Can Peace Be Bought? (2)
The storm that had begun on the twenty-fifth had not broken for three days. It was as if a hole had been torn in the sky, and the rain simply would not stop.
"This year's harvest is completely ruined."
It was not the kind of rain that hammered a single place into submission. But the savage gales, and the lightning that cracked down at intervals, were doing plenty of damage across Gyeonggi Province and the three southern provinces. Worse still, the able-bodied men who ought to have been putting things back together had all shipped out to Liaodong and Manchuria, Taiwan and Vietnam. To say this year's farming was a total loss was hardly an exaggeration.
I stood there with my hands clasped behind my back, staring at the window shuddering in the vicious weather, when a curiously accented English voice spoke up behind me.
"Still, the scale of the Tripartite Alliance's war subsidies was rather beyond anyone's imagination, was it not? Even we in the City of London were more than a little astonished by the capital the allied parties managed to mobilize. We had heard the French Republic and the United States were growing at an unusual clip, but—"
"Those two scrambling at Britain's throat is a story every potbelly in Westminster already knows. Don't play the martyr."
"Is that so? Then this, I genuinely did not know."
I turned my head, and a familiar face stepped in. No — it was the familiar face from a textbook illustration, his mustache twitching. Beneath that whisker trembling in the draft of his own breath, he spoke with a rather measured accent.
"What we failed to anticipate most of all was Joseon — or rather, your government, the Republic of Korea. Our failure to grasp your true worth is what has produced this great upheaval in the Far East. Frankly, as a personal impression: when I served as Foreign Secretary, the only Far Eastern news that ever reached me concerned Japan and Qing China."
"Not even worth investigating?"
"I imagine that sits poorly with you, but that is the truth of it. Now, however, the reverse is true. If one does not know you Koreans, reading the situation in the Far East will prove harder than counting the windows on a black giant shrouded in fog. I guarantee it."
The Englishman jiggled a belly that, while not quite a pregnant woman's, still boasted a respectable volume, crossed his legs, and shrugged at me. I sat down facing him and answered.
"You flatter us."
"In any case, that is why the home government dispatched a mediation mission first, without consulting the three allied powers."
Indeed. The man before me was British, and his people were currently sitting in Hong Kong, secretly asking me to extend the ceasefire so they might mediate between the warring Tripartite Alliance and Qing China. I folded my arms, looked him up and down for a long moment, and spoke slowly.
"I heard you were waiting in Hong Kong."
"That is correct."
"And you expect our three nations to take the British Empire's true intentions at face value? If you genuinely wanted peace, you wouldn't have hidden in Hong Kong like rats, watching from the sidelines. You could have visited Beijing anytime these past two weeks while the peace talks were underway, and the whole business would have been settled easily enough."
The timing was exquisitely suspicious. Why wait until the peace talks — which nobody had ever believed were sincere — had already collapsed before requesting an extension? Naturally, I wanted to know first whether Britain was stalling on Qing China's behalf.
As if he had read my mind, the Englishman laid a hand on his chest and pledged himself to me.
"Before God and Her Majesty the Queen — boldly — I can swear it."
"I didn't ask you to go that far. You take people for small-minded creatures."
I waved him off as he launched into an oath as if it were a familiar role, and asked:
"You want to claim it was coincidence?"
"I was rather occupied trying to determine Your Excellency's real negotiating terms — those of the Republic of Korea, France, and the United States."
"The ten articles of the peace terms were circulated to every embassy by America's Minister Foote, acting as intermediary. Claiming you never received them would be a bit too shameless, wouldn't it?"
"We received them. But those weren't the real ones, were they?"
Britain, after all. Germany, Russia, the Netherlands, Portugal — they had all taken the document at face value and sat there looking stupid. I gave an awkward laugh and made a show of smacking my forehead.
"There. I've gotten sloppy, dealing with nothing but idiots."
The Englishman before me smiled and dumped the results of the intelligence they had gathered in Hong Kong.
"I understand Prince Gong fell from power last year. Which means there is not a single functioning channel of communication left in Qing China's diplomatic line capable of a normal conversation. What's more, we have intelligence that Li Hongzhang, the Minister of Beiyang, stands a high chance of being dismissed over this defeat and the responsibility for the war. In that case, there would have been no Qing official or minister whatsoever who could grasp the Tripartite Alliance's true demands."
At this point I thought: so this is the level you have to operate at to stay number one in the world. I clapped and answered.
"Did you plant spies in Beijing?"
