Image Source: Map of China, from the CIA Factbook. Public domain. Retrieved online at

The Bund, Shanghai.
Saturday 18 January, 1936.

Under the tower clock and telephone wires Jacintha watched the ships come and go. Sweat trickled on her neck. Maurice borrowed a trolley from the Cathay to move the boxes. Jiahao, who had not left with Willem and Adeline, pushed it along the Bund. Left onto Nanking Road, left again: away from the Bird Market and Great World amusement centre. He swerved the cart from criss-crossing trams and rampaging rickshaws. They waited for the bus outside Park Hotel. All human life was in this city. Indian policemen watched mah-jong players for ivory gambling. Vietnamese in straw pointed hats spoke with French dealers of silk and cotton. An Italian merchant sat high behind household goods, his radio blaring Rudolf Hess’s speech. There were so many stations to choose from and the city seemed to sound them all. In minutes, the Thomas Cook motor bus arrived and they heaved the trolley on board. The ride quickly passed Jing’An Temple. It went far out to Avenue Joffre and further, through the Badlands. The driver stopped for them on Yu Yuen Road: hamburger and corn beef smells from the Hungaria. The restaurant’s aged proprietor, Stella Szirmay, stood at the entrance in a low cut top, greeting ugly Dr. Miorini and his spouse, Ruby Edwards. Jacintha led the monks on into the Book Mart next door. It was a shop full of new age literature and nazi tracts. The ‘Countess’ thumbed the League of Truth books and prepared their receipt. While Jacintha waited, she made the decision to return home to Singapore.

Chaokung glanced to the upper floors of the Glen Line Building: the German embassy. Only twice since Lincoln M.P.’s appendix was removed did the pain hit: on learning of Stephani’s assassination plot, and when incarcerated in Vienna. Quickly, he looked back to the twenty-five miles of wharf. Back to smoke-stacks of bobbing steamers on the Whangpoo’s brown-blue water. The pain subsided, was soon forgotten as he and Margot walked the harbour. Each day he took a different acolyte and they’d look over the boats for sale. It was six months since Hertha’s suicide. His plan was to take them for a leisurely getaway to Madeira Island, south-west of Portugal. He’d read of breathtaking sea cliffs and tiny villages by mouths of ravines. The Mediterranean climate would be good for their health. A hundred foot floating monastery, would manifest his dreams so perfectly: at least until they reached Tibet. He could see it all, beyond the Yellow Sea. All the opportunity. In South Africa, the largest diamonds. Mexico’s revolutionary new President. America’s tribes self-governing their reservations. The sellers were interested in his idea: he’d already found a captain for ‘The Ark’. Margot was silent during each conversation about credit lines and financial backers. They wanted several hundred dollars in advance; money she knew they didn’t have.

He turned his back on the harbour that let the world pollute China. A world of Donald Duck and Monopoly; of Shirley Temple On The Good Ship Lollipop. Bauer’s legacy was a Germany re-arming, growling at it’s own tail. Himmler and Heydrich’s SS murdered their own: Kapp Putschist Gustav von Kahr; White Internationalist Ernst Rohm. Mussolini invaded Abyssinia, and infuriated MacDonald and Laval. Bonnie and Clyde were dead, Elgar too. There was nothing out there anyway, thought Chaokung.

They took the train along the coast seven hundred miles northeast, to Tientsin. The League of Truth worshipped at Dabei Temple on Tianwei Road. Like Shanghai there were European settlements and an Anglo-American concession. In the Japanese area they found Shoukei Chogen, a calligrapher who brought new funds but was antagonistic with Jiahao. Chogen regarded the Chinese as a sub-species. At sunrise, they gathered around the Future Buddha in Dabei’s Grand Hall, the statues of the Four Heavenly Kings on each side. They prayed by ancient statues of bronze, iron, wood and stone. In the afternoons Chao led them on walks through the Jewish Cemetery, or to the hilltops for mountain views; teasers for Tibet. Or they sat at the benches on the waterfront and watched the ships. In the evenings they returned to the Buddhist House on the corner of Poppe Road and Romanoff Avenue. They were watched by British agents who scrutinised Chaokung’s meetings with Soviets, and reported back to Whitehall. Meanwhile, Chaokung wrote a new book, ‘Dawn or Doom of Humanity’. Over two hundred and fifty pages he expounded the principles of good government, free press, education, national defence and foreign politics. In each case man had a choice to make: embrace the ultimate potential of humankind; or sink into a deep, degrading abyss which threatened all life on Earth. He appealed to readers to cast off false labels of nationality. Yet he failed to intervene in the bullying of Jiahao. Failed to tell Chogen to recognise their shared humanity.

