A LOVE STORY:
THE CHINA MEMOIRS OF THOMAS ROWLEY
Dean Barrett
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Dean Barrett at Smashwords
Copyright (c) 2011 by Dean Barrett
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Chapter Outline
CHINA - 1862
The Death of Corporal Chatterton
NEW YORK - 1922
Foreword
In 1836, an intense, twenty-two-year-old village school teacher named Hung Hsiu-ch’uan traveled to Canton to sit for an Imperial Examination. On a street crowded with anxious students, a foreign missionary approached the young man and handed him a religious pamphlet entitled, “Good Words for Exhorting the Age.”
Over the next several years, as China was defeated and humiliated by western powers in the First Opium War, Hung Hsiu-ch’uan abandoned his attempts to study the Chinese classics. In 1843, his attention was again drawn to the pamphlet, and, while under severe mental stress, he experienced a series of visions in which he visited heaven and spoke with the Heavenly Father and his son. Shortly thereafter, he founded The Society of the Worship of God and proclaimed himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ.
From such an almost insignificant beginning, China's Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), in fact, a revolution, began; and before it was over it would become one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history; somewhere between twenty and forty million people would lose their lives, in battle, or to starvation and disease. With the exception of World War II, more lives were lost in this conflict than in any conflict in history.
The Taiping rebels fought to spread their own bizarre form of evangelical Christianity throughout China, and to overthrow the Manchus who in 1644 had defeated the Chinese and established the Ch'ing Dynasty. The Taipings were opposed not only by Ch'ing forces but by various western adventurers and professional soldiers who formed their own private armies: men such as America's Frederick Townsend Ward and England's Charles George “Chinese” Gordon.
Among the fiercest and most-feared soldiers of the Taipings were the divisions of women warriors who often fought independently from men. On June 10, 1862, Thomas Rowley, 24 years old, serving as a lieutenant to Ward, was separated from his men in battle outside the walls of Ch’ing P’u, southwest of Shanghai, and captured by Taiping women warriors. Many years later he committed his experiences to paper.
Although no mention is made of Rowley’s manuscript in such excellent modern histories of the Taiping period as Caleb Carr’s Devil Soldier and Jonathan Spence’s ’s Chinese Son, the author’s name is listed several times in 1862 in supplements to the China as one of the “foreigners-for-hire” fighting the Taipings. There is also a reference to Rowley’s travailsin a 1934 East London Mercantile Society pamphlet printed in Shanghai and a short quotation from his appears in Y. L. Burquardt’s Devils in Old China (Worland Press, 1941, London). Why a London merchants’ society would take an interest in the capture and enslavement of an American adventurer in China is made clear as Rowley describes events that involved the daughter of one of their own.
The badly faded photograph of Rowley in Burquardt’s book is the only one of Rowley known to exist. His handsome face is framed with bushy sideburns and adorned with a well-trimmed mustache but he is not bearded. He stands between two other foreign men, their right boots resting on a cannon, and in front of what appears to be part of a mercantile house. A glimpse of water in the background may well be Shanghai’s Soochow Creek. All three men are dressed in military uniform complete with sabers. Each man displays a confident smile and the jaunty flamboyance of an adventurer-for-hire. Although Ward is not in the photograph, it was most likely taken when Rowley was in training with Ward in Shanghai. Despite the poor quality of the photograph, Rowley’s features are clearly those of a sensitive man; and, although the expression in his deep-set eyes suggests a man eager for adventure, it also hints at a certain fatalistic irony, a quality completely absent in the expressions of his two companions.
Other than what appears in his Memoirs, little is known of Thomas Rowley’s life. Considering the reclusive and solitary nature of his existence after his China experiences, that is natural enough. However, Rowley’s manuscript was apparently circulated privately by a nephew or cousin after his death. It seems to have been lost over the years until it surfaced recently in New York when sold by a Manhattan auction house.
Despite an exhaustive search, no death certificate for Thomas Rowley has been found but many such certificates were lost in 1929 in the Manhattan fire that destroyed the Record and License Bureau containing both birth and death certificates for the previous twenty-six years.
Nevertheless, Rowley’s descriptions of China in 1862 accurately reflect the China of the period: The fierce independence of the Taiping women even to their refusal to indulge in footbinding; the turmoil caused by the Taiping Rebellion; and the attitudes of the women to foreigners. His observations are also invariably those of someone living in that period of history. For example, he describes the merchant’s daughter as “well above average in height.” The average height of a Victorian Age woman was five feet so it is natural that, through Rowley’s eyes, at 5'4” she is regarded as taller than normal. Rowley was astonished at the eventual change in attitude of the woman toward her Taiping captors; a change of attitude which today we might sum up in the modern phrase, ‘Stockholm Syndrome.’
As to the lesbian activities which Rowley claims to have witnessed among the Taiping women, both foreign and Chinese scholars have made note of the open attitude among the Chinese toward this type of behavior. In Li Yu’s 17th century play, “the Constant Companion,” a young wife persuades her husband to take a beautiful concubine so that the two women can be together.
Modern scholars no longer dismiss typical erotic Chinese paintings of maids joining with their mistress and her lover as male fantasies but as accepted behavior during most historical periods. In her study, Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century, Susan Mann writes that “Hints about homosexual attraction among women...suggest that it was not considered abnormal or unhealthy.” In his classic study, Life in Ancient China, the scholar Robert Van Gulik also noted that “a very tolerant attitude is taken toward Sapphism...it is also recognized that when a number of women are obliged to live in continuous and close proximity, the occurrence of Sapphism can hardly be avoided.” He also mentions that “in archaic times woman was considered as sexually superior to man.”
