1636- the China Venture Read online

  “It’s better than coughing your life away,” the doctor added.

  USE mission residence

  Hangzhou

  “Eric, what the hell were you thinking?” demanded Mike Song.

  Eric Garlow, looking flustered, turned to face him. “What are you talking about?”

  “I am talking about Liu Rushi, idiot! Why did you tell her that she was predestined to marry Qian Qianyi? Were you trying to break us up?”

  Eric held up his hands. “Hey, I didn’t even know you were together! And I didn’t say that she would marry him. I just said that she was famous because of that, in the old time line. Courtesan-scholar marriages were the staple of late Ming vernacular fiction, but hers was one of the few that happened in real life, so my prof talked about it.

  “And I sure didn’t say anything about predestination. Yes, in that same fiction, the author might reveal that the courtesan and the scholar were reincarnations of people who were supposed to marry in a past life, but didn’t. It was an excuse for an otherwise inappropriate mar—”

  Mike banged the table. “I don’t need a lecture on Chinese literature! I need you to undo the damage you’ve done.”

  “I already told her that the future is changeable.… What more did you have in mind?”

  “You’re the ambassador. Think of something!”

  Seventh Month, Day 16 (August 28, 1635)

  Liu Rushi’s straw sandals clickety-clacked on the wooden steps.

  “How much further?” asked Mike.

  “Just one more story,” said Liu Rushi. They were in the Six Harmonies Pagoda, which overlooked the Qiantang River. “You’re a balloonist; you should be an expert at ascension,” she added slyly.

  The Six Harmonies Pagoda, on Yuelin Hill south of West Lake, looked like it was thirteen stories tall, but that was the result of exterior architectural skullduggery; there were really only seven stories. It was built of red brick, but with wooden eaves, painted white on top and black underneath.

  Mike Song and Liu Rushi finally reached the top story, close to two hundred feet up. It was shaded from the early August sun by an octagonal roof, but there were many square windows.

  They walked all the way around, stopping frequently, with Liu Rushi pointing out various sights to Mike. “I know you have seen all this and more from your balloon, but I think it special to see it from a building that has stood for almost five hundred years.”

  They sat down before a window facing southeast, toward the Qiantang River. Liu Rushi removed from her sleeve a small scroll with the tide tables. “High tide is in Hour of the Horse.” That was between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. by European reckoning.

  The Tide-Watching Festival was not until the fifteenth day of the eighth month—September 25, 1635—but Mike was hopeful that they would get an unusually high tide today. It was middle of the seventh lunar month and the Moon was full, signifying that it and the Sun were in line with the Earth. That produced a “spring” tide. However, according to Jim Saluzzo, this particular full moon was within a day of perigee, when the Moon was closest to Earth.

  Water rushed into fifty-five-mile-wide Hangzhou Bay, and the lay of the coast funneled it into the Qiantang River, only two miles wide. There, the tide rose as the “Silver Dragon,” a great tidal bore. The Chinese astronomers knew that it was associated with the tide, and thus with the Moon and Sun; they had constructed tide tables for almost six hundred years. But the storytellers in Hangzhou said that the tidal bore was caused by the vengeful spirit of the minister Wu Tzu-hsü, unjustly forced to commit suicide and then thrown into the river rather than be properly buried. The Six Harmonies Pagoda, in turn, had been built to propitiate the spirit of Wu Tzu-hsü.

  From their high vantage point, the bore was a great mass of foam that swept upriver from the bay. Even from the pagoda, they could hear the water, rumbling with the anger of Wu Tzu-hsü as it approached. When it came abreast of their location, they could feel it as well as see and hear it, a vibration that shook the walls of the Six Harmonies Pagoda and, Mike fancied, even rattled their teeth.

  Comparing the bore with the tiny figures of people on the bank of the Zhe, watching the spectacle, Mike guessed that it was at least twenty feet high.

  The bore continued upriver, and the other spectators on this floor of the pagoda departed, leaving Mike Song and Liu Rushi alone.

  After a time, Liu Rushi said, “Eric Garlow spoke to me again. About Qian Qianyi.”

