The Chinese Alchemist

Seven

The first indication that Wu Peng had been right about my ability to make considerable sums of money came when Number One Brother asked for a meeting with me. Thinking he planned to berate me for not sending money to our father, I was reluctant, but it was difficult to refuse. He made no mention of other members of our family; he merely discussed an issue in the ward in which my family lived that would benefit from palace attention, and gave me a petition. I said I would see what could be done. When I had in fact, despite my reservations, spoken to one of the eunuchs who would know more about this matter, it was suggested to me that a gift would do much to ease the required petition through the system. Number One Brother obliged.

I was on good terms with many of the more influential and powerful eunuchs in the palace and after that episode with Number One Brother found that my advice was sought on many matters. Gifts came my way in a satisfying manner. Many petitions passed through my hands and it was very simple for me to expedite one and delay another. One in particular, though, caused me much consternation.

It was from Lingfei. In it she asked leave to marry a man that she loved. She did so, she said, because she recognized that she no longer enjoyed the favor of the Son of Heaven, now that Yang Yuhuan was Most Favored Consort. She said she begged his indulgence in permitting her to spend her remaining days with this man, a member of the Gold Bird Guard. As astonished as I was that she would have the temerity to ask to leave the emperor’s service—it spoke of a rash and unsettled spirit, it seemed to me, however evident her pain—still I felt a shiver of excitement. Had Auntie Chang not told me that Number One Sister had stayed out all night with a member of the Gold Bird Guard? Surely if I needed proof of our relationship this was it.

To be sure, her request was not without precedent, something she would have known. There were imperial concubines who had been given their freedom to marry. Certainly Yang Guifei was dealing with other former favorites with dispatch. The Plum Concubine had already been exiled to the second capital in Luoyang, one that the Son of Heaven had not visited in years. Yang Guifei was extraordinarily beautiful, and she was also intelligent and ambitious. The Son of Heaven spent more and more of his time with her. I was not entirely sure why. I am perhaps not the best person to comment on this, but my feeling was that Lingfei’s slender form was rather more attractive than that of Guifei, who was rather plump. Evidently the Son of Heaven did not share that opinion.

More than just recognizing the reasons behind Lingfei’s petition, I also felt a pang of jealousy. I planned, like my adoptive father, to take a wife when I had accumulated sufficient funds, and perhaps to adopt children as well. But I would never know the thrill of love, or its loss, of the sort Lingfei had expressed so passionately in this letter, of that much I was certain. Despite this unpleasant feeling, I moved Lingfei’s petition forward expeditiously.

I did several things that evening, which given my state of mind was something of an accomplishment. I asked to change rooms, making up some lame excuse to do so, and then bolted myself in the new one, barring the door with a chair. I wanted to move to another hotel, but without my passport, that was not possible. No visitor got to check into a hotel in China without first producing this document.

Next I called Mira Tetford’s office in Beijing, given I didn’t know if she was still in Xi’an, and left a message asking her how she was doing getting my passport back to me. I gave her my mobile number, and told her I’d pick up the passport whenever I was allowed to do so. I also left a message that evening at Dr. Xie’s office to the same effect.

Then I called Rob in Taiwan. He didn’t answer. I wanted to leave a message, but I knew I shouldn’t. I would have sounded absolutely hysterical. What would I say? That I had locked myself in my new hotel room in Xi’an because I’d witnessed a terrible murder and that a colleague from Toronto had either managed to poison himself by drinking too much silver, or had been dispatched by some other means, possibly malevolent? The poor man might have a stroke. I figured I’d better calm down first and talk to him directly.

Then desperate for something rational to do, I took a sheet of hotel letterhead, drew a line down the middle so that I had two columns, and put “Don’t Know” at the head of one, “Know” on the other. Dr. Xie might say I should stay away from it, and perhaps he was right, but that was easier said than done. People were dying around me, and there were other people out there I didn’t know, but who appeared to know me all too well. Somehow I had to understand this.

