Relevant History | Author Suzanne Adair

An Unsuitable Job for a Gentleman, Part 1

Posted on February 4, 2014 by suzanneadairFebruary 5, 2014

Relevant History welcomes back Susanne Alleyn. The Executioner’s Heir, about Charles Sanson’s youth and early career, is Susanne’s latest novel. She is the author of the Aristide Ravel series of historical mysteries set in 1780s/90s Paris, in which some of the Sansons make guest appearances. She is currently working on a fifth Ravel novel, on the sequel to The Executioner’s Heir, and on a heavily annotated edition of A Tale of Two Cities. For more information, check out her web site.

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Throughout history, people have regarded the public executioner much as they regarded the undertaker. The undertaker’s job has always had an “ick” factor attached, originating from a superstitious dread of human corpses and people who dealt with them. But the person who, in a formal judicial process, deliberately transformed a living person into a corpse was far worse.

So who would willingly choose to become an executioner, and choose to remain in the job?

While writing The Executioner’s Heir, the first of two novels about eighteenth-century Parisian executioner Charles-Henri Sanson, I came across the autobiography of Albert Pierrepoint, the most famous British executioner of the 20th century. Pierrepoint’s attitude toward his “craft” uncannily matched the psychological makeup and motivations that I had already constructed, from my historical research, for my fictional portrayal of Charles Sanson.

Becoming a Hangman

There were, naturally, many surface differences between the two. Pierrepoint (1905-1992), like most British hangmen, came from a blue-collar background; “official executioner” was a part-time occupation, returning only a modest flat fee per engagement. Both his father and uncle were hangmen and young Albert evidently decided to follow in their footsteps because such a useful civil servant received a remarkable amount of respect from his neighbors.

Charles-Henri Sanson (1739-1806), on the other hand, was a fourth-generation executioner in a wealthy family that—like many others—passed its lucrative title down from father to son and considered itself practically aristocratic. In pre-revolutionary France, the master executioner of Paris was a high-ranking court officer, received a generous salary, and enjoyed a great deal of prestige among colleagues from lesser towns.

Notwithstanding the Sanson family’s pretensions to semi-nobility, most of the superstitious public still viewed the executioner and his household as the vilest and least desirable neighbors possible. The master executioner and his aides were responsible for all forms of public punishment, from shaming by exposure on the pillory to whipping and branding, from relatively humane hanging to the cruelest and most long-drawn-out forms of execution like breaking, burning, or quartering. For centuries throughout Europe, executioner’s sons had inevitably had to become executioners themselves because no one else would ever think of giving them a job, or even of socializing with them. Since the Middle Ages, the executioner’s touch had been considered unclean, contaminated by death, torture, and contact with corpses, and only the most broad-minded or desperate would choose to mingle with him.

“A Gentle, Friendly, Kindly Man”

Despite the public revulsion toward the Sansons and their occupation, the few surviving contemporary accounts of Charles Sanson suggest that, aside from the official duties he was obliged to carry out, he was a remarkably decent, conscientious, and compassionate human being. Well educated, he had studied anatomy and medicine—not to improve torture techniques, but, like his father and grandfather before him, in order to maintain a sort of free clinic in which, when not at work, he doctored the poor who were willing to endure contact with the executioner in order to get the treatment they couldn’t afford elsewhere. “His profession aside,” an acquaintance whom Sanson had cured of a mysterious illness wrote about him, “he was a gentle, friendly, kindly man.”

Execution by sword of the comte de Lally, May 9, 1766. Although probably not illustrated by an eyewitness, it does show the executioner as a young man (Sanson was 27 at the time).

The greatest irony of a life full of ironies was that, after three decades of officiating at often horrific punishments under the absolute monarchy, Sanson became the most famous public executioner of the French Revolution. The Revolution, of course, soon abolished such cruel traditional execution methods as breaking on the wheel and replaced them with the democratic, reliable, and humane guillotine. This and other legal reforms must have greatly relieved Sanson for a time—until the political cataclysm of the Terror obliged him to execute more people with the guillotine than he had ever had to hang, break, or behead by sword in all his career before the Revolution. During 1793 and 1794, the “gentle, friendly, kindly man” would be ordered to behead his king and queen, a few minor royals, many prominent revolutionaries, and several of his own former bosses in the Parisian law courts, among about three thousand people convicted of various crimes, both heinous and petty, under the severe emergency laws of the Terror.