Mid-May 1937, and the dark prophecies of ‘Dawn or Doom’ appear in bookstores. Early June, the Second Sino-Japanese War begins. At the end of the month, the Japanese navy takes out Tientsin’s forts and aircraft. The city falls quickly to three thousand soldiers, though the foreign concessions are left alone. In August, the occupying forces travel seventy miles to suppress Chinese militia, leaving a skeleton staff of a hundred. From the cornfields, rebels machine gun the barracks. Their bodies are burned by four Japanese bomber planes, first of the vicious reinforcements. Chaokung keeps his monks indoors. Jiahao, ready to abscond, finds he is penned in. Reports have come from Shanghai: unbelievable stories of thousands massacred in city-wide bombardment. He’s sceptical, until he sees the photo. The lone baby crying in the smoking debris of Shanghai Station, ‘Bloody Saturday’, is printed in papers around the world. Weeks later a typhoon, among the worst in Hong Kong’s history, claims eleven thousand lives.

William, the First Baron Tyrrell, signs the visitors book. His Foreign Office replacement, Vansittart, meets him in the hall. Socialising usually takes place at the club, but Vansittart is up to his eyes in it. Tyrrell, now seventy-one, is confident he isn’t going to be put to work. Behind the door they hear loud cursing. The impossible man! Cause of all migraines! Vansittart opens up quickly and dresses down his civil servant. Andrew Scott apologises, but Trebitsch Lincoln; again! Tyrrell empathises; chuckles; feels an anger of three decades here. After Whitehall, Tyrrell went to Paris as their Ambassador, and found Trebitsch staring out at him from a Buddhist lecture poster. No sooner had he returned to Britain than Trebitsch arrived at Liverpool docks. He’d assumed, three years later, he was free of the annoyance.

“You’re William Tyrrell aren’t you?” asked Andrew. “Look at this. Jan 7^th, 1934: Telegram to George V. ‘Wholly wanton imprisonment in provocative insult challenge to China!’ What?? 28^th June, Alexander Cadogan in Peking: ‘Please, I hope the British Empire and I will reconcile.’ Miles Lampson in Shanghai the following year: more nonsense!”

“I hardly see what I can do about any of it,” quipped Tyrrell.

“This Summer: to the P.M. ‘I am a victim of a diabolical vendetta waged by your government’s machinations. I demand honourable amends for all the wrongs perpetrated against me.’”

“Mr. Scott, that is enough,” said Vansittart. “Baron Tyrrell doesn’t want to hear any of this!”

From Scott’s desk, Tyrrell picked up, ‘Anti-Japanese Propaganda’, a new pamphlet from The League of Truth. “I quite understand Mr. Scott’s exasperation… Listen to this. ‘As a resident of Tientsin I declare: I have never seen a better behaved Army of Occupation than the Japanese. They molest nobody, interfere with no lawful occupation…’” Tyrrell dropped the pamphlet back onto the desk.

“Japanese propaganda, more like,” said Vansittart. “Let’s get out of here, William. I’ll buy lunch.”

They were gone, without Andrew Scott gleaning any advice from Tyrrell. He read on: of Chaokung’s description of the New Japanese Empire: just, tolerant, and peaceful. Then, he recorded his last minute on the last page of the Trebitsch Lincoln file.

‘I think the only comment I can make on this is !!!’

Weeks after the fall of Shanghai, reports came from the West the Panchen Lama had died. The leader of Tibetan Buddhism had gone. The same day the aggressors set out for Nanking on killing competitions, transmitting plagues of death-by-rape, two to three hundred thousand people murdered in six weeks. A month later the heartless Japanese warriors bombed Chongqing, turning the brown Yangtze red. From America, Roosevelt excuses Hirohito over Americans killed in Shanghai. Chamberlain appeases Hitler over Czechoslovakia. Global forces converge in Spain as Franco leads massacres in Guernica and Brunete. In Hungary, Regent Miklós Horthy tries to distance his government from pro-German co-operation, set up by his late Prime Minister, Gyula Gömbös. Joachim von Ribbentrop and Martin Luther of the German Foreign Office notify Horthy they are not happy about this. At the end of May 1938, Gömbös’s successor passes The First Jewish Law: millions of Jews are restricted from marriage and employment. Sandor Trebitsch has every reason to be worried when a few weeks later a skinhead in black cloak shows up at his door. She introduces herself as Tao Lo, Margot Markuse, a disciple of Chaokung. Sandor has no idea who she’s talking about. When he reads her letter of introduction he’s less pleased. Krausz comes around that evening and Sandor warms to her. They subject her to such quizzing, allowing her to stay seems only polite.

