The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel

  I hate waking in rooms that have once been warm and ready for passion, but have become cold with reality when expectations have not been met. Not so for Doihara, who was puffed up and pleased with himself. He left the bed and dressed surprisingly quickly. He told me to come to his office after breakfast and he would inform me of the task he had in mind for me.

  'I am pleased with you, Princess,' he said. 'I know you will do the job well.'

  After he left, I woke the hotel's servant boy and told him to bring me soup with an egg in it, and some fruit. I knew that in what was left of the dark I would not sleep again. At dawn I saw a cluster of morning stars in the lightening sky and remembered that Sorry always thought of them as a good omen.

  'There is nothing like the morning star for luck, little mistress,' she would say. 'It's a gift from the gods to the early riser.'

  * * *

  I am not a superstitious person but better a good omen than a bad.

  My task was not as exerting as I had hoped, but as Doihara explained it was a vital one. He had mistakenly thought I was a childhood friend of Pu Yi's wife Wan Jung, and wanted me to join her and the Emperor at their villa, Quiet Garden, in Tientsin. I was to persuade the reluctant Wan Jung, whose beauty was legendary, to agree to go with her husband to Manchuria in the north-east of China, where Japan was extending its empire. There, Pu Yi would be proclaimed Emperor of that province, which was also the homeland of his - and my - ancestors. It was a bleak place, a land of hostile terrain and challenging climate.

  Despite his longing to be restored to his throne and to regain his status, Pu Yi most likely would have wished that he had been offered somewhere other than the land that bordered Mongolia. Not only was there a dislike of the Chinese on those borders, but also a healthy strain of communism. Since the murder of the Romanovs by the communists, no emperor could feel easy about that particular philosophy. All the same, as I was eventually to remind Pu Yi, even China's Great Wall had not been able to keep out our own magnificent Manchu warriors. It was not without reason that those of our blood had been called the 'Eastern Tartars'.

  'Perhaps, it is in the stars for a Manchu emperor to once again enter China from its borders,' I said, even though I knew that one such as he could lay little claim to our ancestors' courage. If he did achieve his ambition to restore his throne, it would be as Japan's creature.

  The Sun Empire needed that Manchurian foothold in China, and under the pretence of being Pu Yi's champions they intended to make him their puppet and enlarge their own power base. Doihara was eager to fulfil his orders and remove the royal couple from Tientsin and place them where they would be the most useful for Japan. Pu Yi would live with the title of Emperor, under a big sky on a hard land, where he would come to know that it was the Japanese who ruled and not him. He would eventually know, too, that along with the privilege and power he had been born with, the Emperor of China's Qing dynasty had also been cursed with devilish luck. It may be that he would live in Manchuria more luxuriously than I had done in neighbouring Mongolia. Yet still, the climate and much of the terrain was so similar that had I been him, I would not have gone, even for a throne.

  Doihara had nothing but contempt for Pu Yi; he thought him a weak man whose blood was so thin that it wouldn't nourish mosquitoes. Face to face he was deferential, but behind Pu Yi's back he decried him as a decadent and spineless man, who was the last and weakest creature of a dead dynasty. In truth, Doihara, despite being a scholar of Chinese history and fluent in several Chinese dialects, despised all Chinese whatever their rank. He warned me not to be seduced by the Emperor's fine manners. He said they disguised the true weakness of his character and that at heart Pu Yi was a spoilt child, a bully to his inferiors and a bad judge of character.

  'Let me give you the mark of the man, Princess,' he said. 'When he lived in the Forbidden City, his greatest pleasure with his child concubines was to whip them until they bled, then to bathe them by candlelight while he cried in sympathy at their pain.'

  Pu Yi had no concubines in Tientsin, as he was obsessed with restoring his throne and besieged by dreams of his assassination. Even though the Qing Emperor could only take one of his own clan as a concubine, he was mistrustful of everyone and saw the sword in every new face he came across. At that time, he could not find it in himself to trust even a Manchu girl. Doihara thought this state of affairs would not last long, as Pu Yi had always needed young girls to pamper his ego and to reassure him.

