Mandarin-Gold (7 page)

The girl was the first to move.

'Come into the bedroom,' she said softly. Her eyes in the dark room were luminous, like stars, and she was smiling. 'You have things to learn. And I want to be the one to teach you.'

4

In Which the Son of Heaven Utters an Important Prayer

The procession had set out some time before dawn, so that when the sun came burning up over the four cities that constituted Peking, the leading marchers were already near the Altar of Heaven — a huge open marble dais in a park near the main gates.

People had packed the narrow streets of the capital for hours, climbing up on the roofs of the gaily painted shops for a better view. Outside teahouses in side streets, so narrow that two wheelbarrows could barely pass, comedians went through their patter, and acrobats and jugglers flung themselves about furiously while colleagues touted busily for coins from the crowds.

The sun gilded the curved tiles on the towering gatehouses that guarded the city entrances, turning their red shutters, quaintly painted with pictures of cannon, to the colour of dried blood. Steam rose from the sluggish river and hung like fog in streets already heavy with the stench of sewage. In China, all household waste was collected in pails and then carried to the fields to fertilize the crops, along with hair gathered daily from the floors of barbers' shops. It slopped over and was trodden through the streets.

At the head of the procession marched the Emperor's imperial bodyguard, tall, broad-shouldered men, sweating in the suffocating, stinking air. They marched in leather skirts and black helmets, and carried quivers of sharpened arrows on their shoulders. They, held whips in their right hands, and to the rhythmic boom of a brass gong beat back people who had poured from their stews and alleys and hovels to see the passage of the Son of Heaven, the Emperor of the Celestial Kingdom.

Behind the bodyguard came standard bearers with flags and streamers on golden poles, and then a pig-tailed mandarin in blue robes, wearing the red cap of his rank, holding a gold umbrella, the symbol of royalty. Court eunuchs, each six feet tall, their faces plump as capons, and other lesser mandarins marched after him. All intoned the Emperor's praises in a strange high chant.

Tao Kuang, Glorious Rectitude in the Chinese translation, Emperor of China for the past ten years, sat on a golden throne, its legs carved in the likeness of talons. This throne was carefully shielded by glass and borne on gilded poles by sixteen men. The Emperor's hat was shaped like a scholastic mortarboard, and from it twenty-four pendentives swung with every step of his bearers. His yellow gown and purple coat were special garments worn by succeeding Sons of Heaven when acting as High Priests of the Children of Han, and about to address themselves to Heaven, as only they were privileged to do. For this procession had neither political nor military significance; it was a religious pilgrimage of national importance. Tao Kuang was on his way to the Altar of Heaven, near the Hall of the Blending of Heaven and Earth and the Palace of Heavenly Purity, to pray for rain.

China lay in the grip of a ferocious drought. Reservoirs were empty; cattle had died for lack of water; crops stood parched and stunted. Many rivers had dried up altogether; only a few contained enough water to keep fish alive.

This in itself was an omen of more terrible things to come, for fish were most important symbols of life, and how they fared was a sure indication of what awaited the whole Kingdom.

For weeks, priests had lamented and prayed for rain; but no rain had fallen. So now the Son of Heaven would speak to Heaven, his Father, and, begging forgiveness for his grievous sins, would ask that rain should fall, and quickly, and in abundance.

As befitted, the supreme dignity of such an occasion, the Emperor's coat was embroidered with the Twelve Ornaments, each symbolic and significant of some
^:
part of China or Chinese life. First, the sun; then the moon and the stars; fire; grass; a pheasant; a key-fret; the head of an axe; mountains; the dragon; cups of wine and milk; rice grains, that represented both food and drink.

The Emperor wore a leather girdle, studded, and glittering with sacred gems, each big as a man's eye, and hanging with clattering metal pendants. His black leather boots, soft as silk, had white leather soles three inches thick.

Behind him, through the tortuous streets of the city, followed thousands of his subjects. They felt supremely honoured that they had set eyes on the man whose power and word were infinite; who usually spoke to other men only through intermediaries; who alone could speak to the gods; whose wisdom was the wisdom of all the ages.

