Mandarin

by Elegant, Robert;

  A broad bed was set in an alcove separated from the largest room by lavender curtains. On the yellow satin coverlet lay a small green hat embroidered with a symmetrical shou, longevity, ideogram, which Lionel knew from its recurrence on porcelains. Examining the long pipe chased with silver and the embroidered tobacco pouch abandoned on a side table, he knew that a harassed young man had found in these apartments sanctuary from the perplexities of politics. He realized that the monarch who appeared the incarnation of evil was a bewildered human being.

  Lionel felt the fugitive monarch’s presence even more poignantly when he saw on the waterways winding behind the private apartments a flotilla of miniature junks, each mounted with a minute bronze cannon. It was, somehow, pathetic that the young Manchu who was adored as the Son of Heaven should have been forced to seek diversion by watching eunuchs fight mock sea battles in those Lilliputian vessels.

  “What have we here?” Wolseley stooped to peer under a dwarf rhododendron. “Oh, you would, would you, you little devil?”

  Deep growls defied him. But he reached beneath the shrub and brought out a small dog whose face was hidden by the same red-gold pelt that cloaked its body. He cradled the animal in his arms, his long features glowing with the proprietorial affection a dog aroused in the heart of every English gentleman except the most depraved.

  “He’s a lion, you know, a lion dog,” Wolseley expounded. “A Tibetan breed treasured by the ladies of the court. Handsome little beast, ain’t it?”

  “What’ll you do with it?” Lionel was amused by the Colonel’s concern. “You can hardly take it campaigning.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, Henriques. He’s too delicate, a ladies’ dog, after all. Perhaps he belonged to the Empress. Here’s a thought. Lord Elgin might like to present it to Her Majesty the Queen.”

  “You could call him Loot,” Lionel suggested sarcastically.

  “No, not that. Too bald. But Lootie, that’s a fine name. Lootie he is.”

  Lionel wondered whether the lion dog might actually belong to the Empress or an Imperial concubine, perhaps a young concubine just budding into womanhood. He knew the name of only one concubine, who was no pubescent flower but the Emperor’s evil genius. Yehenala, incongruously called the Virtuous Concubine, was notorious for her bellicosity. A mastiff was more her style. Yehenala, he reflected, would hardly shower her fierce affections on the small lion dog.

  October 8, 1860

  THE PARK OF RADIANT PERFECTION

  James Bruce, Eighth Earl of Elgin and Twelfth Earl of Kincardine, was weary of journeying to China to resolve problems other statesmen found intractable. He had, however, responded loyally to the Prime Minister’s request that he return again to the Far East as Ambassador Plenipotentiary, though he would, at forty-nine, have preferred to remain on his estates in Scotland.

  His younger brother had failed to bring the Chinese to terms. The Honorable Frederick Bruce had been belligerent when diplomacy was required, and he had shrunk from force when only force could prevail. To redeem the family honor the Earl had set out on a four-month voyage to China, unhappily protracted by a shipwreck off Ceylon.

  Finally seated in the Hall of Audience of the Yüan Ming Yüan, the white-haired nobleman pondered the impasse with the Mandarins, who were alternately as subtle as chess masters and as brutal as Huns. He had, unfortunately, pledged not to sack Peking itself. Resigned to that inconvenient restriction, he discussed their situation with his brother-in-law, Lieutenant General Sir James Hope Grant, the General Officer Commanding, who had made his name in the Indian Mutiny three years earlier.

  Lord Elgin had a few minutes earlier acquiesced with the same mild resignation to the suggestion of his ambitious Quartermaster General, Lieutenant Colonel Wolseley, that he present the Empress’s lion dog to the Queen-Empress Victoria. Although its plucky spirit touched him, he forgot the beast when his orderly led it away. Only with difficulty was he to recall the incident when Her Majesty thanked him for the “darling dog” at Balmoral two years later.

  The General Officer Commanding had just presented His Excellency the Ambassador Plenipotentiary with advice that soured their previous victories. The Earl found all generals irritating, and Hope Grant, the Hero of Delhi and the husband of Lord Elgin’s favorite sister, was no exception. Like all generals, the Earl’s brother-in-law combined rash impetuosity with excessive caution. He and the French General de Montauban insisted that their troops could not be exposed to the harsh Peking winter. No later than the first week of November the army must return to Tientsin, where it could, if necessary, embark on its hundred and fifty transports for the more hospitable south. They could not be responsible for the consequences, the generals respectfully submitted, if their advice were rejected.

