1636- the China Venture Read online

  When Eric Garlow mentioned to him that there were two hundred and fifty million people in China, he started drooling over the prospect of Chinese sales. Jennings did his research and found out that in the old time line, the rickshaw hadn’t been invented until the mid-nineteenth century. There was, plainly, a niche to fill. The USE mission got a cycle rickshaw consigned to it, and Steve Jennings started using the line “By Appointment to the Diplomatic Service of the United States of Europe” in his advertising.

  This cycle rickshaw had a cloth roof over the bench seat, which hung down at the sides to provide some privacy. Originally, the wood sides of the seat had been unpainted. However, Wei urged the westerners to paint it red, like a traditional sedan chair, and they eventually decided that he probably knew more about such things than they did.

  Then he wanted to be dressed in red livery to match the rickshaw. He got that, too. And now, plainly, he thought it was time to become the talk of the town. Or, at least, the servants’ taverns of the town.

  “Here I am, Wei,” said Judith. “Martina will be out in a moment.”

  Soon thereafter, Martina and Jim came out. He helped her into the rickshaw, and kissed her goodbye.

  “Let’s go!” said Judith.

  * * *

  People stopped to stare at Wei’s strange contraption as they lumbered down to West Lake. Along the way, they stopped to pick up Fang Yizhi’s aunt, Weiyi. Yizhi’s wife, who was more of a homebody, had declined the invitation.

  The women were supposed to meet by Leifeng Pagoda at sunset, which offered one of the ten traditional famous sites of West Lake. It was famous because of the centuries-old legend of the white snake, which Mike Song had described to Martina and Judith. It was about a romance between a lad and white snake spirit who transformed herself into a woman and married him because of a favor he did her when he was a little boy. A tortoise spirit is envious of the white snake spirit and tries to break up the marriage by forcing her to reveal her true nature to the lad—causing him to die of shock. She restores him to life and he still loves her. Then the tortoise spirit first imprisons the lad in Jinshan Temple, and then imprisons her in Leifeng Pagoda.

  Now, when he first gave them the story, Martina assumed that Mike had learned of this legend by reading some Chinese classic. But in fact, as he later admitted, it was from some movie out of Hong Kong.

  The pagoda was five stories tall, and octagonal in shape. It had a half-ruined look. Japanese pirates raiding Hangzhou in the last century had burned it, so only the brick skeleton was left.

  It was, Martina thought, a good place to tell ghost stories.…

  Judith, Martina and Weiyi exited the rickshaw just outside Leifeng Pagoda, and Weiyi pointed to a small cluster of Chinese women. “There they are!”

  Martina was surprised to see that Liu Rushi was among them. “Isn’t she a courtesan?” Martina asked Weiyi in a whisper.

  “So? She is a very well-educated, very talented woman, fully our equal in the arts. She is very good company. As long as there are no men around—servants don’t count, of course—we and the courtesans can mix freely. Of course, it’s rare for a courtesan to wake up before noon, or to be available to consort with lady friends in the evening hours. That’s the real surprise.”

  Judith, Martina and Weiyi walked over to join Liu Rushi and the others.

  “Please let me introduce you,” said Weiyi. “Leyster Judith and Goss Martina”—by hand gestures, she indicated which was which—“this is my good friend Gu Ruopu. She is a native of Hangzhou, and an excellent poet and scholar. She prepared her sons Can and Wei for the official examinations, just as I did Yizhi.”

  Ruopu appeared to be a fortyish woman in very good health. She smiled at Martina, and said, “I see you have a child on the way. When do you expect the birth to come? And is he or she your first?”

  “In the Eleventh Month,” she answered, meaning December. “And yes, this will be my first childbirth.”

  “It is fortunate that you are here in Hangzhou, and not in Beijing,” said Ruopu. “An expectant mother should keep warm. Weiyi told me that you are from a town of scholars. And of course I saw your people fly into the sky, right here in Hangzhou, so I know that it is true.”

  Martina laughed. “I am from Grantville. We never thought of ourselves that way, but it appears that we do know things that the rest of the world does not. Including, of course, the art of flight.”

