Mandarin

by Elegant, Robert;

  Her parents would join them at that table for the first time. They could not, of course, dine at the Gentiles’ nonkosher tables. Besides, it did not occur to the Christians to ask the leader of the Hebrew community. They knew he would feel uncomfortable in their homes.

  Lionel Henriques was, however, almost one of them. Though Jewish, he was also indisputably British, and he was cloaked in the prestige of a powerful banking house. Founded upon trade, the Foreign Settlement was concerned with money above all else. Which great merchant knew when he might not need an additional line of credit? Besides, Henriques was a good fellow, a first-class shot, and a fine horseman, even if he was a little mannered. You’d hardly think he was a Hebrew.

  The same self-serving tolerance now embraced Fronah Haleevie. Though she was not yet formally betrothed to Lionel Henriques, all Shanghai knew they had reached an understanding. For the first time, the Europeans welcomed her as one of themselves, rather than an exotic creature who lent color to a dull evening, like an emerald cockatoo chattering in strange accents. Though Fronah was not by protocol the guest of honor at Derwents’ dinner dance on September 16, 1856, she was the center of attraction. Beakers of claret and goblets of champagne were lifted to her, while ladies as well as gentlemen beamed on the prospective bride. She was delighted to have finally attained the acceptance whose vain pursuit she now realized had led to the unfortunate episode with Iain Matthews. That callow infatuation seemed to have occurred eons ago, almost in another life.

  The candles on the mahogany table, whose Foochow-lacquer finish was burnished to a mirror sheen, cast a glow upon the company. Lionel Henriques was most impressive in his severely tailored tailcoat, whose broad black silk lapels spread like the wings of a midnight-blue butterfly beside his snowy stock and his looped bow tie. He needed neither a showy uniform nor trumpery medals to lend distinction to his patrician features framed by his wavy silver-gilt hair. His manner was also perfection: relaxed and attentive to the conversation, but slightly aloof. He was far above the stolid men of commerce, but he was too well bred to flaunt his superiority.

  Fronah smiled when his light-blue eyes rested proudly on her for an instant. Her amber eyes sparkling over the rim of her champagne goblet, she pursed her lips in a kissing movement only he could see. She almost laughed with joy when he smiled in return. He then shook his head in infinitesimal warning to restrain her impulsiveness. Displaying one’s emotions was not, he had previously advised, good form—never in public and better not in private.

  Lionel was no eager youth. He had kissed her on the lips only once—for a fleeting but delicious instant. Unlike grubby Iain Matthews, a true gentleman did not paw a lady. There would be time for that when they were married. With Lionel that would be an exquisite delight, not a rough tumble. She shuddered in horror at the memory of Iain—and smiled in derision at the foolish fears she had felt immediately after promising herself to Lionel.

  She knew that she had never looked better. The pink roses in her hair complemented the coral-pink taffeta of her flounced skirt beneath its overskirt of Brussels lace. The basque, which left her powdered shoulders bare, discreetly concealed the cleft between her breasts behind a cluster of three pink roses. For once, her mother had protested neither at the extravagance of the gown, which was her reward for obedience, nor at the cost of the string of pale-green Peking jade beads set between chased gold links.

  Fronah was momentarily disconsolate when she remembered that Lionel must leave for Hong Kong in a few days’ time. But, as he said, the joy of their reunion would make even separation an exquisite pleasure. Oddly, all her admirers were leaving Shanghai. First, Iain Matthews with whom she had played the fool. She was delighted that the young ruffian was gone, though minutely sorry he couldn’t see her present triumph. Of course Gabriel Hyde wasn’t really an admirer, just someone to laugh with. And David? Why, David was her brother, and she naturally missed him.

  Yet none really mattered except Lionel, who would soon return. Perhaps she was too eager for future joys. Her mother said it was foolish to rush your life. But the foretaste of the future she already enjoyed was intoxicating. Perhaps she did not love Lionel utterly—not yet. But she knew she would grow to love him deeply—as a woman loved, not a silly young girl.

