A sketch of a Beijing church as it would have appeared a little after the events described in this chapter
Princess Yining, youngest child and only surviving daughter of the Tianqi Emperor, is five years old. Well, she’s five years old counting from the date of her birth, in the manner of the Europeans. Customary age-reckoning practices are a little different in China.
She’s an unremarkable child. A couple years ago, when the plague really hit Beijing in earnest (although it’s still around and people are still dying), she’d fallen ill, either with the plague or something more mundane. Eventually her fever broke and she recovered, but she seems to be quieter now. More thoughtful, perhaps.
One day, she announces to her family that she wants to be a Christian.
This is unusual for some obvious reasons -- regardless of the rumors circulating about the Prince of Xin, brother to the emperor, no scion of the Ming imperial family ever has made such an announcement -- over the years, some members of the literati have converted, but this? Unprecedented. Still, among the upper echelons of the bureaucracy, there’s a largely muted reaction. If she were a prince, that would be different. A prince would have to participate in any number of ceremonies incompatible with foreign superstition. But a princess? Eh. It’s not like China has powerful neighbors to appease with marriage alliances -- its neighbors can wheel and deal among each other, but they are manifestly not peers to the Great Ming. Point is, the King of England might marry his daughters off to, for example, the Prince of Orange and the Duke of Orléans for political reasons, but the Emperor of China feels no such pressure. The whole incident is
unusual, sure, a rather curious fancy for a child to have. The girl’s started calling herself a “bride of Christ.” Well, her indulgent father figures, at least this relieves me of having to think about marital plans. He tolerates her youthful enthusiasm.
Nicolas Trigault, for his part, is overjoyed. He immediately writes a bunch of letters about it to his Jesuit superiors back home, only some of which is exaggerated. Due to his friendship with the emperor, he is entrusted with the child’s education insofar as it relates to her curiosity with religion -- the emperor, though unlettered, is keen that his children learn as much as they are able.
Not everyone in Beijing is happy about this.
Meanwhile, the first response to Minister Zhou’s proposal comes from Dongshan. It is authored by Di Yimin, the scholar who was among the first to be sent to that island, and who has since cycled through several magistrate positions over county-equivalent areas before becoming appointed as prefect over...well, technically his prefecture covers the entirety of Dongshan under Admiral Zheng’s control. The office of governor is still officially vacant.
Di Yimin writes a somewhat abbreviated treatise acknowledging Minister Zhou’s text. While he thanks the minister for seeking to reform the tax system, he points out that some of the calculations or assumptions made are not quite correct. See, under the current system, most taxes are paid in silver at the final step. Taxes are still low, but this requirement allows the empire to extract a little more out of the mandated taxes -- paying people in one currency and requiring payment in another was a classic move among medieval European banks to avoid committing “usury,” and in this application is something akin to seigniorage -- however, the price of silver has been subject to severe fluctuation. This is due to most silver being sourced through trade with the Spanish colonial empire, and for some reason the Spanish haven’t been very keen on trade lately.[1] And why penalize people for paying taxes in gold? If anything, because the empire has a new source of gold -- the river operations and mines on Dongshan -- maybe the empire should be more flexible in that regard. Maybe gold could be standardized as the base of a common currency which would hopefully be acceptable to the imperial tax collectors. If future discussions are successful, of course.
He promises to address the other elements of Minister Zhou’s proposals in a little bit, once he finishes some additional analysis.
(Di Yimin’s treatise is received relatively well in Beijing. Even Nicolas Trigault, who is typically jealous of anyone else with influence over the emperor, acknowledges that Di has said many wise things. That being said, he’s predisposed to be a little skeptical of what Minister Zhou is doing over at the Ministry of Revenue, and writes that the man’s secretary Gao Xuan is “half a Saracen in appearance.”)
Anthony van Diemen, the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies, is thinking very hard. He’s been running things in Batavia ever since his predecessor, Hendrik Brouwer, stepped down to return home and explain the whole Dongshan debacle to the Dutch East India Company’s leadership.[2] Now, he’s got some of his captains, including the reliable Abel Tasman, probing south from the lands colonized by the Dutch. They report that there are many large islands to the south -- inhabited islands! -- but the inhabitants are aloof, sometimes hostile, and don’t appear to have anything useful to trade.[3]
Tasman’s willing to go back and take a closer look, but the colonial administrators are less interested -- for all his exploring, he didn’t bring back any gold. So van Diemen and his compatriots turn their attention to the one place nearby where there
is plentiful gold.
Yes, he’s thinking about Dongshan.
It rankles, a little bit, that the Dutch could be forced out of the place, and then the newcomers apparently prove that there was gold in them thar hills after all. (True, there’s some question over exactly how honest Admiral Zheng is being about the gold deposits. There is
some gold being extracted from the rivers of eastern Dongshan, and Zheng’s men, in cooperation with the Portuguese, are starting to make probing excavations into the highlands, but the overall profitability is not entirely public knowledge.) And van Diemen is worried that he’s left it too long as it is; the hostilities between Spain and Portugal caught everyone by surprise, and in retrospect the best time to make a move on Dongshan would have been right after the Portuguese forced the Spanish out, when things were still super chaotic.
Still, a good hard push might get the Dutch
something. His compatriots might be quietly skeptical, but van Diemen’s too busy drawing up plans.[4]
The Dutch East India Company, by the way, hasn’t explored much to the north of Japan -- they have their outpost on Dejima, and some of their captains have navigated those waters, but even with being the only Europeans allowed (tenuous) contact with Japan, there isn’t much that interests the Dutch up there.
Not so for the enterprising captains of Dongshan. Later in the year, a ship is blown off-course by a summer storm. Although it drifts for a time through some northerly currents, its crew manage to bring it back under control, and the craft is beached on the shore of a strange island.
Fortunately, the people there are not immediately hostile. Communication is tenuously established -- a little awkwardly, through intermediaries who speak Japanese -- in any event, nobody gets shot or stabbed, and repairs are swiftly completed. Later ships from Dongshan will make the journey on purpose, trading for furs with these people who call themselves the Ainu.
Footnotes
[1] This happened IOTL once the Spanish realized they were losing a lot of silver to foreign trade. ITTL it’s the same, but it really hasn’t helped that Admiral Zheng backed the Portuguese against the Spanish in his power play on Dongshan.
[2] van Diemen was Brouwer’s assistant and succeeded him as Governor-General IOTL, when Brouwer was not reappointed due to his handling of trade disputes. Brouwer’s still around -- the Dutch East India Company is still appointing him to lead various exploratory missions.
[3] This was about the same as what happened IOTL. On the plus side, van Diemen and Tasman got stuff named after them.
[4] IOTL van Diemen was throwing Dutch men and materiel into a war with Cambodia, after King Ramathipadi violently expelled the Dutch from his country. When van Diemen died, his successor shelved his plans to escalate the conflict and mostly left Cambodia alone after that. Right now the Dutch still have access to some of that region but haven’t colonized as much because their attention was focused elsewhere, so tension in Cambodia is much lower. Also, King Ramathipadi converted to Islam and adopted the name Ibrahim. That isn’t relevant, I just thought it was cool.
