At little cost in French blood, Consul C.N.M. de Montigny congratulated himself again, he had struck a mighty blow for France, for legitimate rule in China, and for himself. The first foreign intervention in the civil strife of China was brilliantly successful—in the judgment of its initiator.
CHAPTER 9
February 26, 1855
THE FOREIGN SETTLEMENT
Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul in Shanghai leaned back in his swivel chair and gazed past Saul Haleevie’s shoulder at the traffic on the Bund, the enbankment along the Hwangpoo River. He noted with pleasure that the pale afternoon sun had partly dispersed the fog.
“Do believe me, Mr. Haleevie, I feel deeply for your distress and I respect your devotion to your Chinese associate.” John Rutherford Alcock, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons and sometime Inspector of Anatomy for the Home Office, spoke in an agreeable baritone. “I shall, I assure you, continue my endeavors on behalf of Mr. Aisek Lee, though I am already stretching my authority …”
“But, Your Excellency Consul Alcock,” Saul protested. “For almost a year now, Aisek Lee is still imprisoned—and not even charged, even for all your trying. Even for my trying, too, the bribes and …”
“Samqua is pestilential, I grant you that.” Rutherford Alcock permitted himself an indiscretion. “But we must work with him. After more than ten years in China, I have, I believe, learned a few things. First, we can only deal with those Chinamen who will meet us halfway. They are few enough. Second, we Europeans must act together. That, Mr. Haleevie, is why I am striving on your behalf for your associate, though he has no strict claim to my protection.”
Despite his own self-confidence, Saul Haleevie was awed by the tall man with mutton-chop whiskers, who spoke in measured periods. The forty-six-year-old former military surgeon had already proved himself decisive—and, upon occasion, autocratic—in dealing with the Mandarins. He was also kind, benevolent in his ponderous good will. His manner was avuncular, for he was sincerely concerned for the welfare not only of his own British charges but of the Chinese, as well. Nonetheless, Saul was uneasy in his presence. The British Consul was primus inter pares, unquestionably first among the theoretically equal consuls who ruled the Foreign Settlement.
Intimidated by the Consul’s authority, Saul felt his own vulnerability keenly. His robe and turban must appear outlandish to the Englishman in the frock coat whose high lapels accentuated the luster of his cravat under the starched wing collar that framed his square chin. Recalling Fronah’s desire to speak in the understated, precisely emphatic manner of the English, Saul was acutely conscious of his own failings. The guttural undertone of his native Hebrew was harsh in his own ears, and his Bombay lilt was comical; his grammatical errors and unidiomatic phraseology were ludicrous. To the supremely self-assured Englishman he must not only sound but look like a music-hall comedian with a jutting proboscis. Did he only imagine that Rutherford Alcock’s classically straight nose wrinkled in disdain or, worse, amusement?
“It does your heart credit, Mr. Haleevie, your dedication to Aisek Lee,” the Consul continued. “But do consider my position. If I intervened on behalf of every Chinaman who had a tenuous claim to my protection, I’d be infernally busy, wouldn’t I? A hundred million Chinamen would line up outside my door, all demanding that I intervene against their own Mandarins. There would not be enough men in all England to read their petitions—not to speak of the troops to enforce my jurisdiction.”
“Look here, Your Excellency Dr. Alcock …”
“I don’t use the medical title now, Mr. Haleevie, as you should know.” Though gentle, the reproof stung. “I haven’t practiced in decades.”
“I’m sorry, Consul. Forgive me. I couldn’t know all the fine differences of titles.”
“You’re a British-protected person, Mr. Haleevie, and therefore entitled to demand my intervention on behalf of yourself and your family,” Alcock said, relenting. “Your daughter, being Bombay born, is a British subject. But what of yourself? Should we not see about naturalization? You’re qualified, and it’s high time.”
“You honor me too much, Your Excellency, and I would see about that soon enough.” Saul was not diverted by the Consul’s imperative good will. “Yet now I’m talking about poor Aisek Lee.”
“If you must,” Alcock sighed. “Though I fear we’ve been over all that ground before … many times.”
“Look now, Your Excellency, the French, you know, give protection to all their religions.”
