The Extinction Club Page 9

  UPRISING

  IN 1899 Ernest “Chinese” Wilson, the Birmingham plant collector, was sent to the collapsing Celestial Empire to obtain a living sample of Père David’s Davidia involucrata, the ghost tree or dove tree, which so far had resisted attempts to be grown in Europe. Wilson was armed with Wardian cases—closed glazed boxes in which living plants could be expected to live during the months of a sea crossing.

  Wilson found the ghost tree in Ichang province, just as the Boxer Rebellion was getting under way. The Boxers had taken up the cause of the poorer Chinese, with their hatred of railways, church steeples, missionaries, and other foreign innovations. There had rarely been a worse time to be a foreigner in China, but Wilson survived by refusing to visit any towns. He stayed out in the fields and forests looking for plants.

  KUNG FU

  APARTISAN IMPRESSION of this period can be gleaned from the classic Kung Fu movie Once Upon a Time in China III. I have to say it is a great movie, starring the incredible Jet Li and featuring an amazing fight sequence using wet towels, but it is not a hugely reliable source for the actual event. In common with most Chinese movies, the foreigners are portrayed as arrogant buffoons, which isn’t helped by the poor stock of non-Chinese actors they have kicking around Hong Kong. In a way the Chinese are still refighting the Boxer Rebellion, just as the Americans refought Vietnam in the movies, providing endless opportunities to redefine defeat.

  FIRE, PAPER, WATER

  THE BOXERS took their name from an intercepted message between two members of a secret society known as the Fists of Righteous Harmony. The assumption was that the “fist” indicated skill at boxing. In fact, only a few members of each secret society practiced Kung Fu, or the “iron cloth shirt” chi gong, which was supposed to provide invulnerability to hard blows. In far more cases, the secret societies of that time were simply populist antiforeigner mobs capitalizing on the mystique of martial arts. Instead of a long apprenticeship, the Boxers would intoxicate themselves by whirling until a state of trance was achieved.

  First came the chanting of the magic words, chanted from a scrap of paper, held under the breath; read from, if reading had been learned, or from memory otherwise. And after the chanting, the scraps of fur-edged yellow paper were eaten with all the saliva attendant on such gatherings of the ecstatic.

  Then corybant Boxers would begin to swirl, red wristbands and head scarves flying, halberds like hedge-pruning hooks, eyes glassy before falling down in a trance.

  The boxing master might then do tricks with his chaff-cutting knife, slashing his own arms and legs but producing no wounds. Needles would be passed through cheeks and tongues. Sometimes sleight of hand and trickery were used. Sometimes a man in a trance simply does not bleed as much as a man in a normal state.

  Invalids were brought out to be healed. The cure for insanity was to make a paper doll, stick a strand of the sick person’s hair to it, and burn the thing. Then crack your whips, for all ghosts fear the crack of a whip.

  The Plum-Scented Warriors, Big-Sword Society Members, Fists of Harmony and Brotherhood, meeting on the village green to learn the ways of the divine.

  But always those scraps of paper, scratched by the local penman into an ideogram of survival. One scrap to be eaten before battle, another to be worn as hard qigong, a talisman against the musket ball and shrapnel of the foreigner.

  If a boxing master wished to summon disciples he would burn a notice, inscribed with calligraphy, and the smoke of the burning letters would bring warriors running.

  Let the judicial officer come to the spirit’s place on the charm;

  The iron clan, the Kitchen God protect my body.

  Amida’s instructions pacify the three sides;

  Iron helmet, iron armor, wearing iron clothes.

  A gold-topped bronze pagoda sealed with a rock;

  sword chops, ax slashes—I knock them away with one kick.

  In a reduced form, the ritual of writing and casting spells into fire remains in the West. Children still write a list for Father Christmas and send it with fervent hope up the chimney on Christmas Eve.

  The Boxer magic was trance, spell, and fire; incantations and vows made after fasting; and avoidance of women and their pollution. There is no warrior caste on earth that does not suspect women of sabotaging its strength. The worst time is at the full moon; to look at a woman then, her face beautiful in the soft silvery light, would be the end of a Boxers strength.

