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The gate was opened from the inside. Within a year the winners were arguing not over territory, but over who would speak for the party from then on.

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Shenzhou Dadi, Episode Thirty-Two. One party, two governments; the collapse of law, and the coming of a broken age. The year is nineteen twenty-seven.

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At the end of the last episode we asked: after Wuchang was taken, what did the victors fight over first?

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The flags on the Wuchang wall had not yet faded, and the clock at the Hankow customs house still struck the hour. But south of Wuchang, along the field paths, in front of ancestral halls and at county yamen gates, another sound had begun: not a bugle, but gongs, spear shafts striking stone slabs, and thousands of voices shouting in unison.

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In the houses and headquarters of Shanghai another game was being played, quietly. Each move would only become a document or an order in April.

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As the Northern Expedition moved north, the sky over the villages behind it changed first. By the end of nineteen twenty-six the Hunan peasant associations had more than two million members; by April nineteen twenty-seven the national figure approached five million. Numbers do not show people. One has to walk into a village.

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On the fourth of January, Mao Zedong left Changsha for Xiangtan, Yintian, Shaoshan, Xiangxiang and Hengshan, thirty-two days in all. Under an oil lamp at Yintian temple, association cadres read out the account item by item: Tang Junyan and Luo Shulin of the local defence bureau, who over fourteen years since nineteen thirteen had killed more than fifty people and buried four alive.

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He later set this down in the Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan. The sentences defending the movement and the country gentlemencry of terrible disorder were printed on the same page. On paper the word was violent; on the field paths it looked like something else.

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In Changsha there was an old gentleman named Ye Dehui, sixty-three that year. Behind his back the townspeople called him Pockmarked Ye; to his face they still said Old Ye. A younger fellow townsman, Hu Naian, recorded his appearance: tall and broad, his face covered with pockmarks, and when the mood took him he spoke freely and loudly, with vivid gestures.

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He had survived smallpox. Zhang Zhidong once said of him, that Ye is not solemn; instead of taking offence he was rather pleased.

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He had passed the imperial examination in the eighteenth year of the Guangxu reign and been posted to the Board of Civil Office, but soon asked for leave to return home. His Guan G u Tang library on Pozi Street held nearly three hundred thousand volumes, with a note pasted on the shelves: my wife is not lent out, and my books are not lent out. Erotic prints were tucked among the books, because the fire god was said to be a woman who would be too embarrassed to burn the collection.

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He wrote two lines about himself: I have come and gone so often at the gate of death, and all my life this mouth of mine has made trouble.

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When the Hunan peasant movement rose in nineteen twenty-seven he sent a couplet: the movement opens grandly, and the six grains come to market, a mixed seed; the meeting hall grows wider, and the six domestic animals gather in a herd. The horizontal scroll held four made-up characters, each meaning neither one thing nor another: neither civil nor military, neither small nor large, neither up nor down, neither human nor ghost.

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He had probably reckoned it out: a couplet could offend a few people at most. He had offended far more in his life, but those were debts in essays, not debts on a blade.

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By then he had no fixed time to return and no fixed place to sleep. The provincial association learned he was resting on Pozi Street; forty men of the peasant self-defence corps were posted in several lanes, and a plan was laid to lure him back. When they came in through the back door he had just arrived and was sitting in the bedroom washing his feet.

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They hauled him up, and his voice was still high. Ye Dehui said, one couplet from Pockmarked Ye, and you need all this array?

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Nobody answered. In the study they found correspondence with north and south, filling two old official document cases. Watching them carried off over the threshold, he thought of only one thing: the books are not to be lent. Put locks on the cases, and do not let them be scattered.

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At ten in the morning on the eleventh of April he was tried in public; at four in the afternoon he was taken to Shiziling outside Liuyang gate. His son Ye Shangnong later wrote the ending down plainly: two shots struck him, one in the head and one in the chest, and so he died.

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The book cases of Guan Gu Tang were sealed and locked and carried away box by box.

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Tang Junyan, head of the defence bureau at Yintian temple, was called Butcher Tang locally. The report preserves one sentence of his: kill two beggars to open the account. Among the more than fifty he killed, the first two were beggars with no guilt at all.

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When the association came for him he fled first, ordering his guns buried. Several hundred spearmen rushed the bureau and dug out more than twenty rifles. He was later caught at a relatives house in Ningxiang, hiding and smoking opium.

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The next day more than two thousand peasants escorted him through the fields. On his head was a paper hat three feet high, and from Yintian town to Yunhu bridge they killed pigs and took grain at dozens of landlord houses along the way, calling it eating the big households.

