Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
WALLS
It's hard to be always on the outside, looking in, but these
foreigners have no choice. They live crammed together by
the water's edge, two hundred yards or so beyond the southwest
corner of Canton's crumbling but still imposing walls.
They climb often to the roofs of their rented residences, and gaze from
there across the walls to the close-packed streets and spacious landscaped
residences of the Chinese city that lie beyond. They are allowed to stroll
along the west wall's outer edge and peer, past clustered Chinese guards,
through the long dark tunnels that form the city's major gates. If times
are peaceful, a group of foreign men by prearrangement meet at dawn
and walk the city's whole outside perimeter, a walk that takes two hours
or so if no one blocks the way. During the fire that raged all night near
the end of 1835, and destroyed more than a thousand city homes, one
Westerner clambered onto the walls to watch the flames; initially turned
away by Chinese guards, he was allowed to return the next afternoon, and
walk along the walls at leisure. But this was exceptional grace, and not
repeated. Some, with permission, visit rural temples in the hills, which
from their upper stories give a different angle to the view across the distant
walls. Others scan old Chinese maps that let them place the city's
major landmarks in the context of the unwalked streets.(1)
In their frustration, the foreigners pace out the dimensions of their
allotted territory. It takes them 270 steps to cross the land from east to
west, and fewer still from north to south. Along the southern edge of their
domain, where the Pearl River flows, there is a patch of open ground, and
this the Westerners call their "square" or "esplanade." But 50 paces from
the shore rise the solid fronts of the buildings where they live, and these
fill almost all the space remaining, save for three narrow streets that intersect
them from north to south, closed at night by gates. Here, in 1836, live
307 men--British and Americans, in the main, but also Parsees and Indians,
Dutch and Portuguese, Prussians, French, and Danes. No women are
allowed to be with them, and the 24 married men must leave their wives
in Macao, one hundred miles away, three days by sampan on the inland
waterways where travel is the safest. Twice, in 1830, defiant husbands
brought their wives and female relatives to visit them. But even though
the women came dressed in velvet caps and cloaks to hide their sex, and
stayed indoors all day, when they went out at night (a time chosen because
the shops were closed and the streets seemed empty) to see the sights,
excited shouts at once announced the arrival of the "foreign devil women."
The local Chinese lit their lanterns, and blocked the roads till all the
foreigners retreated back to their homes. And the authorities, threatening
to cancel all foreign trade unless the women returned to Macao, won their
point.(2)
Not that the life lacks compensations. There is money to be made, by
old and young alike, two thousand dollars in a few minutes if one deals
in opium and a buyer is in urgent need, smaller but still steady sums from
trade in tea and silk, furs and medicines, watches and porcelain and fine
furniture. The foreign community publishes two weekly newspapers,
printed on their own presses, which cover local news and feud and bicker
over trade and national policy. There is a fledgling chamber of commerce,
and two hotels where one can stay, for a dollar a night, in a four-poster
bed, with hot water for shaving, but no mirror. There is fresh milk to
drink every day, from the small herd of cows that the foreigners keep
always nearby, either in local pasturage or aboard specially adapted boats
that moor in the River. There is a small chapel that seats a hundred, a
dispensary, and a branch of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
There is even a new mall service, between the factories in Canton
and the city of Macao, collected Wednesdays and Saturdays, five cents a
letter and twenty cents a parcel, to replace the old letter boats, whose
volatile crews sometimes tossed the mailbags overboard, and left them
bobbing in the water until they were rescued (if they had not sunk).(3)
The thirteen rows of buildings, known as "hongs," or "factories," rented
from the small circle of Chinese merchants licensed by the state to deal
with the foreigners, are spacious and airy. Many of them were destroyed
by the great fire of 1822, but they have been well rebuilt, of granite and
local stone and brick, two stories high near the waterfront, rising to three
stories in the rear, and are better protected from fire than before, with
well-designed fire pumps ready in the yards. Arched passageways give
access and privacy within each of the thirteen lengthy structures, which
are divided into contiguous apartments, storerooms, and offices, and
shaded from hot summer sun by long verandas and venetian blinds; the
men sleep well, despite the heat, on clean, hard rattan mats, or mattresses
filled with bamboo shavings, unnostalgic for the feather comforters of
home.
