京华烟云英文版.doc

Chapter 1It was the morning of the twentieth of July, 1900. A party of mule carts were lined up at the western entrance of the Matajen Hutung, a street in the East of City of Peking, part of the mules and carts extending to the alley running north and south along the pink walls of the Big Buddha Temple. The cart drivers were early; they had come there at dawn, and there was quite a hubbub in that early morning, as was always the case with these noisy drivers.Lota, an old man of about fifty and head servant of the family that had engaged the carts for a long journey, was smoking a pipe and watching the drivers feeding the mules; and the drivers were joking and quarreling with each other. When they could not joke about each other¡¯s animals and the animals¡¯ ancestors, they joked about themselves. ¡°In such times,¡± said one, ¡°who can tell whether one comes back dead or alive after this journey?¡±¡°You are well paid for it, aren¡¯t you?¡± said Lota. ¡°You can buy a farm with a hundred taels of silver.¡±¡°What is the use of silver when you are dead?¡± replied the driver. ¡°Those bullets from foreign rifles doesn¡¯t recognize persons. Peng-teng! It goes through your brain-cap and you are already a corpse with a crooked queue. Look at the belly of this mule! Can flesh stay bullets? But what can you do? One has to earn a living.¡±¡°It¡¯s difficult to say,¡± rejoined another. ¡°Once the foreign soldiers come into the city, Peking won¡¯t be such a good place to live in, either. For myself, I¡¯m glad to get away.¡±Ö»The sun rose from the east shone upon the entrance to the house, making the leaves of the big colanut tree glisten with the dew. This was the Yao house. It was not an imposing entrance ¨C a small black door with a red disc in the center. The colanut tree cast its shade over the entrance, and a driver was sitting on a low stone tablet sunk into the ground. The morning was delightful, and yet it promised to be a hot day with a clear sky. A medium-sized earthen jar was standing near the tree, which provided tea in hot summer days for thirsty wayfarers. But it was still empty. Noticing the jar, a driver remarked, ¡°Your master does good deeds.¡±Lota replied there was no better man on earth than their master. He pointed to a slip of red paper pasted near the doorpost, which the driver could not read; but Lota explained to him that it said that medicines against cholera, colic, and dysentery would be given free to anybody.¡°That¡¯s something important,¡± said the driver. ¡°You¡¯d better give us some of that medicine for journey.¡±¡°Why should you worry about medicine when you are traveling with our master?¡± said Lota. ¡°Isn¡¯t it the same whether you carry it or our master carries it?¡±The drivers tried to pry out of Lota information about the family. Lota merely told them that his master was an owner of medicine shops.Soon the master appeared to see that all was in order. He was a man of about forty, short, stumpy, with bushy eyebrows and pouches under the eyes, and no beard, but a very health complexion. His hair was still perfectly black. He walked with a young, steady gait, with slow but firm steps. It was obviously the gait of a trained Chinese athlete, in which the body preserved an absolute poise, ready for a surprise attack at any unsuspected moment from the front, the side, or behind. One foot was firmly planted on the ground, while the other leg was in a forward, slightly bent and open, self-protective position, so that he could never be thrown out of his balance. He greeted the drivers and, noticing the jar, reminded Lota to keep it daily filled with tea as usual during his absence.¡°You¡¯re a good man,¡± chorused the drivers.He went in, and soon appeared a beautiful young woman. She had small feet and exquisite jet-black hair done in a loose coiffure, and wore an old broad-sleeved pink jacket, trimmed around the collar and the sleeve ends with a three-inch broad, very pale green satin. She talked freely with the drivers and showed none of the shyness ususal among higher-class Chinese young women. She asked if all the mules had been fed, and disappeared again.¡°What luck your master has!¡± exclaimed one young driver. ¡°A good man always is rewarded with good luck. Such a young and pretty concubine!¡±¡°Rot your tongue!¡± said Lota. ¡°Our master has no concubines. That young woman is his adopted daughter and a widow.¡±The young driver slapped his own face in fun, and the others laughed.Soon another servant and a number of pretty maids, from twelve or thirteen to eighteen in age, came out with bedding, packages, and little pots. The driver were rather dazzled, but dared not pass futher comments. A boy of thirteen followed, and Lota told the drivers it was the young master.After half an hour of this confusion, the departing family came out. The beautiful young woman appeared again with two girls, both dressed very simply in white cotton jackets, one with green, the other with violet trousers. You can always tell a daughter of a well-to-do family from a maidservant by her greater leisureliness and quietness of manner; and the fact that young woman was holding their hands showed the drivers these two were the daughters of the family.