The following day she walks to the Royal Palace, and again twice that week. Unable to get a meeting she leaves a signed copy of ‘Dawn or Doom’, dedicated to Regent Horthy, and a note from Tientsin.

‘Tortured by nostalgia, broken of body and soul, a tired wanderer on this earth returns to his native soil. The path of glory and success is paved but with sorrow and grief until one rests at the place of his birth.’

Local and international papers want to learn Margot’s story and she impresses many readers with her intelligence. Still, the weeks pass without word from the Royal Court. Sandor tires of her love for Chaokung and tells her all about Ignacz Trebitsch. Finally, Regent Horthy sends a man to fetch her. At that moment, she’s on a train pulling out of Budapest-Keleti. Margot Markuse does not return to China.

The Tientsin escalation drives Chaokung, Maurice and Chogun back to Shanghai, port of last resort. Labourers fill craters were once stood the Palace Hotel; the Wing On department store; the Great World amusement centre. Sassoon House is boarded up and the Cathay Hotel lobby is only boards. A bomb had frozen the hands on her clock tower at 4:27. The rising violence does not spare the respectable Cathay. One day, they see a gun battle break out in front, spitting balls of blood. In the past year, say members of the Buddhist Benevolent Society, they picked eighteen thousand cadavers from the streets. Chinese gangsters still move the opium, but a nastier Japanese strain that boils into blood. On Chaokung’s sixtieth birthday, everywhere he walks he sees beggars with festering sores and eye infections. The monks are anomalies: fixed stoic features in a stream of diverse identities; almost. Chaokung claims to be the tenth Panchen Lama; to another, the reincarnated (fourteenth) Dalai Lama; to another, the Lama Dorji Den.

Shanghai feels the coming war and defies it, taking in boat-loads of Jews Canada and Cuba will not. Japanese barricades are around each foreign concession; checkpoints everywhere. The Germans, once slow to Nazism, are pushed to become fully fledged party members. Consul Martin Fischer strongly resents Goebbels’ new posting, Louis Siefkin. From the consulate, Siefkin transmits the speeches of Hitler and Hess to six Shanghai public radio frequencies. Above the houses of the International Settlement, national flags rise like some great pissing contest. Chaokung has Maurice deliver a press release: a universal appeal for world peace. A few days later the Abbot’s bowels are a disaster zone. Through the night he burns on the toilet in excremeditation. In the morning he learns the Third Reich have invaded Poland. After sleep his pain has gone, but the problem has not. Shanghai sees little evidence of the war in the months coming up to Christmas. The New York Times publish his second appeal: all governments of warring European countries must resign at once. On New Year’s Day Franklin D. Roosevelt pleads for world peace. The Abbot tells the United Press he is going to America to meet with him. He says goodbye to Chogen, to Maurice; to Baron Collenberg and Walter Fuchs; to Baroness Soucanton and Lo Chia-Ling. He says goodbye to Dr. Miorini and Two-Gun Cohen; Mickey Hahn and Stella Szirmay. He says goodbye to Shanghai, whose light is dying. The press gather around as he tells them he has been denied a visa, and that the American bureaucrats are stupid, stupid people, but they are tired. Tired of his old rants of turncoats and treachery. Tired with Trebitsch Lincoln, whose international vaudeville act has had its day.

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Image Source: Pacific Press Ltd / Wasserstein, B. (1989) The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln, Penguin.
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Great Western Road, Shanghai.
Friday 25 August, 1933.

The north-west suffered a devastating earthquake and armed conflict, but Shanghai had returned to a state of relative peace and sunny serenity. The door opened at Buddhist House, 131 Great Western Road. Martin Steinke, Marie Chauve and Hertha Henschel left, walking fifteen minutes to Jing’an Temple.

The Italians, Anthony and Giotto, studied under Adeline, a small stern Belgian nun with a fat head. Her icy exterior only breaks when Chaokung enters. He looks the manuscript over. Thirty years in the civil service has made her a polished communicator.

