Furin Chime Press™

Tag: I Ching

  • Miasma

    Miasma

    The sweet smoke bathed everything in a black light, turned even the sun black, which cast down its inky rays upon an ashen desert dotted with blasted stumps and the remains of unidentifiable beings. And it was as though a miasma arose from the earth to meet the ghastly light, some dark cloud arising. Finally his senses would numb and the faint vestigial flicker of luminous bone dim along with the remnants of wakefulness. What relief it brought, fleeting alas, this bleak corpse-like state.

    Herein unendurable day-lit regrets and cravings subside, assimilated by whichever skeletal self donned them as slabs of weightier stuff, like rag-doll stuffing, marionette trunks chiseled from wood and covered in miniature clothing, so as to impart a compelling illusion of life. First, the fleshing-out of a penny existence, soul without hope; and now the reverse, as in the erasure of a sketch, spiriting away first hatching and shade with light strokes of the rubber, and then the substantive lines with razor blade and spittle.

    Whose awareness was it of the grinning skull within, yet containing him, strangely? A drooling grin spread across his own sticky face; more than an expression, an extension of his embodied grotesqueness, a germ of lasciviousness for its own sake, abjuring any particular object. Some kind of perversion implicit in the skull. Memento mori. Never forget that you must die as well. Well, if that’s all, that’s naught: neither death nor life makes much difference to me. Why should I dread my approaching dissolution? Life is a borrowed thing, and the living frame thus borrowed is like so much dust. Life and death are day and night. He observed such thoughts pass through the skull over and again.

    A shadowed figure peers into a smoky opium den filled with drifting haze and dimly seen occupants.

    Echoing his uneven, scuffing footfalls and stumbles, a passage had led him here, but which? Or which wasn’t it? The one with the ante-room? On the one side a deserted gambling table and on the other the same. Both deserted, for luck had forsaken the place. A hallway led down through the building, from which a number of small rooms opened off, half of each occupied with a staging spread with gaudy carpet. He pushed open a closed door, to peer in through the beckoning smoke, almost sickly sweet as it was. Two … what do they call them … orientals, celestials … pigtailed, reclined on the staging, curled either side of an oil lamp, the wisps of black smoke spiraling up. To look into their eyes was to find no spark beyond faint reflections of the lamplight. Beyond those unseeing orbs, no, orbs revolved inward, no sign was granted the interloper, no sign of life, nor any of the myriad fluorescent blossoms and gems of the transcendent realms, the dreams that held them in thrall.

    Further back, in the shadowier corner, another lay, grotesque grin on his unshaven face, hugely magnified, as though mirrored on the convex surface of the observing eye that had somehow passed by the other two unseen.

    From time to time, one or another stirred in order to reload his cane pipe, about a foot long, on the end of which was affixed a bell-like covered bowl, with a round hole the diameter of a pea, to admit the opium. Using a long steel needle he took up a portion of treacle and heated it above the lamp until it attained the plastic consistency of dental gutta-percha, whereupon it was ready then to be inserted into the hole. He put the end of the cane tube to his lips, applied a light, drew in the smoke and released it out through his nostrils.

    The third awakened, reenacted the ritual, then lay back and drifted again into a fleeting paradise, his head resting on a firm-cushioned stool about six inches high. Once again, and again, further confounding the befuddled mind, which beheld as one continuous action what was in truth a composite of disparate moments. And what if not merely the mind but the spirit as well was so disorientated by this freezing of time’s components that it became dispersed among them? Not knowing where or when it existed in any segment of the action. Not to say that the self was concerned about such contingencies as time and place, so close was it to its dark and eternal home, so close, merely a membrane separate. Bearing in mind that the self itself – note the impersonal pronoun – could not be said to know or think, being merely an effect or illusory thing.

    Immediately he recognized his own face in the contorted smirk, the gesture itself took control, such that he, the mirror image, must only obey. Which was this dark passage through which he had arrived, from a course traced through so many forked paths? Might he rejoin his mother and intimates, Pu-erh, Ugly Toad, Yongyan, and Wang via this corridor, with rooms coming off to the right and left, multifarious false paradises? Places of dreams, ante-chambers of the grave, which remind us of our lost ones, since the walls are hung with their portraits and decorated with their busts, as though designed to relieve our desolation, we who must remain a while longer.

    Whence the guilt, the miasma, the dark cloud arising?

    • • •

    Ugly Toad rose to a position of great respect in the temple, successfully wooed one of the most beautiful women in the village below, and took her for his concubine.

    “I would prefer to be next to him,” she said, “than married to any other man in the province, unattractive as he is.”

    Her given name was Ling, which is like the sound of a bell or a tinkling piece of jade. Jokingly, he called her his Concubine Ling, which was the title the Empress Xiaoyichun had borne a century before, when she rose to fifth-rank consort of the Qianlong Emperor.

    “Concubine Ling,” he said, “your name carries within it the sound of the sweetest chime, but surely you must realize that such a chime will sound muffled and confused when hung between two old earthenware pots like your father and me.”

    How could she answer other than with a smile?

    “You are getting these chestnuts out of some old Taoist rascal in those books, I’m sure. I think you’re spending far too much time pondering in the library these days and not enough planting in the garden.”

    “Yes indeed, Concubine Ling, I noticed just today that the new bamboo shoots are coming up; it may be time for somebody to harvest a few, for they will soon be growing up in front of our eyes.”

    “I disagree,” she replied. “The watermelon radishes are more advanced, and if we don’t pick them, they will turn. And what is more,” she added with a come-hither smile, “they are called ‘beauty in the heart,’ so it is auspicious if you are the one to harvest them, emperor of my heart.”

    “Of course, my dear, you are right. The bamboo shoots can wait a little longer. It is yet quite cool, after all.” And he never failed to do exactly as she wished.

    Similarly, he never expressed any opinion contrary to those of his neighbours. Consequently they grew to love him nearly as much as did his wife and father-in-law, who moved in with the couple and would never be separated from his son-in-law, such was the fondness he developed for him.

    “I wonder why you always seem to agree with everyone’s opinions?” his father-in-law said to him with a faintly critical overtone, one quiet evening when they sat relaxing by the cliff-top, enjoying the moon over a cup of hot toddy mixed from rice wine, sugar, and spices. “I’ve noticed that, even when they are quite contrary to each other, you always manage to concur with all of them and don’t adopt a particular one of your own.”

    “Well, you know,” Ugly Toad said, “it must be because here in this temple I have grown to prefer appealing to the infinite, rather than be disturbed by everyone’s conflicting ideas. Now I think of it, though, listening to what you say, perhaps I should make an effort to have an opinion of my own one day …”

    Lao Tzu’s disciple Zhuangzi says that if an ugly man has a child born to him at midnight, he hurries to it carrying a light to examine it most eagerly, afraid that it may look like him. When their daughter arrived, Ugly Toad did just that, but the baby turned out to be even more beautiful than Ling, and he wept tears of a greater joy than that of most new fathers, as joyful as they are in their own right.

    Endowed as she was with a phenomenal wisdom and depth of knowledge in Confucian law, among her wealth of other attributes, Pu-erh had her pick of administrative roles in the district, for a succession of emperors had come and gone, and the Imperial Court had by now forgotten all about her, sunk from notice in such a far-flung place, leagues upon leagues from the Forbidden City. And anyway, anyone who came across any mention of her in the records would have assumed, naturally enough, that she had passed away many years ago.

    She employed Yongyan and Wang as assistants-in-training, instructing them in the “Ten Wings,” Confucius’ own commentaries on the Yi Jing, and in his principles of law and social harmony, while at the same time guiding their education in Taoist philosophy. A far cry from their activities as less than competent ginseng poachers and bandits, their lives now became devoted to self-improvement and to becoming citizens whom all the villagers would admire for their virtues and upon whom model themselves. Pu-erh’s aim was to form a supremely harmonious society in the mountains – to transform this rough clay into the finest porcelain. Corporeally honed by a fervent idealism, Yongyan the Hungry became thin as a reed and came to be known as “the Sated,” while Wang the Eviscerator became “the Meek.” Wang kept his head and face shaved and packed away his beloved goose-wing sabre, having learned that sharp weapons are instruments of evil omen, not of the cultivated person, who uses them only when compelled by necessity. The regional government instituted Pu-erh as travelling magistrate, and she and her two subordinates successfully undertook many charitable projects. Together, the three engineered drainage and irrigation projects, set up soup kitchens and winter shelters for the poor, and eliminated the widespread practice of infanticide carried out by families who had too many children to feed, known euphemistically as “marrying her off” or “transmigrating him to the body of another.” Mostly girls, but sometimes boys; mostly the poor, but the rich as well.

