River of Smoke - Amitav Ghosh [135]
You must not think I was completely unprepared for the meeting: in the days preceding I had been to some trouble to inform myself about this magnate. His family, Zadig Bey had told me, has been conducting business in Canton for hundreds of years and one of his ancestors was among the founders of the Co-Hong guild, in the middle years of the last century. Yet they are not from the province of Canton – they hail from another maritime province, Fujian, where lies the port of Amoy – and despite their long residence in the city they are careful to maintain many of the ways and customs of their ancestors. They are now among the wealthiest of the Co-Hong families, and Punhyqua himself has a mandarin’s rank and is entitled to wear certain buttons in his cap: he is said to be a great sensualist, with a vast harem of wives and concubines, and an epicure too, famous for his banquets.
These accounts had led me to wonder whether Punhyqua might not be a little like our Calcutta Nabobs – insufferably conceited and consequential. But I need have had no fear on this score: he is a grandfatherly man with a kindly twinkle in his eyes. There is not a chittack of conceit about him. When we came upon him he was taking his ease in an airy pavilion, with windows of blue and white glass. He was dressed in the simplest way, in a quilted jacket and a robe of plain cotton, and he was lying on a kind of divan, with a little teapoy at his side. He greeted us in the most hospitable way and inquired at some length after Lamqua, and after Jacqua’s family. Then he asked about Mr Chinnery, whom he knows well, having had his portrait painted by him. I happened to express some curiosity about this work, which, like many of Mr Chinnery’s Chinese paintings, was unknown to me, so he had it fetched from his house – and it proved to be one of my Uncle’s finest, executed in his Grand Manner, with many dabs and flourishes.
Only after these preliminaries had been completed did I show him the camellia paintings– and you would have been thrilled, dear Puggly, to observe his response, for his face lit up in such a way that you could not doubt that he had recognized something. At once he summoned a retainer and sent him racing off along the winding pathways. I thought for sure the man would return with a potted camellia and thereby put an end to our search. But no! He came back with a roll of silk, from the inside of which there emerged a picture that was very similar to the one I had brought with me – the flowers were arranged at different angles, which changed the composition slightly, but even to my unpractised eye it was evident that the blooms were of the same variety. As for the colours, the brushwork and the paper, they were like enough to suggest that the two pictures had been painted by the same hand and at about the same time.
I can see you now, my dear Puggly-mem, sitting with your brow furrowed and holding your breath as you ask: whose was this hand?
I regret to say you are shortly to be disappointed …
… for Punhyqua did not know who the illustrator was: the only thing he could remember was that he was a young Canton painter but employed by an Englishman – a botanist or gardener who had come to Canton some thirty or thirty-five years before. And strange to say, it was this man – the fanqui – who had given Punhyqua the picture and for the same reason that Mr Penrose has entrusted me with his: that is to say, in the hope that it might help in tracing the flower. But the variety was unknown to Punhyqua, and despite making extensive inquiries he has been able to learn nothing about it. So far as he knows the Englishman was never able to find any trace of it either.
Now once again, I can see you asking yourself: so who was this fanqui, this Englishman in whose footsteps you follow?
And you may be sure that I did not neglect to put this question to my host – but to no avail alas, for he could not remember the man’s name (which is not surprising, I suppose, after a gap of thirty years!).
This is all that I would have to tell you today,