The Silver Lotus Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  This book is dedicated to my beautiful and gifted wife, Gail Knight Steinbeck.

  Proposing to her has proven to be the only truly ingenious thing I have ever done.

  In the far off Kingdoms of the Eastern Sea

  The Silver Lotus sings for me.

  And in the night, when dream’s alight,

  I’ll hear her songs once more.

  J. M. H.

  1

  THE WEALTHY, influential, and much admired Master Chu-Woo Yee was considered one of the most astute and clever grain factors in Canton. In fact, he dealt in a great many varieties of exported and imported goods, but for all intents and purposes he preferred to be known as a simple grain merchant, an act of false modesty that all pretended to believe for the sake of good manners. It was said by some that Master Chu-Woo Yee was so canny in affairs of business that he could, by virtue of his wide network of mercantile correspondents and traveling associates, predict the market price of numerous goods many months in advance of their availability. This was especially true of grains and minerals. He often traveled great distances to see things for himself, to talk to farmers and miners and anyone else who could be relied upon for accurate intelligence concerning matters of interest. He once sailed all the way to Java to procure a rich cargo of medicinal herbs, and then went on to Madagascar to trade for precious minerals, pearls, and those exotic elements so prized by Chinese pharmacologists and doctors. Rarity had a virtue all its own in this trade, and Master Yee possessed an instinct for such things. He returned home with his cargo loaded into three sturdy Arabian ships, and safely warehoused his goods until after the end of the trading season. When the typhoons and winter storms closed the shipping lanes, and scarcity raised prices, Master Yee gradually released his goods onto the market at the best prices and made a considerable fortune again. It was well-known that even the imperial household physicians, renowned medical scholars known for their professional discretion, were counted on his books as valued clients.

  However brilliant Master Yee’s prognostications were in the course of business, his ability to foretell the future within the sanctity of his own home was almost nonexistent. Evidence for his lack of foresight could be found in the fact that every time his wife was with child, Master Yee predicted sons, and on each occasion his beloved wife presented him with a daughter. But these were no simple girls to be raised for strategic marriages. Indeed, Master Yee found to his utter amazement that he had sired three of the most talented daughters in the empire. All three girls were considered great beauties, but above and beyond appearances, they were each profoundly gifted in a number of talents. The oldest was New Moon, who at the age of eighteen was a most accomplished musician, singer, and composer. The next daughter, Winter Light, was a marvelous and inventive poet who composed beautifully complex and intriguing verse. She also gained a firm reputation for her magnificently elegant calligraphy. Even the imperial governor applauded her talents and respectfully commissioned several of her unique scrolls for his private library. But it was his youngest daughter, Silver Lotus, affectionately known in the family as Lady Yee, who proved a constant source of wonder and consternation to her parents, teachers, and friends. Every time her father returned from one of his long journeys, it was to discover that his youngest daughter had added another accomplishment to her quiver of remarkable talents.

  By the time Lady Yee was seven years old, she could already speak, read, and write in both Mandarin and Cantonese and could calculate extensive lists of numbers on her abacus with absolute precision. It proved a little disconcerting when it was discovered that she could do her calculations twice as fast as her father, or any of his regiment of clerks. Sometimes she would make a game of challenging her father’s chief steward to tests of speed and accuracy in mathematics, and it soon came to pass that she never lost a competition of this kind to anyone, regardless of his experience or ability. And that wasn’t the least of the surprises Lady Yee had in store for her parents.

  When Master Yee returned from a five-month trading journey to India and Madagascar, Lady Yee had just celebrated her fourteenth birthday. He returned to discover that his youngest treasure had mastered passable English and very good French, and was beginning to study Italian under the tutelage of her father’s warehouse master, who had served the Italian consul in Hong Kong for ten years in the same capacity.

  In her brief fourteen years, Lady Yee had also managed to learn a great deal from her older sisters. She could play several musical instruments quite well, sing wonderfully, and compose lovely poetry in her own right. Her calligraphy lacked a little grace, and her sisters said she brushed her characters like a street scribe, but the copious notes she made relating to her studies and numerous interests caused her to write rapidly, and it was a habit she found difficult to break except when writing formal letters or poetry.

  Lady Yee’s sisters were much sought after as prospective brides, and they were soon married to men of prominence, influence, and wealth. Only Lady Yee resisted the idea of being married off. She had, since infancy, been in the habit of making up her own mind about everything, and Master Yee had come to love her too much to thwart her aspirations in anything that gave her joy. He wisely let the question of prospective husbands lie unspoken. He assumed that if anyone was going to choose a husband for his daughter, it would most likely be Lady Yee herself. This, of course, went against all tradition, but Master Yee knew that some customs had to be adapted to fit extraordinary circumstances, or at least configured to coincide with Lady Yee’s requirements, which were much the same. Thus, as the saying goes, is a doting father ensnared by the love he bears for a brilliant and beautiful daughter.

