Mandarin

by Elegant, Robert;

  “Majesty, if the Imperial Presence is withdrawn, there can be no hope of holding the capital,” the weary Yehenala persisted. “If Your Majesty will only consent to remain—only another few days.”

  “So be it, Nala.” His abrupt change of mind startled her. “We shall give Our armies two more days to prove they can defend Our Sacred Dynasty—and Our Sacred Person.”

  Yehenala was elated by her victory. Ironically, the main body of the barbarians was marching on Peking while a few defended Shanghai from the Taipings. The Manchu dispositions were the reverse. A small force screened the Northern Capital against the barbarians, while the main force defended remaining Imperial positions in the Yangtze Valley and, incidentally, the treaty port, from the Taipings. The might of the Empire—all troops not engaged against the Long-Haired Rebels—must now concentrate to defend the Northern Capital. It was not too late.

  She was exhausted by her struggle against the mindless obstinacy of the weak Emperor. Arguing with him was like grooming her shih-tzu kou, the lion dogs the Dalai Lama sent her from Lhasa. The beasts squirmed so that she had to exercise great care not to pull out clumps of their fur or scratch their tender skin or break their delicate bones. Their soft hair curled back into snarls as the comb passed, and they snapped at her hands with their needle teeth.

  The slightest disagreement with the Emperor demanded almost inhuman restraint. If she bruised his fragile self-esteem, he would turn and rend her. Also almost inhuman patience. She had to repeat her arguments over and over again because he constantly reverted to his original position or raised irrelevant issues.

  Lightheaded with exhaustion, Yehenala leaned her forehead against the latticed window. Night had fallen, and the clock tower was a black triangle against the star-bright sky, its red-brick base splashed with crimson by pitch torches. The yellow rays shining through the open doors of the palace lit the streams of eunuchs flowing around the waiting vehicles.

  Yehanala closed her eyes against the disorder, so unlike the normal preparations for an Imperial Progress. Hearing a gabble behind her, she turned to see a eunuch kneeling before the Emperor.

  “Majesty … Majesty … catastrophe!” the terrified half-man babbled. “A disaster … only a few miles away … almost at the gates of the capital.”

  “Now, fellow, pull yourself together.” Surprisingly composed, the Emperor steadied the messenger. “We still sit here, don’t We? Get a grip on yourself and give Us your news.”

  “Majesty, at Palichiao … hardly nine miles from Peking,” the eunuch reported incoherently. “A great force of barbarians, cross-flag and three-color-stripe-flag barbarians together. First salvos of cannon, then the three-color barbarians stormed our batteries with knives on the ends of their rifles. Our troops at Tungchow are isolated. The last stretch of the Grand Canal is taken. Peking is naked to the enemy. Majesty, the barbarians are advancing like the wind.”

  Yehenala promised herself she would have the eunuch roundly thrashed for alarmism. Slightly cheered by that thought, she awaited the Emperor’s inevitable decision.

  “We thank you for your promptness in reporting,” he said calmly. “Go now and convey Our orders to Our Chief Eunuch. We depart before dawn on Our hunting expedition.”

  Striding past the kneeling messenger, Yehanala swung her hand and knocked him to the floor. Frantic at the collapse of her hopes, she spoke impulsively to the Son of Heaven.

  “You cannot. You must not leave now.” Not only the prohibited imperative spilled from her lips, but the familiar “you,” never addressed to the Son of Heaven. “It cannot be as bad as this stupid servant says. At least wait for a proper report. You must not flee.”

  “Yi Kuei …” he replied with frigid formality. “Virtuous Concubine, female slaves do not say must to Us. Nor do they say you. Our mind is made up. We depart before dawn.”

  “Majesty, I implore you …”

  “Cease plaguing Us, woman. We leave before sunrise.”

  “Without me, then. One Manchu of the Imperial Family will remain at the post of danger. Your Majesty journeys without this slave.”

  “So be it!” The Emperor rose and smiled with cold rage. “Of course, Our younger brother Prince Kung remains. He will, perhaps, be glad of your counsel. Leave Us. Go now and say farewell to the child.”

  “The child, Majesty?”

  “Prince Tsai Chün, naturally, travels with his father. We are leaving solely to keep the barbarians from seizing this Imperial hostage. Do you think We would leave them another almost as valuable?”

