Chapter 2021 - Li Suiqiu Returns to the City
When local scholars came to call at the Five Immortals Temple, Cui Hantang invariably received them with warmth—despite Fu Meng's repeated warnings not to grow too close to such people. Cui saw the matter differently. Religion, he believed, should maintain a folk character rather than presenting an official face. Too much bureaucracy stripped away flexibility, making certain things impossible to do and certain words impossible to say.
His current titles—Elder and Supervisor of the Five Immortals Temple—already carried sufficient official weight. If he cleaved too closely to policy, aping every directive from above, he would alienate the very moderates whose support New Daoism needed. Better to preserve a measure of independence, to exist as a gray channel between the public and private spheres.
What fate awaited these scholars and gentry in the future, how the Council of Elders would ultimately deal with them—that was none of his concern. For now, their attitudes held considerable sway over New Daoism's expansion throughout Guangzhou.
Though he had met with many local scholars recently, including several minor celebrities, none carried real weight in the city's intellectual hierarchy. Li Suiqiu was the first who truly mattered.
In late Ming Guangdong, Li Suiqiu enjoyed considerable fame as a literatus—the celebrated "Peony Top Scholar," accomplished in both poetry and painting. He embodied the ripe, brilliant urban culture that flourished in the dynasty's twilight years. Yet he was also a member of the Restoration Society, an anti-Qing patriot who would one day die defending Ganzhou for the Ming.
But at this moment, Li Suiqiu was neither celebrated scholar nor future martyr, merely an examination candidate who had failed repeatedly and turned his talents to poetry and prose instead. Though he had participated in the Yinshan Assembly during Chongzhen's second year and counted himself an early member of the Restoration Society, his political influence remained negligible.
He could not have dreamed that the Confidential Directory of Guangzhou Local Celebrities—compiled by the Foreign Intelligence Bureau—recorded his complete chronology from another timeline. His teacher Chen Zizhuang received the same treatment, as did ten others from the yet-to-be-formed Twelve Masters of the Southern Garden Poetry Society.
These men, who had expressed such unwavering integrity and loyalty in that other world, now stood as key targets of the Council's attention. Not merely because they commanded great influence among Guangzhou's gentry and common folk, but also to prevent them from becoming anti-Council martyrs.
In the days since the city's occupation, the Political Security Bureau monitored them closely but left them undisturbed. Those who quietly slipped out of Guangzhou encountered no obstacles—for the Council, their voluntary departure counted as a blessing.
Li Suiqiu did not leave. His filial devotion was legendary; in the old timeline's history, he had refused imperial conscription during the Chongzhen era, citing his mother's advanced age. Now Madame Su had passed seventy and could hardly endure the rigors of prolonged travel. So he gathered his wife and children and withdrew with his mother to the old family estate, Liaoshui Residence, in Banqiao Village, Panyu County.
They remained there more than half a year. The Li clan had inhabited Banqiao Village for generations and wielded considerable local influence. Though social order beyond the city walls descended briefly into chaos after Guangzhou's fall, the village maintained its own militia and weathered the crisis unscathed. Soon the National Army swept through the countryside, eradicating banditry, and peace returned to Guangzhou's suburbs.
Li Suiqiu had contemplated returning to the city then, to assess the situation before choosing whether to stay or depart. But news arrived of a great plague ravaging Guangzhou, and rumors swirled that Governor Xiong would lead an army to retake the city. Li Suiqiu abandoned his plans. He simply remained in the countryside, studying and writing in tranquil seclusion. By the time the plague receded, Chongzhen's ninth year had arrived.
From that spring in Chongzhen's eighth year when the Australians seized Guangzhou, a year and a half had elapsed. The city had endured one crisis after another—the sorcery accusations, the plague outbreak, the succession of "tax cases" triggered by the revenue cleanup—leaving gentry and wealthy households perpetually anxious. Yet Li Suiqiu's rural life remained remarkably peaceful. He even completed his treatise Zhouyi Yaowu Dangming, accomplishing a work he had long contemplated.
Though he dwelled in seclusion, concentrating on his writing and refusing callers, affecting the posture of one who "ignored affairs beyond the window, reading only the sage books"—in truth, he remained keenly aware of events within Guangzhou. Servants left to mind the family's city residence came periodically to Banqiao Village bearing letters and sundries. Sometimes they even delivered copies of the hair-thieves' gazette, the Sheep City Express.
Li Suiqiu was hardly ignorant of the Australians. Years earlier, when Australian goods from Purple Nu first appeared in Guangzhou's markets, he had purchased their mirrors for his mother and wife. He had stood among the crowds watching the great military parade before He Rubin's "Expedition to Qiongzhou." When the Australians besieged the city and set Wuyang Post Station ablaze, he had fled hurriedly inward from his villa beyond the East Gate. Later, from the rockery at his teacher Chen Zizhuang's Donggao Villa, he had witnessed with his own eyes the "iron ladder" extending all the way from the Great World complex, those self-moving carts running along it belching black smoke and white steam.
His impression of the Australians had evolved through distinct phases: first as "sea merchants of ingenious skill," then as "pirates with powerful ships and devastating cannon," and finally as "bandits harboring dangerous ambitions." Yet no matter how the hair-thieves advanced, step by inexorable step, he had never imagined that these pirates—however skilled at commerce and industry—would dare raise the Great Song banner and contend for mastery of the realm.
