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

pay our agency men with silver. The agency men use the silver to buy tea. But where does the opium come from? India. Bengal mostly. Grown by the East India Company. Surely that’s right, isn’t it, sir?”

Colonel Lomond did not answer. He rose from the table. Taking Charlie by the arm in a friendly manner, but in a way that obliged Trader to walk behind, he led them towards the door.

Moments later, they were all walking down the steps of the club together and would have parted there and then in the street if a voice had not interrupted them.

“Papa!” It came from a covered carriage where, accompanied by her mother, a servant, a coachman, and outriders, a young lady dressed in silks and carrying a parasol was being driven along the esplanade. The carriage stopped.

“Good afternoon, Papa,” said Agnes Lomond. “Have you had a good lunch?”

Colonel Lomond hadn’t expected this encounter, but turned to his daughter with a smile, and to his wife with a look of caution which that lady noted at once.

“You both know young Farley, of course,” he said genially as the two women greeted Charlie. “And this,” he added vaguely, indicating Trader with a hand that had suddenly gone limp, “is a friend of his.”

“John Trader,” said Trader, smiling politely at Mrs. Lomond before shifting his glance towards her daughter. But once resting on the younger woman, his dark blue eyes did not move.

Agnes Lomond was twenty and already a lady. There was no other word for it. Her mother was a handsome, stately matron. But Agnes was slim, like her father, and a little taller than her mother. Her face, well protected from the sun, showed a wonderful pale complexion. If her nose was too long for her to be called pretty, it served only to make her look more aristocratic. Of her character, it was impossible to guess anything at all.

Perhaps it was this reserve, or her auburn hair, or the fact that she was socially unattainable, or her dark walnut eyes, or a deep desire to steal her from her father—but whatever the causes, John Trader’s mouth opened and he stared at Agnes Lomond like a man in a trance.

Her mother saw it and intervened at once. “Will you go with us?” she asked her husband, who promptly stepped up into the carriage. “We must let you and your friend get to your work, Mr. Farley.” She gave Charlie a nod, to which he returned a bow as the carriage moved off.

But Trader forgot to bow. He only stood and stared.

◦

The red sun was setting once again when Jiang Shi-Rong, emerging from the pine groves through which the old road led, came in sight of the city. High above, like a heavenly rib cage, great bars of cloud lay across the sky, catching the orange glow of the sun in the west. As he always did, whenever he gazed upon its mighty walls, its towers, its huge curved roofs of gleaming tiles, Jiang Shi-Rong caught his breath.

Beijing. It was magnificent.

Yet was it his city?

—

Jiang knew that the people who called themselves the Han—his people—had built a walled city on the site three thousand years ago. But it was only five centuries ago that Kubla Khan, a grandson of Genghis, the mighty Mongol conqueror, had made himself overlord of China and, after building fabulous Xanadu on his summer hunting grounds in the steppes, had chosen this northern town as his Chinese capital.

But after less than a century, a native Han dynasty, the shining Ming, had managed to kick the Mongols out and strengthen the Great Wall to deter other invaders. They’d kept Kubla Khan’s capital, however. And for three centuries the Ming had ruled China.

It had been a golden age. Literature and the arts had thrived. Chinese scholars had printed the greatest encyclopedia of herbal medicine the world had ever seen. Chinese fleets explored westward to Africa. Ming porcelain was the envy of the world.

But even the shining Ming came to an end. The pattern had been seen in China so many times before: a gradual degeneration, a weak emperor, a peasant revolt, an ambitious general trying to seize power. And in this case, another huge invasion from the north—this time a confederation of clans—the Manchu—from the vast forests and plains northeast of the Great Wall.

The Manchu armies were organized into great companies, known as banners, each led by a prince or trusted chief. As the Ming Empire crumbled and fell under their yoke, its great cities were garrisoned by bannermen, and remained so as the centuries passed.

As for the proud Han Chinese, they were now a subject people. Their men were forced to adopt the Manchu hairstyle, shaving the front of their heads and plaiting the rest of their hair into a single long braid—a pigtail or “queue”—that hung down their backs.

Yet if the Chinese had succumbed, their culture had not. To be sure, the Manchu were proud of their heroic warrior past, but as masters now of the huge cities, palaces, and temples of China, they soon gave themselves a Chinese name—the Qing, or Ch’ing—and ruled more or less as conventional Chinese emperors. The Qing emperors performed the eternal sacrifices to the gods. Some became quite erudite in Chinese literature.

Jiang owed them obedience. Yet even now, like many Han Chinese, he still knew that it was he and his people who were the true inheritors of the millennia of Chinese culture, and that he should have been superior to the overlords he served.

—

The huge outer wall before him ran four miles across, from east to west, with a mighty gatehouse in the center. Inside the wall, on the right, raised above the surrounding world on a great mound, he could see the great drumlike pagoda at the Temple of Heaven, before which the emperor performed the ancient ceremonies to ask the gods for good harvests, its three tiers of blue-tiled roofs turning to indigo under the reddening embers