The Harem and the Barbarian [PART 1]
The Harem and the Barbarian: Beijing’s Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, Great Wall, and More
Date: Monday, October 10th – Saturday, October 15th, 2016
I did not eat deep-fried scorpion on a stick.
They were being sold at the Wangfujing Night Market, two minutes walk from my hotel. I was a few blocks from the Forbidden City off Wangfujing Avenue. An upscale shopping district was about a few minutes walk down Wangfujing, and at night booths sprung up in alleyways off this major thoroughfare selling brass or clay statues of dragons, horses, tigers and qilins, magnets, laser pointers, green camo hats with the Chinese communist star on them, silk scrolls with tigers, phoenixes or the Great Wall on them, and t-shirts proclaiming “I [heart] BJ”. There were ubiquitous bottles of milk, Yanjing and Tsingtao beer, lamb on a stick, grilled snake and tentacles on a stick, tripe (strips of stomach lining), deep-fried tarantulas, footlong millipedes and, yes, deep-fried scorpions on a stick, which were skewered through while still alive – twitching and squirming, their tails jabbing about – and then deep fried upon their sale.
(One young woman walked by me one night at this market, munching off a two-foot stick or deep-fried tentacle pieces. I, as a sheer gut reaction, spat out a disgusted grunt: “Uurgh.” She, standing not three feet from me, heard me say it, and looked up to see the uncontrolled – and, admittedly, rather rude – reaction of an uncultured Westerner to her delicacy, and burst out laughing, sniggering to her friend as she passed.)
Wangfujing itself was closed to vehicular traffic for the 5th Beijing Wangfujing International Brand Festival, and beer and ice cream shacks were erected, salesmen dressed up as Mongol aristocrats outside shoe stores, police were out with their red and blue flashing epaulettes and bomb-sniffing German shepherds.
You walk the street at night. Buddhists and Christians perform dance numbers in the sidewalk, or in front of St. Joseph’s church. It’s a little chilly in Beijing in October, and I was just wearing a t-shirt. You’re a racial minority, and stand out like a sore thumb; everyone knows you’re a tourist. At major tourist sites like the Temple of Heaven or the Summer Palace young women try and sneak pictures of themselves with you, until you catch them, offer them a picture and they’re giddy as can be, linking arms with you and making the peace sign. But at night, it’s a different type of woman that comes up to you.
The first was from Harbin, in Manchuria. She was pretty, perhaps about thirty, sitting with a woman a little older on a sidewalk bench. She spoke exceptional English, though her friend seemed to speak fairly little. “Aren’t you cold?” the young one in red asks. Sit, talk for a minute. Where are you from? Ah, Canada, it’s colder there, right? You’re more used to the cold. Many Chinese people there, yes? Many immigrants? Your Chinese is very good. Where did you learn?[1]
[1: We were conversing almost exclusively in English, but I’d said the odd word in Mandarin.]
Within thirty seconds or so she got to the point. How about we go for a beer, just down the street, we can talk some more? Get out of the cold?
No, I told her politely, saying I had to get back soon. I had an early morning the next day, off to see the Forbidden City. She was insistent, but when she saw I wasn’t going to fall for it, she quickly conceded and ended the conversation.
The second one appeared beside me like a ghost as I was walking back towards the hotel. Same general questions. Where you from? Lots of Chinese people in Canada, no? You here on vacation? Hey, would you like to go to a bar and get some beer? No, well how about coffee? How about you give me money for a beer and I’ll go alone?
Then she cursed me out and ran off the other way. The third, maybe sixty seconds later, leapt off a bench and jogged towards me. Hello, where are you from? I just shook my head and held up a hand, and kept walking.
They were all women, all around thirty or so, all spoke exceptional English. Reasonably pretty. But then why was I ignoring their advances?
This sort of thing is on dozens of videos and blog posts on travel to China, it was listed in the Beijing travel book I carried with me in my pocket, and it’s right on the Government of Canada travel advisory website. It’s the tea house scam, and it seems to be the number one thing to be on the lookout for in Beijing.[2]
[2: Apart from espousing the wrong political opinions. More on this in a little bit.]
Generally she’ll suggest going to a tea house. She’ll say she’s a student of English, wants practise with it. You go to the tea house, order a couple drinks, you naturally pay for hers, and you either have neglected to ask the price, or when they gave you a number like three (yuan or renminbi[3]), it was shorthand for three hundred. When the bill comes, it’s exorbitant, and they physically won’t let you leave until you’ve paid it. She, of course, is in on the scam with the tea house.
[3: The exchange rate, at the time of writing, is ¥5.12 to CAD$1]
I was approached by one textbook tea house scam on the Friday. I was out visiting the Foreign Language Bookstore, in the middle of this shopping district. No DVDs of Legend of Yuan Empire Founder, a 2013 HBS series on Kublai Khan. As I was leaving, though, a book almost jumped off the shelf at me. It was on Emperor Puyi and his harem. Yes, I think I’ll get this.[4] Walking out, a woman bounded up from a sidewalk bench and ran over to me. They’re hungry like vultures. Hello, where you from? Toronto? Vancouver? Are you here on vacation? And so on it goes.
[4: The Last Emperor and His Five Wives by Professor Wang Qingxiang. It cost me about $22 Canadian; looking it up back in Canada, the cheapest I saw was $65 plus shipping. Despite the efforts of the translator, much of it is in a somewhat broken, halting grammar.]
She was also around thirty, had a partner behind her that was more submissive. She wore a white turtleneck with her hair down and had a thin, wispy, feminine moustache. She claimed to be from Hangzhou – you know Hangzhou, it’s down near Shanghai – and was here practising her English. Her English was already quite good, but she apparently needed a refresher. Would I like to go for some tea and practise?
Wangfujing Avenue is in the heart of downtown Beijing. Tienanmen Square isn’t far, and the same with Beihai Park, the “earliest and best preserved imperial garden in the world.”[5] North of Tienanmen Square is the Forbidden City, the former centre of the Chinese empire and imperial palace in which the emperors lived. This one-hundred-and-eighty-acre palace, now a museum, is surrounded by a moat, contained within a massive red-bricked wall, and contains nine hundred and eighty buildings, all held together by not a single nail. Completed in 1420, it was first used by Zhu Di, third emperor and the great usurper of the Ming Dynasty (he’d committed a coup d’état against his nephew). The last emperor, Puyi – who, after his abdication would become a Japanese war criminal, tried as such by the People’s Republic in 1950 and imprisoned for a period of ten years – was forced from the palace in 1924.
[5: Quote taken from a placard outside the park.]