¡°Hisaochieh, come into my cart,¡± said the young driver. ¡°The other¡¯s mule is bad.¡±Mulan, the girl, thought and compared. The other cart had a smaller mule, but his driver had a more jovial appearance. On the other hand, this young driver had ugly sores on his head. Mulan chose by the driver rather than the mule.So important are little things in our life, perfectly meaningless in themselves, but as we look back upon them in their chain of cause and effect, we realize they are sometimes fraught with momentous consequences. If the young driver had not had sores on his head, and Mulan had not got into the other cart with the small and sickly-looking mule, things would not have happened on this journey as they did, and the course of Mulan¡¯s whole life would have been altered.In the midst of the hustle, Mulan heard her mother scolding Silver-screen, a maid of sixteen in the other cart, for being overpainted and overdressed. Silver-screen was embarrassed before everybody; and Bluehaze, the elder maid of nineteen, assisting the mother into her cart, was silently smiling, being secretly glad that she had known better than to overdress for this journey and had listened to the mistress¡¯s instructions.You could see at a glance that the mother was the ruler of the family. She was a woman in the middle thirties, broad-shouldered, square-faced, and inclined to be stout; and she spoke in a clear, commanding voice.When everybody was well seated and ready to start, a little maid of eleven, whose name was Frankincense, was seen crying at the door. She was utterly miserable about being left behind to stay alone with Lota and the other servants.¡°Let her come along,¡± Mulan¡¯s father said to his wife. ¡°She can at least help fill the tobacco for your water pipe.¡±So, at the last moment, Frankincense jumped into the maid¡¯s cart. Everybody seemed to have found a place. Mrs. Yao shouted to the maids to let down the bamboo screen at the front of their covered cart, and not to peep out too much.There were five covered carts, with one pony among the mules. The maternal uncle, Feng, and the young boy led the party, followed by the mother, riding with the elder maid, Bluehaze, who was holding a baby two years old. In the third cart were Mulan and her sister Mochow and the adopted daughter, whose name was Coral. The three other maids, Silverscreen, Brocade, fourteen, and little Frankincense, were in the next cart. Mr. Yao, the father, sat alone and brought up the rear. His son Tijen had avoided riding in the same cart with him, and had preferred the uncle.A manservant, Lotung, who was the brother of Lota, sat on the outside in Mr. Yao¡¯s cart, one leg crossed on the shaft and one left dangling.To the people who had gathered to watch the departing family, Mrs. Yao loudly announced that they were going for a few days to their relatives in the Western Hills, although actually they were going south.Whatever their destination, it was obvious to the passers-by that they were fleeing from the oncoming allied European troops who were marching upon Peking because of the Boxer uprising.And so with a waddle-ho! And ta¡­tr! And crackings of whips, the party started. The children were all excited, for it was their first trip to their Hangchow home, about which they had heard their parents speak so often.Mulan greatly admired her father. He had refused to flee from Peking until the evening of the eighteenth; and, now that they had decided to seek safety in their home at Hangchow, he had made extremely cool and unperturbed preparations for the departure. For Mr. Yao was a true Taoist, and refused to be excited.¡°Excitement is not good for the soul,¡± Mulan heard her father say. Another argument of his was: ¡°When you yourself are right, nothing that happens to you can ever be wrong.¡± In later life Mulan had many occasions to think about this saying of her father¡¯s, and it became a sort of philosophy for her, from which she derived much of her good cheer and courage. A world in which nothing that happens to you can ever be wrong is a good, cheerful world, and one has courage to live and to endure.War clouds had been in the air since May. The allied foreign troops had taken the fort at the seacoast, but the railway to Peking had been destroyed by the Boxers, who had grown in power and popularity and swarmed over the countryside.The Empress Dowager had hesitated between avoiding a war with the foreign powers and using the Boxers, a strange, unknown, frightening force whose one object was to destroy the foreigners in China and who claimed magical powers and magic protection against foreign bullets. The Court issued orders one day for the arrest of the Boxer