The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (31 page)

And ever so quietly the sign that Ma had foreseen had been preparing itself. When on the seventh day sixty of the local people knocked at the monastery gate, the sign caught up with the Broken Melon.

The sect had made its home in one of the richest parts of western Chihli. Cotton was grown here; sericulture was highly developed.

A peculiarity of the district was the occurrence of active salt wells. In the course of decades a great number had been dug and whole livelihoods depended on the wells. To win the slat a funnel-shaped hole a yard across was dug until water was struck. At the bottom brine was allowed to collect and evaporate; it was brought up in buckets. As on the coast, the further preparation was divided among salt boilers, panners and stockpilers. In giant kettles and pans the slat boilers drove off the water from the mother brine. Hay for heating the kettles was provided by the wealthier owners of grazing land and farmland, most of whom at the same time stockpiled the salt arranged its transport, delivered prescribed quantities to the Imperial depots. Whoever among the well diggers owned sufficient land could work faster, let the briny groundwater flow over tamped earth levels, hasten evaporation in the sun. Transport of the dutiable heaps of salt was almost entirely along waterways; only short stretches called for mules, carts, ox wagons to transport the commodity to the next river or canal.

Now nine years earlier the father of a man called Hou of this district had been carried off by the smallpox. He had been a judiciary official with a reputation for competence, plain and strict in the extreme, greatly feared for the brevity and succinctness of his judgements. By clever speculations in the purchase of rice, which he then sold on to the government, this man had amassed great wealth. He bought more estates. When he reached the fourth rank he retired, made presents to the Imperial privy purse, continued to speculate with circumspection and one day returned from a journey across country in poor condition; the corpulent man had to be lifted from his chair; he soon died.

His eldest son, the present landowner Hou, as a child the worry of the family for his sickliness, was no less shrewd than his father; but whereas the older man had used people as they offered themselves to be used, he for no reason was hard and cold towards everyone. In his outward figure he took completely after his father, the ponderousness, the plumpness of the limbs, the amiable rustic burr. He shunned ostentation, observed all the prescribed rites strictly, led an exemplary family life. Despite his hardness in commerce he exuded a certain joviality, so that many of the common people who had no business dealings with him were true partisans of his. He increased his property, though not blessed with his father’s farsightedness.

Two years after the old man’s funeral misfortune began to assail Hou. Two of his sons died in the same month of an unknown sickness that caused them to lie rigid for days, tossing their heads, then begin to rave and perish before the demon responsible could be identified. His best friend in southern Chihli let him down in the course of a few daring speculations, of a kind that would have brought his father success: Hou amassed great piles of rice in his storehouses; the speedy export of rice from his friend’s stores was supposed to lead in southern districts to an artificial increase in the price, which Hou would exploit. But the friend claimed not to have secured in time the great barges he’d ordered; Hou was left sitting on enormous stocks. There followed at short intervals two arson attacks on his properties, causing severe losses. Thus set in a turn in his fortunes.

Hou had often regarded with painful feelings the canal that passed in front of his villa; the long barges of the salt transport, transporting as well grapes, plums, pears, the cries of the haulers, the scraping of ropes against the canalside; from here it was a short journey to a broad tributary of the Imperial Canal.

An astrologer visited him about this time from Peking, who because of his ignorance had been relieved of his post in the Ministry of Rites. Since he could not penetrate the secret of computing important events, he found for himself a scandalous profession that came all the easier to him with his respectable figure, his reticent confidence-inspiring demeanour: he became a factor in the extensive trade in children for the southern provinces, new blood for the theatres and houses of pleasure. The trade was carried on under the mask of adoption or procurement for adoption; on occasion he provided apothecaries or very wealthy invalids with little children whose eyes, liver and blood would be processed and used. As a sideline this man was a highly esteemed marriage broker.

As he sat with Hou in a pavilion on the estate beside the little canal and his sorely afflicted friend related his woes, they sat there a while smoking the waterpipe and watched the haulers toiling as they broke a passage through the frozen water.

