“You know, my dear …” Saul Haleevie was again tempted to tell Fronah of her husband’s death, but he drew back. He could not risk throwing her into renewed illness. “You know I’m doing all I can to find out.”
BOOK IV March 7, 1872–January 14, 1875
THE RESTORATION
CHAPTER 63
March 7, 1872
TIENTSIN
David Lee’s eyes strayed involuntarily to the peacock. Silver rondels gleaming on its iridescent tail plumes, the turquoise bird was frozen in flight toward the sun disk in the corner of the square of rank. The pristine embroidery was bright, almost garish against the worn fabric of his black surcoat. That ceremonial garment should not have been hanging on the door of the rosewood wardrobe, which was severely plain in the Ming Dynasty style that the conservative gentry of North China preferred to the ornamented furniture of the progressive South. He would need the surcoat for the banquet the foreign merchants of Tientsin were tendering that evening to the Mandarin Li Hung-chang, Viceroy of Chihli, the Metropolitan Provinces surrounding the Northern Capital. But there was no reason to hang it out at six in the morning.
The blatant display of his new insignia as a Mandarin of the Third Grade was unseemly when his chief clerk had brought him confirmation of his elevation only the previous day. Still, he could not remove the surcoat and offend the old fellow, who was even more elated than David over such virtually unprecedented promotion at the age of thirty-four. As David knew so well from his own experience, a Mandarin’s elevation not only enhanced his subordinates’ prestige but enriched them. When the senior official’s dog barks, the folk maxim said, even Heaven listens! Besides, his clerk could not understand the perverse modesty David had learned from the barbarians.
It was only twelve years since he had worn the crested bird of paradise of the Ninth Grade—and preened himself in every mirror and window he passed. His wife of three years, who was a Chao of Kaifeng like his paternal grandmother, would be overjoyed that he now ranked with—but above—a major general in the military hierarchy. She would also complain in her next letter because she could not sew his new insignia on his surcoat herself. He was so overworked that she was better off in the ancestral Lee family mansion in Shanghai. The opportunity to reclaim that confiscated property for a ridiculous price had been a reward for his service to the Grand Mandarin Li Hung-chang—one of many rewards.
Only a fool, however, would allow unremitting good fortune to make him complacent. Though he was alone, David composed his features in piety. Neither must he allow pride in worldly advancement to distract him from his morning devotions.
He reverently recited the last phrase of the Hebrew prayer and sipped his green tea before unwinding the black velvet bands that bound to his forehead and arm the phylacteries, small leather boxes holding texts from the Bible. Ever since his marriage was solemnized by the Jewish rite, he had been diligent in saying the morning prayers learned from Saul Haleevie years earlier.
Until the present age, no practicing Jew had been a Senior Mandarin for more than three centuries. In this enlightened era, which men already called the Tung Chih Restoration of China’s greatness, his faith was no particular obstacle. A few Christian Mandarins, descended from converts made when Jesuit influence was strong at the Ming Court, were also advancing.
Heavy knocks shook the door, and David resigned himself to the barber’s ministrations. They were all clumsy, these big-boned northerners, but the churl with the razors, scissors, and ear picks was particularly ham-fisted. The northerners were also good-natured and forthright.
“Kung-hsi!” The barber glanced meaningfully at the new insignia, and David knew his charge had just doubled. “Congratulations! Not bad for a young fellow like you. Not bad at all.”
No obsequious flattery here, David reflected as the crescent-shaped blade scraped his cheeks, skidding dangerously near his ear. Instead of the elaborate courtesy of his southern countrymen, this brash greeting, which assumed that they were equals. On the other hand, a subtle Shanghai barber would have quadrupled his charge to celebrate his patron’s promotion.
While the barber twirled his ivory ear pick, a manservant brought a zinc hip bath into the bedroom. Two scullery boys bearing canisters of steaming water entered while the stubby scissors trimmed the hair in his nostrils, and a third carried a glowing brazier on a bronze tripod. When the grinning quintet withdrew, David lowered himself into the hip bath.