There were a lot of things I didn’t know. I really didn’t know how Burton had died, but given the terrible events of the day, I could not assume an accidental death. I was no longer putting any effort into convincing myself that he had somehow inadvertently managed to poison himself with silver. Even though there had been no blood, no obvious trauma, I believed he had been murdered, just as surely as the young man with the package had been murdered. It was a matter of waiting for the autopsy results to confirm that. As much as I tried to tell myself that I was just being hysterical, I could not rid myself of that belief.

I did know that Burton had been in Xi’an and presumably Hua Shan on the trail of the silver box. Logically if Burton were following his normal routine, that is to say visiting every antique dealer he could find, he would have gone to the antique market at the Baxian Gong that day just as I had. But he didn’t. He went to the western tombs in Dr. Xie’s Mercedes, then straight to the train station and on to Hua Shan to meet someone. In the morning he had met with the man in the mosque. As far as I could tell, Burton hadn’t gone there to pray. He had gone there because it was a quiet place at that time of day, where he could meet someone he didn’t want to be seen chatting with in the hotel lobby, which while perhaps not nearly so evocative, was considerably warmer and more comfortable. Who was the man in the mosque, and what if anything did he have to do with the silver box? Given Burton’s obsession with the box, it didn’t seem to me he’d be having discussions like that about anything else, except perhaps how to get the box out of the country illegally. But if the times logged in to my Beijing hotel room voice mail were accurate, Burton didn’t have the box then, if he ever did. Was the man in the mosque the person who convinced Burton to go to Hua Shan?

It had not escaped my notice that Burton had been much better at tracking the silver box than I had. All I had done was follow him. What did that mean? Certainly his facility in Chinese had made a huge difference. But who had talked to him? I had seen him speaking to two individuals I couldn’t identify, the man in black and the man in the mosque. Was it possible that the former had sent him to Xi’an, and the latter to Hua Shan? It seemed to me that if I could backtrack on his trail, I’d possibly learn what he had. Whether or not this was a good idea was open to question.

I didn’t have a clue who the hapless young man in the alley was. Of his demise I was certain. He was not going to spend the night in a hospital and then be sent home. His throat had been slit. His heart would have stopped in seconds. Could it have been a random robbery that ended in murder? I didn’t think so. He had looked to me as if he knew very well who was around the corner in that alley, and he’d chosen to come to me. This was quite possible because, of the two, I was clearly the lesser evil, and he probably thought he’d be able to push me out of the way easily enough, which I suppose he could have. He just never got the chance. The other horrible thought was that if I hadn’t been there, standing in one entrance to that alley, he might have gotten away from the motorcycles by retracing his steps and blending into the crowds of a main street. I had stood in his way, slowing him down long enough to doom him.

I had not seen enough of him in the Baxian Gong to clearly identify him with real assurance as the man in New York who had looked to be interested in bidding, nor as the person who had stolen the box in Beijing, just as I didn’t know if the package he held contained the silver box. I did not let this lack of clarity stop me from leaping to conclusions. He was Mr. Knockoff, and the fact that he’d wanted the box, maybe enough to steal it, pointed once again to this entire situation being about the silver box. If that was true, then two people had died for it.

Another big question mark was the identity of the man in black, the smirking army officer. Who was he, and what if anything did he have to do with this? How had Burton known him? Burton apparently knew him well enough to know where he lived. He’d gone to a house in the Beijing hutong neighborhood and, lo and behold, there the man in black was. Did Burton have an appointment? Did he go to confront the fellow about the box? Had the man in black told him something that had sent Burton on a hasty and fatal trip to Xi’an?

I was more and more convinced, again with no real facts to back me up, that the man in black had been blocking the view of the box in the auction house. If I was right, then he too was tied to the silver box. Dr. Xie had told me not to try to find out who the man in black was, but surely I didn’t have much choice now. Someone had told Burton who the man was, and presumably it had been someone in the room when the box was snatched or, I suppose, when the videotape was shown, which would add three police officers. The police seemed unlikely, so that left Dr. Xie, Mira, Ruby, David, or the hapless employee of Cherished Treasures House, who had looked guilty all right, but surely for dereliction of duty and not theft. He had been devastated at losing his job. Dr. Xie had said he didn’t know who the man in black was. Maybe he didn’t, maybe he did. Maybe he was simply trying to protect me when he said he didn’t know.