The astrologer asked whether the land on the other side of the canal also belonged to Hou, and for how far, and what sort of goods were transported here. After a couple of gurgling pulls on the pipe gave as his opinion that the canal ought to be closed.

Hou understood at once, laughed, warned him to speak softly. Of course it would be good if the canal were closed, but quite impossible to achieve. Naturally if some conceivable way could be found he wouldn’t forget his friend. The canal was important for those and those and those; if anyone did manage to close it there’d be enormous profit to be gained.

The dignified astrologer, simply attired in black, was grateful for the presumptive splitting of profits; of that later. He sat in thought, spoke suddenly in melancholy tones of the death of old Hou, so highly valued by the Emperor, and when had he been buried, who had specified the place. Then without explanation,
bewailing the untimely death of that true friend of the nation, he went into the house with his friend, lit candles before the ancestral tablet. He excused himself and retired for contemplation, as he said, to the room placed at his disposal.

Next morning, accompanied by the boorish rheumy-eyed local astrologer, he had himself carried to old Hou’s grave furnished with all his professional equipment: compass, zodiacal table, windrod. After investigating for three days, they put their extensive calculations together for comparison and came to the conclusion that the position of the grave was disturbed by the line of the canal. The constricted nature of the site made it impossible to ameliorate the spirit’s rest by erecting a pagoda. Hence the misfortunes in the Hou household since the old man’s death.

Hou didn’t catch on, and when the crafty astrologer began to lament the meritorious man’s fate Hou threw himself howling to the ground, didn’t know where to turn. He ran to the ancestral tablet; he didn’t want the fault falling on his shoulders; he had to inform the departed that he wasn’t to blame for the siting of the grave, not he. How could he, grateful son that he was with his daily obeisances, have come upon the dreadful idea of hounding his late father from his rest? Imploring he embraced the astrologer, and to his astonishment gazed into an artfully wry, chubby face. The astrologer grunted as the fat arms squeezed him, pushed his friend back, finished the censing, and they walked slowly to the garden pavilion down by the canal. The phlegmatic man from Peking said in ministerial tones, “We must not upset the deeply offended spirit of your father still more by removing the grave. That would be the pinnacle of disrespect. The line of the canal must be altered. This canal must be closed as quickly as possible.”

Fat Hou grunted “Yes, yes” in his misery, and then, after a pause during which they looked earnestly at one another, in a
brighter voice, “Yes, yes.”

The months-long correspondence with provincial authorities and the Ministry of Rites was taken over from the troubled, distraught son entirely by the astrologer. Weeks went by, for appraisers from the Imperial Astrological Bureau were charged with compiling an urgent report following the rejection of Hou’s petition by the subordinate authorities on grounds of its damaging effect on the public weal. Ch’ien-lung, however, informed personally, stated without hesitation, “A canal can be dug elsewhere. Until another small canal can be completed with all necessary despatch, provisional means of transport are available. It is base to hound a deceased person of Hou’s enduring service from his rest because of some temporary local inconvenience.”

So the affair was settled. And before the guilds of haulers, salt boilers, coolies, wagon hirers in the villages to the west realized what was up, the lock gates were closed in utmost haste, the water drained into a lake by means of a connecting ditch that Hou had had dug even during the protracted negotiations. The transport of cargo had to be effected by quite other means; it had to be unloaded, carried by land a day’s journey across Hou’s property to what was now the end of the canal. Hou refused to allow the first coolies, wagoners onto his land. Hasty intervention from the prefecture resulted in the granting of passage, for the time being free of tolls. It was left to Hou to discuss with the relevant trade associations how to construct as quickly as possible a road through to the canal.

He acceded without further ado; but with the approval of the authorities, speedily gained, charged a small toll for the use of his property, erected five storesheds on open sites beside the road, helped the transport workers by placing large auxiliary wagons and oxen at their disposal. The profit was enormous; to it was added
gain from the pilfering that was unavoidable with so much transshipping and placing in storage. What it came to finally was that his place seemed the natural spot for a central salt depot, Hou by underhand methods having made transport difficult for those who stored their salt elsewhere.

