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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Permissions

  Note on Chinese Names

  Map

  The Characters

  The British Legation, Peking, July 1899

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Two

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Afterword

  Copyright

  To HHA, PDLW and FR lePW

  Permissions

  Tang and Li Ho verses from The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’Ang Exotics by Edward H Schafer. Copyright © 1963 The Regents of the University of California.

  ‘To The Tune “A Lonely Flute on the Phoenix Terrace”’ by Kenneth Rexroth, from One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese, copyright © 1970 by Kenneth Rexroth. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  In the UK: The Yin Yang Butterfly: Ancient Chinese Sexual Secrets for Western Lovers by Valentin Chu, originally published by Putnam Publishing Group, copyright © 1993 Valentin Chu.

  In all other territories: ‘The bee steals wild nectar…’ translated by Valentin Chu from The Yin Yang Butterfly: Ancient Chinese Sexual Secrets for Western Lovers by Valentin Chu, copyright © 1993 Valentin Chu. Used by permission of Jeremy P Tarcher, an imprint of Penguin Putnam inc.

  Boxer doggerel, quoted in The Origins of the Boxer Uprising, copyright © 1987 The Regents of the University of California.

  Wang Wei poem in Three Chinese Poets, trs Vikram Seth, Faber and Faber, copyright © 1992 Vikram Seth

  Note on Chinese Names

  In transliterating the sounds of the Chinese language into English I have used where I can the modern Chinese Pinyin system rather than the Wade Giles spelling that would have been current in 1900.

  For well-known place names and historical personages, however, I have used the spelling that would have been current at the time. The Chinese capital is therefore Peking rather than Beijing. I have the Boxers originating in Shantung Province rather than the modern Shandong. The reformist Chinese minister is Li Hung-chang rather than Li Hongzhang (as his name is spelt in Chinese history books today). And I have used the word Ch’ing for the name of the Chinese dynasty rather than the modern Qing.

  In China the surname comes before the given names. Hence Fan Yimei is Miss Fan rather than Miss Yimei. And as in our own society a hundred years ago, even friends are more likely to use surname than forename. A title comes after the surname. For example, taking the words for Mister (Xiansheng, literally Firstborn), Miss (Xiaojie, literally little sister) or Master (of trades: Shifu), ‘Mr Lu’ would be ‘Lu Xiansheng’. ‘Mandarin Liu’ would be ‘Liu Da Ren’ (Liu the Great One); ‘Master Zhao’ would be ‘Zhao Shifu’; ‘Auntie Ma’ (Frank’s housemaid) would be ‘Ma Ayi’. Nicknames follow the same rules: for example, the brothel-keeper, ‘Mother Liu’, is ‘Liu Mama’ in Chinese.

  Chinese also tend to show intimacy and respect through a descriptive epithet before or after the surname. The gatekeeper calls Fan Yimei ‘Fan Jiejie’, i.e. ‘Elder Sister Fan’. An older friend might call her ‘Xiao Fan’, or ‘Little Fan’. This is not derogatory at all. Nor is its opposite: ‘Lao Fan’, or ‘Old Fan’, the term of address that might be given by a younger friend to an older one. But sometimes there can be a different meaning if the adjective is put after the surname rather than before. The Chamberlain is customarily addressed as ‘Jin Lao’, or literally ‘Jin Old’—but put this way it actually means ‘the Venerable Jin’ and is a term of enormous respect, given by an inferior to a superior. To use ‘Lao Jin’ in this case would be overfamiliar.