And, indeed, the famous fifth century A.D. Hua Mu Lan is part of a long Chinese tradition of female warriors conquering men in battle as are the intrepid female leaders of pirate fleets in the South China Seas. Although the youth of the Taiping women struck Rowley as unusual, in fact, Chinese females of almost every age have taken up arms. During the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, the Red Lanterns (some of the many women who fought against westerners) were all between the ages of 12 and 20.
There have been other accounts of those imprisoned in China about this time, one even involving the Taiping capture of Edward Forester, one of Ward’s closest officers. Like Rowley, he too, was stripped naked and placed on public display: “...An iron collar was riveted around my neck and one end of a chain fastened to this collar and the other to the saddle of a packhorse. In this manner, with my arms bound and my person entirely naked, I walked or was dragged for more than thirty days under a broiling sun...During the few days we remained (at Soo-chow-fu) I was kept fastened, in a sort of gorilla fashion, to a stake in one of the streets. Every conceivable indignity, annoyance and torment was heaped upon me, by both soldiers and natives....” (“Personal Recollections of the Taiping Rebellion,” Cosmopolitan, Vol. 21 (1896).
The British General William Mesny was captured at Fushanchau in November of 1862 and held at the Taiping capital of Nanking until March the following year when, thanks to the efforts of the British consul, he was released. Far from being tortured, he later wrote that he found Taiping women charming and had in fact been offered a wife if he would stay. The year before, the traveler Alexander Michie made a brief visit to Nanking and wrote: “There is a wonderful number of good-looking young women (in Nanking), all exceedingly well-dressed in Soo-choo silks....”
The most detailed account of enslavement involved the incarceration of a Western woman and was published by John Lee Scott in his Narrative of a Recent Imprisonment in China (London, 1842, W.H. Dalton). When the 281-ton brig, Kite, sank near Chusan, the wife of Captain James Noble was taken captive by the Chinese as was Scott and several others.
Scott and his companions were placed in bamboo cages where motley crowds of adults and children often pulled his hair, spat on him and gave him other abuse. Although Scott does not write of sexual slavery, he is at times circumspect in writing of what was done to him. Once, when tied to a tree, he writes, “...but the most active of my tormentors was neither old nor ugly, being a tall and well-made person; her feet were not so misshapen as the generality of her countrywomen’s; in fact, she was the handsomest woman I saw in China.”
The above description would fit a Hakka Chinese woman perfectly. And, while entirely helpless inside his cage, Scott leaves much to the imagination when he writes how “sometimes we were visited by a party consisting entirely of women....”
Scott’s ordeal ended after five months, whereas Rowley’s lasted just over three, but Rowley is by far the more uninhibited of the two writers, perhaps because he never again attempted to reenter the world he had known previous to his incarceration and therefore had no fear of censure from his peers.
His feelings toward his experiences in China are made clear in the text and, perhaps, especially in his choice of title. Rowley saw the events that changed him forever not as centering on or defined by his sexual slavery but, rather, by the feelings he developed for the woman who had enslaved him. Hence, “a love story.” The entire manuscript is handwritten in black ink on unlined foolscap but at the beginning in blue ink are four lines from Shakespeare:
Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend
Nor services to do till you require
The lines are poorly scrawled and less legible than those of the manuscript itself suggesting Rowley may have added them toward the end of his long life. In any case, because of its very private and very erotic content, it should not seem surprising that Rowley’s manuscript has taken so long to surface; rather, it is remarkable that it has surfaced at all.
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Chapter One
“WINE hollows” the Chinese called them. Whenever she smiled her dimples would appear like delicately formed tiny moons at each end of the lovely curve of her lips. The jasmine scent of her incredibly fine waist-length black hair, her dark brown apricot eyes, her almost perfectly oval face, her complexion as smooth as polished jade. I have been privileged to have these memories of all that she was with me throughout my life. But even more than her physical beauty I recall her mischievousness, her playfulness, her way of tilting her head and looking at me in mock displeasure as I tried to please her. The pride she took in being a Taiping woman warrior. Her courage in battle. Her poise and confidence as she rode her stallion. The expression on her lovely face when I held her in my arms for the last time. And the poignancy of our final kiss.
Of course, I had no way of knowing when I led my men out from Shanghai to search for local Taiping rebels that I would never see Frederick Ward again; and that my life would change forever; that, in truth, it would no longer be mine and I would lose the life I had known to a higher and far nobler cause than playing soldier: serving a beautiful Chinese woman warrior as her slave.
All of us admired Ward for his bravery and of all the officers I was perhaps closest to him, but he was a rather straight-laced fellow always contemplating the next battle. And, I might add, impatiently looking forward to it. But out of his earshot over a few cups of John Barleycorn I often speculated with his other officers about persistent rumors that Taiping women warriors were mostly young and often incredibly beautiful.
We had yet to meet them in battle but we knew that, whatever the truth of their looks, their fervent devotion to their cause was no fiction: The Taipings practiced a bizarre and fanatical version of Christianity holding allegiance to the “Heavenly King” himself based in their capital of Nanking. Buddhist and Taoist temples were razed to the ground. Prostitutes reformed or were beheaded as were opium dealers and adulterers. No tobacco, no opium, no alcohol, no wine, no polygamy, no illicit sex. And in the areas of China which they controlled they had banished the foot binding of women. Without doubt, Taiping women were not the type to be at the beck and call of a man.