“Their religions, Mr. Haleevie? Oh, you mean their coreligionists, do you?”
“Yes, that’s right. The French Consul, if any priest comes to him, he covers with his protection a Catholic, also Chinese Catholics.”
“Yes, I grant you that, though I wonder if he should. The French have some queer ways. My esteemed colleague M. de Montigny did not hesitate to start a small war. But I digress. What’s all that to do with your friend Lee? Or you, for that matter?”
“Now, Consul, I am a kind of priest, you know. Jews have no priests, not like Christian priests, but scholars who are expert in our Law. We call them rebs. And I am a reb, a clergyman you may call it, though I work also as a trader.”
“That’s all terribly interesting. Some day you must tell me all about the customs of the Chosen People. But I am busy, and it’s nothing to do with …”
“Your Excellency, I, Rabbi Saul Haleevie, make a formal application to you, the Honorable Rutherford Alcock, Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul.” Saul painfully repeated the much-rehearsed sentence. “I make formal application for protection for my religions … my coreligionist … Mr. Aisek Lee.”
“Now look here, Mr. Haleevie, I admire your ingenuity as well as your devotion. But nothing, nothing in treaty or law, obligates or empowers me to act as protector of any religion, no matter what the Frenchies do. Do you want me to start a war for Aisek Lee? What do you think I can do? I’d be relieved so fast … Believe me, I am sorry.”
Embarrassed by his impotence, Rutherford Alcock picked up a wax model of a hand and forearm from his mahogany desk. He swiveled in his chair to gaze at the juncture of Soochow Creek with the Hwangpoo River and continued the strained interview with his back half-turned.
The Consul’s big hands stroked the model with wary affection, but his grip was awkward. The entire foreign community knew that rheumatic fever had left Rutherford Alcock with chorea, ending the career that had won him the chair of military surgery at King’s College and a consultancy at Westminster Hospital, where he had studied medicine. He could no longer operate, and he could hardly support himself by molding anatomical models in wax, a skill he had learned in Paris in his youth. To rescue him from that tragic impasse, he had been offered appointment in the consular service. Further recalling the tragic death of Rutherford Alcock’s wife only eleven months earlier, Saul was marginally less resentful of the Consul’s rejection of the last argument he could find for British intervention on Aisek’s behalf.
“I’m glad to have this opportunity to discuss other matters, Mr. Haleevie,” Alcock said. “Your silks were finally released last week, I understand.”
“Yes, Your Excellency, though why I don’t …”
“I’m not quite blind to British interests, you know. With the Customs in our hands for administration, I could finally shake the silk free. I even stretched a point. I made sure you got the lot, including that belonging—between us, of course—to your partner. That I could do.”
“I am grateful, Consul, very grateful. With that money I have more for Aisek’s defense.”
“I know you’re looking after him well. You’ve behaved most commendably. From what I hear, unofficially, he’ll need all the help you can give. And you’ve claimed his land in the Settlement as your partnership’s, haven’t you? Mark my word, that land will be immensely valuable some day.”
“I believe also, Consul.”
“There is another matter. Not so pleasant, I fear. I’m firing a shot across your bow,
Mr. Haleevie, no more just yet. This trading with the Taipings, it won’t do, you know. I’m telling you unofficially—for the moment.”
“But everyone does,” Saul protested. “And I only in a small way.”
“I know that too. I just don’t want to see it go further. It’s too dangerous. Besides, the Taipings can’t win, which is even more important. I can understand why some missionaries are wild for the Taipings. Coreligionists, they call them, as you’d say. But you Hebrews don’t even acknowledge the true Messiah. How can you accept a second Messiah, as that fellow the Heavenly King calls himself?”
“It’s not religion, Your Excellency, but …”
“But profits, of course. Quite. And, in the ordinary course, commendable. You’re here to trade, and I’m here to help you. But don’t overdo it. Just a friendly warning at this stage, you understand.”
A fresh-faced clerk in frock coat and wing collar slipped into the room after knocking perfunctorily and handed his superior a document. Rutherford Alcock slit the seal and read slowly.