  Since the Manchus showed no sign of yielding, that counsel left the problem in Lord Elgin’s lap—as usual. Instructed to secure ratification of the Treaty of Tientsin in the Forbidden City, he was determined to do so. He could allow his judgment to be swayed neither by his indignation at the Manchus’ having taken captive envoys negotiating under a flag of truce nor by his anger at the brutal treatment accorded those envoys and his rage at the slaughter of a half-dozen British prisoners of war. No more could he allow himself to be mollified by the envoys’ subsequent release. He could not in honor leave the Manchus virtually unscathed while they still obdurately rejected his lenient terms.

  Besides, the Treaty of Tientsin was his own creation. The Prime Minister would believe him as inept as his brother Frederick if he could not in 1860, backed by the most powerful European army ever landed in China, secure Imperial ratification of the treaty to which he had compelled the Emperor’s ministers to agree in 1858, though supported by a much smaller force. Like Alexander the Great, he would have to find a Gordian solution.

  Sir Hope Grant had also plagued him with a lesser problem, which touched another raw nerve of the Bruce family. Lord Elgin was proud of the arduous efforts of his father, the Seventh Earl, to preserve the ancient sculptures of the Parthenon of Athens by securing the permission of the Turkish rulers to take those statues to Britain. That selfless act had been denounced as “rapacious vandalism” by a pack of slanderers led by the poetaster Lord Byron. In 1816, a Parliamentary Commission declared the Seventh Earl innocent of wrongdoing and recommended the statues’ purchase by the British Museum. The £35,000 paid fell absurdly short of the true value of the Elgin Marbles. Despite the vindication, the Bruces were sensitive to charges of looting. His brother-in-law had pressed him to approve looting on a spectacular scale.

  The Earl was, however, moved by the General’s submission that they would otherwise face a major disciplinary problem. The issue, Lord Elgin agreed, was actually neither moral nor legal. The contents of the Summer Palaces were clearly the personal property of the Hsien Feng Emperor, who had expressly forfeited his rights under the rules of war. The problem was practical. Reaching the Yüan Ming Yüan first, the French had skimmed off the most valuable articles. British officers and other ranks alike were murmuring angrily that they had been cheated by their wily allies.

  Sir Hope Grant allowed his soldiers to take what treasures remained, but that was not good enough. The outnumbered French were compelled to disgorge most of the gold ingots from the Emperor’s treasury. In fairness, all British soldiers were then compelled to disgorge all their loot—except a few baubles. One such bauble was the triple strand of black Caspian pearls Lionel Henriques had scooped from an overlooked jewel case in Yehenala’s villa. It would look well on Fronah, and a civilian like himself did not come directly under the General’s orders.

  October 10, 1860

  THE PARK OF RADIANT PERFECTION

  An auction of all the loot, Sir Hope Grant ruled, would ensure that every soldier received a fair portion. While the undisciplined French scoffed, a colonel and two majors sold off the Emperor’s treasures.

  Lionel Henriques was an eager bidder. He was also an intelligent one. While others competed for gaudy silks
and knickknacks set with semiprecious stones, he bought the porcelains he knew. Most officers were not interested in “China pots,” which were fragile and unwieldy. He was too discreet to bid on the one garment that did catch his eye. The Emperor’s blue satin robe bearing four Imperial five-clawed dragons and the twelve symbols of earthly power went to Lord Elgin for a few shillings. Lionel also gracefully underbid so that Colonel Garnet Wolseley could acquire a matched pair of three-color-glazed Tang Dynasty funerary horses for £16.

  “Infantryman myself, Henriques,” Wolseley confided. “But there’s something about those beasts. Fearful price, though.”

  Lionel restrained his impulse to offer double, though he knew he could sell the horses for five times as much to Old Curiosity Soo in Shanghai. He was not as self-abnegating when the bidding jumped to £4/10s for a foot-high blue-and-white flask of the Yung Lo reign of the Ming, made in 1416 and exquisitely decorated with a bird singing on a cinnamon branch. He flicked his fingers to bid an even £5.

  “Sold to Mr. Henriques for a fiver.” The auctioneer colonel was enjoying himself hugely. “A fabulous price, but how can poor devils of soldiers compete against Messrs. Samuelson and Co.?”

