Tariq Ali - Night of the Golden Butterfly

I sometimes wondered what the emperors would have demanded had the Arabs not observed the pork taboo and had the meat not been forbidden by the Honoured Classic. It would have been difficult to sew the foreskins back onto the men. But enough of this nonsense.

Six months before the Sultan was captured, a young soldier arrived at the court from Kunming. He was unarmed, but hurt. His arm was bleeding profusely through makeshift bandages. He was offered food and water, but insisted on seeing the Sultan personally. Suleiman saw the young man and immediately ordered that a surgeon be sent for, but the soldier insisted that it was a flesh wound and had been wrapped in a salt bandage. He would be fine soon. He asked to speak to the Sultan in private.

Very few people knew that my brother had a network of spies throughout Yunnan, mainly to report on Manchu activities in our country and the neighbouring regions. The soldier said he was one of them. The code to help identify the network was Wang Tai-yu’s ‘True Answers’. Each region in Yunnan had been given a separate set of them.

‘What is your password?’

‘A question.’

‘Ask.’

‘The language of the Lord — what is its sound and script?’

Suleiman gazed at the young man’s face and smiled. ‘The real word of the Lord belongs to neither sound nor script. Ask the second question.’

‘How did the Honoured Classic come to be?’

‘It descended from heaven.’

The soldier was from Kunming. Suleiman gave him some water and insisted on tending to the wound himself. He gently removed the soldier’s shirt and blouse and drew back in surprise. It was a woman. She covered her breasts, leaving the hurt arm hanging by her side. Suleiman washed it and dried it tenderly, then tore a bit of his own silk tunic and bandaged her arm.

‘How were you hurt, Li Wan?’

She looked scared. How could he know her name?

‘It’s inscribed on this amulet. It is your name?’

She nodded in relief. ‘One of Ma Rulong’s men tried to stop me as I was leaving the city, since I had no identification. I brushed him aside. He drew out a dagger, which grazed me. I broke his neck and left the city.’

‘How old are you, Li Wan?’

‘Eighteen. Ma Rulong is my uncle.’

‘What?’

‘Our family despises him. That is why I agreed to join your network.’

‘Who recruited you?’

‘We are forbidden to say.’

‘I am the Sultan. I can find out easily.’

‘Please do. I am forbidden to say.’

And nor did she, but the inevitable happened. Your uncle avoided the four vices. He was not addicted to wine, lust, avarice or anger, but he was a human being with all the strengths and weaknesses of one and we Yunnanese are a passionate people. My brother was overcome by emotion. The young woman must have been flattered, but she resisted. Then he asked her another question from the master’s work.

‘Which is prior, heaven or earth?’

She smiled, but refused to reply and insisted, very correctly, that the question had nothing to do with her recruitment to the network.

‘You are talking statecraft and I am speaking passion’, said the Sultan, ‘and I order you to reply.’

She answered: ‘If you know the sequence of men and women, you will naturally know the priority and posteriority of heaven and earth.’ He roared with laughter, and she added: ‘The Master Wang Tai-yu was a brilliant sage, but not always correct. That was a wrong answer, since in our country and especially in the more remote regions, the sequence of men and women is not always the same.’

You can tell from this conversation, Qin-shi, that your uncle was developing a passion for Li Wan, and despite her pretence, it was obvious that she was not indifferent to his attention, but she was a very disciplined girl and would not let him touch her till she had given him a detailed account of what the Qing court had asked of Ma Rulong in return for the promised governorship of all Yunnan.

His fever of passion cooled as he heard the story. He became firm and fierce, but first he wanted to be sure that Li Wan’s sources were trustworthy. She hesitated, but only for a moment.

‘He told me so himself.’

‘Explain.’

‘The network teaches us that we must utilize every possible method to gain information without arousing suspicion. Ma Rulong sometimes visited our household. I saw him looking at me in the way old men do. Then he asked my mother whether I would come and keep his daughter company. She resisted, but I stood up with a smile and said I would like that very much.’

‘Enough. I don’t want to hear any more.’

‘You should. It concerns you. After he had his way with me, and I should report that he had the violent and rough manner of a shepherd locked in a mountain hut with only his sheep for the winter, and believe me, it filled me with revulsion, but afterwards he spoke openly in my presence. He spoke of having you killed and your head sent to Beijing in a diamond-encrusted silver basket as a gift to the emperor. He spoke of becoming an ally of the Manchu and ruling Yunnan from the Forbidden City in Dali. His allies tell the people that Dù Wénxiù is not a proper Hui, that he eats pork, does not say his prayers and has no concubines, that they alone are the real defenders of the Honoured Classic. All this is being said even now.’

She provided the Sultan with a complete picture of what the traitors were planning. For days Suleiman was busy and did not see her, but he could not forget her features nor the soft skin that he had bandaged. Together with her obvious intelligence, they weighed on him a great deal. Since this is not a story of personal passion but a history of political defeat I will not dwell on every detail except to say that she became his favourite lover. They were inseparable, and since she knew the enemy so well she was often present at meetings of the Grand Council that organized the defence of the city.

When this news reached Ma Rulong he panicked and is reported to have considered suicide, since he thought that Suleiman would send assassins to kill him. Men who plot murder always believe that it is being plotted against them. Suleiman was generous. He sent a messenger to plead with Ma Rulong not to commit treachery but to share power in Dali. Suleiman suggested that their children should marry each other to cement the alliance, but Ma Rulong was too far gone in his intrigues and was afraid that this offer was a trap, that Suleiman meant to ensnare and kill him.

Suleiman was dominated by one idea, and that was to never let the Manchu retake Dali and Kunming and to remain free of the Qing court. For a while it seemed he would succeed. Of the governors-general despatched by Beijing to Yunnan, one was assassinated, another committed suicide, one lost his mind completely, several were fired for incompetence and one refused to take up his position in the rebel region. Even their policy of using Hui to fight Hui had failed, and Ma Rulong was becoming increasingly isolated as more and more of his Hui soldiers deserted him. But fate was against us. There were too few of us and just too many Qing soldiers, and they were now all united to crush Dali. Incapable of defeating the Europeans, they wanted to prove they were still capable of some victories against us.

The rest you know. Our council met and the Sultan told them that further resistance was impossible. The Manchu would kill every person and every animal in the city unless he, Dù Wénxiù, gave himself up. He had decided to go to the Qing encampment early the next morning and surrender. Your father wept, Qin-shi, and begged to go with him, but he refused. He would go alone. The next morning he put on his sultan’s robes for the last time and seated himself in his sedan chair. Thousands of people rushed out of their homes to say farewell. Many were weeping. At the Southern Gate he got out and thanked the people for the way they had supported him for eighteen whole years. Once inside his chair he swallowed a fatal dose of opium and was dead by the time he reached the enemy camp. His corpse was dragged in front of the Qing army and he was decapitated.