So how did such a man keep his sanity, and justify his part in not only the savage cruelty of the pre-revolutionary legal system but also in the sheer number of executions of the Terror in Paris, and in the frequent injustices that took place both before and during the Revolution? How could Sanson bring himself to put someone to death when he strongly suspected that that person had not deserved such a punishment?

Christopher Lee as a middle-aged Charles Sanson in La Révolution Française (1989). Sanson was described as tall, strong, and good-looking in the family history published by his grandson Clément, but no contemporary portrait exists of him.

The swelling number of death sentences in Paris during the last weeks of the Terror appalled him. Guillotining a record fifty-four people in one day, including an eighteen-year-old servant girl who, he stated, looked about fourteen, drove him to a four-day mental breakdown. “I do not glorify myself with a sensitivity that cannot be mine,” Sanson wrote in his diary soon afterward; “I have seen the suffering and death of my fellow men too often and too closely to be moved easily. If what I feel is not pity, it must be the result of a malady of my nerves; perhaps it is the hand of God punishing me for my cowardly obedience to that which so little resembles the justice I was born to serve? I do not know; but for some time now, every day, when the hour [to collect condemned prisoners] comes, a vertigo seizes me that holds me in its grip and cruelly tortures me . . . I feel a redoubling of the fever that night and day devours me; it is like fire flowing under my skin.”

Why, in the midst of the carnage in 1794, consumed by guilt, didn’t Charles-Henri Sanson simply quit his job and honorably retire, as he did do a year later, well after the Terror had ended?

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Join us here tomorrow for the conclusion of Susanne Alleyn’s post. She’ll give away three electronic copies of The Executioner’s Heir to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Saturday at 6 p.m. ET.

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The Winner of Whispers of Vivaldi

Posted on January 26, 2014 by suzanneadairJanuary 26, 2014

Margaret Dean has won a copy of Whispers of Vivaldi by Beverle Graves Myers. Congrats to Margaret Dean!

Thanks to Beverle Graves Myers for a provocative look at castrati, Casanova, and gender-bender opera stars of 18th century Italy. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Relevant History this week. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.

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The Curious Case of Teresa Lanti

Posted on January 21, 2014 by suzanneadairJanuary 20, 2014

Relevant History welcomes back historical mystery author Beverle Graves Myers, who combines a love of Italy, opera, and traditionally written mysteries in her Tito Amato novels featuring an 18th-century singer-sleuth. The latest title is Whispers of Vivaldi. Bev also writes short fiction that has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Spinetingler, and Crime City Central (audio). Her work has earned nominations for the Macavity, Kentucky Literary, and Derringer awards. Bev and husband Lawrence have recently relocated to south Florida. For more information, check her web site, and look for her on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.

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A portrait hangs in a dusty corner of the La Scala opera house in Milan. A woman in an 18th-century gown and towering, flower-bedecked wig sits at a harpsichord, staring into space. She appears distant, sullen, and not entirely comfortable in her elaborate dress. Known as Teresa Lanti, she was an accomplished soprano and the mistress, for a time, of the even more famous Giacomo Casanova.

I introduce you to Teresa Lanti because this pensive-looking woman inspired a character that came to mystify Tito Amato more than any other. Who was she really?

First a little about Casanova. The man whose name has come to define womanizing was a real person, actually a Venetian of Tito’s era. He was born in 1725, the first child of Zanetta Farussi, a comic actress who went by the stage name of La Buranella, and an actor-dancer named Gaetano Casanova. Or perhaps that’s only part of the truth. Casanova often claimed Venetian aristocrat Michele Grimani as his father, but where Casanova is concerned, truth is a slippery concept. History does record that young Giacomo refused to go along with his parents’ plan to make him a priest and was expelled from a seminary for immoral conduct. He proceeded to scheme his way through Europe, romancing a dazzling array of women (and several men) and running afoul of authorities at every turn. Though Casanova is famed for being a self-styled great lover, he was also a cabalist, spy, soldier, violinist, lottery administrator, and more. Near the end of his long life, he finally settled down to write a highly entertaining twelve-volume autobiography, which I often mine for eighteenth-century background and characters.