Each building is named for the foreign nation that rents most of the
space within it. So one finds the Spanish and the Dutch, the Danish and
the Swedish hongs, the English, the Austrian Empire's hong, and, most
recently, the American. But these national labels are not exclusive, and the
small community is interlayered among the thirteen hongs. Some of the
buildings have billiard rooms and libraries, spacious terraces jutting out
toward the river to catch the evening breeze, and grand dining rooms with
gleaming chandeliers and candelabra shining on the silverplate and spotless
table settings. Meals can be sumptuous, with solemn Chinese servants in
formal hats and robes, silent behind every chair.(4) The inventory of one
young American's personal possessions, as tabulated by watchful Chinese
clerks, shows glimpses of this life: thirty knives and thirty forks, thirty
glasses and decanters, one trunk of woolen clothes, shaving kit and mixed
colognes, mirror, soap and candles, hat and spyglass, framed pictures, a gun
and sword, fifty pounds of cheroots and 542 bottles of "foreign wine."(5)
There is friendship among the foreigners, and sometimes music. A redcoated
band from a visiting ship plays in the square, to the delight of the
Westerners, but to the astonishment and tonal anguish of the listening
Chinese.(6) Or--a novelty first seen in 1835 at Canton--a steam-driven
pleasure boat with band aboard takes parties down the river and into the
beautiful, isle-filled sea.(7) And out beyond the harbor one can scramble up
the narrow track to the top of Lintin Mountain, aided by fifteen bearers,
and picnic there on a large flat rock, laid with a repast of poultry, fish,
pastry, ham, and wine, while again a band that accompanied the climbers
plays. Replete and rested, one can, if one chooses, slide back down the
hillside on one's bottom through the long dry grass.(8)
Language might seem a problem, since in all of Canton and the foreign
hongs there is no Chinese who can read or write in English or other
European languages, and only a few Westerners who know enough Chinese
to write with even partial elegance. This has not always been the
case. In the 1810s and 1820s, when the East India Company was at its
peak of power, there were a dozen or more young men from England
studying Chinese in the Canton factories. They translated Chinese novels
and plays, and even the Chinese legal code, so they could assess the equity
of the government's rules more carefully. Though the local officials on
occasion imprisoned Chinese for teaching their own language to foreigners,
and even executed one, and Chinese teachers often had to shelter
privately in their pupils' lodgings, the East India Company representatives
fought back. By tenacity, they won the right to submit commercial documents
in Chinese translation, rather than in English, and to hire Chinese
teachers, for study of classical texts as well as Cantonese colloquial dialect.
And though the company directors never won official acknowledgment
of their right to hire Chinese wood-carvers, they went ahead anyway and
block printed an Anglo-Chinese dictionary using Chinese characters; in
addition, they managed to accumulate a substantial library of four thousand
books, many of them in Chinese, which they housed in their splendidly
appointed hong, with the company's senior physician doubling as
the librarian.(9)
With the termination by the British government in 1834 of the company's
monopoly of China trade, these glory days were over. Most of the
language students and experts were reassigned to other countries; their
finest teacher, Robert Morrison, died the same year; and the great library
was scattered. Only three young men, who had been classified on the
company's roster as "proficient" enough to receive an annual student's
allowance, are left in Canton by 1836, and their main role is to be caretakers
of the company's former buildings and oversee their closing down.(10)
Nor are there any established bookshops to be found in the foreigners'
restricted zone of residence, for specific laws forbid the sale of Chinese
books to foreigners, and even make it a crime to show them one of China's
local histories or regional gazettes. Those who wish to search out books
must walk some distance to the west, where two bookshops on a side
street (a street with gates locked and barred at night) will break the law
to the extent of selling novels, romances, and "marvellous stories" to the
foreigners, and sometimes arrange for purchases of other titles from the
larger stores within the city.(11)
But years of experience have led to the growth of a language shared by
nearly all who live among the foreign hongs, a language known as "Canton
Jargon" or "Pidgin English." This serves to keep the differing communities
in touch, by mixing words from Portuguese, Indian, English, and
various Chinese dialects, and spelling them according to Chinese syntax,
with r transformed to l, and b to p. "Pidgin" itself comes from the word
"business," via its intermediate mispronunciation "pidginess"; gods are joss
from Deos; and a religious service is thus a "joss pidgin." Sex is "lofpidgin."