  “Did he now,” said Mike cautiously.

  “Qian Qianyi is a great scholar, you know. He passed the imperial examination at age twenty-eight! With high honors! He rose to vice-minister of rites and chief supervisor of instruction. He even was considered for appointment as chief grand secretary, but that didn’t work out well for him.”

  Although Qian Qianyi was a sensitive subject, Mike’s curiosity was aroused. “What do you mean?”

  “He was the candidate of the Donglin faction, in direct opposition to Wen Tiren. Wen Tiren accused him, falsely you understand, of taking a bribe in the examination case of 1621, and of having formed a clique to promote himself. When other officials defended him against the bribery charge, their words were taken as proof that the clique existed, and the emperor first had him imprisoned, and then reduced to the status of a commoner. Since then he has confined himself to literary pursuits, for which he is held in high esteem here in Jiangnan.

  “I can well understand why my other self was attracted to Qian Qianyi. But he is fifty-three years old now, and he has a wife, so I can only be his concubine in reality. And worse, Eric Garlow has also told me that according to his studies, in the future-that-was-to-be, Qian Qianyi surrendered Nanjing in 1645 to the invaders. If he is capable of such an act of betrayal, how can I consider a liaison with him? Even if after 1645, he engaged in underground activities in opposition to them?”

  Liu Rushi smiled. “Especially when he has not crossed an ocean in the pursuit of knowledge, knows nothing of the caging of lightning, and has never, ever flown in a balloon.”

  Mike wasn’t very experienced with women, but even he knew he had better kiss her. And so he did.

  Chapter 37

  Year of the Pig, Eighth Month (September 11–October 10, 1635)

  Hangzhou

  The Americans’ latest visitor, Xu Xiake, reminded Eric of the sweet gum trees that were native to Charleston, West Virginia, the town in which he grew up. Xiake was tall, a good six feet in height, but thin; plainly, he ate to live rather than lived to eat. His complexion was darker than the Chinese norm, but Eric had no idea whether he was naturally so, or tanned by many hours out in the sun. He smiled frequently, so his snowy-white teeth seemed to glow. The admiral had said that Xiake was almost fifty years old, but he walked as if he had the vigor of a much younger man.

  His name itself said something about the man; it was a pieh-hao, a poetic name that he had chosen for himself, rather than his legal name. Literally, it meant that he was someone who visited the rosy clouds of sunrise and sunset. The implication, as best Eric could surmise, was to say that he was a man whose interest was in nature and not in society.

  In the mission’s conference room, Eric Garlow cleared the table and spread out the world map. He pointed out the locations of West Virginia, Thuringia, and China.

  “I thought I was a great traveler,” said Xu Xiake. “But you have traveled farther than I could have dreamed.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Do you have a map of the Middle Kingdom?”

  Eric did indeed. Before the expedition departed, the trading company had commissioned the artist Felix Gruenfeld to create a bilingual map of China, using a physical map as the base. It had reference numbers identifying the various towns and a legend giving both English and Chinese names. There were also latitude and longitude lines. They had made a print run of a few hundred copies from the copperplate master. It was not only a reference for the expedition members, but also a lightweight gift item.

  X
u Xiake leaned over the map, muttering to himself. As he did so, Jacob and Eva Huber, the mission’s geological survey team, walked into the room.

  “Ah, this is very interesting,” said Xu Xiake. “I grew up in Jiangyin, in the province of Jiangsu. From a very early age I wanted to travel, but I worried about leaving my mother behind. She settled the matter by making me a travel cap. I first went north to Shandong and Hebei, then south to Zhejiang and Fujian. Then I climbed Sung Shan in Henan, Hua Shan in Shensi, and Tai Mo Shan in Hebei. I went back to Zhejiang and Fujian, and continued further south to Kwangtung. In 1632, I went back with my cousin to Tiantai Shan and Yen-tang Shan in Zhejiang. I had been planning a new trip, through Zhejiang, to Jiangxi, Hunan, Guizhou and Yunnan, when I heard that there were visitors from the Far West here.”