Still, we had laughed at the time and dismissed rumors of their beauty and physical prowess as fantasy. After all, swathed in uniforms of looted Hangchow and Soochow silk, the Taiping “silken armies” had been incredibly successful in their early campaigns against the Ch’ing military giving rise to all sorts of nonsensical rumors about their fighting ability. From the bawdy taverns along Hong Kong’s Queen’s Road to the crowded refugee areas of Shanghai, exaggerated accounts of Taiping invincibility were told, retold and embellished. But as I was to experience firsthand, everything I had heard about them was true.
Of course, if it hadn't been for the godrotting bluish-white smokescreen of black powder from our own rifles, I might not have been so confused as to rush headlong in the wrong direction. Battles were confusing enough with enemy arrows falling on us like rain, balls and bullets from matchlock, flintlock and percussion rifles whizzing by, the shouts of the wounded and dying, and combatants constantly shifting ground; but the black powder smoke of our rifles had obscured the fact that my lads had pulled back to regroup while the enemy had taken the field.
And the Chinese had fitted out their arrows with a thingamajig that made them “sing” as they fell through the air to disorient an enemy; “singing arrows” they were called, and, while I was blinded by the smoke, they sure as damnation had disoriented me.
My percussion rifle had been damaged at the start of the fighting and I hurriedly snatched up a flintlock from a fallen warrior. I employed the ramrod to tap down the powder, ball and padding into the barrel of the rifle, replaced the ramrod, repositioned the flint, then moved carefully forward without being able to see a damn thing. I called out to Cpl. Chatterton and the rest of my men but heard only the cries of the wounded.
Suddenly, the wind shifted and the smoke cleared and one of the most frightening yet beautiful sights I have even seen met my eyes. Sunlight illuminated dozens of young Chinese women dressed in shimmering silk and satin uniforms, above whom silk banners floated in the breeze. Perhaps two dozen or more looked down at me from on horseback but most were on foot. They wore wide riding jackets over baggy trousers or else were swathed in tighter fitting silk clothes which clearly revealed the contours of their curvaceous young bodies.
Taiping uniforms were assigned color by the four directions and as their uniforms were yellow with green trim I knew these women served the “Prince of the East.” They had a reputation for being the most fanatical of all the women warriors.
Yellow patches on the front of each uniform read Taiping” Great Peace” and on the back sheng bing, “Holy Warrior.” Many had covered their heads with yellow or red scarves formed as turbans and tied sashes at the waist, every color of the rainbow, while a few wore colorful conical helmets made of bamboo. Sunlight reflecting off their swords and spears only served to add a more spectacular splendor to the scene. The bright glitter and vivid color seemed more in keeping with performers in a showy pageant than a military unit engaged in a vicious civil war.
That was the beautiful part. The frightening part was that they stood facing me with the arrows in their bows pointed directly at my chest. One slip of a feminine finger and I would be off to Fiddler's Green well before my time.
It was useless to resist. My flintlock could have taken out only one and by the time I reached for the Colt model 1851 revolver at my waist I would have had a dozen arrows in me. One of the women on horseback who appeared to be the leader said something in Hakka dialect which I didn't quite catch, as, during my training with Ward in Shanghai, I had learned only mandarin. But it was clear she wanted me to drop the rifle and to be damn quick about it. She was the only one whose head was covered by a hood and whose silken uniform was augmented by a cloak. Both the hood and cloak were a deep shade of scarlet which contrasted with the extremely light grey of her horse.
As soon as I'd dropped it, several women came forward and removed my pistol from my belt, and, from my pockets, black powder, Congreve matches, all ammunition and my bone box with flint, steel and tinder. While they continued to point their arrows at me, the woman in the cloak gave orders to a young woman warrior astride a magnificent chestnut stallion. The woman dismounted and removed several strips of bamboo from her saddlebag. As she strode toward me, I saw that she could not have been more than 19 or 20. She grabbed my wrists and tied them tightly together behind me with the strips of bamboo. Chinese used bamboo for nearly everything, including caning, a fact which would before long be brought painfully to my attention.
Another tough bamboo cord several feet long was tied to my wrist bindings and this leash was held by the young woman who apparently had been placed in charge of me. This woman--barely more than a girl, really--had a rose-tinted complexion, fine black hair spilling out from beneath her yellow headscarf, and beautiful dark brown eyes. In front of the others she had the same stern expression on her face, but, as she passed directly before me, I noticed a brief flicker of playfulness and curiosity cross those brown eyes; qualities of youth that would one day cause us both great pain.
Another woman had found a thin branch near the side of the mud-dried road and handed it to her. My lovely young captor stood behind me and gave me a painful flick on the ear. She spoke several sentences from which I only understood the words, yanggweidz, “foreign devil,” and nuli, “slave,” but I understood well enough that I had been placed in her charge; not as a prisoner-of-war but as a slave.
Some of the other women began to giggle at their first encounter with an “outside barbarian” and especially at having complete power over me, but a stern glance from their beautiful but no-nonsense leader instantly silenced them. After the tip of the branch landed even more painfully on my other ear, I began walking.