He could not linger in the warm water this raw morning, since the day would be arduous and long. He would not, however, forgo his bath, though the northerners were amused by his bathing four times a week. They, who hardly immersed their hands in water that often, considered the practice certainly unhealthy, probably effeminate, perhaps perverse. The soul-soothing rituals of Shanghai’s bathhouses were unknown in Tientsin, the northernmost treaty port, although the Kiangsu Provincial Association had introduced that luxury to the Northern Capital, eighty miles away, many years earlier.
Recalling his own recent visit to Peking, David toweled himself dry and slipped into his cotton underclothing before pulling on his heavy silk trousers and tunic. He would not wear a fur-lined robe indoors, though the soft pelts were warm. Soiled by ink and food, his colleagues’ robes exuded a revolting fusty smell after the long winter. Though his fastidiousness amused not only the servants but his colleagues, David Lee religiously observed the personal cleanliness he had learned from his adoptive father. Their Mosaic creed required them to be pure in body as well as soul.
David walked briskly across the courtyard to his office. Most foreigners were not as meticulous, though they were cleaner than the northerners, particularly the slovenly Manchus. Whether they were wealthy Princes of the Blood Imperial or crippled former Bannermen cadging a living from door to door, one was well advised to stay upwind of Manchus. They stank not only of their own sweat but of greasy half-raw meat and fermented mare’s milk.
The Empress Dowager Yehenala was the only Manchu of either sex who bathed daily. Sitting naked on an unpainted chair, she would chat animatedly with her ladies in waiting while maid-servants washed her with scented soap and rinsed her with warm water tinctured with fragrant oils.
Yehenala was unique, and, despite his Western skepticism, David was mesmerized by her. After granting the Mandarin Li Hung-chang a private audience a month earlier, the junior Empress Dowager had graciously agreed to receive his personal suite. With five other privileged Mandarins, Saul Haleevie’s adopted son had kowtowed before the silk-gauze screen that obscured her gorgeously attired figure. The filmy fabric barely concealed the features of the small woman who at thirty-six exercised absolute authority over the world’s most populous empire. However, the screen decorously maintained the fiction that Yehenala self-effacingly administered the government on behalf of her fifteen-year-old son.
Even if she had not just raised his chief from Assistant Grand Chancellor to Grand Chancellor, the highest position in the Mandarinate, David would have been profoundly impressed by the first female autocrat to rule the Great Pure Dynasty. Her searching questions and quick understanding would have been extraordinary in an emperor twice her age. Her vivid personality made him forget that she was a half-educated Manchu female who had come to power almost as much by luck and intrigue as by her force and talent. He saw her as the embodiment of a resurgent China.
When his chief clerk entered, David was transported from his memories of the Throne Room of the Six Western Palaces in the Forbidden City to the reality of his own austere office in the yamen of the Viceroy of Chihli.
“Your Honor!” The clerk bowed so low he almost dropped the sheaf of files clutched to his thin chest. “May I again offer my heartfelt congratulations on your amply merited promotion?”
“Come off it, Old Liu.” David laughed. “Next you’ll be calling me Your Excellency.”
“I expect to address Your Honor as Your Excellency in a few years’ time.” The clerk’s white goatee bobbed. “Your Honor’s merits
ensure further rapid promotion.”
“Old Liu, that’s enough,” David protested. “I’m just lucky. I’ve never held a substantive independent post, and I’ve been promoted far above my merits. Except for the chief’s kindness, I’m of no importance.”
“You mustn’t say that, sir.” The clerk was shocked. “The chief of the secretariat of the most powerful Chinese in the Empire himself possesses extraordinary ability. Otherwise the Mandarin Li Hung-chang would never keep Your Honor by him. Not only rare distinction, but outstanding bravery …”
“That’s more than enough, Old Liu.” David was impatient, though he knew the clerk was sincere. “What have you got for me this morning? My conference with the chief is put forward to half past seven. I’ll have to be quick if I’m to get any breakfast.”
“There is the matter of the Maritime Customs dues, Your Honor. The barbar—the foreigners’ remittances are later and later.”
