Shanghai (25 page)

* * *

THE VRASSOON PATRIARCH'S generous financial offer to the Manchu Mandarin assured the heathen's co-operation in this matter. The Mandarin, in fact, seemed only too ready to write a proclamation that would call on all civic officials to “Enforce our local laws, to their full extent, on
all
the citizens of Shanghai, without exception.”

* * *

MR. NORMAN VINCENT dipped his quill in the inkwell on his highboy desk and marked a bill of lading “Paid,” then rubbed his hands together to revive the feeling in his fingers. The cold here in Shanghai was different from his native London, and he had been sick often since his first arrival in the Far East just over three years before. He took the locket from around his neck and opened it. The broad, honest features of his wife stared back at him. In her arms she held their baby girl.
She won't be a baby any more,
he thought.
She must be
walking and talking by now.
He sighed, and his breath misted in the office.

He'd worked hard this morning and wanted to reward himself. The Old Shanghai Restaurant in the Chinese section—the Old City—was technically out of bounds for foreigners, but the food there was wonderful, and a bowl of soup,
tong
, was just the thing he needed on a cold day like today.
Maybe with those wonderful dumplings in it
. The thought made him smile as he signed out with his supervisor and, grabbing his muffler, headed out of the Vrassoons' British East India Company offices.

On the partially built raised promenade along the Huangpo River he looked across at the Pudong and gave a little shiver. He needed to control his urges and save his money, he reminded himself. That's why he was here in this far-off place—to make money. But the sexual offerings across the river were a great temptation to him. Only in the Pudong could a man get sexual satisfaction at a price a shipping clerk could afford.

He turned away from temptation and toward the rewards of the palate as he headed east along the river, then south into the heart of Old Shanghai.

Just moments after Mr. Vincent turned toward the Old Shanghai Restaurant, a fellow
Fan Kuei
, this one a bookkeeper in the employ of the Hordoons, also made his way toward the forbidden Old City. This man had a new girl, and his new girl needed a present. Something special. Only in the Old City could a bookkeeper like Charles David afford a special present—for a new girl. He whistled as he walked, his step jaunty, a smile creasing his attractive young features. It would be the last smile that would grace his countenance on this earth.

The Manchu authorities arrested both men, as had been agreed upon, strapped chains to their wrists and then threw them literally into a hole in the ground to await their fate. By entering the Old City they had, after all, broken the law, the Manchu law, and Manchu courts would decide their punishment.

Richard felt a momentary pang when he heard of the arrest of Charles David. He had put forward the names of three men in his employ, as had Vrassoon, so that neither would have directly “condemned” anyone. He comforted himself by thinking,
Someone has to make the sacrifice. At least it wasn't one of Maxi's irregulars
.

* * *

THE CONFUCIAN WAS SURPRISED when he was asked to sit as judge in the trial of the two Europeans. Usually such cases would go directly to the Manchu Mandarin, but he sensed that something was afoot in all this. He hastily sent messages to Jiang and the Body Guard. They met late that night in his study. He laid out the facts. Two Europeans had been taken into custody and charged with treason against the state for doing no more than almost all Foreign Devils had done in the past in Shanghai. The Manchu separation law had been ignored from the beginning. But now, seemingly out of nowhere, the law had been put into full force.

“Why?” asked the Body Guard

“Who cares why?” said Jiang. “There may be an opportunity here for us to advance the prophecy.”

“How?”

“What is the greatest problem in the Concession?”

“What it's always been. Our people won't work for them.”

“Right. So if you were in the traders' position, what would you do?”

“I'd call upon my nation's navies to force extraterritoriality—”

“So would I.” Jiang cut off the Confucian. “So why haven't they done that?”

“That one I can answer,” said the Body Guard. “They hate each other more than we hate them, so they can't unite themselves. They are like children unable to see what is right before them.”

“True. So what can we do to unite them, to get them together, and bring in their countries' great ships?”

The Body Guard nodded. Jiang canted her head. The Confucian smiled. “Death can bring together the living.”

