By making inquiries around town, Sano tracked down the merchant Urabe in Nagasaki’s Chinese settlement. This occupied an area near the harbor and was surrounded by high wooden palisades, a moat, and fishermen’s cottages. A continuous stream of Japanese merchants, porters, officials—and even a few women, accompanied by male escorts—passed through the gate, where guards searched them and recorded entries or exits.

Afternoon had begun its descent toward evening by the time Sano tied his horse to the moat’s railing and joined the traffic entering the settlement. The sunlight had turned coppery, the sea cobalt. Windblown clouds, edged in violet, swept across a fading sky.

“State your name and business,” a guard ordered when Sano reached the gate.

Sano complied, noting the perfunctory way the man searched him and recorded his name without asking for proof of identity. The Chinese were subject to the same basic restrictions as all foreigners—trade quotas; a separate residential area; limited contact with citizens—but China’s centuries-old relationship with Japan accorded special advantages.

Entering the settlement, Sano found himself in a busy marketplace. Chinese merchants manned stalls decorated with red lanterns and heaped with porcelainware, bolts of raw silk, barrels of sugar, turpentine, camphor, and myrrh, Cambodian teakwood, Korean ginseng root, books, medicines, and other exotic goods. The merchants, dressed in cotton trousers, high-collared tunics, and cloth slippers, dashed about, queues waving as they bargained with Japanese buyers. Their fingers flew over abacus beads, calculating prices. Each Japanese merchant was accompanied by clerks, an interpreter, and porters carrying the goods he’d purchased or brought to trade. Government censors examined Chinese books and applied seals to those that passed inspection. The rapid singsong of Chinese speech lent the business a frenetic quality. The Chinese enjoyed freer trade privileges than the Dutch—seventy ships allowed each year instead of just one, and continuous sales open to a greater number of Japanese merchants. With the current peaceful state of relations between the two countries, security was looser; the Chinese merchants and sailors could even leave their residences to worship at their own temple.

Lifting his gaze, Sano saw the temple’s red pagoda rising from its distant hillside. He recalled Hirata’s story about mysterious lights and the abbot’s grudge against the Dutch. The Chinese were allowed to keep guns on their ships. Sano must eventually question the abbot, whose mobility and access to weapons made him a viable murder suspect.

However, freedom of movement and trade didn’t translate into other special privileges for the Chinese. Their quarters consisted of shabby, crowded barracks. Laundry flapped on the balconies, and the stench of sewage mingled with cooking odors. Still, none of the residents stayed long, and their profits made up for the discomfort.