Puppet Flower by Yao-Chang Chen

Author:Yao-Chang Chen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

Le Gendre couldn’t remember the story’s conclusion, but he had left that particular lesson with the impression that Chinese people were wont to engage in pointless debate.

Indeed, his recent experience appeared to confirm these suspicions. From April 19, the Qing government bureaucrats had been procrastinating, sending letter after letter in poor excuse of their inaction. This in contrast with Admiral Bell, who had taken immediate action without informing others of his intentions. Perhaps, Le Gendre thought resentfully, Pickering had something of a point: these different attitudes might be typical of the two cultures.

When Le Gendre last met with them, he and the Qing officials had appeared to reach an agreement. Although General Liu had admitted that his soldiers lacked experience fighting in the mountains and therefore he needed some time to ready them for the operation, Daotai Wu had promised to send troops to punish the culprits “as soon as possible.”

Le Gendre had thought that Liu had spoken sensibly, and although the general had not specified how long the preparations would take, Le Gendre imagined it would be at most a month. But to his frustration, the Qing government had not sent out its troops in anything like a timely fashion. Le Gendre had written a letter at the beginning of June to push them into action, but soon thereafter, Bell took the initiative to fight.

The Taiwan daotai’s latest letter had arrived on June 13, just one day before Admiral Bell’s attack on South Bay. It described Koalut as completely inaccessible and concluded in a most ridiculous way.

According to the Tientsin Treaty, if your countrymen are injured or killed, local government officials should indeed arrest the culprits and punish them severely. Furthermore, the local magistrate should send out troops to deal with those involved. However, as your countrymen on the Rover were not killed on our land nor in our seas, but rather in an area occupied by savages, the Tientsin Treaty does not apply. Those raw savages live beyond our dominion; thus, our army need not take any action in that place.

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