  The Characters

  (1) In Peking

  (a) GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS

  The Empress Dowager Tz’u-Hsi: the power behind the throne, effective ruler of China

  Li Hung-chang: elder statesman: ‘father’ of China’s international diplomacy and modernization under the Ching Dynasty, in disgrace after China’s defeat by Japan in 1895

  Prince Tuan: head of the xenophobic faction in the Chinese court

  Prince Yi: a court official

  Li Lien-ying: Tz’u Hsi’s Chief Eunuch

  (b) THE FOREIGN COMMUNITY

  Sir Claude MacDonald: British minister, head of the British Legation

  Lady MacDonald: his wife

  Douglas Pritchett: Ostensible interpreter at the British Legation, also head of intelligence

  Monsieur Pichon: French minister, head of the French Legation

  Madame Pichon: his wife

  Dr G. E. Morrison: Times correspondent, traveller, adventurer

  Herbert Squiers: first secretary at the American Legation

  Countess Esterhazy: european aristocratic adventuress visiting Peking

  B. L. Simpson: employee of the China Customs Service under Sir Robert Hart

  Mr and Mrs Dawson: representatives of Babbit and Brenner, a chemicals company

  Colonel Taro Hideyoshi: a military attaché at the Japanese Legation

  (2) In Shishan

  (a) GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS

  The Mandarin, Liu Daguang: the ‘Tao Tai,’ or chief magistrate of Shishan

  Jin Zhijian (called Jin Lao—Venerable Jin): the Mandarin’s chamberlain and master of his household

  Major Lin Fubo: head of the Mandarin’s militia

  (b) THE MISSIONARY COMMUNITY

  Dr Edward Airton: a Scottish Missionary Society doctor, practising in Shishan

  Nellie Airton: his wife

  George and Jenny Airton: his young children

  Father Adolphus: deceased head of the Catholic mission in Shishan

  Sisters Elena and Caterina: Italian nuns now working at Airton’s mission

  Zhang Erhao: Dr Airton’s major-domo

  Ah Li and Ah Sun: Dr Airton’s Cantonese servants

  The Rev. Septimus Millward: American Congregationalist missionary living in Shishan

  Laetitia Millward: his wife

  Hiram, Mildred, Isaiah, Miriam, Thomas, Martha, Lettie and Hannah Millward: his children

  (c) THE MERCHANT COMMUNITY

  Frank Delamere: a ‘soap merchant,’ representative of Babbit and Brenner in Shishan

  Tang Dexin, Jin Shangui, Lu Jincai: merchants of Shishan

  Mr Ding: textile dyer from Tsitsihar, one of Frank Delamere’s customers

  Hermann Fischer: chief of the railway building project in Shishan

  Zhang Dongren (‘Charlie’): the westernised compradore at the railway and Fischer’s interpreter

  Zhang Haobin: foreman of the Chinese workers on the railway

  Ma Ayi: Frank Delamere’s housemaid

  Lao Zhao: muleteer working for the railway compan
y

  (d) THE PALACE OF HEAVENLY PLEASURE

  Mother Liu: proprietress of the Palace of Heavenly Pleasure, a notorious brothel

  Ren Ren: her son

  Fan Yimei: a courtesan in the Palace of Heavenly Pleasure, Major Lin’s mistress

  Shen Ping, Su Liping, Chen Meina: courtesans

  Monkey: one of Ren Ren’s disreputable friends

  (e) IN THE BLACK HILLS

  Wang Tieren (Iron Man Wang): a shadowy figure, leader of a gang of bandits in the Black Hills

  (f) IN BASHU, AN OUTLYING VILLAGE

  Pastor John Wang: head of the Christian community

  Mother Wang: his wife

  Mary and Martha: his daughters

  Headman Yang: the village headman

  Miller Zhang, Lao Yi: Christian villagers

  Mother Yang, Xiao Hudie, Lao Dai, Wang Haotian, Zheng Fujia: non-Christian villagers

  The village bonze: the local Buddhist priest

  (3) Newcomers to Shishan

  Henry Manners: formerly an officer in the British army, now working for the China Railways

  Helen Frances Delamere: Frank Delamere’s daughter fresh from convent school

  Tom Cabot: Frank Delamere’s new assistant

  The Rev. Burton Fielding: representative of the American Board of Commissioners for Missions in China

