Emperor’s Remedy

In China he is established in a part of the Queen’s Summer Palace,though the Queen herself is never seen. Antonio is placed under the care of a doctor named Xu who undertakes to teach him the whole of the Nei Ching school of medicine,since it seems that the cure for syphilis cannot be applied without knowledge of the whole. He divides his time between the Legation,a nearby colony of Europeans,and the Palace where he rapidly falls in love with Fumi,the elusive Xu’s assistant. Through all of this,larger political events are taking place in China. The Boxer Rebellion is brewing in most of the novel,breaking out properly in its final third.

The Yellow Emperor’s Cure looks back to a fascinating moment in history. The delicate equations between the great powers at the dawn of the 20th century may not be the subject of this book,but they are ever present. This is particularly evident in the interactions of the various foreigners (Americans,Japanese and an assortment of Europeans) at the Legation. In addition,there’s a strong sense of an end to power in both of the novel’s main locations. Portugal’s colonial prominence is all but over,and in China,the elusive Queen does almost nothing to assert her power.

Portugal and China are notable for being relatively unusual settings for English language fiction. This has its disadvantages,and over and over again,one gets the feeling that the text doesn’t trust the reader to keep up without being fed quantities of historical context. Particularly in the early stages of the novel,we are subjected to many scenes in which things are painstakingly explained — and here Basu’s writing is at its least elegant.

Antonio’s perspective is another difficulty. His impressions of China are entirely in line with those one would expect from a 19th century European man. The problem,however,is that many of these assumptions also colour a great deal of later literature which takes them perfectly seriously — we’re all too familiar with the “inscrutable” Chinese,or the European who bothers to learn his native servants’ names being morally superior to his fellow countrymen. At times it is easy to remember that Antonio’s vision is imperfect. The Legation scenes recognise this with deadpan humour. And when his internal narrative comes up with “lovesickness,a disease no less mysterious than the rarest of female disorders” or “the secret workings of the Chinese mind,how it went about solving puzzles and inventing things” we’re being invited to roll our eyes at him. But all too often in his interactions with the natives the only thing reminding us of this is a prior faith in Basu’s abilities as a writer. The binaries the book sets up are predictable and uninteresting; in Xu’s words “Western doctors deal with simple cause and effect… the Chinese look for reasons that might even lie outside the body”.

The search for the cure that lies at the heart of this book is an elusive one. Syphilis,a disease associated with sin,comes to mean more than itself. “What if it was immortal?” asks Antonio’s friend Arees,speculating that syphilis is “the price we must pay to be alive”. Antonio connects the mystery of syphilis to that of his lover Fumi,“two symptoms both arising from the same condition”. Even the name of the disease reflects this endless deferral of meaning; the “French Disease” in Portugal,it is named after the Portuguese elsewhere and in China it is “Canton Rash”. In the real world a cure for syphilis would be developed within a decade of the events of The Yellow Emperor’s Cure; within the novel,this seems almost inconceivable.

The Yellow Emperor’s Cure skilfully weaves together its various historical strands,resulting in an unusual,intelligent novel. Yet it is let down by its own simplicity in places,and (particularly when placed next to some of Basu’s earlier work) is eventually a little underwhelming.