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  Mandarin

  A Novel

  The Imperial China Trilogy

  Robert Elegant

  FOR

  Robert Pepper Martin and Keyes Beech

  WHO KNOW WHY

  CONTENTS

  BOOK I April 11, 1854–October 21, 1855

  THE SETTLEMENT

  BOOK II April 1, 1856–November 7, 1856

  THE HEAVENLY KINGDOM

  BOOK III August 24, 1860–September 1, 1864

  THE COLLAPSE

  BOOK IV March 7, 1872–January 14, 1875

  THE RESTORATION

  Preview: Dynasty

  About the Author

  Women hold up half the sky.

  —Mao Tse-tung

  BOOK I April 11, 1854–October 21, 1855

  THE SETTLEMENT

  CHAPTER 1

  April 11, 1854

  The Garden of Crystal Rivulets

  THE SUMMER PALACES NEAR PEKING

  The young Manchu officer sidled behind the crimson pillars on the highest tier of the Tower of Buddha’s Fragrance. Though he stood at his assigned post in obedience to the regulations of the Great Pure Dynasty, he was nonetheless uneasy—as apprehensive as if he were skulking for some ignoble purpose rather than carrying out his duties. Before allowing his eyes to range over the sunset vista of Kunming Lake, he assured himself again that he was hidden by the twilight shadows of the pillars supporting the azure-and-gold umbrella roof.

  The seventeen arches of the bridge to South Lake Island were mirrored in the placid water—illusorily close from the Mount of Myriad Longevity, the highest eminence within the Garden of Crystal Rivulets. In the east, grotesque in his eyes, shone the white-marble façades and the bulbous domes of the Romanesque palaces erected a century earlier by an Italian Jesuit architect for the Chien Lung Emperor, the fourth and greatest sovereign to rule since the Manchus conquered China.

  Stealthily, almost furtively, the young officer’s gaze shifted to the Hall of Jade Billows and the Hall of Joyous Longevity, which loomed under outswept roofs on the foreshore of the lake. He started when he saw the diminutive Pavilion of Auspicious Twilight between the two massive halls, and, almost against his will, his eyes fixed themselves on the terrace.

  Though certain he was unseen, he smiled placatingly—and guiltily. With an effort, he resumed his surveillance of his assigned quarter of the Yüan Ming Yüan, the Park of Radiant Perfection, which extended for several hundred square miles for the pleasure of his sovereign, the Hsien Feng Emperor of the Ta Ching Chao, the Great Pure Dynasty. The sight he had glimpsed was forbidden to all eyes, above all his, though he had been detailed to watch over the Summer Palaces this unseasonably warm April evening.

  The low rays of the setting sun lit two figures framed like puppets on a stage between the scarlet balustrades and the upcurled eaves on the terrace of the Pavilion of Auspicious Twilight. A young man lounged in a rosewood chair, his Imperial-yellow robe thrown back to expose his beige under-robe. A woman sat erect on an ebony stool beside him, the voluptuous form the officer remembered obscured by the stiff folds of her tribute-silk gown. Across the distance, the white narcissi appliquéd on the plum fabric shone clear in the golden light, as did the stylized shou, longevity, ideograms embroidered on her black cuffs.

  The Baronet Jung Lu forced his eyes toward the red disk of the setting sun, which burned through the haze-shrouded clefts of the Fragrant Hills. He would not look again at the woman who had been the companion of his early youth. He would not worry the old wound. Above all, he would not allow himself to hope. Fate was a whirligig, constantly spinning, but, despite fate’s wildest vagaries, she was forever beyond his reach.

  Jung Lu shrank into himself behind the crimson pillar. Though the Emperor could not have sensed his impious gaze, much less his blasphemous memories or his sacrilegious longings, he shivered in the warm twilight and pulled his cape around his shoulders as if the balmy dusk had suddenly grown cold. He could discount neither the preternatural insight the common people attributed to the Son of Heaven nor, more practically, the sovereign’s myriad sources of mundane information. The penalty for lèse majesté—in thought as much as deed—was decapitation after prolonged torture.