The pillars of a narrow hallway hold up two floors to blue sky. Adeline strolls the square by gargoyles the size of fingernails, and gryphons, big as houses. The shade of curving roofs and emerald lotus leaves give her pause to interrogate the self. From the kitchen there is a vegetable aroma and Maurice from Munich taking dishes from bamboo drainers. Adeline barks his name. Suddenly Juliet Escoffier flies past, pulling bowls from Maurice, putting them back. The mother sauces must be prepared first, she says. She comes from a family of gourmet chefs. Escoffier looks at Adeline as if she is responsible. Maurice apologises, and Escoffier suggests he brush the square.

Maurice C. Braus is thirty, with a ball shaped chin and dazed black eyebrows. The Latvian, Margot Markuse, wipes the steps in circular motions and does not see him passing. The married couple from Cannes bow. Henri and Marie rake the allotment soil on this, Henri’s fiftieth birthday. The expedition is much harder than they pictured yet gardening around the stone lions makes it all worthwhile. Marie is twelve years younger than Henri. They met after the war, when she became his first hire at the perfumery. Marie wooed him with her eye for art and renditions of show-tunes. Marie notices the Abbot watching them. Between the black cloak his face is thin, all bone and bulbous head. Marie’s friend, Hertha, the youngest, is at his side. There is to be no talk now for Chaokung sends Marie away.

He puts the tool in Hertha’s hands and guides her in direction and posture. A slow rake can make sure soil is not pushed onto the path, he says, taking her hands in his.

The summer furnace recedes, transforming into purple clouds at dusk.

Three months and three hundred kilometres by Tientsin-Pukow railway, they toil above Nanking. Damp Yangtze River rain sprinkles on the frost: on red maples at cave entrances; sixth century rock-cut shrines; golden gingkoes with fan shaped leaves.

Willem Jansen, the railway planner from Holland, knocks on the Abbot’s office. When called, he sees Martin Steinke counting the last donations. Chaokung puts his pen down and asks Willem to approach. The invite to the Confucian monks of Fuzimiao to come there, to Ch’i-hsia Chan Monastery, on Sunday, was positively received. The Soviet and French ambassadors will also be there, helped by their familiarity with Steinke’s writings. Steinke has protruding angular ears but does not seem to hear Willem. He’s fixed on the accounts. Their land is owned in perpetuity and so temple finances should be stable.

Willem is dismissed, and the Abbot and Steinke exchange books. Chaokung’s draft sermon uses Steinke’s writings on breathing and healing. It is barely in Steinke’s hands when Escoffier enters. She gives the Abbot an envelope bursting with yuan banknotes. Steinke is pleased his work will be shared however, it may not be appropriate to lecture the crowd on sexual desire. Escoffier agrees. The people do not want to hear all that. They do not want to be told what they can’t do, for their life is not for everyone. Very well, said Chao. He will bow to her wisdom in this matter.

Escoffier steps out to the path were the rain is now only an echo. She makes her way to the bathroom. On nearing the partitions anguished sobbing fills the air. Young Hertha’s face streams with blood from cut hair, razor trembling in her hand.

At Ch’i-hsia Chan they rose before the dawn, sitting cross-legged reciting vows. At seven they washed, then ate. Before lunch they studied The Sublime One’s holy texts, and after, attended a lecture. Adeline took strength from the sermons on avoiding the pleasures of the flesh. Chao said he was legally married, but in all things he was married to God, and looked at Henri and Marie as he spoke. In doing so, he saw Hertha’s mouth dip in sadness.

“Abbot,” she asked, “nothing will stand between myself and God. Should I not share him with others?”

He thought for a moment. “Of course you must. You live with God, day and night. He is with us not just in prayer. We do eat with Him and do sleep with Him; do all in His Presence.”

On Sunday Hertha was ordained ‘Tao Ta’, which means ‘Our Right Path’. Steinke was also anointed as ‘Tao Chun’, and Margot Markuse as ‘Tao Lo’. The Bodhisattva led the ceremony before a crowd of two hundred people. Afterwards, Adeline and Jiaho politely turned away reporters. Chao and Hertha spoke with Walter Fuchs, and a Chinese official. Steinke was with Lo Chia-Ling and Baroness Soucanton. They were the monastery’s two biggest funders. Chao saw them and excused himself. Steinke was caught off guard by the interruption. Ladies, he said, our mission starts under favourable signs. We will propagate the Buddha’s doctrine in the West with His Holiness The Panchen Lama at our side. Steinke briefly registered the lie; his thoughts raced to Chao’s role in this successful day.

In December they returned to Shanghai, and mourned the death of the thirteenth Dalai Lama. The Italians, Anthony and Giotto, left then, and Chao did not seem to care. He was quite happy to hear of The New Life Movement, a moral reform program led by Kai-shek and his wife. Chao said it reflected their own principles.