Early on the Wednesday morning, I shook hands with the tour guide that would show a small group around this elaborate palace, as well as the Temple of Heaven and Summer Palace. His name was Bruce Lee, or so he called himself. His driver showed up not long after with a cargo van. We toured with a lovely older British couple – actually, he was born in Canada and she was Georgian-Russian, though they hailed from London – as well as a clueless Australian woman. The British couple were in the middle of a several weeks-long Eurasian tour, which began in St. Petersburg, then along the Trans-Siberian from Moscow to Lake Baikal, into Mongolia, and they were flying out the following day to Lhasa, Tibet. Just the day before, they’d toured the Badaling site of the Great Wall with Bruce Lee.
“It’s packed, shoulder to shoulder,” said John, the husband, bringing up pictures on his phone with crowds that looked like a Hong Kong subway station. He’d toured Mutianyu, another major site, about fifteen years before, and so this time around they went to Badaling.
Mutianyu was the one that I’d wanted to see, as I knew it was less crowded, less commercialized and more hilly, with steep, never-ending staircases and a wavy course along the mountains. It’s about ninety minutes outside Beijing, as opposed to Badaling, which is sixty. Not really all that far north when you consider the constant threat, the constant raids, from barbarians beyond the Wall.
The hotel concierge desk employed three people, with three different levels of fluency in English. The youngest of them, Matthew, spoke barely a word. Boyd was better, could book tours and answer basic questions about the airport shuttle bus, but struggled greatly with it. Eason, however, was practically fluent. Mutianyu was not offered through that hotel, but no worries, assured Eason. “I can hire a private car for you to go there if you like. Eight hundred yuan for the day. You can leave whenever you like.” The driver, however, will speak only a little English. I had to think on this. The concierge desk was closing in ten minutes. “Just talk to Boyd tomorrow,” says Eason. Boyd, however, didn’t speak enough English to know about this arrangement. He tried flipping through a tour book and priced out something closer to 1,600. So the Great Wall we’ll leave until later in the week. In the meantime, I booked the tour with Bruce Lee.
“Forbidden City,” says Bruce Lee, standing just inside the Meridian Gate, “is from Ming, Qing Dynasties. Total, twenty-four emperors live inside.” He was holding the little yellow flag of his tour company on a collapsible stick, and spoke largely with his hands. The courtyard inside was tremendous. All the buildings were in vibrant colours, and had ornate, Oriental xieshan designs. There were dragons carved into the wood and elaborately painted. The emperor’s throne room is in line symmetrically north of the Meridian Gate, with civic offices to the one side and military offices to the other. Elaborate stone designs line the pathway just inside the Meridian Gate, leading to the expansive courtyard of interlocking brick, which, as Bruce Lee explained, was fourteen layers deep – almost a meter and a half thick. The emperors, it seemed, were paranoid about enemies tunnelling in.
“Inside the Forbidden City, you including two parts: Front Court and Inner Palace. Front Court used for the emperor for grand ceremony, meeting, conference. The Inner Palace for the emperor, empress, concubines.”
Deep inside the Inner Court, one of the buildings we saw (through a pane of glass) was the imperial bedchamber. There were many beds inside, each draped in silk embroidered with phoenixes and dragons, and covered with curtains and the lot. Sometimes there would be a version of a wedding ceremony for a concubine (this would probably depend on the emperor’s whim, and her rank as a concubine), but nothing as elaborate as the ceremony for his wife. The wife, Lee explained, was not chosen by the emperor, but usually by the emperor’s parents. The father, usually the retired emperor, still had a certain patriarchal function within the royal family, even after stepping aside from the throne (which they didn’t always do, Lee was quick to add). Divorce, likewise, was something decided by the emperor’s parents. These were political affairs, not personal. Besides, for the monarch’s sexual whims, for his perpetual satisfaction, that’s why he had concubines.
“How many concubines?” Bruce Lee had asked before we got to the emperor’s bedchamber, standing just inside the Gate of Heavenly Purity, separating the Front Court and Inner Palace. “Three thousand.”
Let’s suppose you’re a Chinese emperor for a moment. It’s 1449. You’re Zhu Qiyu, the second son of the Xuande Emperor. Your half-brother, Qizhen, just ten months older than you, ascended to the throne in 1435, at just the age of eight (at least one of you was born from one of your father’s concubines). When he was twenty-one, he decided he needed to prove himself in battle. As it so happened, the Ming did have a powerful enemy out there causing problems, and one who was growing in strength every day. His name was Esen. John Man, in his book The Great Wall: The Extraordinary Story of China’s Wonder of the World, says,
“[Esen] inherited control of the western Mongol groups, the Oirat. In the 1440s he took over what are today Uzbekistan and the other Central Asian -stans, then the Chinese-Mongol borderland groups along the Gobi to Manchuria. ... It looked as if one day he might become another Genghis and lead the Mongols to reclaim China. One way he increased his popularity at home was to exploit the ‘tribute system’ by which China dealt with the ‘barbarians’. ... The reality behind the euphemistic exchange of barbarian ‘tribute’ and imperial ‘gifts’ was trade ... but also payment to keep the peace, always with the (unstated) threat of blackmail – that if the emperor’s gifts were not good enough, the barbarian leaders might go on the war-path. ... This was nothing but extortion.”[6]
[6: Man, pg. 186-187.]
In other words, the Chinese had better pay up if they don’t want raids to take these things by force. The Chinese would often enter into treaty agreements with their barbarian neighbours to keep the peace. Sometimes the Chinese emperor would symbolically adopt the Mongol khan, forming a father-son, an uncle-nephew, or, when barbarian power was particularly strong, a brother-brother relationship. Often times Chinese princesses were carted north to become the latest wife of a khan to seal such agreements. Perhaps you’ve even seen some of your sisters sent north to Esen.
So in 1449, under the guidance of a corrupt eunuch, your august brother raises a half-million-man army in just two days, and sets out north. And doesn’t disaster happen. In a confrontation known as the Crisis of Tumu Fortress, not far from Badaling, Esen, alerted of your brother’s movements by his intelligence network, acts quickly and attacks, cutting off the royal contingent from the body of the army. Qizhen falls into Esen’s hands. The court in Beijing receives a letter: Half your army lies dead, and I have your emperor. You will send me....
Beijing reorganizes. A new minister of war has now pushed through a motion that Qizhen be declared a retired emperor – this being the quick and easy fix to the hostage situation. In essence, it means Beijing is abandoning your brother, while at the same time trying to put a nice face on it. And the war minister... well, guess who he’s decided should be your brother’s replacement.
You come to the throne just one day after your twenty-first birthday. As a prince, you’d have had your own concubines, but they were not (comparably) great in number. You knew each of their names, and could list where they came from. One of them, in fact, Suxiao, was a favourite of sorts, and will remain so as you ascend the throne; in just a few short years, you’ll depose the wife you took shortly before the Tumu Crisis and instill Suxiao as your new empress.[7] But there are worlds of difference between being a prince and an emperor. As emperor, you are the personification of yang (among other things, maleness), in Daoist eyes. To maintain the balance of the universe, you need an appropriate magnitude of yin (femaleness).
[7: There’s no father emperor here to manage the family politics – that falls on you as well.]
