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The Grave Robbers’ Chronicles: Wu Xie’s

Private Notes

Written by: Xu Lei

Translated by: Tiffany X
Edited by: Merebear

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Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 5
Chapter 2 The Mystic Nine Leaders .............................................................................................................. 8
Chapter 3 Zhang Da Fo Ye ........................................................................................................................... 11
Chapter 4 Er Yuehong ................................................................................................................................. 16
Chapter 5 Banjie Li ...................................................................................................................................... 21
Chapter 6 Chen Pi Ah Si............................................................................................................................... 26
Chapter 7 Old Dog Wu ................................................................................................................................ 30
Chapter 8 Black Back The Sixth ................................................................................................................... 34
Chapter 9 Huo Xiangu ................................................................................................................................. 39
Chapter 10 Qimen Fortune Teller Qi Tiezui The Eighth .............................................................................. 44
Chapter 11 Xiao Xiejiu ................................................................................................................................. 48
Chapter 12 About Our First Trip.................................................................................................................. 53
Chapter 13 Temple of Seeds ....................................................................................................................... 55
Chapter 14 The Map That Was Decoded From The Warring States Silk Book ........................................... 60
Chapter 15 Seven Star Lu Palace Floor Plan ............................................................................................... 61
Chapter 16 Marine Salvage ......................................................................................................................... 66
Chapter 17 The Xisha Islands ...................................................................................................................... 69
Chapter 18 Qinglan Harbor ......................................................................................................................... 72
Chapter 19 Transcription of Yongxing Island .............................................................................................. 73
Chapter 20 The Floor Plan Of The Undersea Tomb .................................................................................... 74
Chapter 21 Drawings Of The Ship ............................................................................................................... 78
Chapter 22 The Bronze Tree and “The Classic Of Mountains And Seas” .................................................... 80
Chapter 23 Erdao Baihe .............................................................................................................................. 82
Chapter 24 Analyze The Heavenly Palace From The Architectural Point Of View...................................... 87
Chapter 25 The Bodies In The Alcove ......................................................................................................... 90
Chapter 26 The Giant Bronze Door ............................................................................................................. 91
Chapter 27 The Warring States Silk Book ................................................................................................... 93
Chapter 28 The Jade Coffin Cover............................................................................................................... 97
Chapter 29 The Book of the Ruler of Dead Soldiers ................................................................................... 98
Chapter 30 Zombies and Monsters........................................................................................................... 102

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Chapter 31 The People I’ve Encountered ................................................................................................. 119
Chapter 32 Ancient Countries In Shandong .............................................................................................. 125
Chapter 33 Notes and List of Xisha Archaeological Members .................................................................. 141
Chapter 34 Other Related Information ..................................................................................................... 146
Chapter 35 Other Related Information 2 .................................................................................................. 161

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Chapter 1 Introduction
I had written this before everything happened.

I never thought that I would use this notebook one day. I used to be
someone who was idle all day, and the only chance for me to write
something was to sign the bill and pay the money.

It should be a good thing to be so busy that I have to write things down, but
for some reason, I can’t feel happy about it.

The reason why I’m writing this is because I hope the things I experienced
can be recorded clearly. The things that I’ve been through are so incredible
and complicated that I just hope that everything can be restored, along with
the cause of this whole incident.

This incident occurred on February 1, 2003 when an old man with a golden
tooth came to my store to ask me about my grandpa.

At that time, I was cautious and didn’t pay much attention to him, but it was
strange the more I thought about it.

Our family had suppressed anything related to my grandfather’s affairs for

almost six or seven years, and no one had mentioned them since. So why did
this Gold Tooth suddenly ask about him?

Looking at his style and tone of speech, I didn’t think he had any good
intentions.

Later, Boss Qian from next door told me that he knew the old man with a
golden tooth who came to my store. That guy was notorious, and his name
was Jin Wantang. He was a patron of Beijing’s Crescent Hotel.