As we marched, I glimpsed the bodies of several young Taiping women warriors and a few of my own men. They lay where they had fallen in battle. We passed a Taiping woman and a Caucasian soldier who had died in hand-to-hand combat, and their bodies lay entwined as if in passionate embrace. If it had not been for the blood-stained knife hilts and eternal stares, it would have appeared that young lovers were lying peacefully on a carpet of carmine and yellow wildflowers, simply sleeping off a long night of carousing.
After about a ten-minute walk, I saw the first head. The Taiping women had placed the decapitated heads of Ch'ing soldiers on stakes along the roadside as warnings to their enemies. Sunlight reflected off their shaven crowns and a gentle breeze swayed their braided queues in playful unison, as if performing a macabre dance. Flies buzzed excitedly about their gruesome prey. Our presence had scattered a flock of crows pecking at the heads and they circled at a distance, waiting for us to pass. A thick, colorfully banded and probably poisonous snake balanced motionlessly atop one of the heads coiled like an exotic turban. I stared back at their sightless eyes and wondered if my head would soon join them.
At that point I still entertained some hope of being rescued and attempted to slow my pace. But whenever I did so, I felt the tip of the branch quickly sting my ear, hurrying me forward. When I turned to look at her, my young captor would meet my stare as if daring me to attempt to escape. Her silken uniform was a golden yellow, a resplendent aureate shade that seemed to warm and intensify in the rays of the late afternoon sun.
We crossed a narrow wooden bridge over a small rivulet and I contemplated escape by diving into the water below; but both banks were thick with sugar cane which would have hampered any attempt to flee. When we passed the emerald green carpet of a fertile valley I thought I might have a chance to make it to its border of wooded hills; but my captor seemed to know my thoughts and a tug on my leash followed by a painful flick of her branch on my ear urged me onward.
We had not walked for more than forty minutes when we reached what must have been their rear encampment. There were dozens of tents, several more colorful banners, more horses, spears, lances, bows-and-arrows and a bit of smoke rising from whatever food they had left to cook. In the tall grass, it was difficult to estimate their strength; but I knew that a company of Taipings consisted of one hundred and four warriors, and it appeared that if all were present, they had lost nearly a third of their women warriors in battle.
The leader jumped from her horse and quickly walked to one of the wounded lying beneath a sprawling banyan tree. Streaks of sunlight streamed through gnarled branches casting grotesque shadows onto the ground where the wounded lay. One woman had an arm inside a bamboo splint and another was being treated with lighted paper inside bamboo cups applied to her back. She lay prone on a blanket, her uniform of dark silk rolled down to her waist, and the fire inside the cups gave her skin an unnatural sheen. She and the other wounded stared at me with the hardened expressions of seasoned warriors.
In the distance, on a nearly barren hillside, I could just make out the slim silhouette of a small pagoda, its stones shining brightly in the sunlight. In the several moments of stillness, the tinkling of its wind-tossed bells reached my ears.
Meanwhile, I was surrounded by the women guards as they too wished to admire their “long-nosed, foreign devil” captive. I had only a mustache and sideburns, no beard, but that and the chest hair sprouting from the top of my torn uniform was enough for them to comment on what a hairy barbarian I was. Their soft laughter rang in my ears. One of the braver ones approached me the way we would approach a helpless but still dangerous animal and gingerly reached out and touched my chest hair, then, to the laughter of her friends, jumped back in fright.
At a sudden high-pitched wail from the leader, the women immediately backed away from me. After several seconds of absolute silence, the leader rose, walked to her horse and removed a whip. She glared at me as she approached and her riding boots made a strange swishing sound as they passed through the tall grass.
With barely controlled fury, she slapped my face several times. As I attempted to step back to avoid the blows, my young keeper grabbed my arms and, with surprising strength, held me firmly in place.
The leader screamed at me in Hakka, beside herself with grief and anger. I understood only that her sister had died of her battle wounds. Whether it was really her sister or, in the Taiping custom, she simply meant one of her closest comrades, I wasn't sure. But there was no denying it could well enough have been my bullet that had caused her death.
She spoke to my keeper who immediately used a knife to sever my bonds. As she began cutting my clothes from my body, I pushed out my forearms and twisted my body to resist. Others rushed in to help subdue me, even lifting me to pull off my boots. Within seconds, my tunic, breeches, under-vest and officer’s cap lay on the ground after which the waistband buttons of my ankle-length drawers were ripped off and I was ordered to step out of them. I knew if I didn’t do it they would do it for me so I removed my drawers as ordered and stood stark naked before them, not even able to cover my sex as my arms were once again tightly held behind me by my young captor.
The leader's eyes narrowed and she threw back her scarlet hood, allowing her hair to spill about her back and shoulders. Later I would learn that she was originally from a well-placed family in Peking and that would explain why she had the stature of a northerner and the arrogant bearing of a Chinese woman from the upper classes; one of the spoiled elite of their “celestial kingdom.” She pointed to the ground. Hao ma, gwei sya! (“Good horse, kneel down!”)
I shook my head and angrily spoke in English: “Listen, you piece of celestial skirt, if you and your crumpet army think I'm going to-”
She slapped me so hard I saw stars and, almost simultaneously, she reached down and grabbed a knife from her riding boot. She pressed the razor sharp blade firmly against my throat. Her left hand slammed open my thighs, and her fingers painfully squeezed my scrotum, forcing me up on my toes.
For several seconds, she seemed to enjoy the sight of fear in my eyes. She then leaned in close to my still burning ear and spoke in perfect mandarin: “You will obey or I will eat your flesh and sleep on your skin.” It was a literary reference and I understood then that she was as well educated as she was powerful.
