Chapter 2917: Zheng Hongkui's Cannon

Viewed with the wisdom of hindsight, the "vigilant activists" of the Hong Kong shipyard — and the covert Political Security officers who had interrogated Mai Ruibao the moment he came into their hands — had both carried vigilance rather past the point of reason. Four thousand-odd li away in the capital, nobody whatever cared that the Australians were racking their brains to cobble together an expanded fleet in a hurry, even toying with the crooked notion of converting colliers into warships — still less would anyone send spies expressly to gather such intelligence. Had the subject truly come up in conversation, it would have been no more than the idle spectator's appetite for watching beasts baited in a pit. Witness how, from dawn onward this day, countless Beijing idlers had produced copper cash and little clots of loose silver to grease the city patrol's sentries, and led wives and children up onto the walls and into the arrow towers. From Anding Gate to Desheng Gate the ramparts were thick with heads; kerchiefs were unwound from faces, and heedless of the dust storms the capital so often suffers in late spring, every eye strained northward toward the great parade ground of the Five Armies Camp. From the crowd rose arguments, now loud, now low:

"...General Shengyi — Zheng Hongkui, that is — sent men in secret to seek out the Kun bandits' arcane art of casting, then engaged Frankish artificers at heavy price to puzzle over the workings, and hired master founders from Luzon in the South Seas to smelt and cast the metal. Only thus was this Great South Seas Gun brought into the world — how could it fail to be extraordinary..."

"Wang Laowu, since you say this South Seas gun was cast by Kun methods, let me ask you: set that gun of yours against Kun soldiers and Kun generals, Kun ramparts and Kun forts, Kun fire-wheel ships — your own spear against your own shield — what odds would you reckon then?"

"Aye, and I heard it from a military man: every Kun trooper stands eight chi tall and measures eight chi about the waist, sheathed head to toe in three layers of steel armor, with iron-wheeled carts beneath his feet; once he works his sorcery he crosses hills and ravines like level ground. A matchlock ball fired at him from ten paces does no more than make a noise. Who's to say this great South Seas gun would serve?"

"Bullshit — bullshit and dogshit! You lot, red-lipped and white-toothed, puffing up the Kun spawn's majesty and trampling down the Great Ming's spirit. I'll warrant every last one of you has pocketed the Kun spawn's silver dollars..."

The bellowing roar of the 24-pounder cannon drowned Wang Laowu's curses in an instant. Yet in the intervals between firings, once the buzzing in the ears of the officials and camp troops at the edge of the parade ground had faded to quiet, one could still faintly make out the clamor and hallooing from the walls and gate towers — threaded, now, with the wailing of frightened women and children. Zhao Guangbian, Vice Minister of the Court of the Imperial Treasury, felt a flush of genuine anger: had the capital garrison's vigilance slackened to such a pass? If a Kun spy were to slip in among this brood of gawkers on the walls and gorge his eyes on the instruments of state war-making — what then?

That said, Zhao Guangbian, long served in the Ministry of War, did not think much of these "South Seas great guns" hauled the thousand-odd li up from Fujian. The No. 1 South Seas long gun was imposing enough — a single shot, a solid iron ball of twenty-four jin, blasted the earthen target mound into fountains of clods and dust. But in Zhao Guangbian's eyes it stood, at best, neck and neck with the "Divine Might Grand General" guns of home manufacture that Xu Guangqi, Grand Coordinator of Tianjin, had forwarded up earlier. More interesting was the No. 2 short tile-tube piece demonstrated afterward: mounted on its gun carriage, hauled by four horses, it trotted about the parade ground with real agility, and it could fire explosive shells that blossomed where they struck the ground. Zhao Guangbian examined the carriage closely and found that a thick hardwood screw, turned this way and that, would raise or lower the barrel — ingenious in the extreme. And the shell's fuze was a marvel of subtlety: no preliminary ignition required; it burst of itself on landing — all but incredible. But when he questioned the gunnery officer and learned that the shells were entirely the work of a bureau Zheng Hongkui had established at Anxi, fuze included, at a cost running to five fen of silver apiece, he shook his head and said no more.

The Zheng clan had grown restless of late. In the capital Zheng Hongkui curried favor above with his "newest Frankish firearms," while agents of Zheng Sen — Zheng Zhilong's son by the lawful line — came and went on brisk feet, working to win the family a transfer of garrison to Ningbo. But the thing was without precedent since the dynasty's founding; the court above and below seethed with argument, and the dispute ran hot.