Marie preferred Nanking: she missed the deer; the goats; gibbons; the coveted sightings of big cats. Initially reluctant about their early retirement, now she enjoyed sitting in one space for many hours. Except, Shanghai was noisier, and with it, the Abbot was harsher. He doled out extra work and punishments. She wanted to discuss it with Henri but Chao made sure she saw him less and less.

In January, Chao took Marie to the German embassy. His friends, Collenberg and Fuchs, had been replaced by Richard Behrend, and his request for a visa would have to go to Munich. Marie sensed Behrend had no interest in helping them. Two weeks later, she took down Chao’s dictated letter to the Fuhrer. He said he had once judged him wrongly and now, was full of praise for his role in the rise of Indo-Aryan civilisation, of which the foundations were the universal truth of the Buddha.

Hertha, twenty-four years young, thought the monastic life suited her. Where-ever they practised she could pray and paint, and find balance. She got on especially well with Escoffier, Marie and Willem, but not Adeline. She sensed she was not alone in this. Only The Venerable One considered Adeline a favourite. When he asked Hertha to join him in applying for a visa at the Belgian consulate, she was surprised. On Nanking Road, the Chinese turned Hertha’s head. She examined the women’s faces and postures. Hertha wanted to be one of them and could not understand why they held low status: women, and the Chinese generally.

A month later, Hertha looked over the edge of the SS Empress of Russia, the North Pacific Ocean long kissing her lungs, that vast face of God. She grappled with the door and found the Frenchwoman laughing at her on the other side. Escoffier had magnetism: she was sensible but also exuberant, and forever chirping on about colour. Hertha sneezed as old Adeline walked past and she stared disapprovingly from black raisin eyes. Escoffier, looking to cheer her up, took her to one side. Abbot Chaokung, she said, was once known by another name. He was a British spy! Hertha laughed at the idea of it. She did not believe Escoffier’s stories; until they reached Vancouver.

At first they thought it was related to Jiahao, and the Chinese Exclusion Act. They waited patiently forty five minutes. Then word came the Abbot would not be admitted on Canadian soil. Chao raised his voice. They had planned to go to Ontario to set up a Buddhist colony!

The group were returned to the ship and Adeline arranged for a telegram appeal to be sent to the Prime Minister. Journalists from the Vancouver Sun, The Courier and The Province gathered with cameras and tape recorders. Immigration were swamped with enquiries. The next morning, a telephone call came in from Ottawa. It was the Prime Minister, R. B. Bennett. He told the head official that Chaokung was to be allowed into Canada for thirty days.

They stayed at a skid row hostel between Gastown and Chinatown. Most other buildings they walked by in the afternoons were extravagant: Birks on Georgia Street with terracotta friezes; the Hotel Vancouver, where Babe Ruth and Sarah Bernhardt lodged; the Eastside Majestic picture house, and the Army and Navy Shoe Department claiming, ‘We Undersell Everybody’. The people were crushed by the Great Depression. ‘Willing to Work’ lay in laps of men sleeping in the streets. Rats ran around spilled soup and beans in a Government relief camp. Man, wife and child fought with police, who charged them with vagrancy. Chaokung’s protégés offered an intriguing distraction, and they discussed which were men and which were women. Reporters followed them, and the locals took advantage of this. Why did the papers not talk about Eton’s Clothing, who exploited crisis laws to pay half the minimum wage? The reporters brushed them off, and Chaokung in turn brushed them off. The acolytes formed a protective circle around him, but a few slipped through.

“I am pleased at being officially on British soil for the first time since the war,” one heard.

“I will speak at leading cities throughout England this summer,” another learned.

He told a third, “You can write a story without seeing me or talking to me,” before a door was slammed in his face.

Hertha was there only for show when he agreed to be interviewed by The Sun at Vancouver Hotel. When the journalist said he was in court for the trial of the Abbot’s son, he was gripped by sadness. Hertha was sent out, as Chao demanded the man recall every detail.

The attention from the press made sure the public lecture sold out quickly. Martin Steinke opened with a reminder how Siddhārtha Buddha was but a man living two thousand years ago. Modern culture was quite different. No one could stick to finding enlightenment in Buddha’s old ways. The modern disciple should embrace relevancy, be open to new teachings and new revelations.

At the interval, the Abbot was short and cold with him. He said it was him they came to see.

