He buried his nose in his wine flask again, and burped comfortably.
“The abbot of the Monastery of Sh'u was truly heroic,” he said. “He had vowed to raise me as his own, and he kept his word, and so well did he pound an education into my head that I eventually did quite well in my chin-shih examination. When I left the monastery, it was not in pursuit of scholarship, however, but in pursuit of an unparalleled career in crime. It was quite a shock for me to discover that crime was so easy that it was boring. I reluctantly turned to scholarship, and by the accident of handing in some good papers I was entombed in the Forest of Culture Academy as a research fellow, and I escaped from that morgue by bribing the court eunuchs to get me an appointment as a military strategist. I managed to lose a few battles in the approved manner, and then I became one of the emperor's wandering persuaders, and then Governor of Yu, and it was in the last occupation that the light finally dawned. I was trying to get enough evidence to hang the loathsome Dog-Meat General of Wusan, but he was so slippery that I couldn't prove a thing. Fortunately the Yellow River was flooding again, and I managed to convince the priests that the only way to appease the river god was through the custom of the ancients. So the Dog-Meat General disappeared beneath the waves tied to a gray horse—I was sorry about the horse, but it was the custom—and I tendered my resignation. Solving crime, I had belatedly discovered, was at least a hundred times more difficult than committing it, so I hung the sign of a half-closed eye above my door and I have never regretted it. I might add that I have also never left a case half-finished.”
I gulped noisily, and I suppose that the hope in my eyes was shining as brightly as the moon.
“Why do you think I've been telling you this?” said Master Li. “I have a very good reason to be angry at the Duke of Ch'in, since one of his ancestors killed my parents, and if nothing else, my various careers have uniquely prepared me for the task of stealing ginseng roots.”
He patted my shoulder.
“Besides, I'd take you for a great-grandson any day,” he said. “I would never dream of allowing you to go out on your own to be slaughtered. Get some sleep, and we'll leave at dawn.”
Tears blurred my eyes. Master Li called to the dogs and crawled from the cave, and they gamboled happily around him as he danced down the path toward the monastery, waving his wine flask. The high-pitched four-tone liquid-voweled song of High Mandarin drifted back upon the night breeze.
I wished that I could have seen him when he was ninety. Even now his leaps and capers were magnificent in the moonlight.
Part Two—THE FLUTE, THE BALL, AND THE BELL
12. Of Castles and Key Rabbits
At the suggestion of the abbot I will explain for the benefit of barbarians that my country is Chung-kuo, which can mean Central Country or Middle Kingdom, whichever one prefers. The point is that it is the country in the exact center of the world, and the only country that lies directly beneath Heaven. “China” is a barbarian invention that was coined in awe and honor of the first Duke of Ch'in, who took over the empire in the Year of the Rat 2,447 (221 B.C.). He was a remarkable reformer. Mass murderers are usually reformers, the abbot tells me, although not necessarily the other way around.
“We are being strangled by our past!” roared the Duke of Ch'in. “We must make a new beginning!”
What he had in mind was the suppression of every previous philosophy of government and the imposition of one of his own, called Legalism. The abbot says that the famous first sentence of the Book of Legalism is, “Punishment produces force, force produces strength, strength produces awe, awe produces virtue; thus virtue has its origin in punishment,” and that there is little need to read the second sentence.
The duke began his reforms by burning every book in the empire, with the exception of certain technical and divinatory works, and since the scholars were burned along with the books, there were vast areas of knowledge that vanished from the face of the earth. He disapproved of certain religions; temples and priests and worshippers went up in flames. He disapproved of frivolous fables; professional storytellers were beheaded, along with vast numbers of bewildered grandmothers. The leading Confucianists were decoyed into a ravine and crushed by falling boulders, and the penalty for possession of one line of the Analects was death by slow dismemberment. The problem with burning and beheading and crushing and dismembering is that it is time-consuming, and the duke's solution was a masterstroke.
“I shall build a wall!” cried the Duke of Ch'in.
The Great Wall of China did not begin with the duke, nor did it end with the duke, but it was the duke who first used it for the purpose of murder. Anyone who disagreed with him was marched away to the desolate north, and men died by the millions as they labored on the public-works project that insiders call the Longest Cemetery in the World. More millions died as they built the duke's private residence. The Castle of the Labyrinth covered seventy acres, and it was actually thirty-six separate castles connected by a labyrinth of underground passageways. (The idea was that he would have thirty-six imperial bedrooms to choose from, and assassins would never know where he slept.) Beneath the artificial labyrinth was a real one, running deep through a sheer cliff, and it was said that it was the home of a horrible monster that devoured the screaming victims of the Duke of Ch'in. True or not, the thousands of people who were tossed into it were never seen again.
The duke produced another masterstroke when he had the finest craftsmen in the empire fashion a great golden mask of a snarling tiger, which he wore on all public occasions. His successors continued to wear it for more than eight hundred years. Did a duke have watery eyes, a weak chin, and facial tics? What his subjects saw was a terrifying mask, “the Tiger of Ch'in,” and the abbot explained that the barbarian rulers of Crete had used the mask of a bull for the same reason.
Mystery and terror are the bulwarks of tyranny, and for fourteen years China was one vast scream, but then the duke made the mistake of raising taxes to the point where the peasants had to choose between starvation or rebellion. He had confiscated their weapons, but he was not wise enough in the ways of peasants to confiscate their bamboo groves. A sharpened bamboo spear is something to avoid, and when the duke saw several million of them marching in his direction he hastily abandoned the empire and barricaded himself in the Castle of the Labyrinth. There he was invulnerable, and since he still controlled the largest private army in the country it was tacitly agreed that Ch'in would exist as a state within the state.
Emperors came and emperors went, but the Dukes of Ch'in seemed destined to go on forever, crouched and snarling in the most monstrous monument to raw power known to man.