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

still sitting in his chair, out in front of them, now? Had they retreated past him?

They had.

At least none of the British had tried a shot at him from their walls.

But when General Li came to Nio, he saw that his best commander was very far away by now, in another place entirely, leaving, in death, a look of inexpressible sadness on his face.

You can imagine how I felt. Mr. Liu was a head eunuch in charge of the palace household. He had the power. I had none. And he was going to destroy me.

He didn’t waste any time.

The next morning, when I arrived for work at the eunuchs’ quarters and went to my mentor, he told me, “I’m sorry, but I’m not your mentor anymore. You’re to report to the laundry next door.”

The laundry was a big rectangular workroom, with vats you could have drowned in. Along one side there were the mangles and the racks where the clothes were hung to dry. Apart from a faint scent of pine resin from the wooden scrubbing boards, the space was pervaded by the acrid smell of lye laundry soap. The eunuch in charge was a tall man who looked as if he’d had the life scrubbed out of him long ago. And I remember looking around and thinking, This is going to be so boring.

But I needn’t have worried about that.

“The orders have been changed,” the laundryman said. He pointed to a shriveled old eunuch in blue cotton overalls—none too clean, I might add—standing by the door. “You’re to go with him,” he told me.

—

“You can call me Stinker,” the old man said. “Most people do.” He looked at me curiously. “What was your crime?”

“Does it matter?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “But usually people get sent to work with me for a month, to punish them for something. And I was just told you’ll be working with me for the rest of your life. So I wondered what you could have done.”

“There’s plenty of time to tell you,” I said. “Where are we going?”

“Up to the kitchens,” he answered.

The eunuchs’ quarters were tucked away in the corner of the southern wall, just below the side gate. The kitchens were all the way up in the northwestern corner. So we had to walk the entire length of the Forbidden City to reach them.

Our path took us by long alleyways, past the walls of all kinds of enclosures: the Garden of Benevolent Tranquility, the Palace of Longevity and Health, the Pavilion of Rain and Flowers.

There were gardens and alleys into which we could look. Once we passed a small, rather dark alley. “What’s in there?” I asked.

“A ghost,” Stinker told me. “She’s been haunting that alley for three hundred years, and she can be really mean. People avoid it.”

“Oh,” I said. “I won’t go in there, then.”

The kitchens occupied a long range of buildings inside the northern wall. Nearby gateways gave access to the courtyards of the imperial quarters.

“Welcome to your new home,” said Stinker.

“Are we going to cook?” I asked.

“No. We are in charge of the garbage,” he replied.

—

The Forbidden City’s plumbing arrangements were impressive. The drinking water was brought through pipes and channels that went all the way out to the Jade Spring in the Western Hills. It was healthy and sweet to the taste.

The sewage system dated back centuries, to the start of the Ming dynasty, with tunnels deep underground where streams carried the waste away.

So every morning, the junior eunuchs took the chamber pots and emptied them into these deep drains, and that took care of that business.

But the solid waste from the kitchens was another matter. It all had to be carried away by carters, who could come as far as the Forbidden City’s western gate, but not enter. The eunuchs had to bring the kitchen waste to them in handcarts, and this was normally done every other day.

Stinker’s job, therefore, was to collect the scraps, bones, entrails, carcasses, slops, blood, dirt, and any other waste from the kitchen workers, put it in barrels, cart the barrels to the gate, and keep the kitchen area clean. Every ten days or so, he also had to clean out the barrels. That, of course, is how he got his name.

The worst thing for me, that first day, was when Stinker told me: “As it happens, today’s the day we clean out the barrels. We always strip naked for that,” he added. I didn’t want to. I was still embarrassed about being a eunuch. Some people imagine being castrated makes you look like a woman, but it really doesn’t. No matter how well the operation’s been done, it’s not a pretty sight.

“Why?” I wailed.

“Because by the time we’re done, if we’re wearing our overalls, the laundry can never get the stink out of them. And even if they could, they don’t want to handle them.”

I have to say they were right. It took hours to scrub and wash down those barrels and somehow get the smell out of the wood. When we were done and had cleaned the handcarts as well, we washed ourselves with laundry soap and scrubbing brushes—especially our pigtails, you can imagine. Then we put on the clean overalls we’d been given in the morning, stacked the clean barrels in the storeroom, lit the incense burners to fumigate them during the night, and closed the door. We took the dirty overalls we’d worn during the day to the laundry and then went home.

—

There was a delicious smell coming from the kitchen when I got home. Someone had paid my father for running errands by giving him a duck to roast. Rose had been preparing a little feast all afternoon: Beijing duck, noodles, stir-fry vegetables, dumplings.

So I played with my little children, and then they were put to bed while my father and I sat down to our meal.

“It’s a pleasure to see how