So picture your situation for a second. You were destined to be just some mediocre royal official, yet, at the age of twenty-one, you’ve stepped into the emperorship of China. You’ve signed off on all the proclamations ‘retiring’ your brother. Human tribute (i.e. concubines) begins coming in from vassals and neighbouring countries. The Koreans have stopped sending concubines at this point, but you still get them from the Vietnamese, Champans (southern Vietnam), Cambodians, Thais, Tibetans, Manchurian tribes, Okinawans, and even some Mongol and other Central Asian peoples, as well as from across China. An administrative woman, the nüshi (essentially your own private madam/sexual manager) will interview various candidates on your behalf, right down to a strip inspection and gynaecological exam. Administrative eunuchs catalogue and house these women in the Forbidden City. The only males, apart from yourself and certain royal officials, permitted inside the palace are eunuchs, so no one shall touch them but you. When you hold court, a coterie of wenches are there, silent in the gallery. When you tour the Imperial Garden, at the north end of the palace, women are gathered at every corner, hoping just to catch your eye. You don’t know all their names anymore – you can’t. You haven’t even met them all. Sometimes a bowing eunuch will tell in passing that an embassy arrived today from the Uyghur tribes. Thirty new women. Don’t worry, your exalted, they were taken to the baths and are now comfortable in their rooms. Your humble servant has some paperwork on them. Should you meet with these new ladies, you think? Ah, you’re too tired now; you’ll arrange something in the morning, if you remember. Leave the paperwork on the stack over there. Too much baijiu tonight, you tell the eunuch. I need to go to bed. Would you please send a servant to fetch... well, Xiaoyuanjing (your wife) has been moody of late, how about you bring me Suxiao. No, she doesn’t need the lingerie or the nipple tassels, I just want a warm body in bed next to me as I sleep.
“Okay, my friend, now we are on the Dragon Line,” says Bruce Lee, pointing and waving with his index finger. He points to the north: “If you want to go to the Ming emperor’s tombs, just go straight. Fifty kilometres.” To the south: “Along the Dragon Line, we find Tienanmen Square. Tienanmen Square, Forbidden City, Olympic Park and Ming Tombs, all built on central line.”
At every major building in the palace, there rests two large iron pots, like hollowed-out boulders. Around the corner are equally large turtle dragon – or longgui – statues. What are the pots for, posits Bruce Lee. It’s because the entire palace is wood. These pots are pre-modern fire hydrants.
In the Imperial Garden, there are two large statues of qilins, Chinese mythical figures. I’d seen these around. You can see miniature versions at the Wangfujing Night Market, where you’re badgered by pushy salesmen. “What do they signify?” I ask Bruce Lee.
He smiles, seems impressed I know the name of them. “The qilin is one of nine sons of the dragon – the long,” he says. “They... they can tell is a person if loyal or not, if he is someone that is trustworthy.” During the Ming Dynasty, the mariner and explorer Zheng He (himself ‘human tribute’ as a eunuch) became one of the most widely travelled explorers prior to the discovery of the Americas. Indeed, one such myth is that Zheng discovered the Americas before Columbus, though this claim is doubted by academics. He did make it as far as the west coast of Africa, where the Chinese got their first sight of a giraffe, which was mistaken as a qilin, and the style has varied since. Though they tend to lack the long neck, they have the hooves and antlers (in giraffes, ossicones). They look somewhat fearsome, with dragon-like scales and a wicked, toothy grin. In the Daoist tradition, they punish the wicked. Buddhists believe they refuse to walk on the grass for fear of damaging even a single blade, and do not eat flesh. Generally they’re seen a sign of luck and good omens.
You exit the back side of the Forbidden City, a bridge across the moat and out onto Jingshan Front Street, where the driver would pick us up. Jingshan Park is across the road, a former imperial parkland I never got the chance to tour. To the west of Jingshan Park was Beihai Park, another imperial park, mostly water with Qiongdao Island in the middle of it. Beihai I did tour, but that was another day, and a section for a little later in the story. Instead, we turn east along Jingshan Front to where the driver would meet us. It was broad sidewalk, interlocking brick. There’s a concession truck parked here. Women are selling large picture books in English about the Forbidden City (they were fairly cheap; I don’t remember the price exactly, but it wasn’t much – I almost wish I’d picked up a copy). Police are ubiquitous, their uniforms pristine. A beggar sits on the sidewalk, holding a microphone with his right hand and singing along to a stereo. He’s an amputee, missing his left arm, and he’s badly burned down the whole left side of his body (he wasn’t wearing a shirt, and you could see horrific burns all the way down to the waistband of his pants). But for as much I might have wanted to toss the poor guy a few yuan, I didn’t even make eye contact with him, and briskly kept marching.
Sitting in the waiting lounge at Macau International two days before, I was all too aware I was about to board a plane into a totalitarian country. Customs were simple enough, ushered through quite quickly into the waiting lounge, where I slipped on my headphones and began reviewing my Mandarin. The duty free was stacked full of single malt scotches, pricey baijiu, one rather expensive Japanese whiskey, gallons worth of cognac, and not much else. In my luggage, tucked into a five-hundred-page graphic novel as bookmarks, was some literature on Tibetan Buddhism, picked up in Hong Kong. It was written entirely in Chinese characters which I couldn’t read, and I had to simply trust the gentleman at the monastery when he told me it was politically safe for the Mainland. You don’t mention anything about Tibetan separatism in the PRC. More risky stuff I’d gotten rid of, like the Falun Gong propaganda handed out outside the Ngong Ping 360 cable car entrance. These pamphlets – one decrying Falun Gong forced organ harvesting in China, and one that was pro-Chinese propaganda, denouncing the Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi as a cult leader – were left in the Hong Kong hotel room (though not before photographing every page, emailing the pictures to myself and then deleting them from my phone).
A short list of political topics not to touch in Mainland China: Tibetan independence, Uyghur separatism and/or terrorism in Xinjiang, ‘Southern’ Mongolia (an Inner Mongolian independence movement; look up a guy named Hada), anything critical of President Xi Jinping or the Chinese Communist Party, and, of course, the Falun Gong movement. Both Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners have self-immolated in protest of the Chinese government’s brutal repression.[8] The Falun Gong movement, criminalized as a cult under the presidency of Jiang Zemin (in office 1993-2003), is now at the centre of accusations of large-scale forced organ harvesting by the Chinese government and military, a topic of widespread international condemnation.[9]
[8: Separatists in Xinjiang, predominantly Uyghur Muslims, tend to go a different route than self-immolation. The Turkestan Islamic Party (East Turkestan is the Uyghur separatist name for Xinjiang) is recognized as a terrorist group by China, the European Union, United Kingdom, United States and others, though the extent of genuine Islamic terrorism in Xinjiang has been thrown into question. Prior to 2001, the Chinese blamed dissidence in Xinjiang on the CIA, then conveniently changed their story after 9/11; now they’re involved in a war against al-Qaeda. To be sure, a certain number of Uyghurs have fled the region, some of which joined the Taliban in Afghanistan, and a contingent of which are now al-Qaeda (al-Nusra) aligned in the Syrian Civil War, though Chinese claims of attacks in Xinjiang are treated with scepticism. The Chinese heavily censor the internet, particularly here, once shutting it down entirely for a period of six months, and its geographical isolation and barriers put up by the government prevent independent journalism from verifying Chinese claims.]
