The Sun in the Morning (9 page)

I have the scroll still. It was the only piece of loot — if you can call it that, since he paid for it — that Tacklow brought back from Peking. Others acquired far more valuable objects, and he told me about an acquaintance of his, the adjutant of one of the British regiments, whose men would bring him any item of bric-à-brac that they had looted, in the certainty that if he fancied it he would say ‘All right — stand yourself a pint of beer on me at the canteen'; which was considered adequate payment and gratefully received. One day a private soldier brought him a necklace, describing it as ‘this ‘ere string o' glass beads, sir'. The adjutant, no expert, examined the gaudy thing carefully and had his doubts, so he decided to take a gamble and offered the man five pounds. The private, whose pay was a shilling a day, looked very taken aback at the vastness of the sum, but after mulling it over for a moment or two, said he'd changed his mind about selling it and took it back. The adjutant thought no more about it; but a long while later, happening to meet my father again, he told him the end of the story.…

He and his regiment had in due course returned to England, and
one day, some five or six years later, while strolling down Regent Street in London he was accosted by a very smartly dressed man who said: ‘Do you remember me, sir? — Private So-and-so.' The Adjutant, now a Colonel, said he did indeed, and shaking hands asked him how he was getting on; adding that he looked as though he was doing all right. ‘I am that, sir,' agreed the ex-private. ‘Do you remember that necklace of red glass beads I offered you in Peking? Well, if you'd told me to have a pint of beer on you at the canteen you could have ‘ad ‘em and welcome. But when you said you'd give me a fiver for them, it give me a bit of a shock and I thought I'd stick to ‘em. I brought ‘em ‘ome with me and took ‘em to a jeweller who said they wasn't glass at all; they was rubies and worth a mint of money. They was too — just about a fortune. So I buys my discharge, and a nice little business into the bargain that's doing so well that I'm a rich man. And I owes it all to you, sir, ‘cause if you ‘adn't offered me the five pounds I'd still be in the ranks!'

Another prize of war in those days was the Pekinese dog. Among the earliest of the breed to leave China had been a peke annexed by Lord John Hay during the sacking and destruction of the original Summer Palace at the end of the Taiping Rebellion, and subsequently presented to Queen Victoria; who does not seem to have appreciated the gift. These pampered creatures were regarded as royal, and known as ‘lion-dogs' because though their frames were small they were lion-hearted; a fact that anyone who has ever owned a Pekinese will know well.

One unexpected result of the Boxer Rising was that for the first time many of these hitherto carefully guarded Palace-dogs found their way out into the streets and alleys of Peking, and it was not long before every masterless dog in the city (in India we called such dogs pariah dogs — ‘pi-dogs' for short — and in China they are called ‘wonks') had a dash of Pekinese blood. With the years the strain spread throughout the Celestial Kingdom, and the effects are distinctly odd. Dogs with the bodies of terriers or dachshunds but the flat pansy-faces and curling, chrysanthemum tails of Pekinese; others with the squat, silky-haired bodies of Pekinese but with the whippy tails of bull-terriers and the faces of various long-nosed, pointy-eared breeds. The variations appear to be endless, but the sections that hark back to the Imperial lion-dogs are unmistakable.

North China winters are bitter, and the first winter that the 21st Punjabis spent there was a memorable one. With the arrival of the frost the sea froze for three miles outside Chingwentao, and every river and canal turned to solid ice. Tacklow and his fellow officers acquired skates, and on the first morning that they tried these out they became aware of a row of turban-crowned faces watching them wide-eyed with horror over the top of the canal bank; apparently the Punjabis thought that this was some form of evil magic and imagined that the water would open and swallow up the Sahib-log at any moment. Eventually, however, reassured by explanation and demonstration, the entire audience lined up in fours and marched resolutely down the bank and onto the ice. The result was a shambles, for as each rank reached it, four pairs of feet either shot up into the air or performed the splits as their owners fell sprawling and skidded every which way across the slippery surface; bodies piled up on bodies, arms and legs flailing wildly, while the frosty air turned blue with strange oaths. Tacklow assured me that no Keystone Cops comedy that he ever saw lived up to it, but that in no time at all the whole regiment had acquired skates and were performing complicated acrobatics on the ice.