    Then one day, his eyes reflecting the heaviness of his heart, Wang the Meek came up to Yongyan the Sated where he was working in a vegetable patch, lowered a pack to the ground, and leaned on his walking stick.

    Two weathered monks tend a small garden in a misty, rugged landscape.

    “The life of the do-gooder has been great for what it’s worth,” he said, “and I’ve learned all sorts of new things, but enough is enough and I’ve come to the end of my tether. It’s tired me out, as much good as I know we’ve done. My heart weeps and all this is starting to give me the shits. Before we met up with Pu-erh and Mow Fung, I had a hankering after adventure. Remember after the bear got me up there at Changbai, I said to you, Enough of the mountain life, let’s go down to the Pearl River Delta and work as pirates shipping opium for the Heaven and Earth Society? There are all sorts of openings down there with secret societies starting up all over the place, all wanting to get rid of the Emperor and all the other Manchus.”

    He spat down onto the dirt.

    “And how about Ugly Toad? I can’t talk to him any more, he just agrees with me all the time. How can you communicate with someone like that? I used to like him much more when he was disagreeable. I’ve loved Pu-erh since I first set eyes on her, but there’s no denying she’s too good for me and always will be, no matter how hard I work at it. She doesn’t even see me; it’s as though her eyes look right through me. I love Mow Fung too, like the son I never had, but I never see him any more. Last time we met he raved on about the Jade Volume and all it was teaching him, over and over. He sits up in those caves in the cliffs above the Jagged Rocks. He’s going loco with all that fasting and chanting, and too much reading that old stuff isn’t good for you in this day and age. He’s been acting even weirder than usual, and he’s got even the monks talking, let alone the village folk. How would you like to come with me, back to our good old life of fun and adventure?”

    “Too much still to accomplish,” Yongyan said, resting on his hoe. “When you do a job well, you should do it thoroughly, and when you start something, you ought to finish it.”

    “You don’t say. Really? Did you make that up by yourself?” Wang said, realizing how utterly he had relapsed, but preferring things that way.

    “It is a wise teaching of the ancient sages, a rule that we all should follow.”

    “See what I mean?” Wang said almost to himself, sighed, shook his head and spat again.

    “Even now as we speak,” Yongyan said, “the villages in the valley below the eastern flank of Tranquil Mount are engaged in a controversy about the watercourses over there. Some of the villages noticed unused water flowing down the canal to the Eight-Mile River, you see, and they decided to tap it with unauthorised irrigation ditches. But the village of Great-Water thought this was wrong and appealed to Pu-erh as magistrate; and on going down to investigate the river system and seeing abundant water running down from Dog-Head River – which used to be known as South Ditch, the lower stream of Dog-Head Spring, but hasn’t been called that since the sluice gate was put in and the ditch dredged in spring and summer … But that’s by-the-by. Where was I? Ah yes, noticing that the South Ditch has quite a deep bottom, thus letting more water through than the forty per cent she had allotted to the eight villages along the circulation ditch, she ordered stones be placed on the bottom and sides, thus decreasing the amount they can siphon off. You see, that restores the forty-sixty ratio between the two main groups of villages. As well, she’s placed a five-wen fee on water usage for one day and one night, and limited the amount of water that each person can take during a given cycle of twenty days. Now, listen closely, because here it gets complicated –”

    “Enough,” Wang pleaded. “That’s exactly what I mean. You’ve changed too. I understood you better when you used to let your belly do the talking. I can’t bear any more of these convoluted issues. They have brought both my brain and spirit to the point of collapse. These are exciting times in the world, you know, what with the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom toppling Nanjing and chasing the Emperor out; and you’ve still got the Miao kicking up a stink in Guizhou province, and the Red Turbans look like they may take over Canton. And I’m missing it all for what? The chance to play sluice monitor for a gaggle of rustics.”

    “Wang!”

    “Alright, I apologize, I take that back.” He gave a snort. “Well, there’s little more to say but fare-thee-well. My destiny is out there somewhere waiting for me. Always remember that I love you like a brother, and it is my joy to have gotten us out of some sticky situations in the old days. Pass on my fond regards to Pu-erh and Mow Fung, will you? I hate long goodbyes and don’t think I’d be able to get away without making a fool of myself.”

    With that, disguised in the clothes of a peasant, best to avoid the attention of rebel and Qing soldiers alike, who, when they were not engaged head-to-head in one deadly battle or another, seemed to spend their time searching out and terrorizing Buddhists and Taoists, and defacing their temples, he shouldered his pack and set off for the forking paths in the bamboo grove. His heart was heavy but his tread light, in the understanding that “the skilful traveller leaves no trace of his footsteps.” The last Yongyan heard was a few snatches of a sad old song that Wang used to whistle once in a while in the old days:

    Breaking willow twigs –

    a hundred birds cry in the garden grove.

    • • •

    Mow Fung dreamed of a giant fish that turned itself into a bird and flew across the Southern Ocean, known also as the Heavenly Pond. When he awoke, the heart of the bird remained inside him, and he found himself consumed with its yearning for the south. Impenetrable darkness enclosed him as though he were a fossil caught in a piece of coal, and he recalled that in his dream, before he became the fish, he had found himself in a dark house of multiple paradises where he lost his way as well as his friends. He sat up and reached forward gingerly in the dark until his palm came to rest on a vertical granite plane. He began to crawl, groping his way along the wall. At the next turning, he halted. This was further than he had come on his past excursions in answer to the call of the thousand-mile-long black dragon Zhu Long, believed by the ancients to be the creator of the world, who usually lived deep beneath Zhong Mountain, fasting and holding his breath, but had evidently come here to pay a visit. It was through the light shed from the candle it held in its mouth that, roaming deep inside those caverns, Mow Fung gained his first views of the Nether World.

    The call had become an increasingly powerful roar during recent weeks. He did not hear it through his ears exactly, like a normal earthly noise, but rather through various parts of his body. At first, his heart, stomach and lung cavity vibrated annoyingly, a symptom that would become so pronounced and painful in one or another of them that he feared he might keel over dead any second. As for his ears, first they numbed, then began to burn and feel as though they bled inside. The channels that led from his ears into his brain fed in waves of pressure, synchronized to the pulsing of the blood. Having come so far inside the granite labyrinth, so near the dragon, the fluctuating pressure assaulted his ears, not from the outside but from within himself. Squeezed by the pressure, his eyeballs warped and perceived false, luminescent ghosts.

    He had the subterranean system memorized perfectly up to his present location and found his way back outside without difficulty, though assaulted all along by the voice. The mouth of the tunnel opened from a sheer cliff high above the rocks. As soon as he emerged, four peals of thunder sounded and a bluish-green light flashed six or seven times in the sky like thunderbolts. Clouds of dark vapour arose from the foot of the adjacent mountain and from the depths beneath him. From behind, mice scurried out between his limbs and along the narrow track carved into the cliff face. A silence descended, but for a whistling breeze carrying a scent of rotten eggs. The breath of Zhu Long! He knew immediately what it was the dragon had been trying to tell him all these long weeks.

    As frantic as was his effort to hasten, progress was nauseatingly slow, inching along the track, back pressed against the cliff, heels guided by a carved groove. Then into the forest he went, stumbling over boulders, splashing through streams as he staggered down the eastern shoulder. He came to the crossroads, deep in the forest, the place the monks called the “ineffable centre,” meaning the centre which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. The temple or the high village? There was only time to warn the one, but not the other. He must decide. Behind him, the east, the Black Dragon; to his left, Rosefinch; straight ahead, White Tiger; to his right, the Tortoise. Out of nowhere, a streak of crimson, a pause, then a ringing, slowly rising trill, Weeja-wu-weeja! Next, the alarm: Chay-eeee! And away.

    A dishevelled monk runs toward villagers, who stop their work and stare at him in a mountain village scene.

    At the outskirts of the high village, peasants tended vegetables, led an ox, wove a basket, braided leather thongs, repaired a gate. They all stopped what they were doing at the sight of the mad young monk in rags come staggering into their midst, unable to speak. Moved his mouth, but no words came – either from the effect of some narcotic or from his months of confinement in the caves. They started to laugh at him and continued until the moment the first tremor struck and threw them all off balance. The earth shuddered and their hovels shook and creaked, but none collapsed. A massive clap of thunder sounded from the direction of White Tiger peak, and an overpowering crash and rumble rent the air, as gargantuan slabs of rock and earth slid and vanished into the abyss before their eyes. The Taoist temple and everything within its grounds and its walls disappeared along with the entire mountain peak, everything mangled and disintegrated as one, like a shovelful of gravel. When the peasants arrived running, there was only an abyss of nothingness where the temple had stood minutes before, much as if it were a chalk drawing wiped from a slate. A vision of it was still there in the memory, as tenuous as a retinal image. Yet, much as they rubbed their eyes and shook their heads, the building itself would not reappear.