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Villagers pointed and cursed: so you have your day too; one dog life of yours, how will you answer for dozens of human lives?

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His hands were bound behind him and the hat was too tall for him to lower his head. Tang Junyan said, neighbours, I will repay, I will repay, land and grain, I will give it all. Nobody wanted his repayment.

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At dusk more than three thousand people filled the ground before Yintian temple. The trial was held under the white fruit tree. The presiding judge listed the charges and announced the sentence; the families of the victims rushed forward, and he was beaten to death with sticks.

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That day tens of thousands were going east of the river to see the oil burned. A pontoon bridge of civilian boats spanned the Xiang; people from the west bank poured across it, the planks booming underfoot.

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Young workers hollowed out great bamboo poles and joined them into a pipe half a li long, so the kerosene could run into a dry pond. Splitting the bamboo joints took time, and the smell of oil was on their hands and on the mud.

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It is running! It is flowing down!

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At two in the afternoon the fire was lit, dozens of torches thrown at once into the pool. East of the river more than twenty-eight hundred barrels of kerosene burned; on the west bank opium, woollens, silk and foreign piece goods, nearly a thousand items. The tenth issue of the Peasant Pictorial, printed the following year by the Hunan provincial association propaganda department, drew the fire.

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There was another force in the countryside, each man carrying a sharpened bamboo spear: the spear corps. Around Xiangtan a rhyme went: hammer iron at dawn, hammer iron at dusk, forge a spear for the association; the spear shines bright, seize the chief first and the rest will follow.

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Idols in the temples were smashed and ancestral tablets overturned. At Baiguo in Hengshan, women went in a body into the clan hall, sat down, and drank the wine.

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One question has to be asked first: in those months, who counted as a local tyrant or an evil gentry? The report records the peasants own saying: where there is land there is a bully, and no gentleman is not evil. In some places fifty mu made a man a tyrant, and a long gown made him an evil gentleman. Fifty mu was the grain field of one family; a long gown was what a schoolmaster wore in front of his class.

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Hu Yuzhi noted: local tyrants and evil gentry were often paraded in tall paper hats without even asking their names; some were shot at once after a public judgement by the crowd. If the name was not asked, the charge need not be asked either, and no file need be written.

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In the Wuhan government, Xu Qian described a small landholder: his grain was sealed and distributed, then he was forced to make a donation, then labelled a local tyrant, and even offering to hand over all his land did not necessarily free him.

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The length of the lists survives in the local gazetteers. The Huarong special court had sentenced forty-seven people to death before the May Day incident; Xiangyin held more than a hundred; a later survey of the Changde area recorded eighteen executed, one hundred and thirty-four paraded, seven imprisoned and one hundred and eighteen fined in grain or money.

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On individual people it looked different. Zhang Juqing of Huarong was dragged from his house and beaten to death on the road of public display; Liu Yuelin of the same county answered back a few words while accounts were being settled and died on the spot at the dyke office. Zhou Hequan of Changle street in Xiangyin wore a tall paper hat, beat a gong through the streets, and had to call out his own crimes again and again for those along the way.

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There was another class of the dead, named plainly in the proclamations of the time: relatives of officers were routinely labelled gentry and killed. A son was fighting at the front while his father or elder brother at home was entered on the execution list.

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Not everyone who was disciplined owned land. Small traders were made to write out donations; grain could not be shipped out, so army supplies and merchants goods were stopped together at the crossroads; shop stock was sealed and divided. At the end of nineteen twenty-six most mission schools in Changsha closed and missionaries were driven out; in Guangzhou strikers surrounded a mission hospital and cut its water and power, so the seriously ill had to be carried home.

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Killing was the last step. Before that, daily life was taken under control, rule by rule. One section of the Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan is titled The Peasants Prohibitions.

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Cards, gambling and opium went first. A district association in the fourteenth canton of Xiangxiang burned a load of mahjong tiles; the association ordered opium pipes surrendered, and a gentry man in Liling who refused was paraded through the villages. The report also says that the elderly fathers of many revolutionary army officers, heavy smokers who depended on a pipe to get through the day, had those pipes taken away.

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Then the rules reached the dinner table. Flower drum plays were banned; sedan chairs were smashed and chair bearers wages raised sharply; grain could not be used for brewing or sugar. At Futianpu in Hengshan the price of wine was fixed so low that the shops stopped making it. Pig keeping was capped; Xiangxiang banned chickens and ducks; at Yangtang in Hengshan each household might keep three, at Futianpu five.

