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My grandmother, having dispensed with the biographical information, began using my visits to interrogate me about my dating status, followed with long-winded testimony, evangelizing, and parables. I heard her entire conversion story. Even a retelling of her time as a science teacher at a missionary school in wartime Macau was framed as a fable about industriousness. “I had no home to return to, so I focused on teaching,” she said. “The big point here is that teachers worked hard, students worked hard. This is a lesson.”
“I know, I know,” I said. “Did you know how your family was doing back in Jiujiang?”
“I wrote letters back to my grandparents at home,” she said.
“Did you keep any of them?”
“There were lots of things I didn’t take with me from Macau,” she said. “A whole suitcase of photos. But that’s my family business, we don’t have to talk about this stuff. My point is to say that we all worked hard, because—”
“Grandma, you already told me this! I’ve written it down many times!”
Of her time in Chongqing during the Sino-Japanese War, she mentioned running into one of her college professors, who was later swept up by the Communists. “Don’t write this,” she said. “Absolutely don’t write this.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, playing dumb.
“The part I just said, these people killed by the Communists,” she said. “Don’t write this political stuff.”
My grandmother refused to discuss “political stuff,” which turned out to cover just about everything I was interested in knowing, and her stories grew vague and obtuse. Regarding one of my great-great-grandfather’s sons, her uncle, all she would say was that he graduated from the prestigious St. John’s University in Shanghai. “I think he was an economics major, but he didn’t use it,” she said. “I think he taught English after graduation.”
He was also the only one of my great-great-grandfather’s sons to survive the war. But my grandmother wouldn’t say more. “There’s some stuff that has to do with Communists that I’m not going to tell you,” she said.
“Tell me what?”
“Breaking the law. So this you don’t want to know. Stuff that has to do with politics, Communists, it’s better not to talk about it.”
“But he might have an interesting story,” I said. I had not yet mentioned that I wanted to go look for the buried porcelain.
“Just say he graduated from college and then taught school,” she said. “Leave it at that.”
The more I pressed, the more resistant she became, which only tantalized me more. “You’re just a xiao wawa,” she said once, calling me the equivalent of a “wee babe.” “You don’t understand.”
Andrew never expressed any interest in our family history or my conversations with our grandmother, but when I recounted these exchanges with our grandmother to him, he didn’t seem surprised. “The Changs put the ‘fun’ into ‘dysfunctional,’” he said. And it all started with our grandmother.
I CAME HOME from work one evening to find a pile of hard-sided suitcases blocking the doorway. Andrew sat on the couch with the owner of the suitcases, his father, Lewis, watching television. “What kept you?” Andrew acknowledged my entrance without taking his eyes off the television.
“One of the vice-presidents advised me to stay late,” I said. “He sounded pretty serious. I didn’t want to get in trouble with him.”
Lewis laughed and slapped at the air. “Shit, the only thing he’d do to you is pray for you,” he said.
Uncle Lewis was the eldest sibling, belligerent, profane, speaking primarily in exclamation marks and, perhaps owing to his time at the University of Georgia for a graduate degree in veterinary science, a self-described Chinese redneck. The family attributed his temperament to having been raised by servants while my grandparents were working as government scientists. The servants had frequently scolded and beat him for no reason. When my mother was born, the ayi said to Lewis, then just three years old, “Your mom has a daughter now, so she doesn’t love you anymore.” My grandmother didn’t learn of the reasons for his frequent tantrums until later, and she didn’t dare punish the servants for fear they would take it out on Lewis behind her back. By the time Richard was born, my grandmother’s youngest sister had moved in with them and she could release the servants. “These no education Chinese people, their knowledge isn’t good,” my grandmother had explained. “It’s all negative. We’re Christians, and that’s all about loving each other, but Chinese people, they’ve never had discipline, they teach you to hate each other. No one has taught them otherwise. No education, no Christian love.”
