Night of the Golden Butterfly

SEVEN

MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER QIN-SHI, whom we knew as Elder Granny, was a niece of Dù Wénxiù. The name will not mean anything to you or to most people, but it’s inscribed in the annals of the Han as a byword for rebellion, Islam and ‘petty-bourgeois nationalist deviations’. Elder Granny would talk about the rebellions in Yunnan as if they had happened in the previous week. Hui, or sometimes Hui Hui, was the Chinese name for Muslims or people of Muslim origin, but I suppose you know that by now. Or was China only Mao and Lin Biao for you as well? Nothing else mattered. I can’t help these asides because I can still get very angry with you sometimes.

Every evening just before we went to bed, Father would send us to Elder Granny’s tiny little room near the kitchen. She must have been in her nineties at the time, and we all knew she would die soon. My father worshipped her. She was his last link with Yunnan except for Old Liu, a cobbler from Dali who really was an antique — one hundred years old in 1954. He had taught Grandfather and Father the art of measuring feet and cutting leather to make shoes. Father would tell us that Old Liu always made a shoe from just one piece of leather. That was the test. If you used more than a single piece you would never be a master shoemaker. Sandals were different, of course, but Liu never took them seriously.

Elder Granny had no teeth at all and could eat only soup and barley rice. Her toothlessness made us laugh, because we were children and even though veneration of our elders had been instilled into us at every opportunity, a Punjabi cynicism had crept into our lives as well, infecting us with the Lahori sense of humour. Often stupid, sometimes surprisingly subtle, but usually very funny.

At story-time we would sit at her feet, not looking at her when she talked, so as not to giggle when she became really excited and a shower of spit descended on us and it became really hard to keep a straight face. Despite all this we understood every word. She spoke Mandarin with a strong Yunnanese accent. When she used strange words, Hanif would shout, ‘We don’t know what that means, Elder Granny,’ even though it was considered rude to interrupt elders and he always pretended that he didn’t really care about our past. She didn’t mind at all. She would stop in mid-sentence and patiently explain what each word meant. Hanif wasn’t really interested in the stories, but he loved her presence, so mostly he sat quietly, thinking about cricket and his school friends. Elder Granny would begin each story the same way, so that her introduction became embedded in our heads. I used to tell the same stories to my children, but in Punjabi because they never learnt Mandarin, to their great regret. ‘Please start now, Elder Granny,’ I would say, and she would begin:

‘And there was once a city, a beautiful city, much more beautiful than Beijing, and it was called Dali. It was built on the edge of a lake, surrounded by mountains, and in the spring when the blossoms were out we could be forgiven for thinking that this was a replica of heaven. Kunming may have been the capital, but Dali was the heart of Yunnan, which, as you know, is itself the most beautiful country in China. In this beautiful city, there lived a family. Our family. We had been here for such a long time that nobody remembered how long, and in China that can only mean a very, very, long time ago. Some of us lived on the land, but most of us were traders, including Dù Wénxiù’s father. He was a salt merchant, but that did not satisfy him because it was not aesthetically pleasing, and so he set up a shop with the finest textiles and pottery.

‘The textiles were beautiful, but designed only for the nobility. They were made of pure silk. The pottery was simple. He had discovered that our potters were making thousands of plates with the blue that had become so popular in all of the Muslim world. From Yunnan these plates with Arabic calligraphy would be transported to Baghdad and Palermo and, later, to the Ottoman lands of the great Sultan, and from there to Cordoba in al-Andalus and to Africa and even the barbarian world. When trade with the Arabs ceased, your great forebears made sure that the potteries never closed down. Skills handed down from father to son are too precious to lose. Once lost, they never return.

‘Those plates became the pride of every family in Dali, even those who were not Hui. At the Third Month Fair, which was the largest in the world, I think, because traders came from every province in China, but there were also Lamas from Tibet and tribal peoples and others from Siam and Bengal-India and Burma and Cochin China. They used to say that in the very early years of the fair there were traders from as far away as Mesopotamia in the world of the Arab peoples, and that it took them six months to make the journey, so they were all a year older when they returned to Basra.