  'His wife,' he said, 'is dull and disillusioned with him, she no longer sleeps in his bed. Wan Jung only stays because she values status above everything else in life.'

  Wan Jung did not wish to leave Tientsin unless it was to depart Asia, or to return triumphant to the Forbidden City. Tientsin was the city of her birth, she had family and prestige amongst the community there. Her life was freer than it had been in the Forbidden City, and since her husband's consort Wen Hsiu had divorced him she was the only official woman in his household. In Tientsin, she could and did indulge her extravagant nature, buying anything western she could get her hands on. She spent a fortune on jewels, clothes and shoes, radios, imported tobacco and perfumes and, on one ludicrously extravagant occasion, two grand pianos,

  In briefing me on the etiquette of dealing with the Emperor and his wife, Doihara told me that Wan Jung insisted on being called Elizabeth, a name Pu Yi had selected for her from a list of English names that his old tutor Sir Reginald Johnston had submitted to him. Pu Yi chose for himself the name Henry, and forever after in anti-Imperialist circles they were jokingly referred to as Mr and Mrs Henry and Elizabeth Pu Yi. Doihara said that Wan Jung was a stupid woman who wanted to go to America, where even though she wouldn't be a proper empress, she would be feted as one. He said with scorn that America was an indiscriminate country where, without royalty of their own, they fawned over royalty from elsewhere, no matter how minor. Even though I considered myself as patriotic as the Colonel when it came to Japan, I did not believe that the Emperor of China would be considered minor, wherever in the world he chose to live.

  Doihara had no respect for any dynasty that wasn't Japanese. He considered western royalty pointless, as to him whether they be princes or commoners, all westerners were inferior beings. He was furious that he had to treat Pu Yi and his wife with respect and could hardly bring himself to speak normally to Wan Jung, let alone address her courteously.

  'She's a weak opium addict, no longer beautiful, but she has a hold on her husband that I haven't been able to break,' he said irritably. 'As long as she resists their going, he will make no decision to leave Tientsin. You must convince her, Yoshiko, that Pu Yi has a loyal Chinese population in the north-east who are longing for his return. Persuade her that she can resume her life as Empress there, and eventually be restored to the throne in the Forbidden City. She will trust you as a Manchu princess and a playmate from her childhood.'

  I was not at all sure that Wan Jung would remember me and I didn't care for Doihara's constant references to my Chinese background. But I could see that for this task my ancestry would, as it had often done in the past, work in my favour. My own recollections of WanJung were faint. I remember that she once came to our house with her mother, who was sister to one of my father's concubines. I think my mother told me to be nice to her, because she had come on a long journey and was a frail child. I don't remember playing with her, although I think my sisters might have. I could just about recall a pretty little girl I would have spurned for being too similar to my own sisters. Even if I had known she was destined to be an empress I would still have been unimpressed by her. Then as now, empress meant the same to me as wife, subservient and dutiful.

  I decided not to tell Doihara of my own at best vague memories of the childhood of Wan Jung. I had no idea where he had received the information of our closeness, but I hoped that Wan Jung would at least have heard of me and have the good manners to greet me as an acquaintance. I hoped that Wan Jung's opium-influenced memory was poor and that she
would take my word for what special friends we had been. I had confidence in my powers of persuasion and considered myself thoroughly up to the job asked of me. If Japan had decided that the Chinese Emperor should be a figurehead in Manchuria, then I would do all I could to encourage Pu Yi to return to the land of our shared ancestors.

  Doihara arranged to pick me up at dusk and drive me to the Quiet Garden himself. He would present me to Pu Yi as a companion for Wan Jung. He told me that if I could not convince her to accompany her husband to Manchukuo, Japan's name for

  Manchuria, with words alone, then I was to do whatever it took to get her to change her mind. Pu Yi's decision to go to Manchukuo needed to appear to be his choice, no matter how his wife's consent had been obtained. For all his reliance on Japan and his loveless marriage to WanJung, Pu Yi listened to his wife and would only go to Manchuria with her agreement. In Doihara's opinion, fear would change the mind of the reluctant Empress quicker than anything else. I was to convince her that their lives were in imminent danger and that it was no longer safe for the Emperor to stay in Tientsin.

