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Seth’s last weeks in Canton. In that darkened, shadow-filled room, it was almost as if he were there himself, half-reclining, smoking opium and staring at the Maidan – as though he were looking for phantoms, as Vico once said.
    This thought gave me a strange turn and I went quickly downstairs, back into the sunlight. I thought I’d visit Compton’s print-shop, and turned into Old China Street. Once a bustling thoroughfare, this too has a sleepy and forlorn look. It was only when I came to Thirteen Hong Street, where the foreign enclave meets the city, that things looked normal again. Here the crowds were just as thick as ever: torrents of people were pouring through, moving in both directions. In a minute I was swept along to the door of Compton’s print shop.
    My knock was answered by Compton himself: he was dressed in a dun-coloured gown and looked just the same – his head topped by a round, black cap and his queue clipped to the back of his neck, in a neat bun.
    He greeted me in English with a wide smile: ‘AhNeel! How are you?’
    I surprised him by responding in Cantonese, greeting him with his Chinese name: Jou-sahn Liang sin-saang! Nel hou ma?
    â€˜Hai-aa!’ he cried. ‘What’s this I’m hearing?’
    I told him that I’d been making good progress with my Cantonese and begged him not to speak to me in English. He was delighted and swept me into his shop, with loudcries of Hou leng! Hou leng!
    The print-shop too has changed in these last few months. The shelves, once filled with reams of paper and tubs of ink, are empty; the air, once pungent with the odour of grease and metal, is now scented with incense; the tables, once piled with dirty proofs, are clean.
    I looked around in astonishment: Mat-yeh aa?
    Compton shrugged resignedly and explained that his press has been idle ever since the British were expelled from Canton. There was little work in the city for an English-language printing press: no journals, bulletins or notices.
    And anyway, said Compton, I’m busy with some other work now.
    What work? I asked, and he explained that he has found employment with his old teacher, Zhong Lou-si, who I had met several times during the opium crisis (‘Teacher Chang’ was what I used to call him then, knowing no better). Apparently he is now a mihn-daaih – a ‘big-face-man’, meaning that he is very important: Commissioner Lin, the Yum-chai, has put him in charge of gathering information about foreigners, their countries, their trading activities &c. &c.
    In order to do this Zhong Lou-si has created a bureau of translation, Compton said: he employs many men who are knowledgeable about languages and about places overseas. Compton was one of the first to be hired. His job is mainly to monitor the English journals that are published in this region – the Canton Press , the Chinese Repository , the Singapore Journal and so on. Zhong Lou-si’s agents bring copies of these journals to him and he goes through them to look for articles that might be of interest to the Yum-chai or Zhong Lou-si.
    The subject that Compton follows most closely is of course the daaih-yin – ‘the big smoke’ – and it happened that he was going through an article in the Chinese Repository , on opium production in India. It was lucky for him that I came by for he was having trouble makingsense of it. Many of the words in the article were unfamiliar to him – ‘arkati’, ‘maund’, ‘tola’, ‘seer’, ‘chittack’, ‘ryot’, ‘carcanna’ and so on. Compton had not been able to find them in his English dictionary and was at his wit’s end. Nor did he know of many of the places that were mentioned in the article – Chhapra, Patna, Ghazipur, Monghyr, Benares and so on. Calcutta was the one place he had heard of – it is known here as Galigada.
    I spent a long time explaining everything