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How many dishes a guest might be served was also resolved by motion. At Shaoshan in Xiangtan guests were limited to three meats, chicken, fish and pork; Hengshan allowed eight bowls and not one more; the eastern third district of Liling allowed five, and the western third district forbade New Year visiting altogether. Sedan chairs were prohibited, long gowns opposed, old wedding and funeral customs fined, and women made to cut their hair and unbind their feet, including women of sixty.

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Even a quarrel between husband and wife had to be taken to the peasant association for settlement. In the villages the association decided everything; outsiders might say it was good, and might not say it was bad. Men who had once opposed it now begged to join and were refused, frightened by the phrase put them in the other register, locally called being struck off to zero.

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It was the same in the cities. In the Wuhan labour movement, arbitrary arrests, courts and prisons of their own, searches of steamers and trains, and the seizure and redistribution of factories and shops were described at the time as extremely ordinary and widespread. Wages were raised to startling levels and the working day fell by itself to under four hours.

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None of this was killing. Yet what a man wore, whether he rode in a chair, how many chickens his household kept, how many dishes were set before a guest, who settled a quarrel between a couple, whether he could say one word of no: all of it had stopped belonging to him. The law was not overturned by a single order. It was worn away like this, day by day, at the stove and at the table.

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Nine out of ten soldiers of the Northern Expedition army were Hunan men. In a telegram of the fifteenth of June nineteen twenty-seven to the Communist International, Chen Duxiu wrote the items out one by one: the land and property of officers families confiscated, their relatives detained, civilians held and fined; grain transport banned; merchants forced to subscribe; grain divided privately and big households eaten out; the small remittances soldiers sent home seized and shared out by peasants.

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The proclamations of the day were more detailed: the families and property of front line servicemen in the Hunan counties were often robbed by mobs, and even the few dollars a soldier sent home to support his mother were taken by the associations, so that morale was deeply unsettled. Another said: relatives of officers were routinely labelled gentry and killed, and officers property routinely called landlords property and taken.

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A soldier saved a few silver dollars and sent them home for his mother to buy rice; the money was divided on the road. An officers father was made to wear a tall paper hat and paraded. What reached the front was not a military report but a letter from home.

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In the same telegram Chen Duxiu wrote the consequence: these excesses forced officers drawn from the middle and small landlord class to join with the local tyrants and evil gentry in a united anti-communist and anti-peasant front. Ninety percent of the National Revolutionary Army were Hunan men, and the whole army was hostile to the excesses of the peasant movement. Even the slogan of correction was his own: our urgent task is to correct the excesses.

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He Jian, commander of the Thirty-Fifth Army, turned in that current of resentment. On the night of the twenty-first of May came the May Day incident. Even official party history materials state that the struggle against landlords included not a few families of National Revolutionary Army officers, and so caused extreme dissatisfaction within the army.

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North from Xiangtan the Xiang river enters Dongting lake. More than two thousand years earlier this waterway carried a man named Qu Yuan. Exiled between the Yuan and the Xiang, he walked the marshes composing verses and at last drowned himself in the Miluo. Later generations built a shrine to him on its bank; every Dragon Boat Festival the boats go down and rice dumplings are thrown into the river. In the spring of nineteen twenty-seven the clan halls of the Hunan countryside were being smashed, and the boats still raced on the river.

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East of Changsha, in the Western Han tombs at Mawangdui, the family of the Marquis of Dai had slept for twenty-one centuries. When the tomb was opened in nineteen seventy-two, the plain gauze robe on Lady Xin Zhui weighed forty-nine grams, and the T-shaped silk painting over the coffin showed heaven, the human world and the underworld.

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Across the Xiang to the west is Yuelu mountain. The Lushan temple was founded in the fourth year of the Taishi reign of the Western Jin, two hundred and sixty-eight. In the ninth year of the Kaibao reign of the Northern Song, nine hundred and seventy-six, the prefect of Tanzhou, Zhu Dong, enlarged the monks school on its old site into the Yuelu Academy. In the eighth year of the Dazhong Xiangfu reign, ten fifteen, Emperor Zhenzong summoned the headmaster Zhou Shi and wrote the academy plaque with his own hand.

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In the third year of the Qiandao reign of the Southern Song, eleven sixty-seven, Zhu Xi travelled from Chongan in Fujian to visit Zhang Shi, who was teaching at the academy. For three days and nights they debated the mean before it is aroused and after it is aroused without reaching agreement. Those who came to listen arrived on horseback and by carriage in such numbers that the pond before the gate was drunk dry. The ferry on the Xiang was afterwards called the Zhu Zhang crossing.