[9: For more on this, see The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem by Ethan Gutmann.]
Seeing a badly burnt amputee as a beggar in the Beijing streets, I wanted to get away from this political powderkeg as quickly as possible.
“You have to try the pu’er tea,” insists Bruce Lee. Next on our tour was a traditional Chinese tea house. “Only sold in China. It comes from Yunnan Province and they can’t make enough for export.” As we drove, he explained how tea is supposed to be drunk. It’s a very technical procedure. “Men, your fingers curled inwards, to symbolize the dragon. The dragon is yang, it is male. Women have their fingers spread outwards like the phoenix. This is yin, female. Men, don’t hold your fingers like this, or else you’re a ladyboy.”
At the tea house, our host reiterated this. “If a man holds his fingers like this,” she says, “it means he’s a sissy.”
There were five different types of tea to sample, with all sorts of gimmicks like teacups that change colour with warmth applied, or a little clay ‘pee boy’ statue which ‘pees’ when the water gets hot enough. The Australian woman touring with us bought nearly too much to carry, while at the same time deciding to ask the British couple about Australia’s duty and declaration policies with a confused look on her face.
“Temple of Heaven,” Bruce Lee says in the van, “three times bigger than Forbidden City. Summer Palace, six times bigger.” The Temple of Heaven, or Tiantan, a large Daoist park also built in the early fifteenth century by the usurper Zhu Di, consists of two parts. The outer portion is manicured parkland, where senior citizens gather in numbers and aggressively play cards. The inner portion is the temple itself, a large, three-story Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. This circular building, elevated on a stone platform and surrounded by a large courtyard, and was also constructed entirely of wood with no nails holding it together.
This is where you (Qiyu) would come to make offerings to Tian, or Heaven, twice yearly for good harvests. You may have even come here to pray for your brother, the retired emperor, in the early days, who (according to Esen’s memorandums) was kept in good health and was being treated like an imperial guest.[10] In cases of national emergency, such as a drought, you may be expected to come here outside of the usual, twice yearly schedule as well. That’s why you’re here today: Lihua, your sister, whom Qizhen sent off to seal a pact with Esen in 1443,[11] has sent a secret message to the court through a Mongol emissary (you’re pretty sure she seduced him, but the message doesn’t specify this). She’d been sent off to the wedding bed at the age of fourteen, and has no great love for the brother that sent her there. That’s one more reason you decided to make certain demands of your brother when he showed up at the Wall a year after your enthronement – yes, Esen did release “his useless prize in exchange for a weak Chinese promise to reopen border trade”,[12] but you were sure to make him disavow the throne before you let him through the Wall. He’s now under house arrest. Lihua did always have a fondness for you, and in her rambling note expresses joy that you came to the throne. The main text of her message though is this: Esen, her ‘darling husband’, is plotting a large-scale raid near Red Salt Lake, about sixty kilometres into the Ordos, in what is today Inner Mongolia. The Wall out there is not finished, and you have to act fast.[13] You’ve dispatched an army to reinforce local garrisons, but those barbarians have always moved faster than Chinese armies, and there’s no date on Lihua’s message. So here you are, abasing yourself before Heaven above, awaiting updates from your commanders in the field.
[10: He was even offered a Mongolian wife, which he declined.]
[11: Unlike the other historical figures I’ve put names to, Lihua is fictional.]
[12: Brook, pg. 96.]
[13: I’m taking liberties here. There was an incident at Red Salt Lake, but it was a local commander that got word, leading an attack against the Mongols and sparking debates about the national interest in continuing the building of the Ming Wall. This occurred in 1473, not 1453 (the year following the deposing of Empress Xiaoyuanjing), as I’m depicting. See Man, pg. 201, for details.]
Suxiao, now your wife after you got rid of the first one (Suxiao was right, Xiaoyuanjing really wasn’t cut out to be empress), stands back as you make your obeisances to the gods. You haven’t touched her, or any of your women, for three days, nor have you eaten meat or had wine. You’ve been by yourself, west of the park, at the Palace of Abstinence. You leave that hall just before dawn at the ringing of a bell. Everything in Tiantan Park is in multiples of nine, a lucky number. Singers, dancers and bannermen all take their places. Everything is highly choreographed. Incense is being burned. A cow has been prepared; it has been shaven and the stove is warm. Animal sacrifice doesn’t happen at every ceremony, but a cow has been arranged today because of the urgency in your sister’s letter. You make your prayers. While you pray, officials offer meats, vegetables, wine, silk and jade to other gods on the upper level of the altar. These things are burnt in stoves to the south while incense wafts throughout the park.
“Things went well,” Suxiao tells you in the palanquin en route back to your palace. “The prognosticators assured me Heaven was quite please.”
When you get back to the palace, the sycophantic eunuchs are all smiles. There are two generals there, also offering praise, their heads bowed. You wave them all away.
You have gone the past seventy-two hours without release, something a man in your position only does for Heaven itself. Suxiao, your darling wife, is prepared. She’s wearing her best corset beneath her court robes, and has had the eunuchs prepare a vase of tororo-jiru.[14] Moreover, when you’re finished with all the post-ceremonial hoopla in the Front Court, you’re pleased to find she has one of her sistren in the harem[15] already in your bed chamber. You know this one. Yes, yes... don’t say it, you’ll get her name. Thin, Vietnamese, has a sexy accent...
[14: Made from grated Chinese yams, the Japanese apparently used this as a pre-modern lubricant. In fact, it dates to Japan’s Edo Period (1603-1868), so I’m a century and a half early in having it appear here, but just go with it.]
[15: Former sistren; she’s your wife now.]
“I was 2655, most exalted,” she says sheepishly.
Ah, that’s right, you never got her name. That was the number on her file, written above her name. You really must speak to the eunuchs – they should write the number in a smaller font or something.
“If the Son of Heaven wishes to hear you speak,” says Suxiao, “he will ask it.” Now your wife is holding a riding crop.
2655 has gone bright red. Yes, that’s what you liked about her. She’s not as coy and practised – not as fake – as the other sycophants streaming through the revolving door of your bedchamber. There’s a realness to her. She’s embarrassed, nods without speaking.
“Good girl,” says Suxiao. “Now take off that dress,” she dictates, pouring a liberal amount of the tororo-jiru into her hand–
Alright, I think I’m going to stop myself there. This is a travelogue. If you want concubine sex scenes, there are other places you can find them.[16]
[16: I might suggest One Night in Ikh Khulan.]