Which brings us to Teresa Lanti, one of Casanova’s more peculiar conquests. In Volume Two of his autobiography, our lovable rogue tells the tale of his compelling attraction to Bellino, a teenaged castrato traveling with his theatrical family. Castrato? Yes! If you’re unfamiliar with 18th-century fads, Europe had gone mad for Italian opera and its star singers. The castrati were men who had been gelded as pre-pubescent boys and were revered for their golden voices that held an uncanny combination of pitch and power. The effect was ethereal and haunting, causing women to swoon and bringing tears to hard men’s eyes—but I digress. When Casanova encountered Bellino at an inn in Ancona, he could scarcely believe that the beautiful creature was male, even though Bellino himself swore it was the truth. So intrigued was Casanova that he tried every trick of seduction to induce the singer to share his bed, even offering the boy’s mother a gold doubloon to view his genitals.

To make a long story short, Casanova eventually invaded Bellino’s breeches and discovered a false penis. He describes it thusly, “long, limp and as thick as one’s thumb, pale, and of very soft leather.” Bellino was indeed a female. Salimbeni, a valid castrato singer, had been her music master and helped develop her fine soprano voice. She blamed her unfortunate situation on her mother’s scheming. Two issues stood behind the disguise. As theaters within the Pope’s political domain banned females from the stage, castrati sang the prima donna roles in Rome and other cities within the Papal States, including Ancona where Casanova met Bellino. In Venice and other, more progressive musical centers, women took their rightful place as prima donna, but they were paid in woeful contrast to the reigning star castrati. Posing as a man, Bellino would have more opportunity to perform and earn a higher salary while doing so.

Casanova recounts that his affair with Teresa, who was sometimes called Angiola on opera bills, was fraught with uncertainty on his part. However, it lasted long enough for her to become pregnant with his son, Cesarino Lanti, whom she went on to raise as her brother. Eventually the couple parted. Casanova sent Teresa to Naples, stating that he could not bring himself to deny her the career she deserved, and he continued on his all-too-merry way. Teresa married Cirello Palesi, a young Roman, and traveled Italy singing prima donna roles in major opera houses. A few years later Teresa and Casanova met one more time, but the magic was gone.

And, at some point, she had her portrait painted.

Highly intrigued by Teresa’s story, I was determined to include a gender-bending character in Whispers of Vivaldi. In this final Tito Amato mystery, set in the dazzling, decadent world of baroque Venice, Tito spars with Angeletto, a young male soprano who has taken Milan by storm. Tito is depending on his star power to save the opera house from ruin, but is the heavenly singer all that he appears to be? Whispered rumors quickly fly through the taverns and coffee houses of Venice. Angeletto is too lovely to be a man—shouldn’t he be wearing skirts instead of breeches? Tito begins to suspect that he’s been tricked by a daring female impersonating a castrato. If the rumors are true, not only will Tito become the chief laughingstock of Venice, but the Senate is apt to withdraw its sponsorship of the opera house altogether. Like Tito, the reader can never be certain just who this amazing singer really is.

If you think this all sounds very Victor Victoria (the delicious 1982 musical comedy starring Julie Andrews) you’re not alone. I had to wonder if the screenwriters were familiar with Teresa Lanti, or, to repeat the old proverb, there’s really nothing new under the sun.

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A big thanks to Beverle Graves Myers. She’ll give away a signed hardcover copy of Whispers of Vivaldi to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Saturday at 6 p.m. ET. Delivery is available within the continental United States only.

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The Winner of Voyage of Strangers

Posted on January 20, 2014 by suzanneadairJanuary 20, 2014

Sunny Frazier has won a copy of Voyage of Strangers by Elizabeth Zelvin plus a copy of the Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine issue that includes Zelvin’s Agatha award-nominated short story “The Green Cross.” Congrats to Sunny Frazier!

