of the State Council, to decapitation. In their great leniency and out of respect for the empress, the allied countries agreed the criminal should be granted mercy, his punishment taking the form of permanent exile beyond the Great Wall, in Manchuria, but he could not be granted imperial amnesty.
His farewells were the most dramatic I have ever known. He was exiled to a minor district of Manchuria where countless anti-Western rebels had perished before him. Acting on Seventy-one’s orders, his wife had had an aviary built so that, with special permission from the law courts, he could take his eagles with him. Day after day the dimensions of the aviary grew, adding new levels until there were four storeys of small compartments, because his friends, his admirers and even complete strangers came in droves to offer him birds, the poorest of them bringing humble chickens. It was a Noah’s Ark: eagles, nightjars, turtledoves, cranes, mandarin ducks, parrots, cockatoos, nightingales, canaries, red-beaked crows, tawny owls, barn owls, pigeons, flamingos, swallows, pheasants, skylarks, magpies, kingfishers, pelicans, storks, grebes, woodpeckers, sparrows, chaffinches, hoopoes, cockerels, hens, ducks, geese … As dawn broke one morning in late autumn, escorted like a criminal by a dozen Chinese soldiers and wearing a wooden yoke round his neck, he left the city in which he had spent all thirty-eight years of his life. He had barely stepped through the West Gate of Peking before the soldiers took off the yoke so he could breakfast with them in a small inn, but a group of horsemen from the army of the foreign powers caught up with them. Speaking through a translator, the captain announced the order given by the commander in chief, General Valleri, to kill all the birds on the spot to ensure they did not become messengers between the exiled prince and Peking’s last remaining rebels. The horsemen dismounted, guns in hand, loaded their weapons, arranged themselves in a firing line and opened fire at point-blank range on the aviary. Strangled squawking and frantic flapping of wings in the blood-splattered Noah’s Ark. According to some witnesses, Seventy-one completely lost his head at the sight of this massacre and punctured his own eyeballs with a knife he found in the inn’s kitchen. After a month-long journey he arrived in Manchuria blind and mad, with his gigantic empty aviary, which, for many years to come, he took with him on weekly authorised trips deep into the Manchurian desert. His children would steer the little cart over to a dune and he would approach the empty aviary, his hands easily identifying the spaces originally reserved for eagles. He stroked the bamboo bars, inhaled the smell left by his birds of prey, lifted his face to the sky and admired their invisible flight, revelling in the long, mournful ringing of their bells. He called them by name, giving them a succession of incomprehensible instructions and orders to attack. His cries rang out in the infinite desert, fierce as a shepherd gathering his flock, filled with hatred and bitterness. Eventually he would put on the thick leather gauntlet that covered his arm up to the elbow, and raise his arm so they could come to rest on it while he stood like a pillar of salt on the sand dune.
During one such outing, one of his children felt a tingle down his spine because he heard a bird cry out, answering his fathers calls. “And I saw an eagle” [he later related to the author of the book] “hovering several dozen metres above the ground, dark against the sunlight like the shadow of a dead leaf on the wind, then it flew up until we could no longer see it. A black dot. But it came slowly back down towards us, as if checking the calls were real; the tips of its wings reflecting the sunlight, projecting a display of glittering flashes onto the dune, dazzling my eyes. Calling. More calling. A blind man and an eagle, their voices mingling in a duet which, even years later, still rings in my ears.”
The book’s author, to whom Seventy-one granted an interview, asked him about a legend which claimed that, during one excursion with the empty aviary, his children changed their route to go to a “singing dune” where Seventy-one’s calls to his imaginary eagles combined with the children’s ascent of the steep slope to produce a rumbling from the dune, a natural acoustic phenomenon, which the locals had known for a long time