  CHAPTER 32

  October 6, 1856

  NANKING

  The rainbow beam pierced the narrow embrasure and played on the rough-hewn stones. Looking up from the leather-bound journal, Gabriel Hyde blinked. The brilliant light was painful after the guttering candles to which he had become accustomed during his month-long confinement in the tower of the massive South Gate of Tienking, the Heavenly Capital of the Kingdom of Great Peace. He laid his goose quill down on the green inkstone and rubbed his smarting eyes with his knuckles.

  His hosts—for he could not really think of the Taipings as jailers—were eager to supply everything he required. But they would permit him neither to walk through their capital nor to leave it. Nor could they provide a modern steel nib to lighten the labor of composition. Compiling the journal and writing out a fair copy were his chief diversion, aside from exchanging lessons in their respective languages and history with his fellow internee, David Lee.

  The American rose and stretched. Although their hosts allowed them to stroll on the ramparts twice a day, Hyde’s cramped muscles ached for more vigorous exercise. Although he knew they were confined for their own safety, as well as the convenience of the embattled Heavenly King, he resented the inactivity imposed upon him. The high-spirited David, normally even more energetic than himself, took their predicament with Chinese resignation. He was lying on the thin quilt covering the hard pallet like a black tomcat in repose. Only the slight movement of his lips as he whispered prolonged passages from the Confucian Classics revealed that he was not asleep.

  Gabriel had grown even fonder of the Chinese lad in their enforced intimacy, though he was irritated by David’s meticulously enumerated gratitude for their confinement, which: first, gave him leisure to review his studies; second, kept them both safe; third, proved their lack of complicity with the Taipings; and fourth, allowed them to record their experiences in the Heavenly Capital for Saul Haleevie. The Chinese were not really fatalistic, but, rather, adept at finding minuscule pearls of consolation in the roughest oyster. To the classical three primary virtues, five fundamental relationships, and twelve celestial signs, David had now appended the four self-consolations.

  The American padded across the square flagstones and leaned his elbows on a stone sill. He craned through the narrow embrasure shaped to shelter crossbowmen when the Founding Emperor of the Ming Dynasty raised the twenty-mile-long wall to make Nanking, his new Southern Capital, impregnable more than two hundred years before that Dynasty rediscovered firearms at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It was then too late for the green bronze cannon cast by Jesuit missionaries to save the Ming from the Manchu invaders. The past month’s events in the Heavenly Capital might, however, save the Manchu Dynasty from extinction, though its position was almost as precarious as the Ming’s had been in the seventeenth century.

  The brilliant rays that had broken his concentration were reflected from the ten-tiered Porcelain Pagoda on the slope of Purple Mountain. That tower was clad with brilliantly glazed tiles, and at a distance its luster appeared undimmed. But he had earlier seen that the tiles were streaked with soot. When they occupied Nanking three years earlier, the Holy Soldiers had put the Porcelain Pagoda to the torch, seeking with passionate iconoclasm to destroy all vestiges of “Buddhist idolatry.” However, folk superstition had prevailed when the timber-framed shrine failed to collapse. The pagoda still rose above the violet hill like an admonitory forefinger warning the revolutionaries to remain true to the glorious traditions of China.

  Gabriel resumed his chair and his goose quill. Since it helped David polish his English, he read aloud before copying into a second journal for Saul Haleevie the introduction he had just written:

  T
he high hopes with which we came to Tienking, the Heavenly Capital, have been dashed. We are in reality prisoners, though we are guests in name and our warders bear us no ill will. Quite the contrary, they do all in their power to make us comfortable. Unfortunately, their capacity to do so is severely limited. I must also regretfully advise that the great expectations for trade with the Heavenly Kingdom we originally discerned dwindle each day as the prospects of that Kingdom grow progressively more somber.

  You will, perhaps, already have received news of the terrible disturbances in this presumably God-fearing capital before you read this account or hear of our experiences from our own lips. It is, therefore, not superfluous to assure you that we have every hope of returning unharmed to Shanghai, though I cannot say when. However, since this journal should come into your hands before we return, I have written this brief introduction to assure you of our safety. What follows is the account David and I set down day by day before and during the calamitous occurrences we have lately witnessed.