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In the fifty-seventh year of the Qianlong reign of the Qing, seventeen ninety-two, the headmaster Luo Dian built a red leaf pavilion in the maple grove halfway up the hill; its name was later changed to the Aiwan pavilion from Du Mus line, I stop the carriage and sit to love the maple forest at dusk. Over eighteen centuries the hill held a Taoist temple, a Buddhist monastery, an academy and a school; in nineteen twenty-six it was named Hunan University.

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In the fifth year of the Dali reign of the Tang, seven seventy, Du Fu died on a boat on the Xiang. In his last years he stayed twice at Changsha, lodging at the river pavilion, and left more than fifty poems. Later generations built the Du Fu river pavilion on the bank. His poem about Changsha stands here in four lines.

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At the house of the Prince of Qi I saw you often, and at Cui Jius hall I heard you several times.

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And now, in the fine scenery of the south in the season of falling flowers, I meet you once again.

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Another poem of Li Bai sets Changsha and the river city together. On his way to exile in Yelang he climbed the Yellow Crane Tower and heard a flute, and thought of Jia Yi of the Western Han, banished to be tutor to the king of Changsha.

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Once banished, I go toward Changsha; looking west to Changan I cannot see my home.

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In the Yellow Crane Tower a jade flute is played, and in the river city the fifth month brings down plum blossoms.

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Hunan people kept another calendar. On the third day of the third lunar month, households in town and country boiled shepherdspurse with eggs: the herb pulled up by the root and simmered with the eggs, said to clear damp and reduce swelling. At the start of summer they ate the lxia broth, glutinous rice balls with sugar, osmanthus and sesame, with the saying that after eating it one can tread a hole in a stone slab. On that day every family weighed itself on a steelyard and tied a red cord on the body afterwards.

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After the winter solstice came cured meat and fish: salted three to seven days, dried in the sun, then slowly smoked over sawdust, peanut shells and coarse bran with a handful of rice, so the scent of rice went into the meat.

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Changsha people liked to chew betel nut. The fruit was cured with sweetener and lime to a dark brown, one nut cut into four pieces and brushed with cassia oil; friends meeting in the street would invite each other to the betel stall for a chew. A Xiangtan rhyme put it plainly: no need for New Year courtesies, come in and chew betel; a guest at my door, a chew of betel and a cup of tea.

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The fried bean curd of the Fire Palace on Pozi Street is called stinky dry curd in Changsha. In the Tongzhi reign of the Qing, a ginger-family bean curd shop in the Xiangyin county town left a vat of brined curd too long and fried it by accident: soaked half a month in brine, fried crisp in tea oil over a slow fire, dressed with sesame oil and chilli and scattered with chopped scallion, black and crisp outside, white and tender within. A local saying runs: the Fire Palace stinky bean curd smells bad and eats sweet.

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On the night Ye Dehui was taken away, the stalls on Pozi Street had not yet closed. The shepherdspurse of the third month, the lxia broth, betel nut and stinky dry curd, customs that had lasted several centuries, would in the months ahead be put to the association to decide whether they might remain.

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In November nineteen twenty-six the National Government decided to move its capital from Guangzhou to Wuhan, and arrived on the ninth of December. At the joint conference on the thirteenth, Xu Qian was chosen chairman with supreme executive authority, and it was resolved to join with Tang Shengzhi, make contact with Feng Yuxiang and open an anti-Chiang campaign.

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Chiang Kai-shek stayed at Nanchang and would not go. He held the military power of commander-in-chief and would not let Wuhan, where the communists and the Kuomintang left were concentrated, stand alone. Wuhan refused. One side had the guns, the other the seal; before spring the board was set.

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From the tenth to the seventeenth of March the second plenary session of the third central committee met in Hankow for eight days. The proposal to fix the capital at Nanchang was rejected; resolutions upheld the three great policies, raised party authority and opposed military dictatorship, and by changing the leadership structure removed Chiang from the chairmanship of the central standing committee, leaving him only commander-in-chief.

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At the same session, in his absence, Wang Jingwei, then in exile in Germany, was elected to the leading posts of the party and the National Government. Chiang was not present and his powers were stripped item by item, all of it before Wang returned to China. Both sides wanted the most useful signboard: he was the man who had written out Sun Yatsens last testament.

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At noon on the twenty-first of March a general strike began in Shanghai, eight hundred thousand people. An hour later it turned into an armed uprising, and in two days and a night the city outside the concessions was taken. By then the city had twenty-seven hundred pickets, more than twenty machine guns and over four thousand rifles.

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On the twenty-sixth of March Chiang Kai-shek entered Shanghai. The powers urged him to act swiftly and decisively; financiers of Jiangsu and Zhejiang brought several million dollars; Huang Jinrong and Du Yuesheng guaranteed that Green and Red Gang men would be used to disarm the workers pickets.