Thieves become la-de-loons from ladrao, ships become junks, markets
bazaars, lunch tiffin, a letter a chit, one who commands (mandar) a
man-ta-le or mandarin, a document a chop, an urgent document chop-chop,
one hundred thousand of anything a lac, a laborer a coolie, a conference a
chin-chin, one's good acquaintance number one olo flen.(12) Double ee is
added after dental consonants, so want becomes wantee, catch catchee. Chinese
shopkeepers have at hand little books of terms compiled locally as
guides to business, guides in which the Chinese characters for a given
object are also glossed below, with other characters suggesting--in Cantonese
dialect--the way to say the English. Scales are rendered sze-kay-lesze,
January che-na-li-le, west wind wi-sze-wun, and one-two-three wun,
too, te-le.(13) Thus can the wealthy merchant Howqua, forewarned that a
senior Chinese official is coming to demand a massive bribe, say with
resignation to a young American trader "Man-ta-le sendee one piece chop.
He come tomollo, wantee too-lac dollar," and everyone knows what he
means.(14)
Even though the city of Canton is closed to Westerners, Chinese life
enfolds them in their little enclave. The riverbank is lined with boats of
every size and shape, so that one can barely see the water. There are
cargo boats from up-country, passenger craft, floating homes and floating
brothels, drifting fortune-tellers, government patrol ships, barbers' boats,
boats selling food, or toys, or clothes, or household notions.(15) And mixed
with these amid the din are the ferryboats that run from the Jutting pier
at Jackass Point across the river to Honam Island, with its tea plantations,
ornamental gardens, and temples where the Westerners are--at intervals--permitted
to take the air.(16) There are eighty of these little ferry
craft, each holding eight passengers, and charging a standard fee of two
copper cents a passenger, or sixteen for the whole boat, if one wishes to
travel alone. And there are the larger floating theater boats, where the
actors rehearse their plays as they travel from location to location between
engagements, and where opium is provided to all visitors with the ability
to pay.(17)
If the owners of such floating pleasure palaces by smile and gesture
invite the foreigner aboard in hopes of financial gain, the same commercial
motive is not present in all those one meets, and genuine hospitality or
warmth is by no means lacking. The workers from a wheat-grinding mill,
washing their bodies after a day of work, and munching their meal of rice
and vegetables, welcome a visitor to view their eleven huge grinding
wheels, and the oxen who drive them. A noisy group of carpenters and
masons, gathering at sunset to eat and drink beneath an awning spread
across an angle of the street for shade and shelter, beckon a passing Westerner
to join them. Gangs of tough, barefoot or grass-sandaled, almost
naked coolies, after waiting patiently for hours in the sun for casual work,
squatting or standing amidst the stalls and markets, each with his bamboo
pole with ropes dangling empty, still greet one cheerfully and show nothing
but good.(18)
The foreigners know some of the Chinese they deal with by name, or
at least by Western variants of their Chinese names. Among these are the
hong merchants, thirteen in all, who have the formal monopoly on foreign
trade, own the buildings in which the Westerners live, and filter all their
petitions and complaints to the higher authorities, and whose own huge
homes and warehouses flank the thirteen factories to west and east along
the Pearl River: Howqua, Kingqua, Pwankhequa, and the rest. The official
linguists," five in 1836, who travel door to door with crucial messages,
which they deliver in their hybrid Pidgin English--Atom, Atung, "Young
Tom," Alantsei, and Aheen--are known to all.(19)
Others have become known in their role as patients, carefully recorded
in the registers of Dr. Parker's dispensary and hospital, opened in late
1835 on the second floor of number 7, Hog Lane, rented for $500 a year
from Howqua. Atso, the rice merchant, the girl Akae, Matszeah, the
scribe in the governor's office, Changshan, the soldier, Pang she, the seamstress,
925 of them in all, just between November 4, 1835, and February
4, 1836, with cataracts, tumors, abscesses, deafness, partial paralysis, and a
score of other woes.(20)
At first glance, Hog Lane is an unlikely site for such benevolent work,
but number 7 is at the north end of the narrow street, away from the river,
near the busy Chinese thoroughfare that marks the northern boundary of
the foreigners' domain. As Parker explains his choice, his "patients could
come and go without annoying foreigners by passing through their hongs,
or excite the observation of natives by being seen to resort to a foreigner's
house." Bamboo strips, numbered in Chinese and English, are issued by
the porter downstairs to each patient who comes to seek treatment (some
have been waiting outside all night), and they are received in turn on the
upper floor, where Parker deals with all he can manage. Their ages range
from six to seventy-eight, and there are women as well as men, and in
large numbers, to his surprise: "Difficulty was anticipated in receiving
females as house patients, it being regarded [as] illegal for a female to enter
the foreign factories," as Parker put it, but with male relatives usually in
attendance, to watch over them and prevent any whispers of impropriety,
"the difficulty has proved more imaginary than real," and female patients
number around one-third of the total.(21)
Others, nameless to the observers, give a fuller sense of Chinese life.