  Unaware of the Baronet Jung Lu’s fearful gaze, the Hsien Feng Emperor, the seventh of his line to rule China, watched a transparent stream pour from the square blue-and-white porcelain winepot. It was good to relax in the gentle twilight, for once untroubled by the usual swarm of eunuchs eager to spare him even the effort of pouring his own wine. In the sanctuary of the Garden of Crystal Rivulets, ten miles from his chief residence in the Forbidden City of Peking, he could also escape the Mandarins who constantly pressed him for decisions he was loath to take. It was delightful to be alone with the Virtuous Concubine Yehenala, far from the jealousies and the intrigues of a thousand court ladies. For once content, the Emperor sipped from a winecup painted with peonies. He must, he cautioned himself, drink sparingly, lest he mar the joys of the night.

  Yehenala was not exalted among his hundreds of concubines. The Dowager Empress had designated her for a low rank when she was chosen among sixteen other aspirants to share his bed. She was, naturally, avid for promotion, but she was not importunate. Yehenala was no more than normally skilled in the arts of love, but her ardor compensated for her lack of total refinement. She was, after all, just past eighteen, having entered the Forbidden City only three years ago, a year after his own elevation to the Dragon Throne. He was himself not quite twenty-three.

  “Ho chiu …” he commanded. “Have some wine, and try these plums. The clotted cream is delicious.”

  “Truly delicious, Majesty.” Yehenala’s tone was as suggestive as the chiming of wind bells. “But the wine … perhaps not too much, lest …”

  “It will be well … glorious, be assured.”

  “It is always glorious, Majesty, pleasure no other man could give. But this slave hopes the ecstasy will not be dulled by wine … only enhanced.”

  “The perfect balance,” he agreed magisterially, “is all-important.”

  The shadow lifted from the Emperor’s brow; the incipient frown no longer marred the dark-ivory skin between his sparse eyebrows. He watched the golden spoon carry the sliced plums dripping with yellow cream to Yehenala’s carmine mouth, and he was pleased that she was almost as discriminating a gourmet as himself. She was, besides, almost as ingenious and avid a lover as himself. One could not, of course, equate the amatory skills of a male and a female, who were so wholly different, but she was proficient—for an amateur. Gratified by the spontaneous profundity of his thoughts, the Emperor gave himself to the pleasure of studying his concubine.

  Her conversation was provocative, and her movements were so graceful she seemed to float on the kidskin-covered six-inch platforms of her flowered-satin shoes. Decorously condescending toward inferiors, she was sometimes wantonly playful toward him. However, she never transgressed the bounds of the deference due the Son of Heaven. He marveled at the porcelain translucence of her skin, and he was stirred by the averted glance of her level eyes under their moth-antenna brows.

  Sighing in satisfaction, the Emperor lifted his cup again. As the rim touched his lips, he was suddenly uneasy—as if he were observed even in the Pavilion of Auspicious Twilight, his refuge from his eunuchs and his Mandarins. He set the cup down and peered suspiciously across Kunming Lake.

  He saw only the old-gold ripples on the lake and the four-tiered Tower of Buddha’s Fragrance silhouetted against the dying sun. He sipped his
wine again and caressed Yehenala’s shoulder, delighting in the feel of the soft flesh and the delicate bones under the silk robe. His hand slipped down the swell of her breast to the curve of her waist.

  The Baronet Jung Lu’s fingernails drew blood from his palms, and rage throbbed in his chest. A pink haze obscured his vision, though his eyes remained inextricably fixed on the terrace.

  “Nala, it’s growing cold,” the Emperor murmured. “Shall we, perhaps? Better go inside and …”

  The Emperor abruptly withdrew his hand. His ears, tuned all his life to such intrusions, had heard a gentle scratching on the door leading to the bedchamber.

  “Lai!” His voice was rimed with displeasure. “Come!”

  The door was opened by a eunuch whose orange-and-green robe was scrolled with the five-clawed Imperial dragons of a personal attendant of the Son of Heaven. His dull eyes cast down and his torso bent, the eunuch shuffled onto the terrace. He sank to his knees and offered a dispatch box of scarlet leather chased with gold.

  The Hsien Feng Emperor’s fingertips toyed with the elongated brass lock as the servant withdrew. Frozen in anger, he stared across the lake past the Mount of Myriad Longevity crowned by the Fragrant Tower toward the Hill of Jade Springs with its single pagoda and the Fragrant Hills hazy in the distance.