Long retired after a career in Asia as an industrial agriculture executive, Lewis and my aunt Jamie lived in a tony Dallas suburb most of the time, but as the co-owner of the apartment that I shared with Andrew, Lewis made regular trips to China and kept a bedroom full of things that he constantly reminded us not to touch. He and Richard mostly avoided each other, owing to internecine hostilities that stretched back for decades. The first was a land deal in Texas gone bad. More recent was when Richard started SMIC and Lewis assumed he would be offered a job. “Sorry,” Richard said, “that would be nepotism.” When Richard built the executive villas, on the cusp of the Shanghai housing bubble, Lewis assumed he would be able to buy one at the employee discount. “Sorry,” Richard said, “that would be nepotism.” Lewis bought an apartment through Andrew, but relations between the brothers had never thawed. Now whenever Richard came up in conversation, Lewis usually referred to him as “asshole.” But there were lots of assholes in Lewis’s book. Richard. All the “phony” Christians at Richard’s company. The Kuomintang president of Taiwan, Ma Yin-jeou. Me and Andrew, occasionally. For Lewis, Chiang Kai-shek’s name was never preceded by the customary “Generalissimo” but rather “That Son of a Bitch.”
Lewis spent most of his visits in his bedroom, watching Taiwanese television from a pirated satellite feed while he made Internet phone calls to friends, or forwarded e-mails of conspiracy theories and crude jokes from the laptop perched on his knees. Once I overheard him talking about me to someone on the phone. “My nephew, Huan,” he told the caller, “as in Qi Huan Gong.” It was common for Chinese to offer context in order to distinguish their names from homonyms, sort of the way someone might say “V, as in Victor” when spelling a name aloud.
When he hung up, I asked him what a Qi Huan Gong was. “Not what,” he said. “Who. He was the emperor of China.”
“Wait a minute, really? An emperor? How long ago?”
“A long time ago. Two thousand years at least.”
Qi Huan Gong, Lewis explained, wasn’t technically an emperor. He was a powerful hegemon with a title that translated into English as “duke,” and he ruled the state of Qi in northeastern China, roughly what was now Shandong province, during the Spring and Autumn Period around the seventh century B.C. Qi reached its pinnacle under his rule, and Qi Huan Gong is regarded as something of a Chinese founding father.
“Why have I not been told about this?” I said.
“I don’t know. Ask your mom.”
“What else do you know about my name?”
“Your dad wanted you and your brother to have ‘wood’ in your names,” Lewis said. “He and his brothers were ‘silk,’ and you guys are ‘wood.’” According to Chinese tradition, the names of descendants in a lineage incorporated a character from a set of about a dozen characters, all of which were auspicious words and in sequence formed a kind of poetic verse. Each successive generation used the next word in the sequence in its names, and once those were exhausted, a new verse was chosen.
“Why has it taken thirty years for me to find out that I have the same name as an emperor?” I said.
“See, next time someone asks you your name, you just tell them, ‘Huan, as in Qi Huan Gong,’” Lewis said. “Everyone will know what you’re talking about.”
Though Lewis’s antics mortified Andrew, who shooed him out of the house whenever he had guests, I enjoyed Lewis’s company. I had remembered him having an even more volcanic temper than Richard, but he seemed to have mellowed with age and revealed himself as the only one on that side of the family who didn’t see the world through the narrow prism of Christianity. I could speak to him as plainly as he did with everyone else, and he always had time to explain Chinese or family history. And he was the only one who encouraged me when I talked about looking for our family’s porcelain.
I CONTINUED TO PRESS my grandmother for more names and personal details, and she continued to ignore me. During one rambling parable about two of her former neighbors, she was so vague that I had trouble keeping the characters straight, and she refused to be more specific. “You don’t need to know these things,” she said. “What I’ve told you is enough.”
“Why don’t you want to say?”
“I just said—”
“If you don’t know, that’s fine, but—”
“Because this is my gexing,” she said. It was just her personality. “I’ve given a lot of testimony, and whether it’s mine or others’, I’m not going to discuss it with you. People with names, I’ll discuss. People without names, I won’t discuss. There were two boys and two mothers, that’s all you need to know.”
I bristled when she said “testimony.” I was tired of being surrounded by people who saw everything in religious terms. And I was really, really tired of people telling me what was good for me. “If you’re just going to tell these stories, I don’t want to hear them,” I said. The words had been dammed up for a while. “You’re just telling half stories. I’m asking what people’s names are, and you won’t tell me. It’s so annoying.”