    From the draft novel Stawell Bardo © Michael Guest 2026

  • Dust of the Dragon’s Tail

    Dust of the Dragon’s Tail

    The fleeting glimpse he had gained of a young fair-haired woman through the half-opened doorway to the inner sanctum of the Jade Phoenix had nagged at the detective. Of late, Chinese camps were acquiring a reputation among certain of the Wimmera youth for the unwholesome diversions they afforded. Alluring as these places may have appeared to some of tender years, especially to the wayward and unchristian among them, they were commonly reckoned iniquitous dens.

    One sixteen-year-old girl undertook a week-long, hundred-and-forty-mile journey from her home at Ballan, only fifty miles out of Melbourne, in quest, so she said, of a situation at Horsham. Playing upon the compassion of publicans she visited along the way, she obtained overnight board and a shilling here and there to buy meals on the road. Her real destination turned out, after a circuitous detour, to be the house of a suspect European woman at the Deep Lead Chinese camp, where she took up quarters.

    Hearing news of her arrival, Constable Hillard went out to interview her and, disbelieving her story, gave her notice to quit. When she spun him more yarns, attempting to fob him off and contrive to remain, he brought her up on vagrancy before the Stawell bench. The magistrate discharged her after a sound admonition, and the next thing you know, off she went to live with a Chinese gardener at Doctor’s Creek. Not a week later, Hillard ferreted out a second one, not even sixteen, who deserted her family home for the camp, because, she explained, of her father’s cruelty and the lack of comforts at home.

    This same girl was already known to the police, having recently preferred a rather serious charge against a young man from Stawell, which he was to answer at the next General Sessions. There was something wrong in the state of Denmark, the magistrate informed Forster in writing, when girls such as these sought the association of a Chinese camp, proposing that if an example were made of those who harboured them there, it might prove a deterrent.

    Dark-eyed Miss Chan – Forster addressed her as such, for the woman’s unassailable poise checked in him any impulse he may have felt to assume the familiarity of ‘Lili’ – acknowledged, when he called on her the next day, that she had indeed engaged a young white woman as a waitress and housekeeper, and he was welcome to meet her; she was just now in the back garden feeding the chickens. This he did. No ragamuffin, but a strapping, jocular red-haired Irish colleen of nineteen she was, radiating goodwill and health, and obviously unsoiled by the demons of opium and rum.

    Perhaps, Forster reflected, the growing distaste for the Chinese immigrant as ignorant pagan and filthy barbarian had little basis beyond plain bigotry and the biased reporting of the newspapers. There was the old enmity of rival gold-miners, resulting in thuggery and atrocity at Buckland River, Lambing Flats, and as close by as Ararat itself, less than twenty years ago.

    Detective Forster sits alone at his desk in a modest 1880s bush office, leaning over papers in a dark coat and brimmed hat. An oil lamp and scattered documents rest on the desk, and the scene has a sombre, reflective mood.

    Disgruntled unionists were, he presumed, at the root of the more recent political pressure to exclude Chinese sailors and stokers from working on steamers trading to and about the Australian ports. Invariably cheerful and obliging Chinese fishmongers and hawkers of all sorts of useful wares had now become the targets of insult and violence from many working-class Australians, owing to a general animus against the Australian Steam Navigation Company, which had been hiring Chinese. Most unworthy of a great, free people. And what did this rabble know of China, a country they so despised? Most likely little, if anything, more than he did.

    If Lili Chan and his other new acquaintance, the mysterious Mow Fung – full of surprises he was, publican-cum-priest of some sort, evidently – were a measure, the Chinese had much to contribute to this country, and especially to a far-flung region like this. In idle moments, he found his thoughts wandering in their direction – and in Lili Chan’s, he cautioned himself, rather too often. He could entertain not the slightest likelihood that such a woman might have any possible interest in a crusty, ill-oiled bachelor such as he, even despite her situation, which was a morally tenuous one in the eyes of most. He could only wonder at what had brought her here, to the middle of nowhere, when clearly her talents and charms – that trace of a cultured American accent – would have fitted her for a rewarding position in Melbourne, at least. Enigma indeed. Her skin was of such a subdued olive hue, her features of such subtlety, that she might well pass for white, given the right circumstances and Western attire. Now, there he went, off again on mad imaginings …

    It was in the midst of reflecting on her features that he recalled having paused, some months earlier, on an item in the weekly Victorian Police Gazette – one that had caught his eye by departing from the usual notices concerning people wanted for questioning, prisoners discharged from gaol and the like. He retrieved the number from the bottom of a tea chest packed with old copies of the journal in a corner of the storeroom by the stables.

    “The whereabouts of a missing heiress are sought. The Cantonese woman, of Anglo-Chinese descent, has been traced from the United States, where she spent several years after leaving China, to the Colony. Information has come to light concerning her entitlement to a handsome fortune, of which she is not likely to be aware. Contact should be made with Chief Commissioner Chomley.”

    The memory of the notice clung to him. The next day he rode to the Jade Phoenix, and presently laid the gazette before Miss Chan. The proprietress looked up from the page and bathed the detective in the cool liquid of her unblinking gaze.

    “I was not aware, Sergeant, that you took such an interest in the minutiae of my appearance and background. Your detective’s training, no doubt. The innocent Miss Finnegan discovered in the employ of this humble if disreputable establishment – that speaks well for your skill. Are you ever able to separate yourself from your duties as a … copper?”

    Mincing by their armchairs just as her name was mentioned, the lusty Molly Finnegan, playing at saucy Irish soubrette, flourished her feather duster and made her exit.

    “Have you ever thought of entering the gambling line? Your attention to detail and, I suspect, your talent for handling disturbances would be invaluable,” Lili Chan said.

    “I dare say the references would prove difficult.”

    “On the contrary, Sergeant. In certain establishments, a good blow and a discreet silence recommend a man admirably.”

    “I suspect I should make a very poor ornament to such a profession.”

    “A poor ornament may still have his uses,” Lili said.

    She lowered her eyes to the gazette again. “In some houses, usefulness is the rarer quality.”

    He watched her a moment. “Miss Chan, does this notice mean anything to you?”

    “My origins are too humble, I fear, to promise any inheritance beyond poverty and woe; but if it will put your mind at ease, you may enquire with the Chief Commissioner on my behalf.” What harm, she reflected, could come of agreeing to so much, when to refuse would only raise suspicion.

    • • •

    “Where were we?” said the voice of Huish-Huish, accompanied by the gentle jangle of a consecrated shamanic rattle, amid the light aroma of incense.

    “I recall, the zither.”

    After Fang Jing Dock’s tong began putting some serious pressure on Ah Toy, unassailable though she had been for the past twenty years, she sold up and moved to an undisclosed destination. With no choice in the matter, Chan Lee Lung became his mistress, and he moved in with her. It had been clear for some time that despite his dandyish affectations he was an enforcer – a so-called highbinder or hatchetman – for the Hing San Fong Tong, passing publicly under the name Society of the Mind Abiding in Tranquility and Freedom. Whenever he went out to conduct business of a certain kind, he would don chain mail beneath his dress shirt, tightly bind his queue up underneath his derby, to keep it from being seized in any rough stuff, and conceal his butterfly swords beneath the back of his jacket, all the while preening himself before his ornate mirror.

    One evening he and a henchman returned to the house with another Chinese man unknown to her. The three repaired to a room that Fang had commandeered as his music studio, where he also kept a small vault containing the most precious valuables of his tong: a handful of flawless diamonds of inestimable value. Before long the sound of Fang’s Viennese zither could be heard filtering out, a fantasia on Il Trovatore. She went to her bed and fell into a deep sleep, to be shaken awake by Fang.

    The highbinder Fang wearing suit, derby, and barely concealed chainmail vest, preens himself in an ornate mirror, adjusting his appearance with deliberate care. The image is rendered in a watery, near-monochrome wash with a subtle red highlight, the reflected figure contained within the frame and the edges fading into abstraction.

    “Go and see what you think of the new centrepiece in the studio and tidy up a bit in there. Fat Louis and I have some business to discuss, then we’ll get things back in order.”

    The third man sat slumped sideways in a wicker chair, his sightless eyes bulging wide, his tongue lolling from the contorted blue face. Around the throat, biting deep into the flesh, was a garrote fashioned from a metal contrabass string, carving what looked like a raspberry-jam-filled rut. She sank silently onto a chair and took stock of her future, which was clearly what Fang had intended.

    When she entered the sitting room, Fang and Fat Louis were sipping pink champagne, and nibbling on Roquefort.

    “Nice tang,” Fat Louis said. “King of cheeses.”