As her left hand moved slowly and inexorably downward, I had no choice but to obey. I knelt. Only when my knees had touched the ground did she release me from her grip. She gestured for me to get down on all fours. At that moment I nearly tried to run but as I looked about at the well-armed and well-trained Taiping women, a few of whom were almost as muscular as amazons, I knew any resistance would be suicidal. I did as she commanded.
She immediately mounted me (Chinese mount horses opposite side than we do) dug the heels of her boots into my ribs and with both hands roughly pushed my head to the right. Toward a copse of trees.
I began crawling in that direction. There were no rocks but still my knees began aching almost immediately as they scraped along the ground and over the stubble of a burned rice crop. I thought of grabbing the knife in her boot but, even had I been lucky and managed to grab it, that still left me surrounded by women warriors with bows and arrows, spears and lances. And a few firearms, not to mention my own revolver.
I hardly need say I felt embarrassed and humiliated by my enslaved condition. Barely an hour before, I had been a proud lieutenant in Frederick Ward's much feared Ever-Victorious Army; now I was completely naked and being ridden by a ravishingly beautiful Chinese woman to my place of punishment.
Already, other women had begun tying bamboo strips to the lower branches of a tree. Her sister was dead but, whoever had actually shot her, I was the one about to pay for it.
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Chapter Two
Punishment
Naked as the day I was born, I moved painfully and fitfully forward on hands and knees. Any hesitation on my part and she quickly dug her knees into my sides or the heels of her boots into my thighs. Chinese boots were made of satin with thick felt soles, but what leverage she lost by not wearing western leather boots she made up for in anger and fury at the loss of her sister in battle. Her silk leggings gripping my waist felt deceptively soft and feminine.
The young woman who had herded me from my place of capture and informed me I was a slave rather than a prisoner of war walked ahead of us to the right, occasionally glancing down at me with a playful smile on her perfectly formed red lips. On my hands and knees, being ridden by her commander, was the first time I noticed her beautiful dimples. I also noticed that she now had her own long black whip, the handle in her right hand and the rest coiled in her left. I learned later her name in Hakka dialect was Tiam Moi(“Sweet Little Sister”) but I could already tell she had the devil in her. Her close-fitting uniform revealed her form and, even then, her direct, almost provocative stare led me to suspect that beneath her imperative bearing were the intense passions of a beautiful young woman.
By the time we'd reached the trees, the tough strands of bamboo had been tied to one of the tree’s octopus-like branches. The branches extended horizontally for several feet before rising. There was something about the tree’s gunpowder-grey squat trunk, twisted limbs and rough bark which seemed ominous and unforgiving, a perfect punishment tree.
The Taiping leader dismounted and abruptly jerked me to my feet by pulling my hair. Tiam Moi and another woman warrior removed their silk head scarves and wrapped them around my wrists: red around the left and yellow around the right. After which they immediately tied my wrists firmly to the lower ends of the bamboo cords and tightened them so that my arms were stretched above my head forcing me to stand on tiptoe. Because the spot was on an incline, I was forced to lean slightly forward, making my naked backside an even more inviting and vulnerable target. Then they stepped back. The leader and Sweet Little Sister disappeared behind me.
In the silence, I could hear the banners of the female Taiping army making tiny cracking sounds as they fluttered in the breeze, and the restless movement of their China ponies, as if even the ponies were aware that this was merely the calm before the storm. I suddenly noticed the birds had inexplicably ceased their chatter. Even the barely audible tinkling of the pagoda’s bells seemed to resemble feminine laughter. I now understood how Lemuel Gulliver must have felt when helplessly bound by Lilliputians.
Along with all my other possessions, the women had taken my pocket watch and gold chain but I looked at the mauve sky streaked with dark crimson and estimated that it was about six o'clock in the afternoon. I wondered if Ward and my other fellow officers were out searching for me or if they had assumed I was dead. Ward had been wounded in battle over a dozen times and many Chinese had come to believe he could not be killed. He had the courage of a bull and he loved his men whom he called, “my people,” paying us out of his own pocket whenever necessary. If he felt there was any chance I might be alive, he would be out looking for me. It was my only hope.
The silence lasted only about twenty seconds. And then it began: Certain things I vividly remember about that beating. I could not forget them if I live to be a hundred: The crack of the whip and its whapping sound as it raked across my buttocks. My sharp intake of breath each time it landed. The increasing pain as the sound was repeated. Again. And again. And again. Methodically covering every inch of flesh on my backside.
The women had split into two groups, one behind and one in front, and those assembled in front were able to observe my every expression, the entire gamut of my humiliation in which I inexorably passed from defiant warrior to subdued male to sobbing child. From their intermittent conversation, I understood that Sweet Little Sister and her Commander were alternating after each set of half a dozen blows, Sweet Little Sister being constantly encouraged to apply the whip more vigorously. I remember thinking how deceptively nonchalant and composed their voices sounded, as if a woman aristocrat were patiently instructing her younger sister in the fine art of embroidery or painting. Except that now their “fine art” was that of subduing and enslaving a male, and the deeper the maiden’s whip cut into my inflamed buttocks the more lavishly she was praised for her “skill.”
My greatest fear was that I might be coerced into revealing battle plans and troop strength of my men. That I vowed to myself I would never do. Frederick Ward at 30 was only six years older than I was and I loved him as a dear elder brother. I would rather die than do anything to harm him.