  When Western women asked what they could do to help after the siege of Peking had started, they were told to “stay under the tables and washstands until the shooting stops.” There was more to this than male chauvinism. Even the “enlightened” Westerners suspected that the presence of women was harmful in time of war, or rather, the presence of feminine energy, which was also in men, although necessarily suppressed. Water is feminine energy, yin energy. Fire is yang. War is big yang and fears extinction, dousing, by the yin force of women.

  The Boxers decided the Peitang cathedral was protected by the malign energy of a thousand Catholic nuns—how else could it withstand attack after attack?

  If a boxing master cut himself as part of a trance performance and there was a menstruating woman nearby, he might have great difficulty stopping his own bleeding.

  In one divine hand pieces of paper and fire, in the other water and blood.

  Boxers who wanted to destroy the foreign devils’ “fire baskets,” the wide-gauge steam trains that ran from Tientsin on the coast to Peking, first burned all the tickets. It was the first of many salutary shocks to the Boxers when they discovered that burning the foreigners’ small paper spells was not enough to stop the smoke-breathing metal monsters. Later they simply ripped up the tracks.

  And who were the foreign spellmasters? Morrison, with his dispatches for The Times, Sir Claude MacDonald, with his endless notes requesting more arms, more picquets, more sandbags sewn from silk, and more wooden tablets to cover loopholes. The writing of orders, memos, lists—the modern form of the spell.

  The foreigners misunderstood the fire in the Hanlin Library. They called it cultural suicide. In fact, it was the Boxers sending the biggest spell of all into smoke for the ancestors to read.

  Heaven brought forth ten thousand things in order to support man; Man has not one thing to recompense Heaven. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.

  SIEGE

  Never make a demand of the Chinese which is not

  absolutely just: when you must make a just demand,

  see that you get it. —

  Lord Elgin

  ON 20 June 1900, the Boxers had both the Chinese court and the foreign legations in their grip. The Chinese promised safe passage to the coast for the foreigners; and the Russians, French, Italians, Japanese, Austrians, and Americans were all in favor of leaving Peking. The British remembered the Indian Mutiny and were against any movement from the fortifiable legation buildings until reinforcements arrived. Only the German minister, Baron von Kettler, was determined to discover just what the Chinese had in mind.

  Fulgent in the bright sunlight, the baron’s Usher and Cole waterproof pocket watch, inscribed by his American wife CK inside the silver casing, read two minutes past ten in the morning. In fourteen more minutes he would be dead.

  The baron snapped the case shut, click-click, with one efficient move that ended with the watch in the second pocket of his finely pressed waistcoat. He was sitting down. An impatient slap of the book in his other hand against the side of the palanquin signaled the four carriers to move off. The baron’s sedan chair arose in small but perfect stately splendor, lifted by his hand-picked coolies, hooded in scarlet and green to notify all of their ministerial status. Next, in strict accordance with protocol, his dragoman, Herr Cordes, was lifted, but jerkily, more like a camel arising. Cordes’ usual carriers had mysteriously not been available, and four kitchen boys had taken their place. It would be a rough ride.

  The baron revived the lit green cigar between his tee
th with several precise puffs, took it out of his mouth to turn a page, and predicted to himself that they would be lucky to be back in time for dinner. This was no cause for regret. The urgency of the mission, which stirred what he felt to be his unstoppable iron will, was like a full stomach, better in fact, His eyes gleamed above wide whiskers and a faint dueling scar.

  Herr Cordes was less sanguine. True, earlier missions about the fire-scarred streets of the city had met with glares and no action. But he felt in the dry deserted roads some sort of portent. The murder of the Japanese chancellor Sugiyama only days before was still on his mind. There had been reports of children playing with the dead body before Japanese Marines had carried it away.