  'Do what you have to,' he said. 'I want results, Yoshiko, and I need them quickly. Japan cannot be held back on the whim of this one pathetic little woman.'

  Doihara said that Wan Jung slept her drugged sleep in the afternoons, appearing for dinner, apparently sober, a state that lasted for about two hours before she returned to her room and took up the pipe again.

  'She sits at the table as course after course appears, but she never eats a morsel,' he said. 'The woman's as thin as a sapling.'

  Occasionally, after dinner, the Empress liked to drink champagne and to play cards with Pu Yi. But lately even that wordless little ceremony had fallen victim to their growing dislike of each other's company. The Empress was a poor card player, and Doihara imagined it was a relief to Pu Yi not to have to face the nightly company of his ailing and unloving wife.

  Before leaving for the Quiet Garden, I spent the afternoon shopping in the provincial but well-stocked Tientsin stores. I bought Tanaka a good watch and an illustrated book of sexual positions with complicated drawings, done by an old eunuch from the Forbidden City. I pictured the ancient artist spying through screens as I had once done, but whereas I could hardly breathe with the excitement of the scene before my eyes, he, more usefully, had busied himself with charcoal and paper. I treated myself to some French perfume that smelled of frangipani, and for Wan Jung I purchased a beautiful silver kaleidoscope, thinking that, as an addict, she would enjoy anything that distorted reality.

  After a walk around the old river port where I spent half an hour in the company of a short-time boy, who was adept but not pretty, I went back to the hotel and bathed in the bathroom, which had a toilet that flushed and thin cotton towels as large as sheets. The water was cool against my skin. It smelled faintly of mud and, I suppose because I had been thinking of my childhood, it reminded me of the scent left on my hands after I had trailed them in my father's carp pools, a forbidden pleasure that allowed me the joy of disobedience. I packed and changed into the western dress that I knew Wan Jung favoured. I chose a soft wool skirt and jacket of dark blue and draped the foxes that Harry had bought me around my shoulders. I rouged my cheeks discreetly and wore lipstick, something I was not in the habit of doing, but Doihara had told me that Wan Jung had an ashen complexion and used a lot of rouge to mimic good health. I wanted her to feel at ease with me, to remember that we were of a shared and superior class and that I was someone she could trust and confide in.

  Doihara took fifteen minutes to drive to the house, which although a solid enough one, was remarkably unpretentious for an Emperor. It sat squarely in gardens scattered with maple and silver-barked willows. There were shutters at the windows and twisted wisteria snaked around them giving the house the appearance of a cottage, rather like the ones the English built on Nanking Road in Shanghai. It may have been the grey evening that made the house look lifeless; the light was certainly about to go, but there was a gloomy feel to the place, as though its occupants did not care for it. The garden was well ordered with neat paths and pruned trees, but it had the dispirited look of land that is tended without love and so gives nothing back. So strong was the gloomy feeling of the place that for a moment as I stood facing it I fancied the house was quietly weeping.

  Two Japanese soldiers sat on a bench outside the front door smoking and sharing a joke. Warned of our approach by a pair of squawking caged cranes, they jumped to attention, too late for the Colonel to have missed their lack of formality. Doihara was furious, his anger as cold as ice. He slapped one of them across the cheek and said they were a disgrace to Japan and that they would be dealt with later for such slovenly behaviour. His eyes were as hard as iron, his lips a thin white line. I marked how in an instant his fury could be aroused to gigantic proportions by the smallest of concerns.

  We entered a hall busy with Japanese officials going in and out of the ground-floor rooms, carrying files and boxes. There were plainclothes and uniformed officers everywhere, the sound of their shoes on the hard floors emphasising the fact that the Emperor and his wife were not the exclusive occupants of the so-called Quiet Garden.

