The Extinction Club Page 10

  The prayers of the besieged had been answered. Even the old hands like Sir Robert Hart said how remarkably rare it was for the wind to change like that in June. Slowly the fire blew back on itself and, lacking fuel, began to go out. In the evening a few determined sinologues, including Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, rescued those few scrolls and smoldering volumes that still remained in the destroyed center of two thousand years of Chinese culture.

  AMERICAN WIVES

  THE BARON’S wife, Maud von Kettler, believed until the end of the siege, when her husband’s body was returned in its coffin, that he was imprisoned and not dead. Perhaps this optimism kept her going throughout the fifty-five-day siege of the foreign legations by Chinese troops. The foreign men built barricades and fought off attack after attack. The women sewed sandbags and worked in the hospital.

  The Russians were the worst for biting through thermometers. Turn your back on a wounded man and if he was sick and a Russian he would try to touch a nurses behind. If he was very sick and a Russian he would simply cackle and chew the thermometer in two, mercury flying into the startled man’s beard like metal beads from a broken necklace.

  A new procedure was needed at the women’s hospital now that they were down to the last two thermometers. Part of the problem was the homemade gun, which fired shells filed down at the rim to fit the breech. Filing was not a job to be envied. When the gun fired it shocked everyone; it was a uniquely unpleasant noise, a roaring and grinding of old iron that connected to the nerves in your back teeth. Not like the maxim gun, which made the acceptable noise of hard wood rapping on hard wood.

  To watch someone carefully as the thermometer did its job took time. The two instruments left were of thick glass and took five minutes to show a true temperature. A nurse was needed just to watch, and there was a shortage of nurses.

  They were down to one clinical thermometer when Baroness von Kettler donated her own. It was a handsome model that registered in less than a minute, which was a great improvement. When not in use it rested inside a mahogany box. She had last used this fine thermometer to take her husband’s temperature during a slight fever the previous autumn. In the end, it was the only such instrument to survive the siege.

  As important as running the hospital was the manufacture of sandbags. During the fifty-five-day siege it has been estimated that 40,000 were made and used as fortifications around the legations. That’s roughly 730 bags a day.

  There were three hand-operated sewing machines in the chapel and two in the house of Mrs. Conger, wife to the American minister. The six women of the Conger household produced 1,500 bags in three days.

  Stout materials were used at first, and those of a naturally camouflaged hue: gray canvas, burlap, buckram, and sailcloth; army blankets and cotton sheets made dirty with charcoal. But this was soon forgotten as more and more exotic fabrics became all that were available. Elegant silks and satins; figured goods; legation curtains and damask; rolls of fine black cashmere appropriated from an empty dry goods shop in Legation Street; bolts of muslin, lustrine, crinoline, and surah; linens, woolens, chiffons doubled and trebled, baldachin, dimity, and calico; velvet cut from chair covers, brocades, and bed linen; portieres donated by Mrs. Conger, velvets and satins from Maud von Kettler’s wedding trousseau; grass cloth, moreen, cotton twill and fustian, corduroy and velveteen; felt, worsted, skirt lining, and the most exquisite silk underwear the Americans had ever seen.

  Mrs. Conger even cut up the rolls of silk the Empress Dowager had presented to her the year before. Not to be outdone, Ethel MacDonald, wife of the British minister, gave up her silk from the king of Thailand.

  And the colors! The patterns! Scarlet, vermilion, delicate green, kingfisher blue, lemon yellow, mustard, mauve, orange, purple, pink, and puce; check, tartan, print, paisley, and polka dot.

  The Chinese troops watched as this earth-filled patchwork quilt grew to cover every gap in the walls, windows, and doors of the legation quarter. Flags of a thousand new nations sewn into bags of sand!

  TRUCE

  QUITE UNEXPECTEDLY, halfway through the siege, a truce was called by the besieging Chinese. Gunfire and shouting were replaced by silence. The Russians even stopped their repetitive chanting of “Kill the tortoise eggs,” a deadly insult in China by reason of the supposed homosexual tendencies of the tortoise.

