Over the years, millions of Chinese became enslaved to opium, severely disrupting the Chinese way of life. Understandably, successive emperors banned its import, sale and use, but demand was rampant and the British East India Company sidestepped the bans by licensing private ‘country traders’ – that is, anyone willing to sail the fast, specially fortified and armed opium clippers and risk being raided by pirates – to ship the opium from India to China, where the traders sold the opium to smugglers and pirates along the Chinese coast who took it ashore. The profits then went back via the traders to the British East India Company to purchase Chinese tea and the like.
In 1839 the emperor’s special emissary, Lin Zexu, ordered the port of Guangzhou closed to all foreign merchants in a determined effort to eliminate the opium trade. British warships retaliated, destroying the Chinese blockade on the Pearl River, and by 1841 British land forces controlled the vast rice-growing lands of southern China. By the following year the ‘foreign devils’, as the Chinese called the British, occupied Shanghai and therefore commanded the mouth of the Yangtze River. The Chinese were forced to sign the Treaty of Nanjing, ceding Hong Kong to the British and, in addition to Guangzhou, open the ports of Amoy, Foochow, Shanghai and Ningbo to foreign trade. Worst of all, the Chinese had to agree to Britain being given ‘most favoured nation’ status and to Western merchants no longer being accountable to China’s laws, only to those of their own countries.
War broke out again in 1856 after two years of Britain’s insisting that China legalise the import of opium from British cultivations in India and Burma, exempt British goods from all import duties, allow the establishment of a full British embassy in Peking, and open all Chinese ports to foreign trade. Again unsurprisingly, China didn’t want to do any of that, and when a fracas arose involving the British-registered ship the Arrow, British – and American, French and Russian – forces descended on China. The defeated Chinese signed the Treaties of Tianjin in 1858 but refused to ratify them, until further military pressure from the British forced them to sign the Beijing Convention in 1860, ratifying the Treaties of Tianjin and opening the ports of Hankou, Niuzhuang, Danshui and Nanjing, and the Yangtze River, to foreign trade. Other conditions included ceding the port of Kowloon near Hong Kong to Britain, agreeing to the export of indentured Chinese labourers to the Americas, and allowing foreign missionaries to preach throughout China.
Jardine Matheson and Company was, and still is, a real entity, founded in 1832 by Scotsmen William Jardine and James Matheson. Aside from the British East India Company, Jardine Matheson and Company are historically the firm most closely associated with the importation of opium into China. William Eastwood, mentioned in the story, however, is fictional.
The Lotus Pond Gardens, where Israel meets his stabby end, are also made up.
I have tweaked history a little in this book. As mentioned above, the British import of opium into China from India and Burma was legalised in 1858 after the Second Opium War, but in this story it’s still being smuggled in by the country traders and pirates. The story doesn’t quite work in places if it isn’t.
Another tweak: the Tongzhi Emperor and the Empress Dowager Cixi (pronounced Tsee-Chee) did not travel to Hong Kong in September 1863. In fact Cixi spent most of her life in the Forbidden City and the Imperial Summer Palace, both in Peking (also known as Beijing).
And just in case anyone’s wondering, Kwangtung, Guangdong and Canton are all different versions of the same name. Canton or Kwangtung Province, now known as Guangdong, is where most Cantonese people come from.
Chinese people are not all the same, as of course you’d expect in such a geographically large country with a very long history. For example, the Cantonese, Hakka and Manchurian peoples were all culturally different, spoke distinct languages, and didn’t necessarily see eye to eye all of the time.
Chinese naming conventions: the family name comes first, followed by the primary given name, then the second given name if there is one; for example, WONG Bao Wan. Thanks S.C.C. Overton! http://www.sccoverton.com/uploads/2/8/3/5/2835504/ cantonese_name_generator.pdf, for help with creating Chinese names.
The details of the Empress Dowager Cixi’s costume, as I’ve described it in the scene at the governor’s residence, come from a photograph taken of her by a Chinese photographer named Xunling, a diplomat’s son. There aren’t many photos of the empress dowager, but apparently she allowed him to take a series of very carefully managed images in 1903 and 1904. The empress dowager was suffering from particularly poor PR by then, having backed the Boxers (who called themselves the Righteous Fists of Harmony) during the Boxer Rebellion against her own Qing dynasty in 1900, and possibly hoped, it’s alleged anyway, that the photographs would rehabilitate her reputation. It seemed they didn’t, as in the West, at least, she remains portrayed as the quintessential Dragon Lady. She died in 1908 at the age of seventy-three, and I should point out that in the story, when she wears the described costume, she is only in her late twenties.