After almost an hour of pondering all this, one ear cocked toward the hall outside my room, my heart leaping into my throat every time a door opened or closed, I had a “Don’t Know” list that covered the entire column and then some. The “Know” side of the ledger was distressingly short, only one entry in fact: a number of people associated with this silver box were dead.

Along with that came the unwelcome conclusion that I too was now inescapably linked to the silver box. It was not a pleasant thought. Here I was in a country where I didn’t speak the language, didn’t understand anything that was going on around me, and therefore didn’t stand a chance of getting out of the place in one piece unless I thought of something fast. Where to start? Given the hour and the fact that I was afraid to leave my hotel room, it had to be something I had with me. That was the file on the silver box that I had put together an eternity before. I had made a copy of the photograph of the box in the Molesworth Cox catalog, and had several photographs that Dory had given me of the silver box George had purchased some time previously. I had also kept the translation of the box up for auction that Justin at Molesworth Cox had given me at the preview in New York, and I had gone to both New York and Beijing with a translation of the box already in Dory’s possession.

I had not paid any real attention to the file, because I hadn’t needed to. Dory was certain the box on offer at Molesworth Cox was authentic, and once I’d taken a good look at it myself and chuckled at the recipe for the elixir of immortality, I’d shoved the pages into the file. Now I needed to revisit the file.

I got out a small magnifying device I always carry with me in case I need to examine some antique or another closely, and looked carefully at the photographs of the two boxes. George Matthews’s box was lovely. On the sides and the top were a group of women musicians in a gazebo. They were all beautifully dressed, and their instruments were quite discernable—a lute, a flute, chimes of some sort, and so on. The workmanship was very fine. The smaller box showed a woman in a garden talking to another woman while a line of women waited. Once again, they were all well dressed.

It was very clear these went together. The rounded tops of the boxes were the same, both in shape but also in what was depicted on them, unlike the sides of the boxes, on which the scenes were different. I had at first seen only the bird on the lids, a crane, but when I looked more closely, I realized there was another scene, or perhaps more accurately, three of them, one on top of the other. At the bottom was a Woman who looked to be laid out in a tomb of some sort, or perhaps she was sleeping. In the middle there was a woman seated in a pavilion while other women stood in line in front of her, and at the top, yet another woman floated above the rest of them, hovering over a mountain. The woman in each scene wore an identical robe, and could quite possibly be the same person. Woven into the design were flowers, possibly chrysanthemums, but more likely roses or peonies. What was also very interesting to me was that fact that it was quite possible these boxes had been done by different artists, even if they depicted the same thing, or at least something similar. There were variations in the strokes, tiny deviations really, but discernible nonetheless. I’d want to see the originals again and examine them closely, but I thought I was right. I wondered why there would be two artists working on these boxes if they were meant to fit together.

I decided that these three vignettes were of the same woman, in life in the middle, dead at the bottom, and floating above us all, as an Immortal at the top. Justin at Molesworth Cox had said the box belonged to someone named Lingfei, a person of some importance in the court of Illustrious August. Could I safely assume that the woman on the box was Lingfei? I hadn’t given much thought as to the gender of Lingfei before this moment. I’m not really familiar with Chinese names, so that hadn’t been a clue, but there wasn’t a single man depicted on either box that I could see. It wasn’t absolutely conclusive, but from now on, Lingfei, at least in my mind, was a woman.

Next, I read the translation carefully. There was the recipe for the elixir of immortality and instructions for its preparation as I already knew. A more thorough reading of the translation of the text convinced me that someone had cared very much for Lingfei and was perhaps drawing some consolation from the thought that she wasn’t really dead. This conclusion seemed to rest on the fact that her body had not been found, which is to say that she was one of the lucky ones who had made the leap to immortality. I wasn’t prepared to accept these immortal leaps, so what, I wondered, had happened to her body? Had it been stolen along with treasures that had been buried with her? Or had her body not really been buried where the author of the text thought it had? The text did, however, make it pretty clear there was a tomb somewhere with, if not Lingfei’s body in it, then something else.