    “Butyric acid caused by the fungus Penicillium roqueforti,” Fang said. “Legend has it that the cheese was discovered when a youth herding his sheep on Combalou Mountain, partook of his lunch of bread and ewes’ milk curds. Seeing a beautiful girl in the distance, he ran off vainly in pursuit of her, leaving behind his flock and his lunch. When he revisited the spot a few months later, the mold had transformed his plain peasant repast into this delectable bonne bouche.”

    Then looking up at Chan Lee, “That was quick. Did he have anything to say?”

    “He thought the end was the best part,” she said in a measured tone.

    “The critics be damned, I say!”

    The two men fell about.

    Chan Lee looked at Fang steadily.

    “There is no medicine for vulgarity,” she said, taking up the champagne flute on the table for Fat Louis to fill. No way out of this but forward; she must watch for an opportunity out of the corner of her eye. 

    “I told you she would have what it takes,” Fang said. “You can tell a woman of breeding. And she knows as well,” lending a malevolent emphasis, “that the song of a dead bird is a sad one.”

    One thing was certain: to run to the police, if the chance arose, would be a waste of time and might well invite a fatal reprisal from Fang’s cohorts, were he to be put away, which in fact was unlikely, since the law tended to stay out of Chinese matters when they did not directly affect anyone else. For the time being she played the dutiful concubine to Fang. As he wished, she took on the mantle of his wife, at least in the view of the public, though the union was not sanctioned by either a Chinese or American ceremony. As an enforced confidante of the highbinder, who often boasted to her of his crimes, she was ever more ensnared in the strands of his fate, becoming, in the parlance of the courts, an accessory after the fact, and thus acquiring the guilt of his felonies.

    • • •

    In the Deep Lead Joss House, Chan Lee sorted through fifty yarrow stalks as Huish-Huish had taught her, occasionally raising them to her nose to savour the herb’s unique aroma. Huish-Huish counted off the number of stalks remaining between Chan Lee’s fingers at each stage, and the procedure was repeated six times to determine the lines of the session’s hexagram: Biting Through – judgement, punishment, discernment. None of the lines signifies guilt, though a little harm may be done. On the whole, an optimistic sign: though there may be trouble at the beginning, one bite’s through. Justice is administered, punishments exacted. If you lose your teeth, you lose your grip.

    Black on gold image of the Yi Jing (I Ching) hexagram 21 Biting Through. Bottom to top, the lines are Yang (solid), Yin (broken), Yin, Yang, Yin, Yang.

    “Cutting … gnawing … chewing …” Huish-Huish said. “A picture of the mouth. You bite through, get your teeth into something.”

    “Cutting.” Chan Lee intoned the word, the eye of flesh closing, the inward gaze of the eye of her contemplation floating back in time. “If you chew dried salt meat, you’ll find yourself poisoned.”

    Knowing not whether for good or ill, she decided that her best move would be to gratify him by seeming to take pleasure in what he did – deeds she found appalling and sickening, lacking as she did the same innate relish for inflicting misery that she now knew to be his. She did not stop to ask whether repeated exposure would inure her to his evils; whether, by touching black paint, her fingers too might be blackened. One thing was sure: there was no iota of love in her heart for the man who had become her ostensible protector. Fang was a man in whose arid heart love for any other creature had never taken root. As time went by, familiarity became contempt, and instead of any initial ardour, the possession of one so desired by others only fed in him a seething sadistic scorn that grew stronger by the day. This scorn he expressed in a ritual of cruelty, a proxy for the conjugal act, with strangulation and cutting for caresses. Sometimes his fervent passions quite got the better of him, and it was on the cards that he would murder her before too much longer.

    Deadened by morphia, a living ghost of herself, she faded from the view of her admirers, most of them so addled that, appeased by a surfeit of available substitutes, they forgot her before long – or rather, recalled only the myth of that bewitching peony of the Barbary Coast, and not the flesh-and-blood woman. Most. An up-and-coming stage magician, Chee Ling Qua, formerly of the ‘Court of Peking’ troupe, was presently engaged at the Bella Union – fire-breathing, sword-swallowing, linking rings, disappearing rabbits and chickens, the works. He could materialize a great big glass bowl full of goldfish out of thin air. A gentle soul, meek and mild, far from a hero come to save the day, but she credited his avowals of undying love and knew that he possessed, if not great means, at least some paste gems of amazing fire and brilliance for use in his performances.

    He was also on close terms with the most highly skilled and secretive Celestial apothecary in the city, whom he commissioned to create incendiaries and other chemical substances necessary for his stage effects. Chan Lee contrived to steal some time alone with the magician in his dressing room one evening when Fang was occupied with business; though he despised her he was as possessive of her as ever. He was much preoccupied these days, his gang embroiled in a war with a rival tong over the exclusive right to operate fan tan games and lotteries in the Barbary Coast. As it happened, Ling Qua was on the verge of pulling up stakes and setting off abroad with his own small troupe. Chan Lee should come with them at any cost, he begged, as she rearranged his robes. She could work as his magician’s assistant, peppering up the act with an arabesque here and a shimmy there … she’d pack them in.

    A month later, the Australasian and American Mail Steamship Company’s City of Melbourne headed towards the Golden Gate, its passenger list including a modest troupe of performers, a mixture of Chinese and Europeans, among them the sylphlike Suzon Chabrier formerly of the Folies Bergère, an inconspicuous brunette who, on closer inspection, as the customs official who processed her had remarked to his colleague, had a charming and subtle nuance of face that could almost pass as oriental. While her fellow passengers lined the decks for their last glimpses of Angel Island, Yerba Buena, and Alcatraz, Miss Chabrier reclined on a deckchair in a discreet black velvet dress, her chapeau decorated with simple field blossoms and pushed forward over her head, perusing the Daily Alta California. She was particularly attentive to an article on page two, which reported on the sudden death of a despised highbinder for the Hing San Fong Tong, one Fang Jing Dock. A photograph of the victim’s corpse had sunk into grainy shadow, which was perhaps for the best, the report ran, since readers would have found the contorted face and twisted limbs most distressing. Suzon applied her reading magnifier to the image, then read on. A note found on the corpse showed that he had expected death by rival hatchetmen.

    Chan Lee, later known as Lily Chan, sits in a deckchair aboard a steamship leaving San Francisco, having assumed the identity of Suzon Chabrier of the Folies Bergère.

    The note read: ‘Soon I must go to my fathers. Whether by the broad bladed axe or by dust of the dragon’s tail, it matters not. This I know. I go. I commend my spirit to Buddha, the all-wise and merciful.’

    “A searching examination of the body,” the reporter continued, “failed to reveal any marks of violence. It is believed that by ‘dust of the dragon’s tail,’ Fang referred to some potent oriental poison. From his expression of agony, it appeared he had been administered sufficient of the substance, whatever it was, to kill an hundred men. Police arrested another highbinder named Fat Louis, who is well-known to have been an associate of the dead man; but it has come out that he was employed surreptitiously by the rival tong in question, the See Yups. The dead man, who will not be missed, was under suspicion for a number of murders of fellow Chinese. A woman with whom he cohabited, once well-known around the gambling dens and houses of ill-repute, has not been seen for several months, and is now added to a long list of the presumed victims of the deceased ne’er-do-well.”

    From the draft novel Stawell Bardo © Michael Guest 2026

  • Junction Teahouse

    Junction Teahouse

    Honourable Buddhist scholars leave the East and go West. Mr Daruma, who doesn’t like Buddha, leaves the West to come East. I thought they might meet at the Teahouse of Awakening. Alas! It was only a dream.

    ⁓ Japanese Zen monk Gibon Sengai (1750–1837), adapted.

    It was Sunday, and a hush had settled over Stawell and its environs, less the product of Christian observance than the fatigue of a community wilting beneath a heatwave. The constables were at rest, their boots airing by the door, while their horses, in the shaded yard behind the lock-up, stood twitching at the flies. Grave-faced publicans bent over their ledgers with a grim focus. And the Reverend Hollins, in his peculiarly tremulous voice and occasional sighs tantalisingly suggestive of a faltering conviction, sermonised to a reduced congregation: a smattering of families, several women in white gloves already thinking of their lunch preparations; a town councillor occupying the aisle-end of the front pew, his straw boater tucked correctly beneath one arm when rising for a hymn, believing virtue to be transmissible through nods, smiles, and a strategic proximity to the pulpit; and indelibly, two boys whose giggles, once stirred, proved difficult to suppress, captive in the back pew, passing between them a folded scrap of paper on which they scratched and scribbled at a caricature of the preacher, recognisable chiefly by the earnest absurdity of his moustaches, while off-key strains of Jesus, Lover of My Soul wheezed from the beloved but dilapidated harmonium.