A note on Lawrence, in Otago, New Zealand. On 20 May 1861, Gabriel Read found gold in an Otago valley – Gabriel’s Gully. A rush soon followed. By July the population of the new goldfield surpassed eleven thousand. A permanent settlement, named The Junction, grew at the head of the valley, where the Weatherston’s and Gabriel’s gully streams united and flowed into the Tuapeka River. The town was surveyed in 1862, a post office was opened on 1 April 1863 and the name Tuapeka adopted. In 1866, however, the name was changed yet again to Lawrence – after Sir Henry Montgomery Lawrence, who died heroically during the Siege of Lucknow in 1857. I’ve gone with Lawrence in the story for the sake of modern geographical clarity, and in case anyone wants to google it.
And here I have to confess to another historical tweak: Otago was not settled by Chinese until 1866 – gold miners who arrived at Dunedin from Victoria, Australia, late in December 1865. Some went to Lawrence (then known as Tuapeka), but as the good citizens of Tuapeka passed a bylaw in 1867 prohibiting Chinese from living or operating a business within the town, the newcomers were relegated to living on an acre of soggy ground a kilometre away, which came to be known as the Chinese Camp. For more on the Chinese experience in Otago, see the Bibliography.
The snippet of poem at the beginning of Part One comes from a work by Chinese poet Shijing, called ‘Guan! Guan! Cry the Fish Hawks’. The line at the start of Part Two is from William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 147, ‘My Love is as a Fever, Longing Still’; and the fragment of poetry at the start of Part Three comes from ‘When I Am Dead, My Dearest’, by Christina Rossetti.
Bibliography
As mentioned, I did some interesting new research for this book. Jung Chang’s Empress Dowager Cixi: The concubine who launched modern China (Vintage, 2014) was really useful. On the front cover is the image I used in the governor’s residence scene. Jung Chang also wrote Wild Swans: Three daughters of China. Also helpful was Tea: A history of the drink that changed the world (Andre Deutsch, 2011) by John Griffiths. Who knew there was that much to know about tea? I bought the book after a very pleasant afternoon at the Zealong Tea Estate at Gordonton. Helpful, too, were Frank Welsh’s A History of Hong Kong (HarperCollins, 1993); The Hong Kong Story (Oxford University Press, 1997) by Caroline Courtauld and May Holdsworth; The Chinese Opium Wars (Hutchinson, 1975) by Jack Beeching; and an interesting working paper by Jeffrey A. Miron and Chris Feige from the (American) National Bureau of Economic Research titled ‘The Opium Wars, Opium Legalisation and Opium Consumption in China’ (May 2005). Go to www. nber.org/papers/w11355
For Chinese costume I found a really useful book by Verity Wilson (photographs by Ian Thomas) called, imaginatively, Chinese Dress (Victoria and Albert Museum, 1996) – full of lovely pictures and really detailed descriptions. Another little book I used, also produced by the V&A Museum (2010) and which already happened to be on my bookshelf, was Chinese Textiles – image after image of gorgeous antique Chinese silk fabrics. Sadly, some of my descriptions of said fabrics have been
edited out of The Cloud Leopard’s Daughter, and quite rightly, too, but I had fun writing them.
As for the Otago bit of the story, Stevan Eldred-Grigg’s beautiful book, Diggers, Hatters and Whores: The story of the New Zealand gold rushes (Random House, 2008) was no end of helpful, as was Dirt: Filth and decay in a new world arcadia (Auckland University Press, 2005) by Pamela Wood, which is about why and how Dunedin got so disgusting in the later nineteenth century, and what was done about it. Well worth a read. Also pleasingly useful was a spiral-bound book I picked up at an antiques fair, which was written for ‘Social studies and technology units level 3 & 4’ (would that be eight-year-olds?) and is called Coaching Days in Otago (Otago Settlers Museum and the Ministry of Education’s Learning Experiences Outside the Classroom Programme, 1998) by John Neumegen. Handy! It has a diagram of a Cobb and Co coach and old Otago maps and coaching trails and everything! Possibly best of all, though, was James Ng’s work, Windows on a Chinese Past (Otago Heritage Books, 1993), a collection of four volumes on the history of Chinese immigrants to Otago. Sadly, they’re as rare as hen’s teeth (another cliché) and I had to photocopy the bits I wanted at the library because they’re reference only. Annoying and expensive.
