ABSTRACT
In the sweltering heat of early August 1880, three intrepid travelers from Shanghai arrived at an earth-constructed military barracks on the outskirts of Hami ⑰⭮, an oasis town in eastern Xinjiang. A German by the name of Focke, an Austrian named Mandel, and their Jiangsu province interpreter, Xi, had reached the fi nal destination of their half-year journey across the Qing empire (see Map 12.1 ). 1 The barracks served as the new headquarters for military general Zuo Zongtang ⶎ⬿㢈 (1812-1885), who had moved there several months earlier from his previous outpost at Suzhou, in northwest Gansu province (see Map 12.2 ). Upon arrival, the trio paid a visit to Zuo, who invited them to stay. In their conversations, the German inquired about Zuo’s ability to live so frugally, work diligently, and bear the hardships of living in the desert. Focke’s travelogue, which was reprinted in an abridged version in the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao 䓛⟙ in early January 1881, went into some detail about the old general’s daily routine. 2 What deeply impressed Focke was not Zuo’s rigid schedule nor his routine of rising at dawn and sleeping at midnight but rather his frequent attention to a patch of land beside the barracks-his vegetable garden. Each day after rising, Zuo “went to the vegetable garden to look out over it for quite a while,” and in the evening at fi ve or six o’clock, he went “again to the vegetable garden to oversee the watering.” 3 While he certainly spent more time conducting military business, Zuo’s daily supervision of twenty mu 䔅 (1 mu = 0.0667 ha) of land, or roughly three acres, which grew “all kinds of melons and vegetables” hardly seems a trifl ing matter, at the very least because the harvest provided for his sustenance. He reportedly ate six bowls of vegetables for breakfast each morning. 4
Seeing an aging general attempting to make a garden bloom almost literally in the desert may have been little more than a curiosity for Focke and his fellow travelers. Yet Zuo’s attention to the garden was not mere show for either his visitors or for the Shanghai readers of the Shenbao who may have marveled at Focke’s report. A fortnight before his visitors arrived, Zuo had written a letter to his youngest son, Zuo Xiaotong ⶎ⬅⎴ (1857-1924), requesting vegetable seeds. After complaining about the oppressive summertime heat in Hami and his own ailments, Zuo asked Xiaotong to have one of his brothers “quickly purchase
Map 12.1 The Qing empire circa 1870 .