Thanks to Elizabeth Zelvin for showing us the dark underbelly of greed and ethnic cleansing that fueled Ferdinand and Isabella’s desire to claim and conquer the New World. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Zelvin’s Relevant History post. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.

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True Confessions of Ferdinand and Isabella

Posted on January 7, 2014 by suzanneadairJanuary 8, 2014

Relevant History welcomes back Elizabeth Zelvin, a New York City psychotherapist and mystery author best known for her series featuring recovering alcoholic Bruce Kohler. Voyage of Strangers, her first historical novel, is the sequel to the Agatha-nominated short story “The Green Cross,” which first appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and introduced the young marrano sailor Diego Mendoza and Admiral Columbus. Liz is a three-time Agatha Award nominee and a Derringer Award nominee for Best Short Story. She has also released a CD of original songs, Outrageous Older Woman. For more information, check her author web site and look for her on Facebook.

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Every American schoolboy and schoolgirl knows about King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. They’re the kindly couple who believed Columbus when he said the earth was round, and Queen Isabella sold her jewels so he could set sail to discover America. Right? Wrong!

By 1492, everyone knew the earth was round and that land lay on the other side of what they called the Ocean Sea. Columbus’s minority opinion was that those far-off lands lay a lot closer than everyone else thought they did. When he got to the Caribbean islands, he thought the mainland was bound to be just beyond them. He’d even prepared by bringing along a converso who spoke Hebrew, so he could converse with the Great Khan. Till the day he died, he believed he’d found the Indies.

Ferdinand of Aragon was 17 and Isabella of Castile was 18 when they married in 1469, uniting the two kingdoms. It was a political alliance, not a love match. While it eventually produced a nation called Spain, their realms remained separate entities. They moved their court around from city to city to maintain their dominion over a fragmented whole. The court was installed in Cordoba, which had been wrested from the Moors in 1236, when the monarchs finally agreed to back Columbus’s exploratory voyage in 1492 and in Barcelona, more than 500 miles away, when he came to report his success and lay his spoils at their feet in 1493.

Ferdinand and Isabella were exceptionally devout Christians by the standards of the day. They introduced the Inquisition in Castile in 1478 and were hand in glove with Pope Alexander VI—the Spaniard now remembered as the infamous Borgia Pope—from his accession in 1492. Ferdinand and Isabella’s mission was conquest, with the desire to increase the power of the crown and the prosperity of the realm inextricably intertwined with the determination to eradicate all that was not Christian, ie. Catholic, from the lands they ruled.

The monarchs totted up an impressive record for genocide and persecution. In 1492 alone they conquered Granada, the last Moorish stronghold, driving out or enslaving the remaining Muslims, and expelled the Jews on the very day that Columbus set sail.

They continued their predecessors’ conquest of the Canary Islands, whose indigenous people, the Guanche, ended up much like the Taino of the Caribbean, ie. close to extinction, their legacy reduced to fragments of a lost language and culture and the bit of DNA remaining in the modern population. They also persecuted the Roma, often called gypsies, whose peripatetic lifestyle was partly due to laws forbidding them to settle down in one place—much as medieval Jews acquired a reputation for expertise in banking by being forbidden to join any of the craft guilds that would have given them a broader choice of occupations.

Ferdinand and Isabella were quick to exploit the wealth of the Jews. Conversos, Jews who had expediently converted to Christianity, became their bankers. While they saw the Jews’ expulsion as a holy mission, it’s no coincidence that the Jews were required to leave their considerable wealth behind—and that their loans not only to the sovereigns, but to the Spanish aristocracy in general, were canceled by their departure. One of the modern arguments for the possibility that Columbus was Jewish is that his voyage was financed not by Isabella but by converso bankers. I don’t believe it happened that way at all. I can imagine Isabella saying: “I’d like to give this crazy man a shot. If he finds the Indies, the profits will be enormous. Portugal dominates trade around the coast of Africa, but a passage to the Indies to the west would be all ours. It costs me nothing to say I’ll pledge my jewels if need be. I’ll order the converso bankers to cover the cost. They won’t dare refuse. And when they see what happens to the Jews who cling to their heretical faith, they won’t dare ask for repayment.”

