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

general’s been killed by a robber, during the storm last night. Killed with his own sword. Who would do such a thing?”

By afternoon, however, a rumor was buzzing around the lake. The general’s servants were saying that the general had had a terrible quarrel with a distant kinsman who’d come to get money from him. The fellow had threatened to do the general harm.

Two days later, news came from Hangzhou. The man had been found in an opium den in the city. Couldn’t account for his movements.

“It’s an open-and-shut case,” said Mr. Yao. “He did it, all right.”

“He should be executed,” said Bright Moon with feeling.

“He will be. Don’t worry about that,” said her husband.

Mei-Ling said nothing.

Ten days afterwards, she returned to her home.

September 1887

Shi-Rong smiled. This time, at last, he was going to get it right. He’d redeem his reputation—not only with his son, but with his late father too. He might even be remembered in the history books. But he had to be careful. He needed to talk to his son. Not that he was going to tell Ru-Hai exactly what his plan was. Better keep that a secret. But he needed to talk to him all the same.

He pulled the last weed from beside his father’s grave. He liked tending his ancestors’ tombs. It gave him a sense of peace. The modest graveyard in which they rested, on a ledge overlooking the wide plain of the Yellow River, was in perfect order. So was the small Buddhist monastery higher up the hill. He’d paid for its restoration just a few years ago. So was the estate. Everything was in order.

The huge orb of the sun had broken free of the eastern horizon, and the gleaming river, its waters choked with rich yellow dust from the vast Asiatic plateau through which it had carved its way, snaked heavily across the land.

Perhaps Ru-Hai will arrive today, he thought. My son and his little boy. He was sure they would come.

They had not come for Qingming that spring or the year before. The festival when all the world returned to their families’ ancestral graves, to meet relations, tend the tombs, and show respect to those who had given them life. All, that was, who could. But it wasn’t easy for Ru-Hai. Beijing was over four hundred miles away. A month’s journey. He couldn’t do that each year. Shi-Rong had swept the graves and prayed alone.

But Ru-Hai would make the journey now. He couldn’t fail to, after the message Shi-Rong had sent.

It has been too long since I have seen you. Your father asks you to come now, since there are matters concerning the estate I need to tell you. Please also bring your son, so that he will have a memory of his grandfather.

I suggest you spend perhaps two days at the house, then take your son up to the great monastery of Shaolin in the hills, where you can see the Zen masters of the martial arts, which no doubt he will enjoy, before you return to Beijing.

Shi-Rong had hardly been to Beijing in the last decade. He’d made one visit to the court when he retired; another to arrange the wedding of his son—quite a good marriage, as it happened, to the daughter of a third-rank mandarin; and a third to see Ru-Hai and his family three years ago. That was all. But he’d kept abreast of events.

Looking back over the last two decades, it seemed to Shi-Rong that China’s affairs could be summed up in two words: stagnation and corruption. He should know. He’d been part of it.

The treasury was still empty. One province after another had suffered famines. There were beggars in the streets of every city. The planned rebuilding of the Summer Palace had been postponed so many times for lack of funds that he’d lost count.

In his own neighborhood, most people whom Shi-Rong knew just wanted to return to the old life as it was a generation ago. And who could blame them? If aging mandarins took bribes and clung to their office, what of it? If governors lied to the imperial court about conditions in the provinces—they always had. Better stagnation than chaos.

The military reforms had slowed down; the colonial powers were circling like wolves. In the northeast, Russia had continued to steal territory at every chance she got. In the southwest, the Burmese no longer took their orders from China, but the British. France was now master of Vietnam, and her warships were patrolling the waters around Taiwan. So far, the Japanese had been stopped from actually taking over the Korean peninsula—but only just. And for how long?

How had it all happened?

Shi-Rong knew what his father would have said: If the king follows the rules of Confucian morality, his kingdom will be ordered. If not, anarchy will follow.

Look what happened a quarter of a century ago, he would have pointed out, when the emperor disgracefully abandoned his post and ran away to the north. The barbarians had destroyed the Summer Palace and humiliated the Celestial Empire.

When the first regency was set up, the rules had been followed. The boy emperor had been the old emperor’s son. The empress was a regent—that was correct procedure. Including the boy’s mother, Cixi, in the circumstances, had made sense. And there had been a council, led by Prince Gong.

But when the young heir had died and they’d had to set up a second regency, it was a different story. Who had chosen the new boy emperor? Cixi. Why? Because he was her sister’s son, and his father, Prince Chun, was on her side. Was it proper? No. The rules of succession had not been followed. Therefore, Shi-Rong’s father would have said, no good could come of it. Yet no one had stood up to the dowager empress.

Except one man. One heroic mandarin: Wu the Censor. He alone had behaved like a true Confucian and made