My grandmother rubbed her arm. “I’ve written down a lot of testimony, and I’ve never used names,” she said. “What’s so important about names?”
“How can you tell a story without names?” I said. “I don’t care if it’s a real name or a fake name. All this ‘he’ and ‘her’ and ‘him.’” Chinese didn’t have gendered pronouns, just ta for all occasions. “It’s confusing.”
“Some people, I don’t know their names.”
“That’s fine, but the people you do know, they don’t know you’re saying their names.”
“That’s individual philosophy,” my grandmother said. “I just don’t like doing it. It’s not virtuous.”
“I know, I know. You don’t want to gossip.”
“Maybe it’s because I’m a Christian.”
“It’s not a matter of being Christian,” I said. “I know you only want to say good things about people. You don’t want to say bad things.”
“Even the good things, I’m not going to use names.”
I took a deep breath. “Why?”
“It’s in the Bible. Don’t tell other people’s secrets.”
“But there are names in the Bible! And there are tons of bad stories about people, with names.”
“Yes, there are names in the Bible, but it also teaches us how to act,” my grandmother said. I thought I caught her smirking. “The Bible teaches us not to leak other people’s secrets. Of course, you haven’t read as much of the Bible as I have.”
“Okay,” I said, knowing I was about to pass a point from which it would be difficult to return. “I don’t think I want to hear any more of your stories.”
“Fine. Don’t listen. I have my own ways of doing things.”
THE WINTER IN Shanghai was overcast, cold, and wet. The Chinese didn’t employ radiant heating systems south of the Yangtze, relying instead on inefficient forced-air appliances that were easily overwhelmed by the damp chill. It didn’t help that the ayi, in her endless pursuit of fresh air, left the windows open every time she came to clean. The sun set before I left the office. I had not spoken to my grandmother since our argument.
One dark evening Richard informed Andrew and me that we had plans. He was having dinner with government officials, whose children were attending schools abroad and didn’t have much in common with local Chinese anymore. He offered Andrew and me to entertain them. “Goddamn, I hate having to preen for Communists,” Andrew complained. “At least dinner will be good. They eat well.”
In the car on the way to dinner, Andrew mentioned that the head of the Communist Party of Shanghai and other high-ranking officials had just been sacked for accepting bribes, abusing their power, and siphoning nearly half a billion dollars from the city’s pension fund. Most people expected the ousted party chief to be executed or, as Andrew put it, given “a nine-gram headache.”
I was still paranoid about my visa snafu and a brief stint giving English lessons to two men from the “public safety” department, which I was convinced were related. A few China-based reporters whom I had befriended told me that they were regularly called in for unannounced meetings with government honchos to discuss their work. They assumed that their phones were tapped and that they were being followed. But they said I probably had nothing to fear. The worst thing that could happen to me was being called an unpatriotic Chinese and told to leave the country. Besides, they said, being Richard’s nephew was pretty good protection.
Even so, I hoped to keep a low profile. “Can you do me a favor?” I asked Richard. “Can you just tell them I taught English literature when I was in the States? Don’t tell them I worked for newspapers or what I’m trying to do here with the porcelain.”
“Sure, sure.”
We met the officials at a Chinese restaurant in a shady quarter of the French Concession. Most of the diners wore the telltale signs of nouveau riche party cadres: ill-fitting suits of shiny material, garish belt buckles, cheap-looking leather loafers, and the ubiquitous designer man-purses slung over their shoulders. A four-foot-tall shark fin in a glass case rose prominently from the middle of the floor. A middle-aged man with dyed hair and stained teeth greeted us. This was Speaker Hu, head of the People’s Congress of Shanghai and one of the highest-ranking officials in the city. Speaker Hu had been in charge of Pudong when Richard started his company, and he remained an important ally in the local government. They met for dinner a couple times every year.
Already at the table were two other couples and their daughters. One of the husbands was the head of the government-run venture capital firm that was heavily invested in Richard’s company. The servers made a big show of setting out dishes of cold appetizers on the lazy Susan. Speaker Hu made formal introductions of the two couples and their daughters. One of the daughters, Bonny, worked for the British Council in Shanghai. She had gone to the top college in Shanghai and completed postgraduate studies in London.
