Not with fire and the sword, eh?” Sir Frederick asked jocularly. “Wouldn’t do, would it? Not a military operation, after all.”

  “Fumigation with toxic gases is usual,” Dr. Parker suggested. “But we can’t be sure. Badly infested places should be burnt.”

  “You’ll need the sword, then, Your Excellency,” Sir Jonathan Sekloong advised. “The Chinese won’t cooperate unless they’re forced to. They won’t let your inspectors into their homes—certainly not into the women’s quarters.”

  “So, it must be fire and the sword, Sir Jonathan?”

  “No, sir. The threat of force should be enough. And Tung Wah should treat all Chinese patients. The people’s suspicion of Western doctors could otherwise lead to violent resistance.”

  “See what we can do about that, Sir Jonathan,” the Governor said. “But we can’t be too tender. ’Twould destroy confidence if we relied chiefly on your group of … though mind you, I’ve the highest respect. I’ll count on you to help persuade ’em. Perhaps the charming Mrs. Sekloong will mobilize her ladies to care for the dispossessed. But she’s to stay away from the plague areas.”

  “It may be necessary, Your Excellency.” Mary was intimidated despite herself by the male assemblage.

  “No, that’s flat.” Sir Frederick cut her off. “You’re to keep clear of the infected areas. Well, gentlemen, that’s it. Inspect ’em, find the hidden cases, turn ’em out, and burn the houses, if necessary.”