‘My grandfather, Wénxiù’s father, always used to throw a big banquet for the most important visitors, whose families had been trading with ours for many generations. Dù Wénxiù had always thought that he would continue in the trade of his father and forebears. My grandfather said that our ancestors had first come here with the armies of Qubilai Khan. It was said in our family that our great forebear, who finally settled in Dali and built the house where we all lived afterwards, had been responsible for supplying the Great Khan’s armies with food and women. I have no idea whether that is a fact or not. I hope it was just food he supplied. So we had been in the city for many centuries.

‘Some Hui, especially those who live in Khanfu [Canton] and Beijing, would never be happy tracing their lineage to the time of the Great Khan. They insist they are the direct descendants of the Arab traders and ambassadors who came to these shores while the Prophet, honour his name, was still alive. The Prophet had once said, “Seek knowledge where you find it, even as far as China,” and the Hui in Khanfu claim that is why their ancestors arrived in the first place: to seek knowledge, not profit. People are so ridiculous sometimes. Sultan Suleiman used to smile and say that every Believer wants to believe that he has a tiny drop of Arab blood in him, because he wants to be blessed with the same blood as the Prophet.

‘However we came, we intermarried so much that were it not for the taboo on pork and circumcision we would be no different from the Han. But we would never be the same as the Manchu. [At this point, D, she would pause, not to regain her breath, but to offer a short prayer to Allah asking him to punish the Manchu for their crimes. Hanif would always interrupt, ‘Mao Zedong is not a Manchu, Elder Granny,’ but she would brush him aside with a gesture. Then she would continue.]

‘Dù Wénxiù was happy helping my father organize our trading activities. He would have done that for the rest of his life and remained happy, but Fate had other plans for him.

‘I think it was springtime in 1856, when the worst killings of our people took place in Kunming. The Manchu governor hated the Hui people in any case, but prices fell and the newly settled Han became resentful of those who could still work. The Manchu governor, Shuxing’a, hated us Hui because when he had been in the northwest he had been defeated by some Muslim rebels. They were not Hui. They spoke their own language and had their own customs, but of course they shared our faith and prayed as we do, facing west, and, naturally, they never ate pork. Shuxing’a’s soldiers had been defeated by them and he was running away disguised as a woman. The rebels captured him. Let’s see if you are a woman, they said, and then they stripped him and threw pebbles at his testicles. He hated them forever after that and suffered from pebble-sickness for the rest of his life. He did not think how lucky he was to be alive. Then he was sent by the Manchu to Yunnan, and once in Kunming he began to plot his revenge, but against us Hui. He thought we were all the same as the people in the northwest. It was he who organized the massacre in Kunming. And once these things start there’s no knowing how they will end. Even before he came, the Han were killing us in the villages, burning our homes and mosques. By the time this monster started in Kunming, we had lost nearly forty thousand men, women and children. So our young men took up arms to defend themselves. What else could they do?

‘Wénxiù suddenly adopted an Arab name, Suleiman, to stress his faith, to unite our people and defy the Manchu. They killed so many of us that year. Thousands and thousands perished. It made our young men very angry. We are not goats to be led to slaughter so easily, Wénxiù told his father, and he and other young men went into the mountains to teach themselves how to fight.

‘My father was a Han, but he fought on our side because he wanted Yunnan to be free of the Manchu. All we Yunnanese are very proud people. The Manchu called us bandits, but they were the real bandits. Do you know what bandits are, Hanif Ma?’

‘I like bandits, Elder Granny. I want to be a bandit.’

Her cackle was infectious and made everyone laugh, including Father.

‘There are good bandits and evil bandits, little Hanif Ma. Good bandits help the poor. Evil bandits work for the Han rulers, never the poor. Wénxiù was only nineteen years old, but my mother told me that he never lost his temper, not even when he was a little boy. So after they went to the mountains and changed their names, all his friends would call him Suleiman Dù Wénxiù, till he became the Sultan. Did you know that, little Jindié and Hanif? Your ancestor was the Sultan of Yunnan. I may have been only eight years old, but I can still remember when all the people came out on the streets of Dali to greet him: “Sultan Suleiman wan sui, Sultan Suleiman wan sui.” It was the first slogan I ever learned. When we went with my mother to see him in his small palace, she made us repeat the slogan. He lifted me up and kissed my cheeks. His beard was very soft, very different from the beards in Xinjiang.