Since Zheng Zhilong fell to the Kun bandits, the Zheng combine had shattered into four parts. Zheng Hongkui, strong in ships and men; Zheng Sen, heir of the direct line; the scattered remnant branches besides — all of them coveted the surviving shards of the family's sea-trade map and the legacy of the old days. To that end every faction had sent men into the capital to move about and angle for its own advantage.

Zhao Guangbian, at the Ministry of War, had felt the influence of these lobbyists directly, and had come in for no little silver, Fujian native goods, and foreign articles. Yet deep in his heart he had a poor opinion of all these Zheng remnants — men bred out of the sea trade, when all was said, were simply not the proper path.

"Halt—" The gun trials over, Zhao Guangbian walked to the parade-ground gate and was waiting for his servant to bring his horse when a bearers' chant sounded and an official sedan, four bearers strong, stopped at his side. The curtain lifted and out peered Yang Sichang's plump face with its short mustache. "Why, Yanqing! Come into the sedan, quickly."

"My lord Minister—" Zhao Guangbian began the full ceremony even inside the sedan, but Yang Sichang pressed him firmly down onto the bench. "Sit, sit, sit. Between you and me, no standing on rank — that way lies distance!"

From outside came the bearers' chant in unison, and the sedan began to sway. "Yanqing, you have served long on the frontiers and know the business of war. This day's gun trials in the capital — what is your view?"

"Honored Elder, give me leave to report: these Fujian-made great guns much resemble the Red Barbarian guns and the cannon of the Western ocean. Though they have their carriages, they suffer no less from heaviness and clumsiness on the march; yet in violence of gunfire they surpass them. Thus they serve on water but not on land, for defense but not for assault. In your junior's shallow judgment: of the eighteen pieces forwarded up from Fujian this time, the first allotment should go to Dongjiang. As for the guns demanded by the Ji and Liao garrisons, let them be ordered to cast their own for the present. If the Quannan Guerrilla speaks true, that several tens of guns more will arrive within a month or so, there is no haste in distributing those."

The speech Zhao Guangbian had prepared carried its own arithmetic. In the ninth year of Chongzhen, the Deng-Lai garrison had sent troops to the aid of Korea and for a time prevailed, forcing the slave chieftain Hong Tai to withdraw. Then, last tenth month, Hong Tai led a new campaign in person against Korea; the Deng-Lai garrison joined the Dongjiang garrison in a second expedition — and met reverse upon reverse. This was passing strange. In the old days the new Deng-Lai army, green to battle, had routed the slave chieftain utterly on the strength of its "new-fangled Frankish firearms," taking better than five hundred heads of genuine caitiffs and cutting down enemy captains by name on the field; the victory dispatches had reached the capital swaggering with the air of a force about to swallow the mountains and rivers of Liaodong whole. And now this same army had produced a "collapse at first touch." The Ministry of War officials had rubbed their eyes, half suspecting them of deceiving them.

Shen Shikui, commander-in-chief of Dongjiang, shoved the whole of the blame onto the Deng-Lai garrison: not only did he charge the Deng-Lai officers and men with cringing before the enemy, worse — he accused them of withholding Dongjiang's soldiers' pay, winter clothing, and firearms; above all, that the Deng-Lai grand coordinator had drawn from Tianjin the "Divine Might Grand General" guns and the Kun-style quick-firing muskets yet refused to share them with Dongjiang, so that Dongjiang's officers and men had in the end been slaughtered in heaped ranks by the enemy's cannon and broken. The Deng-Lai grand coordinator Sun Yuanhua and his party naturally gave as good as they got, crying that Dongjiang "drew rations for phantom soldiers." Impeachment memorials flew thick from both sides, attack and counterattack, a fine lively show. Hard on that, Yan Jizu, Grand Coordinator of Shandong; Xu Guangqi, Grand Coordinator of Tianjin; and several of the Grand Secretaries at court were dragged in, willy-nilly, each to take his corner. The uproar swelled so great that it drowned out even the rumor lately running loud through the capital — that the Emperor in secret meant to open markets and treat with the slave chieftain. Nor, of course, did the purists fail to seize the affair to memorialize impeachment against Minister Yang: the fault, in sum, lay all in his feeble grip on his subordinates. As for what the Qing armies had actually made of Korea, and how the fighting truly stood — that, by then, nobody cared to ask.