Several other arguments for Columbus being Jewish fail to convince. One early proponent of the theory was a Spanish Fascist who wrote in 1940 that Columbus’s greed for gold suggested he had “Jewish blood.” Anyone but a neo-Nazi would laugh that off today. Ferdinand and Isabella, not to mention all the Spaniards who accompanied Columbus on his voyages, had a greater lust for gold than Columbus himself, whose greatest wish was to bring an abundant return on their investment to the King and Queen. When gold proved to be in shorter supply in Hispaniola than expected, he made up the shortfall by taking Taino slaves and transporting them across the sea in conditions as appalling as those in the slaving ships of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Some modern Jewish scholars claim that Columbus was seeking a Jewish homeland, a New World Israel. This is a fashionable idea today. But first, it was the Christians, not the Jews, who longed to expel the Muslims from Jerusalem in the later Middle Ages—hence the Crusades. Second, Columbus expected to find existing civilizations open to trade with Europe, not empty lands. And third, the King and Queen made it perfectly clear when they agreed to sponsor the second voyage that all lands claimed and gold mined or collected became the property of the Crown. The sailors, soldiers, and settlers who crossed the sea in 1493 were not entitled to seize these riches for themselves. I doubt that any of them took this stricture seriously—except Columbus himself, whose own words in his logs and letters reveal him as a deeply devout Christian and devoted champion of his King and Queen.

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A big thanks to Elizabeth Zelvin. She’ll give away two prizes to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week: an electronic copy of Voyage of Strangers in .mobi (Kindle) or .pdf format, and a copy of the Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine issue that includes her Agatha award-nominated short story “The Green Cross.” I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Friday at 6 p.m. ET. Make sure you leave your email address.

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The Winner of The Hell Screen

Posted on December 22, 2013 by suzanneadairDecember 21, 2013

Ashley McConnell has won a copy of The Hell Screen by I. J. Parker. The author also sent Ashley an ARC of Death of a Doll Maker. Congrats to Ashley McConnell!

Thanks to I. J. Parker for showing us what Japan was like before “Shogun.” Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on her Relevant History post back in November. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.

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The Winner of Shadow of the Alchemist

Posted on December 17, 2013 by suzanneadairDecember 17, 2013

Michele Drier has won a copy of Shadow of the Alchemist by Jeri Westerson. Congrats to Michele Drier!

Thanks to Jeri Westerson for offering insight on the contribution of alchemists to modern science. Thanks, also, to everyone who visited and commented on Relevant History this week. Watch for another Relevant History post, coming soon.

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Crispin vs the Alchemist

Posted on December 12, 2013 by suzanneadairDecember 12, 2013

Relevant History welcomes back Los Angeles native and award-winning author Jeri Westerson, who writes the critically acclaimed Crispin Guest Medieval Noir mysteries. Her brooding protagonist is Crispin Guest, a disgraced knight turned detective on the mean streets of fourteenth-century London. Jeri is president of the southern California chapter of Mystery Writers of America and is vice president of the Los Angeles chapter of Sisters in Crime. When not writing, she dabbles in gourmet cooking, drinks fine wines, eats cheap chocolate, and swoons over anything British. You can learn more about Jeri’s books, watch a series book trailer, and find discussion guides on Jeri’s website. For more information, read her blog, friend Jeri on Facebook, and follow her on Twitter and Goodreads.

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My sixth Crispin Guest medieval noir, Shadow of the Alchemist, has hit the bookstore shelves. Crispin, my disgraced knight turned detective on the mean streets of fourteenth-century London, has faced many foes, dealing with many religious relics and venerated objects. Each object seems to possess a power of its own, either something everyone wants to get their hands on, or can’t wait to get rid of. A Veronica’s veil, Crown of Thorns, the Spear of Destiny, and now the Philosopher’s Stone. Crispin doesn’t believe in the power of these mortal objects, preferring his intellect to the suspicious ramblings of priests and frightened and greedy merchants. But there is something about these objects, something that gives him pause.

Men of power have tried to thwart him, either wealthy merchants, noblemen, or lowly servants. Crispin has seen them all. But this time, he comes up against his Moriarty of sorts, involving a chase down the shadowy streets of London, between men who know the secrets of poisons and purges, sorcery and forbidden sciences. An alchemist.