  Von Kettler’s courage was a mixture of ire and physical fearlessness and it had served him well in the past. He also believed he was fair. Take the disgraceful reprimand he’d received from the other foreign ministers over beating that impudent Boxer boy. The boy had received his due punishment: 300 strikes with a thin bamboo. Von Kettler had studied such beatings carefully. A full Chinese-style punishment meant accurate and repetitive strikes to the crease just below the bared buttocks, hitting the same spot again and again. After 230 such blows the skin would be broken. By 300, the beating was down to the bone. Salt would be applied to the wound to slow the healing. If the beating was repeated each month, as many were, the man would be crippled for life. Von Kettler was no sadist: the strikes to the boy’s behind were widely spaced, not concentrated, the skin marked but not broken. And the civilian-minded ministers feared reprisals so much they would not even visit the foreign ministry! Only he had the guts to do that.

  He thought about his wife, and it unsettled him, which of course just angered him further. What had she said? Just “Don’t go,” with that stranded look in her eyes. He’d taken the gun to stop her from worrying, the tiny and quite useless Forehand and Wadsworth .32 “Terror” in its neat leather case. Von Kettler was well aware that its nickname was the “suicide special,” but he did not tell his wife that. Her desperate manner was distinctly odd— she did not even seem to care that he had armed himself. Normally she would have been soft, oversolicitous, feminine, encouraging. Like Cordes.

  Protocol dictated that he refuse an armed guard. Seven sailors equipped with the latest Mauser Gewehr 98s—a 7.92 mm bolt-action firearm, considered by many to be the finest rifle in the world—were told to return to the German legation barrack room. Only the unarmed mafoos, ceremonial outriders, would accompany them. Prince Ching had guaranteed his safe conduct. To take an armed guard would be to slight the prince and negate the fine diplomatic point at stake. Von Kettler relished this world, the furthest reaches of diplomacy in the moments before it toppled into war. The rules were so very different, yet the requirement of nerve was the equal of war, and the need for judgment greater.

  He had little doubt that the legations would be massacred by the mob if they attempted to leave for Tientsin. Chinese assurances about the protection of missionaries and converts counted for very little. But as a minister he was less vulnerable than a missionary. He could use his prominence to prolong the uncertain period between war and diplomacy, long enough, he hoped, to leave warfare to any advancing column from the treaty ports.

  So there would be no bodyguard. The pistol was different. A minister was entitled to carry whatever he liked as long as it was hidden, though von Kettler had more faith in his fierce reputation than in a tiny American-made revolver.

  Rounding a corner, he could see people gathering at one end of the boulevard, and along its length milled more people around food carts with ducks stretched brown in a line. Two children flew a hexagonal kite made of red paper. A woman feeding a baby looked at him with indifference. It was vaguely cheering to see the barbers trimming queues, Manchurian pigtails, along the Southern Wall.

  He took an interest now in the crowd. It seemed to ebb and flow toward him like undecided weather, red banners and black writing. A crowd without personality.

  He thought fondly about how his wife had annoyed him by making a reference to Nietzsche. What was his wife doing reading such deceitful immorality? How like a woman to fall for such tortuous arrogance!

  The simple act of getting things done was what counted. The crowd got nearer and louder, until at its forefront he took notice less of the sight than of the sure knowledge that this man meant to harm him. What nonsense! But before that, for a hair’s breadth, the dead certainty of the ending. Then the fear wiped away—this young soldier was no Boxer—he wore a mandarin’s hat with a feather and an imperial button. There was nothing here to concern the German. Von Kettler pointedly ignored this young soldier holding a rifle, coming toward him out of the crowd.

  The outriders started to circle, their ponies skittish. Cordes was irritatingly behind him. Cigar was out. “Cordes!” shouted von Kettler, losing his calm. The young Chinese soldier, with half his face in the sun, unshouldered his rifle, a German rifle, a tube magazine II mm Mauser, old but serviceable. As long as he had his rear sight calibrated to the maximum, he might miss. Chinese soldiers often set their gun sights to one thousand meters on the mistaken assumption that the bigger number equaled more power. At close range their bullets went too high. But this young man knew what he was doing, he had the imperturbability of a gamefowler, he knew his rifle. “Down!” von Kettler shouted, but the bearers began inexplicably to wheel, bringing into view a new flank of chanting crowds, much closer. “Sha! Sha! Sha! Death! Death! Death!” they chanted. He stood up to get out as the chair descended, wobbly, higher than he should be, catching the lip with his spotless English boot. First there was the noise of the crowd shouting, then there was a scrambling silence. He saw Cordes running in the opposite direction, deserting him. A pony reared up, blocking out the sun for a moment. Then Cordes fell, probably shot.