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On the first of April, at H. H. Kungs house in Shanghai. Wang Jingwei had just returned from Germany, his luggage not yet unpacked and the tea just poured, when Chiang arrived with Wu Zhihui, Li Zongren, Bai Chongxi and others. He opened with two matters: send Borodin away, and separate from the communists.

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Chiang Kai-shek said, you must not go to Wuhan; the communists have to be got rid of before anything else is discussed.

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Wang did not answer at once. His calculation was not about the communists but about himself: go to Nanjing and he would be in Chiangs palm; go to Wuhan and there would be a real seat for him.

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Wang Jingwei said, I stand with the workers and peasants; whoever injures them is my enemy.

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As the words left him the air in the room changed. Wu Zhihui, driven to desperation, knelt before Wang, more than ten years his junior, begging him to stay in Shanghai and lead. Wang stepped back quickly, his leather shoes striking the stairs one by one, until he reached the half landing.

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Wang Jingwei said, old master, you are of the elder generation, I cannot bear this, I cannot bear it.

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Three months later the man who backed up those stairs would in Wuhan carry out the separation from the communists with his own hand.

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On the second of April, Wu Zhihui, Zhang Jingjiang and six others convened the central supervisory committee and submitted a bill of impeachment against communist and cross-party members for endangering the party, shaking the rear and betraying the country. The phrase shaking the rear referred to these months in Hunan.

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On the third of April, Chiang, Wang, Wu Zhihui, Li Jishen and Cai Yuanpei agreed on four points. The fourth was the essential one: all armed bodies such as union picket corps were to come under the commander-in-chiefs headquarters, and any that refused would be treated as conspiratorial groups and suppressed. Nine days later that line became the disarmament order on the streets of Shanghai.

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Early on the fifth of April the joint Wang Jingwei and Chen Duxiu declaration appeared in the papers, stating in black and white that talk of the Kuomintang driving out the communists and suppressing the unions and pickets was all rumour, and calling on the two parties to cooperate sincerely, as close as brothers. Wu Zhihui seized on the word alliance: there is no such clause; our party statutes say only that communist members are admitted into the Kuomintang.

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On the sixth of April Wang Jingwei left Shanghai for Wuhan without farewell. The Shanghai papers were still printing as close as brothers while the man himself was already on a steamer up the Yangtze.

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Wang Shouhua was twenty-six, from Zhuji in Zhejiang, chairman of the Shanghai General Labour Union. Du Yuesheng invited him to dinner on the pretext of confidential business to discuss. Luo Yinong urged him not to go; Gu Shunzhang said that if he went he should take at least a platoon. He insisted: I have often dealt with Green and Red Gang men before; if I do not go they will laugh at me.

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At the door he turned back to his wife: do not be afraid. Look after mother for me.

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Near the Du house he told Li Bozhi, who was accompanying him, to wait at the corner of Rue Wagner: if I am not out in two hours, something has happened; go back at once and report.

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He went in alone. The face that met him was not a smiling one but Zhang Xiaolins. We have been waiting for you. Before the words ended he was gagged, struck unconscious, put into a sack and carried to a car.

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Du Yuesheng came hurrying out, anxious about something else: do not do it in my house; the new house has only just been built, and if it is done here, who will ever dare to call again?

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The wheels crossed the cobbles of the French concession toward Fenglin bridge in western Shanghai. At the corner of Rue Wagner, Li Bozhi stood at the agreed spot, checking his watch again and again. Wang Shouhua never walked out of the Du house again.

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At one in the morning on the twelfth of April a signal rose from a warship off Gaochangmiao. Several hundred men, already assembled, in blue shorts with white armbands bearing a black character for worker, posing as labourers, drove out from the French concession in a number of cars and fanned out toward their targets. From one to five in the morning, fourteen picket posts in Zhabei, Nanshi, western Shanghai, Wusong and Hongkou were attacked in turn.

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The men who rushed them also wore white armbands and the same character, so for a moment nobody could tell who was firing at whom. The pickets shouted, our own men! Do not shoot, we are on the same side!

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Then the Twenty-Sixth Army of the National Revolutionary Army, posted beforehand around the positions, moved up and, on the pretext of mediating a quarrel among workers, collected the weapons of the workers side as well. By dawn the hall of the Shanghai General Labour Union and the district picket posts were all occupied.

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The next morning, on Baoshan road. A petition column of a hundred thousand stretched a kilometre; near Sandeli the soldiers of the Second Division opened fire with machine guns, and more than a hundred were killed or wounded on the spot. It rained that day.