  “In that case, this slave will accompany Your Majesty, if she is permitted.” Yehenala bowed in submission. “Your slave profoundly regrets her effrontery, Majesty.”

  “It is too late for regrets, Yi Kuei. Your insolence has passed all bounds. Our lenience has been tried too much. Do not expect Us ever again to speak with you familiarly. Now, woman, leave Us.”

  CHAPTER 37

  October 6, 1860

  THE SUMMER PALACES NEAR PEKING

  “Revolting, sir, utterly depraved!” The Colonel’s long face was scarlet with indignation. “They are a race lost to all sense of decency.”

  Lionel Henriques lifted his Panama hat and patted his damp forehead with a silk handkerchief. He fastidiously edged his rough-haired pony a pace farther from the choleric officer, whose heavy red barathea tunic was already soaked across his shoulders at eight in the morning of October 6, 1860. Lieutenant Colonel Garnet Wolseley, quartermaster of the British Expeditionary Force, stank of sweat, though he had sluiced himself with cold water before they rode out of camp. Cleanliness was impossible for troops bivouacked for almost three weeks beside the Grand Canal waiting for the siege artillery train that had finally arrived the preceding night.

  Escorted by a detachment of Sikh cavalry, Henriques and Wolseley were making a wide circle around Peking across the ochre North China plain. Shorn millet was a brown stubble on the fields beside the dirt road, which rose gently as it led them northwest. Behind them, the Northern Capital’s gray-tiled roofs were frozen waves within granite walls. Before them, the golden roofs and sparkling waterways of the Summer Palaces shone against the seamed backdrop of the Fragrant Hills. The russet leaves of the maples cloaking the valleys beneath the snow-dusted summits stirred in the north wind blowing out of Manchuria across the mountains girdled by the Great Wall. Somewhere on the plains north of the Great Wall the bedraggled cavalcade of the Hsien Feng Emperor of the Great Pure Dynasty was still struggling toward the old Summer Palace at Jehol.

  Lionel gasped when he saw the majestic panorama of castles, palaces, temples, and pavilions glowing from horizon to horizon like an immense fairyland. He had not believed the Summer Palaces so vast, though he had been told the Imperial pleasure grounds, almost a century and a half in the building, included more than two hundred edifices spread over almost a hundred square miles.

  What forces, he wondered, had broken the truly Imperial resolution of the Manchus, which had built that gigantic monument? An army of eleven thousand British and Indian soldiers, supported by seven thousand Frenchmen and Annamese, was creating blind panic in the capital of an Empire that fielded more than two million soldiers. Though he had never doubted that a determined European assault would prevail, he was astonished by the flabbiness of the defenses. Aside from occasional harassment, the elite troops guarding the Northern Capital seemed to have been blotted up by the arid plain.

  “I assure you, sir, lust and sensuality are graphically represented in hideous nakedness … in their most disgusting aspects.” Colonel Wolseley was still vehement. “The lama temples, sir. Religion they may call it, but it is no more than pornography—the vilest pornography. The images of their deities are revolting. They exhibit extraordinary perversions of sensuality: women, men, and children all entangled. Also ponies, dogs, and monkeys. And the priests who exhibit those beastly carvings positively gloat over the abominations. Those spectacles must be loathsome to any but bestial souls. Lust is deified.”
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  “A matter of some anthropological interest, I should imagine, Colonel. Will you view them again?”

  “Only to ensure the accuracy of my report to the Royal Geographical Society, sir. But I should be glad of the company of an impartial gentleman to testify to my accuracy. Otherwise, no decent-minded man would credit the depths of depravity.”

  Was this blond Hebrew, the Colonel wondered, truly a gentleman? One would hardly call the brilliant but flashy Benjamin Disraeli, lately Chancellor of the Exchequer, a gentleman, though he had been baptized in the Church of England as an infant. Though this Henriques made no show of his Jewishness, he was patently not a Christian gentleman. However, his association with Samuelson and Company had overridden all objections to his attachment to the Expeditionary Force as a gentleman observer. Lord Elgin, the Ambassador Plenipotentiary, was pleased to indulge a connection of the great merchant bankers. A lieutenant colonel who still had his way to make in the world could do no less. Like the hereditary nobleman, he too might some day be glad of Samuelsons’ good will.