  The last minutes: struggling up to get to the impudent man. Then reaching for the pistol case. Noticing that his killer was a mere boy. A sudden decision to rush the lad. Knowing with full certainty the bullet will hit.

  The attentions paid to von Kettler allowed Herr Cordes, wounded in both thighs, enough time to escape and make his way back to the foreign legation.

  Von Kettler s body would be returned to the German legation at the end of the siege in a dull black wooden coffin, high at one end like a Chinese junk. Inside he had been arranged so as to be still holding his book. There was no sign of his watch and its gold chain, and this upset his wife terribly.

  As soon as the foreigners knew that an imperial bannerman, presumably under orders from Chinese authority rather than a secret society, had murdered von Kettler, they closed the gate to the legation. The siege had begun.

  HANLIN II

  IN THE British legation, the bell cast for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee had already been the cause of several nasty ricochets from snipers’ bullets. The bell rang only in times of emergency, and it was ringing now. It was the third day of the siege, and the Chinese were trying to burn the foreign devils out.

  Thunderheads of smoke poured from the legation roof, which was not yet on fire, but behind it the Hanlin Academy, which housed the oldest and richest library in the world, was already burning like dry grass.

  The wind was not propitious. It was a typical dry summer breeze from the north, driving the flames like a bellows into the British legation.

  In summer, the wind never changed direction during the day. They could expect the worst.

  Now the smoke was hotter, salt-and-pepper swathes that sucked the air out of the compound. Tung Fu-Hsiang’s Muslims fired from the upper windows of the burning academy at the snaking human chain of children, ministers’ wives, Chinese converts, and missionaries slopping water from hand to hand using everything from cloisonné vases to chamber pots. Soon the roar of burning wood and paper drowned out the recondite sounds of musketry. Boxers were running from courtyard to courtyard inside the academy, systematically setting fire to the entire complex of buildings. A hole had been punched by British M
arines through the wall of the British legation, across the arm’s width of alley and into the nearest Hanlin cloister. This was the water head, where a doomed attempt was made to put out the fire. All along the smoking northern walls of the legation, water scooped from the odiferous Jade Canal was splashed to stop the fire spreading further.

  The proximate air was so hot that the hundred-year-old trees standing in the legation courtyard burst spontaneously into flames, like huge match heads.

  Inside the library, the largest repository of unprinted manuscripts in the world, the celebrated Yung Lo Ta Tien encyclopedia was burning. This work, which ran to an incredible eleven thousand volumes, contained “the substance of all the classical, historical, philosophical and literary works hitherto published, embracing astronomy, geography, geomancy, the occult, medicine, Buddhism, Taoism and the arts.” The ignorant young men from the countryside who started the fire perhaps had no idea what they were doing. Nevertheless, it was said to be the greatest act of cultural felo-de-se in the history of mankind.

  The fire was gaining ground. The wooden walls were now cracking in the intense heat of a hundred thousand stacked and burning manuscripts. If the British legation fell, the whole siege would be over, and no man, woman, or child could expect quarter from the short swords and spears of the blood-seeking “Fists of Righteous Harmony.”

  There was one last hope. The wind. Children with smoke-blackened faces stared at the sky. Men working hard, shirts straining against their shoulders, would check every few minutes with a hastily licked thumb held out to one side. Like a gathering silence it descended on everyone to wish for the wind to change. High in the now burning towers of the academy, the long red banners of the Boxers began to lose shape, drop into the flames, catch fire, then lift again, but this time extending out to the east.