It was from Inspector Gregson of the Yard.
‘Rumours abound in Limehouse,’ he wrote, ‘that anew and deadly master-criminal has you in his sights. The only description we have of him comes from the last words of one of his victims: ‘a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan...’.’
The letter continued, ‘Take great care even on your walks to and from The Tiger Inn. His favourite weapons include pythons and cobras ... fungi and bacilli ... and black spiders.’
Were we soon to encounter this new ‘Napoleon of Crime’ right here in England? Could this be connected to our ‘gross intrusion’ into the internal affairs of that near-mythical Middle Kingdom now seemingly so far away? In the dark I stared back over the grassland of the South Downs. Was he out there somewhere, even now?
Holmes’s new Chinese soothsayer disguise would have to work wonders if the rumour proved to be true.
Epilogue
The Ch’ing (or Qing) dynasty, also called the Empire of the Great Ch’ing, or the Manchu dynasty, was the last imperial dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to its ignominious collapse in 1912. Ch’ing connotes the words ‘clean’ and ‘fresh’.
The real Kuang-hsü Emperor’s death. On November 14, 1908, with his face turned towards the south, the traditional direction in which the sovereign must die, the young Emperor’s unhappy and unfortunate spirit left - or was more likely forced from - his body at the hour of the cock (early evening). Court physicians reported his final days were sleepless and tormented with stomach cramps. He could not urinate. His heart beat grew faster. His face burned purple. His tongue turned yellow. All symptoms which had no connection with any of his known previous illnesses. In a last but typically futile, defiant gesture, he refused to be dressed in the traditional vestments of death, the Robes of Longevity.
In his last moments when he could no longer speak, while the Empress Dowager Cixi, his wife Lung Yu and his Lustrous Concubine stood by the bed, his index finger began to turn in a continuous circle which, in Chinese Calligraphy being ‘Yuán’, ‘fingered’ the General he believed was a sworn enemy who would certainly have been executed if the Emperor had survived the Empress Dowager. As the bedside party watched, the circling finger faltered, then failed to move. The Emperor had embarked on the journey to the Nine Springs.
The Empress Dowager of China. Cixi, also Tz’u-hsi, also called Xitaihou, or Xiaoqin Xianhuanghou, byname Empress Dowager. After ruling China for nearly fifty years, she suffered a severe stroke. She lingered a while and died in the afternoon of November 15 1908, shortly before her seventy-third birthday, one day after the Kuang-hsü Emperor.
After lunch and a substantial helping of her favourite crab-apples with clotted cream, the Dowager Empress fainted and was carried to her apartments, dressed in her Robes of Longevity. It is widely believed she ordered the poisoning of her nephew, sensing her own death was imminent. At the end of her life, her personal jewellery vault held 3,000 ebony boxes of jewels.
Cixi was a towering presence over the Chinese empire for almost half a century. Under her, the ancient country attained virtually all the attributes of a modern state: industries, railways, electricity, the telegraph and an army and navy with up-to-date weaponry. She abolished gruesome punishments like ‘death by a thousand cuts’ and called for an end to foot-binding. On her death she was buried in splendour, covered in diamonds.
Cixi’s legacy: after reading dozens of accounts written between the 1890s and the present, the summary I find most convincing is from Jung Chang’s biography ‘Empress Dowager Cixi, The Concubine Who Launched Modern China’, published in 2014. She writes ‘Empress Dowager Cixi’s legacy was manifold and towering. Under her leadership the country began to acquire virtually all the attributes of a modern state: railways, electricity, telegraph, telephones, Western medicine, a modern-style army and navy, and modern ways of conducting foreign trade and diplomacy... She was a giant but not a saint. Being the absolute ruler of one-third of the world’s population and the product of medieval China, she was capable of immense ruthlessness... For all her faults she was no despot. In terms of ground-breaking achievements, political sincerity and personal courage, Empress Dowager Cixi set a standard that has barely been matched... one cannot but admire this amazing stateswoman, flawed though she was.’
The American novelist Pearl S. Buck wrote in her novel ‘Imperial Woman’, ‘...the peasants and the small-town people revered her. Decades after she was dead I came upon villages in the inlands of China where the people thought she still lived and were frightened when they heard she was dead. “Who will care for us now?” they cried.’
In 1928, revolutionaries dynamited her tomb and looted it while desecrating her body.
General Yuán Shì-kai’s end. Four years after the Empress Dowager’s and the Kuang-hsü Emperor’s death, Yuán supported a self-serving grassroots Yuán-For-Emperor Association. A disreputable petition campaign made it ‘impossible’ for him to refuse the mandate of Heaven. In December 1915 Yuán accepted the Throne and three weeks later the new Dynasty commenced under the reign name Hung-hsien (or Hongxian).
It was not long before celestial displeasure manifested itself. Faced with widespread opposition, the Hongxian Emperor’s prestige became irreparably damaged. Yunnan’s military governor, Cai E, rebelled, launching the National Protection War. 83 days later, towards the end of March 1916, Yuán abandoned the crown.
In less than three months, obese and generally unwashed, Yuán died, aged only 56. The official cause was uremic poisoning. Yuán’s remains were moved to his home province and placed in a large mausoleum. In 1928, the tomb was looted by Feng Yuxiang’s Guominjun soldiers during the Northern Expedition.
Perhaps only Mycroft Holmes understood from the start that Yuán Shì-kai was more than a man of panache and wit who handled foreigners with unusual skill. The General and Viceroy was clever, competent and followed through. At the same time he led a full private life, with a harem full of concubines and at least thirty legitimate offspring. He built a well-deserved reputation as a military commander and Army moderniser, expanding his Northern Army to six full Divisions by 1905.
Yuán’s control of the New Army, China’s most powerful military force, made him a seminal figure; as a consequence he was courted by both the Ch’ing and the republicans. He was also a man of exceptional cunning and brutality - a Captain Ahab figure, and like Ahab he suffered terrible consequences from unbridled ambition.
Glossary
The snarling dragon on the front cover can be seen on the Nine-Dragon Wall at the Forbidden City, Peking. It was built in 1771 and is located in front of the Palace of Tranquil Longevity. Such walls were typically found in Imperial Chinese palaces and gardens as a way to block outsiders’ view.
A friend, Mike Lacey, owns a beautiful Chinese bowl. He writes: ‘The label says ‘The bowl is decorated with phoenixes (fung-hwang) and with paeonies upon a yellow ground. The mark on the bowl is Kwang-shiu. This bowl is reputed to have been removed from a royal palace in Pekin at the time of the Boxer Rising. In China the fung-hwang is the symbol of the Empress and the paeony is called kwa-wang, King of Flowers’.’
Chinese people’s names. Modern Chinese names consist of a surname (known as xing) which comes first, followed by a personal name (míng). Therefore Yuán is the General’s family name, and Shì-kai his first name. Prior to the 20th century, educated Chinese also utilized a ‘courtesy name’ or ‘style name’ (zì) by which they were known among those outside of family and closest friends.