  Their ponies’ iron-shod hooves rang cheerily on the stone-slab pavement of the road from the village called Haitien to the Summer Palaces. Though the slopes of the Fragrant Hills were already dappled with shadows, the Italianate marble palaces of the Park of Eternal Spring gleamed amid emerald groves, while the Tower of Buddha’s Fragrance soared brilliant over the Mount of Myriad Longevity above Kunming Lake in the Garden of Crystal Rivulets. The road ended at a towering gate. The closed vermilion doors were protected against cavalry by a hedge of spikes and against demons by a wall on which porcelain dragons curvetted under a coping of Imperial-yellow tiles. For arcane reasons half lost in the mists of Chinese mythology, spirits could move only in straight lines. Malignant devils could not skirt the spirit-wall to enter the Yüan Ming Yüan, the Park of Radiant Perfection, the central glory of the Summer Palaces.

  The stone wall that actually guarded the Emperor’s seclusion extended westward toward the Fragrant Hills beneath the overhanging boughs of giant cedars and spruces, its moat spanned by arched stone bridges. They rode west past ponds carpeted with white lotuses and pink water lilies, which rippled with the flow of the stream. All the waterways were man-made, as were the hills within the Yüan Ming Yüan. Prodigious labor had created the fantasy realm to which the Emperors of the Great Pure Dynasty retreated from worldly care. Yet the reigning monarch had abandoned the best-beloved corner of his Empire to the European invaders.

  The road curved to the right and soared on a many-arched stone causeway over an artificial lake. The tricolor of France fluttered above a vermilion-pillared temple behind the yellow, blue, and scarlet Imperial pennants still drooping from slender flagpoles. No sentry challenged them, for the French outpost was deserted.

  The British rode through the silent afternoon toward the western gate of the Park of Radiant Perfection. A princely share of the wealth of China, Lionel realized, had flowed into the Yüan Ming Yüan for more than two centuries to create and maintain this impeccable fantasy. His heartbeat quickened when he envisioned the treasures he would find within. The greatest porcelains of two millennia had, he knew, been gathered into the Summer Palaces by the acquisitive Imperial House—and were now accessible through the west gate.

  The ponies stepped gingerly across the gate’s sills into the passageway. A French corporal in a royal-blue frock coat piped with red popped out of the guard room, jerky as a clockwork soldier. His fringed epaulettes quivered as he brought his long rifle to the salute.

  Through the open door of the guard room Lionel Henriques saw the survivors of those few guardians of the Imperial retreat who had remained faithful to their trust. Forty wretched eunuchs, who had been broken by a single French volley the preceding day, huddled on the flagstones. All were manacled, and many were wounded. Their gaudy robes were torn, and their plump faces sagged in mortal dejection. If the barbarians did not slaughter them, they would certainly be decapitated later for failing to hold the Yüan Ming Yüan.

  The low building shining at the far end of the long courtyard moved Lionel so profoundly that he did not hear the querulous trilling of a French bugle. The emerald-tiled roof of the Hall of Audience of the Park of Radiant Perfection floated on slender crimson pillars above marble flagstones in the golden twilight. Mesmerized by that other-worldly beauty, Lionel checked his pony.

  “What’s this?” Colonel Wolseley’s voice was harsh with shock. “What the devil’re the Frogs playing at?”

  A ragged formation of eight infantrymen stood behind the bugler, who wore a Mandarin’s round fur hat surmounted by a ruby button and clutched a silver candelabra. The soldiers’ frock coats were unbuttoned, and they staggered as they aligned themselves. Despite the bugle’s entreaties, only those nine among the hundreds of Frenchmen milling before the Hall of Audience fell into rank.

  The courtyard was brilliant with silk robes draped over grimy uniforms. Spiky beards wet with wine bobbed above the dainty pink-and-violet gowns of young Court ladies, while Mandarins’ hats with upturned brims had replaced red-piped kepis. Every soldier cradled his own treasure: gilt statuettes, gleaming porcelain vases, ebony jewel cases. His sword abandoned, a fresh-faced lieutenant plunged his hands into a split red-leather chest. As fast as he stuffed gold coins into the breast of his tunic the yellow stream cascaded onto the flagstones. Some privates sprawled in drunken sleep while others clumsily searched their pockets.