"Local civilian collaborators are a basic instrument of international diplomacy. We call them our 'friends,' in our way."
"That's the same thing."
It was textbook dirty dealing, nothing more. Local civilian collaborators, in the 1880s, when official intelligence services did not even exist yet. Ahead of their time, the bastards.
More than anything, having to start calculating the moment Britain was involved was exhausting, so I cut straight to the point. It had been true in my previous life and it was true in this one: the second Anglo-Saxons entered the picture, a man got tired in real time.
"Right. Let's talk about the British Empire's 'true intentions.'"
"Not the Korean government's real designs?"
"The one who wants something speaks first. We want for nothing, and we fear even less. We've made some remarkably loyal friends — more so than you'd imagine."
"I do fear how long that loyalty will last."
"That depends on how you play it."
When I pressed him, he tilted his head as if considering. Then he tugged his mustache out to either side, nodded, and spoke.
"The government and Parliament want the status quo."
"Of course they do."
Lies first, as always. I frowned, and he hurriedly added:
"But Prime Minister Gladstone is of a different mind. His Excellency already considers the outcome in the Far East to have tilted completely."
"...Downing Street really is something. You're telling me that by the time you lot decided to sail halfway around the world, you'd already predicted the winner with perfect accuracy?"
"You flatter us."
"May I ask the grounds and reasoning for that judgment?"
I leaned forward, pulling my chair in, and he took a step back, drawing his shoulders away as he answered. The look on his face was a curious mixture, irritation threaded through it.
"The neighbors made rather a spectacle of themselves in days gone by, you see."
The neighbors' chaos — that would be the old French Revolution and Napoleon's revolutionary wars. Well. Europe had been an absolute mess back then.
We're not quite on that level.
I shook my head, roughly comparing those two upheavals with the republican revolution that had broken out in our Korea. Looked at from any angle, we had not committed massacres like the ones in the Vendée, nor staged any life-or-death matches at the guillotine. What's more, we had not so much as contemplated a "march on Moscow," the way a certain someone had. Everyone just wanted to get home and eat white rice and meat stew.
"I don't believe we're quite on that scale."
"An unknown country, already collapsing, flattened not merely the pride but the very face of the Far East's traditional great empire — and you say that isn't on that scale? That isn't humility. That's deception."
Was it?
As I tilted my head, he jiggled that generously proportioned belly of his, raised an index finger, and wagged it in front of me.
"Therefore Prime Minister Gladstone wishes to contain, in advance, the storm that a revolutionary wind blowing out of the Far East might carry into the Asian markets the British Empire has established in China."
"Delusions of grandeur."
"But the canal passage rights and the expansion of French influence across southern China already exceed our concerns by a considerable margin — they are proof. And then there is Taiwan, is there not? Korea's navy, still modest now but certain to grow; France's Far East Squadron; the United States Pacific Fleet. That is truly more than we can bear. What's more, you Koreans will never be able to give up Liaodong and Manchuria, will you? And the Yankees who will hitch a ride on that — what of them? Is this not tantamount to advertising that the Far East is your front parlor?"
"You've studied harder than I expected. I'll give you that — I'm impressed."
The phrase "economic animal" was not wrong. The Englishman's words struck the heart of the matter so perfectly that I nodded without reservation. After all, the French rampage I had stood by and watched from the beginning — so that these people would take the bait — had been precisely that.
"But that is still nothing more than a fantasy that has not come to pass. You and the Prime Minister are leaping rather far. We have no plans whatsoever to shrink Britain's influence over Hong Kong or the Qing market. The same goes for matters related to India and Siam. I merely..."
My throat was dry. I asked his pardon a moment, wet my lips from the teacup, and spoke again.
"Under the framework of the Tripartite Alliance, our Republic of Korea simply wishes to assume the management and supervision of the Far East as a whole."
"Does the Tongnyeong wish to become their agent?"
"A somewhat oversized steward. Or perhaps a lawyer jointly retained by two households?"
A steward who grows large enough to play the master, and eventually goes independent — but that was the sequence.
In any case, I began actively pitching we are no threat to the world champion, and started bringing up the neighbors' problems. If you've got nothing much to boast about, you just tear down the house next door. That remarkable human art of getting by is written down even in the most basic manual.
"Qing China is simply too large right now. And the weapons, machinery, and warships you Europeans keep selling them are swelling at a staggering rate with every year that passes."
"To the point of threatening Britain's own interests."