Richard went around the table and gave short biographies for Andrew and me, trying to impress with our educational and work backgrounds. “He was a journalist in the States,” he said of me. “And he’s doing research on a project now.”
I sank into my chair, but Speaker Hu and his friends seemed more interested in whether I was married. Richard told them I didn’t speak Chinese very well but was learning—typical ABC, he said, as everyone nodded knowingly—while I concentrated on the food. Richard updated Speaker Hu on the company, and the conversation took place mostly over my head. As part of the youngest generation at the table, I was not expected to speak unless spoken to, a return to the boring, endless dinner parties of my childhood where I spent the whole time wondering if there would be dessert.
Then Speaker Hu asked Andrew about his impressions of China. Without hesitating, Andrew rattled off a long list of China’s problems. “And I think China really needs to improve two major things, the pollution and the health care,” he continued.
I considered tackling Andrew to get him to stop talking. I had seen the inside of a Chinese police station before, when I accompanied a non-Chinese-speaking friend to report a stolen purse. The officer in charge led us through a dark row of subterranean jail cells to a dingy questioning room with a single, barred window high above our heads, where he took down my friend’s statement. The room was empty except for a couple of metal chairs and four scarred wooden tables that had been pushed together to form a larger one that would have been just the right size on which to lay a person. Every single inch of the grimy walls between the floor and eye level was gashed or splattered with dark stains or the kind of streaks that result from flailing legs or missed kicks.
Andrew mentioned an incident during a departmental trip to Huangshan, one of China’s most famous mountains and known to me as a shooting location for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, when one of the company’s vice-presidents suffered a heart attack on the peak. Members of the tour group called an ambulance, but its drivers refused to budge until they received 40,000 RMB (about $6,000) in cash, far more than what the employees had on them. The drivers were unmoved by the group’s pleas and promises that they were good for the money as soon as they reached a cash machine in town. Fortunately the tour guide managed to borrow the difference and got the vice-president to the hospital.
“Was that in Shanghai?” Speaker Hu asked. He spoke with a nicotine-laced growl. I wondered if we would get nine-gram headaches, too. “I can’t believe it happened in Shanghai.”
“Well, no, it was on Huangshan, but—”
“Ah, that’s what I thought,” Speaker Hu said, sitting back. “That would not happen in Shanghai.” He indicated that the subject had reached its conclusion.
Speaker Hu turned to me. “So, Mr. Hsu, what are you researching?” he asked.
I tried to think of the most unimpeachable subject I could. “My family history,” I said. “And, um, porcelain.” I readied myself for an interrogation.
Speaker Hu smiled. “What a great topic!” he said. “Porcelain is one of China’s most famous inventions. The history is so long and rich, you’re sure to find a lot of worthwhile material.”
The venture capitalist spoke. “You know, I’m something of a writer myself,” he said. He had just finished writing a book about the history of Shanghai’s textile industry and presented Richard with a signed copy. Everyone acted impressed. “It’s just a vanity project,” he said, waving his hands. “I’m not a professional. But I thought it was important that someone write about their history before it’s forgotten.”
“If you’re interested in porcelain, then you must have been to Jingdezhen,” Speaker Hu said.
“No, not yet.”
“Oh, you must go there. It’s full of history. It was the capital of porcelain production for the world for centuries.”
Jingdezhen frequently came up whenever I mentioned my family’s porcelain. About ninety miles east of my grandmother’s hometown, Jingdezhen was an entire city that had since ancient times been devoted to manufacturing porcelain, everything from daily wares for civilians to the exquisite imperial pieces destined for the Forbidden City, including that red Qianlong chrysanthemum plate in the Seattle Art Museum. Nearly all the porcelain exported to the West during the Ming and Qing dynasties originated in Jingdezhen, as did most of my great-great-grandfather’s collection. One of my grandmother’s relatives—I remained confused about which one—had supposedly worked in Jingdezhen during the late Qing, early Republican period and brought cases of fine porcelain with him every time he returned home. I’d heard that even now Jingdezhen remained awash with porcelain, its markets overflowing with antiques real and fake, its streetlights encased in blue and white porcelain, and its earth inundated with ancient ceramic shards that anyone could take. I imagined it as a kind of ceramic El Dorado, with streets paved with porcelain, where I might understand why porcelain was so important to the Chinese history and culture that I could trace my roots to, and why my great-great-grandfather went to such great lengths to protect his collection.