‘There were many different people of every sort who lived in Yunnan during his time. Han, Hui and non-Han, many of whom were tribal people and others who were Buddhist. Suleiman Dù Wénxiù fought the Manchu armies and defeated them, but he never permitted any discrimination against the Han people in Yunnan. There was so much intermarriage. My mother, Wénxiù’s favourite younger sister, was married to a Han Yunnanese, who was my father. It was like that all over our country. We were all interrelated, and if the Manchu had not interfered with us and sent in more and more of their people to steal our work, our mines, our trade and our property, and this at a time when things were bad for everyone, there would have been no rebellion.

‘And it was all the people, not just the Hui, who fought against the Manchu. Had it only been us, we would have been defeated much, much sooner. Always remember this, children. Your great ancestor was a Muslim, a Hui, but he ruled for all the people. Not just the Hui. That made my father so happy, because after the killings in Kunming and the villages everybody expected the Hui to go in for revenge killings. Sultan Suleiman knew that well and it made him angry. “We are not such poor-spirited people that we seek revenge on innocents. The best revenge is to make the whole of Yunnan strong and free from the rule of the Manchu, who steal, oppress and kill all Yunnanese who refuse to wear the queue.” The day after he said that, many of the Han who had lived in Yunnan for many generations came out and publicly had their queues removed. That was the way they showed their support for your great ancestor. You must always be proud of him and respect his memory. Are you listening, Hanif Ma and little Jindié?’

She rarely said more than that, but soon after she died my father began spending a few hours each Sunday telling us more stories and sometimes reading from manuscripts he had in his possession and showing us where these places were on the map. Your friend Hanif/Confucius became really alienated from these stories and would plead with my father to be allowed to go and play with his friends on the neighbouring streets.

‘You can play with whomever and whenever you like, Hanif,’ my father would say. ‘But I sometimes worry that they will warp your mind and drag you down to the gutter. You must never lose your self-esteem.’

Hanif would surrender abjectly. He hated seeing our father upset and he would sit through our family history lessons, but his mind was usually elsewhere. Once when he was fifteen or sixteen and my father was not in the house, he told me angrily, ‘China is being transformed by Mao Zedong and the Communists. Everything will be different. What’s the use of blind ancestor-worship, which was the curse of the old society and kept the peasants enslaved? If I had been alive at that time in Yunnan, I would have fought with our forebear. What’s the point of all this now?’

I never could see it that way myself. For me it was an accretion of knowledge. Even if our forebears had not been involved in the rebellion I would have wanted to know who we were and why we had been forced to flee Yunnan. We did not leave voluntarily to seek work elsewhere. We were frightened. We thought they would kill us all. Young girls were being kidnapped every day and sold as slaves. We had kind neighbours in the other regions and they helped us because over centuries we had traded and intermarried with them as well. Many of our people were given refuge in Guangzhou and Tibet and also in Burma. What made Hanif really angry was a tendency, I don’t think it was stronger than that, on the part of my parents and Younger Granny to portray life in Yunnan before the Manchu went on their killing spree as a golden age. I know these rarely exist in history, but we always preserve memories of some good things and call them a ‘golden age’ to keep our hopes alive. For if it was possible once, it could be again. [Utopian thoughts are not necessarily bad, or are they, D? I once read something by you many years ago either in praise of or predicting a world revolution in your lifetime. Perhaps I misunderstood what you wrote, but even though the thinking behind it struck me as crude and schematic, I liked the Utopian strain. Have I got it completely wrong? If so, apologies.]

There were some good things that happened in Yunnan when Suleiman declared himself the Sultan. He put a stop to the ceaseless raids authorized by the Qing court, which had affected most Yunnanese, who regarded the Han marauders as odious. I once compared the Yunnanese Sultanate to Yenan and the Maoist attempt to unite the people against foreign (in their case, Japanese) aggression. Suleiman tried to unify Yunnan as a single state to stave off the imperial masters in Beijing. Just because the Chinese empire was coterminous with the people it conquered did not make the Manchu better than the Japanese.