There are many challenges for the author when writing historically. First and foremost is the contract the author has with her readers. That is, the history must be true and correct. Only with this solid framework in place may the author hang her fiction upon it. Without the proscenium of real history, there is no reason for the reader to stick around and dally in the rest of the play on offer. So a worthy foe for Crispin must be a man of his time. He’s had his share of noblemen to cross swords and wits with. He was once a nobleman himself and so to clash with those he used to know works well. But this time, I thought it would be fun to set him up against an alchemist, those medieval scientists whose lives and works were a mystery to those around them.

We have a perception of the alchemist, of the medieval equivalent of the mad scientist. And we have it also from the time period itself. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, for instance, Chaucer gives us the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, from which we can derive that many alchemists were deemed to be charlatans. And no doubt, many were, the precursor to the snake oil salesman. And yet many were also quite sincere in their doings. They were truly the first scientists, truly trying to understand the chemistry around us and doing experiments rather than relying on the faith of philosophers of the past. The Greek philosophers influenced physicians in the medieval period with their conclusions of the human body and its cures—without ever picking up a pipette and seeing if any of those conclusions actually possessed a basis in fact.

We do know of some alchemists of the past: Paracelsus was a scholar and alchemist from the fifteenth century, and the embodiment of what we will later call “scientist.” Among his many accomplishments: he founded the discipline of toxicology; insisted upon using observation rather than merely relying on the word of the philosophers of the past; coined the terms “zinc,” “chemistry,” “alcohol,” and “gas”; and even delved into psychology by daring to suggest some illnesses were caused by the mind.

Michał Sędziwój was a Polish alchemist and medical doctor from the seventeenth century. One of his greatest accomplishments was discovering that air is not a single substance but in fact is made up of many, one being what would later be called oxygen.

Even Sir Isaac Newton dabbled in alchemy. He believed that metals possessed an inner life of their own and tried in vain—much to the embarrassment of some of his colleagues—to create a Philosopher’s Stone.

These varied men led the way to a better understanding—and a better method to understand—the world around us. Such men, with the wrong intent, can be very dangerous. And so in a dark and dangerous London, an alchemist is on the loose who would do anything to get what he wants. A Napoleon of Crime? Perhaps. It’s up to our hero to bring him to justice one way or another.

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A big thanks to Jeri Westerson. Shadow of the Alchemist was named to Suspense Magazine’s “Best of 2013” list and was nominated for the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Historical Mystery. Jeri will give away the hardcover version of Shadow of the Alchemist to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Monday at 6 p.m. ET. Delivery is available within the U.S. only.

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Asia After the Meddling British, French and Americans Arrived

Posted on December 3, 2013 by suzanneadairDecember 3, 2013

Relevant History welcomes Lloyd Lofthouse, award-winning historical fiction author of My Splendid Concubine, the love story of Sir Robert Hart and a Chinese woman. For more information, check out Lloyd’s web site and author blog, and read the first chapter of his latest novel, multi-award winner Running with the Enemy.

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It could be argued that the British Empire and the United States are responsible for World War II in the Pacific and Mao Zedong winning China’s Civil War in 1949.

Before my wife told me in 1999 about Sir Robert Hart, I knew little about Japan and China. My knowledge of Japan, for instance, was the bombing of Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo (April 18, 1942) and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945.

I knew less about China, but that changed after my wife introduced me to Robert Hart. First, I read his journals and letters that had been published by Harvard. It was while researching for several years and writing My Splendid Concubine—based on Robert Hart’s real-life love story with a Chinese concubine named Ayaou—that I discovered the horrors that had been forced upon Asia in the 19th century by countries like Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States.

The British and the French fired the first salvo starting the Opium Wars in 1839–1842 and then again in 1856–1860. The reason: China’s emperor refused to allow the British and merchants of other western countries—including the U.S.—to sell opium without restrictions to the Chinese people. In addition, the treaties allowed Christian missionaries the freedom to go anywhere in China and convert and save the souls of heathen Chinese.

