Tai-Pan

BOOK IV

With the passing weeks spring became early summer. The sun gathered strength and the air became heavy with moisture. The Europeans in their regular clothes and long woolen underwear—

and bustled dresses and whalebone corsets—

suffered intensely. Sweat dried in the armpits and groin, and festering sores erupted. The usual summer sickness began—

the Canton gutrot, the Macao flux, the Asian distemper. Those who died were mourned. The living stoically endured their torments as unavoidable tribulations sent by the good Lord to plague mankind, and continued to close their windows against the air which all believed carried the noxious gases that the earth emanated in summer; they continued to allow their doctors to purge them and leech them, for all knew that that was the only real cure for sickness; they continued to drink fly-touched water and eat flyblown meats; they continued to avoid bathing, which all knew was dangerous to health; and they continued to pray for the cool of winter, which would once more clean the earth of its more deadlier poisons.

By June the distemper had decimated the ranks of the soldiers. The trading season was almost over. This year huge fortunes would be made. With joss. For never had the buying and the selling been so extravagant at the Canton Settlement. The traders and their Portuguese clerks and their Chinese compradores, and the Co-hong merchants, were all exhausted by the heat but more by the weeks of frantic activity. All were ready to relax until the winter’s buying could begin.

And this year at long last, unlike any previous year, the Europeans were looking forward to summering in their own homes, on their own soil of Hong Kong.

Their families at Hong Kong had already moved from the cramped shipboard quarters to Happy Valley. Construction had boomed. Queen’s Town was already taking shape: streets, warehouses, jail, wharves, two hotels, taverns, and houses.

The taverns that catered to the soldiers were nesting near the tents by Glessing’s Point. Those that served the sailors were opposite the dockyard on Queen’s Road. Some of these were tents, crude, temporary structures. Others were more permanent.

Ships arrived from home bringing supplies and relatives and friends, and many strangers. And each tide brought more people from Macao—Portuguese, Chinese, Eurasian, European—

sailmakers, weavers, tailors, clerks, servants, businessmen, sellers and buyers, coolies, job seekers or those whose jobs now forced them to Hong Kong: all who served the China trade, all who lived upon it, or fed off it. Those who came included madams, girls, opium users, gin makers, gamblers and smugglers and pickpockets and kidnapers and thieves and beggars and pirates—

the dross of all nations. These too found dwellings, or began to build dwellings and places of business. Gin shops, brothels, opium cellars began to infest Queen’s Town and spot Queen’s Road. Crime increased violently, and the police force, such as it was, was engulfed. Wednesday became whipping day. To the enjoyment of the righteous, convicted felons were putilicly flogged outside the jail as a warning to the evil.

British justice, though quick and harsh, did not seem cruel to the Chinese. Public torture, and beatings to death, thumbscrews and mutilation and loss of eye or eyes or hand or hands or foot or feet, branding, flesh slicing, gar-roting, blinding, tongue ripping, genital crushing—

all were conventional Chinese punishments. The Chinese had no trial by jury. Since Hong Kong was beyond the pale of Chinese justice, all criminals on the mainland who could escape fled to the safety of Tai Ping Shan and scoffed at the weakness of barbarian law.

And as civilization flourished on the island, refuse began to collect. With the refuse came the flies.

Water began to stagnate in discarded barrels, in broken pots and pans. It was cupped in bamboo scaffoldings, in the beginnings of gardens, and in the thin marsh of the valley basin. These small putrid waters began to seethe with life: larvae, which became mosquitoes. They were tiny, fragile and very special—

and so delicate that they flew only when the sun was down: the Anopheles.

And the people in Happy Valley began to die.