For weeks it remained calm; throughout the affected district the guilds debated ceaselessy. In the prefecture it rained petitions. Barge haulers, unemployed, worked with the salt panners; these, insofar as they did not deliver grass to Hou, lost income from the reduction in storage dues. Unrest grew.

Then a newly arrived Prefect became involved in the affair in a way that nearly cost him his head. In the western counties Hou’s case was nothing unusual. Tax evasion on an enormous scale had been perpetrated by the great landlords for decades; silk spinners, mill owners paid scarcely more tax than some insignificant casual labourer in their employ. In the register at the tax office these rich gentry were entered against some tiny patch of field, the property that their fathers and grandfathers had started out with; good relations with Superintendents of Taxes and with Prefects had seen to it that the initial declarations in the registers were passed down through the generations unrevised; false returns concerning fallow land, flooded areas helped.

As soon as a few cases of this sort had been brought discreetly to his notice, the young Prefect rode solemnly off to the nearest Principal Tax Office where the lists were displayed and reported to the Superintendent of Taxes, audibly, in the open yamen, within earshot of several people, what he’d been told, pointed in a loud voice to the discrepancies between the information in the lists and the actual properties. As he climbed back into his green sedan chair his runners and bearers looked at each other dismayed, trotted off shaking their heads. What the servants in the young Prefect’s household
predicted in their whispered conversations soon came to pass.

The old Superintendent, a well loved man treasured by the government for his knowledge of local conditions in Chihli and Shantung, appointed a deputy for ten days. During this time, as he had announced, he travelled back and forth across his tax zone in order to acquaint himself with the situation, visited commercial enterprises, farms. But he had been unable to hold back the written petition to the central authorities handed in by the young Prefect together with his oral report, and waiting for the grey-haired mandarin on his return was an urgent demand from the Finance Ministry in Peking for a brief on the matters detailed in the attached memorandum.

While the young Prefect, still a bachelor, lay in the evenings beside a pool of red lotus and played the game of floating leaves with friends, his servants, who knew the locality, wrung their hands at his short-sightedness; they’d heard that dissatisfaction with the Prefect was making itself felt in the region.

Unexpected little disturbances arose during the arrests of thieves and at public punishments; there followed more serious incidents that began to keep the Prefect rather occupied. Finally, in several hitherto peaceful villages there occurred attacks on Imperial officials and buildings. A sharp instruction was handed down for him to suppress the unrest. It was no use; his constables declared themselves powerless. When a memorial arch erected by the Emperor in honour of a virtuous widow burned down in the open marketplace, it seemed that the Prefect’s last hour had come.

Then plump Hou invited him for a talk, which the Prefect had already had in mind in view of the transport question. And now the crisis resolved itself in the simplest possible way. The Prefect had no choice; he had to think of the shame that would fall on his still living parents and his ancestors were he to be demoted; not to
speak of his own desolate future.

Hou’s family showed itself highly honoured by the visit. The grossly cringing Hou, hearing of his exalted guest’s still living parents, offered the Prefect a summer residence for the aged couple on one of his estates; he twittered with expressions of the greatest concern at the current difficulties in the prefecture, placed his own excellently trained and armed estate guards at his guest’s disposal. The icy Prefect made no reply.

He sacrificed in front of his ancestral tablet, and prayed; for two days spoke with none of his friends. Then he accepted.

That afternoon at the offices and then at the residence of the Prefect, Hou’s glittering return visit took place, to the unfeigned joy of the neighbours and servants, who praised the Prefect as a wise old man. All misunderstandings were brushed lightly aside; clearly one mistake had led to another, to overreaction, confusion. The happy administrator could expect in less than two weeks an acknowledgement from the central authorities of his energy and perspicuity in the suppression of this dangerous local rebellion. After a little ineffectual violence from villagers affected by Hou’s measures, all was peaceful.