China

by Edward Rutherfurd

  His uncle was the only person Guanji knew who had ever been to the capital. “Will you take me to Beijing?” Guanji asked.

  “Perhaps,” his uncle said. “One day.”

  * * *

  —

  Meanwhile, Zhapu itself seemed like a little heaven. The family lived quite well. Like all bannermen, his uncle received a modest stipend in silver from the emperor, and a grain allowance, and some benefits like schooling for his sons. But he supplemented these with the profits of a printing business he owned in the city of Hangzhou.

  “Bannermen like us aren’t supposed to become merchants and craftsmen,” he explained to Guanji. “It’s demeaning. But preparing and printing fine books the way I do is considered fit for a Manchu gentleman, and so I got permission.” He’d smiled. “It’s just as well, or we couldn’t live as well as we do.”

  As for his uncle’s children—his brothers and sisters now—they’d embraced him so completely that in a year or two he’d almost forgotten they had been his cousins first.

  His favorite was Ilha, the elder girl. He admired her with all his heart. She was everything a Manchu girl should be.

  Manchu women did not totter on bound feet, like the fashionable Chinese ladies. Their feet were as nature intended. In their platform shoes, wearing the simple, loose qipao dress with the long slits down the sides, they walked tall and straight and free. She was funny, too. Her light-skinned face might be composed and ladylike, but her hazel eyes were often laughing. And she was like a second mother to him.

  He loved to walk the streets of Zhapu. For though the British attack had left harsh marks on the garrison quarter, the seaside town was still a charming place, with a winding central canal crossed by nine steep-humped ornamental bridges. Houses, temples, pavilions, whose roof corners curved up into elegant points, and high garden walls flanked the canal; here and there, a willow tree hung gracefully over the water.

  But most of all, Guanji liked to ride out on Wind. Often they’d skirt the edge of the town and take the trail that led to the end of a long, low spit of land that jutted out into the sea, where there was a small shore battery on a little knoll. The sea, protected by headlands, was often so still that, in his mind’s eye, he could imagine it was a vast plain of grassland, like the northern steppe from which his people came. At such times, he liked to think that the spirit of his father, whose face he could scarcely remember, was riding beside him. And this secret company he kept brought him a sense of inner peace and strength.

  Since all things come to an end, the time came when Guanji was getting too big to ride his pony. His uncle bought him a small horse, just as sturdy as Wind, but more fleet; and Wind was to be given to another boy. On the day before Wind’s departure, Guanji took him for a final ride by the sea so that his father’s spirit also could bid farewell to his pony.

  He was on his way back into Zhapu when he saw a boy named Yelu walking along the lane. Yelu was at school with him. He lived in a small house in the garrison and his parents were quite poor. Yelu and he weren’t friends; but they weren’t enemies, as far as Guanji knew. Sometimes Yelu got angry, and then Guanji used to think he looked like a little pig. But he never said so. He nodded to Yelu politely enough as he drew near. But Yelu stood in his path. “They say your uncle’s bought you a new horse.”

  “It’s true. This is my last ride on Wind, so I’m feeling really sad.”

  “You get everything, don’t you? The old men call you Little Warrior.”

  “It’s because I can sing a lot of zidi songs, I think.”

  “And your father’s supposed to be a hero.”

  “He died in the battle here,” Guanji answered modestly, “like many others.”

  “That’s what you think. I heard he ran away. He got killed later. He was hiding in a well. What do you think of that, Little Warrior?”

  Guanji was so shocked and surprised that for a moment he didn’t know what to say. And before he could even shout that it wasn’t true, Yelu ran off.

  When he got home, he asked Ilha what she thought.

  “Of course he’s lying, silly,” she said. “Isn’t it obvious? He’s jealous of you. Besides, after his own father escaped alive on the day of the battle, some people said he was a coward, although it was never proved.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “People don’t talk about it.”

  “But how could he make up such a lie about my father?”