  Bolts of silk unfurled across the courtyard like a fallen rainbow. Some soldiers pranced with small golden images from the household temples, while others minced in robes embroidered with Imperial dragons. The more discriminating officers stuffed their pockets with pearls and jades. A sergeant wept with joy over a bag of uncut emeralds—and laughed when a two-foot-high oxblood jardinière slipped from a wine-fuddled private’s grasp to splinter on the flagstones.

  “By God, it’s an orgy of looting,” Wolseley exclaimed. “You’d think even the Frenchies could control their men better. But troops will loot, sir, troops will loot.”

  Sliding off his pony, he tossed the reins to a Sikh trooper. The guards posted before the crimson pillars of the Hall of Audience were reasonably sober and reasonably presentable, except for the gem-finialed Mandarins’ hats all wore. The corporal saluted the British officer and stepped aside to allow him to enter, but a French sergeant followed suspiciously. Outside, the guards struggled with soldiers shouting in rage.

  “Understand the lingo, do you, Henriques?” Wolseley asked. “Never could get my tongue around it. What’re they saying?”

  “They’re just complaining, Wolseley. Why should we be allowed to hunt for more treasures? It’s unfair to let the British in while keeping honest Frenchmen out. It’s an insult to the honor of France.”

  “Soldiers will loot, Henriques. Why not let ’em loot? Spoils to the victors, you know. They’ll fight harder next time if they hope for booty.”

  “By God, look at that!” Lionel was deaf to the Colonel’s wisdom. “Just look at that!”

  The horizontal rays of the setting sun fell on a floor of thousands of white marble lozenges, flooding the Hall of Audience with a pearly radiance. The meticulous painting of the Summer Palaces on the near wall glowed in three-dimensional reality in that intense luminescence. Upon either side of the rosewood throne at the far end stood black-lacquer screens gleaming with rubies and emeralds set in blue-enamel peacock feathers. State scrolls were heaped among ormolu clocks before the carved peonies and chrysanthemums climbing upon the gilt trellises behind the dais.

  “Interested in porcelain, you said, Henriques.” The Colonel’s voice intruded upon Lionel’s rapture. “What do you say to that little lot?”

  An emperor’s hoard was ranged on altar tables with upcurved ends and ebony cabinets. Lavender saucers in fretwork stands were splashed with crimson roses so dark they appeared indigo. The melting gaze of pearl-gray vases also produced under the Mongol Dynasty in the thirteenth century was so soft that Henriques’
s fingertips seemed to sink into them. He smiled at the mundane Chinese designation: mutton-fat ware.

  The Englishman flitted from Imperial-yellow censers of the Kang Hsi reign to lentil-green crackled celadon of the Sung Dynasty, some eight centuries earlier. He admired an enormous pair of cloisonné unicorns, whose rounded green-enamel flanks were inlaid with swirls of gold wire. He was reaching toward a rice bowl of the intense pale blue called sky-after-rain when the Colonel’s voice jarred upon him again.

  “Can’t stand here gawking all day, Henriques. Must make a reccy before the Frenchies strip it clear. By God, the General will have to let our lads have a go.”

  Dazzled by the splendors he had seen, Lionel followed the officer to the door concealed by the screen behind the throne. Through that same door, the Lord of Ten Thousand Years had entered his Hall of Audience and seated himself on his rosewood throne to receive his Senior Mandarins.

  A maze of paths wound among grassy mounds displaying almost every plant that grew in the Great Empire, from the tropical lowlands of the South to the frozen tundra of the North. Crossing tinkling streams on humpbacked bridges, Lionel glimpsed the fir-screened roofs of the villas of Imperial concubines. Descending rustic stone steps, he saw tall, blanched boulders from Lake Tai near Soochow, which the currents had carved into monstrous shapes.

  Pondering the love of the grotesque that contrasted with exquisite Chinese taste in ceramics, he was startled when the path opened upon a circular pond covered with pink lotus flowers two feet in diameter. The structure beside the pond was so like the Hall of Audience that he momentarily thought they had retraced their steps. The French lieutenant commanding the impeccably uniformed platoon that patrolled the pillared veranda explained that they had come to the Emperor’s private apartments.