  The auction of the Emperor’s personal treasures brought in £8,258/12s/3d to be distributed among the troops according to rank. Every private received £4, almost a third of his yearly pay, while sergeants and officers received more. That night Sapper Captain Charles George Gordon jubilantly wrote his sister that he had received £48. Aside from some grumbling among his staff officers, who like himself were excluded from the share-out, Sir Hope Grant had quelled his troops’ dissatisfaction.

  Lionel Henriques was euphoric. His esthetic passion was for the moment sated, and he believed his financial problems were solved. The porcelains he had bought were worth at least twice the £8,000 raised by the entire auction. Best of all, they had not yet cost him a penny. The General was happy to take his promissory notes on Samuelsons in London. He would decide later how much he would pay against those notes—whether, indeed, he would pay at all.

  October 18, 1860

  THE PARK OF RADIANT PERFECTION

  Lord Elgin finally found his Gordian solution to the impasse created by the cautious generals and the recalcitrant Manchus. The nobleman resolved all issues, practical or moral, by a single stroke. He assured ratification of the Treaty of Tientsin; he punished the slaughter of British prisoners; and he transformed the pillagers into conservators of Chinese culture.

  The Eighth Earl of Elgin no more considered his decision discreditable than the Seventh Earl had felt contrition for stripping the Parthenon. Nor was he ever to realize that he had, quite unintentionally, crippled the Manchu Empire’s finances, so that its subsequent endeavors to meet the challenge of the West by modernizing its industrial base and its military forces would fail. But no one could have foreseen that extraordinary consequence of the collision between the disparate natures of James Bruce, Earl of Elgin, and Yehenala, the Virtuous Concubine, who never met in this life.

  The nobleman had formed his intention on October 16 as he sorrowfully watched the burial of the four British and three Sikh prisoners whose captors had allowed them to die in agony. His resolution was fixed the following day, when the slain French prisoners were buried in the seventeenth-century Jesuit graveyard just outside Peking. After the stalwartly Protestant Ambassador Plenipotentiary and his senior officers acceded to their Catholic allies’ wish that they sprinkle holy water on the raw graves, his resolution became inflexible.

  As a Jew, and therefore an outsider, Lionel Henriques was wryly amused at his countrymen’s reluctance to participate in papist rites. He was, however, horrified when Lord Elgin announced his decision.

  Men were killed in war—and women too. If they were Europeans, it was lamentable, but the soldiers had known that death might await them. If they were Chinese, hundreds of millions stood ready to replace them. But the masterpieces created through many centuries by inspired artistry were irreplaceable—and Lord Elgin had resolved to destroy those masterpieces.

  Lionel remained ever afterward convinced that Lord Elgin’s chief purpose was not to compel the wavering Chinese to accept his terms, but to punish their recalcitrance and their killing of the prisoners. The Chinese had opened one gate of Peking on October 13, a few minutes before massed batteries of artillery were scheduled to bombard it at point-blank range. The Northern Capital, therefore, already lay in the Allies’ grasp. Cut off from reinforcement and resupply, Prince Kung, the Emperor’s half-brother and deputy, would, in any event, have ratified the treaty and agreed to pay an indemnity.

  Lionel, whose opinion was not solicited, agreed that it was necessary to humble the arrogant Manchus and ensure that they never again dared flout civilized diplomatic and commercial practices. He was, however, horrified by the means chosen to attain that end. Curiously, the French, who had happily pillaged the Yüan Ming Yüan, were also aghast at Lord Elgin’s decision. Their objection was summarily overruled.

  The First Division, under Major General Sir John Michel, marched from its encampment near Peking to the Summer Palaces on October 18. Like all the British generals, Sir John was smarting at Lord Elgin’s voluble injunction to greater vigor. The plenipotentiary complained that he was even more sorely plagued by his senior officers’ lack of energy than he had been in 1858. The First Division energetically fanned out through the Park of Radiant Perfection to bring “fire and the sword to the heathen.”

  Among the most energetic officers on the morning of the eighteenth was the sandy-haired captain of engineers called Charles George Gordon. Sapper officers were normally considered eccentrics, perhaps not quite gentlemen, and fanaticism flickered in Gordon’s prominent blue eyes. He belonged to the apocalyptic sect of Plymouth Brethren and perused his Bible so assiduously that even the devout Earl was discomfited. Captain Gordon’s brother officers felt it was not quite pukka to ascribe one’s every action to divine inspiration.