Crescent Hotel was the upgraded version of Panjiayuan, and vendors who
were well-off would open shops around there. They didn’t need to worry
that they had no place to set up or deal with any confrontations with the
cops.
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I didn’t have enough qualifications to get in, but I had heard something
about the hotel. It was said that any item they auctioned was worth lots of
gold bricks.

So, if this rich old fellow came to Jiangnan and walked into this little shop of
mine to try and make friends with me, what were his intentions?

At that time, I told myself that I had to investigate this matter when I had
the chance, but I forgot about it in the blink of an eye. There were too many
weird people and strange things in our business. I couldn’t catch a break
while running an antique shop, so I didn’t really care about such a mess.

I was quite emotional that day. My livelihood back then was very bleak. The
owners of the restaurant next to my shop had built an outside hall, and they
also had a snack processing factory. Even their foreman drove a car to work.
But I was a poor boss and had to save money every month so that I could
pay my staff.

At that time, those who wanted to sell antiques weren’t as successful as

those who opened restaurants. What kind of world was this?

I thought it was better to persuade my father to close the antique shop and
open a restaurant instead, but I wasn’t really serious about it.

I didn’t expect so many things to happen later. If I had known earlier, I

would’ve set my shop on fire to avoid the future troubles.

But the fact is, we can’t know what will happen in the future. In the end, I
inevitably got sucked into the mess and got deeper and deeper into it.

Even so, I never thought that I would have to use this method to sort out the
whole thing later.

These articles were written during the whole process. Although the ending is
still unclear, in retrospect, the bits and pieces in these memories are also
quite interesting.

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Now I’ve sorted out some things for later reference. I believe I’ll eventually
get the answers, I just have to keep persisting until I do.

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Chapter 2 The Mystic Nine Leaders
My grandfather and even my generation’s affairs originated in old
Changsha. From Dart Summit1 to Qiu Dekao, the seeds planted back then
seemed to have finally grown into my generation.

In order to have a general understanding of the customs in Changsha at

that time, I had sorted out some of the things about the Mystic Nine
leaders from my grandfather’s notes, along with all the interesting things
he had told me before. When I looked back at them now, I felt a lot of
things.

All the people in the underworld had known or heard about The Mystic
Nine. These families of tomb robbers were so powerful that they covered
all aspects of cultural relic smuggling. Almost all the grave goods flowing
out of Changsha had to pass through one of the families.

There were many explanations as to why they were called The Mystic
Nine. The most recognized one was that the ancient big city had nine
gates, and merchants who entered or left the city had to choose one of
them. That was how the name “The Mystic Nine” came to be. In
Changsha City, you could only choose one of these nine powers to do
business with, and there was no other way to go.

I didn’t know much about these powerful people’s stories, because my

grandfather didn’t want me to know too much about their past. What
these people did sounded glorious to those in the underworld, but their
stories were all misdeeds to normal people.

The new Mystic Nine was nothing compared to the old Mystic Nine. Most
of the new Mystic Nine were self-sufficient, but the achievements of the
old Mystic Nine had been spread by word of mouth because they had
worked so diligently.

In an era of information obscurity, it was necessary to have extremely

special experiences so that their reputations could be passed on. One

1
Pinyin is Biaoziling (镖子岭). It’s the first place mentioned in Vol 1 “Cavern of Blood Zombies”, where Wu
Xie’s grandfather encountered the zombie. They called it “Dart Summit” in Vol. 5 “Deadly Desert Winds”.

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could only try to imagine how powerful they had to be to get such ranks
among that kind of society.

The Mystic Nine was divided into three parts.

The upper three clans were all well-established old families, and their
official status had been largely honest. They had legitimate businesses on
the surface and were powerful in officialdom, so they mainly relied on
their own underlings when they went grave robbing. There were some
extremely skilled and loyal underlings in the upper three clans, but
because of this, their gradual aging resulted in the upper clans’ gradual
decline.