Of course I developed this line of thinking to argue against Hanif’s uncritical and crude Maoism. [And yours? Or did your brand of Marxism impose a ban on blind worship? Can’t remember now.] Of course he was enraged at any comparison of the revolutionary government to the reactionary Manchu, but that was not what I was arguing. I was simply comparing it to a mid-nineteenth-century uprising that succeeded for a while in creating a state that was not theocratic like the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in Nanjing, where reading the Bible was made compulsory.

Hanif got so angry with me one day that he sat in the living room and read a few books and manuscripts. He had a typical Elder Brother look on his face when I came home from Nairn one day, a mixture of contempt and triumph. ‘Let me tell you a few things, Jindié’, he said, ‘before you take ancestor worship in this household to such heights that it becomes difficult to find a way down.’ I was pleased at being taken seriously and sat down obediently to listen to Elder Brother.

He picked up the late-nineteenth-century book he had found on Father’s bookshelves and read out the following passage:

‘Dù Wénxiù set into action a series of building programs based on Qing imperial institutions in Beijing, including an imperial Forbidden City. At both the upper and lower passes, he had Great Walls built, with only one entrance, which ran from high in the Cangshan Mountains deep into Erhai Lake, making the valley impenetrable.’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘So what?’

‘That is far too childish, Jindié. So what? So this great forebear was engaged in pure mimicry. Qing buildings and Ming robes.’

‘I don’t think that was so stupid. He wore Ming robes to stress that it was the Manchu who were the interlopers.’

‘But Jindié, don’t you understand what I’m saying? There was nothing progressive about Sultan Suleiman. The Taiping were better. They nationalized the land and gave women equal rights.’

That drove me mad: ‘And imposed a Christian theocracy! They were much more irrational. The crazy guy who led the revolt believed he was the younger brother of Jesus. You prefer them only because the Maoists refuse to recognize the Yunnan rebellion as progressive for fear of encouraging something similar. But I accept that Sultan Suleiman was not a progressive. How could he be? Your beloved Marx hadn’t yet been translated into Chinese.’

‘I know, but the French Revolution had taken place. In this part of the world, Sultan Tipu, who was fighting the British fifty years before Suleiman’s victory, exchanged friendly letters with Napoleon in which he signed himself “Citoyen Tipu”. At least he tried.’

‘But his enemy was Napoleon’s enemy, and anyway Napoleon made himself a Sultan. Suleiman did not appeal for outside help. He knew he could win only with the support of his own people.’

‘Then why did one of his generals appeal for support to Queen Victoria?’

‘That was after the defeat, and he appealed for refuge, which is how we came to Lahore.’

Later when I asked Father about why Suleiman had tried to build a Forbidden City in Dali, he smiled.

‘Very simple. He wanted to show that his government was for all the Yunnanese, including the Han. The architecture was designed to reassure people that they could have their own state, just like the Manchu in Beijing. His enemies were spreading the rumour that everybody would be forcibly converted to Islam. He knew it was an attempt to divide the Yunnanese and did everything possible to counter that suggestion. Large banners were painted and hung over the city walls: Make Peace with Han Chinese, Down with Qing Court: Unite Hui and Han people as one, to erect the flag of rebellion, to get rid of Manchu barbarians, to resurrect Zhonghua, to cut away corruptions, to save the people from water and fire.

‘Sometimes he deliberately refrained from praying in the Grand Mosque on Friday, spending the afternoon with non-Hui leaders drinking rice wine. Of course he never touched pork. That would have been going too far. The seal Suleiman used was in Chinese as well as Arabic, but the calligraphy was in our own style. Go and look at it. It’s there, just above the mantelpiece, one of the few mementos Elder Granny managed to keep, apart from one robe.’

The more Hanif became disaffected from our Yunnanese past, the more it became a refuge for me. How could one fail to be moved by the glorious resistance of the Yunnanese and our ancestors? The impact of the victory in Dali was beginning to spread. It’s always like that isn’t it, D? A big wave creates ripples. Then and now.

Imperial agents in Guangzhou were extremely worried by how much support there was for the long-haired rebels in Yunnan. They described how even in Guangzhou people had stopped shaving their foreheads and were growing their hair to demonstrate solidarity with the government in Dali. Similar reports were coming from border towns near Tibet. Everyone assumed that the long-haired people were all Hui, but this was not the case. The Taiping rebels had also grown their hair to show contempt for the Manchu.