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Looking back up the Yangtze, the Yellow Crane Tower on Snake hill in Wuchang began not with a poem but with a war. In the second year of the Huangwu reign of the kingdom of Wu, two hundred and twenty-three, Sun Quan built the Xiakou city against the hill at Huanghu, and the watchtower at its southwest corner was the Yellow Crane Tower. Li Jifu of the Tang recorded in his Yuanhe Atlas of Prefectures and Counties: the city faces the great river on the west, and at the southern corner a tower was raised on the rock, named the Yellow Crane Tower.

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By the Tang the watchtower had become a place of farewell. In the sixteenth year of the Kaiyuan reign, seven twenty-eight, Li Bai, then twenty-eight, saw Meng Haoran off to Yangzhou from here.

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My old friend takes leave of the Yellow Crane Tower in the west; in the third month of mist and flowers he goes down to Yangzhou.

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The lone sails distant shadow vanishes into the blue void; only the long river is seen flowing to the edge of heaven.

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A little earlier Cui Hao had inscribed a seven-character regulated verse, which Yan Yu of the Song, in his Canglang Remarks on Poetry, rated first among Tang regulated verses.

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The man of old has ridden a yellow crane away; this place is left with an empty Yellow Crane Tower.

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The yellow crane once gone returns no more; white clouds for a thousand years drift on in vain.

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Clear and distinct the trees of Hanyang in the sunlight; fragrant and luxuriant the grasses on Parrot Isle.

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Where is my home country as the sun goes down? Smoke and waves on the river make a man sorrowful.

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There are variant readings: the first line in another edition has ridden white clouds away; Li Bais blue void appears in some texts as blue hills, and only seen as still seen. The tower was destroyed and rebuilt many times; the last one burned in the tenth year of the Guangxu reign, eighteen eighty-four, and the tower on Snake hill today was rebuilt on a new site in nineteen eighty-five after the Tongzhi model.

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By Moon lake in Hanyang stands the Ancient Qin Terrace, where Boya is said to have played while Zhong Ziqi heard in the music lofty as Mount Tai and flowing as a great river. When Ziqi died, Boya broke his qin and snapped its strings. The people of Wuhan left the word kindred spirit on that small terrace.

105
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Up the river into Dongting, the Yueyang Tower became famous from the fourth year of the Kaiyuan reign of the Tang, seven sixteen, when the chancellor Zhang Yue, banished to Yuezhou, often climbed it with men of letters to compose. In the sixth year of the Qingli reign of the Northern Song, ten forty-six, Teng Zijing rebuilt it and asked Fan Zhongyan for a record. Fan never went to Dongting; he wrote it facing a painting of the autumn lake.

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I observe that the finest scenery of Baling lies in the one lake of Dongting. It holds the distant hills in its mouth, swallows the long river, vast and surging, boundless to the horizon; morning light and evening shade, ten thousand shifts of weather.

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To be first in worrying about the worlds troubles and last in enjoying its pleasures.

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The day in Hankow begins with a breakfast. In the thirtieth year of the Daoguang reign of the Qing, eighteen fifty, Ye Diaoyuan printed his Hankow Bamboo Ballads, describing the first three days of the year: three days of guozao are unlike the ordinary, one great meal and dinner can be forgotten; cut noodles, bean threads, dried rice vermicelli, fish balls in rolling chicken broth. One edition has fish balls as fish slices. His own note says that on the first, second and third days no breakfast is eaten and noodles are the convenient substitute; bean threads are sheets of green bean and rice flour cut into strips.

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Another ballad is livelier: women of small households imitate the great houses, sleeping till the chen hour before their dreams release them; before combing their hair they first guozao, swallowing cakes and fried dumplings together. People of Wuhan call breakfast guozao and reserve the word eat for the main meals; with midday and late supper the count can reach five. Cut noodles, bean threads, dried vermicelli, fish balls and rolling chicken broth were later joined by hot dry noodles, bean skin wrappers, peppery fish soup noodles and the doughnut called mianwo. A dock worker holds his bowl in one hand and finishes the first meal of the day before the shift begins.

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In the spring of nineteen twenty-seven the clock at the Hankow customs house still struck, and the breakfast stalls still came out. In that same city the National Government held its meetings, stripped one mans powers item by item, and four months later split into two governments.

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At nine in the morning on the eighteenth of April, in Nanjing. Shells from the Zhilu-Shandong army north of the river had just fallen on Xiaguan at dawn; in the hall the seal box sat on the table. Government commissioners took the oath of office, Cai Yuanpei presented the seal and Hu Hanmin received it; the central political conference issued at the same time the Declaration on Establishing the Capital at Nanjing.