I was so surprised by Speaker Hu’s encouragement that I didn’t think to explain why I was researching porcelain, or my desire to try and find my great-great-grandfather’s collection. I sat in a relieved daze until I noticed one of the daughters at the table trying to get my attention.
“I think I might be able to help you,” Bonny said. She had done her graduate thesis on the history of Jews in Shanghai and was putting together a documentary film about it. “Two of my tutors”—she used the British term—“at university here were from Jingdezhen. I’ll put you in contact with them.”
I exchanged information with Bonny while Richard beamed like a proud parent. Contrary to my expectations, these party cadres didn’t seem suspicious or sinister at all, and I felt silly for having been so paranoid. My reporter friends were right: the government wasn’t going to care about me wandering around China looking for my family’s porcelain. That was even more of a shock than when I learned that for all of Mao Zedong’s deification in China, everyone agreed that exactly 30 percent of what he had done was wrong. I began to believe that I might be able to find my great-great-grandfather’s porcelain. I just had to get my family to cooperate.
[3] (#ulink_d5e1998d-9988-5642-9cde-b066156cbe74)
LIU FENG SHU (#ulink_d5e1998d-9988-5642-9cde-b066156cbe74)
MY POOR GRASP OF MY FAMILY ROOTS AND THE CHINESE language paled in comparison to my cultural illiteracy. I didn’t know the difference between a Mongolian and a Manchurian, ancestries that my father’s side of the family claimed, or between the Ming and Qing dynasties (the last two Chinese dynasties, which ruled from 1368 to 1912), or Chiang Kai-shek and Jiang Zemin, whose Chinese pronunciations sounded nothing like their English transliterations. Though my parents often mentioned that I shared a birthday with Sun Yat-sen, I had no idea who he was, or why my parents and their friends from Taiwan always discussed the Kuomintang with such stridency at dinner parties, until I encountered them in a high school history book.
By the time I got to China, I sought to become more informed. But those “five thousand years of history” that modern Chinese loved to boast about remained for me as impenetrable as it was long. I knew that China defied easy explanation, and I had a general idea of its primacy in world history—the Chinese had a claim to several of the most important scientific and technological inventions in recent human existence—but these glories glinted like stars in a constellation I couldn’t decipher. Even the basic primers on Chinese history that I got from a teacher at the SMIC school left me cross-eyed with confusion.
So instead of trying to take the whole of Chinese history in one gulp, I picked at its edges until a thread separated—my family. Then I pinched it between my fingertips and started pulling.
MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER Liu Feng Shu was born in the Yangtze River town of Xingang, in the Jiujiang countryside, in 1867, the Ding—or fourth, according to the Chinese sexagenary cycle—year of the Qing dynasty emperor Tongzhi’s impotent reign. Gone were the days of wealth and territorial expansion. The Opium Wars had bankrupted and humiliated the country, civil order was undermined by a corrupt and antiquated bureaucracy, and the reckless rule of Empress Cixi had alerted the Chinese to the shortcomings of their culture and left them in the mood for rebellion. Despite the turmoil, the imperial examination system remained in place, a thirteen-hundred-year-old tradition that rewarded those who passed the grueling three-day test with positions in the government—possibly even inside the Forbidden City—regardless of family wealth or pedigree. The test was open to all, and even in the Qings’ waning days, becoming a scholar-bureaucrat secured one’s social and financial standing, so Liu’s father, a laborer, put everything he could spare toward his sons’ schooling at a local sishu, or private academy.
The network of sishus, heterogeneous, unregulated, and run by scholarly tutors in rural and urban areas alike, provided the bulk of primary education in China, imparting basic knowledge and Confucian morality. For most, a sishu offered the opportunity to encounter Chinese classics and achieve rudimentary literacy. For the few who could afford to study beyond the basic primers—parents paid tuition in cash or in kind—they were the first step toward possibly passing the imperial civil service examinations.
