Neel glanced again at the Commissioner’s barge: the stooped figure in the stern seemed to him the very image of a Chinese scholar. He said: ‘I would like to meet him very, very much.’

*

For those who were observing the new Commissioner’s entry into the city from the veranda of the Consulate, the most striking moment of the ceremony came just before he disappeared from view. At the gates of the citadel he stopped to confer with local officials. Then, as if in response to a question, some of these lesser mandarins raised their hands to point in the direction of the foreign enclave. At this point the Commissioner himself turned around – and to Bahram and those beside him, it seemed as if he were looking directly at them.

To have their gaze returned was disconcerting to many of the Committee. No one disagreed with Dent when he remarked: ‘Let us make no mistake, gentlemen: that man has not come here with peaceful intentions.’

Afterwards, along with several members of the Committee, Bahram proceeded to the Club, for tiffin. The weather being clear and warm, the meal was served in the shaded veranda. The ale flowed freely and the fare was excellent but there was little conviviality at the table: instead the gathering quickly took on the character of a council of war. It was agreed that they would meet regularly to pool whatever intelligence they were able to collect; Mr Wetmore, as the incoming President, was assigned the task of creating a system of runners so that the Committee could be summoned to the Chamber at any hour of day or night. It was settled that in the event of a crisis the bell of the British Factory’s chapel would be used as a tocsin, to sound the alarm.

After these rather ominous deliberations it came as something of a let-down when there was no immediate call, either for runners or for bell-ringing. The early snippets of news provided no cause for alarm: the Commissioner was reported to be occupied merely in conducting meetings and setting his household in order. The only unsettling item came from Mr Fearon: it seemed that the High Commissioner had elected not to reside in the part of the city where soldiers and high officials were quartered; instead he had installed his household in one of Canton’s most venerable seats of education, the Yueh Lin Academy.

None of the Committee had heard of this institution, and even Mr Fearon had no idea where it was located: the geography of the walled city was indeed something of a mystery to fanquis, for maps of Canton were hard to come by. A few did exist, however, and the most detailed of them happened to be in the safe keeping of the President of the Chamber of Commerce: based upon a two-hundred-year-old Dutch prototype, the map was annotated and added to whenever new information became available. For reasons of security it was kept in the President’s office, in a locked cupboard – at Mr Wetmore’s invitation everyone trooped upstairs to take a look.