Decoded

The man who left Tongzhen on the little black ferry in 1873 with a view to studying abroad was the youngest member of the seventh generation of that famous family of salt merchants: the Rongs of Jiangnan. When he left, he was called Rong Zilai, but by the time he returned he was called John Lillie. Going by what people said later on, he was the first person in the Rong family to break from their mercantile heritage and become an academic, not to mention a great patriot. Of course, this development was inextricably linked with the many years that he spent abroad. However, when the Rong family originally picked him to be the one to go overseas, it was not because they wanted him to bring about this fundamental change in the clan’s fortunes, but because they were hoping that it might help Grandmother Rong live for a little bit longer.

As a young woman, Grandmother Rong had proved an excellent mother, giving birth to nine sons and seven daughters over the course of two decades; what is more, all of them lived to be adults. It was these children who laid the foundations of the Rong family fortune, making her position at the very top of the clan hierarchy unassailable. Thanks to the assiduous attentions of her children and grandchildren she lived much longer than she might otherwise have done, but she was not a happy woman. She was afflicted by all sorts of distressing and complex dreams, to the point where she often woke up screaming; even in broad daylight she would still be suffering from the lingering terrors of the night. When these nightmares tormented her, her numerous progeny, not to mention the vast wealth of the family, came to seem a crushing burden. The flames licking the incense in the brazier often flickered uncertainly with the force of her high-pitched shrieks. Every morning, a couple of local scholars would be invited to come to the Rong mansion to interpret the old lady’s dreams, but as time went by it became clear that none of them were much use.

Of all the many people called in to interpret her dreams, Grandmother Rong was the most impressed by a young man who had recently washed up in Tongzhen from somewhere overseas. Not only did he make no mistakes in explaining the inner meanings of the old lady’s dreams, but sometimes he even seemed to display clairvoyance in interpreting the significance of individuals who would appear in the future. It was only his youth that led people to imagine that his abilities in this direction were superficial – or to use Grandmother Rong’s own words, ‘nothing good ever came of employing people still wet behind the ears’. He was very good at explaining dreams but his divination skills were much poorer. It seemed that if he started off on the wrong foot, he simply could not right himself again. To tell the truth, he was very good at dealing with the old lady’s dreams from the first part of the night, but he was completely unable to cope with those that she had towards dawn, or the dreams within dreams. By his own account, he had never formally studied this kind of divination technique, but had managed to learn a little simply by following his grandfather around and listening in. Having only dabbled in this kind of thing before, he could hardly be classed as an expert.

Grandmother Rong moved aside a sliding panel in the wall and showed him the silver ingots stacked within, begging him to bring his grandfather to China. The only answer that she received was that it was impossible. There were two reasons for this. First, his grandfather was already very wealthy and had lost all interest in making more money a long time ago. Furthermore, his grandfather was a very old man and the thought of having to travel across the ocean at his time of life might very well scare him to death. On the other hand the young man did come up with one practical suggestion for the old lady: send someone overseas to study.

If Mohammed won’t go to the mountain, then the mountain will have to come to Mohammed.

The next task was to find a suitable person to go from among the old lady’s myriad descendants. There were two crucial criteria for selection. It would have to be someone with an unusual sense of filial duty to Grandmother Rong, who would be prepared to suffer for her sake. What is more, it would have to be someone intelligent and interested in study, who could learn the complicated techniques of dream interpretation and divination in the shortest possible time and to a very high level. After a careful process of triage, a twenty-yearold grandson named Rong Zilai was selected for the task. Thus, Rong Zilai, armed with a letter of recommendation from the foreign young man and burdened with the task of finding a way to prolong his wretched grandmother’s life, set out to cross the ocean in search of learning. One month later, on a stormy night, just as Rong Zilai’s steamer was forging its way through the ocean swell, his grandmother dreamed that a typhoon swallowed up the ship and sank it, sending her grandson to feed the fishes. Caught up in her dream, the old lady was so horrified that she ceased breathing. The trauma of her dream resulted in cardiac arrest; the old lady died in her sleep. Thanks to the length and difficulty of his journey, by the time that Rong Zilai stood in front of his would-be tutor and reverently presented his letter of introduction, the old man handed him another letter in return which announced the news of his grandmother’s death. Information always travels much faster than people do. As we know from personal experience, it is the fastest runner that gets to the tape first.

The old man looked at this young man who had come from so far away with a sharp glance, so keen that it could have been used to shoot down a flying bird. It seemed as though he was genuinely interested in taking on this foreign student, who had come to him in his twilight years. Thinking it over afterwards, however, since Grandmother Rong had died, there was no point in studying this esoteric skill and so while he appreciated the old man’s offer, Rong Zilai decided to go back home. However, while he was waiting for his passage, he got to know another Chinese man at the college. This man took him to attend a couple of classes, after which he had no intention of leaving because he had discovered that there was a lot here that he needed to know. He stayed with the other Chinese man – during the day, the two of them attended classes in mathematics and geometry with students from Bosnia and Turkey. At night, he would attend concerts with a senior student from Prague. He enjoyed himself so much that he did not realize how quickly time was passing; when he finally decided that it was time to return, seven years had gone by. In the autumn of 1880, Rong Zilai got on a boat together with a couple of dozen barrels of new wine and began retracing his steps on the long journey home. By the time he arrived back, in the depths of winter, the wine was already perfectly drinkable.