I then looked at the measurements of the two boxes. The one at Molesworth Cox and again at Cherished Treasures House in Beijing would fit into the box that George owned, as Dory had predicted that it would. However, because of the tight fit, only the smaller box could have contained something. Burton had called the box a coffret a bijoux, or jewelry box, but I didn’t think that was right, or if it was, then there was some very special piece of jewelry in the smallest box. It wasn’t big enough to contain a great deal of anything.

Dory had said there was a bigger box that she remembered. She had not hesitated at all on the subject. Now, I think relative size is a difficult thing to remember over many years, particularly given how close in size the two I’d seen were, so despite what she said, the missing third box could have been either larger or smaller than the ones I had seen. I wondered how long there had been between the auction at which George Matthews had bought the silver box he had, and the second one coming up in New York. Dory had implied that George had had his box in his collection for many years. Could I safely assume that was true? I wasn’t sure the answer to that was relevant in any way, but I had so little information that it seemed to me I just had to go on a data search and see what came up. I could simply phone up George and ask him, I supposed. I wasn’t sure yet whether or not I wanted to do that.

Dory had also said there would probably have been an external wooden box, although it was long gone. How did she know that? Was there something about these nesting boxes that required such a thing? Were there other nesting sets like this I might learn from? I wasn’t going to find that out in my hotel room.

I wished I could hold Dory’s box again, or the one that was stolen, to study more carefully the tableaux carved on the outsides. Having concluded that one of the women depicted there—women I’d once just glanced at, being more interested in the workmanship than the content—had been Lingfei, I suddenly wanted to find the missing box even more than I had before. Somehow this had gotten very personal, not just because of Dory, but because of the mysterious Lingfei herself. I suppose, like Burton, I was hooked.

As I contemplated all this, the telephone rang, a sound that jangled right through me, and caused me to jump up in dismay. I stared at the ringing phone, willing it to tell me who was calling, and finally picked it up. I said nothing, however.

“Lara? Are you there?” Dr. Xie said.

“Yes, Dr. Xie,” I replied.

“I woke you up, didn’t I?” he said. “That’s why you’re having difficulty speaking to me. I am truly sorry.”

“No, I’m awake,” I said. “I can’t sleep.”

“I was afraid of that. I am in the lobby. May I come up, or would you like to come down?”

“I’ll come down,” I said. There were two reasons for that decision: I wasn’t going to be in my room alone with anybody, even the lovely Dr. Xie, and I suddenly realized I was really, really hungry. I thought maybe food would settle me down a little.

I met Dr. Xie in the bar. He had a scotch, I had a hamburger and a glass of wine. I’m a firm believer in eating what the locals do, and have been known to make fun of tourists who insist upon eating their own food no matter where they go, but right now what I needed was a hamburger and fries—lots and lots of fries. Having said that, when the food came, I couldn’t eat it.

“Have you slept at all?” Dr. Xie asked in a disapproving tone.

“Not really, no.”

“Then I have a plan, one I hope you will agree to. First of all, let me tell you that Mira thinks she will have your passport by tomorrow evening, or the following morning at the latest. They are holding it only until the preliminary autopsy results are known, and we believe that should be late tomorrow. Of course, it will show death by some sort of misadventure, and you will be able to go. But I can see you are in some distress. First, you must get some sleep. I have brought you,” he said, pulling a small plastic bag out of his pocket, “some of Xie Homeopathic’s finest. You have a kettle and a mug in your room, no?” I nodded.

“Good. There are five or six teabags here. One teabag per cup, please, and one cup should do it. It will help you sleep. It smells a little strong when the boiling water first hits it, but let it steep for three minutes. It is all natural, no narcotics. You will find it tastes quite pleasant, and it will help you sleep. As for tomorrow, while we wait, I don’t want you sitting around thinking about Burton. I repeat my earlier offer. Jackie will pick you up tomorrow morning at, say, nine-thirty after the traffic settles down a little, and take you west of the city to see Famen Si, a quite extraordinary Buddhist temple, and some of the T’ang and Ming tombs.”

Tombs, I thought. There might be some merit in this excursion. Burton had found this trip educational. Perhaps I would as well. I’d be safe with Jackie. He’d already shown himself to be a good man in a crisis. “Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate the tea, and the offer of your car and driver. I accept both.”