“Rising above the restless soul is the only way to banish impatience. Politics is a dangerous game. It makes the heart heavy, but is necessary as a mechanism for Truth to be birthed across nations. Government, the armed forces, big business, these things cannot be entered into for ego. Or profiteering. Or power. Those traits must be removed by abstinence and fasting. The binding power of the universe is energy. Responsibility stands in the flesh. For too long men think in terms of greed and we deceive ourselves into loss.”

The name of his talk was ‘How I Killed Trebitsch Lincoln’.

On the train to Ottawa, he and Steinke looked out into scenes of white hillsides and gold rivers, brown countrysides and tiny houses. Chaokung saw the waterway to St. Lawrence River, and recognised sites of Presbyterian pilgrimages. He got up and passed his silent followers, to send the telegram.

TO RAMSAY MACDONALD, PRIME MINISTER OF THE UNITED KINGDOM

FROM BRITISH TERRITORY WHERE HAVE BEEN KINDLY PERMITTED TO LAND I SEND YOU FOR BRITISH GOVERNMENT FOR BRITISH PEOPLE MY ASSURANCE THAT I AM THEIR FRIEND NOT THEIR ENEMY STOP PLEASE ACCEPT MY SINCERE WISHES FOR THEIR WELFARE PROSPERITY AND PEACE.

Escoffier, Adeline, Hertha and Jiahao sat together, the lenses of Jiahao’s spectacles smiling permanently, and he was, of all of them happiest to be there. With his head shaved he looked much older than thirty-six, due in part to his poor upbringing. Hertha scrutinised him for any clue to the Chinese mindset. Tutelage under Cleather and Chaokung meant Jiahao had a good grasp on sacrifice, divinity and enquiry.

“You should stop staring at him, Tao Ta,” said Adeline.

“Pardon?” asked Hertha.

“Perhaps if you spent more time affirming your vows,” said Adeline.

“Now wait just a minute,” snapped Hertha.

“Oh. Don’t think I don’t see you and Tao Lo.” Adeline shook her head. There was a glimpse of disgust and she turned to the window. “Lusting after the Abbot. Why, it’s unseemly,” she said.

“I did not!” cried Hertha. “I did not!”

“How about you cease bullying her?” said Escoffier. “Looking over that poor child’s shoulder every hour, like nothing is ever good enough. And she dare not say boo to you, no one dare.”

Everyone but Adeline, whose face was white, looked at the Frenchwoman with timid pride.

“We do not make inappropriate remarks about you and the Abbot. Yet you get preferential treatment, you get anything you want!”

“That is simply not true,” snapped Adeline. “How dare you, you harlot! Swanning about like you’re better than me!” Adeline didn’t know where to look. Finally she looked up and saw Chaokung.

He said nothing for a moment, and then, “This will not do. It is not for one sister to turn on another. It is a futile waste of the energies of the Buddha. You are all to remain silent until I say otherwise. Only I will talk during our week in Ottawa. Adeline, you will spend that time in solitary meditation. I hope you will learn to transcend your folly.”

That night they hear Sutton on sax, Gillespie’s trumpet, Ellington’s piano. On Friday morning they see linen mill workers going to risk their lives for a cheque. ‘Closed’ signs are hammered out by alleys brimming with the guts of store rubbish. They see a soup kitchen and ragged malnourished dockers and bawling babies with buckets. It is the third week of April and food rations have run out.

On Monday they return across Wellington Street bridge, above Rideau Canal. Across from the station is the magnificent Château Laurier. The hotel windows are Tiffany stained-glass. A diplomat crosses the lobby’s Belgian marble floor to meet them. They pass carved gables of scrolls and flowers to the new East Wing. The panelling is dark oak, like a British baron’s home, with trophies of the hunt overlooking the gallery. The elevator rises above the Jasper Tea Room, the two floors of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, to Bennett’s seventeen room suite. They line up before the Prime Minister, who greets each in turn. He offers refreshments, only to be told they are fasting.

They stand silently for an hour. In another room, Chaokung and Bennett talk about Buddhism and money.

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Cologne, Germany.
November, 1919.

Something about him troubled Olga Nieuwkamp. Not at first, when he’d come to them from the Prince’s residence at Wieringen. He was charming, knowledgeable, and well connected. He had done some favour for Elsa, Olga’s secretary, at the American embassy. Elsa von Nagelein undertook charity work with Austrian and German P.O.Ws, one of many jobs she did brilliantly. Given how they felt, it seemed fitting to bring him to their home at The Hague. Olga opened up about her father and first husband, both consuls in Singapore; and her second husband, Thomas, the Dutch Consul in Cologne. When Trebitsch asked for a loan of two thousand florins, he had sounded embarrassed, and that endeared him to her.

