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A Thousand Pieces of Gold: A Memoir of China’s Past Through its Proverbs. Adeline Mah Yen
Читать онлайн.Название A Thousand Pieces of Gold: A Memoir of China’s Past Through its Proverbs
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007382101
Автор произведения Adeline Mah Yen
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
After driving out the Nationalists in 1949, Mao became more powerful than any previous monarch had been. To challenge him was to dispute the party and the legitimacy of its rule. In Chinese folklore, there is a mythical character named Zhong Kui who possesses the power to expel ghosts and evil spirits. Mao alluded to this figure when describing his own role: ‘The Communist party needed someone to get rid of Chiang Kaishek 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 later, the idealistic and fiery revolutionary had turned into an autocratic, paranoid and frustrated old despot clinging desperately to his throne. At one point in the early 1960s, he was heard lamenting that his comrades treated him with the same attention paid to the corpse at a funeral.
Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to reassert his dominance, purging his most loyal colleagues, many of whom had been with him for over thirty years. These were the same men who had originally deified Mao in the 1940s. Because of their assiduous promotion of Mao, they had helped to create 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 commodity’ they had helped transform into a demigod would turn against them and plunge the country into chaos.
Although China still considers herself to be a Communist country, it is a very different sort of Communism from that envisaged 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 label solely because of the country’s Maoist legacy.
Even today, criticising 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.
* Handan Xue Bu is a proverb taken from the book Zhuangzi, written around 310 BC. The proverb describes a person who loses his original self by slavishly imitating the ways of others.
One Written Word is Worth a Thousand Pieces of Gold
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 verbalise 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 on 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 would bring 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), meaning ‘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 in unique circumstances in 241 BC to describe a book of essays collected by the true father of the First Emperor of China — the wily and immensely rich merchant Lü Buwei.
In 251 BC, 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 as 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 ruled for only one year before succumbing to illness and dying too.
An Guo’s son, Prince Zi Chu became King of Qin. Merchant Lü Buwei was ecstatic that his dream of investing in a future king of Qin had been fulfilled. Far from forgetting his mentor, Prince Zi Chu made the ex-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 Lü became richer and more powerful than he had ever thought possible. His financial reward was certainly greater than that which 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 Lü 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 Lü his regent as well as his Prime Minister and honoured him by giving him the title of zhong fu or ‘second father’.
Merchant Lü’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, Lü Buwei 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 Lü maintained a household of three thousand guest scholars. Among them was the scholar Li Si, who had recently emigrated from the state of Chu. Merchant Lü introduced Li Si to King Zheng who took an instant liking to the well-educated scholar.
Merchant Lü assembled the best articles written by the scholars under his roof and compiled them into a book of 26 chapters, comprising 160 essays and 200,000 words. According to Shiji, ‘He claimed it to be an encyclopaedia of current knowledge, encompassing all matters pertaining to Heaven, the earth, natural phenomena, the past and the present.’
He entitled it Spring and Autumn Annals of the House of Lü, 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 awarded 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