  In a later conversation that I had with Pu Yi, he told me that he had named the house himself. He had chosen 'Quiet Garden' not to mean a peaceful place, but to imply that he would wait quietly until the opportunity came to resume his rightful place on the throne of China. He was a man who all his life had waited for others to order his days and had lost the power to take control of his own life. His lack of action must have been disappointing for his wife, who had no doubt hoped for a more interesting life as Empress. It was no surprise, then, that she preferred to spend those waiting days in poppy-induced dreams, where colour and life and light filled her being with joy for as long as she slept her opium sleep.

  Pu Yi and his wife occupied the rooms on the first and the top floor of the house. They lived chaotically but comfortably, in the western style, with good furniture, luxurious rugs, a gramophone and a library of American band music. Wan Jung had only one lady-in-waiting, who took care of her clothes and accompanied her on shopping trips. Their living rooms were so untidy that one guessed straight away that there were few household servants. Because Pu Yi thought it too dangerous to open the windows, the smell of dog hung unpleasantly on the air.

  The house was well supplied with fine wines, including an outrageously large stock of champagne. There were cases of expensive sherry that no one touched and the usual array of liquors. There was plenty of gin, whisky and sake, even though it gave the Emperor a headache, and Chinese five-grain wine, which Wan Jung believed had the power to keep her young.

  Doihara told me that Pu Yi's only income came from pawning the jewels he had brought with him from the Forbidden City. But, since this finite source had begun to dwindle, his expensive team of advisors had deserted him for wealthier patrons. The Colonel thought their desertion to be a good thing, as Pu Yi now had fewer people whispering in his ear and was more likely to listen to his Japanese advisors.

  During his time in Tientsin the Emperor had run up huge debts in the city. Those in trade were reluctant to allow him to extend them despite the kudos the Emperor lent to their business. He owed Laidlaw and Company a great deal of money for the extensive wardrobe in the western style they had supplied him with, and many restaurants and jewellers in the city would never see a penny of the money he owed them.

  In his first years in Tientsin, when the numerous caskets of jewels were full and the pieces of fine jade seemed infinite, he had given generously to the old corrupt warlords who had fetched up in the city. He had trusted that they would do everything in their power to bring about his restoration. They in return had promised him their lifelong loyalty, then, one by one, they had deserted the Qing Emperor in his hour of need.

  I was surprised and relieved when, in front of Doihara, Pu Yi said he needed no introduction to me. He remembered me well from his childhood as the girl who wante
d to be a boy. He said that he was pleased that I had come, as his wife was in need of a female companion to share her lonely days. His own time, he said, was spent dealing with the affairs of his forthcoming restitution, which it was his duty to pursue with dedication. He bemoaned the fact that even his beloved golf had to be set aside and that he had given up going to the cinema and to restaurants, as he wanted his people to understand how much he was prepared to sacrifice so that they might have their Emperor returned to them.

  To me Pu Yi looked more like a schoolboy than an emperor. He was slightly built with short oiled hair and a nervous tic in his left eye. There was an air of privileged aristocracy about him and a look of uncertainty in his eyes. Dressed in a Prince of Wales checked suit and highly polished shoes, he smelled, like an Englishman, of soap and cologne. His nails were manicured and polished to a fine sheen, his teeth, which were slightly yellow, looked too large for his thin-lipped mouth. His black hair was slicked back flat and he wore thin-rimmed glasses that made him look studious and unattractive. He was a cold-hearted man with, as I was later to discover, a secret contempt for almost everyone he came into contact with. He was full of obsessions and superstitions that he allowed to rule his life. Regardless of where he was, he would spit on encountering something unlucky, would never eat green food before white and always hesitated before entering a room, debating with himself whether he should cross the threshold with his right or his left foot. He was easily swayed in his views and frequently changed his mind depending on whom he had spoken with last. He was incapable of making even the smallest decision on his own. It would not be an exaggeration to say that it had to be suggested to him when he might urinate, or eat, or sleep. It was a wonder to me that this creature had Manchu blood in his veins, for there was nothing of the warrior in either his demeanour or his thinking.