  Frederick Bowers: engineer, train driver

  The Boxer Priest

  (4) Other Players

  Orkhon Baatar: a Mongolian herdsman

  Sarantuya: his wife

  Lieutenant Panin, Colonel Tubaichev: Russian officers

  The Rev. Richard Brown: a medical missionary

  Arthur Topps: an employee of Babbit and Brenner

  James Airton: Edward Airton’s brother, a bookseller in Glasgow

  The Gillespies: medical missionaries in Tientsin, friends of the Airtons

  Admiral Seymour, General Chaffee, General von Waldersee: leaders of the Allied Expeditionary Force to Peking

  Edmund and Mary Airton: Edward Airton’s children at school in Scotland

  The British Legation, Peking, July 1899

  Geography books will tell you that the dust storms of summer, though rare, are generally violent.

  So it was this summer.

  Strong winds from Siberia, sucked into the heatbowl of a north China plain already unprotected after three years of drought, effortlessly lifted sand from the Gobi desert and powdery loess soil from the Yellow River escarpments, and deluged the cracked farmlands under an amber cloud.

  The advance of the storm was like that of a barbarian horde; or one of those peasant movements that, from time to time in imperial history, have erupted from obscure beginnings and overwhelmed the decadent armies that stood futilely in their way. Like the Yellow Turbans, or the Taipings, or the White Lotus, like any of the revolts in which bandit leaders have aspired to and sometimes attained the Dragon Throne, it grew on its successes, increasing in size and fury until its armies were strong enough to escalade the high walls and tall gatehouses of the Imperial capital, bursting into the narrow streets, penetrating even the courtyards of the Forbidden City, where a weak emperor still held the Mandate of Heaven in feeble hands. So this sandstorm, on a summer night in the last year of the old century, enveloped the streets of Peking. Its myriad conquering soldiers were let loose to pillage the invested town. Dust devils howled a devastating path through the hutongs, whipping down the signs on the ornamented shops, splintering the gates of courtyard houses, slicing the skin of those few passersby who had the temerity to go outside and brave the flying sand darts.

  It was a day without a dusk, for the paling sun had been extinguished at its zenith. The darkness of an unnatural noon merged imperceptibly with the greater darkness of a starless night. The inhabitants of Peking, cowering in the heat of their airless homes, huddled against the shrieks and groans of the marauding wind outside; this was a night in which evil stalked abroad.

  There were no parties in the Legation Quarter that evening. No chandeliers blazed in the ballrooms. Landaus and barouches were locked in the stables with the horses. Windows were battened down. Luckless marines on sentry duty wrapped up their faces and sought protection from the sand as best they could. The ministers and their ladies settled for an early night.

  On summer evenings the British Legation usually presented a fairyland of lanterns in its courtyards. Lady MacDonald, chatelaine of a palace that had once belonged to Manchu nobility, liked to indulge her taste for chinoiserie. She affected not to hear the comments of the few real Orientalists in the Legation, who objected that her Mikado-esque decorations in a Chinese building were somewhat gilding the lily (or ‘painting legs on a snake’, as the Chinese would have it). As the premier hostess in Peking, she knew exactly what appealed to the representatives of the powers who came to her parties: it was more important to present China as it ought to be rather than the squalid reality that stank of the drains and canals outside her walls. So, if Gilbert and Sullivan could improve on three millennia of civilisation, she was all for it.

  Tonight, however, all the gaudy decorations had been removed, and the Chinese pavilions and ornamental archways, with their pillars and curling roofs, lay as unprotected in the sandstorm as any other dwelling in the city. Violent spectres of wind licked over the verandas and rattled the boards that had been placed over the imported glass windows. The ginkgo trees shook their branches like demented spirits, their fan-shaped leaves flailing against the hurtling sand. The old buildings slumped against the onslaught, dark grey shadows against a darker sky. It was as if they had reverted to the decrepit state of abandonment that had existed before the English had come to renovate them. The temple-like roofs silhouetted against the howling night recalled those deserted shrines in Chinese literature popularly haunted by ghosts and devils. Lady MacDonald’s garden had become a wasteland of random violence, in which the uneasy apparitions of previous occupants might well have wandered, as well as those creatures of Chinese folklore—fox spirits, snake gods, hungry ghosts—and other unmentionable creations of superstition that traditionally emerged on nights such as this.