  “Even here!” he said bitterly. “Even here, there is no rest for Us.”

  “Majesty, the cares of state are heavy.” Yehenala was gravely sympathetic. “But Your Majesty’s shoulders are broad … immensely broad. And Your Majesty’s transcendent wisdom …”

  “You too must read it.” The Emperor mastered his rage and joked. “We shall, perhaps, require your wise counsel.”

  He inserted a two-pronged key into the lock and drew a scroll from a case of yellow silk. Muttering to himself, he broke the seal, unrolled the parchment, and began to read.

  “Covering letter from the Ministry of War: Memorial from one Wu Chien-chang, Intendant of Shanghai. Forwarded for Our personal attention because pressing. Submitted with humblest respect and so on and so on.”

  “The Memorial itself, Majesty?” Yehenala’s impatience tested the limits of the privilege her master allowed her. “What does it say?”

  “Ah yes, the Memorial.” Depressed by his martyrdom to the cares of state, the Emperor did not reprove her for impertinence—and thus confirmed her privilege. “Prepare the vermilion ink. It appears that We—always We—are again obliged to decide. As if We did not employ hordes of Mandarins to make minor decisions.”

  While the Emperor laboriously deciphered the formal language of the dispatch, Yehenala ground a red inkstick against a hollowed malachite inkstone, dribbling water from the pierced forehead of a miniature green porcelain tiger. She selected a sable-hair brush from the sheaf in a carved jade brush holder and twirled the tip in the vermilion fluid. The Emperor, however, waved the brush away and handed her the Memorial.

  “Read, Nala,” he commanded. “Read and weep. It is coming again, the time of troubles. If only We had been firmer—as We wished and you suggested.”

  Yehenala frowned, pretending to great difficulty in reading the turgid bureaucratic jargon studded with classical allusions. It would be imprudent for her to display greater proficiency in the Officials’ Language than her Imperial Lord. By his grace she was permitted to develop her unwomanly bent for scholarship and to read the Memorials submitted by his Mandarins throughout the Great Empire. The intimate knowledge of affairs of state acquired from those dispatches had already placed much power in her frail hands.

  Her frown deepened as she read, and her breath quickened. When she laid the document down, her lips were compressed in resolution.

  “The accursed foreign devils!” Her angry forefinger tapped the Memorial. “The cunning, murderous devils. The time has come …”

  “Not so fast, Nala,” the Emperor chided. “We must deliberate.”

  “But they’ve attacked Your Majesty’s troops. At Shanghai, the center of their aggressive, their blasphemous intrigues against the Sacred Dynasty. Worse, they’re plotting with the rebels. The barbarians incited those scum, the Small Swords, to strike at the Imperial Army. Your Majesty must act!”

  “It is evil, gross evil!” In his distraction he did not reprimand her for her imperative tone. “The barbarians come across the oceans to harass Our sacred domains. And now, to unite with the Small Swords, the vile secret society with its obscene motto: Overthrow the Manchus and Restore Chinese Rule! Next the oceanic barbarians will combine with those vermin, the Taipings, the rebels of the so-called Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. As you know, they practice some barbarian mumbo-jumbo religion, and they call Our Imperial soldiers Imps. Those sons of turtle-bitches cut off their Manchu queues and grow their hair long to show they’re free Chinese. Free Chinese! What a contradiction in terms!”

  “And the long-haired rebels dare approach Peking itself,” Yehenala goaded. “Less than two hundred miles from where we sit, those lice who call themselves Holy Soldiers of Great Peace …”

  “We know, Nala, We know,” the Emperor sighed. “But Our counselors advise patience. Manage the barbarians, they say. Do not fight them—just yet.”

  “The barbarians are fighting. They’re attacking Your Majesty’s forces. If they unite with the Taipings, then … I beg forgiveness for my presumption, Majesty, but the Sacred Throne will tremble.”

  “The Sacred Throne already trembles, Nala—as you know.”

  “Not truly, Majesty. Only a passing tremor, no more. But if the oceanic barbarians unite with the Taipings, the Sacred Throne will tremble.”

  “Nala, Our Mandarins still counsel prudence. The Empire is enormous, they say, almost the entire world. The barbarians come from small and distant lands, and their numbers are small. Patience, Our ministers counsel, just wait them out.”