Tao sat with his hands loosely on the gold arms of the chair. He was in his fifties, a quiet man who, in another situation, might have been an academic or a teacher, for he lived a surprisingly austere life. At three o'clock each morning he was carried to his private pagoda to worship Buddha. Then he would walk in his palace garden, in the Purple Forbidden City, at the heart of Peking, before work with his Secretaries or Grand Counsellors. After a light meal of, rice and fruit, he would relax for an hour or two writing poetry with a brush dipped in Royal vermilion ink.

He would retire to bed at seven each evening, and outside his room eunuchs stood on perpetual guard, ready to summon to him any of a hundred concubines and eight queens whose lives were devoted to his whims and his pleasures. These women were all adept at different attitudes of sexual gratification. One, her front teeth removed, would take his penis in her mouth; another, with large, firm buttocks, would, delight on being penetrated from the rear; a third, hands kept perpetually moist in gloves of scented ointment, would massage his phallus to the muted music of harps.

But the Emperor was not thinking of such things now. He was pondering the speech he would have to make when the procession reached the Altar of Heaven. Sinister signs had been seen in the heavens —falling stars, strange glowing lights — which soothsayers could read as ordinary men read books, and all pointed relentlessly to a time of terrible change and war. The ancient rules of Confucius, by which all civilization must live or die, had been flouted and this drought was only one of the results.

There were also other signs of anarchy, equally serious and closer to his heart. Earlier that year, a rebel in Canton, who called himself The Golden Dragon King and claimed he possessed magical powers, had defeated a regiment of the Imperial troops that the Emperor had sent against him.

The Emperor knew from his own spies that this had happened because many Imperial soldiers were opium smokers, living in their private, flowery world of ease and dreams.

But the Governor of Canton, in reporting their humiliating defeat, had prudently not mentioned this addiction, lest his own vast income from trading in the forbidden drug should be questioned. Instead, he had declared that The Golden Dragon King had possessed demoniacal powers against which human troops had been powerless.

This was a falsehood, of course, and Tao had dismissed the Governor instantly and brought him in iron chains to his court in Peking. His possessions had been seized, and then he had been banished to the wild, cold, frontier country in the north, to ponder on his misdeeds. But his punishment did nothing to change the ignominy of Imperial defeat; another regiment had been required to subdue the insolent rebels. The Emperor's palanquin jogged on. The streets were hotter now, and he felt the vague unease he always felt on these occasions. What would happen if he prayed — and no rain fell? What would happen if, next time, not two hundred but
four
hundred of his troops were opium addicts?

Why, even in Peking, a manure gatherer who scratched up horse dung with a wooden shovel, had saved a little money, and gathered together some discontented old soldiers, whose pensions were in arrears, some professional beggars and paupers, and then had the effrontery to style himself the reincarnation of an Old King.

He claimed he had reigned before the Manchus took power, and now had returned to claim his throne.

Fortunately, the Emperor's spies had told him the date of the uprising, so the manure gatherer had been arrested on that same morning and strangled ceremoniously and in public with iron chains. There had been other attempts at rebellion, too, which had fortunately fizzled out like damp fireworks on an autumn evening. But they all were significant, for Tao knew that many still regarded him as a stranger, an interloper.

His family, the Manchus, had ruled China for barely two hundred years, and so were still not accepted in a land where time stretched measureless as the Outer Seas. And because of this feeling he believed that his officials did not fight corruption as fiercely as if he had been a native king.

If his prayers for rain failed, then all kinds of other revolutionaries would instantly rise, like frogs in a marsh, and croak their criticism. He dare not fail, because he could not afford failure — but how could he be certain of success?

How different life had been in the past, he mused, when honest men held office, and corruption was virtually unknown! Once, in the golden days of long ago, a friend of a provincial governor, Yang Chen, had remonstrated with him for not leaving a fortune to his sons, and Yang Chen had replied: 'If posterity speaks of me as an incorruptible official, will
that
be nothing?'