  “Ah, flying!” said another woman. “Excuse me, Ruopu, but I must say how wonderful it was to see the balloon sitting in the sky like a cloud. I have not been able to decide whether to honor the memory with a poem or with a painting.”

  “Why not both, Jinglan?” said Ruopu. Turning to Martina and Judith, she explained, “This is Shang Jinglan. We are lucky she could join us; she is from Shaoxing, on the south shore of Hangzhou Bay. She heard about the balloon flights and came up to see them. She is staying with me right now.”

  There were some benches not far from the pagoda, toward which they’d been drifting as they talked. Now, they sat down. Once they had done so, Jinglan asked the westerners, “Do you paint, or write poetry?”

  “Judith here is a painter. I can’t draw. And I wouldn’t call myself a poet, even in my own language,” Martina admitted. “But I think I wrote pretty good essays.”

  “Essays? On what?”

  “On politics. I was a part-time college student, and I intended to major in political science and then maybe go to law school. I really hadn’t thought that far, because I also had to work and so my studying was dragging out.”

  The Chinese women exchanged looks. Martina was well aware that in China, only the men could go to school, or take the official examinations. Martina had decided months earlier that while she was not going to try to rouse the local women into political action—although every time she saw a bound foot, her blood pressure rose—she wasn’t going to hide how life for women was better back home. And let them make of that, what they might.

  “Before I came on this mission, I was working as an assistant in the chancery for the State of Thuringia-Franconia.” She had to explain what this meant of course, and managed to convey that she was some kind of clerk for a provincial-level official. Not a position open to women in China.

  “Liu Rushi, I think you have met before,” Weiyi continued.

  The courtesan nodded to them. “I share Jinglan’s enthusiasm for your people’s balloon flights.”

  “For the balloon flights, or for a particular balloonist?” asked Martina pointedly.

  The corner of Liu Rushi’s mouth turned up slightly. “The two are not inconsistent.”

  Ruopu gestured to a young woman who had just arrived. “This is Huang Yuanjie from Jiaxing. She is a newlywed, that’s why her cheeks are so red.”

  Yuanjie colored further. “They are red because of what I ate last night.”

  “I like my explanation better. And last but not least, we have Liang Mengzhao, who I have known since we were children. How is your drama coming along?”

  “Fine. I have decided to give the Herd Boy and the Weaving Girl a happier ending.”

  “Good for you!” said Liu Rushi.

  “Where’s Wanjun?” Mengzhao asked. “I thought she was coming to town this week.”

  “She’s confined to bed again,” said Liu Rushi.

  “Poor thing,” Yuanjie added, “after all she’s been through.”

  “I don’t know the lady,” said Martina.

  “You may know her by her formal name, Shen Yixiu; Wanjun is her style name. No?”

  Martina shook her head.

  Liu Rushi clucked her tongue. “Well, she is the wife of Ye Shaoyuan, a retired official. He used to be a secretary in the Ministry of Works. They live in Wujiang.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “It’s part of Suzhou.” Suzhou was, Martina knew, a small city about seventy miles north of Hangzhou, but still south of the Yangtze. There was frequent coming and going among the upper class bet
ween Suzhou and Hangzhou, or so the up-timers had been told.

  “Anyway, they were both of a scholarly disposition, and much in love, and they had a succession of talented children.”

  “Many of whom the gods have taken away from them,” added Ruopu soberly.

  “Yes, Xiaoluan, their youngest daughter, who had been a child prodigy, died at seventeen, five days before her wedding. Then Wanwan, their eldest daughter, died soon after, no doubt of a broken heart.”

  “And no wonder,” said Ruopu. “Wanwan’s husband completely ignored her for seven years, and so her only solace in life were her friendships with her mother and sisters. And she doted on Xiaoluan.”

  “I am not so sure that’s why Wanwan died. There was still an epidemic at the time.…” Yuanjie interjected.

  “How long ago were these deaths?” asked Judith.

  “Xiaoluan, about three years ago and Wanwan a few months later.”