To quote the inhabitants of Tongzhen on the subject: the Rong family had not changed at all during these seven years – the Rong clan was still the Rong clan, the salt merchants were still salt merchants, a flourishing family continued to flourish and the money came rolling in just like before. The only thing that was different was the young man who had gone abroad – he wasn’t so young any more, and he had acquired a really peculiar name: Lillie. John Lillie. Furthermore, he was now afflicted by all sorts of strange habits: he didn’t have a queue, he wore a short jacket rather than a long silk gown, he liked to drink wine that was the colour of blood, he larded his speech with words that sounded like the chirping of a bird, and so on. The strangest thing of all was that he simply could not stand the smell of salt – when he went down to the harbour or to the shop and the stinging scent of the salt assaulted his nostrils, he would begin to retch or sometimes even to vomit bile. It seemed particularly dreadful that the son of a salt merchant would be unable to tolerate the smell of salt; people treated him almost as if he had contracted an unmentionable disease. Later on, Rong Zilai explained what had happened

– when he was on the boat sailing across the ocean, he had accidentally fallen in, swallowing so much briny water that he very nearly died. The horror of this event had etched itself into the very marrow of his bones. After that he had kept a tea leaf in his mouth at all times when on the boat, otherwise he simply would not have been able to endure it. Of course, explaining what had happened was one thing, getting people to accept the news was something else entirely. If he could not stand the smell of salt, how on earth was he supposed to work in the family business? You can’t have the boss going round with a mouth full of tea leaves all the time.

This was a very thorny problem.

Fortunately, before he left for foreign parts, Grandmother Rong had put it in writing that when he came back from his studies he was to have all the silver behind the sliding panel in her room as a reward for his filial piety. Later on, he used that money well, for it paid for him to open a school in the provincial capital, C City, which he called Lillie’s Academy of Mathematics.

That was the predecessor of the famous N University.

N University started to become famous when it was still just Lillie’s Academy of Mathematics.

The first person to make the academy famous was John Lillie himself. In spite of all opposition, he shocked everyone by insisting that the academy should be opened to women students. For the first few years of its existence, the academy was treated somewhat like a peepshow. Anyone who had business taking them to the provincial capital would make time to visit the academy and have a look, to enjoy the spectacle. They behaved just as if they were talking a walk through a red-light district. With the feudal attitudes that people had in those days, the mere fact that the academy took women students ought to have been enough to get it closed by the authorities. There were a lot of explanations offered for why it was able to survive – of which that given in the official genealogy of the Rong family is perhaps the most reliable. According to the genealogy, all the early women students at the academy were members of the principal branch of the Rong family. They might as well have come right out and said: if we want to ruin our own daughters what is that to do with you? Keeping it all in the family turned out to be a very good idea. It was the only reason that gossip was never able to bring about the closure of Lillie’s Academy of Mathematics. In somewhat the same way as the growth of children is accompanied by a lot of howling, the furore surrounding Lillie’s Academy of Mathematics simply helped it to become more famous.

The second person to bring the academy to public recognition was also a member of the Rong family – the child born when John Lillie’s older brother (then already past sixty years of age) took a concubine. The child was a daughter and she was John Lillie’s niece. She was born with a large, round head, but there was absolutely nothing else wrong with her; in fact, she was a remarkably intelligent girl. At a very early age it became apparent that she was unusually clever, particularly at anything involving mathematics or calculation. She first attended the academy at the age of eleven, and when she was twelve she took part in a competition with an expert abacist. No one could believe their eyes when they saw how fast she was; she could multiply two four-figure numbers in the time it took a man to spit. The kind of mathematical problem that other people had to wrack their brains over unravelled at her touch, but this seemed to disappoint the people who challenged her to answer and they wondered out loud whether she might not have cheated by finding out the question in advance.

A blind man who made his living by telling people’s fortunes from the shape of their heads once told her that she was the kind of genius that only came along once every thousand years.

The year that she turned seventeen, she set off halfway around the world with her cousin who was going to study at Cambridge University. As the boat plunged into the thick fog that hung over the London docks, her cousin (who enjoyed composing little poems) was inspired by the scene to write something –

Thanks to the power of the ocean wave,

I have come to Great Britain.

Great Britain,

Great Britain,

The fogs cannot conceal your magnificence . . .

Having been woken up by her cousin reciting this ditty aloud, she turned bleary-eyed to look at her golden watch. She said, ‘We have been travelling for thirty-nine days and seven hours.’

Immediately the pair of them went into a well-practiced question and answer routine:

‘Thirty-nine days and seven hours is . . . ?’

‘Nine hundred and forty-three hours.’

