Empress Orchid - Anchee Min [75]
I gently asked if I could help. He tossed the treaty to me. “You will get sick to death too if you read too much of it.”
I went through the document without a break. I had always wondered what gave foreigners the power to coerce China to do what they wanted, like the opening of ports or the selling of opium. Why, I had asked myself, couldn’t we flatly say no and chase them away? Now I began to understand. They had no respect for the Emperor of China. It seemed a given to them that Hsien Feng was weak and defenseless. What really didn’t make sense to me, however, was the way our court handled the situation. Those who were supposedly the masterminds of the country simply insisted that China’s five-thousand-year civilization was a power in itself. They believed that China was inviolable. Over and over I heard them cry in their writings, “China cannot lose because it represents Heaven’s morals and principles!”
Yet the truth was so clear even I could see it: China had been repeatedly assaulted and her Emperor shamed. I wanted to yell at them. Had Emperor Hsien Feng’s decrees the power to stop the foreign invasion or unite the peasants? Hadn’t His Majesty given enough time for the magic plans of his advisors to work?
I looked at my husband day in and day out when he studied the treaties. Each sentence caused him anguish. His facial muscles twitched, as did his fingers, and he pressed his stomach with his hands as if he wished to pull his guts out. He asked me to heat up his tea to the boiling point. He poured the scalding water down his throat.
“You are cooking yourself!” I cried.
“It helps,” he said with a tired look in his eyes.
I hid in the chamber-pot room and wept whenever I boiled Hsien Feng’s tea. I saw his pain return the moment he went back to work.
“What am I going to do with this mess of mine?” he said every night before bed.
“Tomorrow morning the rooster will sing again and the sunlight will make a difference.” I helped him into the sheets.
“I can’t bear the rooster’s singing anymore,” he said. “Actually, I haven’t heard it for quite a while. I hear the sound of my body shutting down. I hear my neck squeak when it turns. My toes and fingers feel like wood. The holes in my lungs must be getting bigger. It feels like there are slugs parked there.”
Yet we had to carry on the façade of nobility. As long as Emperor Hsien Feng was alive, he had to attend the audiences. I skipped meals and sleep in order to read the documents and offer him a summary. I wanted to be his neck, his heart and his lungs. I wanted him to hear the rooster sing again and feel the warmth of the sunlight. When I was with His Majesty and he happened to be well rested, I would ask questions.
I asked about the origin of opium. It seemed to me that the decline of the Ch’ing Dynasty had started with the importation of it. I knew parts of the story well, others not at all.
His Majesty explained that the infestation started during the sixteenth year of the reign of his father, Tao Kuang. “Although my father banned opium, the corrupt ministers and merchants managed to carry on a secret business. By 1840, the situation had become so out of control that half of the court were either addicts themselves or the supporters of a policy that legalized opium. Or both. In a rage my father ordered an end to opium once and for all. He summoned his most trusted minister to take up the matter …” Pausing, His Majesty looked at me. “Do you know his name?”
“Commissioner Lin?”
His Majesty looked at me with adoration when I told him my favorite part of Lin Tse-shu’s story, which was when he arrested hundreds of opium dealers and confiscated more than a hundred thousand pounds of contraband. It was not that His Majesty was ignorant of such details. I simply sensed that it would bring him pleasure to experience the moment again. “In the name of the Emperor, Lin set a deadline and ordered all foreign merchants to