“Good,” he said. “Now eat. I may not approve of your choice from the menu, but you need to eat something.” I did the best I could.

Later, door barred, I took out a teabag and did as I was directed. Dr. Xie was right. I drifted off to sleep fairly quickly and slept much of the night. It was a disturbed sleep to be sure. Inevitably, I kept dreaming about Burton. He was dead in my dream, dark blue of face, but he was still wearing gloves and making himself cups of tea.

Jackie was waiting for me at nine-thirty the next morning. He handed me a copy of China Daily, the English-language newspaper. One of my questions was answered right on the front page where, in addition to a story about a peasant demonstration not far from Xi’an where poor farmers were protesting corruption in government, and a mining disaster that had killed hundreds of workers, it was reported that a man had been murdered in Xi’an. This man, who had been identified as Song Liang, was an employee of the Cultural Relics Bureau. It was not known whether Song was in Xi’an on official business or vacation. Some vacation! The police believed he had been murdered by two men on motorcycles. The police had a good description of the perpetrators, and the investigation into this brutal crime continued and was expected to be brought to a speedy conclusion.

I was glad the article didn’t mention they were looking for a female foreigner. At least the people who had talked to the police about the crime knew who the culprits were. If Song Liang really was an employee of the Cultural Relics Bureau, then his presence in New York could be explained. He was attempting to purchase the silver box for the people of China. Governments indeed do such things. It certainly did not explain why he’d steal it, unless he’d been given a limit on how much he could spend and despaired of being able to purchase it at the price it might fetch, and just grabbed it on impulse, thinking he was doing his country a favor. Then what would he do? Take it to his employer and beg forgiveness? I didn’t know enough about how this all worked to say. If he had the silver box with him in Xi’an, then he had certainly not ‘fessed up in an expeditious fashion. The other possibility was that he was basically corrupt, had been in New York just to see who purchased it, and then planned to rob the purchaser. If you think that sort of thing never happens, you kid yourself. He’d certainly been unhappy when the object was withdrawn from sale, as unhappy as Burton and I had been.

This put me in something of a dilemma. There was no photograph of Song Liang in China Daily. If there had been, I could tell Mira or Ruby to call the police and tell them that the person I thought had stolen the box might be the employee of the Cultural Relics Bureau who had been killed in Xi’an. But there was no photograph, so if I said that, they might quite rightly wonder how I knew of it, and I would have to say I was there, something I was extremely reluctant to do, not the least because I thought being linked in some way with two suspicious deaths was going to keep me in China for the rest of my life.

Our route took us past the statues that mark either the beginning or the end, depending on your geographic and political point of view, of the fabled Silk Route, through the burgeoning modern city that spreads outside Xi’an’s old city walls, thence past miles of farmland to the place where the emperors and their families centered in that area went to spend eternity.

The tombs were interesting to be sure. We visited T’ang Princess Yongtai’s tomb, a young woman who may have been executed by a rather nasty piece of work named Empress Wu Zetian, or may, as her tombstone related, have died in childbirth. Perhaps Empress Wu had the tombstone carved with her version of events. Princess Yongtai was the granddaughter of the Emperor Gaozong. She was also the granddaughter or Empress Wu, the woman who may have ordered her killed.

These were dangerous times to be a princess, it seems. Was Lingfei a princess? That might explain why her body had disappeared, stolen by an unpleasant rival.

To reach the sarcophagus, you descend a long ramp sloping quite steeply downward, past a few badly faded frescoes depicting the princess’s maids in lovely gowns and elaborate hairstyles, little niches filled with terra-cotta figures of servants and so on, infinitely smaller than the life-size warriors the first emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi had formed for himself, and past a shaft that had been cut by tomb robbers at some point in the distant past. The air was unpleasantly damp, almost fetid, at the bottom where the sarcophagus stood, and there was nothing much to see other than a large stone sarcophagus, but at least I knew what a T’ang tomb looked like.