---continued in PART 2---
Date: Monday, October 10th – Saturday, October 15th, 2016
I did not eat deep-fried scorpion on a stick.
They were being sold at the Wangfujing Night Market, two minutes walk from my hotel. I was a few blocks from the Forbidden City off Wangfujing Avenue. An upscale shopping district was about a few minutes walk down Wangfujing, and at night booths sprung up in alleyways off this major thoroughfare selling brass or clay statues of dragons, horses, tigers and qilins, magnets, laser pointers, green camo hats with the Chinese communist star on them, silk scrolls with tigers, phoenixes or the Great Wall on them, and t-shirts proclaiming “I [heart] BJ”. There were ubiquitous bottles of milk, Yanjing and Tsingtao beer, lamb on a stick, grilled snake and tentacles on a stick, tripe (strips of stomach lining), deep-fried tarantulas, footlong millipedes and, yes, deep-fried scorpions on a stick, which were skewered through while still alive – twitching and squirming, their tails jabbing about – and then deep fried upon their sale.
(One young woman walked by me one night at this market, munching off a two-foot stick or deep-fried tentacle pieces. I, as a sheer gut reaction, spat out a disgusted grunt: “Uurgh.” She, standing not three feet from me, heard me say it, and looked up to see the uncontrolled – and, admittedly, rather rude – reaction of an uncultured Westerner to her delicacy, and burst out laughing, sniggering to her friend as she passed.)
Wangfujing itself was closed to vehicular traffic for the 5th Beijing Wangfujing International Brand Festival, and beer and ice cream shacks were erected, salesmen dressed up as Mongol aristocrats outside shoe stores, police were out with their red and blue flashing epaulettes and bomb-sniffing German shepherds.
You walk the street at night. Buddhists and Christians perform dance numbers in the sidewalk, or in front of St. Joseph’s church. It’s a little chilly in Beijing in October, and I was just wearing a t-shirt. You’re a racial minority, and stand out like a sore thumb; everyone knows you’re a tourist. At major tourist sites like the Temple of Heaven or the Summer Palace young women try and sneak pictures of themselves with you, until you catch them, offer them a picture and they’re giddy as can be, linking arms with you and making the peace sign. But at night, it’s a different type of woman that comes up to you.
The first was from Harbin, in Manchuria. She was pretty, perhaps about thirty, sitting with a woman a little older on a sidewalk bench. She spoke exceptional English, though her friend seemed to speak fairly little. “Aren’t you cold?” the young one in red asks. Sit, talk for a minute. Where are you from? Ah, Canada, it’s colder there, right? You’re more used to the cold. Many Chinese people there, yes? Many immigrants? Your Chinese is very good. Where did you learn?[1]
[1: We were conversing almost exclusively in English, but I’d said the odd word in Mandarin.]
Within thirty seconds or so she got to the point. How about we go for a beer, just down the street, we can talk some more? Get out of the cold?
No, I told her politely, saying I had to get back soon. I had an early morning the next day, off to see the Forbidden City. She was insistent, but when she saw I wasn’t going to fall for it, she quickly conceded and ended the conversation.
The second one appeared beside me like a ghost as I was walking back towards the hotel. Same general questions. Where you from? Lots of Chinese people in Canada, no? You here on vacation? Hey, would you like to go to a bar and get some beer? No, well how about coffee? How about you give me money for a beer and I’ll go alone?
Then she cursed me out and ran off the other way. The third, maybe sixty seconds later, leapt off a bench and jogged towards me. Hello, where are you from? I just shook my head and held up a hand, and kept walking.
They were all women, all around thirty or so, all spoke exceptional English. Reasonably pretty. But then why was I ignoring their advances?
This sort of thing is on dozens of videos and blog posts on travel to China, it was listed in the Beijing travel book I carried with me in my pocket, and it’s right on the Government of Canada travel advisory website. It’s the tea house scam, and it seems to be the number one thing to be on the lookout for in Beijing.[2]
[2: Apart from espousing the wrong political opinions. More on this in a little bit.]
Generally she’ll suggest going to a tea house. She’ll say she’s a student of English, wants practise with it. You go to the tea house, order a couple drinks, you naturally pay for hers, and you either have neglected to ask the price, or when they gave you a number like three (yuan or renminbi[3]), it was shorthand for three hundred. When the bill comes, it’s exorbitant, and they physically won’t let you leave until you’ve paid it. She, of course, is in on the scam with the tea house.
[3: The exchange rate, at the time of writing, is ¥5.12 to CAD$1]
I was approached by one textbook tea house scam on the Friday. I was out visiting the Foreign Language Bookstore, in the middle of this shopping district. No DVDs of Legend of Yuan Empire Founder, a 2013 HBS series on Kublai Khan. As I was leaving, though, a book almost jumped off the shelf at me. It was on Emperor Puyi and his harem. Yes, I think I’ll get this.[4] Walking out, a woman bounded up from a sidewalk bench and ran over to me. They’re hungry like vultures. Hello, where you from? Toronto? Vancouver? Are you here on vacation? And so on it goes.
[4: The Last Emperor and His Five Wives by Professor Wang Qingxiang. It cost me about $22 Canadian; looking it up back in Canada, the cheapest I saw was $65 plus shipping. Despite the efforts of the translator, much of it is in a somewhat broken, halting grammar.]
She was also around thirty, had a partner behind her that was more submissive. She wore a white turtleneck with her hair down and had a thin, wispy, feminine moustache. She claimed to be from Hangzhou – you know Hangzhou, it’s down near Shanghai – and was here practising her English. Her English was already quite good, but she apparently needed a refresher. Would I like to go for some tea and practise?
Wangfujing Avenue is in the heart of downtown Beijing. Tienanmen Square isn’t far, and the same with Beihai Park, the “earliest and best preserved imperial garden in the world.”[5] North of Tienanmen Square is the Forbidden City, the former centre of the Chinese empire and imperial palace in which the emperors lived. This one-hundred-and-eighty-acre palace, now a museum, is surrounded by a moat, contained within a massive red-bricked wall, and contains nine hundred and eighty buildings, all held together by not a single nail. Completed in 1420, it was first used by Zhu Di, third emperor and the great usurper of the Ming Dynasty (he’d committed a coup d’état against his nephew). The last emperor, Puyi – who, after his abdication would become a Japanese war criminal, tried as such by the People’s Republic in 1950 and imprisoned for a period of ten years – was forced from the palace in 1924.
[5: Quote taken from a placard outside the park.]
Early on the Wednesday morning, I shook hands with the tour guide that would show a small group around this elaborate palace, as well as the Temple of Heaven and Summer Palace. His name was Bruce Lee, or so he called himself. His driver showed up not long after with a cargo van. We toured with a lovely older British couple – actually, he was born in Canada and she was Georgian-Russian, though they hailed from London – as well as a clueless Australian woman. The British couple were in the middle of a several weeks-long Eurasian tour, which began in St. Petersburg, then along the Trans-Siberian from Moscow to Lake Baikal, into Mongolia, and they were flying out the following day to Lhasa, Tibet. Just the day before, they’d toured the Badaling site of the Great Wall with Bruce Lee.