After ten years of study, Liu traveled to the county seat of Jiujiang for the annual county-level examination, carrying a basket with a water container, a chamber pot, his bedding, food, an inkstone, ink, and writing brushes. Guards patrolled the walled examination compound, in which hundreds of wooden huts—one per test taker—were set out in rows, and they searched each of the hopefuls for hidden papers before allowing them into their cells, furnished only with two boards that could be fashioned into a bed or desk and chair. There were no age or retake limits for prospective candidates, who ranged from precocious teenagers to stubborn elderly men. After the exam was distributed, a cannon sounded, and Liu started writing: eight-part essays on ancient texts, poems in rhymed verse, and opinions on past and present government policies. For three days, the only interruptions came from the proctors stopping in to mark and authenticate his progress with red stamps.
Liu received the second-highest score in the county and earned the title of xiucai, or “cultivated talent.” Those who passed the exam won the right to take the triennial provincial-level exam, after which a certain number would earn a place in the government. But because of Liu’s score, he was immediately offered a minor local post. Mindful of the reputation of Qing bureaucrats, as well as the tenuousness of the government, he declined. “I’m poor now, and if I accept this ‘little official’ position, I’ll remain that way,” he said. “And I won’t participate in corruption—I want to be able to feel the breeze through my sleeves. Just let me go home.”
The bureaucrats urged him to reconsider. He came from a poor family, with just a speck of land to his name. Did he really want to spend the rest of his life plowing with a writing brush? But Liu, a strict Confucian, figured that an overeducated man in the fields was still more virtuous than a cultured one taking bribes. He returned to Xingang and started his own sishu, where he became known for reducing or waiving fees for especially bright students. Just about every male in the village received some kind of training from my great-great-grandfather. “If you don’t go to school, you have no prospects,” he liked to say. “So go to school.”
He was a good teacher, and his sishu was highly recommended. He made a name for himself as a traveling scholar in the Yangtze delta cities of Suzhou and Hangzhou, where wealthy merchants paid him handsomely as a private tutor for their children. His income allowed him to chi chuan bu chou, or not have to worry about his food or clothing, which qualified as an comfortable life back then. He invested the rest of his money in land, accumulating a hundred acres in Xingang, on which sharecroppers raised wheat, barley, millet, sesame, and other grains. He also bought up most of the paddies in the Poyang floodplain, where they alternated rice and vegetable plantings. Between the two harvests, they grew rapeseed, and each autumn the blossoms covered the countryside with a blanket of gold, interrupted occasionally by the whitewashed walls and curved tiled roof of a Buddhist temple. Most families split the harvests fifty-fifty, but Liu kept only four bushels out of every ten, giving the remainder to the farmers, reasoning that they were the ones bearing the expenses and putting in the labor. Besides, his land, in concert with the river, lakes, and orchards of persimmons, sweet-tart loquats, crispy jujubes, yellow plums, and sugary “southern wind” oranges, already provided all the food he could eat, trade, or sell. As word of Liu Da Xian Sheng’s, or “Lord Liu’s,” generosity spread, sharecroppers flocked to work his land. His prosperity grew in a liang xing xun huan, a virtuous cycle.
Meanwhile the country verged on collapse. Much of China’s recorded history consisted of various peoples fighting for, conquering, and—because the territory persistently proved too amorphous and difficult to govern—abdicating control of parts of it or its entirety. Throughout the upheavals, an ambient continuity managed to survive. Cities rose and burned, and their importance waxed and waned, but they remained cities. Sacred places were revered, ignored, and then rediscovered and rehabilitated. Material possessions made of jade, ivory, wood, stone, and porcelain long outlived their makers, and royal collections of art and antiques were often subsumed and added to by newly victorious rulers. The imperial civil service exam, a thread of meritocracy that stitched together half a dozen dynasties, offered a pathway for all qualified men to make generational changes to their socioeconomic standings. The entire country was a palimpsest over which each successive regime had written a different legend, and for almost all of the oft-mentioned five thousand years of China’s recorded history, those former iterations simply receded underground, one stratum at a time, a slow accretion of something that, over the millennia, formed not just Chinese history but also Chinese culture.