“Four days only,” he’d said, but the weeks went by. He returned to Berlin, and took Elsa with him. It was she who responded, once, to the letters demanding repayment. Her darling, T.L., was getting it organised. He just needed another month. After the Kapp Putsch, Lincoln was reported walking up and down Wilhelmstrasse in defiance of the authorities. That was when Olga lost patience. She talked the matter over with Thomas, and they set his lawyer on Lincoln’s trail. Summons went to Vienna, were the Czechs already had him in the courts. Then he escaped: to America, to China. Thomas continued working at the embassy and related any sightings, but a decade of legal action was going nowhere. He had disappeared entirely when the Great Depression hit. Olga and Thomas dropped the case, sold the house in The Hague, and moved to Cologne permanently.

Berlin Philharmonic Hall.
Tuesday 25 October, 1932.

A line slowly moved on Bernburger, the street home to Germany’s largest newspapers. They paid their admission fee and waited in the lobby, glimpsed Martin Steinke, moving through the crowd. An unmistakeably serious intellectual, he’d tight cheekbones and dark cropped hair. Then into the darkness of Schwechten’s converted ice rink, a thousand seater grand auditorium. Rows Door A, stalls and balconies Door B. The lights simmered low and then the hush. Steinke took the stage and introduced himself, leader of ‘Gemeinde unm Buddha’. For ten years he’s published ‘Community Around Buddha’. Devoted as they were to fellowship and study it was the group’s great honour that evening to present to Berlin a man in keeping with those practices; the Abbot Chaokung.

“Good evening. Wǎnshàng hǎo. Yi’n shui’ si yuan: when you drink the water, remember the spring.”

‘My Way to Buddha’ drew on the teachings of Madame Escoffier, Dr. Grimm and the Brahmavihara bhvana: the four virtues which were love, compassion, empathic joy and an even mind. What could be accomplished in a year’s devotion, he said.

The audience delighted in the descriptions of the Pao-hua-Shan Monastery: how every monk worked in co-operation for the temple’s up-keep. Each were rotated around different jobs: cook, cleaner, gardener, barber, each role like the taking on of a different identity, an identity fluid like the water of life. Some chores were only performed in days ending in ‘4’ or ‘9’. The monastery was cleaned daily, even areas that were spotless. That was how to assure a clean mind and a clear heart. He spoke of Shanghai, were conflict was lessened after the Ceasefire Agreement. Yet “heian shije”, a dark world, was coming. So Buddhism was on the rise. Asia could not contain it. There was a need for it in Berlin, Stockholm, Budapest, anywhere man breathes.

The curtains closed, black on house light, to applause. The newspaper presses rolled, sending Chaokung’s words across Berlin by tram. Night and day, Kung prayed with Steinke and Hertha Henschel. Cymbals chimed and Hertha’s pretty eyes fluttered. Steinke counted out Deutsch-marks, gifted to the Abbot for his train to Brussels.

He looked into the box of silver and would think back wondering if that was the moment everything went wrong.

The window delivered a fast reel of grainy snapshots. Leipzig: tall evergreens of triangular trinities. Frankfurt: mountain ranges rolling and bobbing, yellow and red steel bridges. Cologne, and rain clouds gathered over the locomotive. Then, like sudden revolution, the sun stretched out and breathed into the carriage. The man in black suit and trilby was a British secret agent. He just knew it. He stopped in Liege, where two men seemed to follow him in October’s callous weather. Damp robed he arrived in Brussels. He watched life speed up, contemplated all the people through the intersecting steel bars.

Before Steinke even arranged the lecture he’d wanted to prove he could be in Berlin: capitalising on a successful market; a cooler climate than Munich. Brussels was another return to another country, toward another coast. The prison bars sub-divided the dimensions of the universe, like the mesh of the train carriage. The sound of the train carriage was the encore and omen of applause. He remembered thinking he would go to where he was safe, appreciated, powerful.

From Brussels back to Liege, because he was in no hurry. He’d hustled another speaking lecture. From there, across the German border. Not far, for he was not quite ready to retreat.. He would go back to Cologne, back, back the way he came like some worker ant. There were passengers with newspaper faces talking of Gyula Gömbös, who had become Prime Minister of Hungary. The opening of the San Francisco Opera House. They pass viaducts and transmitter towers, enter the Rhineland. Die Transportgewerkschaften streiken. Shénme? On Thursday. Donderdag. Het is waar. Współpraca nazistowsko-komunistyczna. Ilekshanz zenen vayter vokh. Je vais changer mon vote. Du bist ein dreckiger Verräter!

