Page 99 of Babel

‘And Lovell doesn’t speak it?’

‘No,’ Robin said. ‘No, that’s why he needs me.’

In the evenings, Professor Lovell primed them for the purpose of their mission in Canton. They were going to help negotiate on behalf of several private trading companies, foremost among them Jardine, Matheson & Company. This would be more difficult than it sounded, for trade relations with the Qing court had been marked by mutual misunderstanding and suspicion since the end of the past century. The Chinese, wary of foreign influences, preferred to keep the British contained with other foreign traders at Canton and Macau. But British merchants wanted free trade – open ports, market access past the islands, and the lifting of restrictions on particular imports such as opium.

The three previous attempts by the British to negotiate broader trading rights had ended in abject failure. In 1793, the Macartney embassy became a global punchline when Lord George Macartney refused to kowtow to the Qianlong Emperor and came away with nothing. The Amherst embassy of 1816 went very much the same way when Lord William Amherst similarly refused to kowtow to the Jiaqing Emperor and was subsequently refused admission to Peking at all. There was also, of course, the disastrous Napier affair of 1834, which climaxed in a pointless exchange of cannon fire and Lord William Napier’s ignoble death of fever in Macau.

Theirs would be the fourth such delegation. ‘It’ll be different this time,’ vowed Professor Lovell, ‘because at last they’ve called on Babel translators to lead the talks. No more fiascoes of cultural miscommunication.’

‘Had they not consulted you before?’ Letty asked. ‘That’s quite amazing.’

‘You’d be surprised how often traders think they shouldn’t need our help,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘They tend to assume everyone should naturally just learn to speak and behave like the English. They’ve done a fairly good job at provoking local animosity with that attitude, if the Canton papers aren’t exaggerating. Expect some less-than-friendly natives.’

They all had a good idea of the kind of tension they would see in China. They’d read more and more coverage of Canton in London’s newspapers of late, which mostly reported the kinds of ignominies British merchants were suffering at the hands of brutal local barbarians. Chinese forces, according to The Times, were intimidating merchants, attempting to expel them from their homes and factories, and publishing insulting things about them in their own press.

Professor Lovell opined strongly that, though the traders could have been more delicate, such heightened tensions were fundamentally the fault of the Chinese.

‘The problem is that the Chinese have convinced themselves that they’re the most superior nation in the world,’ he said. ‘They insist on using the word yi to describe Europeans in their official memos, though we’ve asked them time and time again to use something more respectful, as yi is a designation for barbarians. And they take this attitude into all trade and legal negotiations. They recognize no laws except their own, and they don’t regard foreign trade as an opportunity, but as a pesky incursion to be dealt with.’

‘You’d be in favour of violence, then?’ Letty asked.

‘It might be the best thing for them,’ said Professor Lovell with surprising vehemence. ‘It’d do well to teach them a lesson. China is a nation of semi-barbarous people in the grips of backward Manchu rulers, and it would do them good to be forcibly opened to commercial enterprise and progress. No, I wouldn’t oppose a bit of a shake-up. Sometimes a crying child must be spanked.’

Here Ramy glanced sideways at Robin, who looked away. What more was there to say?

Six weeks at last came to an end. Professor Lovell informed them at dinner one night that they could expect to dock at Canton by noon the next day. Prior to disembarking, Victoire and Letty were requested to bind their chests and to clip their hair, which they’d grown long during their years as upperclassmen, above their ears.

‘The Chinese are strict about barring foreign women in Canton,’ explained Professor Lovell. ‘They don’t like it when traders bring their families in; it makes it seem like they’re here to stay.’

‘Surely they don’t actually enforce that,’ protested Letty. ‘What about the wives? And the maidservants?’

‘The expats here hire local servants, and they keep their wives in Macau. They’re quite serious about enforcing these laws. The last time a British man tried to bring his wife to Canton – William Baynes, I believe it was – the local authorities threatened to send in soldiers to remove her.* Anyhow, it’s for your own benefit. The Chinese treat women very badly. They have no conception of chivalry. They hold their women in low esteem and, in some cases, don’t even permit them to leave the house. You’ll be better off if they think you’re young men. You’ll learn that Chinese society remains quite backwards and unjust.’

‘I wonder what that’s like,’ Victoire said drily, accepting the cap.

The next morning they spent the sunrise hour above deck, milling about the prow, occasionally leaning over the railing as if those inches of difference would help them spot what navigational science claimed they were fast approaching. The thick dawn mists had just given way to blue sky when the horizon revealed a thin strip of green and grey. Slowly this acquired detail, like a dream materializing; the blurred colours became a coast, became a silhouette of buildings behind a mass of ships docking at the tiny point where the Middle Kingdom encountered the world.

For the first time in a decade, Robin found himself gazing at the shores of his motherland.

‘What are you thinking?’ Ramy asked him quietly.

This was the first time they’d spoken directly to each other in weeks. It was not a truce – Ramy still refused to look him in the eyes. But it was an opening, a grudging acknowledgment that despite everything, Ramy still cared, and for that Robin was grateful.

‘I’m thinking about the Chinese character for dawn,’ he said truthfully. He couldn’t let himself dwell on the larger magnitude of it all. His thoughts threatened to spiral to places he feared he could not control unless he brought them down to the familiar distraction of language. ‘Dàn. It looks like this.’ He drew the character in the air: ?. ‘Up top is the radical for the sun – rì.’ He drew ?. ‘And under that, a line. And I’m just thinking about how it’s beautiful because it’s so simple. It’s the most direct use of pictography, see. Because dawn is just the sun coming up over the horizon.’