I tried to think of something to divert my attention from the pain. Anything. My years growing up in New York; the pirate attack on our clipper ship in the South China Sea near Hong Kong; my years as 2ndand then 1stmate on various merchant frigates and brigs in Asian waters; the many months of training under Ward in and around Shanghai. But each blow shattered my memories and brought me back to the present. I bit down on my lip and the scene around me blurred with my tears. The Taiping women's brilliant silk outfits and silk banners merged into one colorful mocking ball of pain.
And then there was a pause. Just when I dared hope it was over, Sweet Little Sister and her leader both stood before me. I watched the leader hand the whip to another woman warrior and take an even deadlier weapon: a straight polished length of bamboo, the branches cut away. She held the rod by the smaller end as prescribed in the Ch'ing Dynasty Penal Code of China. The Taipings might be trying to take the higher moral ground in their cataclysmic war with the Manchus but both sides were equally fond of exquisite torture and painful punishment.
The Taiping leader looked at me not as a woman might look at a man but as a scientist might study some experiment to see what was left to be done. She gently wiped my tears from my eyes with her fingers and spoke to the others in mandarin: Wo dei jyau womende waigwo ma: ta dzweihau futsung womende mingling. (“I must teach our foreign horse that it is best to obey our commands.”)
Her splendid black hair spilled well below her shoulders and flew out into the wind. She had the high cheek bones and broad forehead of a northerner. I had never seen a woman with such an air of confidence and poise. And that very self-assurance added to her magnificence in a way I cannot articulate, but I understood then that there was no question in her mind that she would break me.
She went on to speak in a mixture of mandarin and Hakka to her attentive female warriors of her plans for me; so confident was she that I would be successfully enslaved that my knowing of her plans was of no consequence to her. Again and again I heard her use the term, fu li(“to break in a horse”): “This foreign-devil will be broken as a horse is broken. But even though an uncultured outside barbarian, he has a greater learning capacity than a horse. So, at first, like the horse, he will obey us from fear of punishment but, finally, he will obey us from understanding. He will come to understand that it is his privilege and honor to serve us. Submission will become second nature to him.”
Sweet Little Sister stood nearby, still holding her whip, her long hair fanning out in the gentle breeze. There was no way I could hide the near terror in my eyes and I saw in her expression the compassion of a loving parent who feels sorrow at having had to discipline an unruly child. Despite my pain and fear I could not break free of her gaze. This young woman had stripped and whipped me and now stood before me in her silken uniform looking as beautiful and pure as an angel. To my amazement, despite my pain and fear of worse to come I felt myself becoming aroused.
The leader paused to glance at me and then turned again to the others. “Now, he thinks only of escape. But, in time, with proper training from Sweet Little Sister he will regard separation from us as the worst punishment possible. Therefore, the sooner we break him of any hope of escape, the sooner his real training can begin. And when he has been properly trained, he will have lost even his desire for escape. Only then will he come to know his true place.”
She narrowed her beautiful dark brown eyes, grabbed my hair and jerked my head back. She whispered into my ear in mandarin: Nutsai! Jyunbei! (“Slave! Prepare!”) And then she disappeared behind me. For several seconds I heard only the murmuring of the tree’s wind-blown leaves, several of which brushed against my right arm as if mocking me with their gentle touch.
What I shall never forget is the sound of the bamboo against my flesh and the searing pain it caused. It took my breath completely away. For the first several blows, I at least managed to remain silent; then, each time the bamboo landed, I began crying out. Within minutes, I had abandoned my resolve to bear the flogging with courage and in silence and was madly squirming and twisting in anticipation of the next blow. I writhed in agony and desperately tried to extricate my wrists from the bamboo restraints, to no avail.
I had heard the others in Hakka dialect call the leader Gim Lian, “Golden Lily.” And I called to her by name first asking and then begging her to stop. After another several blows, I pleaded, I beseeched, I implored. In English. In Mandarin. In gibberish.
Finally, I could take no more. I agreed to tell her anything she wanted to know about the military plans and movements of Frederick Townsend Ward's “Ever Victorious Army.” I begged to tell her! I would betray even my comrades if that is what it took to stop the beating.
But it quickly became obvious that Golden Lily wasn't the slightest bit interested in anything I had to say, on military matters or anything else. She wanted one thing and one thing only: Her women warriors might very likely find themselves once again facing a force of western men or one led by western men, and it was her intention to show her warriors how little they had to fear; how readily they could break and humiliate a western man--even a trained soldier--and reduce him to pleading and begging and crying and screaming.
Golden Lily's decision to make me beg for mercy was not one of cruelty or even carried out in revenge for killing Taiping women warriors in battle, but simply one of tactics. And the importance of breaking me as thoroughly as possible was a very practical one: to strengthen the morale of her fighting force. Any military commander in the world would have admired her strategy.
And the lesson continued. My frantic but futile wiggling, my sharp intake of breath as the bamboo landed on my buttocks, tears streaming down my cheeks, mucus clogging my nose. I felt as if my tongue had grown thicker and was protruding from my mouth. In my twenty-four years of life I had never even been slapped by a woman before that day and I begged as I have never begged before or since. I would have done anything to have her stop. Anything!
It was only later that I realized why my wrists had been wrapped like Christmas packages. The women knew I would writhe about and frenziedly attempt to pull my wrists from my bamboo restraints, and the silk scarves were protecting my skin from being torn to shreds. My captors had thought of everything. I was to be enslaved as a useful beast of burden, not physically deformed. That is why, for now at least, my private parts had escaped the fury of the beating.