  “I suppose that’s what you’d call a fine literary style?” David grinned. “And you foreigners complain that we Chinese don’t write the way we talk.”

  “It wouldn’t be fitting, Davy,” the American explained. “The style must fit the tragic events. Who knows? Some day others may read our tale.”

  “Just as well, then, you’re not telling them why I wanted to see the Long Hairs, Gabe.”

  “A confidence is a confidence. But I hope you’ll give up that notion. Anyway, I reckon these Holy Soldiers will never be able to help you revenge your father. Not if they go on the way they’re going.”

  “You may be right. It’s no joy being here. Though it’s damned interesting.”

  “Too damned interesting. Wrestling a crocodile’s also interesting, but hardly a great recreation.”

  “Toppling the Manchus isn’t exactly a recreation. But let me have the journal. All that optimism, it’s damned funny.”

  13th August 1856, a glorious summer day [David read aloud, admiring the swirls of Gabriel’s Spencerian script, though it was primitive beside the simplest Chinese calligraphy]. We were welcomed to the Heavenly Capital like honored guests whose arrival has long been eagerly awaited. Introduced by General Wu Ju-hsiao, who is called the Four-Eyed Dog for his courage and his curious physiognomy, we were given an audience this afternoon by the Tung Wang, the King of the East, who is the Commander-in-Chief of the Taiping Armies. A lean man with a glittering ambitious eye and the dark skin of a southerner, the East King condescended to step down from the dais where his throne stands to receive us. He appeared as anxious to recruit my services as the Four-Eyed Dog was at Chenkiang, the Citadel of the River, last spring. David’s welcome was assured, since the Taipings profess an almost reverential regard for scholars, who are few among them. Nonetheless, it is, perhaps, advantageous that David has not yet essayed the first civil service examination, since the supreme Taiping monarch, the Heavenly King himself, repeatedly failed to secure entry to the Mandarinate through that portal. That failure is, of course, never discussed in the Holy City. Farmers and workmen fill the Taipings’ ranks, while converted Buddhist or Taoist monks, soothsayers, and other mystics too numerous to cite, as well as failed Mandarins, are among their leaders. In any event, the letter from the Four-Eyed Dog, which we secured on our passage upriver, was an Open Sesame.

  The East King exercises virtually all temporal power, both civil and military, the two being so intertwined as to be identical. The Heavenly King, the monarch of this theocratic realm, does not call himself Emperor, though he claims divinity, because the title Heavenly Emperor is reserved for the Lord God. The Heavenly King is rarely seen, having withdrawn to devote himself to theological, literary, and philosophical pursuits. The East King is therefore the effective ruler of tens of millions and the commander of standing armies that number more than a million.

  Like all the Taiping princes, he is jealous of the prerogatives and the trappings of his exalted rank. He wore a long yellow robe embroidered with dragons, as the Manchu Emperor does. A coronet of gold wires set with rubies rested on his pepper-and-salt hair, which bristled on a head untouched by the barber’s razor that makes the Manchus and their loyal subjects half-bald. Plaited into a braid intertwined with a scarlet ribbon, his long hair was coiled around his head, the tail falling over his left shoulder.

  “He acted just like an emperor, the East King.” David looked up from the journal. “How can there be two emperors?”

  “All these Taiping Kings are mighty proud for men fighting to make everyone equal,” Gabriel remarked. “All the pomp and panoply.”

  “That’s the Chinese way, Gabe. They say they have to live in splendor so the people will respect them. Then they get to like those splendors.”

  “I can see why. They do themselves proud, don’t they? For men who swear they want to change all the old ways, they cling to all the old privileges like barnacles. But go on.”