  If the truth were known, Master Yee was not all that pleased with the idea of losing his beloved daughter. She was the last and most endearing of his treasures, and he couldn’t imagine his life without her wit, laughter, and generosity of spirit. Master Yee wasn’t the only one who harbored deep affection for the Silver Lotus of Yee. There wasn’t one member of Master Yee’s extensive business family of agents, factors, stewards, and clerks who, having once known the incomparable child, wouldn’t have given his life to protect the beautiful and wise Lady Yee from all adversity. Master Yee once quipped that if he really required his company to focus all its efforts on one goal, all he needed was to have Lady Yee make the request as a personal favor, and every man jack of them would have surrendered all his waking hours to please her. Master Yee would shake his graying head in amused contemplation and admit that his daughter had the ability to charm a rock to dance to her tune. So compassionate and modest was her nature that none could sense even the slightest flaw except, perhaps, her driving ambition to learn and know everything she could. This was a most unusual character trait in a young girl, and one that almost always intimidated the young men she came in contact with.

  In Master Yee’s extended household, there were those few jealous souls, hungry ghosts as it were, who thought that Master Yee had
indulged his daughters beyond the bounds of tradition and decorum, but most wisely kept their sentiments strictly to themselves. The last individual that mustered the audacity to openly voice a critical opinion of Master Yee’s indulgences was his great-aunt on his mother’s side. She paid the price when she suddenly found herself living on a mulberry plantation in the provinces a month later. Yet it was Lady Yee who wrote her long, newsy letters about the family, and sent a constant stream of little gifts of exotic fruits and the special sweetmeats the old woman was so fond of. And it was Lady Yee who earnestly petitioned her father to bring the aging lady home, where she was happiest. It took a while, but Master Yee eventually relented. As it turned out, in the end Master Yee’s great-aunt became one of Lady Yee’s staunchest proponents and confidantes. When she died two years later, she left a will bequeathing Lady Yee her treasure of beautiful jewels. Master Yee said that her collection of rare emeralds and her twelve large star sapphires were worth more than two thousand ounces of fine gold, and the antique ivory casket she left, which contained two hundred large matched pearls called quail’s eggs, was worth perhaps as much again. This made Lady Yee wealthy in her own right, but that fact didn’t seem to impress her very much. The first thing she did was finance an endowment to ensure that her benefactor’s grave was perpetually tended by an established brotherhood of Taoist monks whose business it was to look after the venerable dead. This act was considered a remarkable sign of devotion and gratitude from a sixteen-year-old girl.

  Master Yee, being a man of wealth and influence, had acquired his fair share of detractors and enemies, but he had always been able to evade the snares and pitfalls his adversaries had devised to bring him down. This was hardly unusual in the highly competitive atmosphere of international trade with the Eastern and Western barbarians. He had survived many attempts to undermine his influence and power, and he had evaded the axe by practicing two rigid principles. First, he insisted that all his business dealings, whether with the authorities or with foreign traders, be as scrupulously honest and transparent as possible. He made sure that all his books were balanced and open to examination by the authorities at any time. Second, he absolutely refused to deal in contraband or smuggling of any kind, and studiously avoided associating with those traders and ship’s captains who did. But like many in his line of work, the very fact that he entertained the foreign devils in his own home opened Master Yee to floating speculations that he was somehow in league with the round-eyes. This was ridiculous, of course, but hardly unheard of. There were always a number of traders who would do almost anything for gold. The opium trade, despite the devastation it had caused to the empire, had attracted numerous categories of criminals and bandits who suffered virtually no qualms about enslaving their own people to the insidious power of the drug.

  Master Yee had always been a creature of high moral principles. It was part of his nature. He often said that had he been alive at the time, he would have most definitely fought on the side of the Boxers in their fatal attempts to expel the foreign drug merchants. He had watched his own beloved grandfather slowly surrender to the netherworld of opium. The venerable old man had taken to using the drug to alleviate the excruciating pain caused by a lingering injury resulting from a fall. By the time he realized that he had become hopelessly addicted, it was too late. The poor gentleman was so consumed with self-loathing and remorse as a result of his actions that he took his own life rather than burden his family with the shameful consequences of his predicament. As a result, Master Yee had come to the conclusion that opiates in the hands of a qualified doctor were one thing, but opium in the hands of the patient was a recipe for disaster, and inevitably a measured course toward a reprehensible and unnecessary death. Master Yee inculcated his beliefs in all those who worked for him, as well as his family, and even funded a clinic for those poor souls trapped in the tentacles of the drug. His feelings on the matter were so strong that he strictly refused to do business with those companies that had once been responsible for the opium trade, and in some cases were still involved in smuggling the insidious drug into China disguised as other products, and did so with the connivance of corrupt state officials who took money to betray their own people. These shameless officials were also his enemies, for they knew only too well that Master Yee would happily betray them to the courts if he ever got his hands on evidence of their involvement. They also knew he would reward anyone who came forth with such evidence, and they lived in fear that one of their number would supply it, if only to save his own neck from the block. These men would have rejoiced to discover that Master Yee had been bested by one of his competitors, and substantially reduced in wealth, respect, and influence, but none had managed to snare him as yet, and it was highly unlikely they would manage it anytime in the near future. Master Yee had always cultivated his relationships with honest and dedicated officials, and he counted many prominent scholars and administrators as friends, and occasionally even colleagues in one venture or another. But if it could be said that there was one particular driving force that encouraged Master Yee to hold a moral and upstanding course in all things, then one need look no further than the pride, love, and respect he cherished from his daughters, in particular Lady Yee. It was Lady Yee, who had by now read all the most important translations of Buddhist texts, who sometimes reminded her father that there was often greater power in total transparency than the shaded substance of subterfuge, especially when one is surrounded with jealous rivals eager to whisper dangerous aspersions in the ears of authority. Master Yee, in a moment of amused paternal pride, had once confided to a judge of his acquaintance that if Lady Yee had been born a male, she would have already taken first place in all her civil examinations and be well on her way to becoming a figure of authority on her own.