  During the truce, the Empress Dowager sent creaking carts filled with watermelons for the relief of the ladies, but refused to send ice on account of the Boxers’ terrible addiction to the stuff—sending ice would just inflame the “Righteous Fists” to yet more robbery and murder. A brief market was set up and a roaring trade in duck, goose, hen, and thrush eggs was done. Some refused this bounty from their oppressors, some believed it was poisoned. Others only risked melon rind, and even then only after it had been pickled into a chutney.

  One night during the truce, those on duty were treated to a rare sight. At first it sounded like distant musket fire, but in fact it was fireworks. A hundred men in costume formed a carnival dragon. Excited boys threw firecrackers and Roman candles, which bathed the many-footed dragon in a golden rain of crackling light.

  Then from the courtyard of a temple came thirty men dressed in spotless white, dragging the City God on his car, a bulbous-eyed lion painted scalet and breathing fire. The men pulling the car intoned thanks or berated themselves for past misdeeds. One man had a huge abacus draped around his neck—a sign of false accounting; another wore brushes tied like stocks around his—this man had written falsehoods. Others tortured themselves with the more usual cangue, a device that from a distance bore a resemblance to a wooden lavatory seat around the throat, but it was heavy and no joke to carry for the eight or so hours of the march. One young lad following the procession was naked except for his black shorts. He had two oil lamps pinned to his breast flesh with S-shaped hooks and another one dangling from the thin skin of his forehead. Some had model bridges with figures fastened by points into the muscles of their upper arms; many had cut themselves with swords and were in a trance, like Boxers. But these were ordinary folk and not Boxers.

  TIMING

  INTERTESSELLATION OF the stars! Corruption of the Heavens! And now the turning-up of that watch.

  Nakayama, half Chinese, half Japanese, who spent the entire siege roaming Peking avoiding detection by the Boxers and spying for his Japanese masters, was the man who located von Kettler’s timepiece.

  He found it in Hong’s shop on Crooked Water Lane, in the area known for pawn shops, all with the large carved wooden dragon in green and gold over the doorway. Hong’s differed in its extent, a labyrinth of narrow alleys winding through the mountain of antiques, glass display cases, cabinets with locked drawers, and long narrow display tables. Hong’s shop was bigger than any other and he would pawn anything. Porcelain ewers, conches and censers, tripod vessels, dragon jars, and water droppers; a hypodermic syringe made out of two brass thimbles and a bit of glass tube; tall-necked stoneware vases, gilt bowls with peony scrolls, parcel-gilt silver cups, silver padlocks from the T’ang, silver coins and silver bottles made in Sian; a perfect ivory shovel, no bigger than a fountain pen, decorated in turquoise and coral, for the sole purpose of removing bird droppings from a cage; bronze mirrors, gold pedestal bowls, pottery camels the height of a small child, white porcelain spittoons, tomb guardians in stoneware, Siberian jade rings in the shape of pi, gold and silver needles for acupuncture and cautery, a fragment of five-colored silk damask; a pair of gold-filigreed glass snuff jars, still wrapped in blue silk and nestling in matching pear-wood boxes of beautiful simplicity; bone spatulas, red pottery amphoras and bowls, half rings made of white jade, tall tou beakers, Shang ritual goblets and bronze vessels ornamented with dragons; a silk-stringed ku-ck’in zither in black lacquer; an enameled silver fingernail guard five inches long; a jade ear scoop and various bronze tweezers, tattered mandarin plumes in peacock and blue argus feathers; stringless harps, brass bells green with age, faded silk portraits of a famous an
cestor, geomantic compasses, optics ground from quartz and glass, an astrolabe made from whalebone, bronze incense holders, bronze lions, and a camphor-wood commode with inlaid mother-of-pearl. Then there were the rooms of furniture: dressers, ironwood chests, and low lacquer tables, pyramid clocks set to a twelve-hour day, and overstuffed chairs carved in imitation of the French. One room was dedicated solely to the pawned footwear of prostitutes—tiny clogs and sandals made for bound feet. Another room was for weapons: swords, spears, lances, matchlock rifles, hexagonal-barreled pistols, and a small iron mortar from the twelfth century. Von Kettler’s pistol had been there, a beautiful miniature in a leather case, but it was bought a day after his death by the emissary of some Manchu trader. The watch, however, remained. Inscribed CK, made by a British firm, Usher and Cole, priced at ten taels—bargain.