As Christian missionaries were saving these souls, they converted a failed Confucian Scholar, Hong Xiuquan, who soon claimed that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ; he published a Bible in Chinese after writing and including his own gospel. Then he led the 19-year Taiping rebellion that’s considered the bloodiest rebellion in human history with 20–100 million Chinese killed by the time he was defeated. And because God’s Chinese son was against the opium trade, Christian British and French troops joined in the fight, including American mercenaries, to defeat the Taipings. As for Japan, in 1846, America made its first attempt to open Japan for trade. Commander James Biddle anchored in Tokyo Bay with two ships, including one warship armed with 72 cannons, but his requests for a trade agreement were unsuccessful.

The Japanese, similar to the Chinese, didn’t want anything to do with the Western barbarians, but those barbarians weren’t about to accept no for an answer and miss an opportunity to find new markets for their growing consumer-based economies. Customers were to be gained; cheap labor was to be had, and this would lead to increased profits for European and American companies.

A few years later in 1852, Commodore Matthew C. Perry returned to Japan and turned his canons on the town of Uraga. The Japanese demanded he leave. In answer, Perry ordered some buildings in the harbor shelled. When Perry returned in February 1854 with twice as many ships, the Japanese agreed to virtually all of President Fillmore’s demands for trade with America.

It would take Japan almost a century to transition from a primitive, feudal agricultural-based economy to an imperial industrial power ready to wage war in 1937 with a goal to take Asia back from the Western powers that were exploiting and colonizing the region. To achieve this objective, Japan attacked China because it needed China’s resources.

If America had left Japan alone, Japan may have stayed an agricultural-based economy, and there would have never been the invasion of China in 1937.

It was Japan’s invasion of China that eventually caused the defeat of the Nationalist Chinese led by Chiang Kai-Shek in 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) led by Mao Zedong won the civil war that had raged from April 1927 to December 1937—with a break during World War II as both the Nationalist (KMT) and the Communists fought Japan. The Chinese Civil War resumed in March 1946.

Fighting Japan cost the KMT 1.3-million KIA; 1.8-million WIA and the CCP 500,000 KIA/MIA. The KMT fought a traditional war while the Communists practiced guerrilla warfare. During World War II, most Chinese lost trust in the Nationalists who clearly wanted to return China to the way it had been before the Civil War when the average life span was age 35, and more than 95% of Chinese lived in extreme poverty and were often treated worse than animals by those at the top of the economic pyramid.

By June of 1949, the Red Army had four million troops fighting Chiang Kai-shek’s 1.5 million. What would have happened to China and Japan in the 20th century if the United States and Great Britain had not forced both countries to open markets to unwanted products and religions in the 19th century?

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A big thanks to Lloyd Lofthouse. He discusses his research for My Splendid Concubine in this video and presents a timeline of China’s history here.

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Japan Before “Shogun”

Posted on November 21, 2013 by suzanneadairNovember 20, 2013

Relevant History welcomes historical mystery novelist I. J. Parker, who has followed the exploits of her eleventh-century Japanese detective, Akitada, in short story and novel since 1996. Her story “Akitada’s First Case” won the Shamus award in 2000. Her novels have been translated into several languages. In addition to the Akitada mysteries and stories, she has written three novels set during the Heike Wars at the end of the twelfth century, and one about eighteenth-century Germany. For more information, visit her web site.

Note: the Akitada novel Death on an Autumn River will be free in Amazon Kindle format 23–26 November.

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I first discovered Asian history, and more precisely that of Japan, through its literature, especially the great novel Genji, written by a court lady in the first decade of the eleventh century and thus the first novel in the world. This book astonished me by its sophistication, its understanding of the psychology of men and women, its emotional and poetic response to nature, and its probing of the human condition.

Not long after exploring Japanese literature of this period, I became interested in writing mysteries and decided to write about early Japan. I was convinced that others would also come to love this strange, wonderful, and exotic culture and discover another world while spellbound by a mystery plot.

