A Thousand Pieces of Gold Read online

  A few months later Lu returned from Xianyang in the best of spirits and immediately sought out Zi Chu. “Congratulations!” he began. “I met Princess Hua Yang’s sister and asked her to present some gifts to the princess, telling her that they are from you. Then I said to her, ‘King Zao is getting old. When he dies, your sister’s husband, Prince An Guo, will be king. At present, Prince An Guo loves your sister deeply even though she is barren. Princess Hua Yang is a beautiful woman, but I have heard that when a woman ages, her husband’s love vanishes along with her beauty. Since she has no son, the loss of Prince An Guo will mean that there will be no one left to protect her after his death. Her position will become more and more precarious as she gets older and feebler. Who will be there to look after her at that stage of her life?’

  “I could see that she was getting interested. Now I brought out the jewelry and said, ‘All this jewelry was specially purchased for Princess Hua Yang by Prince Zi Chu. Please give them to her. Prince Zi Chu is a worthy and filial son and loves your sister like his second mother. Life is hard for him, and the people of Qin have largely forgotten Prince Zi Chu, who has languished in the foreign state of Zhao as a hostage for over five years. In spite of this, he remains good-hearted and honest. What a fine young man! He is worthy and filial, and everyone in Zhao holds him in the highest esteem!

  ‘When I think of it, since Princess Hua Yang has no son of her own, why doesn’t she adopt Zi Chu as her heir and persuade Prince An Guo to make Zi Chu his successor? This way, your sister, you, and your family will always be protected and honored, even after Prince An Guo’s death. When Zi Chu ascends the throne, Princess Hua Yang will be the queen mother. Even after her death, Prince Zi Chu will honor your sister’s memory and the memory of her family. This is called yi yan er wan shi zhi li, “speaking one sentence that results in ten thousand generations of gain.” ’

  “I’m glad to report that Princess Hua Yang became convinced of the truth of my advice. She praised you to your father, saying what a worthy man you are. Then, with tears in her eyes, she begged your father to allow her to adopt you as her son and set you up as his rightful heir so that her own future would be secure. Your father gave his consent and even had a jade tally engraved with words to this effect. He broke the tally in two and gave one half to Princess Hua Yang while retaining the other half for himself. That means you are now your father’s rightful heir! Congratulations!”

  “What you’ve done is incredible!” Prince Zi Chu exclaimed. “But why did my father not make a public announcement that I am now his heir?”

  “How can he do that? Remember, your grandfather is still very much alive and sits on the throne at this very moment. Your father is only the crown prince, not yet the king. But the fact that he had a jade tally engraved to this effect and divided it with Princess Hua Yang means that he has made a solemn promise. Here! I almost forgot! Your father and Princess Hua Yang also asked me to be your tutor and entrusted me to bring you all these rich gifts. Just look at them! I have no doubt that all the noble lords in Handan will soon look at you with different eyes, and your fame will spread far and wide from now on.”

  “I shall always be grateful to you,” Zi Chu exclaimed. “How can I ever repay you?”

  “Don’t even think of it!” Merchant Lu replied. “Why don’t you come to my house tonight to celebrate? I have many concubines who can entertain us. Tonight they will sing for us while we dine.”

  Over the next five years the two men became best friends and spent much time together. Though Merchant Lu had many concubines, he was particularly fond of one named Zhao Ji, who was very beautiful and had great skill in dancing. One day in 260 B.C.E., Prince Zi Chu happened to catch sight of her. As Zhao Ji danced and sang, Prince Zi Chu could not take his eyes off her. Throughout the dinner he thought of her. Finally, when it came time for him to leave, he stood up and proposed a toast.

  “I drink to your long life!” Prince Zi Chu said to Merchant Lu. “You have done so much for me. May I ask for one more favor?”

  “Of course! Whatever I have also belongs to you. Just ask and it will be yours.”

  “In the last five years, I have been to your house many times and seen many of your concubines,” Prince Zi Chu began. “Even though they are all very pretty, I have never been tempted. But tonight I have met someone who is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Please, will you give Zhao Ji to me?”