The middle three clans were the main grave robbing forces. They were all
courageous heroes who had a few apprentices and usually worked in the
mountains all day. These people were relatively young, but they were
very greedy and did everything, from murdering to stealing goods. Their
reputations were made from killing people, so they had nothing to be
afraid of. The big cases after the founding of the country all had
something to do with them.

The lower three clans were businessmen who specialized in antique

dealing. Even though they had skills, they didn’t go grave robbing often.
The lower three clans worked closely with the middle three clans. Since
the upper three clans were on such a large scale, they had no profits left
over for the lower three clans. As a result, the upper three clans had
almost no interactions with the lower three clans.

If we were to use one word to describe them, the upper three clans
would be “officials”, the middle three clans were “thieves”, and the lower
three clans were “businessmen”.

Since ancient times, there had been collusion among officials, thieves,
and businessmen, so it wasn’t surprising that the Mystic Nine had this
sort of structure as well.

The Upper Three Clans

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The founders of the upper three clans were all extremely famous grave
robbers. These three families were people of their own word.

It wasn’t really fair to say that they were grave robbers, because their
family power was already similar to that of some of the small warlords at
that time.

Since the Autumn Harvest Uprising2, most of these three families joined
the revolution. One of them was even the hero of the founding of the
country. But this matter was quite secretive, so it wasn’t convenient for
people to tell me more about it, and I only learned a few names.

2
It was an insurrection that took place in Hunan and Jiangxi provinces, China, on September 7, 1927. It was led
by Mao Zedong, who established a short-lived Hunan Soviet. Wiki link

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Chapter 3 Zhang Da Fo Ye
Da Fo Ye’s name was Zhang Qishan. The Zhang family was the number
one family in Changsha. There was a giant Buddha statue in his house, but
no one knew where it came from. That was how he got the nickname Da
Fo Ye.3

Zhang Qishan was very good at studying feng shui, so the way he did
things was rather different from that of the Southern tomb robbers. He
was a northerner who moved to the south.

According to legend, Zhang Qishan could tell three generations of soil.

Once he stood on a mountain, he would clearly know what it was like
three hundred years ago, and what it would look like three hundred years
later.

As a result, the valuable tombs that the Zhang family discovered couldn’t
be found by others, and they often got some strange treasures. The
bracelet that Zhang Qishan carried with him came from a zombie. It was
called “the second ring bracelet” and was very precious. If you knocked
on it, the solid jade bracelet would ring twice.

There was an inscription on the bracelet, which led Zhang Fo Ye to think

that it was part of a pair, so he searched everywhere for the other one.
He didn’t care how much money he had to pay as long as he could make
it “ring three times”, which had everyone talking for a while.

The most legendary story of Zhang Da Fo Ye was how he brought his

family from the northeast and fled to Changsha.

Before the Mukden Incident4, Zhang Da Fo Ye was still a very young man.
His father had already foreseen that the situation wasn’t good, so he sent
his wife and family to his in-laws in Changsha. Meanwhile, he decided to

3
Remember, “Da Fo Ye” means “The Giant Buddha”. Also, the Zhang family here had nothing to do with Poker-
face’s family.
4
An event staged by Japanese military personnel as a pretext for the 1931 Japanese invasion of
Manchuria. Wiki link

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stay and take care of the remaining things, preparing to leave with his son
and a few men by boat, which would go down the Yangtze River.

Before the boat arrived, however, the Japanese came. Zhang Da Fo Ye

was trapped in the countryside between villages in Liao Province. In order
to break out of the encirclement, they tried to cross the border secretly,
but his father was killed by a machine gun. He and a few buddies were all
arrested and placed in a concentration camp.

Entering such a place at that time meant being taken to Heilongjiang to

dig a coal mine. They were never going to be free, and there was no
doubt that death was bound to happen. The Japanese were very strict,
and all those who ran were basically caught and stabbed to death with
bayonets. Few people could run away successfully.

Zhang Da Fo Ye lurked there, and after careful observation, he found that

the reason why those people couldn’t escape was mainly because the
dogs the Japanese had trained were too powerful.