Finally, when I was barely conscious, the beating stopped. I was left to hang from the tree, completely naked, buttocks bright red and bleeding, any flicker of defiance beaten out of me. Ward's soldiers were known to the Taipings as “devil soldiers” and the picture of a naked, helpless, and enslaved western male soldier whimpering and sniveling like a child in front of her “silken army” is precisely what Golden Lily wanted.
She stood beside me and lectured her women warriors on how feeble and weak men were--even foreign men. And how quickly our will to resist could be broken and transformed into a willingness to betray our comrades. As she spoke she occasionally patted my buttocks and ran her fingers along the welts, causing me to thrash about, throw my head back and beg for mercy. I was no longer a soldier and certainly not a devil to be feared; simply a specimen to be examined and discussed by women warriors who had tamed me.
Toward the end of her lecture, she stood before me and slightly to the side. She again slapped my face with her right hand and without warning gripped my scrotum with her left. As she suddenly tightened her grip I let out a yelp. She smiled and turned to her female army. “We shall see if our slave responds to punishment or if further measures will be necessary.” To this day when I hear the laughter of women, it never fails to remind me of the soft laughter of the Taiping women at that moment.
When her speech had ended, the women began carrying out their duties: lighting fires and cooking, washing clothes in a nearby stream and tending to the horses. Golden Lily assigned several to prepare her sister for burial. With the exception of a few who went off to relieve those guarding the outer perimeters, none hardly gave me a glance. I was, after all, no longer a threat; simply a degraded, pathetic spectacle.
I could see a lamp fed with tea-oil smoking at the entrance to Golden Lily's tent and candles had been lit nearby. Beside the lamp offerings had been set out as before a shrine: three cups of tea, three bowls of rice, three chopsticks and a Bible. This, I knew, was in honor of what the Taipings referred to as the “Three-fold God,” the Holy Trinity. Regardless of their bizarre misunderstandings of Christianity, the Taipings considered themselves Christian and were despised by the Manchus as “God-worshippers.” And in a ritual more Confucian than Christian, they offered a cup of tea to each of the Holy Trinity.
Before long, all of the women not on guard duty gathered near Golden Lily's tent and sat on the ground facing her. Together they recited the Ten Commandments. She then led them in a discussion praising the Taiping “Heavenly King” in Tienking and spoke of how he was the brother of Jesus sent by Heaven to carry out God’s will that he replace the Manchu emperor sitting on the Dragon Throne in Peking. At first I didn’t recognize the city she mentioned, but then I remembered once the Taipings had seized Nanking (“Southern Capital”) they had changed the name to Tienking (“Heavenly Capital”). As Nanking had been the capital of the previous dynasty, the Ming, its capture was a symbolic as well as military challenge to the Manchu government. All of the women warriors began singing several Christian hymns, mostly in Hakka dialect.
Hanging naked and helpless and humiliated in sight of beautiful and self-assured Chinese women singing Christian hymns is something that must be experienced to be appreciated.
I was certain that at least a contingent of Ward's army could not be far from the Taiping camp and I dared hope that the worst of my ordeal at the hands of these women warriors was over; that within days if not hours I would be rescued. Little did I realize at the time that my slave training was just beginning. Or that all I had been, the identity I had formed, would be sloughed off as completely as a snake casts its skin. Or that, despite the pain and humiliation, I would come to regard it as the day my liberation began.
The late spring day had been warm and in any case I had little time to worry about the weather. But now in the cool night air I began shivering. Despite the chill, my buttocks were pulsating and actually felt on fire. As gusts of wind hit them, it felt almost as if I were again being beaten. I wondered if I would be left to starve to death or if the Taiping women had something more devilish in mind for me. If there was one thing John Chinaman was good at, it was in devising fiendish tortures including the dreaded “death of a thousand cuts.”
Finally, their service was over and I could see a figure approaching me. It was Sweet Little Sister. She had changed into more practical, tighter fitting, clothes and was carrying a small earthenware container. She stood in front of me and her eyes stared into mine. Lovely brown eyes that seemed able to penetrate my soul. Where Golden Lily was domineering and commanding, Sweet Little Sister was curious, playful, and mischievous. Her tightly fitted silk tunic revealed the feminine form of her nubile young body and her bright, spontaneous smile suggested the impish nature of her personality.
I had been placed in her charge and, subject to the approval of Golden Lily, I had no doubt this striking young woman could do with me as she wished. She dipped her fingers into the container and reached around me to spread some lotion on my aching buttocks. That way she could observe my expression as she worked.
I immediately gasped as the heated lotion touched my flayed skin, more in anxiety than pain. But there was plenty of pain as well. She began rubbing my buttocks and speaking to me softly in Hakka dialect. I understood little but I did understand that she was speaking as if to a frightened horse rather than to a man. Even the terms she used were those for addressing animals, not men.
She patiently explained that the lotion was a mixture of dried insects and herbs and would soothe my ache. I understood her to say that as long as I obeyed her commands and never attempted to escape I should not be afraid. She spoke to me with the tone of an exacting schoolmarm gently chastising a wayward student.
She reached around me and worked slowly, methodically, spreading the lotion on the flayed flesh of my buttocks, constantly observing me with her beautiful dark eyes. Then, she looked casually about to see if anyone was nearby and, under cover of darkness, she let her hand lightly grasp first my scrotum and then my manhood. After only a few seconds, she slid her hand farther between my legs and began soothing where the tip of the whip had struck my inner thighs. All the while her delicate wrist was pressed firmly against my slowly swelling member.
