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

came up from the remote southwest. By the time they swept along the Yangtze River, they were like an invading Mongol horde, besieging towns and fighting huge battles with the emperor’s troops. Nobody knows how many people were killed at that time.

It’s amazing how people can just disappear and be forgotten after a single generation.

In any case, they kept advancing along the Yangtze, and more and more people joined them as they went. Of course, they were still a thousand miles away from us. And the hill country along the Yangtze has always seemed like another world to people on the great northern plains. So we just told ourselves not to worry.

Until they took Nanjing.

It happened so suddenly. One month they were deep in the Yangtze valley; then before we knew it, they’d raced hundreds of miles north, almost to the Yangtze delta, and had come to the walls of Nanjing.

Nanjing may be six hundred miles away, but it’s linked by the waterway of the Grand Canal that runs all the way to Beijing. We’d often see cargo vessels that had begun their journey in Nanjing. We felt as if the rebels were on our doorstep.

No one had believed the Taiping could take Nanjing—a huge walled city like that. Yet it fell in no time, and they killed every Manchu family in the place.

And now the old Ming capital, the sacred City of the Purple Mountain, which controlled the whole Yangtze valley and half the river trade of China, was in the hands of these shaggy-haired vagrants, who told the world that it was the capital of their Heavenly Kingdom. And the emperor couldn’t do a thing about it.

I wonder how Grandfather’s Elder Brother, for all his serenity, would have felt about that. Would he have been so philosophical then? That’s what I mean when I say he died at the right time.

—

Well, having set up their Heavenly Kingdom, the Taiping stayed there for a while. And I had to get on with my life.

I was fifteen, so naturally I was anxious to find steady employment. I wanted to learn a craft, but there were only a few craftsmen in our village, and they had sons of their own to employ. Besides, they weren’t anxious to employ me, because they didn’t have much respect for my father.

It was my mother who came to the rescue. She was friendly with another woman in the village where the bootmaker lived, who was married to quite an important man who made lacquer goods, which were sold in Beijing and to foreign merchants down at the coast as well. My mother told me to go to this lady and her husband, and perhaps something would come of it.

But I didn’t do that. Not at first.

One sees it all the time: People being asked to give jobs to young fellows they don’t really need or want. Then they have to think of tactful ways of saying no, without giving offense. So I decided on another plan.

First, I told my mother that I wasn’t interested. She was quite upset, but that couldn’t be helped. Then, a few days later, I walked to the next village to take a look at the lacquer workshop.

The works consisted of a broad yard with open sheds on one side and closed sheds on the other. The open sheds had bamboo blinds that could be rolled down if the breeze blew in too much dust. But there was no wind that day, so the men were sitting at a long table in the open shed, because most craftsmen prefer to work by natural light. There was nothing to stop people entering the yard, so I went in, chose a place opposite a thin, sad-looking man with thinning hair who seemed to be engaged in the simplest task—applying a layer of lacquer to a plain wooden tray—and began to watch.

I wasn’t just idly staring. The first thing I noticed was that the tray was made of two pieces of wood glued together with opposing grains. This, I guessed, must be to make the tray more rigid, so it wouldn’t warp. He was quietly coating the tray with red lacquer, using a small brush. I took note of the tiniest details: the way he held the brush, how he moved it. And I’d been watching like this for half an hour when a big middle-aged man emerged from one of the closed sheds and came towards me. He had a broad bony head with deep eye sockets and a jutting brow that reminded me of a rock face. I felt sure he must be the owner.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“I was watching the craftsman, sir,” I said with a low bow. “Just to see how it’s done.”

He looked at me suspiciously. He probably wondered if I was planning to steal something. He turned to the craftsman. “Is this boy annoying you?” he asked. The thin man shook his head. “Well, throw him out if he gives any trouble,” he said, and went into the street.

When the craftsman had finished the thin coating of lacquer, he took the tray over to another shed, but this one was closed. As he went through the door, however, I could see that there was a pot hanging over a lamp in there, and a little steam was coming from the pot. As it was a warm day, but rather dry outside, I supposed that this arrangement must make the room more humid. I took note of that, but I didn’t say anything.

Then the thin man took up another piece of work. This one had already been coated with lacquer. But as he started brushing a new coat on it in exactly the same way, I realized that each piece of lacquer work had probably been coated several times.

—

I was still there two hours later when the owner came back. He looked very surprised, which was just what I wanted. For a moment I thought