  Not that Sir Claude and Lady MacDonald noticed or cared. They were sleeping soundly in their beds under their mosquito nets in the Main Residence, formerly the Ancestral Hall.

  Only one official was awake and sensitive to the perils of the night. His light burned faintly through an upper-storey window of one of the less imposing edifices on the edge of the compound, formerly a storehouse where the dukes in the past had kept their treasure. It was the room of the interpreter, a young Englishman who had only recently been appointed to the Legation. Stripped to his shirt, he was hunched over a small desk on which an oil lamp flickered. The light revealed bare wooden walls, a hospital bed and shelves loaded with books, most of them in Chinese. He was writing a despatch, out of Chancellery, out of office hours, in the middle of a stormy night—it could hardly be official Legation business; in any case, his furtive manner was enough to indicate that secrets were involved. He was sweating, his thin face pinched by tiredness, and his red-rimmed eyes widened at every noise. Occasionally he would pause, put down his pen, go to the door and peer into the dark corridors outside his room. Then he would return to his manuscript, from time to time dipping his pen into a pot of ink. He wrote hurriedly but in a neat script.

  Your lordship is aware of the activities of the Germans in Shantung. We are advised that they have already established a functioning colonial government in the concession which they seized last year in Chiao-chou. There continues to be concern regarding the overbearing conduct of their missionaries whose ‘defence’ of Christian communities has as often as not been supported by German troops; reparations imposed for alleged attacks on Christian property have been rapacious. This is potentially dangerous in a province with a history of rebellion and banditry, which is also the home of many of the martial-arts sects and secret societies, which colourfully thrive in poor areas such as these.

>   There was a crash from the floor below. He paused, staring at the door. The crash was repeated. ‘Shutters. Wind. That’s all it is,’ he muttered to himself, and resumed writing.

  More alarming are the activities of the Russians in the Northeast. Much of Manchuria is already a Russian protectorate in substance if not in name. It was evident what were their intentions as far back as 1896 when they pressured the former Foreign Minister, Li Hung-chang, to sign a so-called ‘defensive alliance’ granting Russia the right to extend the Trans Siberian Railway eastwards across Heilungchiang. Their seizure last year of the Liaotung Peninsula was followed by demands for concessions to construct a north–south railway from Harbin to Port Arthur. Despite our protestations these were granted. It is true that since Li Hung-chang’s disgrace and subsequently the conservative coup d’etat last summer a more reactionary government has shown less inclination to accede to foreign demands, but this does not alter the fact that Russian railway building is going on apace. There is already a substantial network in northern Manchuria, and once the system is linked to the sea it will be difficult to withstand Russia’s economic (and de facto military) advance. The prospect of annexation becomes a practical concern.

  Until recently our only recourse has been to organize financial support for the Chinese-owned Peking–Mukden Railway. The main line to Mukden is moving towards completion. The suggestion to construct a northern spur from Jinzhou to Shishan or even beyond to the Liao River, has also been greeted with favour by the board. There are sound commercial reasons for doing so: it will facilitate the transport of soybeans from the western regions of these provinces to the southern ports. There are also unspoken strategic considerations: if this can be the beginning of a line which runs parallel to the Russians’ railway, it will neutralize to some degree their military advantage. We had some concern that the Honorary Chairman of this company, who happens to be the same Li Hung-chang who granted concessions to the Russians, might offer objections to this scheme, but ironically he also was supportive. Perhaps he has learned the error of his ways. Railway building in itself, however, will not be the answer to our problem. Progress so far has been slow, for all the efforts of the British and German engineers in charge of construction. It is time to …