The Englishman nodded as if the explanation resonated. With a worldly expression that sat oddly on a man of his years, he added that Qing China's encroachment on the market was more severe than one might think. And with that, I understood once more how a mere colonial official had been recommended for a board this large and flown out to the Far East.
"Now I see why a mere colonial finance minister such as yourself was summoned by the Prime Minister and sent to Hanyang as acting special envoy."
"I realized the moment I stepped into this office that Your Excellency is the same sort of creature I am."
"Don't play the familiar, even as a joke."
He laughed heartily at the look of distaste on my face. I frowned at him and said:
"The point is that Qing China requires periodic castration. Physically."
"And that is the decisive reason the Tripartite Alliance was formed?"
"Exactly. France may have struggled in the jungle, but the war was going to end as a French decision victory regardless. Then we appeared."
"A most timely first 'revolution' in the East, to be sure..."
He looked from me to the Taegeukgi hanging at the back of the office and back again, suspicion on his face, but there was nothing for him to find. Naturally.
He spent a long while turning over the conversation we had just had. He opened his mouth again at roughly the moment I had emptied an entire teacup.
"I see now. You Koreans are truly cunning people."
"I'll take that as a compliment. But if you run your mouth like that in front of other Koreans, an axe handle is going to end up planted in your forehead."
"Are Koreans descendants of the Vikings? Axes?"
"We're not blond like that lot, but every household has so many axe handles they're rotting in the shed. Live in Hanyang awhile and you'll see."
In truth, every household — yangban estates, ordinary commoners, even the homes of nobi and the lowborn — kept at least one axe.
Even a yangban whose fortunes had fallen might not stoop to weeding a rice paddy, but he split his own firewood.
What's more, Choe Ik-hyeon had made it fashionable to present an axe when submitting a memorial to the throne, and lately an axe with a smooth handle and a spare pattern engraved on the blade had become a product nearly as popular as a bow. Something like the silver ornamental knives women carried, one might say.
"We've wandered off. Anyway: Qing China is a failing student in need of periodic instruction. We, for instance, are standing in to provide the character education the international community requires."
"And the parents are Britain and France?"
"That doesn't mean Ivan, a complete stranger who happens to live next door, needs to show up at the parents' association in anyone's place, does it?"
The moment I mentioned Russia, the man's face crumpled as if he had seen something hideous. He pleaded with me, his expression saying he did not even want to imagine it — as if begging that the drunken brown bear please not take an interest in this neighborhood.
"A truly dreadful prospect. I understand everything now."
Yet at the same time, he put a question to me with a look that said something still did not quite add up. Purely, and with a thoroughly personal curiosity.
"Still, I thought it a touch arrogant. I wouldn't say Britain has no agent at all to put forward in the Far East."
At the question that invoked Japan, I answered with a sneer packed full of frost.
"Then you people are still blind to how things stand on this side."
"I beg your pardon?"
"An Englishman's inner thoughts are perfectly transparent to me. The Prime Minister fears that the balance in the Far East has tilted completely toward the three powers, with our Korea at the center, and that the British Empire will be pushed out of the Asian market. Isn't that it?"
"..."
He rolled his eyes, flustered by the pressure. I did not stop there. I pressed the attack.
"And if Britain has a candidate for agent, it can only be Japan. France backed the wrong horse in the last shogunate civil war and lost the lot. The United States set the table and then had a fire break out at home, and left without so much as picking up a spoon. That leaves Japan as the only country in the Far East where British influence runs as deep as it does in China — and you think I overlooked that?"
"...A candidate is a candidate, but neither our government nor Parliament has yet clearly diagnosed Japan's capacity for growth or its potential."
He was still wrestling with it — no settled will or direction yet on whether to support Japan in earnest. Having confirmed that much, I spoke with a confident, unashamed expression.
"Then that's convenient. I give you my word. They are critically ill patients with a chronic disease that is all but incurable. Cripples living on narcotic painkillers. I guarantee it."
"Isn't that rather vicious slander for a neighbor?"
"It is my strategic judgment, objective and grounded in reason. It isn't as though I never considered our Japanese friends when I was drawing up plans to deal with Qing China. But they—"
I scratched my forehead, hunting for the right word to make this Englishman — a businessman at heart — understand in a single stroke.
Too strong a phrase, perhaps. But it was not a lie.
Truly: where else in this world was there a nonperforming loan that, a few decades on, would drive its creditor to the brink of death?
That was what Japan was. That was what the island country next door was.