  Eric was following this description on the map. “You have nothing to be apologetic about. We came most of the way by sailing ship, whereas you traveled by horseback.”

  “When I could,” said Xiake. “Other times, I had to walk.”

  “I am told that you kept diaries when you traveled?”

  “Diaries?” Xiake laughed. “I spent over a thousand days on the road, and wrote a diary entry every single day. Sometimes just a few lines; sometimes much more.”

  “And what do you write about?”

  “The weather, the people I meet, the stories they tell me, the animals I spot, the views large and small, the distances I traveled and the times elapsed.”

  “You are already an experienced geographer,” said Jacob Huber. “Perhaps you would like to learn about geology, too? It is the science that attempts to describe the Earth, from its smallest to its largest aspect.”

  “Everything from minerals and rocks to mountains and valleys,” Eva added.

  “You are husband and wife?”

  “No,” said Eva, “brother and sister.”

  “And your parents did not mind your going so far from home?”

  “Our parents.… Our parents are dead. Murdered.”

  “I am so sorry to hear this. By bandits?”

  “Mercenaries, that is, hired soldiers, who are no better than bandits. Heinrich Holk’s men. Their mission was to terrorize the good Protestants of Saxony.”

  “I have not heard of this Heinrich Holk—” Xiake stumbled over the pronunciation—“but am sad to say that we have bandit bands too. Some thousands, even tens of thousands strong. When there is famine in the same place, year after year, farmers get desperate and join with army deserters to make mischief. That is what has happened in the northwest, in Shansi and Shensi. And the trouble has spread into Honan, even Nan-Zhili.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “It is a dangerous time to travel by road.”

  “What about by water?” asked Eric Garlow.

  “That is safer. On the Grand Canal, or the lower Yangtze, at least.”

  “We intend to sail upriver on the Yangtze, but not as far as the Three Gorges. We wish to turn south, up the Gan River, to Dayu.”

  “Dayu? What could possibly be of interest there?”

  “We think that wolframite can be found there. It is an ore of a metal we call tungsten, which is heavier than iron. We can show you a sample.”

  Lingshan Cave

  Near Hangzhou

  Xu Xiake shuttered the bronze lantern he was carrying, and addressed his companions, Jacob and Eva Huber from the USE Geological Survey Service. “Can you see anything?” he asked them.

  They stood inside one of the chambers of the Lingshan Cave, about a dozen miles south of the center of Hangzhou.

  “I am holding my hand in front of my face, and I can’t see it,” Jacob admitted.

  “When it is too dark to see anything, we must rely on all our other senses. What do you hear? What do you smell? What do you feel?”

  “I hear water dripping,” said Eva.

  “And so you should,” said Xiake. “The walls of the cave are wet, and on the fourth level, there is an underground river, and even a waterfall.”

  He opened the door of the lantern, and light illuminated the portion of the cave that lay ahead of them. Eva and Jacob could see stalactites and stalagmites of different sizes.

  “How beautiful!” said Eva. “I have read about these formations, but I have never seen one. How large do they get?”

  “There is one in this cave that is more than twelve times the height of a man. We call it ‘Tianzhu Peak.’”

  “That’s amazing,” said Eva. “In Grantville they teach that limestone caves form because the water slowly dissolves the limestone above the cave, and then the minerals in the limestone precipitate out to make the stalactite or stalagmite.”

  “What is limestone?” asked Xiake. “What are minerals? And what is precipitation?”

  Eva herself had stumbled over the terms “limestone,” “minerals” and “precipitate” because she’d had to mix the English terms into Chinese speech. Xiake, who also had to wrestle with the strange pronunciation, stumbled even worse.

  This was by now a familiar phenomenon to the westerners, though, so Eva adjusted quickly. “Minerals are the basic building blocks of rocks; they are all the same substance. A rock is composed of one or more minerals. This rock”—Eva tapped the cave wall—“is a sedimentary rock, that is, it’s laid down because wind or water wear away little bits, and pieces of other rocks, or the remains of living things, carry them for some distance, and then drop them someplace else. That’s the sediment. They build up and over the course of many thousands or even millions of years get compacted and cemented together to make a sedimentary rock.”

