Empress and Mrs. Conger, The: The Uncommon Friendship of Two Women and Two Worlds

8 - Unlocking the gates

8 Unlocking the gates Sarah began to wander deeper into Beijing in the winter and spring of 1899, where she discovered a site which fascinated her more than any of the palaces or temples: the Imperial Observatory.1 The movement of stars and planets and the bright patterns of the constellations had been of interest to Sarah since childhood—from the flat Midwest plains, she had only to look up at night to see the skies transfigured by the hour. She loved, too, the fact that many of the greatest minds of past centuries had watched the stars for answers. As Sarah wrote to a nephew, Every age seems to have reverently recognized the heavens as a watchful, changeable, never-failing friend, always true to man physically and spiritually. The Life, Truth, Love that never fails is so indelibly stamped in the brilliant heavens that all mankind has recognized it, looked up to it, and humbly clasped its proffered, helping hand. Once she discovered the Imperial Observatory,2 built on the southeast corner of the old city wall in 1296 during the reign of Khublai Khan, 78 The Empress and Mrs. Conger she could not stop coming back. Under the Mongols, the observatory (largely the work of Muslim astronomers) had consisted of a tower with a quadrant for determining the altitude of celestial bodies. A century and a quarter later, the city walls were pulled down and re-erected further south and east, leaving the observatory on its remaining corner of city wall. In 1674, bronze astronomical instruments were designed by Jesuit priest Ferdinand Verbiest at the command of the Kangxi emperor, who was not yet an enemy of Christians and their innovations. Verbiest designed six instruments in total—a quadrant, celestial globe, an altazimuth (similar to a quadrant), an ecliptic armilla to measure longitude and latitude, a sextant, and a zodiacal armilla that showed the geocentric astronomy of the time, a herd of celestial bodies trailing around the earth with the twelve signs of the zodiac encircling them. Fifteen years later, a theodolite was added, with another armilla thirty years after that. Louis XIV, France’s Sun King, was appropriately said to have contributed a second altazimuth.3 When Sarah came to see them, all these instruments were still in place, as was the Ming-era water clock in a chamber at the base of the observatory. Climbing to the platform fifty feet above the street, Sarah was enthralled by two things: the antiquity of the spot, and the fact that most of the extant instruments on the platform were not Chinese at all. As Sarah moved among the graceful silhouettes, starkly outlined against the jumbled backdrop of the city below, she who knew how they were meant to be used could not get over the fact that they still functioned, easily shifting on their pivots. “They are always exposed to the changes of the seasons,” she recorded, “always in the open, yet they are without corrosion.” She attributed this imperviousness to the material the instruments were made from, gold mixed into the bronze, which made them a form of astronomical jewelry, alfresco art with their superbly molded dragons and Chinese designs. “Each line,” she marveled, “seems to stand out as boldly and accurately as if in the first year of its long existence.”4 Though she only visited the observatory by day, Sarah easily imagined court astronomers standing atop the wall, moving the instruments that were “so nicely poised upon their axes,” following the “myriads of bright lights” through the aspects of which “simple and complex problems could be solved.”5 79 Unlocking the gates “My thought,” she told a nephew, when describing one of these observatory visits, “reaches out to know more. All that this vast universe has said, is saying, and will continue to say to mankind, will never be known. The vibrations of the sunbeams tone and intensify the rich and varied colorings of nature in all their grandeur.” Just as the great scientists and explorers whom Sarah admired had loved the mysteries of the universe as much as they loved uncovering the truth behind them, so it was that she was most fascinated by the mysteries of China that she could least fathom, and it was these that would most elicit both her sympathy and her admiration. But what also moved her was the fact that here, for a moment in time...