I also learned that several hundred objects had been found in the princess’s tomb, including lots of gold and silver. Could I safely assume the silver boxes had at some point been in Lingfei’s tomb, even if her body had disappeared? Yet another question for the “Don’t Know” side of the equation.

Quite unexpectedly the most interesting part of the visit was that to Famen Si, a Buddhist temple an hour or so west of Xi’an. During the T’ang dynasty, emperors went to Famen Si to worship, and the temple’s most famous relic, a finger bone purported to be that of the Buddha himself, was also carried in a great procession to Chang’an, now Xi’an, from time to time. It seems that an Indian prince, determined to earn celestial points in his lifetime, had dispersed a number of such relics, and Chang’an had one. The relic was essentially forgotten, but when the stupa at Famen Si collapsed in 1981, an underground chamber was found, and in it, the relic.

What was interesting to me, and had perhaps been for Burton as well, was an exquisite little museum on the site in which I found a series of silver boxes with hinged and rounded lids that were supposed to contain said finger bone. All of these boxes looked to contain a finger bone when they were opened, but only one of them had the real thing. These boxes were not unlike Dory’s missing box, and I found myself wondering once again whether the smallest of Lingfei’s boxes had held anything. There certainly hadn’t been anything in it when it went up for auction, but that didn’t mean much. Whatever it was could have disintegrated over the intervening centuries, or it could have been something more permanent, a particularly costly jewel perhaps, that someone had decided to separate from the box at some point. Was it the contents, and not the box itself that were so important to someone? It did lead me to believe, given the finger bone of the Buddha, that silver casket boxes held important objects.

Once again I was filled with regret that the silver box was gone. I wanted to know who Lingfei had been, partly because it might be relevant to what was happening now, but also because I was interested in her, assuming I was correct in considering her a woman. If she was a princess, I stood a chance of finding her; if not, it would be much more difficult. History records the famous, the victorious, the wealthy, and by and large, the men. If Lingfei was none or these things, her voice might remain silent forever, except, of course for the words and the pictures on the boxes. That made them all the more important.

When I was safely back at the hotel, my first order of business was to call Ruby in Beijing. I asked her if she knew who the man in black at the auction house that day was. She said she didn’t. I said that somebody had to, somebody other than the police.

“I wonder if David knows him?” she mused.

“Can you ask him?” I said, as casually as possible. I didn’t want to ask him myself.

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll call you back.”

She did call back, but only to say that David was in Shanghai for a couple of days. She didn’t know him well enough to have his mobile, so she’d call him in a day or two. I had his mobile number. He’d given me his card at the party at Dr. Xie’s after the auction. I still didn’t want to phone him myself, but I didn’t seem to have any choice. I called, but got his voice mail. I didn’t leave a message.

Next, I went to the business center and searched for Lingfei on the Internet. As always zillions of entries came up, but nothing that helped me. There was a Chinese appliance manufacturer with Lingfei in its name, that’s about all. Then I tried famous Chinese women of history. Once again there was no Lingfei, but there was a Meifei and a Yang Guifei. The latter two were concubines of Illustrious August, Yang Guifei a woman he neglected affairs of state to spend time with, and who was known as Number One Consort. All three names had “fei” as a suffix. I knew two were concubines. Was fei“ a job description as opposed to a name? Was Lingfei a concubine, too? You wouldn’t think an appliance company Would have ”concubine“ in its name, but that, I thought, might be due to the lack of subtlety in translating Chinese into English. This Meifei, for example, was called Plum Concubine, but ”mei“ also meant rose, so maybe there were two meanings for something we would write as ”fei,“ but which would actually be two different Chinese characters with different corresponding meanings.

I had a flashback to New York, to Burton’s exit from the auction house preview. Had he not said something like “Farewell, my concubine”? Had he been talking to Lingfei and the box rather than to me? It would have been a relief at the time to know that, but even now it was useful. Lingfei was an imperial concubine!

If she was, I was soon to learn as I searched further, she was in serious danger of being lost in a crowd. According to what I read, Illustrious August had a harem of approximately forty thousand women. Apparently there was something called the Flank Court where the wives of men who had displeased the emperor were sent. New emperors tended to free the women held by the previous emperor, but since Illustrious August had reigned for more than four decades, from 712 to 756, there were a lot of women in his harem by the time he passed on. They were there on sufferance as it were, both acquired and discarded at his whim. Being of a feminist bent, the whole idea of a harem made me distinctly nauseous, but I read on.