  Lu was outraged. But instead of lashing out, he took a long drink of wine and thought deeply. By now he had invested all his wealth in Prince Zi Chu and could no longer afford to break with him. And unknown to anyone else, Zhao Ji had just told him that morning that she was pregnant. If they concealed her pregnancy and Prince Zi Chu married her, his son would be King of Qin one day.

  He forced a laugh and said to Prince Zi Chu, “I would not do it for anyone else but you! You are my best friend, and I can refuse you nothing. Give her a few days to pack her belongings, and I will send her to you.”

  Zhao Ji successfully concealed her pregnancy from the prince. When she delivered a son some months later in 259 B.C.E., Prince Zi Chu assumed the child was his and promoted her to the level of a proper wife. He named the boy Prince Zheng.

  Two years later hostilities between Qin and Zhao escalated to such an extent that the Qin army laid siege to the city of Handan. This infuriated the men of Zhao, and they wanted to kill Prince Zi Chu. With the help of Merchant Lu, the prince successfully bribed the officers acting as his guards with 600 catties of gold, and the two friends managed to escape. They made their way outside the city gates of Handan to the Qin army and were escorted back to Qin.

  Back in Xianyang, Prince Zi Chu was hailed as a war hero. Since his adoptive mother, Princess Hua Yang, was originally from Chu, Lu urged Prince Zi Chu to dress in the costume worn by Chu noblemen when he went to pay his respects to her and his father, Prince An Guo. Princess Hua Yang was very much impressed by this thoughtful gesture and advised Prince An Guo to grant Zi Chu even greater riches.

  Meanwhile, in Handan, Prince Zi Chu’s wife, Zhao Ji, and son, Prince Zheng, were threatened. Over the years, however, through the assistance of Merchant Lu, Zhao Ji’s parents had become wealthy in their own right. They paid heavy bribes for Zhao Ji and Prince Zheng to go into hiding. Mother and son lived quietly by themselves for a number of years close to the home of another royal hostage, a prince from Yan. This prince had a baby son, Prince Dan, who was approximately the same age as Prince Zheng. The two princelings often played together and developed a close friendship as they grew into boyhood.

  In reading Shiji, I am repeatedly struck by the extensive role that close friendships, family ties, and personal commitments played on the course of Chinese history, leading to consequences undreamed of by the perpetrators. By “giving” his pregnant mistress to Prince Zi Chu without the latter’s knowledge of her pregnancy and “guiding” Zi Chu into becoming King of Qin, Merchant Lu created a train of events that would eventually explode completely out of his control. We will follow the story further in the next chapter.

  For now, we may note that the proverb has a striking parallel in our own time. During the 1940s in China, almost all the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party were special friends of Mao Tse-tung. They actively participated in the promotion of Mao’s image, claiming him to be a qi huo ke ju, “precious treasure worth cherishing” and “the highest ideal of mankind.” While deifying Mao, they rode on the coattail of his success and developed a total and blind commitment to him.

  After driving out the Nationalists in 1949, Mao became more powerful than any previous monarch. To challenge him was to dispute the party and its legitimacy to rule. In Chinese folklore we read of a mythical figure named Zhong Kui, who possesses the power to expel ghosts and evil spirits. Mao himself described his role in these words: “The Communist Party needed someone to get rid of Chiang Kai-shek and the other bad elements in order to personify its claim to power. I became the party’s Zhong Kui of the twentieth
century.”

  As the years went by, Mao identified more and more with his own press. Twenty years after he came to power, the idealistic and fiery revolutionary had turned into an autocratic, paranoid, and frustrated old despot clinging to his throne. At one point in the early 1960s, he was heard lamenting that his comrades were treating him with the same attention paid to the corpse at their father’s funeral.

  Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to reassert his dominance, purging his most loyal colleagues, many of whom were veteran cadres who had been with him for over thirty years. These were the same men who had originally deified Mao in the 1940s. Because of their previous assiduous promotion of Mao, they created the Mao dynasty and identified Mao so closely with the Chinese Communist Party that the two became synonymous in the eyes of the Chinese people. Never did they expect that the “precious treasure” they had helped transform into a demigod would turn against them and plunge the country into chaos.

