documents, which were brought every evening by his eunuchs. He would work until exhausted. Night after night I heard him weeping in utter despair.
A handsome rooster was brought to his garden to wake him up at dawn. Hsien Feng preferred the singing of a rooster to the chimes of clocks. The rooster had a large red crown, black feathers and emerald green tail feathers. It had the look of a bully, with vicious eyes and a beak like a hook. Its claws were as large as a vulture’s. The Imperial rooster woke us with loud cries, often before dawn. The cry reminded me of someone who was cheering:
One night Hsien Feng threw a pile of documents on the bed and asked me to take a look. He pounded his chest and yelled, “Any tree will bear a rope for me. Why should I hesitate?”
I started to read. My limited schooling didn’t allow me to go much deeper than the meanings of primary words. It was not difficult to understand the problems, though. They were all anyone had talked about since I had entered the Forbidden City.
I don’t recall exactly when Emperor Hsien Feng began to regularly ask me to read his documents. I was so driven by the desire to help that I ignored the rule that a concubine was forbidden to learn the court’s business. The Emperor was too tired and sick to care about restrictions.
“I have just ordered the beheading of a dozen eunuchs who have become opium addicts,” His Majesty told me one evening.
“What did they do?” I asked.
“They needed money to buy the drug, so they stole from the treasury. I can’t believe that this disease has invaded my own backyard. Imagine what it’s doing to the nation!”
He pushed himself out of bed and went to his desk. He flipped the pages of a thick document and said, “I am in the middle of reviewing a treaty that the British forced on us, and I am constantly distracted by things that come up unexpectedly.”
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 facade 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 turn over their opium.” My voice was as clear as a professional storyteller’s. “But he was ignored. Refusing to give in, Commissioner Lin collected the opium by force. On April 22, 1840, Lin set fire to twenty thousand cases of opium. He announced that China would stop trading with Great Britain.”
Emperor Hsien Feng nodded. “According to my father, the burning pit was as large as a lake. What a hero Lin was!”
Suddenly short of breath, His Majesty hammered on his chest and coughed and fell onto his pillow. His eyes closed. When he opened them again, he asked, “Has something happened to the rooster? Shim told me that yesterday the guards had seen weasels.”
I called in An-te-hai and was shocked to learn that the rooster had vanished.
“A weasel got it, my lady. I saw it myself this morning. A fat weasel the size of a baby pig.”
I told His Majesty about the rooster, and his expression grew dark. “Heaven’s signs are all here. The touch of a finger will put the dynasty out of existence.” He bit his lower lip so hard that it began to bleed. There was a hissing sound in his lungs.
“Come, Orchid,” he said. “I want to tell you something.”
I sat down by him quietly.
“You must remember the things I have told you,” he said. “If we should have a son, I expect you to pass on my words to him.”
“Yes, I will.” I held His Majesty’s feet and kissed them. “If we should have a son.”
“Tell him this.” He struggled to push the sentences out of his chest. “After Commissioner Lin’s action, the barbarians declared war against China. They crossed the oceans with sixteen armed ships along with four thousand soldiers.”
I didn’t want him to go on, so I told him that I was aware of all this. When he didn’t believe me, I decided to prove myself. “The foreign ships entered the mouth of the Pearl River and fired at our guards at Canton,” I said, remembering what my father had told me.
His Majesty’s eyes stared into space. His pupils were fixed on the sculpted dragon head that hung from the ceiling. “July twenty-seventh… was the saddest day in my father’s life,” he uttered. “It was the day… when the barbarians destroyed our navy and took Kowloon.” The Emperor drew in his shoulders and coughed uncontrollably.
“Please rest, Your Majesty.”
“Let me finish, Orchid. Our child must know this… In the next few months the barbarians took the ports of Amoy, Chou Shan, Ningpo, and Tinghai… Without stopping…”
I finished it for him. “Without stopping, the barbarians headed north toward Tientsin and took the city.”