  “When people make up lies like that, it’s often because they’re afraid the lie is the very thing people might say about them. It’s like transferring an evil spell. You take the ugly spider that’s fallen on you and throw it onto someone else.”

  The next day, when Guanji told Yelu to be ready to fight him after school, Yelu apologized and confessed he’d made the story up and that he knew it wasn’t true. So they didn’t fight. But Guanji couldn’t help wondering if Yelu had just apologized because he was afraid of getting a beating. So he didn’t really feel better. And although he would never disbelieve his uncle, the little episode left a tiny doubt in his mind.

  A few days later he went riding on his new horse to the long spit of land by the sea. And as usual, he imagined that the silent water was a great expanse of steppe. But though he waited, the spirit of his father did not come to join him, and he rode out to the end all alone.

  * * *

  —

  A year after this, Ilha got married. “As nobody’s allowed to marry one of their own clan,” she had teased her father, “I don’t see how any husband is going to please you, unless he’s one of the royal clan.” But in the end, they found a young man whose ancestors were satisfactory and whose prospects were good. He lived in the great city of Nanjing, on the Yangtze River, a hundred and fifty miles to the north.

  Guanji remembered two things about that day. The first was the bride. The beautifully embroidered red marriage qipao she wore seemed fit for a princess. Her platform shoes raised her to the same height as a man. But it was her hair that amazed him. Normally on formal occasions it would be parted in the middle, then wound into two pinwheels, one above each ear. As a bride, however, her hair had been pulled over a big comb, high above her head, and decorated with flowers, so that she seemed to be wearing a towering crown. “You look so tall,” he said in wonderment.

  “Be afraid.” She laughed.

  The second thing was the shamans. Her father insisted upon them. The two old men set up a curious little shrine and performed ancient rites from the Manchurian forests, in a deep chant that nobody understood except his uncle—and Guanji wasn’t even sure that his uncle did, really. It added a strange solemnity to the day.

  Guanji was sorry Ilha wasn’t living closer, but she promised to come to see him whenever she could.

  * * *

  —

  It wasn’t long, in any case, before Guanji himself moved away, at least for part of the year, when the time came for him to enter the Manchu officers school in Hangzhou. As his uncle had a little house beside his printing workshop in the city, Guanji lived there except on holidays, when he returned to Zhapu.

  Hangzhou was eighty miles down the coast from Zhapu, at the head of a river estuary. Until that time, Guanji had never been there, and at first he’d been rather overawed. Hangzhou was the capital of the province, one of the oldest cities in China, with mighty thousand-year-old walls and widespread suburbs. On a rise above the river there was a huge pagoda towering into the sky. “In the old days, they kept a great lamp at the top,” his uncle told him, “that sailors could steer by from out at sea.” At Hangzhou also, the Grand Canal began, carrying all kinds of goods northward. “It’s eleven hundred miles long,” his uncle explained. “If you go up the canal, you’ll cross the valley of the mighty Yangtze, and then farther north, you’ll cross the Yellow River valley, too, until you finish up at Beijing. After the Great Wall, it’s
the greatest marvel of construction in all China.”

  Hangzhou’s broad streets contained famous stores, pharmacies, and teahouses that had been run by the same families for centuries. As for the vast compound of the Manchu bannermen, it enclosed no less than two hundred and forty acres.

  When Guanji entered the big officers school there, where nearly all the boys were older and already accustomed to this great city, he assumed they would be far more advanced than he was. And in Chinese studies and mathematics he certainly had much to learn. But in Manchu, he discovered that he already knew more than most of them. And to his even greater surprise, there wasn’t a single boy in the school who could match him in the traditional martial arts. Many of the pupils couldn’t ride at all.

  “If the emperor gives them an allowance for horses,” said his uncle sadly, “they just spend the money on themselves.”

  * * *

  —

  It was during the years at Hangzhou that Guanji came to know and understand his uncle better. Since he was being raised as a bannerman soldier, he’d never taken much interest in his uncle’s printing business. So he was quite surprised to discover how much of a tradesman his uncle was and how hard he worked.