    The shopfronts along Main Street were shuttered, each a mute testament to the Sabbath and the wisdom of retreat. At the swimming hole, boys lay strewn in a loose ring beneath the gums, not so much resting as resisting motion altogether, while their sisters played jacks in the spindly grass nearby, casting now and then a glance at their brothers that combined idle curiosity with frank disdain. They had all been spectators the day before, as Stawell’s cricketers ruthlessly dispatched the visiting Ararat team, notorious across the Wimmera competition for their aversion to practice afternoons.

    The players themselves had scattered after the match, victorious and vanquished alike, most of them inclined to the drink. By nightfall, it was difficult to tell who had won: the mood had turned to the camaraderie of once-opposing warriors. On the brink of sunset, a few were seen crossing a drying creek bed, stumbling and laughing while arguing a call of leg-before-wicket as if time might reverse itself were the point laboured long enough, while the bottle, wobbling among them, passed hand to hand with the erratic solemnity of an intoxicated relic.

    Forster was not at rest on this Sabbath, nor was he attempting rest, which for him had never been a natural state – least of all while that torn bundle of clothing remained stubbornly mute. The scattered remnants of hat, flannel undershirt, trousers, and coat refused to yield the truth he was sure they withheld. During the week he had moved among storekeepers, stablemen, drinkers, and those who passed for bush-hands in that part of the country, collecting fragments of recollection that slipped, often visibly, from possibility into fancy. They revolved in his dreams, these lingering ciphers of some anonymous, ill-treated lost soul: a vest too long for most men, with a single bleached button still clinging to a thread; a coat with its lining turned the colour of the grass in which it was found; a twilled shirt, comparatively new, now torn open at the front and stained along the seams with dirt and dried blood. An unremarkable wardrobe from which to conjure a name.

    And it nagged at him that something vital waited to be perceived, if he could only loosen his grip on his habitual, strictly methodical approach to such evidence. That morning, he had reread a marked passage from a volume he carried in his travelling library, an old work by the British physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter, something about knowledge arriving through circuits of which the thinker remains unaware. “Unconscious cerebration,” Carpenter called it. Not instinct, exactly, but a deeper faculty, which underlies reason. It reminded him of something the Chinese publican had said to him offhandedly: that a man may fix his gaze too closely on the fragments of a thing, and so miss the thing itself. Forster, who did not consider himself a mystic, found the idea returning to him incessantly in recent days, like a tiny pebble he could not get out of the sock of his reason. Yet oddly persuasive. The detective was, like Carpenter, a committed empiricist, but it seemed to him of late that a narrow channel might exist between the Western scholar’s rigid concepts and the Buddhist’s drifting brushstroke. Whence come our “hunches,” our “insights,” our “intuition”? he mused as he crunched along, his plain walking stick, little more than a trimmed length of hardwood, tapped lightly at the ground as he pondered. That solution to a problem suddenly flashing into the mind unbidden: whence does it arise? Its quiet elaboration occurring beneath the awareness.

    The heat bore down, and without quite intending to, he had taken the red track to Deep Lead. Past the edge of the diggings, smoke exuded here and there in the Chinese camp, tinted with incense. Truth to tell, when entered from this side, alleys leading from the main street bore signs of the dissolution of which the camp was sometimes accused. There were a few grimy, tumbledown edifices, constructed as though from a pack of pub playing cards – among them opium haunts; the area had of late become known for drawing the idle young from miles around. Denizens of an unprepossessing, not to say suspicious, appearance loitered in the shade; yet even so, Forster reflected, there was a loafing, arrogant class of colonial that roamed around the country and might as easily be found lolling and expectorating about the corners of the principal streets in the best Australian cities.

    Towards the Junction Hotel end, the outlook was much improved, with a man repairing an eccentrically designed but spotless and sturdy cabin, or watering a vegetable garden; women in loose cotton trousers and indigo tunics, sleeves rolled to the elbow as they stooped and rose, pegged laundry to low-strung lines between sheds. Beneath a couple of pepper trees in a scorched yard, half a dozen children clad in faded cotton shrieked with delight as they played a game of bat and ball. A little further along he spotted Mow Fung’s own eldest daughter Lena, appearing wraithlike in the haze, suspended in a shimmer of mirage. She was some distance off, walking in his general direction along a track that led into the dusty street. As she came nearer, she recognised the detective and offered a pleasant smile and nod, gesturing that she was on her way elsewhere. He paused under the eaves of the Junction Hotel and glanced at the door. And just at that moment the proprietor appeared from around the corner of his premises, wearing his habitual loose trousers and black satin Chinese “melon rind” cap.

    Forster settled into one of two comfortable cane chairs arranged on either side of a small table in the corner of the Junction’s exaggeratedly named Tea House, where his acquaintance had guided him with quiet formality. Actually an interior room, it lay beyond public access, tucked behind the family quarters and adjoining a dim little chamber that might have been a storeroom – it was hard to say. Shelves lined the far wall, crowded with potted plants that leaned gently toward the filtered light. The tearoom itself was reached through a plain, easily overlooked door, and Forster had the distinct sense of being ushered into an inner sanctum, not merely for the warren-like route that led him there, but for the subtle change in the publican’s bearing as they entered: an attitude approaching deference, tinged with the protective instinct of a man offering something precious to one who might not recognise it. Perhaps his one or two official visits to the hotel since the post-mortem had earned him Mow Fung’s trust. It was an unintended but welcome result for a city detective newly stationed in the district, slowly learning the elusive protocols of rural trust.

    Mow Fung had then excused himself, to attend to some domestic task or other. More finely dressed than on previous occasions, Mrs Mow Fung was seated at a table in the far corner, opposite a woman whose back was turned to Forster; she gave him a quick smile, then turned back to her companion. The two conversed in hushed tones, drifting between English and Mandarin. A lacquered box sat open on the table, its contents laid out with care: long stalks, slender and pale gold, like dried reeds, along with a square of folded silk, an inkstone, and a strip of scarlet paper. They were playing a counting game with the stalks, or as far as he could tell, tallying up accounts. Forster glanced away, thoughts wandering as he looked out at the garden beyond the window. There was Mow Fung with Lena watering a wattle. Even a scene of such trivial domesticity had the power to soothe the soul, within this hush.

    A soft sound drew him back. The woman had shifted in her seat, and he could see her more clearly now: her lissome form and proud profile even with lowered eyes – beauty understated, yet unmistakable. She wore a pale silk blouse, the fabric catching the light just enough to reveal a faint peony motif in the weave; below that, loose, modest dark trousers.

    Mrs Mow Fung moved the stalks in her hands while the other woman watched intently, Her elbow rested on the table beside the inkstone box, fingers idly tracing its lacquered edge, her posture languid though her eyes tracked the other’s every gesture. She looked up as Mrs Mow Fung posed a question, articulating each word slowly in Chinese, and the answer came in an equally measured tone.

    Mrs Mow Fung’s sleeves made a faint, dry whisper as she moved and a moment later she tapped the yarrow stalks lightly on the square of silk. The woman said something inaudible, and Mrs Mow Fung gave a soft laugh in reply.

    “Yes, they are called ai yao, and that lovely perfume lingers on them for a long time. But we should be quiet now and think only about what troubles you.”

    Forster resisted an urge to clear his throat. He reached for the small teapot on the cane table and poured some tea into one of the two small, handleless Chinese cups Mow Fung had set down. He was sure the splash had cracked the silence, but neither woman looked up.

    Forster closed his eyes. He flinched at the first sip of tea, then smacked his tongue lightly against his palate before taking another. It was a tad bitter, with a taste of mushrooms and … damp soil … that caught him off guard; but after he swallowed, a subtle aftertaste emerged: warm, sweet, and unexpectedly wholesome. He lifted the cup to his nose and inhaled its strange aroma.

    Across the room, Mrs Mow Fung spread the stalks slightly between her hands, then divided them into two uneven bundles, with practiced ease. From the right-hand pile she drew out a single stalk and placed it aside, distinctly articulating the word “Heaven.” The remaining stalks she counted in groups of four, sliding them gently between her fingers until three remained. These she laid to one side, and gathered the bundles again. The motion was repeated. Divide, draw, count, set aside – three times in all.

    Forster listened to the rhythm: a rustling of sleeve, a concentrated breath, a feminine murmur. A pause. “Yang,” said Mrs Mow Fung. The younger woman took up the brush and marked a single line on the red paper – one clean, black stroke. Mrs Mow Fung took up a new bundle, and again the process unfolded: division, removal, counting. At the end of the cycle, she cupped the remainder in her palm and said, once again, “Yang.” Another mark was made – two strokes now, neat and parallel.