There was ice-sailing too: a fast, furious and thrilling sport in which small flat-bottomed boats with matting sails skimmed before the wind across the flooded, frozen levels of the countryside at a terrifying speed; leaping dykes as a racehorse or a hunter leaps a fence, and turning and swerving like a flight of swallows. On windy days the speeds that the ice-boats could achieve were hair-raising, and much of the heavy traffic on the rivers and canals, where in winter the boats were poled along the ice, would raise lateen sails and make use of the wind to drive them forward.

That year when the first snow fell, the regimental post office received a number of bottles filled with snow and labelled to various addresses in the Punjab, with messages attached saying that this was the peculiar kind of rain that fell in this country. The senders had to be tactfully told that long before the bottles reached India this interesting stuff would look no different from the rain that fell anywhere else, and if left for an hour or so they would be able to witness this disappointing transformation for themselves.

Tacklow also told me of the occasion when, talking to a Manchu
friend in the presence of a stranger wearing peasant dress, he noticed with interest that the stranger held his nose throughout the interview. When the man finally left, still holding his nose, Tacklow asked his friend the meaning of this curious behaviour. The Manchu, deeply embarrassed, apologized profusely; explaining that the man was from a small village in the interior that had not enjoyed the benefits of education, so he hoped that Tacklow would forgive such uncouth behaviour. Tacklow replied that he wouldn't give it another thought, but he would dearly like to know
why
the man had behaved like that? Well, it was this way, explained his friend: to the Chinese, all Western people smell unpleasant, though this did not of course justify bad manners! — people who knew how to behave bit on the bullet and politely ignored it. When pressed, he said he supposed that the unpleasant odour of Occidentals sprang from the food they ate, which included an inordinate amount of red meat and animal fat; plus the fact that they smoked a great deal of tobacco in pipes, cigars and cigarettes, used shaving-soap and strange-smelling mouthwashes and washed with strongly scented soaps.

This piece of information fascinated Tacklow, because of course Occidentals have often complained that Orientals, Asians and Africans, probably on account of their diet, have strongly individual body-odours which white races are apt to criticize and take exception to. It was therefore salutary, he said, to discover that other races thought that
we
were the ones who smelt unpleasant; and he was duly grateful to his Manchu friend for enduring it without complaint.

Another foreigner Whom he made friends with in China was a convalescent Russian officer who was in Tientsin in the early months of 1905, recovering from the effects of starvation and a wound received during the siege of Port Arthur — a fortified town that Japan had ceded to Russia less than seven years earlier, and recently retaken. Port Arthur, in a day well before the age of aerial warfare, and when high-explosives had yet to be invented and no gun then made was heavy enough to breach its massive walls, had been considered impregnable. Nevertheless the Japanese took it by assault, after a prolonged siege and many days of ferocious fighting. Tacklow's Russian friend, telling him of it, said that it was like being opposed by a vast and inexhaustible army of killer-ants to whom death had no meaning whatsoever. He described to him how rank after rank of Japanese troops would rise
from their entrenchments and race forward (their officers, sword in hand, always well to the fore), only to be mown down by the guns and rifle-fire of the defenders; how another line of officers would instantly leap up, raise their swords and shout the order to advance to the next rank — who would rise and run forward over the piled-up bodies of their dead and wounded, and falling in their turn, be trodden under by the next rank … and then the next and the next —

The Russian said that it was not only uncanny but beyond belief, and that no one who had not seen it with their own eyes could believe it. They died, he said, in their thousands; yet there were always more of them. They kept coming and coming until in the end it broke the nerve of the garrison. He said, too, that the famous story of the Japanese officer who, not trusting to a fuse, used the tip of his cigarette to touch off the charge of explosive that relays of men had carried forward — the living picking it up from the hands of the dead to run on with it for the next few yards until at last it was put in place against the outer walls or one of the gates — was inaccurate. Not because it had not been done, but because it was
always
done. And not by just one officer, but by dozens of officers who took no chances but pressed the lighted tip of a cigarette against the charge, and shouting ‘
Banzai
!' were blown to pieces with it. This, and sheer numbers, was, according to the Russian, the reason why the ‘impregnable' fortress fell to the descendants of the Samurai. The kamikaze pilots of the Second World War were only following the example of their fathers — or perhaps grandfathers — who died for their country before the walls of Port Arthur in the violent opening years of the twentieth century.