“It’s packed, shoulder to shoulder,” said John, the husband, bringing up pictures on his phone with crowds that looked like a Hong Kong subway station. He’d toured Mutianyu, another major site, about fifteen years before, and so this time around they went to Badaling.
Mutianyu was the one that I’d wanted to see, as I knew it was less crowded, less commercialized and more hilly, with steep, never-ending staircases and a wavy course along the mountains. It’s about ninety minutes outside Beijing, as opposed to Badaling, which is sixty. Not really all that far north when you consider the constant threat, the constant raids, from barbarians beyond the Wall.
The hotel concierge desk employed three people, with three different levels of fluency in English. The youngest of them, Matthew, spoke barely a word. Boyd was better, could book tours and answer basic questions about the airport shuttle bus, but struggled greatly with it. Eason, however, was practically fluent. Mutianyu was not offered through that hotel, but no worries, assured Eason. “I can hire a private car for you to go there if you like. Eight hundred yuan for the day. You can leave whenever you like.” The driver, however, will speak only a little English. I had to think on this. The concierge desk was closing in ten minutes. “Just talk to Boyd tomorrow,” says Eason. Boyd, however, didn’t speak enough English to know about this arrangement. He tried flipping through a tour book and priced out something closer to 1,600. So the Great Wall we’ll leave until later in the week. In the meantime, I booked the tour with Bruce Lee.
“Forbidden City,” says Bruce Lee, standing just inside the Meridian Gate, “is from Ming, Qing Dynasties. Total, twenty-four emperors live inside.” He was holding the little yellow flag of his tour company on a collapsible stick, and spoke largely with his hands. The courtyard inside was tremendous. All the buildings were in vibrant colours, and had ornate, Oriental xieshan designs. There were dragons carved into the wood and elaborately painted. The emperor’s throne room is in line symmetrically north of the Meridian Gate, with civic offices to the one side and military offices to the other. Elaborate stone designs line the pathway just inside the Meridian Gate, leading to the expansive courtyard of interlocking brick, which, as Bruce Lee explained, was fourteen layers deep – almost a meter and a half thick. The emperors, it seemed, were paranoid about enemies tunnelling in.
“Inside the Forbidden City, you including two parts: Front Court and Inner Palace. Front Court used for the emperor for grand ceremony, meeting, conference. The Inner Palace for the emperor, empress, concubines.”
Deep inside the Inner Court, one of the buildings we saw (through a pane of glass) was the imperial bedchamber. There were many beds inside, each draped in silk embroidered with phoenixes and dragons, and covered with curtains and the lot. Sometimes there would be a version of a wedding ceremony for a concubine (this would probably depend on the emperor’s whim, and her rank as a concubine), but nothing as elaborate as the ceremony for his wife. The wife, Lee explained, was not chosen by the emperor, but usually by the emperor’s parents. The father, usually the retired emperor, still had a certain patriarchal function within the royal family, even after stepping aside from the throne (which they didn’t always do, Lee was quick to add). Divorce, likewise, was something decided by the emperor’s parents. These were political affairs, not personal. Besides, for the monarch’s sexual whims, for his perpetual satisfaction, that’s why he had concubines.
“How many concubines?” Bruce Lee had asked before we got to the emperor’s bedchamber, standing just inside the Gate of Heavenly Purity, separating the Front Court and Inner Palace. “Three thousand.”
Let’s suppose you’re a Chinese emperor for a moment. It’s 1449. You’re Zhu Qiyu, the second son of the Xuande Emperor. Your half-brother, Qizhen, just ten months older than you, ascended to the throne in 1435, at just the age of eight (at least one of you was born from one of your father’s concubines). When he was twenty-one, he decided he needed to prove himself in battle. As it so happened, the Ming did have a powerful enemy out there causing problems, and one who was growing in strength every day. His name was Esen. John Man, in his book The Great Wall: The Extraordinary Story of China’s Wonder of the World, says,
“[Esen] inherited control of the western Mongol groups, the Oirat. In the 1440s he took over what are today Uzbekistan and the other Central Asian -stans, then the Chinese-Mongol borderland groups along the Gobi to Manchuria. ... It looked as if one day he might become another Genghis and lead the Mongols to reclaim China. One way he increased his popularity at home was to exploit the ‘tribute system’ by which China dealt with the ‘barbarians’. ... The reality behind the euphemistic exchange of barbarian ‘tribute’ and imperial ‘gifts’ was trade ... but also payment to keep the peace, always with the (unstated) threat of blackmail – that if the emperor’s gifts were not good enough, the barbarian leaders might go on the war-path. ... This was nothing but extortion.”[6]
[6: Man, pg. 186-187.]
In other words, the Chinese had better pay up if they don’t want raids to take these things by force. The Chinese would often enter into treaty agreements with their barbarian neighbours to keep the peace. Sometimes the Chinese emperor would symbolically adopt the Mongol khan, forming a father-son, an uncle-nephew, or, when barbarian power was particularly strong, a brother-brother relationship. Often times Chinese princesses were carted north to become the latest wife of a khan to seal such agreements. Perhaps you’ve even seen some of your sisters sent north to Esen.
So in 1449, under the guidance of a corrupt eunuch, your august brother raises a half-million-man army in just two days, and sets out north. And doesn’t disaster happen. In a confrontation known as the Crisis of Tumu Fortress, not far from Badaling, Esen, alerted of your brother’s movements by his intelligence network, acts quickly and attacks, cutting off the royal contingent from the body of the army. Qizhen falls into Esen’s hands. The court in Beijing receives a letter: Half your army lies dead, and I have your emperor. You will send me....
Beijing reorganizes. A new minister of war has now pushed through a motion that Qizhen be declared a retired emperor – this being the quick and easy fix to the hostage situation. In essence, it means Beijing is abandoning your brother, while at the same time trying to put a nice face on it. And the war minister... well, guess who he’s decided should be your brother’s replacement.
You come to the throne just one day after your twenty-first birthday. As a prince, you’d have had your own concubines, but they were not (comparably) great in number. You knew each of their names, and could list where they came from. One of them, in fact, Suxiao, was a favourite of sorts, and will remain so as you ascend the throne; in just a few short years, you’ll depose the wife you took shortly before the Tumu Crisis and instill Suxiao as your new empress.[7] But there are worlds of difference between being a prince and an emperor. As emperor, you are the personification of yang (among other things, maleness), in Daoist eyes. To maintain the balance of the universe, you need an appropriate magnitude of yin (femaleness).
[7: There’s no father emperor here to manage the family politics – that falls on you as well.]
