River of Smoke(214)

What’s this place? she demanded to know. Where is it?

It’s a place you’ve heard a lot about, said Neel. Kalua and your brother Kesri Singh were there during the wars – they must have told you about it. And Jodu too – and Paulette as well.

Ah! Is it called Chin-kalan?

Yes. Canton in English.

Why is it burning?

It’s a strange thing …

Turning the picture over Neel pointed to the bottom right-hand corner, where the words ‘Pixt. E. Chinnery, July 1839’ were written in tiny letters.

See, he said, the painter – Paulette’s friend Robin Chinnery – has put down the date as July 1839. But the destruction of the Thirteen Factories did not happen until seventeen years later. But it seems that Robin saw it in a dream.

So the place doesn’t exist any more?

Neel shook his head. No. It was burnt to the ground. One night during the wars, Canton was bombarded by British and French gunships. The townspeople saw that the foreign factories were the only part of the city that was unharmed and they were enraged. A mob set fire to the factories; they were razed and never rebuilt.

Have you been back there then?

Neel nodded. Yes. The last time was almost thirty years after my first visit. The place was changed beyond recognition. The site of the Maidan was a scene of utter desolation: the factories were gone – hardly a brick was left standing upon another. A new foreign enclave had been constructed nearby, on a mudbank that had been reclaimed and filled in. It was called Shamian Island and the houses the Europeans had built there were nothing like the Thirteen Hongs. Nor was the atmosphere of the new enclave anything like that of the Fanqui-town of old. It was a typical ‘White Town’ of the kind the British made everywhere they went – it was cut off from the rest of the city, and very few Chinese were allowed inside, only servants. The streets were clean and leafy, and the buildings were as staid and dull as the people inside them. But behind that façade of bland respectability the foreigners were importing more opium than ever from India – after winning the war the British had quickly put an end to Chinese efforts to prohibit the drug.

I hated the dull, European buildings of Shamian, with their prim façades and their pediments of murderous greed: the new enclave was like a monument built by the forces of evil to celebrate their triumphal march through history. I could not bear to linger there: it was so unlike the Canton of my memories that I began to wonder whether my recollections were only a dream. But then I went to Thirteen Hong Street, which was the only part of Fanqui-town that remained. There were still some shops there that sold paintings. In one of them I found a picture of the Maidan and the Thirteen Factories …

Neel looked down again at Robin’s painting and a catch came into his throat.

The picture cost more than I could afford, he said, but I bought it anyway. I realized that if it were not for those paintings no one would believe that such a place had ever existed.