“Very little, I’m afraid,” I said. “Truth is, I haven’t even seen what it looks like.”
“It’s beautiful, McKenzie. Exquisite. It’s fourteen inches long, nine inches wide, six inches deep, and it’s carved from a single block of imperial jade mined in Burma, or whatever they call that country these days. That’s the good stuff, imperial jade—intense emerald green color and semitransparent. It was stolen from a Burmese artisan by a Chinese warlord around 1800. Now I admit that part of the story is a little murky. However, we do know for historic fact that the Lily was presented to Jaiqing Emperor, the sixth emperor of the Qing Dynasty, in China in August of 1820, although we don’t know who gave it to him or why. On September second of that year, Jaiqing was struck by lightning and died. They say that’s when the curse began—the curse of the Jade Lily.”
I had to smile, not at the curse but at the obvious joy it gave Heavenly to tell me about it. The first time I met Heavenly, she was in the Minnesota History Center Research Library investigating everything she could find about Jelly Nash and the gangsters that resided in St. Paul when it was an “open city.” She lived for this sort of thing.
“Eventually, the Lily became the property of Empress Dowager Cixi,” Heavenly said. “It didn’t do her any good, either. The Empress Dowager ruled China during the Boxer Rebellion. The Boxers were simple peasants who resisted the Western powers that wanted to carve China into colonies—France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Spain, Belgium, Russia, Japan, the Netherlands. The only countries that didn’t want to colonize China were the United States and Great Britain, although the British were intent on milking her for everything they could get.
“At first the Empress Dowager attempted to suppress the Boxers in order to appease the Europeans. When the German envoy was murdered on June 20, 1900, she realized that there was going to be hell to pay anyway, so she went all in. She committed the imperial troops to battle and declared war on all the Western powers. The foreign delegations that were in Beijing at the time—back then it was called Peking—took refuge in a fortified compound. They held out for fifty-five days under relentless assault and artillery bombardment until an army consisting of troops from eight different nations relieved them.
“That’s when things got really ugly. The Europeans literally raped China. Stole everything that wasn’t nailed down and a lot that was. Great Britain held loot auctions every afternoon because it wanted to make sure that ‘looting on the part of British troops be carried out in the most orderly manner.’ That’s an actual quote. It was through a loot auction that the Jade Lily fell into the hands of Colonel G. Nicholas Chaffee, a British serving officer.
“Chaffee was one of those ‘Take up the White Man’s burden’ kind of guys. Once the Chinese were subjugated, he volunteered for duty in India—apparently he wanted to help keep the natives in check following the Indian Famine. But while on his way to Bombay, Chaffee’s ship sank—no one has ever been able to figure out how or why—and Chaffee drowned. Chaffee’s widow quickly sold the Lily to the ninth Earl of Huntington for the princely sum of one hundred and fifty pounds. He was killed when the British captured Baghdad from the Ottoman Turks in March 1917 during the First World War. He was run over by General Sir Frederick Stanley Maude’s command car—I am not making this up. The Lily then became the property of his brother, the tenth Earl of Huntington, who was military attaché to the British Embassy in what was then called the State of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes but we know as Yugoslavia. His wife prominently displayed the Lily at social functions and delighted in telling guests about the curse until she died of an undiagnosed ailment. Soon after, the earl gave the Lily to his daughter Lady Julia as a wedding present when she married a Serb politician. A week later, Yugoslavia was invaded by the Nazis. Are you following me?”
“You make the Lily sound like one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” I said.
“I’m just saying, bad luck follows the Lily,” Heavenly said. “For example, Lady Julia and her husband fought with Tito’s partisans against the Nazis—apparently she was one helluva girl. However, they protested when Tito took control of the country after the war and established a constitution patterned after the Soviet Union’s. They were both shot. The Lily then fell into the hands of the politician’s sister, who had no idea what it was. She packed it up in a box and stored it in a bank vault in Sarajevo, where it was forgotten until her daughter, Tatjana Durakovic, rediscovered it following her mother’s death in 1992. Unfortunately, before Tatjana had a chance to cash in on her find, the Yugoslav Wars broke out, and what a happy little bloodbath that was.”