Other than his propensity to keep forty thousand women around for his personal pleasure, Illustrious August looked to have been a good emperor. He had several names; all emperors did. He was born Li Longji. The T’ang dynasty was founded by the Li family, and he was a Li. His dynastic title was T’ang Mingdi, also known as Minghuang. We know him best as Emperor Xuanzong. Emperors got special names after their deaths that encapsulated their reigns. If someone was a bad emperor, he got a bad name. Xuanzong is remembered as Illustrious August, or Profound Ancestor, which spoke well of him. Contrary to my earlier impression, perhaps he hadn’t named himself. From my perspective, he seemed to have had the most glorious reign of all in terms of culture. He loved music, and he even wrote some himself. There is a song he is supposed to have written when he was on a journey to the moon or something like that.

It was interesting to speculate what it would take to become an imperial concubine. People fanned out across the kingdom to find lovely young girls—virgins were esteemed as always—for their emperor. Fathers would want their daughters to be chosen. But being chosen or perhaps offered to the emperor just got you into the pool, as it were, sort of like the secretarial pools of old. Then you had to claw your way up through a ranking system in hopes that you would be an imperial favorite, get your own luxury apartment in the palace and an annual stipend that was generous enough to keep you in cosmetics and finery, and maybe even acquire the opportunity to bestow favors, like homes and titles, on your family. For the few who managed this, others, perhaps the majority, probably never got to even see the emperor. So there had to be something exceptional about this Lingfei. Perhaps she was a singer or dancer, or she wrote exquisite poetry. That would appeal to Xuanzong. Above all, she must nave been extraordinarily beautiful.

After about an hour of searching, I gave up. I’d have to have another go later. But I did look up argyria. Yes, it existed; yes, it was exactly as Dr. Xie had described it; and yes, you could make colloidal silver yourself with some distilled water and a battery to run a charge through it and the silver somehow. I didn’t spend a lot of time on this. It didn’t seem to be a useful life skill from my perspective.

I made another attempt at eating and was marginally more successful than the day before. There was a message on my hotel phone from Rob saying his mobile wasn’t working very well, so he might be hard to reach, but given I’d been delayed for a few more days—that was an understatement—-he and Jennifer were taking a short cruise. He said he didn’t know whether his phone would work there either, but he would try to get in touch. Jennifer came on the line at the end to say how much she wanted to see me, and that I was to hurry up and get there. It was all I could do not to sob uncontrollably. Then, after watching Chinese television, hoping to see a photograph of Song Liang pop up on the screen even if I couldn’t understand a word, I decided to try once again to get some sleep.

I boiled the water for my bedtime cup of Dr. Xie’s tea. It did smell a little strong, as he had said it would, but I had not found it that difficult to drink the previous night, and it certainly worked. As I took a teabag out of the plastic baggie in which Dr. Xie had given it to me, I had a sudden flash of memory: Burton taking a similar plastic baggie out of his pocket that day we’d had tea on Liulichang Street when I’d caught him checking out the antique stores. He’d brought his own tea bags.

I got out my magnifier and had a really good look at the teabag. It was of the sort that has a string attached to it to help you dunk it in the water, with a little tag at the end where you hold it that usually gives the manufacturer’s name and the type of tea. This one was blank. The teabag itself was not of the type that is sealed all around. Rather, the staple attaching the string to the bag also sealed the bag. I painstakingly removed the staple, being careful not to tear the paper in any way. Were there two separate staple marks? There were not. Was it possible that the teabag had been stapled twice? I looked at the holes very carefully through the magnifier. I thought it possible that the teabag had been stapled twice.

I decided then and there that Burton had been poisoned, not through his own actions, his pathetic although understandable desire for good health. No, there was something in that awful tea he drank, something that shouldn’t be there, something he would not detect because of the extremely strong and bitter flavor and aroma of the tea. The burning question was, had Xie Jinghe given it to him?

I didn’t drink the tea.