“What have we here!” he exclaimed. “Mr. Haleevie, it’s come at last, the formal indictment you wanted. Trial of Aisek Lee in one week, it says. The charge is—Damn me!—matricide. That’s a capital offense, of course, under British law as well as Chinese. And an abomination under Chinese law, killing a parent. But how can they? I’m baffled. Matricide!”
CHAPTER 10
March 6, 1855
Shanghai
HUATING PREFECTURE
Aisek Lee was superficially little altered by his ordeal. Saul Haleevie, who was just six feet tall, saw his friend clearly over the heads of the lictors who kept the witnesses at a distance from the tribunal. He thanked God that constant pressure and copious bribes had spared Aisek the barbaric treatment that so often either killed prisoners or inflicted severe injuries before the creaking machinery of Chinese justice brought them to trial. As he knelt bareheaded before the Prefect of Huating in the ashen dawn of March 6, 1855, Saul’s partner seemed to have suffered little from his confinement of almost nine months.
The defendant wore his second-best long gown of blue silk padded with raw silk, rather than prison rags. His head was newly shaved; his oiled queue was freshly braided; and his goatee was neatly trimmed. Since the barbarians were interested in his case, the good name of the Ching Dynasty required that the accused appear no more harmed by his imprisonment than he might have been by an equally protracted journey.
By further special favor, a small pillow cushioned Aisek’s knees from the cold flagstones. Chains might yet replace that pillow, since the Criminal Code of the Great Pure Dynasty authorized that “discomfort” to ensure that the accused spoke the truth. The size of the links and the duration of the torture were, however, precisely delimited for mercy’s sake. Schooled to public impassivity, Aisek’s features revealed no more than polite interest in the proceedings that would determine his fate.
Whatever wounds might be concealed by the long gown, his face was not only unscarred but fuller than it had been when he was arrested. Thanks to Saul’s bribes, he had been well fed during those months of inactivity. His plumpness, the sign of good health in Chinese eyes, further demonstrated his jailers’ benevolence. Saul, however, feared that his partner’s face was in fact unhealthily swollen.
Head bowed, Aisek Lee knelt before his judge as the pearly dawn flooded the courtyard of the magistrate’s yamen. He had glimpsed the beige turban surmounting Saul’s lean height when the lictors led him before the tribunal. He assumed that other witnesses had been summoned by the court, though the throng concealed his concubine, Maylu, his sons, Aaron and David, and two of his former servants.
Fifteen other defendants surrounded Aisek. Most wore sixty-pound cangues, wooden collars whose dimensions were also prescribed by the Criminal Code. Their heads lolled disembodied on the planks as if already decapitated. Aisek shivered at that portent and studied the enthroned Mandarin who was his judge.
The grave charge—and the foreigners’ interest—had moved Intendant Samqua to assign the case to the Chief Magistrate of Huating Prefecture, one of Shanghai’s three major administrative divisions. The middle-aged Mandarin wore the wild goose of the fourth grade on the breast of his robe, for he was an official of long and exemplary service. He chafed at his subordination to the arriviste Samqua, who had purchased—rather than earned—his eminence. He had already decided to ignore the Intendant’s oblique instructions. Not only honor but pride required him to render impartial justice. He would not be swayed by Samqua’s apparent inclination toward lenience. Nor would he be swayed by the substantial gifts of the anonymous donors who contended the accused deserved the severest punishment. The magistrate knew those gifts came from Aisek’s business rivals, particularly the conservatives who hated him for working with a barbarian.
Like virtually all his colleagues, he had to accept such gifts if he were to keep his household in comfort, assure his children’s future, and provide for his old age. But he would, he promised himself, render an evenhanded judgment.
A frown drew the Mandarin’s thick eyebrows together. His lean face was set in a severe expression after his decades of service as a buffer between Chinese subjects and Manchu overlords. However, his full lips quirked upward, and Aisek discerned kindliness in his deep-set eyes. The Prefect of Huating’s reputation for mercifulness was, perhaps, another reason Samqua had designated him to hear the case.