Father often used to say that if the Sultanate had survived another five years, the British and perhaps even the French would have recognized Yunnan as an independent state. Beijing, aware of the developing trade links between Dali and the Europeans, was determined to move swiftly and crush the Sultan’s armies.

Someone intelligent must have been advising the Qing emperor, who was told to ignore the insults — Suleiman had let it be known that his grasp of Mandarin and Chinese culture was on a much higher level than that of the Manchu barbarians in Beijing, and it is said that when the emperor was informed of this remark by his son, he became so angry that he had a seizure, and six eunuchs were required to lift him and place him on his bed. The emperor wanted to assault Dali immediately but was told the provocation was a trap and the Hui generals would wipe out the imperial army. An old palace eunuch reminded him that the European powers had won the Opium War just over a decade ago. They were waiting and watching, and if Beijing became isolated the foreigners might decide to help the Hui in Yunnan. If you attack Kunming and Dali, he told the emperor, there will be a prolonged conflict that will undermine the court, and what if some new rebellion erupts in the lower Yangtze, cutting off the supply of grain and rice? If our supply routes are cut we are finished. The long-haired rebels might even move on to Beijing reinforced by Britain and France. The Hui have been accumulating muskets and building gun-towers all over Yunnan. That is what the emperor was told, and for once he listened to his advisers and asked them to prepare an alternative method of destroying the independence of Yunnan.

That decision turned out to be our undoing. The Qing court bought some Muslim generals and made overtures to the Hui in Kunming, who were meant to be our allies, and by dividing our ranks they defeated us. That, D, is the verdict of history and the overriding weakness of Islam. Since the very beginning the followers of the Prophet have been unable to live in a single mansion. This has led to many defeats, but I fear you might be getting bored with this history lesson from an untrained historian, and so I’ve translated this document from our family’s archive that my father guarded so devotedly and which I inherited. I have now sent many of the documents and books to the museum in Yunnan, where they are displayed quite proudly.

But this one document I kept, because it was very personal. It was written by Elder Granny’s mother a few weeks before she died. She was Sultan Suleiman’s youngest sister. He had appointed her Yunnan’s trade commissioner in Burma. That’s how she survived, and later the British gave her permission to shift her operations to Calcutta. We moved to Lahore soon after her death in 1882, and only because some of the Hui who were descendants of the collaborators had established themselves in Calcutta and began to make our commercial existence difficult. My greatgrandfather refused to pay them protection money and, as a consequence, we had to leave the city.

That history is without any intrinsic value to anyone outside our family. It’s like immigrant life everywhere, and I observed similar divisions among the subcontinental Hui in the United States. Always divided by clans and political affiliations. What always amused me greatly was the facial expressions of Punjabi taxi drivers in New York and Chicago and now London when they realized I was more fluent in their language than some of them — they tend to use too many English words — and that I had understood every word uttered on the cell phones to which they are permanently attached. It was as if they had received an electric shock. I suppose it would be the same in Yunnan if a healthy, moustachioed Punjabi boy suddenly broke into our dialect. Forgive the digression.

I have translated the old document from Chinese as accurately as I could, but I could not have it double-checked by anyone in the family. Everyone is dead and your old friend Confucius has disappeared. We haven’t seen my brother for more than twenty years. Outside help I considered inappropriate. For one thing, the document is still private, and for another, I am not convinced that it is an accurate account. Also there are elements in it that are cinematic, and I would hate a tart like Zhang Yimou to be tempted. He’s wrecked enough Chinese history. Some swear words I have left in Chinese with my translation in brackets. Very mild compared to Punjabi, but more hurtful, said without a trace of affection.

I think Elder Granny’s mother was searching for other explanations. She could not quite bring herself to believe that the great betrayal was due solely to money, jealousy and an unhealthy power addiction. Many centuries ago, as you keep writing, al-Andalus and Siqilliya had already experienced what happened in Yunnan a hundred and sixty years ago. A case of those who never learn from past mistakes being destined to repeat them?