Night of the Golden Butterfly

EIGHT

QIN-SHI, MY DEAREST child, I am writing this memorandum for you and your children and whoever comes after them. It is the story of your uncle’s last days, but also about a great deal more, as you shall read. I am not used to writing anything except trading reports and balance-sheets and, rarely and only when my brother Sultan Suleiman instructed me, detailed dossiers on the rulers of Burma and India and what we might expect from them in the future. As you know, I loved my brother dearly. He never treated women as mere bearers of children and he permitted me to marry a Han, outside our family and community, but a pure Yunnanese boy. Your father refused to leave Dali with me in 1872, even when ordered to do so by the Sultan, who was worried about his pregnant sister travelling on her own. I was three months pregnant with you and had returned to give a report on our trading situation. My brother had ruled for sixteen years, but he knew we were about to be defeated and he wanted us all to leave. Your father refused. He was killed defending the Sultan. A Han fighting the Hui traitors. His memory has never left me, which is why I never remarried, though there were more than a few offers. Together with your uncle, your father was truly the kind of man of whom our great scholar Liu Chih wrote in older times:

Only those who are the most sincere, authentic, true and real can fully realise their own nature;

Able to fully realise their own nature, they can fully realise the nature of humanity;

Able to fully realise the nature of humanity, they can fully realise the nature of things;

Able to fully recognise the nature of things, they can take part in the transforming and nourishing process of Heaven and Earth;

Once this is achieved they can form a trinity with Heaven and Earth.

Before I tell you what happened in those last months, I want you to remember that the Hui in southeastern China were never fully trusted by the Muslim people in the northwest, who were far more rigid than we were in the application of their beliefs and the observance of rituals. The Han mistrusted us because all that divided them from us was ritual. They simply could not understand how pork could be forbidden, since, unlike some Buddhists, we were not vegetarians. When they started burning our villages near Kunming before the big massacre, they would first address us impolitely as Hou didi [monkey’s brother], Gou nainai [grandmother’s a dog] and always Zhu shi ta de Zuxian pai [your ancestral tablet is a pig]. One of my great-uncles used to say that the Hui are descended from the good son of Adam who did not eat pork and the Han from the bad son who ate pork all the time. It is strange that this meat became such a big issue, but the Han regarded eating it as healthful, and many Hui noble families, ordered by the emperor to desert their faith or incur his displeasure, used to prove their loyalty by ostentatiously eating pork at court banquets. At my brother’s banquets in Dali, since there were many non-Hui Yunnanese present, pork was always served, but the polluted dishes were never kept in the palace kitchens. Our northwestern cousins would regard serving pork even to non-Hui as a heresy.

I sometimes wondered what the emperors would have demanded had the Arabs not observed the pork taboo and had the meat not been forbidden by the Honoured Classic. It would have been difficult to sew the foreskins back onto the men. But enough of this nonsense.

Six months before the Sultan was captured, a young soldier arrived at the court from Kunming. He was unarmed, but hurt. His arm was bleeding profusely through makeshift bandages. He was offered food and water, but insisted on seeing the Sultan personally. Suleiman saw the young man and immediately ordered that a surgeon be sent for, but the soldier insisted that it was a flesh wound and had been wrapped in a salt bandage. He would be fine soon. He asked to speak to the Sultan in private.

Very few people knew that my brother had a network of spies throughout Yunnan, mainly to report on Manchu activities in our country and the neighbouring regions. The soldier said he was one of them. The code to help identify the network was Wang Tai-yu’s ‘True Answers’. Each region in Yunnan had been given a separate set of them.

‘What is your password?’

‘A question.’

‘Ask.’

‘The language of the Lord — what is its sound and script?’

Suleiman gazed at the young man’s face and smiled. ‘The real word of the Lord belongs to neither sound nor script. Ask the second question.’

‘How did the Honoured Classic come to be?’

‘It descended from heaven.’

The soldier was from Kunming. Suleiman gave him some water and insisted on tending to the wound himself. He gently removed the soldier’s shirt and blouse and drew back in surprise. It was a woman. She covered her breasts, leaving the hurt arm hanging by her side. Suleiman washed it and dried it tenderly, then tore a bit of his own silk tunic and bandaged her arm.

‘How were you hurt, Li Wan?’

She looked scared. How could he know her name?

‘It’s inscribed on this amulet. It is your name?’

She nodded in relief. ‘One of Ma Rulong’s men tried to stop me as I was leaving the city, since I had no identification. I brushed him aside. He drew out a dagger, which grazed me. I broke his neck and left the city.’

‘How old are you, Li Wan?’

‘Eighteen. Ma Rulong is my uncle.’

‘What?’

‘Our family despises him. That is why I agreed to join your network.’

‘Who recruited you?’

‘We are forbidden to say.’

‘I am the Sultan. I can find out easily.’

‘Please do. I am forbidden to say.’

And nor did she, but the inevitable happened. Your uncle avoided the four vices. He was not addicted to wine, lust, avarice or anger, but he was a human being with all the strengths and weaknesses of one and we Yunnanese are a passionate people. My brother was overcome by emotion. The young woman must have been flattered, but she resisted. Then he asked her another question from the master’s work.

‘Which is prior, heaven or earth?’

She smiled, but refused to reply and insisted, very correctly, that the question had nothing to do with her recruitment to the network.

‘You are talking statecraft and I am speaking passion’, said the Sultan, ‘and I order you to reply.’

She answered: ‘If you know the sequence of men and women, you will naturally know the priority and posteriority of heaven and earth.’ He roared with laughter, and she added: ‘The Master Wang Tai-yu was a brilliant sage, but not always correct. That was a wrong answer, since in our country and especially in the more remote regions, the sequence of men and women is not always the same.’

