China by Edward Rutherfurd (historical books to read TXT) 📕

—

It wasn’t long, in any case, before Guanji himself moved away, at least for part of the year, when the time came for him to enter the Manchu officers school in Hangzhou. As his uncle had a little house beside his printing workshop in the city, Guanji lived there except on holidays, when he returned to Zhapu.

Hangzhou was eighty miles down the coast from Zhapu, at the head of a river estuary. Until that time, Guanji had never been there, and at first he’d been rather overawed. Hangzhou was the capital of the province, one of the oldest cities in China, with mighty thousand-year-old walls and widespread suburbs. On a rise above the river there was a huge pagoda towering into the sky. “In the old days, they kept a great lamp at the top,” his uncle told him, “that sailors could steer by from out at sea.” At Hangzhou also, the Grand Canal began, carrying all kinds of goods northward. “It’s eleven hundred miles long,” his uncle explained. “If you go up the canal, you’ll cross the valley of the mighty Yangtze, and then farther north, you’ll cross the Yellow River valley, too, until you finish up at Beijing. After the Great Wall, it’s the greatest marvel of construction in all China.”

Hangzhou’s broad streets contained famous stores, pharmacies, and teahouses that had been run by the same families for centuries. As for the vast compound of the Manchu bannermen, it enclosed no less than two hundred and forty acres.

When Guanji entered the big officers school there, where nearly all the boys were older and already accustomed to this great city, he assumed they would be far more advanced than he was. And in Chinese studies and mathematics he certainly had much to learn. But in Manchu, he discovered that he already knew more than most of them. And to his even greater surprise, there wasn’t a single boy in the school who could match him in the traditional martial arts. Many of the pupils couldn’t ride at all.

“If the emperor gives them an allowance for horses,” said his uncle sadly, “they just spend the money on themselves.”

—

It was during the years at Hangzhou that Guanji came to know and understand his uncle better. Since he was being raised as a bannerman soldier, he’d never taken much interest in his uncle’s printing business. So he was quite surprised to discover how much of a tradesman his uncle was and how hard he worked.

He liked the printing workshop. Beside the big wooden presses and the paper stacked on shelves, there was a long table where a line of craftsmen sat, diligently carving. For the books were not printed using metal type, but little woodblocks, each bearing a character, fitted into sets of page frames.

His uncle handled all kinds of projects. “Here’s a fine book of poems on the presses,” he might explain. “We’re copying characters from an old Ming dynasty text for this printing. Here’s a mandarin, good friend of mine, wants his essays printed. And this…”—he pointed to a pile of thick papers, covered in untidy writing—“will be the genealogy of a certain nobleman, going back three thousand years. Partly invented, of course, but he’s paying me handsomely.” He smiled. “I may not be a scholar, but I know how to write an introduction—you know, gracefully flattering, that sort of thing.”

None of this would have been possible, Guanji came to realize, if his uncle hadn’t developed a huge network of contacts. There wasn’t a cultivated person in the province he didn’t know. These were his patrons and his audience.

Some lived in the city. But the favorite meeting place was outside, at the lovely West Lake, where emperors went to relax, writers and artists to contemplate nature, and mandarins to retire. From time to time his uncle would take Guanji to some rich man’s villa on the lakefront or some scholar’s retreat in the encircling hills. And Guanji enjoyed these visits.

But though he admired his uncle, he wouldn’t have wanted such a life himself. He had far too much energy. He wanted action, not to be cooped up all day in a library or printing house.

—

During these years at the officers school, Guanji did well at his work. He grasped ideas quickly; his memory was excellent. As for his physical prowess, there were hardly any big open spaces where one could gallop in Hangzhou, so his horsemanship did not improve. But archery practice was another matter. As Guanji entered adolescence, he grew far more muscular and exceedingly strong. Before he was fifteen, he could draw a more powerful bow and shoot farther and with more deadly accuracy than any other boy at the school. His face also began to change. It became rounder, more Mongolian; a wispy dark brown mustache began to droop from the sides of his mouth. One day his uncle, looking through some drawings, pulled out an ancient picture of a warrior prince. “You’re getting to look just like that,” he remarked with a smile. And though this was a slight exaggeration, there was a certain resemblance. Whenever the school was putting on one of the plays the Manchus loved, Guanji was always picked to be the warrior prince.

Only two small clouds appeared on the horizon of his life during these years. The first was the death of the emperor. He was succeeded by his son, quite a young man. But this dynastic business hardly affected Guanji’s daily life, except for the need to observe the official mourning.

The second was a revolt that had broken out in one of the southern provinces.

“It’s the usual story,” his uncle posited. “The empire’s so huge there’s always a revolt somewhere. The White Lotus wanting to restore the Ming dynasty, the Muslims on the western border, Triad gangs trying to take over the ports, minority tribes giving trouble in the outer provinces. We’ve seen it all before.”

“Who’s behind this one?”

“The leader is a Hakka called Hong.”

“What do they want?”

“To throw