  “But her travails weren’t over,” said Liu Rushi. “This very year, her second son, Ye Shicheng, died of an abscess. He was eighteen years old. Then her mother-in-law died—”

  “That was, perhaps, less of a blow,” said Yuanjie. “She wanted Yixiu to wait on her hand and foot, and when Yixiu was a young bride, she prohibited Yixiu from doing any writing of her own until Shaoyuan passed the national examination.”

  Liu Rushi continued her tale. “A month ago, her son Ye Shirang died of a lung disorder. He had been sick for two years, and when he died, he was only five years old.”

  “How horrible! It makes me think of the Greek myth of Niobe,” said Judith.

  When asked for details, Judith and Martina did their best to explain. Huang Yuanjie was fascinated. “Have you painted Niobe crying for her children?”

  “I haven’t,” Judith admitted, “but Abraham Bloemaert did ‘The Death of Niobe’s Children.’ And other artists have painted the earlier scene, of Apollo and Diana shooting their arrows, and Niobe trying to shield her children.” She cautiously refrained from mentioning that the paintings she had in mind were from the eighteenth century, and thus existed only in the art history books of Grantville.

  “Is this illness of Yixiu’s also a lung disease?” asked Martina.

  “Yes, she has been coughing up blood.”

  Martina looked at Judith. “I don’t know when she will be well enough to come to Hangzhou again, but if she does, I’d like her to visit our physician, and find out if there’s anything that can be done for her.”

  “Or perhaps we can persuade him to go to Suzhou or Wujiang to see her,” Judith added.

  “If he is interested in silk, the people in Wujiang call their town the ‘Capital of Silk,’” said Ruopu.

  “Excuse me, but this is all very depressing,” said Mengzhao. “Aren’t we here to have fun? Why not a song?”

  “Or a drinking game,” said Yuanjie. “Each of us sings a song in turn, or drinks as a forfeit.”

  “Judith and I hardly know Chinese well enough to sing in it,” said Martina.

  “May we sing in our own language?” asked Judith.

  “That seems fair to me,” said Liu Rushi. “But you must tell us what the song means.”

  “I am still going to end up quite drunk,” said Martina. “Or you are going to get very tired of the Beatles,” she added, sotto voce.

  Judith laughed. “Wei will drive us home, so why worry?”

  Chapter 36

  Wujiang

  Near Suzhou, north of Hangzhou

  “Welcome to our home,” said Ye Shaoyuan, bowing. “You really think you can help my wife?”

  Doctor Carvalhal bowed back. “I will certainly try, but I can make no promises.”

  “What doctor ever does?” asked Ye Shaoyuan, his tone bitter. “But I appreciate the attempt.”

  Doctor Carvalhal asked a series of questions about the course of her illness. The answers confirmed what Judith and Martina had relayed from Shen Yixiu’s lady friends.

  “Is she coughing now?”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “That’s good.” At a sharp look from Ye Shaoyuan, Carvalhal explained himself. “That she is coughing at all is unfortunate, but the fact that she is coughing now will contribute to the diagnosis.”

  Carvalhal was not permitted to examine Shen Yixiu directly, since literati women were usually secluded in the inner quarters of their home. If they traveled outside to visit a relative, a female friend, or a Buddhist temple, it would usually be by palanquin. However, Carvalhal had invited Doctor Tan and his daughter Hengqi to join him on this house call. Carvalhal instructed Hengqi on how to collect a sputum smear on a glass slide and waited for her to return with it.

  “From the description of the disease reported to me by Miss Leyster, I suspect the disease that we call ‘tuberculosis.’ Ideally, I would take a chest X-ray, or at least carry out a tuberculin test, but those aren’t options here and now. But what I can do is examine the nature of the bacteria that she is coughing up.”

  “Bacteria?”

  “You are familiar with parasites that live on or inside the human body. Ticks, fleas, certain worms?”

  Ye Shaoyuan and the Tans nodded.

  “As you know, they vary in size. Well, the bacteria are too small to see with the unaided eye. But I have brought a microscope.”

  “A microscope?”

  “You have heard of the telescopes that the Jesuits have brought to China? A device for making things far away seem closer?”

