Typhoon

23

Which, of course, famously, it did.

And not just any old rain. A monsoon that made the red dye in Lance Corporal Angus Anderson’s Black Watch hackle run pink like a child’s watercolour as he marched in the gala parade. Rain that soaked the crisp white tunic of the lone bugler who played the “Last Post” as the standard was lowered over Government House for the final time. Rain that tried to drown out every solemn, stubborn word of Prince Charles’s speech to the “appalling old Chinese waxworks” at HMS Tamar. And rain that stained the shoulders of Governor Christopher Francis Patten’s already crumpled blue suit as he aimed one final shot across China’s bows.

“As British administration ends, we are, I believe, entitled to say that our own nation’s contribution here was to provide the scaffolding that enabled the people of Hong Kong to ascend,” he said. Huddled under complimentary umbrellas beneath a lightless, granite sky, 9,00 °Chinese and expatriate spectators looked on. “This is a Chinese city, a very Chinese city, with British characteristics. No dependent territory has been left more prosperous, none with such a rich texture and fabric of civil society. Now Hong Kong people are to run Hong Kong. That is the promise. And that is the unshakeable destiny.”

Watching the live broadcast on television from a suite in the American consulate, Miles Coolidge turned to Dave Boyle of the Visa Section and said, “In other words, Beijing can go fuck itself.”

“One country, two systems,” Boyle replied.

“Exactly.”

Miles watched as Patten reluctantly returned to the dais to accept the thunderous applause of his most loyal subjects.

“You know that can’t be easy,” he said.

“What can’t?”

“Clapping. Most of the people out there are holding umbrellas. You gotta really commit if you want to clap while you’re holding an umbrella.”

In common with about three-quarters of the international community in Hong Kong, Boyle had been drunk for the better part of five days. Yet the character of Patten’s conduct in these moments triggered something in his melancholy soul. When the governor returned to his seat and briefly bowed his head, as if holding back tears and searching for renewed strength within himself to cope with the magnitude of the occasion, the man from the Visa Section choked up.

“When a great man leaves, the heavens open,” he said, as the pitiless rain sliced across the parade ground. A boozy sleeplessness formed a knot in his Adam’s apple.

“What’s that?”

“A Chinese proverb,” Boyle replied.

In different circumstances, Miles would have poured scorn on this. You wanna hear another Chinese proverb? It takes many days of rain to wash away 150 years of shame. But he thought better of it. Guys in the Visa Section weren’t worth the trouble. Instead he said, “So you’re a fan of Fat Pang, are you?”

“Fat Pang” was the affectionate nickname that Patten had been given by the people of Hong Kong who, over a period of five years, had noted his fondness for Cantonese food, and for custard tarts in particular.

“He did his best,” Boyle replied.

Less than a kilometre away, David Waterfield raised his own silent toast to the waterlogged sunset of the British Empire and squeezed his wife’s hand. They had gathered at the Hong Kong Club on Chater Road to see out the final hours of colonial rule at a black-tie event attended by several hundred of the island’s business and diplomatic elite. When the post- Tamar fireworks began to explode over Victoria Harbour at around 8:30 p.m. there was a brief moment of panic when the glass walls of the club became so thick with condensation that a waiter had to be dispatched to the top of a ladder to wipe them clean. Thereafter, as the night sky erupted in umbrellas of light and fire, the assembled guests were afforded a clear view of proceedings.

“Beautiful,” Waterfield muttered. “Beautiful. God we do this sort of thing well.” Then he realized that somebody was missing. “Have you seen Joe Lennox at all this evening?” he asked his wife.

“No, darling” she replied. “Have you?”

The Waterfields had turned down the most sought-after and prestigious invitation of 30 June, the official handover dinner at the newly completed Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. Kenneth Lenan, on the other hand, had lobbied long and hard for his place at table. Waterfield’s number two believed that it was his right to break bread with the great and the good, to exchange knowing glances with Douglas Hurd and Sir Geoffrey Howe, to get a decent look at the all-new, all-smiling Tony Blair, and to witness Baroness Thatcher in the misery of her perpetual retirement. For some reason the menu for the event had been one of the most closely guarded secrets in the colony, but as Lenan chewed on his flavourless smoked salmon and sawed into a stuffed breast of chicken, he reflected that he could have eaten better at the airport. His suit was wet through from the celebrations at HMS Tamar and he was intensely bored by the property developer making conversation to his left. All anybody could talk about was the weather. Wasn’t it symbolic? Wasn’t it just a disaster? The only disaster, he reckoned, was that he had been forced to stand for over an hour in the shivering, air-conditioned hall while an international array of bored, exhausted VIPs had gradually made their way into dinner. The champagne had been over-chilled and, several times, the recently completed roof had dripped water onto his head.

