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Everything they knew would transpire in London was already happening in Oxford, for Oxford, by proximity to Babel, was the most silver-reliant city in the world.
‘There is no path to victory here,’ warned Professor Chakravarti. ‘This will only make them hate you.’
The British did not hate them, because hate was bound up with fear and resentment, and both required seeing your opponent as a morally autonomous being, worthy of respect and rivalry.
The attitude the British held towards the Chinese was patronizing, was dismissive; but it was not hatred.
‘you know, one of the most commonly misunderstood Sanskrit concepts is ahimsa. Nonviolence.’
‘Many think ahimsa means absolute pacifism, and that the Indian people are therefore a sheepish, submissive people who will bend the knee to anything. But in the Bhagavad Gita, exceptions are made for a dharma yuddha. A righteous war. A war in which violence is applied as the last resort, a war fought not for selfish gain or personal motives but from a commitment to a greater cause.’
No one knew how to do laundry – they tried producing a match-pair using the word bleach and words derived from the Proto-Indo-European root bhel (‘shining white, to flash, to burn’), but all this did was temporarily turn their clothes white and scorching-hot to the touch.
‘When I think of Letty, I think about the character xì.’ He drew it in the air for her: 隙. ‘It’s most commonly used to mean “a crack or a fissure”. But in Classical Chinese texts, it also means “a grudge, or a feud”. According to rumours, the Qing Emperor uses a bar engraved with the xì-feud match-pair installed under a stone mural of the imperial lineage. And when cracks appear, it shows that someone is plotting against him.’ He swallowed. ‘I think those cracks were always there. I don’t think there’s anything we could have done about them. And all it took was pressure for the whole thing to
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brown man refuses an English rose. Letty couldn’t bear that. The humiliation.’ He wiped his sleeve against his eyes. ‘So she killed him.’
Victoire, who’d been reading furiously through French dissident literature, composed the match-pair élan-energy, the latter of which bore connotations of a particular French revolutionary zeal, and which could be traced back to the Latin lancea, meaning ‘lance’.
The word seduce came from the Latin seducere, meaning ‘to lead astray’, from which the late-fifteenth-century definition ‘to persuade one to abandon their allegiance’ came
There was also the German word Nachtmahr, a now rarely used word for ‘nightmare’, which also referred to a malicious entity that sat upon the sleeper’s chest.
Some experimentation proved this match-pair made bad dreams worse when one had them, but seemed unable to induce them in the first place.
‘At the French barricades, revolutionaries would march up to the soldiers with their shirts open and shout at them to shoot, if they dared.’
Insane was not enough to cover it, Robin thought. English was insufficient to describe all this. His mind wandered to old Chinese texts, the idioms they employed about dynastic collapse and change. 天翻地覆; tiānfāndìfù. The heavens fell, and the earth collapsed in on itself. The world turned upside down. Britain was spilling its own blood, Britain was gouging out its own flesh, and nothing after this could go back to the way it had been before.
Only Chinese had a character that encapsulated how much simple words could hurt: 刺, cì, the character for thorns, for stabs, for criticism. Such a flexible character. In a phrase, 刺言, 刺語, it meant ‘barbed, stinging words’. 刺 could mean ‘to goad’. 刺 could also mean ‘to murder’.
The people who run this country care more about the pride of the British Empire than they do mild inconveniences, and they’ll let the city collapse before they bow to the demands of what they see as a handful of – of Babblers.’
You have no idea how much they’re willing to bleed for the sake of their pride. These men let Westminster Bridge fall. What else can you threaten them with?’
That identity is foreclosed to us. We are foreign because this nation has marked us so, and as long as we’re punished daily for our ties to our homelands, we might as well defend them.
‘Please understand.’ Letty’s voice hardened. ‘You gave them a headache. Well done you. But you are, in the end, expendable. All of you. Losing you would be a minor setback, but the imperial project involves more than a few scholars. And it will span more than a few decades. This nation is trying to achieve what no other civilization has done throughout history, and if mowing you down means a temporary delay, then they’ll do it. They’ll train new translators.’
Letty scoffed. ‘Of course they will. We knew very well what they were up to, didn’t we? They told us on the very first day. And we still loved it here. They’ll always be able to find new translators. They’ll relearn what they lost. And they’ll just keep going, because no one else will be there to stop them.’