The police car mesh window broke down all the buildings of the twenties: Cologne Butzweilerhof Airport, the University; disassembled them for his study. Then it was fogged over from his sweat. The door to his dirty cell rolled back like the carriages of the trapped. He was in prison in Brussels. He was in prison in Cologne. The two seemed to blur together:: with Parkhurst and Pentonville and Vienna. At night he dreamed of Cologne’s auditorium, rows and rows of metal seats filled with monks and nuns in black and white. From darkness, he illuminated. Then he remembered curtains backstage, and the sudden flash of the policeman’s torch on his eyes. They poked and prodded him and he screamed at the Belgian officer.

“Do you work for the British Secret Service?” Chaokung said. “Ou étes-vous des agents de la France? Je suis un moine bouddhiste et aucun crime n’a été commis!!”

“Vous avez été identifié comme un personnage indésirable,” said the Belgian officer.

The heat had boiled over in him as he listened to the demeaning tone. He put it at a distance, watched the events unfold before him, as the other prisoners swore, howled, laughed at the Nosferatu jail-bird.

“Vous êtes expulsé. Vous ne devez pas retourner en Belgique,” said the officer.

“Ihre Haftbefehl ist vom niederländischen Konsulat. Ihnen wurde der Diebstahl von zweitausend Gulden vorgeworfen,” said the German, and left.

Here he was again, trapped in the world’s dark time, the “heian shije”. When would it end? Might he slip through the bars, aided by the spirits of the Wise Ones? Chaokung thought deeply, silently. He practised his breathing exercises. He had to take his time. When he was released, for he would be, he would savour the successes, just like Steinke said. He’d do what he needed to do: be the victor, the advisor, the leader. This current state was just a part. He remembered the Belgian returning his personal artefacts: telegram from Collenberg, a book of prayer, his journal and the German visa. As he clung to this, something slipped through the cracks.

“Frau Nieuwkamp,” seethed Trebitsch.

Chaokung looked past the apparition. To speak with it was to engage with it.

“I have no money to give! I have only just gotten out of jail. Imprisoned because I am an enemy of the people!” said Trebitsch.

It was moustached, thirteen years younger and frail. This Trebitsch spoke in English, smelled of the sea air around Harwich A temporary autonomous state, released from Pentonville, he thought he could hear the radio orders demanding his recall.

Chaokung had accepted the truth of these words, of all things. He had no possessions worth any money. His only assets were owed fees from various concert halls. He was just a poor Buddhist monk.

“I am already declared bankrupt!” shouted Trebitsch.

Footsteps approached. “Mr. Lincoln, ich bin Ihr Anwalt”

Chaokung raised his head and smiled. “Gut. Gut. Ich möchte eine Insolvenz anmelden.”

Chaokung drank his green tea then set the cup upon the saucer. He was barely in Cologne prison a week, he said. All part of some elaborate intimidation tactic, again!! Hermann Erben laughed. He asked what didn’t Trebitsch do to annoy the German government. Chaokung said that he was no longer that person. Neither was he the man Erben met in Shanghai in 1928.

The three of them sat in the lobby of the Hong Kong Hotel. Erben was an Austrian physicist, now in his mid thirties. His friend, twelve years younger was a handsome bit-part actor from Australia. They listened with wonder as the monk spoke of Cologne, and his return to Berlin. The new government there refused to give him a new visa. The British said the same, so he returned to Nice. Errol Flynn asked about Shanghai and Chaokung talked of birdsong and bountiful fauna along the Yangtze’s mammoth cliffs. Flynn, who had come from filming ‘In the Wake of the Bounty’ in Sydney, didn’t talk of himself much. He was keener to hear about the twelve star tattoos on the Abbot’s forehead, which he learned were spokes on ‘The ‘Wheel of Becoming’. Their talk was cut short by Margot Markuse, arriving in flowing brown robes.

“Excuse me, Master,” she said. “You asked me to inform you when the time was right.”

Chaokung bowed. Flynn and Erben shook his hand and he walked with Margot along Victoria Harbour to the ferry. Henri and Marie Chauve followed behind them, then Madame Escoffier, Martin Steinke and Hertha Henschel, each robed, looking out at the South China Sea anticipating their voyage to fantastic Shanghai.