  Although China still considers itself to be Communist, it is a very different sort of Communism from that envisioned by Marx, Engels, Lenin, or even Mao himself. Since Mao’s death in 1976, China has been radically transformed culturally, economically, and politically. Some consider China to be Communist in name only, retaining that name solely because of its Maoist legacy.

  Even today, criticizing Mao for his actions during the Cultural Revolution is still perceived as challenging the Communist Party’s right to rule. This issue remains unresolved and continues to haunt the present leadership.

  CHAPTER 3

  One Written Word Is Worth a Thousand Pieces of Gold

  Yi Zi Qian Jing

  For the first ten years of my life, my Aunt Baba and I shared a room. We knew in our hearts that we were both viewed with contempt by the rest of our family, even though we never dared verbalize this, not even to ourselves. I was the lowest of the low because I was a girl and the youngest of five stepchildren. In addition, everyone considered me to be a source of bad luck because my mother had died giving birth to me. My Aunt Baba was also despised because she was a spinster and financially dependent upon my father.

  Aunt Baba was always like a mother to me. After the death of my grandmother we grew even closer. She paid the greatest attention to everything about me: my health, my appearance, and my personality. Most of all, she cared about my education and checked my homework every evening. Whenever I got a good report card, she would lock it in her safe deposit box and wear the key around her neck, as if my grades were so many precious jewels impossible to replace.

  In those days I already loved to write. On the evenings when I had no homework, I used to scribble kung fu stories in a special notebook and take them to school the next morning. It thrilled me to show my stories to my giggling classmates and watch them pass my writing illicitly from desk to desk during class.

  When she was in a good mood, Aunt Baba read them too. She would pour herself a cup of tea, put on her glasses, and chuckle over my narratives. If she came across one she particularly liked, she would smile and say, “ Yi zi qian jing! ‘One written word is worth a thousand pieces of gold—a literary gem!’”

  It was only when I was doing research for this book that I learned the origin of this proverb. The phrase was first used under unique circumstances (in 241 B.C.E.) to describe a book of essays collected by the true father of the First Emperor of China: the wily and immensely rich merchant, Lu Buwei.

  In 251 B.C.E. old King Zao of Qin finally passed away after a reign of fifty-six years. His son, Crown Prince An Guo, succeeded him as King of Qin. Princess Hua Yang became queen, and Prince Zi Chu was officially named crown prince. By that time the political climate had changed so much that when Prince Zi Chu requested the return of his wife and son, the King of Zhao obliged by sending them to Qin under official escort. King An Guo was already fifty-one years old, and he ruled for only one year before succumbing to illness and dying.

  An Guo’s son, Prince Zi Chu, became King of Qin. Merchant Lu Buwei was ecstatic that his dream of investing in a future King of Qin was fulfilled. Far from forgetting his mentor, Prince Zi Chu made the former merchant his prime minister. Queen Hua Yang, whom Zi Chu had come to treat as a mother, was named queen dowager. The former courtesan Zhao Ji was named queen of Qin, and her son, Prince Zheng, became crown prince and successor to the throne.

  As his father had predicted, Merchant Lu became richer and more powerful than he had ever thought possible. His financial reward was certainly greater than what he might have reaped from any other investment. Zi Chu addressed him as “brother,” ennobled him as a marquis, and allowed him to keep the revenues of 100,000 households in Luoyang in Henan Province. It was recorded that Lu Buwei employed 10,000 servants and engaged them in handicrafts, industry, and commerce, thus further increasing his wealth.

  After Zi Chu’s death from illness only three years later, thirteen-year-old Prince Zheng ascended the throne. He made Merchant Lu his regent as well as his prime minister and honored him by giving him the title of zhong fu, or “second father.”

  Merchant Lu’s authority over the affairs of state was absolute during King Zheng’s teenage years. He resumed his sexual relationship with his former concubine, the beautiful Zhao Ji (now the queen mother), but kept it a secret from their son, the boy king. For the next eight years he was the de facto ruler of Qin.