  “The barbarians’ weapons are powerful, Majesty, yet no more than fly whisks beside the might of the great Empire. Despite this disgraceful affair at Shanghai, Your Majesty can easily overcome …”

  “What do you advise, Nala, my little firebrand?” He smiled at her pugnacity.

  “War, My Lord! We must crush them. And we must split the barbarians from the rebels by shrewd stratagems.”

  Yehenala spoke eloquently and bitterly for several minutes. Fired by her passion, the Emperor snatched the vermilion brush from her fingers. His hand trembled with anger as he wrote.

  Concealed by the darkness under the eaves of Buddha’s Tower, the Baronet Jung Lu still watched. In the yellow glow of the oil lamps, the Emperor and the Virtuous Concubine looked even more like puppets. But she was, he knew, warm flesh and hot blood. Jung Lu wearily wiped his own blood from his palms on his blue tunic.

  CHAPTER 2

  April 12, 1854

  SHANGHAI

  Clouds obscured the divided city, and rain lanced the Hwangpoo River. The downpour tore with cold ferocity at the straw mats of the refugees sleeping in the streets of the South City, where the Chinese lived. Infants shrieked in terror of the spirits of the night, and wretched dogs yelped. From the camp of the Imperial Army on the east bank of the Hwangpoo a cannon boomed funereally.

  When the winds parted the clouds mantling Shanghai, the City Above the Sea, moonlight skittered on the river and unlighted junks rolled in the gusts. To the north, lamplight shone warm from the pillared mansions of the European and American intruders. Only guttering lanterns lit the gloom of the Chinese quarter, which stank of sour rice, rotting vegetables, and excrement. Gongs boomed and cymbals clashed in the Imperial camp to terrify the rebels holding the South City—and to drive away the demons of the rain clouds.

  A dark junk bucked across the current toward the west bank of the Hwangpoo. The stern oar shrilled in its tholes, and the halyard supporting the matting sail squealed through its wooden block. When the sail’s bamboo battens clattered to the deck, the two men squatting near the prow cocked their heads. Though the storm overwhelmed all other sounds, they feared discovery.
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  “I pay nung allee time kyong-eow.” The shorter man threw off the straw raincape covering the short jacket and baggy trousers of a respectable workman. “I tell you many time more better we wait and come down with silk on steamboat.”

  “Aisek, no can do.” His taller companion, who was similarly dressed, replied in the same mixture of pidgin English and Shanghai dialect. “Already we come late. We must come back fast. A sin if no come back this night.”

  “I fear to meet the Small Swords or, worse, the Imperial soldiers,” Aisek grumbled. “A terrible shame after that great stroke of business. Better we come in daylight by steamboat—even a week late.”

  “And let everybody see us and spoil our business?” the taller objected. “We have much silk to fill the empty hulls. Rejoice and put away your fears.”

  “I rejoice when we reach …”

  “We’re almost there now. And the families wait for us.”

  “Let it please God we see them safe tonight,” Aisek insisted querulously.

  “Sh’ma Yisroel …” Saul intoned the Hebrew prayer, and Aisek joined him. “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one!”

  As the cloud mass descended again, blotting out the moonlight, the junk’s prow embedded itself in the sodden riverbank, and the impact hurled them to the deck. They rose hastily, clutched their cloth-wrapped bundles, and dropped over the side into the darkness. Their cloth shoes squelching in the mud, the two men clambered onto the shore.

  The boatmen grunted and swore hoarsely as they leaned on their long poles to free the junk from the sucking mud. Despite the wailing of the storm and the clashing of cymbals from the Imperial camp, they were also stalked by fear of discovery. The junk’s master and owner, who was called Low Dah, the Old Great One, sighed with relief when the prow shook off the clutch of the land and pointed toward the junks rearing at their anchors in the stream. He mouthed soft obscenities of relief at escaping the hidden perils of the Shanghai night. It had been a hazardous voyage from Soochow, the city of brocaded silks and walled gardens, which lay sixty miles northwest across low land seamed with canals and rivers. The green delta of the Yangtze, which he called the Long River, was infested with rebels against the Manchu Dynasty and was harried by the Dynasty’s predatory soldiers.