The Year of Rice and Salt

The slaves stood in the waist of the big ship, silent in the midst of the cheering Chinese, who cried out 'Tianfei, Celestial Consort, thank you!' and 'Hangzhou, my home, never thought to be seen again!' 'Home, wife, new year festival!' 'We happy, happy men, to have travelled all the way to the other side of the world and then make it back home!' and so on.

The ships' huge anchor stones were dropped over the side. Where the Chientang River entered the estuary there was a powerful tidal bore, and any ship not securely anchored could be swept far up into the shal lows, or flushed out to sea. When the ships were anchored the work of unloading began. This was a massive operation, and once as he ate rice between watches at the hoist, Bold noted that there were no horses, camels, water buffalo, mules or asses to help with the job, or with any other job in the city: just thousands of labourers, endless lines of them, moving the food and goods in, or taking out the refuse and manure,

Mostly by canal – in and out, in and out, as if the city were a monstrous imperial body lying on the land, being fed and relieved by all its subjects together.

Many days passed in the labour of unloading, and Bold and Kyu saw a bit of the harbour Kanpu, and Hangzhou itself, when manning barges on trips to state warehouses under the southern bill compound that had once been the imperial palace, hundreds of years before. Now lesser aristocrats and even high ranking bureaucrats and eunuchs lived in the old palace grounds. North of these extended the walled enclosure of the old city, impossibly crowded with warrens of wooden buildings that were five, six and even seven storeys tall – old buildings that overhung the canals, people's bedding spread out from balconies to dry in the sun, grass growing out of the roofs.

Bold and Kyu gawked up from the canals while unloading the barges. Kyu looked with his bird's gaze, seeming unsurprised, unimpressed, unafraid. 'There are a lot of them,' he conceded. Constantly he was asking Bold the Chinese words for things, and in the attempt to answer Bold learned many more words himself.

When the unloading was done, the slaves from their ship were gathered together and taken to Phoenix Hill, 'the hill of the foreigners', and sold to a local merchant named Shen. No slave market here, no auction, no fuss. They never learned what they had been sold for, or who in particular had owned them during their sea passage. Possibly it had been Zheng He himself.

Chained together at the ankles, Bold and Kyu were led through the narrow crowded streets to a building near the shores of a lake flanking the west edge of the old city. The first floor of the building was a restaurant. It was the fourteenth day of the first moon of the year, Shen told them, the start of the Feast of Lanterns, so they would have to learn fast, because the place was hopping.

Tables spill out of the restaurant Into the broad street bordering the lakefront, Every chair filled all day long.

The lake itself dotted with boats,

Each boat sporting lanterns of all kinds Coloured glass painted with figures,

Carved white and apple jade, Roundabouts turning on their candles' hot air, Paper lanterns burning up in brief blazes. A dyke crowded with lantern bearers Extends into the lake, the opposite shore is crowded As well, so at the day's end The lake and all the city around it Spark in the dusk of the festival twilight. Certain moments give us such unexpected beauty.

Shen's eldest wife, I Ii, ran the kitchen very strictly, and Bold and Kyu soon found themselves unloading hundredweight bags of rice from the canal barges tied up behind the restaurant; carrying them in; returning bags of refuse to the compost barges; cleaning the tables; and mopping and sweeping the floor. They ran in and out, also upstairs to the family compound above the restaurant. The pace was relentless, but all the while they were surrounded by the restaurant women, in white robes with paper butterflies in their hair, and by thousands of other women as well, promenading under the globes of coloured light, so that even Kyu raced about drunk on the sights and smells, and on drinks salvaged from near empty cups. They drank lychee, honey and ginger punch, paw paw and pear juice, and teas green and black. Shen also served fifteen kinds of rice wine; they tried the dregs of them all. They drank everything but plain water, which they were warned against as dangerous to the health.