Let me caution you. Eleventh-century Japan is not the time of shoguns and samurai. Life was far more decorous then—at least on the surface. The country was still ruled by an emperor and a complex central government. Influenced by Tang China, Japan’s culture had reached its height of elegance and artistic achievement by the eleventh century. The arts flourished, and both men and women of the upper classes played musical instruments, painted, read and wrote poetry and prose in both Japanese and Chinese. They had universities, elegant palaces, huge temple complexes, exquisite gardens and parks, and whole cities neatly laid out by the ancient rules of feng shui. The upper classes dressed in silks and brocades, enjoyed games like backgammon, chess, and go, and engaged in sports like football, wrestling, archery, fishing, and hunting.

But this advanced and luxurious culture was controlled by a large, rigid bureaucracy and supported by the labors of peasants, fishermen, artisans, and merchants. Many of the common people were very poor and lived in densely-packed, rat-infested neighborhoods. Some resorted to crime in city streets and on the highways. And in distant provinces, warlords were busily building their armies. Unlike the Chinese, who took swift and brutal action against traitors and criminals, Japan’s system of law and order forbade the taking of life, and consequently criminals flourished because they could not be effectively restrained. Except for rare special cases, exile with hard labor or imprisonment were the only available punishments, and these were frequently nullified by sweeping imperial pardons.

Against this background, I conceived of men like Akitada, a civil servant representing the law, a man of honor and duty. Such men would have had their hands full, especially when crimes were committed by the privileged who could count on support from powerful men in the government. In such cases, considerable personal danger would be involved, as Akitada discovers in Rashomon Gate and in the short story “Akitada’s First Case.”

Akitada is a member of the upper classes, but his family has fallen on hard times. Because he excelled at his law studies at the university, he was given a lowly position in the Ministry of Justice where his interest in “low crime” keeps him in constant hot water and gets him various punitive assignments to unpleasant places. However, this means that he makes interesting friends (like Tora, Genba, and Hitomaro) among the less privileged but more colorful members of his society. We learn from history that human beings don’t change much over the centuries or geographic distances. Basic human traits are constant, and knowing this allows us to understand the past by identifying with its people.

Akitada has taken me on many exciting adventures. We have explored Buddhist monasteries, visited the imperial palace and its surroundings, traveled to a penal colony, delved into a gold mine, and attacked a warlord’s fortress. We have been to brothels and bathhouses, shopped at markets, viewed aristocratic gardens, and roamed among professors and students at the university. The people Akitada introduces me to are princes and paupers, officials and outlaws, monks and courtesans. We have visited eleventh-century entertainers and sword smiths, wrestlers and martial arts practitioners together.

You may wonder how true to actual fact all these details are. I enjoy research, and have been working on this period for thirty years now. I know the scholarly and primary materials and do additional research for each new novel or story. But I write fiction, not history, and sometimes facts have to be bent to the story. I try to do as little of this as possible and add a historical note at the end of each novel to explain the background and any liberties I may have taken. For example, scholars don’t know for certain how long the famous Rashomon gate stood at the southern entrance to Kyoto, but the gate has enormous symbolic significance for early Japanese culture and is familiar to many western readers from the Japanese film by the same name. I used the gate for its historical connotations but explained the problems of dating in the end note.

In the process of our imaginary travels, I have become very fond of my protagonist. Akitada is by no means a perfect man. He is shy, introverted, stubborn, rash, and judgmental. He makes mistakes and suffers the pangs of conscience for them. But he does not rest until the wrong has been righted, even if it means risking his career, his life, or the lives of loved ones. In spite of all his flaws, he is ultimately a man of great courage and intelligence, though he is completely unaware of this. The women in his life love him and he loves them back, but he is an awkward and unintentionally insensitive partner. Akitada is a man of early eleventh-century Japan, but he is always human, I hope, and human nature does not change much over the centuries.

I look forward to future adventures and to watching him change from the naiveté of the very young man in The Dragon Scroll to a wiser, sadder, and perhaps more troubled middle age. The eleventh novel in the series, Death of a Doll Maker, was released this past summer, and there are many others waiting, I hope.

*****

A big thanks to I. J. Parker. She’ll give away one copy of an Akitada book to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Tuesday at 6 p.m. ET. Then the winner may select either Rashomon Gate in hardcover or The Hell Screen in trade paperback Delivery is available within the U.S. only.

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