    “It is excellent quality Pu-erh tea.”

    Forster opened his eyes. The proprietor had materialised across the table. “It is,” Mow Fung added, “imported from the city of Pu’er in Yunnan province, the only place in the world it is cultivated.”

    Clearly on an intuitive impulse, having judged something favourable in his guest’s manner, he paused and continued:

    “‘Pu-erh’ is an important name in my life,” he said, “but not because of the tea. In my tradition, it’s also the name of a semi-immortal – a Perfected being, a sort of spiritual ancestress.

    “When I was an infant, there was a ritual – a dedication, not unlike a christening – where she was named as my guardian. When I grew a little older, I was told she had been my mother in earlier lives. Her task, I learned, was to help me return to my original true self.”

    Forster blinked, having anticipated nothing quite so personal, nor so metaphysical. Each looked quietly at the other as the words echoed away, infusing the atmosphere of the tearoom.

    “Unfortunately, I could never learn to do that.” Mow Fung chuckled as he reached for the teapot and poured again, the dark stream sliding softly into each cup. The deep, earthy perfume rose. “If you are not used to it,” he said, “it can taste a little like mushrooms and dirt.”

    “It’s not too bad,” Forster said. “Even to a milk-and-two-sugar man like myself. You’re uncannily right about the flavour. Must’ve read my mind.”

    “Much easier to read the face,” said Mow Fung. “Tongue-sounds too – most revealing.”

    Unsettled, Forster reverted to a tone of workaday officialdom, which rang oddly in his own ears amid the intoxicating bouquet of the Pu-erh tea.

    The female voice came from the far corner, and Forster glanced across to see the young woman holding the calligraphy brush upright in her left hand, poised to paint a mark.

    “Shame about that article – you and the doctor, after the post-mortem,” Forster said. “One of the constables tried to chase off that blasted reporter hanging about, but unfortunately not firmly enough.”

    If Mow Fung noticed the tone at all, he betrayed it only in the steady, crystal gaze he cast into Forster’s eyes before reverting to his humble mien. The atmosphere was once more in balance, as the women’s voices drifted and the yarrow stalks whispered on the silk.

    “Ah,” he smiled. “Newspaper. Sometimes the young reporter sees what he wants to see. Wants to make the reader of the newspaper feel superior to a lowly ‘Chinaman’ like myself. Always so. Very natural.

    “In this case, Doctor Bennett needed to wash his hands, but Mow Fung could not allow the dead man’s spirit to adhere to utensils like a bowl or towel – not only for the purity of the space, but for the spirit’s own journey. He should not get stuck to more things here, but instead, progress through the proper stages into the beyond. For this dead man, such matters are especially important, because he is disconnected from his head. It is said by some that a person should be intact, or they will never escape from this world.

    “So, leaning back, not to get splashed, I pour water from the trough over the doctor’s hands to wash them, with the water running into the earth, just as in our ritual cleansing. Doctor Bennett offers me the soap, but for obvious reasons, I refuse to take it back. And what do we find? Articles not only in Hamilton Spectator but as far away as Adelaide Observer. That ‘Heathen Chinee’ headline … Like all Chinese, superstitious, afraid of death, too ignorant to take the soap! Poor Mow Fung! Ha!”

    Across the room, Mow Fung’s wife made two quiet raps on the table, freezing mid-motion as she replaced the stalks into their lacquered box.

    “So sorry, my dear,” said the husband with a chuckle. “Getting a little excited. Since you’re finished, would you keep Detective Forster company while I fetch something I want to show him?”

    The younger woman’s gaze flicked up – not startled, but suddenly still, her face passive for an instant.

    “Detective,” she said, “I see.” She wiped the brush clean and pressed it gently into its groove beside the inkstone.

    Forster, already halfway into a polite nod, faltered slightly.

    “Would you care to join us?” said Mrs Mow Fung, smoothing over the pause.

    “Only if I’m not interrupting,” Forster replied.

    “We were done,” said the younger woman, her tone cool now. “All the lines are drawn.”

    “Please – call me Anna, my English name,” said Mrs Mow Fung graciously. She motioned to the seat beside her. “This is my dear friend Lili.”

    The young woman’s gaze slid from Anna to Forster and back again, and she offered a minimal nod.

    “Excuse me,” she said to her reflection in the window, languidly adjusting her sleeve. A fine silver bracelet caught the light. “Teahouse rituals are deeply exhausting.” The trace of an American accent barely surfaced.

    “You have been playing an intriguing game,” Forster said. He was looking at Anna when he spoke, but he caught a barely perceptible shrinking in Lili, like a bracing, or a folding inward.

    “It is not quite a game,” Anna said gently, “but more of a window into ourselves. It can speak to you, if you listen.”

    Lili regained her composure just as if it had never left. She tapped the red paper with the six parallel lines she had drawn. “It says someone in the room asks too many questions.”

    “This picture is called a gua,” said Anna, ignoring Lili as she might an impertinent child. “You see it is made up of two parts, upper and lower; here they are both the same, a picture of a lake: two Yangs with one Yin – broken line – on top. That is a most desirable gua: one lake perfectly reflecting another lake; two lakes side by side, filled with water, sharing it all with each other. Creative is balanced by receptive. The inside and outside are as one, without any separation. It is a state of joy, or harmony, or even delight. Profoundly satisfying.”

    Lili sipped her tea. “I’ve heard good things about joy,” she said dryly. “It’s on my list.”

    Anna continued. “There is always a risk with joy: it must be correct. False, incorrect joy, will never last long but will disappear; having lost it, you will be worse off than before.”

    “How poetic,” Lili said. “And how typical! A pair of lakes gazing longingly at each other, just before one of them evaporates.”

    “Exactly,” said Anna, implacable. “The top Yin line, broken, is changing to Yang, unbroken – that’s why I asked you to mark it with an x. It’s the culmination of delight, but also its overturning. When we cling too tightly to pleasure, we lose ourselves. Everything changes and then comes the sorrow. That’s the nature of joy when it runs too far.”

    She glanced down again. “Now look – only one Yin is left, and it’s climbing up through the strong Yang lines. This gua becomes a new one: Treading. Heaven above the lake. Like walking on a tiger’s tail – it may not bite, but you must tread carefully. Especially if that remaining, soft Yin is misused. Squint and miss the path; limp and the tiger turns and bites.”

    Then, more softly: “But that one Yin – it’s also the key. It must remain open, yielding. That is not weakness. It’s the only way forward when the forces around you are strong. The gua speaks to your moment. It shows where you stand – and how to tread the path with clarity and grace.”

    Forster ran his finger lightly around the rim of his teacup. “Well, I suppose if you stare at a thing long enough… Some say the mind produces answers of its own, even when we think we’re getting them from elsewhere. From cards, or symbols, or whatever’s at hand.” He lifted the cup to his lips. “Doesn’t necessarily mean they’re any less true.” Climbing up, Forster repeated to himself, smiling – or floating, maybe; the fact gently floating up of its own volition.

    “Here is what I wanted to show you, Detective!” Mow Fung suddenly manifested himself in his irrepressible mode. He drew up an extra seat and slipped in between Forster and Lili, placing a small scrapbook on the table. “You will see how we are growing more famous and may soon catch up with even you, although we have not arrested even a single criminal.”

    The scrapbook was open to a page with the “Heathen Chinee” clipping. Mow Fung laughed delightedly and tapped his finger on the next column, its headline set in bold capitals: “A Chinese Lady at Ararat.”

    “Ah, this one,” he said. “Another of our local triumphs. You see – our old store on the Mullock Bank in Ararat and a banquet said to honour the arrival of a real Celestial lady from the Flowery Land.” He glanced at Anna with a boyish grin. “My wife’s debut on the goldfields. She was the marvel of the district.” He shook his head. “Eighteen years. How time flies. Tempus fugit … He frowned and glanced up, searching a different part of his brain: “Sed fugit interea, fugit …”

    “Fugit irreparabile tempus,” said Lili, a singsong lilt in her voice, faintly amused by her own erudition. Mow Fung paused to look at her.

    Forster quoted the Virgil: “But meanwhile it flees … time flees irretrievably.”

    Mow Fung turned the book slightly so that Forster and the others could see the old clipping, the type still declaiming its truths after all these years. “The reporter wrote that half the township came to peer through the doorway. Then he says, ‘curiosity turned to drink, drink to uproar, and soon every man in the place was fighting – Europeans with their fists, Chinese with bamboo sticks: free fight and no favours.’ He casts me as ringmaster, conducting us Celestials in one-sided combat; and somehow we emerge the fools. while the drunken ruffians are likable country larrikins at heart.”