The judge’s regalia evoked awe, as it was intended to. Seated on a dais behind a table draped with red silk, he was flanked by four lictors bearing the black-and-scarlet-striped bamboo staves that proclaimed his punitive powers. The overhanging eaves of his yamen ensured that he alone in the courtyard was sheltered from the morning mist, while smoke from a charcoal brazier that warmed him alone seeped through the drapery. Confronted by counsel for neither prosecution nor defense, hampered by neither advisers nor jurors, he was as isolated as his master, the Hsien Feng Emperor.
“You, prisoner, are Li Ai-shih, a merchant of this town?” The judge followed the fixed procedure. “Now forty-one years of age, arrested on the night of June 21st last year while returning from meeting the leaders of the Small Swords, the pestilential secret society that seeks to overthrow the lawful rule of the Sacred Dynasty, the legitimate heir of the Great Ming Dynasty?”
“Shih-di …” Aisek Lee volunteered no explanation since the charge was not treason. “I am, Your Honor.”
“You are, however, not here arraigned for that misdeed. It pleases His Imperial Majesty to be lenient to those who were misled while the rebels usurped his authority over a minuscule portion of his domains. The law does not concern itself with trifles, and the Small Swords were no more than a swarm of mosquitoes. Nor did your deeds assist the rebellion.
“You are arraigned for matricide, a most heinous crime, an abomination to all decent men and to Heaven itself. Aside from raising a hand against the Sacred Person of the Emperor, there is no deed more foul and reprehensible than causing the death of a parent. The penalty prescribed by the Criminal Code of the Great Pure Dynasty is decapitation after torture.”
“But, Your Honor, I could not … did not. I wasn’t even there.” Aisek blurted his justification, though he had been warned it was foolhardy to interrupt the judge.
“The accused will be silent.” The Prefect’s expression of stringent benevolence did not alter. “Later, you will be allowed to answer questions in full. For the moment, you will reply in simple affirmatives or negatives.”
Aisek was relieved at escaping with a reprimand. Another judge might have ordered the lictors to beat him and place chains beneath his knees.
“Do you, Li Ai-shih, acknowledge that on the night of February 12th of the past year your mother, Li Chao Wen-ai, being in the sixty-seventh year of her age, did hang herself from a beam in the residence she shared with you? Do you dispute the contention that her anxiety over your actions caused her to adopt that ultimate means of protesting your behavior?”
“No … Yes,” Aisek stuttered. “I don’t, Your Honor.”
“You may speak more fully.”
“I thank you profoundly, Your Honor.” Aisek marveled again at the judge’s tolerance. “I cannot confirm the facts, since I was not present. As for my revered mother’s reasons, it is not for me to say.”
“I note your contentions. As far as I can see, the facts are not in question. Their interpretation, however, is open.” The Prefect’s brusque assumption of the facts threw Aisek into despair, but his hopes rebounded since the magistrate had obviously not prejudged the case. “I shall, nonetheless, call witnesses to establish the facts as the Code requires. I shall also explore your mother’s motivation. The crux of this case is the reason for her self-destruction, not the fact thereof.”
Raising his eyes as he sipped his tea, the judge saw two prisoners whispering to each other. He cocked an eyebrow, and a lictor laid his bamboo stave across their shoulders. Lenient the Prefect of Huating might be, but not indulgent.
“Several interesting points of law are embedded in this case,” he mused in a louder tone. “I look forward to their explication, which will test my poor knowledge and my feeble power of ratiocination. Fortunately, the precise formulations of the Criminal Code are an unerring guide through the mazes of the human heart.”
For the first time, Aaron Lee heard the bench clearly, and he whispered a translation to Saul Haleevie. The Jewish merchant was, of course, not permitted to express his admiration for the learning, the impartiality, and the perspicacity the judge celebrated in himself. Besides, he saw little to admire. The judge did not weigh facts and arguments presented by lawyers, but sat in judgment on evidence he presented to himself. The prisoner was denied any advocate, whether a counsel learned in the law or merely a sympathetic champion. No wonder foreigners adamantly refused to submit themselves to Chinese law. One fallible human being was judge, jury, and counsel for both prosecution and defense. Whatever safeguards the complex Criminal Code provided, all came down to the questionable impartiality and the impossible omniscience of that single Mandarin.
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