With the fall of the Boxers and the lifting of the siege of the Legations, peace was established in China and the Dowager Empress returned to Peking and was gracious to the ‘foreign devils' and their wives. She gave a reception for them in the Forbidden City — several receptions in fact — and succeeded in charming the diplomats' women, who could not believe that this small, pleasant old lady could possibly have carried out any of the terrible deeds attributed to her. Tacklow, on temporary loan as ADC to some senior General, was privileged to see her once and he described her as looking rather like an Egyptian mummy; her face a yellow parchment-like mask, in which only the eyes were alive, under an elaborate Manchu head-dress; her hands hidden in the sleeves of a yellow satin robe that was stiff with embroidery.
He got the impression, he said, that if by saying a single word she could have doomed every one of them to the ‘Death of a Thousand Cuts', she would have said it without a second's hesitation — and with relish!

Tzu Hsi was undoubtedly a wicked and murderous old woman. But she was also a great one and a ruler to be reckoned with. Even after that second ignominious retreat from Peking (she had run away once before and returned in triumph) she still retained her hold upon her subjects. She was still, to them, the ‘Old Buddha'; and Tacklow told me that when a portrait of her, painted by an American artist, Miss Katherine Carl, was carried through the streets of Peking on its way to America and the St Louis Exhibition, the citizens treated it as though it had been the Empress herself, kowtowing to the ground as it passed; and that a special train was laid on to take it to Tientsin from where it was sent on by sea with royal honours.

She was very old when Tacklow saw her. But once she had been young and beautiful and burning with ambition. As the daughter of a petty Manchu official she was required, on reaching puberty, to present herself before the Empress Dowager, together with a number of other Manchu maidens of the same age, from among whom the Emperor's mother, assisted by a panel of eunuchs and elderly court ladies, would annually select those who were considered fit to become the Emperor's concubines. The young Tzu Hsi (then known by her clan name of Yehonala) passed the test and was sent to the women's quarters to apply herself to a rigorous course of tuition in manners, deportment and the art of pleasing a man. Each concubine had her name engraved on one side of a tablet of jade, and every night the Emperor would be presented with a selection of these tablets laid face downwards on a lacquer tray. He would turn one over at random, and the owner of the name thus disclosed would be bathed, rubbed with scented oil and parcelled up naked in a padded quilt of scarlet satin, to be carried into the bedroom of the Son of Heaven and unrolled on the floor at the foot of his bed.

Since this particular Emperor, Hsien Feng, was a sickly youth who suffered from headaches and had little or no interest in women, the wretched girl would generally spend the night flat on the floor in a humble kowtow with her forehead on the outspread quilt; shivering from a combination of cramp, cold, terror and pins-and-needles until
dawn brought the eunuchs to re-wrap and remove her. Yehonala, however, was made of sterner stuff. She managed to charm or bribe one of the eunuchs into arranging that her tablet would be the one turned up, and when that happened she literally took her life in her hands, for instead of remaining on the floor she rose and sat boldly on the edge of the bed and began to talk to the boy; sympathizing with him, stroking his aching forehead and soothing him to sleep so that he passed the first comfortable night he had had in years. As a result, he demanded her presence on the following night. She became so necessary to him that neither his young wife nor any of the concubines ever visited him again, and soon there was a new Empress in the Forbidden City with the title of ‘Empress of the West' — the first Empress now being known as the ‘Empress of the East'. When Yehonala bore a son the poor Empress of the East ceased to be of any importance at all, and when the sickly Emperor died and her rival, as mother of the new Son of Heaven, was declared Regent during his minority and given the honorific title of Tzu Hsi (Motherly and Auspicious), she must have known that her days were numbered.