SixChung Ji Zeng felt nothing except a prickly irritation at the two coffins laid out before him. Did he really have to go through this charade when there were so many more urgent things he could be doing? Like organize the finance for the opium shipment arriving on the White Cloud clipper next week.
The comprador and his wife lay wrapped in anonymous shrouds in sweet-smelling camphor wood coffins in the front room of Grass Valley’s most celebrated herbalist and apothecary, Dr Wau Kee. The walls and windows had been draped in white cotton sheeting, the Chinese color for mourning, the bodies wrapped in blue and white cotton. Under more normal circumstances, his father’s young wife would have been decked out in her bridal dress, and the bodies displayed, but the fire’s total destruction had