Under the Qing, a Manchu people from the north, China reached its zenith of social, cultural, military, and economic power in the eighteenth century. This golden age spanned the reigns of three emperors, Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong, who, while not above the brutality, depravity, or immorality of their time, continue to be held up as the standard for effectiveness. By Qianlong’s rule, the Qing had consolidated double the territory the Ming had governed, including all of Mongolia and parts of Russia. Despite being foreign occupiers, the Qing became increasingly sinicized, and Qianlong anointed himself the preserver of Chinese culture and history. He was a ravenous collector of objects and penner of poems and was known to travel with paintings so that he could compare them to the actual landscapes. He closely supervised the imperial porcelain kilns in Jingdezhen and compelled artisans to impress him. As a result, the kilns made great leaps in creativity and technology during his reign.
Despite its reputation as insular and xenophobic, China had regular contact with outsiders and accepted foreign trade as an inevitability. Jesuit missionaries from across western Europe were fixtures in Kangxi’s court, serving as translators, scientific advisers, and cartographers. Qianlong also employed them as painters, musicians, and architects—so frequently that some complained of not having time for missionary work. As Qianlong became fascinated with exotic buildings, he commissioned Giuseppe Castiglione, a Jesuit missionary-cum-artist, to the Qing court, to design the Western-style mansions in Beijing’s Yuan Ming Yuan, or “garden of perfect brightness,” made of stone instead of wood, the Chinese building material of choice. The general manager of Beijing’s famed glass factory was a missionary, tasked with producing scientific instruments. The technique of painting on glazed porcelain, or famille rose, developed from European enamel technology.
Chinese porcelain, tea, and silk commanded top prices, paid for by silver, and by the eighteenth century China had become known as the world’s silver repository. But as foreign countries saw their treasuries dwindle in the procurement of these exotic goods, they sought schemes to equalize trade with China. One such scheme was addicting the Chinese to opium. The Qing court allowed for the importation of opium by the British, as it generated tax revenue, but it restricted the trade to the port of Guangzhou (known then as Canton), conducted through Chinese merchants instead of directly with the general population, and only during a certain season—terms that chafed the British, whose belief in their heavenly mandate surpassed even that of the Chinese.
This uneasy accord frayed as the Qing government grew alarmed about more and more of its population falling prey to the drug. The Daoguang emperor, Qianlong’s grandson, appointed Lin Zexu, a principled scholar-bureaucrat, as the governor of Guangzhou with an edict to stem the flow of opium into the country. Lin launched an aggressive campaign against the trade, arresting thousands of Chinese opium dealers and confiscating tens of thousands of opium pipes. When British merchants refused to halt shipments into Guangzhou, he blockaded them in the designated enclave for foreign traders and cut off their food supplies. After a month-long standoff, the British turned over more than two million pounds of opium—approximately a year’s supply—which Lin destroyed and threw into the sea. Lin also led expeditions onto ships at sea to seize crates of opium.
When Britain learned of the situation in Guangzhou, it demanded compensation for the destroyed merchandise and better trade terms. Over the following months, tensions escalated to the point that in 1839 the British foreign secretary finally declared war on China. It was too much to bear for the Qing, which had already begun to decline at the end of Qianlong’s reign. In this First Opium War, British gunboats operating with steam engines and modern firearms decimated the rickety Chinese defenses; China, despite having invented gunpowder, had failed to weaponize it with the same sophistication. The Qing court quickly capitulated and agreed to cede Hong Kong to the British, pay an indemnity, and open five ports to trade of all kinds, through which foreign missionaries flowed along with the goods and currency. Lin Zexu was the scapegoat and exiled to the country’s remote northwest.
Palace intrigue was as constant in Chinese history as change and was often the source of that change. In the latter part of his reign, Qianlong, for all his wisdom, had divested many of his responsibilities and much of his decision-making to a man named Heshen. Heshen was said to have come from a family of some means, though his education did not result in any imperial degrees, and he first went to the Forbidden City to serve as a guardsman. There he encountered Qianlong and within just a few years was promoted up through the most important positions in the imperial government, ultimately being appointed the grand secretary, the highest post in the government and akin to prime minister.