    He laughed softly, without mirth. “As I recall, there was supper, some singing, too much beer, and one fool who threw a weight from the counter and smashed two jars. The police were fetched; the magistrate dismissed the case. But the paper had its say: a lady from the ‘Flowery Land,’ a ‘Celestial’ riot in her honour, and another good story for breakfast.”

    Anna’s face barely shifted, but her minimal shrug suggested it took more than colonial attitudes to worry her.

    Mow Fung smoothed the edge of the clipping with a fingertip, but it curled back again. “I keep these to remind myself that in print, the story that pleases is the one that endures. I have found joy in this peaceful settlement far away from the violence and strife I left behind in China.”

    Forster shifted in his seat, unsure of what had unsettled him. Lili’s eyes lingered on the yellowing paper, musing, “And here I thought I was the exotic guest.”

    Their host turned another page. “And here – something happier.” The headline, neatly set in small type, read: “Baptism of a Celestial Infant.”

    “That was our first child,” he said. “The paper noted it as the first christening of a Chinese baby in the colony. It says the church was well attended, and that our boy bore himself with ‘admirable composure throughout the ceremony.’” He smiled faintly. “No one meant any harm. It was all quite kindly done – a curiosity for the readers, nothing more.”

    His hand rested lightly on the page. “I remember the minister’s face: the awe with which he regarded a new life; and the townspeople, craning for a better view of the novelty. We thought of it as a gesture of friendship, a courtesy between faiths.”

    He closed the book. “So – a happy clipping to end on.”

    Anna’s eyes softened; Forster gave a small, respectful nod. Lili’s reflection was faint in the window. Now so close, Forster was struck by the quivering delicacy of her beauty – as though each passing second revealed a new facet, trembling and shifting. It reminded him of a tightrope walker: balanced, poised, never quite at rest. There was a fragility to her. Her black hair gleamed and her eyes glistened in the filtered light. A gleam set gently against stillness – that was the essence of her allure. There were traces of Chinese ancestry in her eyes, but something mutable in her features, as though they might shift to match any gaze that sought to define her. Depending on the light, the company, or the hour, she might seem unmistakably Chinese or equally European. A chameleon beauty: composed, ultimately unreadable. She brushed a hand lightly through her hair. A scar traced the line of her jaw.

    “Shall I prepare some more tea?” she said, already rising.

    From the draft novel Stawell Bardo © Michael Guest 2025

  • 6. Jade Volume (from the draft novel Stawell Bardo)

    6. Jade Volume (from the draft novel Stawell Bardo)

    Jade Volume

    There is a mountain in the northern reaches of central China, known by devotees as Time’s Heavenly Sanctuary an Infinity above the Jagged Rocks. To the uninitiated, the summit lies at a distance no greater than a rice husk from the utterly impossible. And yet the region dazzles with natural vistas and unimaginable beauty. Many have tried to get to the higher elevations, but most failed. This is the realm not of mankind, but of the eagle, the heavenly tiger, and also the mischievous monkey who toys with the mind.

    Below, a wide, pure, meandering river traverses a pristine landscape that extends into unknown territory, amid countless acres of giant bamboo, their upper branches seeming to beckon the breeze. The skies above are the sapphire blue of heaven. Hearts lift at the sight, and there are climbers so intoxicated by the vision that they hurl themselves in ecstasy to their doom – clearing the sheer cliffs and smashing against the rough boulders below. It is no wonder that, to a remaining few, Time’s Heavenly Sanctuary an Infinity above the Jagged Rocks is believed the holiest of holy places and, indeed, not to be slighted without profound risk.

    Abstract watercolor landscape featuring red mist and glowing light in the foreground, with blue-grey watercolor waves suggesting water and fog. Evokes a mythic Chinese mountain scene from the Jade Volume chapter.

    The path winds upward through groves of giant bamboo, past shadowed outcrops and long-forgotten steps. Midway up the mountain’s flank, obscured by foliage and time, stand the ruins of a small, ancient temple – crumbling, barely visible through a thick curtain of green. Though seemingly deserted, the sacred fonts are kept full, and the stone steps swept clean.

    Inside, a modest offering of a simple rice-ball and bamboo shoot invariably awaits the intrepid visitor. To come so far demonstrates a purity of heart that is well rewarded. To accept the offering in proper humility opens the senses to the contrast between the essences of darkness and light – a rare clarity amid the world’s illusions. But should the offering be taken improperly, or worse, scorned in any infinitesimal degree … then the shattered remains of the fallen, far below the cliffs, bear silent witness to the error.

    Slightly below the temple’s ledge, until a century or two ago, burial tunnels were dug into the side of the sheer cliffs, extraordinarily deep, hand-carved tunnels in which it was the tradition to inter beings deemed noble of mind and spirit. It is said that, for the adept, the tunnels lead into a subterranean network that joins together all the holiest mountains in China, though not in the form of a physical labyrinth. Rather, access can be had only by an astral body, guided by the lines of an ancient map inscribed by the Tao on the shell of a certain large tortoise. Gravediggers would once upon a time swing down on ropes and steer one’s coffin into place in the cliff. Unsurprisingly, some of these erstwhile aerial ferrymen perished alongside their cargo, a worthy sacrifice for which they accrued what some call good Karma.

    And still the mountain ascends.

    Above this middle sanctuary of shrine and tomb, the mountain veils its final secrets. The temple, perched on a precarious ledge far above the valley, is not the summit. Beyond it, higher still and hidden from even the boldest climbers, lie the archives. Cascades of shining white water shield the opening to the cave, mighty enough to wash intruders away like ants. To human eyes, from all but an angular perspective of higher insight, the entrance appears no greater than a long, narrow crack in impenetrable stone.

    Seldom indeed will visitors appear at these elevations – whether temple, tomb, or the archive beyond – in a living, physical form – but when they do, they find awaiting them the welcoming rice-ball and fresh bamboo shoot. Quite the mystery. Either there are ways to attain such heights known only to the peasants who reside in hovels dotting the mountain here and there, shrouded in mist, or else a supernatural force is at work. We adhere to the former explanation because, no matter how sheer the cliffs or tangled the paths on the way to enlightenment, there are always those who will dare to ascend and untangle them, even among us simple monks and peasants.

    Yet there are also tales of hazardous spiritual journeys undertaken in order to consult the archive, in which an adventurer-adept awakens from trance to find the rice-ball and bamboo shoot in his mouth – rotten and crawling with maggots. And this although no flies exist above the treeline! The scenario is horrific, and it invariably concludes on the boulders at the foot of the cliffs.

    The archive is a forest of books dating back to the earliest ‘butterfly’ volumes, constructed from vertical strips of bamboo, each inscribed with a line of text, and linked together into concertina-folded pages. The works kept in the archive are expertly arranged, meticulously ordered and colour-coded, their calligraphy flawless, their ink illustrations brilliant in economy. Naturally, they are dusty and draped in thick wreaths of spider web, for they are seldom taken up in the hand of a reader.

    In the present day, the name of Chung Mow Fung yields only a single footnote, in a ‘recent’ volume from two or three centuries ago, referencing parentage under a different name. This name, however, is barred from formal publication, for it was altered by edict of the Tao, as made clear and manifest in the Forty-Ninth Hexagram: Revolution (革 – Gé). As Fire meets Metal (the lake), producing illumination, so too are personal desires refined into unselfishness. What is obsolete is shed like a snake’s skin; acquired pollution is burned away, revealing the essence of primal, unified awareness. The spirit aligns with its path. The great person changes like a tiger.

    Abstract watercolor of a fiery metallic I Ching hexagram, glowing against a watery background. Symbolizes transformation or revolution..

    It was not uncommon for those of the Mow Fung line to alter their names – a necessary measure during those periods when the study of the Tao fell into disfavour with ascendant militant ideologies. When he settled on the southern continent, Chung had been his family name; however, local officials, in their ignorance, reversed the order. That moment marks the point at which we locate our pivotal index for extracting the lineage, and so the name becomes, in the final analysis, arbitrary. Yet the Mandarin denotation, Admirer of the Phoenix, perhaps remains apt. After all, how may we pin down a karmic ripple or trace an Akashic echo by means of a single name? Naturally, such terms are merely Buddhist and Hindu approximations, and useful metaphors at best, for, as Lao Tzu correctly observes, the true Way is named only tentatively: Tao.

    So much for names. The Tao does not trouble itself with the consistency of library catalogues.

    Although the familial lines extend back centuries into various narratives concerning the most enlightened individuals, this and further changes in name make certain crucial connections obscure, such that the specific ancestry becomes a matter of interpretation and even, in the worst cases, divination. It is like pursuing the strands of a fog. Any identifiable and named individual will not necessarily correlate with the line of the Mow Fung who occupies our current interest.

