Book Review: The Yellow Emperor’s Cure

The year is 1898. In Lisbon, a gifted young doctor by the name of Antonio Maria receives some shocking news. His father, one of the most respected men in the city, is suffering from a terrible, incurable disease—syphilis. In the late nineteenth century, syphilis was perhaps the most horrifying killer. A cure eluded the medical establishment, and its unsavoury origins and final symptoms—hideous lesions and rashes—were impossible to obscure, making patients of syphilis social outcasts.

So how does Antonio Maria react when he sees his father, reduced to delirium and ulcer-ridden decay? He heads off to China to find a cure for syphilis. One can only imagine an epilogue or sequel to The Yellow Emperor’s Cure in which Antonio grinds his teeth when the first cure for syphilis is discovered in nearby Germany.

The Yellow Emperor’s Cure has some charming descriptions of late nineteenth-century China and some engaging characters, like the European expatriate party set. However, it struggles to balance historical accuracy with author Kunal Basu’s desire to spin a fabulous yarn. Perhaps in an effort to retain the reader’s interest, the focus of The Yellow Emperor’s Cure keeps shifting. This has the detrimental effect of turning the plot slack. The timing of Basu’s release is also unfortunate. His novel follows outstanding titles such as David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke, which have similar plots about foreigners who seek to explore and understand the Orient, and fall in love with local women.

It’s an uphill task to write in the shadow of authors like Mitchell and Basu’s casual disregard for causality in The Yellow Emperor’s Cure doesn’t help. Antonio’s conviction that the notoriously secretive Chinese will reveal their medical secrets is about as inexplicable as how easily Antonio lets syphilis take a backseat and instead gets tangled in an affair with Fumi, the woman who is supposed to teach him Nei Ching, the Chinese art of diagnostics. Antonio meets Fumi through Xu, the Empress of China’s personal physician. Fumi is introduced as Xu’s assistant and is supposed to be an expert at Nei Ching herself.

We are, however, somewhat dubious about a medical assitant’s training when her lessons involve disrobing and her means of administering medicine to a feverish patient is by dribbling the potion over her naked breasts strategically positioned near the patient’s mouth. Antonio, on the other hand, has no such reservations. He takes both his medicine and Fumi regularly, thus turning The Yellow Emperor’s Cure into a love story about a European doctor and his Chinese teacher. Within a few chapters, Antonio is in the middle of far more strenuous action than trying out postures from the Chinese Kama Sutra (such a thing exists, apparently) because the Boxers, a secret society of foreigner-hating Chinese, are going around slaughtering Christian missionaries and European traders. For those who hold out hope that the story of a cure for syphilis will see some satisfactory conclusion, the biggest anti-climax is discovering how the Chinese treat victims of the disease.

The Yellow Emperor’s Cure by Kunal Basu, Picador, Rs499.

Deepanjana Pal is a journalist and the author of The Painter: A Life of Ravi Varma. She is currently a consulting copy editor at Elle magazine.