* * *

THE TWO MEN standing before the Confucian, heads bowed, seemed pitiful specimens of their races, but then again a full week in a dark pit had broken stronger men than these. One was on his knees begging for forgiveness. The other stood very still and said nothing, strangely dispassionate.
These people are so short-sighted. They have no view of themselves as part of the continuum of history, as we do
, the Confucian thought as he held up his hand and the guards roughly silenced the blubbering man.

The packed court fell quiet. Maxi stood at the back and demanded a translation of the proceedings from Richard.

The Confucian rose and, allowing the old-fashioned singsong to come into his voice, pronounced his
sentence on the men: “
Xuan shou shi zhong
—Death by public strangulation.”

* * *

MR. NORMAN VINCENT had wet himself and couldn't control his shaking. The mumbled prayers of the Evangelicals only seemed to make it worse. He couldn't focus. This couldn't be happening to him. Not to him. He looked at the cracked paving tiles upon which his knees rested. Then vomit spewed from him and he voided into his britches—and he felt the bite of the rope on his neck.

Charles David caught the whiff of human excrement from the man beside him. He was strangely calm—or so the watchers felt. Some called it brave. Charles knew better. It was the normal detachment that he had been able to cloak himself in since he was a boy.

He looked up at the crowd. Every non-Asian in Shanghai had been forced to come view the strangulation. He scanned the faces, recognizing some. Then his eyes landed on the face of the young Hordoon boy named Silas. The boy was staring at him, but not with the fear and disgust that was so evident on the faces of almost all the non-Asians. The boy had a detached curiosity … a detached curiosity that Charles recognized as akin to his own. When the rope slid around his neck he continued to stare at Silas Hordoon, and as his lungs screamed for air and his eyes bulged he stared steadily at the boy and forced his mouth to form the words, “Despite it, do great things, boy, great things.”

* * *

“BARBARIC! Beyond any sense of law!” Jedediah Oliphant exclaimed, and for the first time in a very long
time he envied those who could indulge in the calming effects of alcohol.

“At least demand their bodies,” shouted Maxi.

Richard appreciated Maxi's sentiments, but he didn't want to deal with them now. Now, with all the traders upset and together back in the offices of Jardine Matheson, was the time to act. To rally the troops, not get bogged down in niceties like the disposition of dead bodies.

“Outrageous, beyond the bounds of civilized behaviour—well beyond it,” added Percy St. John Dent as he topped up his glass with Hercules's fine whisky and took a seat.

“Never again must this be allowed to happen to our people,” stated Hercules, ignoring the pain from the new nodule on the baby toe of his left foot.

The Vrassoon Patriarch stepped forward, caught Richard's eye briefly, and suggested, “Then we are agreed that we must take our fate into our own hands. That these heathens must be shown a lesson. That we will speak as one voice to be free in our lands to do as we see fit.” He looked around for a moment, then lifted the glass in his hand. Slowly everyone in the room lifted theirs—even Jedediah Oliphant grabbed an empty glass and held it aloft. “To extraterritoriality, gentlemen.”

The men drank to their pledge, then retreated to their offices to contact their highest government sources to begin the process that would bring on what history would call the Second Opium War.

It proved to be not much of a war, as wars go. The arrival of the six British man-o'-war and two American fighting vessels in the Shanghai harbour was remarkably effective. A slight hesitation from the Manchu authorities induced an out and out shelling of the Chinese section of the city from the ships. Before the sun set that day, the basics of an extraterritoriality agreement had been proposed by the Manchu Mandarin himself.

Richard translated, and with Hercules and Percy St. John Dent pushing the traders' points, the agreement got more and more specific. The relentless squirming and conniving of the Mandarin to make the agreement porous were resisted at every turn. Eventually, six days later, when the document was signed, it was the most
inclusive, restrictive document on Chinese power that had ever been written or, more importantly, signed.