You can tell from this conversation, Qin-shi, that your uncle was developing a passion for Li Wan, and despite her pretence, it was obvious that she was not indifferent to his attention, but she was a very disciplined girl and would not let him touch her till she had given him a detailed account of what the Qing court had asked of Ma Rulong in return for the promised governorship of all Yunnan.

His fever of passion cooled as he heard the story. He became firm and fierce, but first he wanted to be sure that Li Wan’s sources were trustworthy. She hesitated, but only for a moment.

‘He told me so himself.’

‘Explain.’

‘The network teaches us that we must utilize every possible method to gain information without arousing suspicion. Ma Rulong sometimes visited our household. I saw him looking at me in the way old men do. Then he asked my mother whether I would come and keep his daughter company. She resisted, but I stood up with a smile and said I would like that very much.’

‘Enough. I don’t want to hear any more.’

‘You should. It concerns you. After he had his way with me, and I should report that he had the violent and rough manner of a shepherd locked in a mountain hut with only his sheep for the winter, and believe me, it filled me with revulsion, but afterwards he spoke openly in my presence. He spoke of having you killed and your head sent to Beijing in a diamond-encrusted silver basket as a gift to the emperor. He spoke of becoming an ally of the Manchu and ruling Yunnan from the Forbidden City in Dali. His allies tell the people that Dù Wénxiù is not a proper Hui, that he eats pork, does not say his prayers and has no concubines, that they alone are the real defenders of the Honoured Classic. All this is being said even now.’

She provided the Sultan with a complete picture of what the traitors were planning. For days Suleiman was busy and did not see her, but he could not forget her features nor the soft skin that he had bandaged. Together with her obvious intelligence, they weighed on him a great deal. Since this is not a story of personal passion but a history of political defeat I will not dwell on every detail except to say that she became his favourite lover. They were inseparable, and since she knew the enemy so well she was often present at meetings of the Grand Council that organized the defence of the city.

When this news reached Ma Rulong he panicked and is reported to have considered suicide, since he thought that Suleiman would send assassins to kill him. Men who plot murder always believe that it is being plotted against them. Suleiman was generous. He sent a messenger to plead with Ma Rulong not to commit treachery but to share power in Dali. Suleiman suggested that their children should marry each other to cement the alliance, but Ma Rulong was too far gone in his intrigues and was afraid that this offer was a trap, that Suleiman meant to ensnare and kill him.

Suleiman was dominated by one idea, and that was to never let the Manchu retake Dali and Kunming and to remain free of the Qing court. For a while it seemed he would succeed. Of the governors-general despatched by Beijing to Yunnan, one was assassinated, another committed suicide, one lost his mind completely, several were fired for incompetence and one refused to take up his position in the rebel region. Even their policy of using Hui to fight Hui had failed, and Ma Rulong was becoming increasingly isolated as more and more of his Hui soldiers deserted him. But fate was against us. There were too few of us and just too many Qing soldiers, and they were now all united to crush Dali. Incapable of defeating the Europeans, they wanted to prove they were still capable of some victories against us.

The rest you know. Our council met and the Sultan told them that further resistance was impossible. The Manchu would kill every person and every animal in the city unless he, Dù Wénxiù, gave himself up. He had decided to go to the Qing encampment early the next morning and surrender. Your father wept, Qin-shi, and begged to go with him, but he refused. He would go alone. The next morning he put on his sultan’s robes for the last time and seated himself in his sedan chair. Thousands of people rushed out of their homes to say farewell. Many were weeping. At the Southern Gate he got out and thanked the people for the way they had supported him for eighteen whole years. Once inside his chair he swallowed a fatal dose of opium and was dead by the time he reached the enemy camp. His corpse was dragged in front of the Qing army and he was decapitated.

His surrender was a mistake, because the Manchu were determined on revenge. They persuaded our generals to disarm, and three days later they assaulted the city. Your father died defending his people. Thousands of innocent Hui were slaughtered. Women and children still alive were given as war booty to the Qing soldiers.

And Li Wan, with her heavenly beauty? Several months before the surrender, she had given birth to a daughter and was pregnant again. She was greatly vexed and even offended when Suleiman insisted she had to leave the city and seek safety elsewhere. She did not want to go, but he insisted and became angry, reminding her of her duty to the higher cause, to their lofty principles and the questions and answers. He said, ‘One day you or your daughter or the child inside you now might be needed to continue the fight for Yunnan.’ Then for the last time he asked her a question from the great work.

‘Why is this place of worship called Clean and Aware?’ She sobbed. ‘When water is clean, fish appear.’

‘What is water? What are fish?’

Tears poured down her cheeks. ‘The True Teaching and Real People.’

‘Never forget that, my dearest woman whom I have loved more than anything in this world.’

Still she resisted the idea of leaving him, and then, finally, much against her own will, she agreed to accompany her parents in a heavily guarded caravan ordered by the Sultan to take them to Cochin China. He promised he would join her there; she knew it would never happen. Fifty soldiers escorted the family to their safe haven, where some of our people were already living. The soldiers, too, had orders not to return.

I made some inquiries in Burma and offered money for any information, but never heard anything about them. Perhaps one day Li Wan’s daughter, or, who knows, her son, will find you, and then you two cousins will have much to discuss.

Qin-shi, memory is the preserve of the victors, but wherever you go, I never want you or your children to forget who we were and what they did to us. They say that the grass grows stronger on plains enriched with blood, but sometimes nothing will grow on that soil.