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Chiang Kai-shek sat in the fifth place on the platform, in uniform, his satisfaction kept in check. From the stripping of his powers in the January dispute over the capital to that morning was four months. He knew clearly: the seal was in Hu Hanmins hands, and the guns were still in his.

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The first order of the new government was Secret Order Number One, for the arrest of leading communists and one hundred and ninety-seven Kuomintang members said to have adhered to them. The text named Borodin, Chen Duxiu, Xu Qian, Deng Yanda, Wu Yuzhang and Lin Zuhan among the chief offenders.

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On the same day Wuhan, upstream, issued another order, expelling Chiang from the party and removing all his posts. One Kuomintang, split in a single day into two governments, each holding its own list of arrests and dismissals. This is the Ning-Han split.

115
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Wang Jingwei reached Wuhan in mid April and described what he saw in his own words: looking only at the labour movement and the peasant movement, their theory and method are already wholly the communists and not the Kuomintangs.

116
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On the fifth of June the Comintern representative M. N. Roy handed Wang the Russian original and the Chinese translation of the May Instructions in person. Wang took the telegram and said nothing about it for more than a month. He held a paper that could turn the whole party against itself; the day to lay it out had to be chosen.

117
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At the meeting on the fifteenth of July Wang read the five points out one by one to those present: confiscation of land from below; the insertion of worker and peasant leaders into the central organs; the remaking of the Kuomintangs structure; a new army of twenty thousand party members and fifty thousand workers and peasants; and special courts organised in the name of Kuomintang members. At the fifth point he said, this means, let the Kuomintang be the executioner.

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In the room He Xiangning and Xie Jin kept silent; Sun Ke and Gu Mengyu agreed; Yu Youren and Peng Zemin put forward different views obliquely. The night before, Soong Ching-ling sent a representative to object; it did not change the decision, and that day she issued a statement of protest.

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On the fifteenth of July the Wuhan Kuomintang central committee formally resolved on separation from the communists. The man who on the first of April had backed up the stairs at H. H. Kungs house saying I cannot bear it took those four words back in Wuhan in July. From the first of April to the fifteenth of July, one hundred days.

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On the sixteenth of July the Hankow Republican Daily News still printed an Order Protecting the Personal Liberty of Communist Party Members, advertising a peaceful separation.

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To this city of Nanjing, Sun Quan first gave two names. In the sixteenth year of the Jianan reign of the Eastern Han, two hundred and eleven, he moved his seat of government to Moling, and the next year built the Stone City, taking the position of dragon-coiling bell hill and tiger-crouching stone city. Liu Yuxi passed here later and wrote.

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The hills ring the old capital, still there on every side; the tide beats the empty city and returns in loneliness.

123
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The old moon east of the Huai water, at midnight still crosses the low parapet.

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On the south bank of the Qinhuai is the Black Robe Lane, in the Three Kingdoms the camp of the Wu black robes, and in the Eastern Jin the residence of the Wang and Xie families. Liu Yuxi pressed the rise and fall of six dynasties into twenty-eight characters.

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Wild grasses and flowers by the Vermilion Bird Bridge; the slanting sun at the mouth of Black Robe Lane.

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Swallows that once nested before the halls of Wang and Xie now fly into the homes of common people.

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Li Bai climbed the Phoenix Terrace and wrote of the same city.

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Phoenixes once roamed upon the Phoenix Terrace; the phoenix is gone, the terrace empty, the river flows on by itself.

129
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Flowers and grasses of the Wu palace bury the hidden path; caps and robes of the Jin age are ancient mounds.

130
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Three hills half sink beyond the blue sky; two waters divide at the White Egret Isle.

131
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Always the floating clouds can hide the sun; Changan unseen makes a man sorrowful.

132
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Du Mu moored at night on the Qinhuai and heard singing from the far bank.

133
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Cold water veiled in mist and sand veiled in moonlight; I moor at night on the Qinhuai near a wineshop.

134
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The singing girls do not know the grief of a lost kingdom; across the river they still sing the Rear Courtyard Flower.

135
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At the southern foot of Bell hill east of the city, in the fourteenth year of the Hongwu reign of the Ming, thirteen eighty-one, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered the building of the Xiaoling mausoleum, where he was buried with Empress Ma. The dismounting arch is carved with the six words all officials dismount here, and civil and military officers had to proceed on foot. In the third year of the Yongle reign, fourteen oh five, Zhu Di set up the great stele of the divine merit and sacred virtue of the Ming Xiaoling, its inscription two thousand seven hundred and forty-six characters.