  2

  OF ALL THE FOREIGNERS, and there weren’t that many, who were allowed the privilege of being entertained under Master Yee’s roof, the one that fascinated and intrigued him most was a young Yankee ship captain who traded on his own behalf and was as vigorously honest and forthright as Master Yee himself. He was handsome, for a round-eye, with long curly auburn hair, which he oiled and clubbed at the back in the style of British tars. His name was Captain Jeremiah Macy Hammond, and he was one of the last of a long line of the great Nantucket seamen. He was heir to a great tradition of whalers, but whale oil being no longer in fashion for fuel, those Macys who still clung to the sea went into trade with the distant ports that were already familiar on their charts. But Captain Hammond was unique in many respects. Not the least of his peculiarities involved his mode of trade and transport.

  In an age when steamships had started to dominate transoceanic trade, Captain Hammond still transported his cargos under sail. He had made enough money in the first few years to purchase a small fleet of older wooden four- and five-mast gaff-rigged schooners. What they might have lacked in speed, they more than compensated for by their dependability, generous cargo capacity, and economy of operation. The crews required to sail these great ships were a fraction of what was required to man the great square-rigged clippers of an earlier generation, and they carried every bit as much cargo. Accepting the utility of the age, when Captain Hammond refurbished his ships for the Eastern trade, he equipped each with a gasoline-powered cutter that was powerful enough to service the ship as a small tug to help it enter and exit port if necessary. They could also tow the mother ships when the winds went slack, or when faced with a dangerous lee shore and contrary winds and currents. But in any event, Captain Hammond was saved the expense of feeding gluttonous steam engines tons of fuel from spacious coal bunkers. The space that the large steam engines and coal supply occupied might otherwise be better used to carry cargo. His schooners had one other substantial advantage: The chances of boiler explosions and fire were substantially reduced; subsequently his insurance costs were held to a minimum.

  Captain Hammond also stuck to a traditional Yankee method of making profits under the axiom of “a penny saved is a
penny earned.” He carried only relative nonperishables and sold his cargos at reasonable prices. Yet he still made better profits than his steam-powered competition, and without the added expense of having to sign on a gaggle of engineers, mechanics, and stokers to run his ships. In some cases these engineers made better wages than most ship’s officers, and for doing less work.

  The captain was also a very pragmatic and insightful trader. He carried into China only those goods the Chinese really wanted, and in that regard he became well-known for his cargos of medicinal goods so prized in Chinese pharmacopeia. For instance, when he discovered the highly prized value the Chinese doctors placed upon an herbal root called ginseng, and was told that a wild species of the plant grew deep in the deciduous forests of eastern America, he decided it must become a staple of his trade. So he sent his cousin, Jonathon Macy, east as a purchasing agent to make bargains with various eastern Indian tribes to hunt, gather, and dry the wild roots. Captain Hammond put forward a generous offer of five dollars a pound paid in silver or currency. It cost him twenty cents a bushel to ship the ginseng by rail to San Francisco, and another dollar a bushel to ship the cargo all the way to China. The captain paid little or no export duties because the American customs agents deemed the product useless, and valued it as such. The captain might have realized substantially more money on Mexican bird guano, but the malodorous guano lingered and polluted the holds with a cloying stench that permeated all other cargo long after the guano sacks had been off-loaded. And nobody in his right mind would lay down hard cash for a cargo of fabrics, spices, or anything else that smelled like guano.

  The captain studied his subject well, and even made inquiries of noted Chinese pharmacists. He was told that the wild ginseng plant is a crafty master of invisibility. When seen from above, ginseng looks like a most unremarkable little plant. Nothing about its structure, leaf shape, or color stands out at all; even its diminutive flowers are difficult to see because they only bloom late in the day and blossom fully into the night. Morning light finds the buds closed again. To hunt these innocuous little plants requires that the searcher focus closely on the ground in dense and overgrown forests, no easy task at the best of times, especially in the lengthening shadows of twilight.