  Ashamed of his merchant background, he emulated the practice of the four most renowned and cultured kings of that era (those of Zhao, Chu, Qi, and Wei) by opening his home to visiting scholars regardless of their family background or origin. At the height of his fame and power, Merchant Lu maintained a household of 3000 guest-scholars, many of whom came from places outside Qin. Among them was the scholar Li Si, who had emigrated recently from the state of Chu. Merchant Lu introduced Li Si to King Zheng, who took an instant liking to the well-educated scholar.

  Merchant Lu assembled the best articles written by the scholars under his roof and compiled them into a book of twenty-six chapters, comprising 160 essays and 20,000 words. According to Shiji,

  He claimed it to be an encyclopedia of current knowledge, encompassing all matters pertaining to Heaven, the earth, natural phenomena, the past and the present.

  He titled it Spring and Autumn Annals of the House of Lu and had the words carved in stone and the tablets displayed at the city gate of Xianyang. One thousand pieces of gold were suspended above the text along with a notice proclaiming that the sum would be rewarded to anyone who could improve the literary value of his book by adding or deleting a single word. Naturally, no one dared risk the displeasure of someone as powerful as the prime minister by challenging his writing. Merchant Lu’s book is still in print. The phrase yi zi qian jin, “one written word is worth a thousand pieces of gold,” has become a proverb, used nowadays to describe any literary work of exceptional merit.

  During the eight years that he ruled the country, Merchant Lu successfully waged war and annexed various territories from Haan, Wei, and Zhao, thereby increasing the size, wealth, and prestige of Qin.

  As Zheng approached manhood, Merchant Lu became fearful that the boy king would discover his liaison with the queen mother. So he decided to distance himself and look for someone who would take his place. He searched about until he found a man named Lao Ai, who had the reputation of being very well endowed, and made him his servant. Shiji tells us that in order to arouse the queen mother’s interest, Merchant Lu ordered Lao Ai to parade around with a cartwheel made of paulowina wood balanced on his phallus while sensual music was being played. Hearing of this, the queen mother expressed a desire to meet him. To avoid a scandal, Merchant Lu disguised Lao Ai as a eunuch by plucking his beard and eyebrows. (After castration, eunuchs would lose their source of testosterone and typically became beardless). He then gave him to Queen Zhao Ji as her servant in her private apartments. Lao Ai got along so well with the queen mother that they secretly had two sons together. Queen Zhao Ji lavished gifts upon her lover and referred all deci
sions to him. Ennobled as a marquis, he was assigned lands, palaces, parks, and hunting areas, while employing several thousand male servants.

  In 238 B.C.E. King Zheng reached the age of twenty-one and began to take the reins of government into his own hands. Meanwhile, the former servant Lao Ai was becoming increasingly boastful while the besotted queen mother continued to shower him with riches and titles. At a dinner party a drunken Lao Ai was heard openly bragging of his influence over the queen mother and claiming to be the stepfather of the young king. His comments were duly reported back to His Majesty.

  King Zheng now heard that Lao Ai was not a eunuch at all but his mother’s lover. “Your mother has borne Lao Ai two sons who are being kept hidden,” he was told. “As soon as Your Majesty passes on, they have agreed between themselves that one of their sons will succeed you.”

  The king investigated and discovered that the lovers had been brought together by Merchant Lu. He was still uncovering evidence when he set off to the ancient capital of Yong to undergo the capping ceremony (equivalent to the coronation) and to perform ritual sacrifices to his ancestors. While he was away from Xianyang, Lai Ai made his move. He seized the queen mother’s seal without her permission, forged the king’s seal, mobilized the army in the outlying counties, and ordered them to rebel in the name of the queen mother. Swiftly and resolutely, King Zheng commanded his officers to attack the rebels. At the sight of the army under the young king’s flag, Lao Ai’s troops from the provinces laid down their arms and refused to fight. The few who remained loyal to Lao Ai fled for their lives along with their ringleader.

  King Zheng placed a price of one million copper coins on Lao Ai’s head if taken alive and half a million if dead. Lao Ai and his supporters were captured while fleeing. Twenty of his fellow plotters were beheaded and their heads exposed in the marketplace. Lao Ai himself was torn in two by carriages and his entire family was executed to the third degree. The young king also put to death the queen mother’s two young sons by Lao Ai.