So picture your situation for a second. You were destined to be just some mediocre royal official, yet, at the age of twenty-one, you’ve stepped into the emperorship of China. You’ve signed off on all the proclamations ‘retiring’ your brother. Human tribute (i.e. concubines) begins coming in from vassals and neighbouring countries. The Koreans have stopped sending concubines at this point, but you still get them from the Vietnamese, Champans (southern Vietnam), Cambodians, Thais, Tibetans, Manchurian tribes, Okinawans, and even some Mongol and other Central Asian peoples, as well as from across China. An administrative woman, the nüshi (essentially your own private madam/sexual manager) will interview various candidates on your behalf, right down to a strip inspection and gynaecological exam. Administrative eunuchs catalogue and house these women in the Forbidden City. The only males, apart from yourself and certain royal officials, permitted inside the palace are eunuchs, so no one shall touch them but you. When you hold court, a coterie of wenches are there, silent in the gallery. When you tour the Imperial Garden, at the north end of the palace, women are gathered at every corner, hoping just to catch your eye. You don’t know all their names anymore – you can’t. You haven’t even met them all. Sometimes a bowing eunuch will tell in passing that an embassy arrived today from the Uyghur tribes. Thirty new women. Don’t worry, your exalted, they were taken to the baths and are now comfortable in their rooms. Your humble servant has some paperwork on them. Should you meet with these new ladies, you think? Ah, you’re too tired now; you’ll arrange something in the morning, if you remember. Leave the paperwork on the stack over there. Too much baijiu tonight, you tell the eunuch. I need to go to bed. Would you please send a servant to fetch... well, Xiaoyuanjing (your wife) has been moody of late, how about you bring me Suxiao. No, she doesn’t need the lingerie or the nipple tassels, I just want a warm body in bed next to me as I sleep.
“Okay, my friend, now we are on the Dragon Line,” says Bruce Lee, pointing and waving with his index finger. He points to the north: “If you want to go to the Ming emperor’s tombs, just go straight. Fifty kilometres.” To the south: “Along the Dragon Line, we find Tienanmen Square. Tienanmen Square, Forbidden City, Olympic Park and Ming Tombs, all built on central line.”
At every major building in the palace, there rests two large iron pots, like hollowed-out boulders. Around the corner are equally large turtle dragon – or longgui – statues. What are the pots for, posits Bruce Lee. It’s because the entire palace is wood. These pots are pre-modern fire hydrants.
In the Imperial Garden, there are two large statues of qilins, Chinese mythical figures. I’d seen these around. You can see miniature versions at the Wangfujing Night Market, where you’re badgered by pushy salesmen. “What do they signify?” I ask Bruce Lee.
He smiles, seems impressed I know the name of them. “The qilin is one of nine sons of the dragon – the long,” he says. “They... they can tell is a person if loyal or not, if he is someone that is trustworthy.” During the Ming Dynasty, the mariner and explorer Zheng He (himself ‘human tribute’ as a eunuch) became one of the most widely travelled explorers prior to the discovery of the Americas. Indeed, one such myth is that Zheng discovered the Americas before Columbus, though this claim is doubted by academics. He did make it as far as the west coast of Africa, where the Chinese got their first sight of a giraffe, which was mistaken as a qilin, and the style has varied since. Though they tend to lack the long neck, they have the hooves and antlers (in giraffes, ossicones). They look somewhat fearsome, with dragon-like scales and a wicked, toothy grin. In the Daoist tradition, they punish the wicked. Buddhists believe they refuse to walk on the grass for fear of damaging even a single blade, and do not eat flesh. Generally they’re seen a sign of luck and good omens.
You exit the back side of the Forbidden City, a bridge across the moat and out onto Jingshan Front Street, where the driver would pick us up. Jingshan Park is across the road, a former imperial parkland I never got the chance to tour. To the west of Jingshan Park was Beihai Park, another imperial park, mostly water with Qiongdao Island in the middle of it. Beihai I did tour, but that was another day, and a section for a little later in the story. Instead, we turn east along Jingshan Front to where the driver would meet us. It was broad sidewalk, interlocking brick. There’s a concession truck parked here. Women are selling large picture books in English about the Forbidden City (they were fairly cheap; I don’t remember the price exactly, but it wasn’t much – I almost wish I’d picked up a copy). Police are ubiquitous, their uniforms pristine. A beggar sits on the sidewalk, holding a microphone with his right hand and singing along to a stereo. He’s an amputee, missing his left arm, and he’s badly burned down the whole left side of his body (he wasn’t wearing a shirt, and you could see horrific burns all the way down to the waistband of his pants). But for as much I might have wanted to toss the poor guy a few yuan, I didn’t even make eye contact with him, and briskly kept marching.
Sitting in the waiting lounge at Macau International two days before, I was all too aware I was about to board a plane into a totalitarian country. Customs were simple enough, ushered through quite quickly into the waiting lounge, where I slipped on my headphones and began reviewing my Mandarin. The duty free was stacked full of single malt scotches, pricey baijiu, one rather expensive Japanese whiskey, gallons worth of cognac, and not much else. In my luggage, tucked into a five-hundred-page graphic novel as bookmarks, was some literature on Tibetan Buddhism, picked up in Hong Kong. It was written entirely in Chinese characters which I couldn’t read, and I had to simply trust the gentleman at the monastery when he told me it was politically safe for the Mainland. You don’t mention anything about Tibetan separatism in the PRC. More risky stuff I’d gotten rid of, like the Falun Gong propaganda handed out outside the Ngong Ping 360 cable car entrance. These pamphlets – one decrying Falun Gong forced organ harvesting in China, and one that was pro-Chinese propaganda, denouncing the Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi as a cult leader – were left in the Hong Kong hotel room (though not before photographing every page, emailing the pictures to myself and then deleting them from my phone).
A short list of political topics not to touch in Mainland China: Tibetan independence, Uyghur separatism and/or terrorism in Xinjiang, ‘Southern’ Mongolia (an Inner Mongolian independence movement; look up a guy named Hada), anything critical of President Xi Jinping or the Chinese Communist Party, and, of course, the Falun Gong movement. Both Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners have self-immolated in protest of the Chinese government’s brutal repression.[8] The Falun Gong movement, criminalized as a cult under the presidency of Jiang Zemin (in office 1993-2003), is now at the centre of accusations of large-scale forced organ harvesting by the Chinese government and military, a topic of widespread international condemnation.[9]
[8: Separatists in Xinjiang, predominantly Uyghur Muslims, tend to go a different route than self-immolation. The Turkestan Islamic Party (East Turkestan is the Uyghur separatist name for Xinjiang) is recognized as a terrorist group by China, the European Union, United Kingdom, United States and others, though the extent of genuine Islamic terrorism in Xinjiang has been thrown into question. Prior to 2001, the Chinese blamed dissidence in Xinjiang on the CIA, then conveniently changed their story after 9/11; now they’re involved in a war against al-Qaeda. To be sure, a certain number of Uyghurs have fled the region, some of which joined the Taliban in Afghanistan, and a contingent of which are now al-Qaeda (al-Nusra) aligned in the Syrian Civil War, though Chinese claims of attacks in Xinjiang are treated with scepticism. The Chinese heavily censor the internet, particularly here, once shutting it down entirely for a period of six months, and its geographical isolation and barriers put up by the government prevent independent journalism from verifying Chinese claims.]