  26th August 1856: In the streets, we were most struck by the absence of certain phenomena. Most astonishingly, we saw not a single mendicant, not one wretched beggar imploring alms. Both the thoroughfares and the byways of the Holy City are also distinguished from Shanghai and the cities under the rule of the Manchus by a curious stillness. Men wearing tight-fitting red, green, or blue jackets over wide petticoat-trousers of black silk go briskly but silently about their errands, which are chiefly quasimilitary. All are armed with daggers, and many have clumsy pistols thrust into their scarlet sashes. All are under stringent discipline, and all, it appears, live in constant fear of the Draconian punishments their monarch inflicts for any violation of their numerous ordinances.

  Not a single man so much as glanced at the numerous women who walked freely but decorously among them clad in similar colors, their tunics falling to their ankles for modesty’s sake. The multitude of women, all unfettered by foot bandages, abroad in the Holy City is a constant astonishment. Mostly they go in small detachments under the orders of female corporals and sergeants. Those females exceed by many times the maidservants and the women of the lower orders seen in the streets of the Foreign Settlement, where, of course, Chinese ladies do not go abroad. Males and females must be fully equal in both rights and duties, the Heavenly King has decreed, because they are created equal by Almighty God.

  Not only are men and women considered equal, but all human beings except, of course, those who have risen by their outstanding talent. Yet superior position not only bestows great privilege but also heavy responsibility to assure the well-being of the commonalty. In Taipingdom, the vision of “communism” promulgated by Mr. Karl Marx, special correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune in London, appears to have become reality. Not only are all men and women, except the anointed rulers, equal in rights and duties, but all, in theory at least, hold all goods in common.

  The East King, himself a former charcoal burner, is responsible for the innovations that make the Taiping realm not merely unique in China at this time, but, I believe, unique among all civilizations throughout human history. His design for the life of the commonalty is fiercely puritanical, passionate for abstinence and self-denial in the service of the Lord. That passion accords ill with the “divine revelation” that inspired his ruling that all the Taiping Kings, like the Taiping Emperor, must take multitudes of wives and concubines whose numbers rival the seraglio of the Grand Turk of the Ottomans or the venerable Solomon himself. To the common people he is, however, a stern father, who enforces separation of husbands from wives except on the infrequent days appointed for indulgence.

  The majority of those strictures must, nonetheless, arouse approbation in any liberal-minded man who has seen the extraordinary laxness and corruption of Chinese society under the Great Pure Dynasty. Like the spectacle of the streets, it is most convenient to enumerate the abuses that do not exist in Taipingdom.

  The use of opium has been extirpated, whether taken in pellets or smoked. Neither may the submissive subjects of the Heavenly K
ing avail themselves of the consolations of tobacco or spirits in any form, even the mildest of rice wine being stringently prohibited. Foot binding to produce “golden lilies” has also disappeared, largely I suspect (prompted by David, my guide among the mysteries of things Chinese) because the Taipings originated among the lower orders of the South who infrequently bind their women’s feet—and further, because females could not perform the arduous tasks assigned by this puritanical “communism” if they were hampered by maimed feet. Also strictly enjoined are gambling and slavery, both unfortunately common elsewhere. Ancestor worship and idolatry are, of course, prohibited. Polygamy, too, has been outlawed, except for the rulers. In practice, the normal cohabitation of monogamy has been virtually outlawed for the commoners.

  That arduous manner of life is reckoned to stimulate great ardor for the “emancipation” of all China. On the day when the Heavenly King comes into his entire Kingdom, the strictures will presumably no longer be necessary to sustain the disciplined ardor of a people in arms. The savage penalties for transgressions are at least equally effective in maintaining that servile discipline. The punishment for offenses ranging from petty theft through insubordination and rape to murder is the same: death.

  David broke off to remark, “It’s always been that way, Gabe.”

  “What’s always been that way?”

  “Harsh punishment. No one can rule China by lenience. Benevolence, virtue, and universal love don’t work … no matter what Confucius taught. But not harsh punishment for filial impiety!” David said bitterly and resumed his reading.

  28th August 1856: We have just returned from witnessing how the holy “communism” functions. Above all, it works. Certainly the people are both more orderly and less deprived than those under Manchu rule.