Two blind girls, nine years old at most, walk to the esplanade, holding on
to each other and clutching their wooden begging bowls, laughing and
chatting despite their rags, bare feet, and lice.(22) A traveling librarian,
banging his rattle, his current stock of popular novels packed into boxes
dangling from a bamboo pole across his shoulder, evades the rules that
apply to bookshops by walking from door to door in search of customers
among the Chinese clerks and coolies. He shows his wares to foreign
questioners, and tells them he has no complaints. The three hundred volumes
he is carrying--small, light, paperbound--are but those remaining
from over a thousand he currently has out on loan.(23)
On the esplanade are rows of stands, whose owners--each with a distinctive
cry--sell fruit and cakes, sweets and soup, dogs, cats, and fowl,
slabs of horsemeat with the hooves still attached and strings of dried duck
tongues, shaped like awls and hard as iron to the touch.(24) Others lure
viewers to their peephole boxes, decorated brilliantly in red, or erect a tiny
stage on which to mount their puppet shows. Old women sit on the
ground, with needle and thread, to mend your clothes, or play a game of
chance together, the prize a pair of shoes; a healer presses bamboo cups to
men's naked backs, to draw the blood; tinkers at their stalls mend locks
and pipes, drill broken glass and porcelain and mend the shards with
finest wire, sharpen razors, fill cracks in metal pots. Bird fanciers squat in
solemn circles, some with their precious birds in cages, others with birds
perched on sticks, or cradled in their hands.(25)
Three streets cut through the foreigners' businesses and residences,
dividing them into four blocks of unequal width. All are densely packed
with shops. Old China Street, the widest, is twelve feet broad, New China
Street and Hog Lane a little less. The streets in general are so narrow that
it's almost impossible to move, and one is jostled by the crowds, or
bumped harshly by the coolies carrying palanquins with passengers, or
massive loads.(26) Buddhist nuns with shaven heads, Taoist and Buddhist
priests, ratcatchers with a dozen or more of their captured prey dangling
in rows from bamboo poles, fortune-tellers, itinerant doctors, money
changers, sellers of the finest fighting crickets that have been collected
from the hills outside the town--all join the throng.(27) The shops that sell
expensive goods the foreigners might like to buy have signs in Roman
letters to render the owners' names and English descriptions of their treasures:
carvings of ivory, turtle shell and mother-of-pearl, silks of all kinds,
lacquer ware, and paintings of insects and fruits, or of famous battles,
where red-coated Englishmen in cocked hats sit rigidly in rows under the
relentless fire of Chinese guns. For every item purchased you must get the
shopkeeper's chop or seal on your invoice, else it will be confiscated as you
leave Canton.(28)
One June evening in 1835, at the entrance to a side street leading to the
more affluent Canton suburbs, a dead baby lies in a basket among the
rubbish, its body doubled up and its head, slightly swollen, dangling over
the basket's edge. So narrow is the way, at this spot, that a Westerner,
returning from a stroll in the countryside, has to step over the basket,
noticing the contents only when his foot is in midair. As he stares in shock
and bewilderment at the baby's face, a group of Chinese bystanders gaze,
in equal bewilderment, at him.(29)