Of Zhao Guangbian's scheme — to quiet the storm by balancing the gun allotments — Yang Sichang offered neither assent nor refusal. He simply drew a sheaf of papers from his sleeve and put them into the other man's hands.

"What — the Eastern caitiffs have taken the Korean royal capital again?" Zhao Guangbian exclaimed over the latest dispatch from the Deng-Lai garrison. "Then what has become of the Korean king, Yi Jong?" He unfolded several more pages: a sealed memorandum from Ling Yiqu, Supervising Secretary of the Office of War, which first gave thorough tongue-lashings to Shen Shikui and Chen Hongfan both, then reported that, according to Korean fugitive soldiers, the Korean king had moved his court once more to the refuge fortress of Namhansanseong; that the caitiff army had ringed the fortress round and set up explosive shell-guns to batter it from the four sides; and that its fall was to be feared within days. The memorandum closed, for good measure, with a pointed question: the explosive shell-gun is an engine of war without peer — from what place did the Eastern caitiffs obtain them? If the offices of state do not ask, they should be charged with dereliction.

"Explosive shell-guns?" Zhao Guangbian's first thought was of the South Seas tile-tube guns on today's parade ground; then the thought turned, and he startled himself with a shiver. "The bursting gun is the very sharpest weapon of the Kun. Can it be the Eastern caitiffs have gotten Kun guns? Then the Kun bandits—"

"First read this courier report from Zhejiang." Yang Sichang, as if he had read the doubt off Zhao Guangbian's face, drew a rolled booklet from his sleeve as well. Its contents were more astounding still: a Korean monk, dharma name Dubu, had contrived to slip aboard a Tsushima domain trading ship at the Japan House of Domaopo, at Korea's southernmost tip, and so reached Japan. From there he meant to make for Ryukyu, and thence take a Ryukyu tribute ship to Fuzhou. But scarcely out of Japan the ship met storm and wrecked, drifting all the way to the coast of Zhenhai. And all this laborious circuit for one purpose only: to report to the Ming court that on the very eve of Hong Tai's second march, Kun pirates had raided Gyodong Island at the mouth of the Han River, scattered its guards, and carried off the deposed King Gwanghae to Tamna Island, long held by the Kun bandits by theft. In the eleventh month, a Kun fleet put out from Tamna and invaded Jeolla Province. Consider that Dubu had drifted so long upon the sea: by this day, in all likelihood Jeolla and Gyeongsang had both passed entire into the Kun bandits' hands — perhaps the Kun and the slave chieftain had already split Korea down the middle, each to rule his side of the line.

Zhao Guangbian's throat felt parched. "Th-this Goryeo monk may not be entirely to be trusted. The pressing matter is to order Deng-Lai and Dongjiang out to gather intelligence, and separately to gather the naval forces of Nanzhili, Zhejiang, and Fujian; once these are assembled, to plan the great stroke..."

"Too late for that." Yang Sichang heaved a long sigh. By now the sedan had been carried into the city. The capital's lanes and streets were planted thick with scholar trees, and the slanting sun, threading between branch and leaf, fell through the thin gauze of the sedan window and lit the Minister's face in flickers of light and shade. "That the Eastern caitiffs and the Australian Kun have linked hands is all but settled fact, and His Majesty is set on chastising the Kun. Were tomorrow's China to repeat today's Korea, the rot would be past all mending. Wherefore, first and foremost, we must come to terms quickly with that Hong Tai — open the markets at Uiju, lay down arms on both sides. As for the finer names — investiture, tribute, and the rest — these touch great fundamentals and may be debated at leisure hereafter. In sum: toward the Eastern caitiffs the court must use the policy of appeasement, that it may bend its whole strength against the Australian Kun. Is that not the logic of it, Yanqing? And yet those gentlemen at court — ah. Ah. Well. These reasonings, we had best go and lay them before His Majesty more often."

Listening to the Minister of War's sighs and lamentations in that Huguang lilt of his, Zhao Guangbian felt his throat grow drier still; he wished to say something and could not. With the rocking of the sedan, the dim tree-shadows of the scholar trees passed and repassed before his eyes, and little by little they smeared into a darkness like the bottom of a wok.