  Captain Gordon brought special skills to the terrible execution of justice, for he was adept not only in constructing fortifications, roads, and bridges, but in destruction.

  The Hall of Audience behind the West Gate was blazing fiercely minutes after the fires were lit. The dry wood, seasoned over the centuries, burned like cardboard. The immense painting of the Summer Palaces on the wall was a sheet of flame within seconds. The rosewood throne flickered briefly and was consumed. Red-hot roof tiles and flaming beams crashed onto the shimmering white marble floor, leaving it cracked and charred. Just before the Hall of Audience collapsed, it was outlined by flames like an enormous fireworks display. The tower of smoke was visible in every hutung of the Northern Capital.

  The soldiers cheered and laughed as they scampered through the maze leading to the Emperor’s private apartments and the villas of his concubines. The conflagration engulfed the gardens that exhibited the horticultural diversity of the Great Empire. The needles of firs and the pointed leaves of rhododendrons withered and cracked in the intense heat before vanishing in brilliant explosions. The thick bark of cedars smoldered and contracted before bursting into flame. When fiery trees toppled into the canals, the water seethed and hissed under a carpet of gray ash.

  Because its chief building material was wood, the conflagration leaped across the Park of Radiant Perfection. Only the square brick base of the clock tower remained when the beams supporting the three-tiered roof disintegrated. The Pavilion of Precious Clouds, west of the Tower of Buddha’s Fragrance in the Garden of Crystal Rivulets, was preserved because the Chien Lung Emperor had ordered it constructed of bronze in 1750. Glowing cherry-red, the bronze pavilion stood intact amid a welter of smashed roof tiles coated with soot. The Romanesque palaces designed by the Jesuit Castiglione for the Garden of Eternal Spring were obdurate, since they were faced and crowned with stone. But the sappers’ scientifically placed charges brought them down handily, leaving only gutted façades.

  Red-coated Sikhs raced through the billow
s of smoke, exuberantly waving golden ingots they had discovered in an outlying hall overlooked in the looting of the preceding weeks. That trove, General Sir Hope Grant immediately resolved, would not be shared with the niggardly French. The first sappers to enter a remote pavilion stared in astonishment at two gilded coaches, which had been presented to the Chien Lung Emperor by the Earl Macartney, Britain’s first envoy to reach Peking. Those European vehicles, never used during the intervening sixty-five years, must also burn to administer justice to the Manchus.

  The northwest breeze whipped the flames and showered embers on the streets of Peking. The Yüan Ming Yüan was the center of the holocaust, but there was no reason to spare the outlying parks. The troops diligently put the torch to the two-hundred-odd edifices of the Summer Palaces of the Manchu Emperors.

  British officers remained characteristically cool as they wreaked their violent revenge. Lieutenant Colonel Garnet Wolseley took the opportunity, as he said, “to inspect the countryside around the palaces while the work of demolition was going on.” Lionel Henriques trailed unhappily behind as the officer climbed the ridge up to Wan Shou Shan, the Mount of Myriad Longevity, where the bronze Pavilion of Precious Clouds glowed red. He was silent when Wolseley remarked that the view was charming, but nodded when the Colonel observed with satisfaction: “Like a damned prolonged eclipse, ain’t it, Henriques? The smoke’s so thick the whole world’s in shadow.”

  Looking down upon the billows of smoke lanced with flame, Wolseley added: “And those Frenchies, what hypocrites! They pillaged like Visigoths, but objected for form’s sake to our administering the coup de grâce.” A black cloud eddied around them, briefly veiling the destruction, as Wolseley continued equably: “Our gallant allies left us only the bare shells of buildings to wreak our vengeance for the inhuman cruelty our unfortunate countrymen suffered.”

  The stench choked Lionel, and his eyes streamed. He did not see Captain Charles Gordon appear like a genie through the smoke, apparently satisfied that the demolition would proceed efficiently without his supervision. The pious Captain was as mercurial as he was dogmatic. The near-frenzy in which he had begun his work had given way to melancholy. His protuberant blue eyes were dull; his sandy hair was filmed with ash; and the firm mouth beneath his bushy mustache drooped.