136
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Beside the Confucian temple is the Jiangnan examination hall, first built in the Qiandao years of the Southern Song and one of the largest imperial examination sites under the Ming and Qing. The Qinhuai lantern boats, the examination cells and the Black Robe Lane all lie within these few li.

137
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The food of Jinling is about one duck. Chen Zuolins Records of the Products and Customs of Jinling of the Qing says it plainly: killed and plucked and sold raw in the market, it is called crystal duck; roasted on a fork till the skin is red but not scorched, roast duck; brushed with sauce and simmered till the flavour goes through, sauce duck; and none of them equals salted duck, the highest grade, mild yet savoury, rich but not heavy; in winter, salted longer, it is called pressed duck.

138
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Yuan Mei settled at the Sui Garden on Little Cang hill and in the fifty-seventh year of the Qianlong reign, seventeen ninety-two, printed the Sui Garden Menu, recording the turnip of Chengen temple that improves with age, the dried bean curd of the monk Xiaotang of Niushou hill, and the taro dumplings of the Taoists of the Chaotian palace. The noodles and pastries of the Qinhuai wine houses were called the Seven Marvels of Jiankang: cakes so thin that writing on the reverse showed through, noodles that could be threaded through a hole and tied in a knot, and wonton broth clear enough to pour into an inkstone for grinding ink.

139
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On the morning of the eighteenth of April nineteen twenty-seven, the hall of the inauguration was not far from these places. Outside the city shells had just fallen on Xiaguan; inside, the seal had just been handed over. That night the lantern boats of the Qinhuai were lit as usual.

140
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Down the Yangtze from Nanjing to Shanghai, in the old walled city, stands another garden. In the thirty-eighth year of the Jiajing reign of the Ming, fifteen fifty-nine, the Sichuan provincial administration commissioner Pan Yunduan began the Yu Garden to give pleasure to his aged parents; the garden master Zhang Nanyang designed it and piled the great artificial hill. The name Yu was taken in the sense of peace and ease. In the twenty-fifth year of the Qianlong reign of the Qing, gentry and merchants bought it jointly and handed it to the Taoists of the City God temple to manage; renamed the Western Garden, it became a temple garden.

141
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The market around the City God temple sells pear syrup candy, five-spice beans and osmanthus lotus root; the local cuisine speaks of thick oil and red sauce, and the street cries begin before dawn in the lanes. The Dianchun hall was the Fujian sugar and confectionery guild hall of the early Daoguang years, and in the third year of the Xianfeng reign it served as the northern city office of the Small Swords rising. In the spring of nineteen twenty-seven the pickets of Zhabei and the cars of the French concession both passed the edge of this old city.

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Each city has its own rules: the third day of the third month in Hunan, guozao in Hankow, salted duck in Jinling, pear syrup candy in Shanghai. These rules were not ordered by anyone; they handed themselves down, year after year.

143
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Set the days out in order. From January to April, the letters home from Hunan, the submissions to the supervisory committee and Chen Duxius telegrams to Moscow all record disorder in the rear. The associations grew from more than two million to nearly five; fifty mu of land or one long gown was enough to make a man a local tyrant or evil gentry; names went unasked as tall hats were put on, and men were shot without a file. Cards, gambling, opium pipes, sedan chairs, the number of dishes at a feast and the number of chickens in a yard were all decided by the association. The few silver dollars a soldier sent home for rice were divided, and an officers elderly father had his opium pipe taken away.

144
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On the second of April the supervisory committee bill of impeachment wrote shaking the rear into the party discipline; on the third of April the fourth point of the agreement supplied a pretext for disarmament; at one in the morning on the twelfth of April the signal off Gaochangmiao turned words on paper into action in the street; on the eighteenth of April Secret Order Number One printed one hundred and ninety-seven names for arrest; on the fifteenth of July even the leftmost government in Wuhan separated from the communists.

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Those disarmed were the pickets of the General Labour Union; those named for arrest were communists and cross-party members; those separated from in Wuhan in July were the same people. The purge was not a by-product of a struggle for power: only after the rear ceased to recognise statute, property and person did the officers at the front turn back. Even the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party admitted the need to correct the excesses, and what he corrected was his own side; even the leftmost government in Wuhan had in the end to separate. The law was first broken in their own hands, and only then did the orders fall upon their own heads.

146
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When the summer of nineteen twenty-seven was over, the party had two governments, two chairmen and two lists mutually proscribing one another. And the force that had been disarmed and proscribed was quietly withdrawing to the south, preparing to play the whole game over again in another way.

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The broken age had only just begun.

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