To oppose the Ming Dynasty's thirteen provincial administrations with the resources of a single prefecture in Qiongzhou? These hair-thieves harbored delusions of grandeur.
Li Suiqiu refused to believe the Australians possessed any legitimate claim to "compete for the Central Plains." They were pirates and merchants by origin. In Guangzhou they recruited only destitute commoners to emigrate to Qiongzhou, never extending invitations to scholars—though they showed considerable enthusiasm for merchants.
Since ancient times, dynasties had been won on horseback. But never from the deck of a ship, and certainly not ruled from one.
He had assumed the Australians, being pirates, would at most imitate Zheng Zhilong's old strategy—seizing Guangzhou to extort amnesty from the court. Once granted some nominal title like Lingao Defender or Qiongzhou Guerrilla General, along with permission to "act conveniently" in Qiongzhou, they would withdraw. Should the court refuse, they would inevitably extort "contributions" from wealthy rural households as they had during the siege, plunder what they could, and depart. He had retreated to the countryside precisely to avoid the worst of it. If the hair-thieves truly brutalized the villages and slaughtered innocents indiscriminately, he would have no choice but to raise a militia and defend his ancestral home to the death.
Instead, after entering the city, these hair-thieves neither pillaged nor murdered, nor did they rush to conduct trade or extract protection money. They settled down to govern Sheep City in earnest. The Australian "Prefect Liu" was said to have entered the city in grand style, borne aloft in an eight-man sedan chair. Thereafter came proclamations every three days, new policies every five, all dutifully announced in their own gazette. The whole performance had the quality of "a monkey wearing a scholar's cap"—though Li Suiqiu could hardly fault them for that. Any bandit king occupying a mountain stronghold might drape himself in dragon robes and play at emperor, much less pirates who had seized the South's premier city through overwhelming force.
Yet remarkably, the hair-thieves' charade proved strangely convincing. Their first initiatives upon entering the city—purging corrupt clerks, restoring public security, dredging sewers, repairing roads, stabilizing prices, improving hygiene, fostering commerce, suppressing banditry—addressed chronic afflictions that had plagued Guangzhou for years. The great plague at year's end particularly moved him. Though his family had sheltered in the countryside, insulated from direct experience of the epidemic, both the servants maintaining their city residence and friends trapped within the walls spoke of the Australians with genuine admiration, crediting them as "gifted in the arts of governance."
Nearly two years had passed since Guangzhou's fall, yet the city had not only escaped war damage but was visibly flourishing. Friends and teachers who had vanished resurfaced. Some, learning of his location, journeyed to Banqiao to call on him.
He had worried that the Australians, having raised the banner of rebellion, would inevitably press local literati into service. But visiting friends assured him otherwise: the Australians showed no interest in recruiting "worthies" from Guangzhou. Far from making "three visits to the thatched cottage," they had not even enacted the scenarios he had imagined—forced conscription at sword-point. Instead, they had staged their "Civil Service Examination" theater. The revelation left Li Suiqiu caught between laughter and chagrin. He had been flattering himself.
With no threat of compelled service, and with the Australians firmly entrenched while Governor Xiong's counteroffensive remained perpetually deferred, the family's rural seclusion grew increasingly inconvenient. His elderly mother particularly missed certain delicacies and tonics unavailable in Banqiao. Half a month ago, Li Suiqiu had gathered the entire household and returned from the old Banqiao estate to their Guangzhou residence.
Entering the city felt like emerging into another lifetime. The streets stretched wide and immaculate, the streetscape tidier than before. Common folk plied their trades in peace. The ramshackle lean-tos that once cluttered shop fronts had all been cleared away. Commerce thrived everywhere—this Guangzhou seemed more prosperous than it had ever been under Ming administration.
That sea pirates could govern with such competence, actually benefiting the populace—it was unprecedented in all of history. Li Suiqiu turned the paradox over in his mind a hundred times without finding resolution. When he arrived home, the old servant maintaining the residence emerged to greet them. The house remained undisturbed, precisely as they had left it, save for a numbered plaque now affixed above the lintel. Though he had heard this from the servants' reports, witnessing it firsthand still filled him with wonder.
Shortly after Li Suiqiu's return, the local paijia—the neighborhood headman—appeared at his door, announcing he had come to "pay respects to Master Li."
In former times, such functionaries would have been handled exclusively by the household steward; the master himself would never deign to meet them. Yet this paijia insisted that Li Suiqiu receive him in person. The breach of custom surprised him—what new protocols had emerged in Guangzhou during his eighteen months of seclusion? He admitted the man and learned he had come regarding household registration.
"Please forgive this intrusion, Master," the paijia offered repeated bows. "I come on official business, acting under compulsion. I beg your understanding."
He continued: Australian regulations now required every household to register anew and obtain official household documents. The Li residence had stood empty save for a few servant caretakers—proper registration could not proceed without the family head present. Now that the master had returned, he must be asked to "condescend to append his seal to the register." Otherwise the Australian Police Bureau would conduct formal interrogations.
"Should the registration prove unclear," the paijia added, bowing ever lower, "the family head and all family members will be summoned to the Police Bureau for questioning. I beg your indulgence, Master—please register according to the book, so this humble one may report completion according to regulations."