    Some traditions suggest that Mow Fung is not so much a reincarnation as a resonance – a particular pattern in the Tao reasserting itself under a familiar-seeming name: a node through which the Tao’s intent briefly shimmers. That such a resonance might walk, speak, or even misbehave is not so much a mystery as a habit of the Way.

    Perhaps he never attained enlightenment, nor will his descendants, his temperament being of a too weak, too dark, too yin-flavoured humour and given to excesses of the flesh: notably, unmindful congress and the ingestion of hallucinogens. Unfortunately, even such faults are not as uncommon as the reader might like to think, even among the membership of our venerable community of ancestors, among whom number not only sages and adepts, but also a handful of artists and poets whose conviction in their own genius outpaced any objective manifestation.

    It is gathered from the relevant volume that this ‘earlier’ Mow Fung was the son of an accomplished civil servant who, after becoming a father, subsequently became a eunuch in the imperial court of the Qianlong Emperor, where he enjoyed a cheerfully untroubled life. Nicknamed, with some irony, Ma Tan-yang, or “Bright Yang” he achieved a degree of enlightenment, thanks to the tutelage of his wife. She, Sun Pu-erh (“One Hearted”), was a child prodigy and a brilliant scholar and seer, trained in a clandestine temple of the Taoist School of Complete Reality (now officially suppressed, but only on paper) and endowed with unsurpassed expertise in the study of Confucius.

    Traditional Chinese watercolor painting of two court officials in ceremonial robes, standing before a decorative phoenix tapestry. Represents Pu-erh and Bright Yang from the Jade Volume, styled as Taoist immortals.

    Moreover, she was a brilliant exponent of foreign languages, which she studied under the tutelage of a Jesuit missionary and painter named Giuseppe Castiglione. She was an adept of high degree, directly descended from the female Wu, the most powerful sorcerers of all time, and engaged as a high adviser in the imperial court. Her husband was charged with supervision of the Emperor’s concubines, who instructed him in the most up-to-date nuances in fashion and cosmetics, in exchange for tutoring them in all sorts of corporeal practices in which he was expert (see Indigo Volume XXXXIV of Late Tang Dynasty Collection, and Emerald Volume XXVII of Song Dynasty Collection).

    •

    One day the Emperor summoned Sun Pu-erh and her foolish young husband Bright Yang to the Hall of Supreme Harmony, in the Forbidden City. Sitting on his Dragon Throne, which marked the centre of the universe, he assigned them a mission. Backed by a magnificent screen of gold, he appeared a multi-coloured, superhuman gem. His voice echoed around and among the six huge gilded columns immediately before him, each encoiled by his own five-clawed dragon. Touch one if you wish to die. The ruler of a round-eyed, red-haired, ghostly-skinned barbarian rabble from a far-flung isle had requested that he receive a delegation. The chieftain, who called himself King George III of England, a territory he described in terms so overblown as to border on hilarious arrogance, wished to discover the wonders of the Great Qing, for the betterment of his own ‘civilization’, which the Emperor understood to be the lowliest among all those in Europe.

    “His baser wish is that we grant certain concessions to his barbarian merchants. Hitherto, all European nations, including those of his own realm, have carried on their trade with our Celestial Empire, as permitted solely at the port of Canton, a restriction he now seeks to overturn.

    “What is the meaning of this word ‘king,’ anyway?” the Emperor said, looking at Pu-erh, who had memorized all 11,099 volumes of the encyclopedia housed in the Hall of Literary Glory.

    She bowed her head and replied.

    “Perhaps related to another word they use, ‘kin,’ implying he is the father of their extended family,” she said. “They say also that ‘the lion is king of beasts,’ referring to their imperial symbolism. Evidently there are no lions there, are there? Perhaps they seek to differentiate themselves from Caesar, derived elsewhere as Czar or Kaiser. I imagine it all originates in Roman times ”

    “Cease!” the Emperor said curtly, and continued:

    “His letter is illiterate. You see, here he addresses us as ‘the Supreme Emperor of China … worthy to live tens of thousands and tens of thousands thousand years.” He coughed lightly, tittered, and cast a glance at the ceiling – augustly decorated with framed images in jade, ruby, and gold leaf: dragons, qilin, phoenixes, and other fabulous beings from the four corners of the earth and beyond – while an imitative titter rippled among the courtiers.

    Close-up watercolor portrait of the Qianlong Emperor in Qing Dynasty regalia, with a stern expression. Painted in stylized ink-brush style evoking Chinese portraiture traditions.

    “However, despite his clumsy expression, we take note his respectful spirit of submission,” he said, raising his hand to cut short the disturbance. “We determine that he is sincere in his intentions.

    “It behooves us here at the centre and apogee of the world to cast our light before such peoples, backward peoples, but those who have nevertheless drawn themselves up to attain a state in which they manage to discern the magnanimity with which we bend towards them and allow them to participate in our beneficence, and therefore shall we acquiesce to these requests. Never mind how meagre their offering, we shall treat them with generosity and luminosity. After all, it is our Throne’s principle to treat strangers from afar with indulgence and exercise a pacifying control over barbarian tribes, the world over. Make a special note,” he ordered his scribes, who were taking down his words.

    “His delegation of a hundred men will arrive in China at any moment now, concluding a year’s voyage from the far-flung regions of barbarians, by way of several countries even more primitive than their own, in the Americas and in Asia. Naturally, we are already well informed about all parts of Asia, thanks to our numerous voyages of discovery and trade, so we require no enlightenment from this English impertinence. Ha! In the year 1405,” he said, his voice rising, “during the Ming dynasty, Admiral Zheng He discovered America – seventy-five years before the Spaniards. And during his seven expeditions, he mapped the entire globe: the Mediterranean, Africa, the Americas, and even Australia.” He looked again at Sun Pu-erh, who bowed her head.

    “I have seen it in an archive in the Pavilion of Literary Profundity,” she said.

    “We have had little need since those times for forays abroad. Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders. Make a special note, underlined,” he commanded the scribes.

    “Since the barbarians have developed some abilities in seamanship, they now scramble to us,” he continued. “We remain loath to admit them – all the more, given the skirmish playing out somewhere over there in those parts, some minor uprising …” He looked at Pu-erh, who bowed her head.

    “The French Revolution,” she said. “King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette beheaded, and so on.”

    “Correct, what they call the French Revolution. Well, we don’t want that sort of nuisance over here, do we?” He looked at Pu-erh, who lowered her gaze and said nothing.

    “At any rate, the weather has become unseasonably warm in the capital, and we have decided to repair to our summer palace and mountain resort in Jehol. You two will meet the ambassador, one Lord George Macartney, en route to Peking, and advise him of our change in plans. His entourage will rest for three days before proceeding north for an audience with us. Pay close attention to any equipment or paraphernalia he must leave behind during his sojourn. He intends to amaze us with certain marvels of English invention. Though we anticipate little worthy of attention, we wish to see recorded, in fine detail, the technical principles of any scientific apparatus – particularly weapons or devices of use in the art of war – that they intend to demonstrate.

    •

    The couple travelled by palanquin with a modest retinue. They found the envoy, news of whose approach had long preceded it, at the town of Tongzhou, a canal terminus.

    Traditional-style watercolor painting of Chinese river junks with sails lowered, depicted on a calm, shallow river. Illustrates the halted imperial convoy near Tongzhou in the Jade Volume.

    The thirty-seven imperial junks that had carried it thus far along the shallow White River could go no further, although the military escort would continue. Armed with bows, swords, and rusty-looking matchlocks, the troops marched in single file, beneath standards made of green silk with red borders and enriched with golden characters. Long braids, tied at the end with a ribbon, hung down their backs from beneath their shallow straw hats.

    A wonderful rigmarole attended the transfer of Lord Macartney’s cargo to a convoy of carts, wooden wheelbarrows, and coolies – those labourers pressed into toil for wages scarcely worthy of the name – for the next leg of the trip to Peking. The spectacle inspired in many of them the words from ancient songs, to which they lent their voices while they toiled:

    Do not work on the great chariot –You will only get dust in your mouth.
    I sing of those who are far away,
    And sorrow clings like a cloak.

    The great chariot groans with its load –
    And saps the strength from my bones.
    I think of those who are gone,
    and my heart is cut open again.

    The great chariot creaks at the axle –
    It cannot bear the weight.
    I remember those who fell blinded by the dust,
    On the side of this distant road    .

    Some of the labourers were given a taste of the whip by their military guards, who perceived seditious intent in the stanzas.

    Thus concludes the scroll of the Jade Volume. The continuation has – most vexingly – been mislaid in a dark corner by one of those accursed archival monkeys, necessitating a brief but unavoidable interruption in our unfolding.

    Michael Guest © 2025

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