  Xiake frowned. “So this rock was formed from little pieces that were carried down by the Qiantang River?”

  “Or by the sea,” said Jacob. “Tens of thousands of years ago, the coastline might have been further west, and this land under water.”

  “That’s pretty likely, actually,” said Eva. “The minerals in limestone are the same substance as that found in shells and coral, and that’s where limestone comes from.”

  “You can actually find fossils in limestone,” said Jacob. “Remains of living things that are big enough to spot.”

  “Fascinating,” said Xiake. “And what is precipitation?”

  “Imagine that you stirred sugar in a cup of hot water. It dissolves, that is, you can’t see the sugar crystals any more. Let it cool, and the crystals reappear.”

  “Is that what happens to make a stalactite? The water carrying the shell minerals cools down?”

  “I am not sure,…” Eva looked at Jacob.

  He shrugged. “Our teacher didn’t say, and we didn’t think to ask. It’s a good question, though.”

  “Shall we go down to the next level?” asked Xiake.

  “Yes!” the Hubers said in unison.

  They continued on, and Xiake stopped from time to time to show them where graffiti had been left by famous artists and poets.

  As they continued deeper into the cave, there were places where Xiake had to walk in an awkward crouch to avoid banging his head on the ceiling. “It is sometimes a disadvantage being tall,” he commented.

  “We should all wear helmets when caving, to protect our heads,” said Jacob.

  “It’s a good idea,” said Xiake. “Soldiers are always selling off equipment on the cheap.”

  On the third level, there were places they had to crawl, and another where Xiake had to tie the rope he had brought with him around a large stalagmite so they could clamber down a cliff.

  Jacob and Eva exchanged frowns.

  “The light of your lantern doesn’t reach down there,” Jacob protested. “How will we see where we’re going?”

  “And how will we get the lantern down there?” Eva added.

  “No problem,” said Xiake. He reached into his new backpack—a gift from the USE mission, and made in Germany after the Ring of Fire—and pulled out a couple of torches. “These are Huangshan pine; they are rich in resin and will burn well.” He used a twig to transfer flame from the lantern to on
e of the torches. It burned brightly, dripping pitch as it did so.

  “And now we just drop it where we need the light,” he added.

  “But won’t the fall put it out?” asked Jacob.

  Xiake just smiled, held the torch over the cliff edge, and dropped it. It sailed down, leaving a trail of sparks as it did so. It flickered but wasn’t extinguished.

  “I have used these when it was windy or even rainy, and not lost the torch light. Now, it’s time to go down.”

  Jacob went first, then Eva. Xiake lit a second torch and propped it against a stalagmite. Then he packed up the lantern and came down the rope himself.

  “Will your ‘upstairs’ torch still be burning when we come back?” asked Eva.

  “If we are back within an hour or so,” said Xiake. “But if not, I’ll go up first. I can manage the last few yards of the climb in the dark, and then I can start a new torch there.”

  Eva looked dubious.

  “It shouldn’t take even half that long to reach the river,” Xiake assured her. And he proved to be correct.

  “Are there fish in the river?” Eva asked once they were standing on its bank. She was stooped over a little, squinting at the dark surface of the river. With the dim lighting, the water was completely opaque. She might as well have been trying to spot fish swimming in black paint.

  Xiake shook his head. “Not that I’ve seen—or heard splashing, either. But perhaps they have heard that there are many good fishermen in Hangzhou.”

  “My,” said Eva, covering her mouth. “I think that’s the first joke I’ve heard since I came to China. Or the first that I’ve understood, at least.”

  “How long is the river?” asked Jacob.

  “Nine hundred ninety-nine paces,” said Xiake.

  By now, the Hubers had been in China long enough not to take this literally. The number nine was pronounced the same way as the word jiu, which meant “everlasting.”

  “I had hoped that it would lead to a cave heaven, but I didn’t find it,” Xiake added.