  He liked the printing workshop. Beside the big wooden presses and the paper stacked on shelves, there was a long table where a line of craftsmen sat, diligently carving. For the books were not printed using metal type, but little woodblocks, each bearing a character, fitted into sets of page frames.

  His uncle handled all kinds of projects. “Here’s a fine book of poems on the presses,” he might explain. “We’re copying characters from an old Ming dynasty text for this printing. Here’s a mandarin, good friend of mine, wants his essays printed. And this…”—he pointed to a pile of thick papers, covered in untidy writing—“will be the genealogy of a certain nobleman, going back three thousand years. Partly invented, of course, but he’s paying me handsomely.” He smiled. “I may not be a scholar, but I know how to write an introduction—you know, gracefully flattering, that sort of thing.”

  None of this would have been possible, Guanji came to realize, if his uncle hadn’t developed a huge network of contacts. There wasn’t a cultivated person in the province he didn’t know. These were his patrons and his audience.

  Some lived in the city. But the favorite meeting place was outside, at the lovely West Lake, where emperors went to relax, writers and artists to contemplate nature, and mandarins to retire. From time to time his uncle would take Guanji to some rich man’s villa on the lakefront or some scholar’s retreat in the encircling hills. And Guanji enjoyed these visits.

  But though he admired his uncle, he wouldn’t have wanted such a life himself. He had far too much energy. He wanted action, not to be cooped up all day in a library or printing house.

  * * *

  —

  During these years at the officers school, Guanji did well at his work. He grasped ideas quickly; his memory was excellent. As for his physical prowess, there were hardly any big open spaces where one could gallop in Hangzhou, so his horsemanship did not improve. But archery practice was another matter. As Guanji entered adolescence, he grew far more muscular and exceedingly strong. Before he was fifteen, he could draw a more powerful bow and shoot farther and with more deadly accuracy than any other boy at the school. His face also began to change. It became rounder, more Mongolian; a wispy dark brown mustache began to droop from the sides of his mouth. One day his uncle, looking through some drawings, pulled out an ancient picture of a warrior prince. “You’re getting to look just like that,” he remarked with a smile. And though this was a slight exaggeration, there was a certain resemblance. Whenever the school was putting on one of the plays the Manchus loved, Guanji was always picked to be the warrior prince.

  Only two small clouds appeared on the horizon of his life during these years. The first was the death of the emperor. He was succeeded by his son, quite a young man. But this dynastic business hardly affected Guanji’s daily life, except for the need to observe the official mourning.

  The second was a revolt that had broken out in one of the southern provinces.

  “It’s the usual story,” his uncle posited. “The empire’s so huge there’s always a revolt somewhere. The White Lotus wanting to restore the Ming dynasty, the Muslims on the western border, Triad gangs trying to take over the ports, minority tribes giving trouble in the outer provinces. We’ve seen it all before.”

  “Who’s behind this one?”

  “The leader is a Hakka called Hong.”

  “What do they want?”

  “To throw out the Manchu. Once we’re gone, apparently, all the troubles of the world will be over.” He sighed. “They’re even promising their own heavenly kingdom—a Taiping, as they call it. Good luck with that!”

  “They say the Hakka are good fighters. Could the revolt grow?”

  “I doubt it.” His uncle shook his head. “They’ve already made one huge mistake. Their leader follows the barbarians’ Christian god. Our country people won’t like that.”

  “I don’t really know what Christians are,” Guanji confessed.

  “They have one chief god and two lesser gods. One of those is called Jesus.”

  “I’ve heard the name.”

  “Well,” said his uncle, “this Hakka, the Taiping leader, says he’s Jesus’s younger brother.” He laughed. “Nothing will come of them.”

  * * *

  —

  It was a year later that Ilha returned to Zhapu on a visit with her husband and their infant son. They had come for an important occasion. In fact, it was for a family triumph.