And again, when someone else had offered Yang a bribe, explaining: 'It is dark, and no-one will know,' Yang had replied in surprise: 'No-one will know? Why, Heaven will know. Earth will know. You will know. I will know.'

In memory of this man's integrity, the Ancestral Hall of his family was still called the Hall of the Four Knows. Where in all his Kingdom now could Tao find a man like this?

I must have more spies, he thought, and I must pay larger rewards for information, so that I can discover which officials are taking bribes from these Barbarians. Or what about getting rid of the Barbarians altogether? This was a most attractive idea. It was very possible that their presence in the Heavenly Kingdom was in large measure to blame for famines, for this present drought — and even for the serious floods of the Yellow River which earlier that year had drowned hundreds of people.

Truly, since the arrival of the earliest Barbarians, the Portuguese three hundred years before, China's troubles had multiplied and grown graver. Somehow the Portuguese had persuaded the Emperor of that time to allow them trading facilities. They had spoken with honeyed tongues and promised him all kinds of benefits. Finally, he had allowed them the use of Macao, a barren, mosquito-ridden island in the Canton River.

But hardly had they set up their warehouses than the Spanish had arrived to break their monopoly. First, the Spanish had seized the Philippine islands and subdued the savages there. Then, sailing from Mexico by way of Manila, the Spanish used Macao to turn round their ships, and re-load them with new cargoes.

Early in the seventeenth century, the Dutch had arrived in Java. They renamed the island Batavia, and almost immediately sent envoys to Peking, impudently asking for the use of a port in China, and permission to trade. But of course the Dutch were only pirates; they had nothing to offer, and they were given nothing in return. The Emperor had explained to them courteously that while it was right and proper for them to come to admire China and worship the Son of Heaven, he did not need their ambassador or their trade, and nothing would change this view.

After this discomfiture of the Dutch, the British had arrived, and the Americans. They were strange peoples, often swearing and shouting, and fighting among themselves, speaking the same language, yet absurdly claiming to be two separate nations. The British were the more politically dangerous, for although his cartographers assured him they came from a tiny island, yet from this faraway foggy place on the edge of a mainland, they had subdued countries a hundred times their size, and thousands of miles away.

Now they pressed impatiently against the shores of his Kingdom. So far, he and his predecessors had managed to confine them with the other foreign devils to a small area in Canton, but they were determined to advance these narrow frontiers, and would use any means to do so.

They had tried with gifts, sending noble lords as ambassadors to him bearing presents, astrolabes, telescopes with huge lenses, and brass howitzers. They had even presented his predecessors with two carriages on springs. These were unusual, for Chinese conveyances possessed no springs, but what strange values Europe must admire if the humble coachman took preference over the owner of the carriage, by sitting above him
and
in front of him!

Tao smiled again at the absurdity of this idea. But what else could one expect from sweating Barbarians, with bristled chins and red hair, who belched after drink and not after food? This was truly the ultimate mark of their crudity, for to belch after food was to acknowledge to your host how much pleasure it had given you. But to belch after drinking was to equate yourself with grunting hogs in a swamp.

These unlikely foreigners had subdued India and had swanned into Burma and Malaya, but their greatest prize would be China itself.

The Americans were even landing men and women with the declared intention of converting his subjects to their strange Christian religion. No wonder the gods were angry with him and withheld rain while he allowed them to prosper, and their strength and influence to increase!

Perhaps his officials also took bribes to allow this, as along the southern coast they took money from the suppliers of opium?

His Imperial Displeasure must flash against them like flame, and be as lightning and thunder over the Purple Mountains. He must show all corrupt administrators how long was his arm and how hard and crushing his fist. Clearly, he had failed to be ruthless enough.

'The quality of the rulers,' so Confucius had taught, 'permeates society to the dregs.' If their quality was good or bad, then the calibre of the entire country must be coloured accordingly. Did he not recall the example of Emperor Chang K'an, in the first century, who was so just a ruler that nature had responded and made every blade of corn grow two ears instead of one?