Despite the pain and mortification of hanging naked and helpless before her, there was nothing I could do to prevent her from seeing undisputable evidence of my arousal. I began breathing deeply again but this time from a very different stimulus.
The Taipings prescribed death for moral turpitude and I knew the chance she was taking. She had almost certainly passed from girl to woman in this puritan atmosphere, separated from men for long periods of time, and I began to wonder if she had ever slept with a man.
While her increasingly unstable Taiping “emperor” ensconced himself in his palace in Nanking spouting out pseudo-religious nonsense, he and his assistant “coolie kings” found ample time to surround themselves with imperial harems. But the emperor’s rules for his followers regarding frivolity between the sexes were strict to the point of condemning even “the casting of amorous glances,” and it occurred to me that if Sweet Little Sister had never had an opportunity to lie with a man, it might be something I could use to my advantage.
But at that moment I was far too afraid of another beating to make even the slightest attempt to improve my situation. Even I wasn't certain at that point if all will to resist had been beaten out of me. I only knew I had gained new respect for the power of these women and the lengths they would go to ensure obedience in their male slaves.
Sweet Little Sister continued to rub me with long, slow strokes, experimenting with how long she might allow her fingers, palm or wrist to touch, fondle and caress my manhood. She pulled my foreskin back and forth, exploring with her fingers, the whole time staring into my eyes to see the effect of her manipulations. The top of her head came within inches of my nostrils and even the scent of her hair acted as an aphrodisiac. I made no attempt to conceal my sexual arousal and, through half-closed eyes, completely gave myself over to her.
I could see the excitement lighting up her own eyes as my erection grew inside her hand. She was beginning to appreciate the unbearably urgent sexual desire she could create in men and the sexual power it gave her. And she was enjoying it with an inextricable mixture of childlike wonder, impish delight and mischievous teasing. Around us, I could hear only the crackling sounds of wood on the campfires and the soft voices of other women warriors carried by the wind. Only the outlines of their lantern-lit tents were visible in the darkness.
But Tiam Moi had no intention of granting her new slave any kind of release. If such a favor was ever to be bestowed, that would obviously have to be earned. She stopped her massaging, leaned forward and whispered in my ear in Hakka-accented mandarin: Hsihuan ma? (“Do you like it?”) I tried to slow my excited breathing while I nodded.
I was about to beseech her to continue when, suddenly, another woman warrior appeared from out of the surrounding darkness. She wore a yellow turban and a flowing red robe which ended at her knees. Beneath the robe, yellow satin trousers reached to her boots. I would later learn this woman's name was Siu Fah, or, “Pretty Flower,” and that she was from Honan province.
She was taller than Tiam Moi, slender and possessed what the Chinese call a “willow waist.” She was indeed pretty with the face of an angel and a complexion that resembled the most flawless ivory. But foreign advisors and their weapons had aided the Chinese Green Banner Army that had mercilessly tortured her husband before cutting off his head. He had not been a Taiping rebel but Chinese armies often decapitated the heads of innocent farmers and villagers and sent them on to Peking officials to prove their military successes against the “Taiping rebels.”
All this I would learn later, but already, as she looked at me I could see the hatred and loathing in her eyes for foreigners. I was not certain how much of Sweet Little Sister's daring actions she had seen, but her gaze drifted downward to my rapidly shriveling manhood and I watched as her hand moved to the knife in her waist sash.
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Chapter Three
Feminine Rage
While I hung by my wrists naked and helpless, the night had grown colder and the sky was full of stars, but except for the sounds of the crackling woodfires, and the rhythmic chirping of crickets, the Taiping camp was silent.
Siu Fah (“Pretty Flower”) glowered at me while resting her hand on the hilt of her knife. As she had approached, I couldn't help but notice her unusual height and undeniable beauty. Now that she was up close I saw that she had small lustrous eyes, a delicate, almost Caucasian, nose and thin red lips. Following the fashion of the day, she had shaved away a portion of her eyebrows and filled them in with a thin arched line drawn in black paint and charcoal.
In Shanghai, not long before I was captured, a Chinese prostitute had explained to me that because of their shape, such eyebrows were known as “the new moon makes its first appearance,” and were considered a sign of beauty. It seemed that during lulls in the fighting, even some of the Taiping women found time to maintain their feminine pulchritude.
At the time I thought it strange that women warriors engaged in vicious battles with Chinese and Manchu soldiers would pay attention to maintaining, even enhancing, their appearance. I was not yet wise enough to realize that they did this not as women who might wish to attract a man in flirtatious romance, but as a tool they might need to employ should they be captured; their femininity was simply one more weapon in their armory that could be used to disarm and overpower men.
In the custom of the Taipings, Pretty Flower had wound a cloth around her head to resemble a turban, but clusters of her jet black hair framed her ears and forehead and were clearly visible in the moonlight, somehow making her even more desirable. But at that moment, as I hung from the tree without a stitch of clothing and completely unable to defend myself, I was not thinking of how beautiful she was, but rather how quickly an angry woman's hand lingering on a knife can summon forth a man's deepest fears of castration.
She began speaking sharply to Tiam Moi in Hakka and Sweet Little Sister responded in a polite fashion as if trying to appease her “elder sister.” But Pretty Flower's burning anger was not to be easily mollified.