  “A few years ago, I was a secretary in the Ministry of Works in Beijing,” said Ye Shaoyuan. “It was during the time that the Jurchen threatened Beijing. I supervised the deepening of the city moat, and I also administered the military supply depot. I heard a rumor that the Jesuits who worked with the Astronomical Bureau had some device of that sort, which might have seen the Jurchen cavalry coming from far away. But I have never seen one.”

  “With a different arrangement of lenses, we have a device for making things very small seem larger—the microscope. The one I brought with me is a simple microscope, with just one lens, however.”

  He opened a vial, put in an eyedropper, and deposited a drop on the smear. This was a mixture of phenol, which had been extracted from coal tar, and rosaniline, a magenta coal tar dye made by the Stone dyeworks.

  “First, we must make the bacteria easier to see. Next, we need to distinguish the tuberculosis bacteria from other kinds. We add this decolorizer, which works on most other bacteria, but not the tubercle type.” The decolorizer was a mixture of hydrochloric acid and alcohol.

  “And finally, just to improve the contrast, we add a counterstain. This will stain the other bacteria blue while the tubercle bacteria will look red.” The counterstain was methylene blue, another coal tar dye.

  Even in their vials, the colors of the rosaniline and the methylene blue were obvious. “Which plants do you extract these colors from?” asked Ye Shaoyuan. “Can they be used to dye silk?”

  Carvalhal laughed. “I noticed the big loom in the courtyard your servants took me through.” It was not unusual, Carvalhal had also been told, for Chinese gentry woman to weave silk, either for the household or even for sale. “No, the blue and the red aren’t from plants at all. They are what we call coal tar dyes and we buy them from Tom Stone’s company, Lothlorien Farbenwerk in Grantville. Yes, rosaniline and methylene blue can be used to dye silk, but honestly, we’d rather reserve them for medical purposes. The Rode Draak brought other coal tar dyes for sale as silk dyes.

  “Now, let’s see what we have.” He brought the slide with the sputum smear under the objective lens of the microscope. He muttered to himself, “Start low, then eye to scope and edge away to focus.… Fine focus.… Hmm.…

  “It’s definitely some sort of acid-fast bacterium. Given the chronic coughing, that’s as close to a positive diagnosis of tuberculosis as we’re going to get with the tools we have.”

  He allowed each of his companions to look through the microscope at the tiny but deadly organism.


  Hengqi shook her head. “I never thought that I would actually be able to see a demon of disease. It seems so, so quiet, so unthreatening.”

  “Looks can be deceiving, my daughter,” said Doctor Tan.

  Ye Shaoyuan, more pointedly, asked, “Can you treat it?”

  “Yes, but it’s an extraordinarily resistant disease. The only anti-tuberculosis drug we have made so far in Grantville is isoniazid, although I have hope that a few more will be available next year. She’ll have to take it three times a week for six months, maybe longer. I pray that she hasn’t contracted an isoniazid-resistant strain. It’s not likely, because isoniazid has never been used before in China, but it’s possible.

  “I don’t want to sound callous, but if, God forbid, she dies before she takes it all, I’ll want to have back what’s left. I only have enough to treat eight to ten people, depending on body weight. The isoniazid can have some nasty effects, so there are certain foods she should eat more of while she is under treatment. We’ll have to figure out which of them are available locally.

  “Also, it’s a contagious disease. The bacteria escape not just when she coughs, but even when she talks and breathes. Fortunately, it’s hard for someone exposed to it to actually get sick. And you are not sick even though you’ve lived with her all this time. Still, I’d suggest she wear a mask over her mouth, until she’s been on the medication for two weeks. And you and anyone in your household who comes into regular contact with her should do the same.”

  Doctor Carvalhal reached into his satchel. “Here are a couple of masks. I am sure you can find someone in the city to make more for you; the thread count should be as high as possible so you can trap the tiniest infectious droplets. Change them daily and burn the used ones.”

  He eyed Ye Shaoyuan’s mustache and beard with disapproval. “Your facial hair will degrade the fit, so the mask won’t give you as much protection. You may wish to shave them off, at least in the area covered by the mask.”

  Ye Shaoyuan winced.