leaders, and the next day appointed the pro-Boxer Prince Tuan as minister for foreign affairs. Court intrigue played an important part in this reversal of the decision to suppress the Boxers. The Empress Dowager had already deprived her nephew the Emperor of his actual power, and was planning to depose him. She favored Prince Tuan¡¯s son, a worthless rascal, as successor£¨¼Ì³ÐÕߣ© to the throne. Thinking that a foreign war would increase his personal power and obtain the throne for his son, Prince Tuan encouraged the Empress Dowager to believe that the Boxers had threatened to capture ¡°one Dragon and two Tigers¡± to sacrifice to heaven for betrayal of their nation, the ¡°Dragon¡± being the reformist Emperor whose ¡°hundred days of reform¡± two years earlier had shocked the conservative mandarinate, and the ¡°Tigers¡± being the elderly Prince Ching and Li Huangchang, who had been in charge of the foreign policy.Prince Tuan forged a joint note from the diplomatic crops of Peking, asking the Empress Dowager to restore the Emperor to actual power, thus making the old woman believe that the foreign powers stood in the way of her plan to depose the Emperor, so that she decided to throw in her lot with the Boxers, whose secret of power was their war cry of ¡°driving out the Oceanic People.¡± Some enlightened cabinet ministers had opposed the Boxers on account of the burning of the Euopean Legations, advocated by the Boxers, which was against Western usage; but these opponents had been killed by the power of Prince Tuan. The Chancellor of the University had committed hara-kiri by disemboweling himself.The Boxers were actually within the capital. A lieutenant colonel who had been sent out to fight them had been ambushed and killed, and his soldiers had joined the Boxers. Hightly popular and triumphant, the Boxers had captured Peking, killing foreigners and Christian Chinese and burning their churches. The diplomatic crops protested, but Kang Yi, sent to ¡°investigate¡± the Boxers, reported that they were ¡°sent from Heaven to drive out the Oceanic People and wipe out China¡¯s shame¡± and secretly let tens of thousands of them into the capital.Once inside, the Boxers, under the covert protection of the Empress Dowager and Prince Tuan, terrorized the city. They roamed the streets, hunting and killing ¡°First Hairies¡± and ¡°Second and Third Hairies.¡± The ¡°First Hairies¡± were the foreigners; the ¡°Second and Third Hairies¡± were the Christians, clerks in foreign firms, and any other English-speaking Chinese. They went about burning churches and foreign houses, destroying foreign mirrors, foreign umbrellas, foreign clocks, and foreign paintings. Actually they killed more Chinese than foreigners. Their method of proving a Chinese to be a ¡°Second Hairy¡± was simple. Suspects were made to kneel before a Boxer altar in the open street, while a piece of paper containing a message to their patron god was burned, and the suspect was pronounced guilty or not guilty according to whether the ashes flew up or flew down. Altars would be set up in the streets toward sunset, and the people who showed obedience to the Boxers would burn incense while they danced their monkey dance, the Monkey Spirit being one of the most popular of their patron gods. The smell of incense filled the streets, and once could believe oneself living in the magic land of Hsiyuchi once more. Even important officials had set up altars and invited the Boxer leaders to their homes, and servants had joined the Boxers to tyrannize over their masters.Mr. Yao, being a well-read man and in sympathy with the reformist Emperor, thought the whole thing silly and dangerous child¡¯s play, but kept his convictions to himself. He had his own good reasons to be ¡°antiforeign¡± in a sense, and hated the church as a foreign religion protected by a superior foreign power; but he was too intelligent to approve of the Boxers, and was grateful that Lota and his brother Lotung had kept away from the rabble.There was fighting in the city. The German minister had been fallen upon and murdered by Kansu soldiers. The Legation Quarter was under siege, and the Legation Guards had been holding out for two months, waiting for relief from Tientsin. Yung Lu, one of the most trusted men of the Empress Dowager, who was put in command of the Imperial Guards to attack the Legations, was not in favor of the attack and secretly gave orders for their protection. But whole blocks of the city near the Legation Quarter had been razed to the ground, and whole streets in the South City burned down. The city was truly more in the hands of the Boxers than of the Government. Even the water carriers and toilet cleaners were not allowed to pursue their business unless they had red and yellow turbans wound around their heads.All through this period Mr. Yao had refused to consider moving. All he consented to was to destroy a few big foreign mirrors in his home and a collapsible fo