The party began that night at sunset in the British Concession and shortly thereafter in the American Concession. Oliphant tried to begin the festivities with prayer but only managed to get through an opening hymn before the revelry took over. Guns were fired into the air and liquor flowed freely as midnight—the appointed hour for the beginning of extraterritoriality—approached.

As the merriment increased, Richard retreated to the Old City and knocked at an unmarked door at the end of a dusty alley. Jiang opened the door and canted her head toward Richard. “Is the woman with you?” she asked.

Richard nodded and called for Lily. From behind packing crates in the alley, the woman without a nose or ears approached with her head down. She carried what Jiang knew were Richard's journals.

“Your usual accommodations are ready for you. Your pipe is cleaned, your dreams await,” Jiang said.

* * *

SEVERAL MILES UP the Huangpo River, Maxi stood by two shallow graves. Milo and Silas were at his side. “You must honour men who fall in your command, boys, or no one will follow you.” Maxi bowed his head. He didn't know prayers or care about them. He cared about lives lost for no good reason. He turned to the boys and said, “Honour these men in your thoughts. Now put your flowers on their graves.”

The boys knelt and put their flowers down. Silas allowed his hand to touch the cold, sandy earth and wondered what it felt like to lie beneath the ground.

Maxi watched his nephew and sensed the boy's distance, something that he himself had been feeling more and more. And now these two senseless deaths. Two murders. He suspected they were two sacrifices but had no more than suspicion upon which to base this. He looked around at the river and the growing city behind them and knew in his heart, for the first time, that this was not his home, nor would it ever be. A strong gust of wind from the west drew his eye. The Taiping rebels were upriver. He knew that. But he wondered why that particular thought had sped through his mind as he stood on the windy hillside beside his two nephews and the two graves.

* * *

THE MIDNIGHT BELL SOUNDED and the town crier called out “Midnight Hour!” and shouts of joy came from the mouths of the non-Asians.

In the Old City, Chinese parents smelled the ozone reek of change in the air and pulled their children close to them.

The third opium ball did the trick for Richard. He opened the holes in his back and spiralled down the deep well to himself and the dark secret that lurked there.

* * *

AS HE DID a sleek sailing ship came about in the harbour. The French had arrived—with Suzanne and Pierre Colombe, madam and priest, side by side on deck.

The sounds of revelry from the land moved across the water and greeted brother and sister on the upper
deck. “A party,” Suzanne said with a smile. “How appropriate a welcome. You'll have to do something about that, brother. Parties aren't good for churches, are they?”

“No, my sister, they are not. Although I believe they are good for your commercial enterprise.” His words were sharp.

“Nice of you to notice,” Suzanne replied. Then she turned her eyes to her new home, Shanghai.

Shanghai 1846 to September 1847

Extraterritoriality immediately solved two problems facing all the traders. With the protection that it provided they were able to recruit and keep enough Chinese workers to run their businesses and households, and under the terms of the treaty the traders could avoid the one hundred thousand
taels
of silver demanded by the Manchu Mandarin. Extraterritoriality worked surprisingly well in other ways, as well. Percy St. John Dent was appointed head of the newly formed Governing Council with the understanding that the position would rotate through the four great trading houses (the Hordoons were not included) on a six-month
basis. On Fridays, from sunrise to just before sundown (out of consideration for the Vrassoons), petitioners to the Council would be heard. Also, each of the trading houses (this time the Hordoons were included) was required to provide six men to act as constables. These men were to report directly to the head of Council.

It all seemed so civilized. What, in fact, this arrangement did was ensure that no trading house would have any power over the others. The “police officers,” in fact, never reported to the head of Council before they had reported to the head of their own trading company.

The one notable advance was the breaking down of the border, at the Suzu Creek, between the American and British Concessions. The two sides adopted the name “the Foreign Settlement” for the merged territory. However, the French—being French—declined to join their English-speaking Protestant counterparts and settled on the novel name “the French Concession” for their lands bordering the Chinese Old City. Shortly after, the name became simply “the Concession.”