David grinned and corrected the bureaucrat’s slip of the tongue. He alone in the bloated secretariat habitually referred to the outlanders as foreigners, rather than barbarians. Alone among the country’s rulers, so did his chief, who was beyond doubt the most powerful official, Chinese or Manchu, in the Ching Empire. For the time being it was necessary to deal with the foreigners as equals, the Mandarin insisted. The natural disdain nurtured by calling them barbarians—which they were, of course—could impede delicate negotiations.
The practiced administrator dealt with ease with the complex problems already sifted by his staff, for the Mandarin was concerned not only with the administration of the Empire’s premier viceroyalty, but with military and commercial affairs throughout East China. Certain matters would be digested for consideration by Li Hung-chang himself, either because of their intrinsic importance or because they touched upon his current preoccupations. David could dispose of most himself after returning from his regular morning conference with his chief.
He was himself among the twenty most powerful men in China because of the latitude the Mandarin allowed him. Since they thought alike on major issues—particularly the need to modernize the nation’s administrative, commercial, military, and industrial structures—there was no danger that he would abuse that trust. Moreover, the Mandarin shared the spoils of office so generously that the chief of his secretariat could never be tempted to seek personal profit. David’s colleagues delicately referred to such enterprises as “private ventures,” but he forthrightly called them “graft.”
The routine matters presented by David’s clerk demanded little concentration. His thoughts dwelt instead on his own influence upon the gradual revision of the archaic and unjust Confucian system. He was most profoundly gratified not by his powerful position, but by realization of the plans he had made with his brother before the gates of Soochow some eight years earlier. Aaron, now Deputy Chief Justice of Kiangsu Province and a Civil Mandarin of the Fourth Grade, was becoming more conservative as he increased in wealth and dignity. But he too strove to vindicate their father by reforming the judicial process.
The abstract enterprise was progressing, though slowly. Yet Aisek Lee was not an abstraction but a being of sinew and bone, the progenitor of his own sinew and bone. At the end of 1872 his father would have lived fifty-eight years, fifteen spent in exile. He was by Chinese reckoning close to sixty, the age at which, the Sage Confucius had declared, a man should be free from worldly care. It was essential to win his father an Imperial Pardon, and that vindication could not be long delayed if Aisek were to enjoy his remaining years among his grandchildren.
The Tung Chih Emperor would come of age in late April of this year, sixteen by Western calculation but seventeen by Chinese calculation. The occasion would assuredly be celebrated by a general amnesty. What better occasion to swing the Mandarin Li Hung-chang’s immense influence behind a petition pleading for a pardon for Aisek Lee?
David instructed his clerk to have the servants bring his breakfast. He would eat at his desk while considering his approach to the Mandarin. Though he could be more devious than any other man in the Empire when he wished, the Mandarin had learned from the foreigners that directness was often more effective than deviousness. As the manservant placed a tray on his desk, David decided he would be forthright, candid—and brief.
“I’ve been expecting you to bring it up again.” The Viceroy of the Metropolitan Provinces and Superintendent of the Northern Ports nodded. “Since it’s important to you, it’s important to me. I want to keep my right-hand man happy so that he’ll serve me better.”
“Then it’s finally the right time, sir, with the Emperor’s coming of age?” David pressed. “This time, you’ll sponsor the petition?”
“David, you have no need of me.” The Mandarin spaced his words economically. “With your new rank, you can petition the Throne directly. You have my permission, and your eloquence is striking. But I will not sponsor the petition.”
“Why, sir?” David did not conceal his irritation. “For years you’ve been advising me to wait. Now, when the perfect opportunity turns up, you tell me to go ahead on my own. Why, sir?”
“Because I would do myself no good pressing a hopeless petition.” Apologetic laughter dinted the Mandarin’s cheeks, but his fine eyes were wary. “As you’ve seen, we can accomplish much by a show of deference—by calculated delay and deliberate misunderstanding. But you know the tactics as well as I.”
“I do, sir.” David grinned despite his dismay. “They need you too badly to cross you when you’ve made up your mind. That’s why I thought that you could push the pardon.”
“Only in major matters, David. I can even be wrong occasionally in matters of state and still survive. But I cannot be less than infallible in small matters. Your father’s pardon is, unfortunately, a small matter. I cannot allow myself to sponsor an appeal that’s certain to be rejected.”
