Eliot Pattison - Mandarin Gate

He finished cleaning the offerings, checked to confirm that Yuan’s ancestral tablets were still in the little cave, then found a patch of grass above Jamyang’s shrine, where he could gaze on the sacred mountain and let the wind scour his pain. As he closed his eyes memory swept over him.

* * *

The visiting chamber was deliberately kept unheated in the winter, to encourage visitors to spend less time with their imprisoned family members. Shan and Ko had shared the room with an aged woman and her skeletal-looking husband, who spent more time coughing than talking, until she had given up and just murmured mantras beside him.

Shan remembered details, every detail of every minute in that room, etched in his memory. They came back unexpectedly, unbidden, often unwelcome.

“We were digging a roadbed when one of the men found a nest of beetles,” Ko said. His voice was always very low, conditioned by years in cells. “He tied them in his sock and sold them that night, for men to mix in their porridge the next morning.” In his own time Shan had seen many prisoners mix insects into their gruel, for the added protein. “I bought one, a big fat black one, for a purple stone I had found. But that night a lama started talking. He said the souls who had the hardest times as humans sometimes came back as beetles. He took out one of the bugs and began reciting a mantra to it. The thing just looked at him at first, never moved, then damned if it didn’t put its front legs up, together, like it was praying. In the morning all the Tibetans went over to the wire and released their beetles. They looked at me and I made like I was going to eat my beetle. They cried out and starting offering me new stones for my big boy. Red stones, yellow stones, blue stones. That lama didn’t offer anything. He just came over and touched a finger to my forehead.”

“What did you do?” Shan asked.

“I let the little bastard go. All those stones would have just weighed down my pockets.”

They stared at each other in silence. Then Ko grinned and Shan grinned back, one prisoner to another.

* * *

“I was hoping I might find you here.”

Shan stirred from his dream to find Professor Yuan sitting beside him.

“I used to go up on the roof of our apartment building in Harbin when I wanted to contemplate the world in privacy.” He gestured to the broad landscape of rich rolling hills, with the majestic Yangon towering behind them. “On the whole I think I prefer this to smokestacks and highways.”

“Your tablets are safe for now, Professor, but I can’t be responsible for them. Others could come.”

Professor Yuan ignored Shan’s words. He reached inside his shirt and pulled out a rolled-up towel. It was tattered and needed washing but he treated it like a treasure, straightening it on his lap with great care. “He was one of a noble few, our Yuan Yi. A censor, a very senior censor in the court of the Kangxi emperor. You no doubt know about the censors.”

“Scores of thousands of officials ran the empire and a few hundred censors watched over the officials to keep them honest.” The current government had perverted the term, but once censors had been the elite of government officials.

“Exactly.” Yuan lifted the towel in his hands, working his fingers into its seams. “Service in government was a sacred trust to such a man. He used the truth against many corrupt officials and made many enemies in doing so. He was in his twentieth year of service when he was sent to investigate corruption in one of the northeastern provinces, in the emperor’s own Manchuria. He discovered the entire province was run as a criminal enterprise, that the governor himself was the ringleader, siphoning off a third of what was supposed to be sent to the emperor. When he returned and made his report to the emperor’s counselors in Beijing he was arrested and tried for corruption himself, sentenced to be beheaded. An old eunuch who was favored in the court came to his cell the night before his execution and told him the emperor knew of the governor’s corruption but could not act against the governor because the governor was the emperor’s strongest supporter in the region. The emperor asked Yuan Yi to withdraw his report. Yuan Yi instead demanded to be executed the next morning to prove he stood by the truth.

“The next morning he was taken to a private temple the emperor used for ceremonies honoring his greatest mandarins, his most trusted advisers. An executioner was there with his sword. Yuan Yi was shoved forward to the block but only to see that his commission as censor was on the block. The executioner cleaved it with his blade.”

“Killing the censor,” Shan said.

“Yes. The emperor stepped out of the shadows and bowed to Yuan Yi. The gate through which mandarins left after receiving honors from the emperor was thrust open and the emperor escorted him to it. Politics prevented him from arresting the governor but honor prevented him from killing a man for speaking the truth. As Yuan Yi reached the arch he pulled off his badge and handed it to the emperor. Kangxi bowed to him and handed it back. Then Yuan Yi stepped through the gate and fled the capital. He found his way back to Manchuria and formed a group of men who began raiding the caravans carrying the governor’s riches. He spread the riches all over the province, to needy families, to temples, to schools. He was an outlaw the rest of his life, but the emperor would never sign the warrants for arrest sent by the governor. For the rest of his years he lived the life of the bandit, helping those who suffered at the hands of the corrupt.”

“The years have a way of embellishing stories, Professor.”

Yuan only smiled, then gripped the towel and ripped it apart. There had been two towels, sewn together.

Shan’s heart stopped beating for a moment when he recognized what was inside. It was impossible.

Yuan held up the secret treasure, a square of silk worked with exquisite embroidery. For hundreds of years, spanning multiple dynasties, there had been nine ranks of official mandarins, each with its own badge of office worn as a square of cloth over dark blue ceremonial robes. The peacock at the center of Yuan’s silk was the emblem of the esteemed third rank. Arranged around the bird were the clouds, peonies, and bats that traditionally brought good fortune to the wearer. Yuan was holding the badge of office his ancestor had worn nearly three centuries earlier, the badge touched by an emperor.

“A lesser man would have burned this after what the emperor did,” the professor declared. “But Yuan Yi kept it as a token of honor. He said his duty was to the people, that he kept the badge for all those who served the truth no matter what the government said. My family preserved a letter from him, for over two centuries, until the Red Guard burned it. My father used to read it to me. Yuan Yi wrote it as an old man to a grandson. In it he said the most important thing he had ever done was step through that arch, the Mandarin Gate, that the most good he ever did for the people was in leaving the government behind.”

Shan’s hand trembled as Yuan handed the silk badge to him. “My father would have been speechless to behold such a thing,” he said. “As I nearly am.” With a racing heart he held the badge closer, examining its intricate artistry, seeing also now butterflies and a sun, and a dark blotch that could have been a very old bloodstain.

“My grandfather would hold this and describe the processions of the court officials before the emperor,” Yuan explained. “I could close my eyes and hear the drums and smell the incense.” He held up his hand when Shan extended it back to him. “For now this is yours. I loan it to you, until the crisis in the valley is resolved.” He cast a pointed gaze at Shan. “It will not be resolved, my friend, except by you.” He extended his open hand downwards, toward the earth. “I say this with the mountain as my witness.” The professor was learning something of the Tibetan ways.