  It was a miracle that Nakayama spotted the watch, but he did. As he always later said, “When things are needed they fly to hand.”

  Straightaway Nakayama noticed the time on the dial. Sixteen minutes past ten. He was a spy, he knew the significance of that. It was Kettler’s death hour. Either the watch had been hit, perhaps by the very bullet that had killed the German, or the watch had stopped by coincidence.

  Intertessellation of the stars! Corruption of the Heavens! That watch was either a sinecure for life or a death sentence.

  There is no such thing as coincidence in the life of a spy. A coincidence is nothing more than a pattern misunderstood, an explanation, a clue that one is too stupid to see. Men who believe in coincidences sleep well at night and are murdered by the morning. CK, read the watch. There was no coincidence. If Nakayama handed the watch over to the German ministry, then he would be rewarded. If a foreigner found the watch after the siege, then Hong would have some explaining to do. He might even be severely punished.

  “That watch,” mused Nakayama. “Ah yes, that watch,” said Hong, polishing his jewelry viewer with a soft cloth. “Before the foreign devils come you must sell that watch to me for, shall we say, twenty taels,” said Nakayama, looking at Hong without blinking. Hong was a good agent, he knew how to cooperate. Besides, he had heard there were foreign soldiers marching from the sea to relieve the legations. Everyone knew the Boxers had lost. He flipped open a cloth-covered box, which contained his ledger. “The man’s name is Fu, but it is really En Hai,” he said, looking up.

  Several weeks after the siege ended, Lance Corporal En Hai of the Peking Field Force spoke before his decapitation: “I obeyed the orders of my superiors, otherwise why should a small person like myself venture to take the life of so exalted a personage as the German minister? My officers offered a reward of seventy taels and a promotion, but I only received forty taels, and waiting around in Peking for the promotion has cost me my life! I curse the bones of those princes who trapped me thus!”

  An expiatory memorial was raised by the Chinese on the spot where von Kettler had been murdered. Strangely, the German inscription was removed after a few years and the white marble arch suffered a complete change in reputation. It became known among the Chinese rickshaw drivers and shopkeepers as the monument to the Boxer who had given his life to kill the foreign devil invader.

  EXTINCTÓK, EXTINCTEE

  THE CARVE-UP of China led to the death of the Celestial Empire and the extinction of a way of life that had survived for several thousand years.

  But the dispersal of Pere David s deer throughout Europe had the very opposite effect. It stopped an extinction. The very greediness and competitiveness of the many nations involved meant a bigger gene pool of European Milu. In fact, it could be said that the nations were not greedy enough. Imagine if they had spirited away several hundred Pere Davids for their private enjoyment in Europe’s capitals. Then the survival of Milu would almost have been guaranteed without Russell’s involvement.

  What can be said is that Russell was the only one in the chain of Milu‧s saviors who knowingly acted to save the deer from extinction.

  With the benefit of hindsight, we can also applaud the first unknown emperor, Père David, and the various European diplomats in Peking in the nineteenth century. But at the time they didn’t know what they were doing. They acted without knowledge—we can guess that from their later actions. Père David did not set up a deer park in France, and neither did the greedy diplomats, even though it must have been obvious that the deer were at risk from living in only one location—any reader of Darwin would appreciate that.

  The idea of extinction had yet to sink in. It was events like the end of the Celestial Empire, and more crucially its age-old way of life, diced up by nations armed with guns and railway trains, which made extinction suddenly an observable event.