Sovereignty was officially transferred at midnight in a ceremony at the Convention Centre which felt sterile and anti-climactic. The Union Jack came down, the flag of China went up, and then the international array of bored, exhausted VIPs made their way back to their $10,000-a-night suites at the Mandarin Oriental. Twelve hundred miles away, in Tiananmen Square, a specially invited crowd of the Party faithful consigned 150 years of shame and humiliation at the hands of the British to the dustbin of history, celebrating the safe return of their beloved Hong Kong with a fireworks display that shook the foundations of the Forbidden City. Meanwhile, the Royal Yacht Britannia slipped her moorings in Central and embarked on a final journey home, heading eastward through the Lei Yue Mun gap bearing a heavy cargo of grieving royals and weeping Patten daughters. The governor himself gave a triumphant, neo-Nixonian wave on the port-side railing and then was gone, disappearing into the bowels of the ship.

It was a chaotic night to be a journalist, fighting against deadlines and rain. Whenever I had a spare moment I tried-unsuccessfully-to reach Joe on his mobile, but neither he nor Isabella were taking calls. As Tung Chee Hwa was being sworn in as the first elected Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, I went down to the democracy rally in Central Square which had begun at about 10:30 p.m. and which straddled the midnight handover. Most of those taking part relished the irony that by the time the gathering had dispersed, at around 1:30 a.m., their right to public protest had effectively been stripped away by Beijing. They could now be arrested and locked up for promoting, say, an independent Eastern Turkestan, or for criticizing elements of Chinese government policy. Twenty-one armoured personnel carriers and 4,000 PLA troops had rolled over the border into the New Territories at midnight to be welcomed by stage-managed villagers waving flags and throwing flowers, smiles decorating their faces in spite of the wind and incessant rain. Hong Kong’s police officers had already removed their colonial insignias and replaced them with the gold star of China. British coats of arms had been taken down from government buildings and the royal emblem quietly detached from the governor’s Rolls-Royce. As Martin Lee, the founding chairman of the Hong Kong Demo cratic Party, finished a speech in front of the Legislative Council building in which he had called on Chinese President Jiang Zemin to respect the rights of the people of Hong Kong, a dry-witted wag from the Daily Telegraph, standing directly behind me, muttered, “That’ll be the last we see of him for a while. See you in the gulag, Marty,” and a bevy of hacks duly laughed in unison. It was depressing stuff. All of us were tired and wet and hot, and it felt as though something decent and hopeful had come to an end.

As a sworn enemy of the Communist Party, Ansary Tursun took little interest in the handover celebrations. At around nine o’clock, on what was a typically warm summer evening in Urumqi, he left his parents’ apartment on Tuan Jie Lu and made his way to the bazaar at Shanxi Hangzi. He walked through the narrow channels of the market, past stalls selling vegetables, sweaters, nuts and dried fruit, occasionally stopping to sift through a table of cassettes or to make brief conversation with Uighur friends from the neighbourhood. The market was crowded and noisy: Uighur songs competed with the new popular music from India and combined with the shouts and arguments of the stallholders to create a discordant yet somehow innocuous din. Large crowds were gathered around television screens showing highlights of the fireworks display over Victoria Harbour.

At the western edge of the market, Ansary became aware of a smell that he loved-pieces of lamb being grilled on a kavabtan. As it always did, the odour of cumin and meat and slow-burning charcoal triggered his appetite and he ordered kavab and nan from a young man who took his responsibilities as a chef so seriously that he barely spoke a word in conversation. As a treat, Ansary also purchased a bottle of musdek piva, opening it with his teeth and taking a first, thirst-quenching slug of lager before his lamb had finished cooking.

In order to eat, he was obliged to sit at one of the small wooden tables beside the kavabtan, because his left arm had still not recovered sufficiently from the period of solitary confinement at Lucaogu prison. Ansary had been hung from a wall by his left arm and leg for more than twenty-four hours; as a result, he could not stand up while holding both the kavab and the bottle of beer. Ansary had adjusted quickly to the constraints of a temporary injury and rarely reflected on the injustice of his physical condition; his scars were purely psychological. As he ate, placing his food on the table in order to drink the ice-cold beer, he made conversation with the mother of the young man who had served him, a middle-aged woman who wore a black skirt, a headscarf, a bright red jacket and a pair of thick, knee-length socks in which she kept the stall’s money. When she was not threading chunks of marinated lamb onto metal skewers with practised efficiency, she was scrabbling around inside the socks trying to find change for a customer.

It was only when Ansary turned to observe an argument between two cloth tradesmen at a neighbouring stall that he realized he was sitting no more than a stone’s throw from Abdul Bary. Abdul had been one of Ansary’s fellow prisoners at Lucaogu. A former student of Professor Wang Kaixuan at the University of Xinjiang, Abdul had spoken passionately in prison of his desire to topple the provincial government in Xinjiang. The two men had been released on the same day and had recovered from their ordeal at Wang’s apartment, under pretence of paying their respects for the death of his son, Wang Bin.

Aware that Abdul might be under surveillance, Ansary made no attempt to communicate with him, but calculated that his appearance was more than coincidence. He tried to watch him as carefully as possible. He was buying fruit at a nearby stall. Was he trying to tell him something with his body language? Did he want Ansary to follow him to a new location, or even to pretend that they had accidentally bumped into one another? It was not clear. Yet it would be extremely dangerous for them to be observed-or, worse, photographed-by Chinese surveillance officers or by informers within the Uighur community. The authorities needed only the slightest provocation, backed up by scant evidence, to prosecute Uighur men for treasonable activities.