‘Nine hundred and forty-three hours is . . . ?’

‘Fifty-six thousand, five hundred and eighty minutes.’

‘Fifty-six thousand, five hundred and eighty minutes is . . . ?’

‘Three million, three hundred and ninety-four thousand and eight hundred seconds.’

This kind of game had become part of her life – people treated her like a human abacus, expecting her to perform calculations like that at the drop of a hat. The constant exercise of her unusual abilities resulted in them becoming even more pronounced. It got to the stage where people changed her name: everyone called her ‘Abacus’. Because her head was unusually large, some people even called her ‘Abacus Head’. The fact is that she was better than any abacist. It seemed as though all the mathematical skills built up by generations of the Rong family in the course of their business had become concentrated in her; as if quantitative experience had finally brought about a qualitative change.

When she got to Cambridge, while keeping all her old mathematical skill, it turned out that she also had another – hitherto unsuspected – talent for learning languages. Where other people just have to grit their teeth and get on with it, she seemed to pick up languages really easily from her foreign room-mates, and she just got quicker and quicker at it. She found a new room-mate every term and by the time the term was over, she seemed to be able to speak a new language, with a remarkable verve and grasp of idiom. Of course, there is nothing special in this method of language-learning – it is a perfectly standard method that seems to work for pretty much everyone who tries it. The amazing thing was the results that she obtained. It enabled her to learn seven languages within the space of a couple of years, and what is more this was not just a matter of speaking them: she could also read and write them. One day, she happened to meet a dark-haired young woman in the college grounds and tried to talk to her. When she could not communicate, she tried each of the seven languages that she had learned in turn, but with no result. It turned out that this girl had just arrived from Milan and spoke only Italian. Once she had discovered this, she immediately invited her to become her room-mate. It was that term that she also started work on the design of Newton’s Mathematical Bridge.

Newton’s Mathematical Bridge is one of the sights of Cambridge University. The bridge is composed from 7,177 timbers, all of a different size. In total there are 10,299 tangent planes, so if you were going to nail each of the tangent planes together, then at the very least you would need 10,299 nails. However, Newton threw all the nails into the Cam and built his bridge to be held together by gravity alone – that is what makes it a mathematical marvel. For many years, students at the mathematics department at Cambridge University dreamed of cracking the secret of the Mathematical Bridge – or rather, you could say that what they wanted to do was to make an exact replica of the Mathematical Bridge on paper. No one succeeded. A number of people worked out a way of replicating the bridge that required more than 1,000 nails, but only a handful were able to design a version that required fewer than a thousand. The person who got the closest was an Icelander, with a design that required only 561 nails. The famous mathematician, Professor Sir Joseph Larmor (at that time the President of the Newtonian Mathematical Society) then promised that anyone who could come up with a design that used fewer nails, even if it were only one less than that number, would receive a doctorate in mathematics from Cambridge University. That was how ‘Abacus Head’ received a university certificate for a doctoral degree from Cambridge, because her model of the Mathematical Bridge only required 388 nails. After the award ceremony, she ended up chatting with one of the dons in Italian, demonstrating that she had mastered yet another language.

This happened in her fifth year at Cambridge, when she was twenty-two years old.

The following year, a pair of brothers who hoped to take the human race into the air came to Cambridge to visit her; their vision and bravery impressed her so much that she went to America with them. Two years later, in North Carolina, the first ever airplane successfully took off over the sand dunes and soared into the sky. Underneath the belly of the airplane, there was a legend in silver letters, recording the names of the most important people involved in the design and construction of the machine. In the fourth line it said:

Wing designer: Rong ‘Abacus’ Lillie, from C City, China.

Rong ‘Abacus’ Lillie was the name that she used when she was in the West, but in the genealogy of the Rong clan, her name is given as Rong Youying, a descendant in the eighth generation of the family. And the pair that took her away from Cambridge University were the pioneers of heavier-than-air human flight: the Wright brothers.

If the Wrights’ Flyer took her name into the sky, she took the reputation of Lillie’s Academy of Mathematics into the stratosphere. After the Xinhai Revolution, she realized that the nation’s fate was trembling in the balance, so breaking her longstanding engagement to her fiancé, she returned to her alma mater to take up the position of Head of the Department of Mathematics. By this time Lillie’s Academy of Mathematics had already changed its name to N University. In the summer of 1913, the President of the Newtonian Mathematical Society, Professor Sir Joseph Larmor, visited China, bringing with him a model of her design for the Mathematical Bridge using only 388 nails, which was then constructed in the grounds of the university. This event only served to make N University even more famous; you could say that Professor Sir Joseph Larmor was the third person to really bring the place to prominence.

In October 1943, Japanese bombing burned N University to the ground. The remarkable gift that Professor Sir Joseph Larmor had given them – the 1:250 model of Newton’s Mathematical Bridge – was destroyed in that fire. But by that time the woman who designed it had already been dead for twenty-nine years. She passed away the year after Larmor’s visit to N University, before she was even forty years old.