‘You can’t change things if you’re dead, Birdie.’
‘Don’t lose sight of your end goal. If you want to fix the Empire, your best course is to work within it.’
Liberation for us means liberation for you as well.’
Ideological righteousness is well and fine, but by God, Robin, you’re letting people die for a cause you must know is bound to fail. And you will fail,’ she continued, relentlessly. ‘You don’t have the numbers. You don’t have the public support, you don’t have the votes, and you don’t have the momentum. You don’t understand how determined the Empire is to reclaim its silver. You think you’re prepared to make sacrifices? They will do anything it takes to smoke you out. You should know that they don’t plan on losing all of you. They just need to kill some of you. They’ll take the rest prisoner,
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Our deaths are thus great acts of rebellion, a wretched lament that highlights their inhumanity. Our deaths become their battle cry.
The future would be fluid. It was just as Griffin had predicted. One individual choice, made at just the right time. This was how they defied momentum. This was how they altered the tracks of history.
Death is nature’s greatest good. Death is a better state. Death frees the immortal soul. Death is transcendence. Death is an act of bravery, a glorious act of defiance.
‘Fānyì. Translate.’ Again. ‘Fānyì. Translate.’ And again. ‘Fānyì. Translate.’
She was born in Haiti, Ayiti, in 1820, the same year that King Henry Christophe, fearing a coup, took his own life.
Victoire’s understanding of Haitian history is of curses in the night; of a magnificent palace named Sans Souci, home to the first Black king in the New World; of men with guns; of vague political disagreements she does not understand that, somehow, uprooted her life and sent her across the Atlantic.
Liberation was a string of coincidences, of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and luck.
But the true liberation of Victoire Desgraves did not happen until she met Anthony Ribben.
She learned revolution is, in fact, always unimaginable. It shatters the world you know. The future is unwritten, brimming with potential. The colonizers have no idea what is coming, and that makes them panic. It terrifies them.
Anthony called victory an inevitability. Anthony believed the material contradictions of England would tear it apart, that their movement would succeed because the revels of the Empire were simply unsustainable.
Victory is not assured. Victory may be in the portents, but it must be urged there by violence, by suffering, by martyrs, by blood. Victory is wrought by ingenuity, persistence, and sacrifice. Victory is a game of inches, of historical contingencies where everything goes right because they have made it go right.
As Robin’s family had only recently migrated south, he had grown up speaking both Mandarin and Cantonese. But his Cantonese, Professor Lovell informed him, could now be forgotten. Mandarin was the language of the Qing imperial court in Peking, the language of officials and scholars, and therefore the only dialect that mattered.
This view is a side effect of the British Academy’s path dependency on scant previous Western research. Matteo Ricci’s Portuguese-Chinese dictionary was of the Mandarin dialect he learned at the Ming court; Francisco Varo, Joseph Prémare, and Robert Morrison’s Chinese dictionaries were also of Mandarin. Britain’s Sinologists of that era, then, were far more focused on Mandarin than on other dialects. And so Robin was asked to forget his preferred native tongue.
無 (wú) means ‘negative, not, without’; 形 (xíng) means ‘appearance, form, shape.’ 無形 means not just invisible, but intangible. To illustrate: the poet Zhang Shunmin of the Northern Song dynasty wrote once that ‘詩是無形的畫, 畫是有形詩’; that poems were incorporeal (wúxíng) paintings, and paintings were corporeal poems.
* 幫忙 (bāngmáng), ‘to help, to lend a hand’.
* Thief’s slang for a gaoler (jigger meaning ‘door’, and dubber meaning ‘closer’).
Jīxīn: 雞心; jìxing: 記性.
A reasonable mistake. The characters in yànshǐ are 艷史. 史, shǐ, means ‘history’. 艷, yàn, can mean both ‘colourful’ and ‘sexual, romantic’.
The character 爆 is composed of two radicals: 火 and 暴.
晴天, qīngtiān; qīng meaning ‘clear’, tiān meaning ‘the skies or heavens’.
Guǐ (鬼) can mean ‘ghost’ or ‘demon’; in this context, it is most commonly translated as ‘foreign devil’.
* The word विभाजित (‘vibhājita’) makes use of the Sanskrit root विभिद् (‘vibhid’) and has a variety of meanings including to disperse, to estrange, to unbind, and to alienate.