Finally, there were all the many other odd bits and pieces that go into my research and which are too numerous to list. I’d be here all day. A few highlights, though, are Papers Past at the National Library (of New Zealand), which I dip into all the time. Great for ideas on what people were buying in the shops, eating in restaurants, furnishing their houses with, making their clothes out of, ship’s names, etc. Go to https://paperspast.natlib. govt.nz/ for New Zealand newspapers, and to http://trove.nla. gov.au/newspaper/about for Australian newspapers. I do use the Internet a lot. I know, you shouldn’t trust the Internet, but you shouldn’t trust a lot of books, either. The Internet’s okay, if you check the sources.
Acknowledgments
Producing a book is team work. A writer might think they’ve done it all themselves, but they rarely have. Unless they self-publish, of course, and I don’t. So thank you once again to the HarperCollins Australia team: to Mary Rennie, my (very patient) editor this time round, and to Shona Martyn, ever supportive and always willing to listen. Thanks also to freelance editor Kate O’Donnell, font of awesomely good ideas and endless enthusiasm, and to my agent, Clare Forster, for level-headed advice and constant encouragement.
A big ‘mwah’ as well to the entire team at HarperCollins New Zealand, for working so hard on behalf of my books and being so rah-rah every time I see them. Thanks, guys. I really do appreciate it.
I think a general blanket thank you needs to go out to my friends and family for being so tolerant during the writing of this one. I did spend a lot of time in my office, putting people off and not going to things due to deadlines, so perhaps a change of some sort could be in order. After all, you’re not likely to get rich, vivid stories out of a boring worn-out writer.
Kerrie Ptolemy, of Ptolemy Consulting, Australia, also deserves a shout-out for doing my new website. Not only is it lovely but it works really well. Thanks, Kerrie!
Last but never least, thanks to my husband, Aaron Paul, who, as usual, made the dinners and cups of tea while I worked, even though sometimes the rubbish didn’t get put out. But that’s okay.
The Smuggler’s Wife series
The bestselling saga of love and adventure on the high seas of the Pacific
The Convict Girls series
The bestselling saga of four adventurous women transported halfway around the world
About the Author
DEBORAH CHALLINOR has a PhD in history and is the author of fourteen bestselling novels, including the Children of War series, the Convict Girls series and the other titles in the Smuggler’s Wife series. She has also written one young-adult novel and two non-fiction books. She lives in New Zealand with her husband.
Also by Deborah Challinor
FICTION
THE SMUGGLER’S WIFE Series
Kitty
Amber
Band of Gold
The Cloud Leopard’s Daughter
CONVICT GIRLS Series
Behind the Sun
Girl of Shadows
The Silk Thief
A Tattooed Heart
CHILDREN OF WAR Series
Tamar
White Feathers
Blue Smoke
Union Belle
Fire
Isle of Tears
My Australian Story – Vietnam
NON-FICTION
Grey Ghosts
Who’ll Stop the Rain?
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Australia in 2016
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Deborah Challinor 2016
The right of Deborah Challinor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
HarperCollinsPublishers
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ISBN: 978 1 4607 5157 2 (paperback)
ISBN: 978 1 4607 0629 9 (ebook)
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry available on request
Challinor, Deborah, author
Title: The cloud leopard’s daughter / Deborah Challinor.
Series: Challinor, Deborah. Smuggler’s wife series.
Subjects: Kidnapping – New Zealand – Fiction.
Chinese – New Zealand – Fiction.
Gold and gold mining – New Zealand – Otago – 19th century – Fiction.
Historical fiction.
NZ823.3
Cover design by Darren Holt, HarperCollins Design Studio
Cover images: Beach by Jill Ferry / Trevillion Images;
Woman by Susan Fox / Trevillion Images
The Cloud Leopard's Daughter Page 35