  DEEP TIME

  GEOLOGISTS AND paleontologists have a term for the eons of time needed to explain evolution. They call it deep time. The key thing about deep time is that it is unimaginable, not on a human scale. Compared to human time, deep time is infinite. It becomes a play area for scientists who no longer have to be embarrassed about the yawning million-year gaps in the fossil record. The gaps now become a strength. Instead of an implausible story about, say, fish evolving into humans, scientists can concentrate on establishing relationships between the few fossils they can actually lay their hands on. Without the need to stick to a centrally agreed-upon story, anything becomes possible. In the inconceivably lengthy deep time, whole species could have arisen and disappeared without any record: unicorns, for example.

  Deep time seems to correspond to the infinite time of the Zoroastrians, the time before humans began living in human time. According to Zoroastrianism, this was twelve thousand years ago.

  The story of evolution, which has, in most places where people study science, replaced the Book of Genesis, tells of how a simple creature became a more complex creature, how an uncouth non-tool-user became a Victorian engineer.

  Of course, this isn’t the “real story” of Darwin’s Descent of Man. The real story is incredibly complex and probably only understood by those who have devoted a lot of time to reading Darwin.

  But we don’t live our lives by real stories, at least not if they are complicated and tedious. We live our lives by cartoons, sound bites, simple stories for a brain that will always choose dramatic impact over truth. Every time. Almost every time.

  The simple story says that might is right. That “progress” is inevitable. And the subtext is: if you’re a freak, or a gypsy, or homosexual, or decadent, or disagree with me, or are just different in some way, then you deserve to die. In fact, we’re doing nature a service if we help along your extinction, because nature means evolution, and evolution means progress.

  But the scientists who espouse deep time, and its allied methodologies, make no such connection between evolution and progress. All they acknowledge is that organisms evolve. To make up a story explaining the path of that evolution is no longer considered credible science. There is simply not enough evidence to support fabulation. In the past, such fabulation depended for its credibility on the status of the fabulator, a literary judgment rather than a scientific one.

  It’s actually surprising that we’ve been taken in by these fables of prehistory for so long. They’re so incredibly thin, like postulating the existence of Troy when you find a single brick.

  Imagine if, in the far distant future, all evidence, both written and visual, were destroyed, except two photographs, one of Père David and the other of Herbrand Russell. If these were the only two photographs, people would feel duty bound to make up a story connecting them. And without knowledge of Milu, every story would be false.

  If the huge swathes of time cannot support a story—and by a story I mean something exciting, like the dinosaurs dying out because an asteroid fell to earth—then all we can do is look and describe what is in front of our eyes. Measure bones. Compare one fossil with another.

  You see how unbearable that is. How killjoyish. You can see why proponents of deep time are regarded with suspicion. In the name of truth
, they are attacking our fundamental human need for stories.

  DIARIES

  Diaries are so often a medium for what was not said or what cannot be said. —

  Paul Verline

  IN LIU-LI-CHANG, the street of booksellers, forgeries were easy to come by. Written in an indecipherable “grass hand,” they relied on broken seals and stamps of high officials for their authenticity. It was here that Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse bought the diary of Ching Shan for one hundred taels, less than fifteen pounds. Written on the instruction of Jung-lu, in order to exonerate him in Western eyes and benefit his family after his death, the diary is perhaps the most influential forgery in history, rivaling the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

  The Ching Shan diary is still the basis for most interpretations of what was going on inside the Forbidden City during the siege of the legations. The dowager empress is confirmed as a not unsympathetic character. She, and the system she represents, is shown as being able to control, to some extent, the destructive urges of the Boxers. In other words, the diary confirms that the decadent order of the day was not seriously challenged by the idealistic Spirit Boxers. This view was forcefully represented by Morrison, and became the standard British Foreign Office line. It was later to result in the consistent underestimation of that other idealist group, the Chinese Communist Party.

  A completely different history might have awaited the Celestial Empire if the Communists had been recognized as a serious force and dealt with before achieving the kind of grassroots support that the Ching Shan diary emphasized was unimportant in China.

  (In 1951, the Chinese Communist collection of documents concerning the Boxer Rebellion, the I Ho T’uan Tzu Liao Ts’ung K’an, quoted the Ching Shan diary as genuine, except that now it served the purpose of showing the decadence of the old order.)