[9: For more on this, see The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret Solution to Its Dissident Problem by Ethan Gutmann.]
Seeing a badly burnt amputee as a beggar in the Beijing streets, I wanted to get away from this political powderkeg as quickly as possible.
“You have to try the pu’er tea,” insists Bruce Lee. Next on our tour was a traditional Chinese tea house. “Only sold in China. It comes from Yunnan Province and they can’t make enough for export.” As we drove, he explained how tea is supposed to be drunk. It’s a very technical procedure. “Men, your fingers curled inwards, to symbolize the dragon. The dragon is yang, it is male. Women have their fingers spread outwards like the phoenix. This is yin, female. Men, don’t hold your fingers like this, or else you’re a ladyboy.”
At the tea house, our host reiterated this. “If a man holds his fingers like this,” she says, “it means he’s a sissy.”
There were five different types of tea to sample, with all sorts of gimmicks like teacups that change colour with warmth applied, or a little clay ‘pee boy’ statue which ‘pees’ when the water gets hot enough. The Australian woman touring with us bought nearly too much to carry, while at the same time deciding to ask the British couple about Australia’s duty and declaration policies with a confused look on her face.
“Temple of Heaven,” Bruce Lee says in the van, “three times bigger than Forbidden City. Summer Palace, six times bigger.” The Temple of Heaven, or Tiantan, a large Daoist park also built in the early fifteenth century by the usurper Zhu Di, consists of two parts. The outer portion is manicured parkland, where senior citizens gather in numbers and aggressively play cards. The inner portion is the temple itself, a large, three-story Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. This circular building, elevated on a stone platform and surrounded by a large courtyard, and was also constructed entirely of wood with no nails holding it together.
This is where you (Qiyu) would come to make offerings to Tian, or Heaven, twice yearly for good harvests. You may have even come here to pray for your brother, the retired emperor, in the early days, who (according to Esen’s memorandums) was kept in good health and was being treated like an imperial guest.[10] In cases of national emergency, such as a drought, you may be expected to come here outside of the usual, twice yearly schedule as well. That’s why you’re here today: Lihua, your sister, whom Qizhen sent off to seal a pact with Esen in 1443,[11] has sent a secret message to the court through a Mongol emissary (you’re pretty sure she seduced him, but the message doesn’t specify this). She’d been sent off to the wedding bed at the age of fourteen, and has no great love for the brother that sent her there. That’s one more reason you decided to make certain demands of your brother when he showed up at the Wall a year after your enthronement – yes, Esen did release “his useless prize in exchange for a weak Chinese promise to reopen border trade”,[12] but you were sure to make him disavow the throne before you let him through the Wall. He’s now under house arrest. Lihua did always have a fondness for you, and in her rambling note expresses joy that you came to the throne. The main text of her message though is this: Esen, her ‘darling husband’, is plotting a large-scale raid near Red Salt Lake, about sixty kilometres into the Ordos, in what is today Inner Mongolia. The Wall out there is not finished, and you have to act fast.[13] You’ve dispatched an army to reinforce local garrisons, but those barbarians have always moved faster than Chinese armies, and there’s no date on Lihua’s message. So here you are, abasing yourself before Heaven above, awaiting updates from your commanders in the field.
[10: He was even offered a Mongolian wife, which he declined.]
[11: Unlike the other historical figures I’ve put names to, Lihua is fictional.]
[12: Brook, pg. 96.]
[13: I’m taking liberties here. There was an incident at Red Salt Lake, but it was a local commander that got word, leading an attack against the Mongols and sparking debates about the national interest in continuing the building of the Ming Wall. This occurred in 1473, not 1453 (the year following the deposing of Empress Xiaoyuanjing), as I’m depicting. See Man, pg. 201, for details.]
Suxiao, now your wife after you got rid of the first one (Suxiao was right, Xiaoyuanjing really wasn’t cut out to be empress), stands back as you make your obeisances to the gods. You haven’t touched her, or any of your women, for three days, nor have you eaten meat or had wine. You’ve been by yourself, west of the park, at the Palace of Abstinence. You leave that hall just before dawn at the ringing of a bell. Everything in Tiantan Park is in multiples of nine, a lucky number. Singers, dancers and bannermen all take their places. Everything is highly choreographed. Incense is being burned. A cow has been prepared; it has been shaven and the stove is warm. Animal sacrifice doesn’t happen at every ceremony, but a cow has been arranged today because of the urgency in your sister’s letter. You make your prayers. While you pray, officials offer meats, vegetables, wine, silk and jade to other gods on the upper level of the altar. These things are burnt in stoves to the south while incense wafts throughout the park.
“Things went well,” Suxiao tells you in the palanquin en route back to your palace. “The prognosticators assured me Heaven was quite please.”
When you get back to the palace, the sycophantic eunuchs are all smiles. There are two generals there, also offering praise, their heads bowed. You wave them all away.
You have gone the past seventy-two hours without release, something a man in your position only does for Heaven itself. Suxiao, your darling wife, is prepared. She’s wearing her best corset beneath her court robes, and has had the eunuchs prepare a vase of tororo-jiru.[14] Moreover, when you’re finished with all the post-ceremonial hoopla in the Front Court, you’re pleased to find she has one of her sistren in the harem[15] already in your bed chamber. You know this one. Yes, yes... don’t say it, you’ll get her name. Thin, Vietnamese, has a sexy accent...
[14: Made from grated Chinese yams, the Japanese apparently used this as a pre-modern lubricant. In fact, it dates to Japan’s Edo Period (1603-1868), so I’m a century and a half early in having it appear here, but just go with it.]
[15: Former sistren; she’s your wife now.]
“I was 2655, most exalted,” she says sheepishly.
Ah, that’s right, you never got her name. That was the number on her file, written above her name. You really must speak to the eunuchs – they should write the number in a smaller font or something.
“If the Son of Heaven wishes to hear you speak,” says Suxiao, “he will ask it.” Now your wife is holding a riding crop.
2655 has gone bright red. Yes, that’s what you liked about her. She’s not as coy and practised – not as fake – as the other sycophants streaming through the revolving door of your bedchamber. There’s a realness to her. She’s embarrassed, nods without speaking.
“Good girl,” says Suxiao. “Now take off that dress,” she dictates, pouring a liberal amount of the tororo-jiru into her hand–
Alright, I think I’m going to stop myself there. This is a travelogue. If you want concubine sex scenes, there are other places you can find them.[16]
[16: I might suggest One Night in Ikh Khulan.]
---continued in PART 2---
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