  If her father’s career had been a series of modest successes—printing a prestigious book, securing an extra pension for a member of the family—each one designed to add in some small way to his family’s advancement, this time he’d outdone himself.

  “The emperor himself is honoring our family,” he told them. And not just with the usual written memorial. “We have permission to erect a ceremonial arch,” he announced triumphantly, “by the garrison gate in Zhapu.”

  It was all on account of a virtuous woman, the kind the Chinese most admired—the loyal widow.

  “My father had several children,” his uncle would relate, “but only one son lived long enough to marry. Soon after marrying, however, and before producing an heir, he died. His widow was young and beautiful. Many men wanted her. Her duty was to look after her father-in-law, who was getting to be an old man. But she went further. Refusing to let her husband’s family die out, she found her old father-in-law a young wife and persuaded him to marry her. Thanks to that, Guanji, your father and I were born. When the old man died, the two widows brought us up at first. Then my young mother became sick and died, which left only that loyal daughter-in-law, whom we always called Grandmother. She looked after us. She slaved for us. She was the rock on which this family is founded. She died the year you were born. The most virtuous woman I have ever known. And now the emperor himself is honoring her.”

  The celebrations for the arch were attended by the local magistrate, numerous officials, and all the family. In the evening there were fireworks. Then the family returned to their compound.

  * * *

  —

  Guanji knew that Ilha was going to tease her father that night. He could see the mischievous glint in her eye. It was done with affection, of course. She started as soon as they’d all sat down. “Well, Father,” she inquired, “are you satisfied now?”

  Her father gave her a cautious look. “Aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but I’m puzzled.” She smiled. “That’s all.”

  “Why are you puzzled?” he asked suspiciously.

  “The virtuous widow. Preserving the family so that the ancestors will have descendants to remember them. It’s all very Confucian. Very Han Chinese.”

 
“That is true.”

  “Yet you’re always reminding us that we’re Manchu. We’re not supposed to worry about the smaller family so much. It’s the clan that matters. And the clan’s plentiful. The spirit pole of the clan is well cared for in Beijing. The noble Fiongdon has plenty of descendants.”

  Her father gazed at her. He knew he was being teased, but he wasn’t going to let her get away with it. “Treat your father and your family with more respect,” he said firmly.

  Ilha wasn’t deterred at all. “I’m a Manchu lady, Father, not Han Chinese. Manchu girls walk tall and straight. We don’t bind our feet. And we say what we think. Even the great khans of old used to take advice from their wives and mothers. It’s well recorded.”

  “I doubt they took any cheek from their daughters,” her father retorted. “In any case, there are many things that are noble in Chinese tradition. Confucian loyalty and correct behavior, in particular. We Manchu are the guardians of China, so the emperor is encouraging us to celebrate virtuous women.” He gave her an admonishing look. “And if it’s good enough for the emperor, it’s good enough for you.”

  “Yes, Father,” she said obediently.

  But she wasn’t quite done. Maybe she’d drunk a little more rice wine than she should have. It was always the men who drank most of the wine, but everyone was celebrating that night. Whatever the cause, at the very end of the evening, she turned to her family with a big smile and addressed them all.

  “Say thank you to Father,” she cried, “for all he has done for you. He’s raised the family yet again. Every rich man and mandarin in Hangzhou owes him gratitude. Every scholar at the West Lake is his friend. Now the emperor himself honors us with a family arch in Zhapu. And you know what? This is only the beginning. He has plans for us all. I had the easiest task. All I had to do was marry a worthy man.” She beamed at her husband. “I’ve no complaints. Thank you, Father.” She turned to her brothers. “But he has plans for every one of you. You’re going to be rich and powerful. And Guanji’s going to be a general, aren’t you, Guanji?” She laughed. “He doesn’t know it yet, but Father will arrange that, too, I’m sure. We’re all part of his great scheme. His wonderful plan for the glory of our family.”