“Rejected, sir?” David felt like a schoolboy demanding an answer to a foolish question. “Why in the name of Heaven would the pardon be rejected?”
“You know as well as I do. You’d be telling me if it were someone else’s father. Your petition would be rejected out of hand because it touches on filial piety.”
“Filial piety? What’s that to do with it? I don’t see why …” David’s voice trailed off as logic asserted itself.
“You do see now, don’t you, my boy? The most delicate subject to the junior Empress Dowager at this moment is filial piety. She cannot show mercy to one convicted of gross filial impiety. With the Emperor coming of age, she’s full of doubts and fears: Will he continue to obey her or will he strike out on his own? He’s a young man, and the sap’s rising. Besides, he’s like his father, unfortunately, in his … ah … ambisexuality and his … ah … mingling with the humblest of his subjects … even harlots, actors, and transvestites.”
The Mandarin curled his powerful fingers around a porcelain teacup and continued: “You know, I believe, that he’s kicking up an unholy fuss right now. He doesn’t want the young lady Yehenala has chosen to be his Empress, but prefers Niuhura’s choice. Not because Niuhura sponsors the girl, but because Yehenala does not. Anyway, he’s cutting up rough. Yehenala, our patroness, has good reason to be worried about her son’s disobedience. And you want her to pardon an abominable act of filial impiety!”
“Abominable, sir? If any man was ever solicitous of his mother’s welfare, it was my father.” David paused, abashed by his own naïveté. “I’m sorry. I appreciate your candor, sir. Now there were a few matters on which I’d be grateful for your comments. First, the Customs dues are …”
“Hold on, my boy.” The Mandarin threw back his head and laughed. “Your apology’s accepted. But I won’t leave you without hope. Heaven knows, this matter has dragged on too long. Just wait till after the Imperial marriage—without question after the coronation, which can’t be put off more than a year, no matter how Yehenala stalls and the astrologers dither. After a year, I’ll ram the petition through whatever the cost—unless it
actually imperils my own position. If for some reason we can’t get a full pardon, we’ll just bring your father out. I imagine you can see that he’s not apprehended again.”
“I’m grateful, sir, deeply grateful. Naturally, I’d prefer vindication, but if …”
“You’d rather have your old father with you, wouldn’t you? I’m glad that’s settled.”
“I’ve taken too much of your time with my affairs, sir. Now the customs dues are very tardy. I would propose …”
“Deal with it, David. Refer to me only if there are major difficulties, though money’s always important. Is there anything of overwhelming importance this morning?”
“Not really, sir.”
“That’s fine. It’s time we had a long chat. Today I intend to meander.”
David grinned and moved his chair closer to the rosewood table with the scrolled legs that was the Mandarin’s desk. The honey-gold surface was bare except for a black-lacquered tray bearing a celadon tea service. As his chief poured the bitter black fluid into the minute moss-green cups, David studied the older man.
His affection for the Mandarin, as Gabriel Hyde had always called Li Hung-chang, was constantly increasing, as was his reverence for the first Chinese to establish a virtually independent and virtually impregnable stronghold under the Manchus. The Mandarin’s confidence was immense. Supported as he was by the Army of Huai, which had accompanied him to Tientsin in 1870 in defiance of the Dynastic Law that permitted a viceroy to bring only a small personal guard to a new post. He was also secure in wealth greater than that possessed by any other individual except the Empress Dowager or, perhaps, the dying Viceroy Tseng Kuo-fan, from whose faltering hands he had received the overlordship of the Metropolitan Provinces.
The Mandarin’s struggles with the jealousy of lesser men while carrying out policies that infuriated the conservatives and occasionally took the Court aback had hardly touched his strong face. However, the mustache that concealed his upper lip was lightly touched with gray, and his widely separated eyebrows knotted when he was tired. Otherwise, his features appeared blander than they had been when David met him a decade earlier. The humorous quirk of his cheekbones was more marked, though time and weight had filled out the lines of laughter around his eyes. His big frame was covered by a royal-blue long-gown with an enormous shou, longevity, ideogram embossed on its breast. The Mandarin was gigantic in physique as well as achievement.
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