Ansary finished his kavab and wiped his fingers on a small piece of cloth which he kept in the hip pocket of his trousers. He drank the rest of the beer and watched Abdul pay for a melon and a bag of apples. At no point did his fellow prisoner turn round and attempt to make eye contact. Perhaps his appearance in the market was just coincidence after all. Finally, he walked away from the stall. Ansary noted that he was not limping. The injury to his leg, inflicted by a laughing guard who had torn out the largest toenail of Abdul’s right foot, must have healed. A few metres away, Ansary noticed a Han trying on a doppa, the coloured hats worn by Uighur men throughout the year. It was an incongruous sight: they were at the minority end of town, in an area where Han were rarely seen. As Abdul passed him, disappearing into the narrow alleyways of the bazaar, the man returned the hat to its table and began to follow him. It was as obvious to Ansary as it would have been to Abdul that he was a plain-clothes surveillance officer with the PLA. Ansary turned towards the kavabtan and indicated that he wished to drink some tea.

The note was hidden between the base of the dirty metal pot in which the middle-aged woman had brewed the tea and the tray on which she carried it to Ansary’s table.

“Your friend left this for you,” she said. “Do not come here again.”

Ansary saw the crumpled piece of paper, folded once in half, and looked around to see if he was being watched. When he was sure that there were no eyes upon him, he lifted the pot, poured the tea, and opened the note. His heart was racing, but he was intrigued by Abdul’s sleight of hand. How had he given the note to the woman without being observed?

The words had been written quickly, in black ink:

Our teacher has a new friend who will provide for us. The friend is rich and has our best interests at heart. We are not to meet or to communicate until the teacher instructs us to do so. You have a class with him at dawn on the first morning of August at the place we both know. Tell as many of our brothers as you can. The teacher’s friend has a great and wonderful plan. I am glad to see you. Burn this.

Professor Wang Kaixuan claimed that he watched the Hong Kong celebrations on a small black-and-white television set at his apartment in Urumqi, although I later discovered that this, like so many of his utterings, was a lie. TRABANT had calculated-correctly as it turned out-that the eyes of Chinese Intelligence would be momentarily averted by the handover celebrations and that it would therefore be a good opportunity to hold a meeting in a room at the Holiday Inn to discuss developments with TYPHOON. Wang must have watched highlights of the broadcast when he returned home at about two o’clock in the morning. His wife was ill in bed next door, which gave him the opportunity to mutter insults under his breath whenever Chinese triumphalism threatened to get out of hand. Drinking a beer on the very couch where his slain son had slept for almost every night of his twenty-five-year life, Wang marvelled at the stoicism of the magnificent British soldiers as they paraded in the rain, and raised his glass of beer to Patten as tears fell from the governor’s eyes. How many other Han Chinese, he wondered, on this night of triumph for the Motherland, would be toasting the health of the “Triple Violator” and his “capitalist running dogs” in London?

One thing, in particular, provoked Wang’s ire. In Jiang Zemin’s speech, delivered in the Convention Centre just a few minutes after midnight, the British were accused of having subjected Hong Kong to more than a century of “vicissitudes.” I remember the Mandarin word he used- cangsang — because it provoked considerable argument among the press corps at the time, not least because nobody was entirely sure of its precise meaning. Had Jiang meant “difficulties” or “problems?” Was “vicissitudes” the correct translation? Had he really intended to insult the British at such a delicate and sensitive moment in their history? But Professor Wang Kaixuan was in no doubt, and the childish slur appalled him. What problems, after all, had Hong Kong suffered under colonial rule? A few riots in the fifties and sixties, all of them engineered by agents of Chairman Mao. By comparison, China in the same period had been decimated by communist rule: millions dead from famine; families torn apart by the insanity of the Cultural Revolution; minority ethnic groups tortured and flung into prison. The hypocrisy was breathtaking.

Towards dawn Wang shut off the television and lay awake on his son’s bed, dreaming of Dapeng Bay as the tune of “Land of Hope and Glory” formed a loop in his mind. He thought of all the lies he had told, and all the truths he had uttered in his extraordinary journey to meet the now departed Patten. What had come over him in those long, crazy weeks? Why had he believed that he had even the slightest chance of fulfilling his quest? He might have drowned. He could have been shot or imprisoned. And yet he had succeeded, in a fashion that he could never have imagined. Western intelligence now given him the opportunity to make sense of his loss and rage. Lenan and Coolidge had allowed Wang Kaixuan the chance to avenge his son’s murder.

One question, however, continued to puzzle him. What had happened to the first of them, the spy from Government House? Wang had warmed to the young graduate of Wadham College Oxford, who had seen through his lies and reacted with genuine horror to the brutalities of Yining and Baren. Why had he never seen him again? What on earth had become of Mr. John Richards?