The concentration camp was at the top of a mountain, and there were
sentries both there and at the foot of the mountain. It seemed easy to
escape and hide, but there were many shrubs in the mountains, and
people would leave a heavy scent as they walked down. The Japanese-
trained wolfhounds would find you no matter where you hid.

He also discovered that the Japanese only gave chase for two days. They
would give up if they couldn’t catch you in that time frame, because two
days were enough for people to get into the mountains where the trees
were towering, and the area was too big. They couldn’t use the dogs by
that point.

As a result, he knew that if he wanted to escape successfully, he had to

find a place where he could hide for two days so that the dogs couldn’t
find him.

The one condition that had to be met was that there needed to be
standing water. Water was a blocking medium that could isolate one’s
own odor, so the dogs couldn’t smell a thing.

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But where would he find standing water that could hide a person? It
wouldn’t work if the water was too shallow, and it was impossible to find
deep water sources in the mountains.

The people in the concentration camp were taken away by the truckload
and he became anxious. He couldn’t figure out a way until one day, while
transporting timber, he found an ancient tomb on the west hillside of the
concentration camp.

This ancient tomb was shaped like a ghost claw and had been built in the
shady part of the mountain. The owner of the tomb must have offended
many people during his lifetime since the form was very poor, but the
terrain around the tomb indicated that it was well preserved.

Zhang Da Fo Ye suddenly had an idea. First, he had to get near the ancient
tomb and punch through the top, so that water would accumulate in the
tomb when it rained. Then, as long as he escaped to the tomb and lurked
in the stagnant water, the dogs wouldn’t find him.

But the ancient tomb was on the hillside outside the concentration camp.
If he tried to leave the camp, he was likely to be found and beaten to
death. He needed to plan out how to get there.

He thought hard and discussed it with some of his buddies. It would take
two hours to smash through the top of the tomb, but that was too long
and they didn’t have any tools, so it couldn’t be done secretly.

He had to think of a way to get the Japanese to take them out, and also
do everything under their watchful eyes.

Finally, they came up with a risky approach. They used medicine to kill a
wolfdog while the Japanese weren’t looking, dismembered the corpse,
and then threw the pieces over the barbed wire where they would land
around the ancient tomb.

Several days later, the Japanese found it strange that a dog was missing.
By that time, the dog’s corpse was already stinking, so Zhang Da Fo Ye
went and reported to the Japanese that he smelled a strange odor.

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The Japanese followed him and noticed a rancid smell coming from
where he pointed. When they went over, they found that the corpse was
already covered in maggots and centipedes.

Of course, the Japanese wouldn’t move the corpse by themselves, so they

had Zhang Da Fo Ye take a shovel and bury it on the spot. They had guns
with them and watched him work from a distance.

Zhang Da Fo Ye went out, picked an area by the ancient tomb, and

carefully dug down until a deep hole was formed. Since they were in the
mountains, the ground was full of tree roots, so he deliberately made the
sound of a shovel cutting the roots from time to time.

When he reached the bottom of the pit, the Japanese could only see half
of his body. He struck hard against the tomb wall more than a dozen
times before it finally cracked. The Japanese became alert and came to
see what was going on.

He immediately shoveled a piece of mud to cover the crack, and then

came up and buried the dog. After that, he pried the crack a bit bigger
and stacked the pieces of the corpse at the opening. He slapped mud into
the seam and then filled the hole.

God favored him. There was heavy rain three days later, and it rained
continuously for one day and one night. Zhang Da Fo Ye felt that the time
was right and told the men that he was ready to escape.

They secretly waited for an opportunity. The best time to act would be
when it was raining heavily because the smell on their bodies would be
washed away by the rain.

One day in September, after a heavy rain, seven people disappeared. The
Japanese took the wolfhounds all the way outside the mountain, but they
couldn’t find any traces. Since then, those seven people never appeared
again.

In Changsha, a wave of anti-Japanese sentiment was suddenly set off

among the people. A great man emerged from the trend and changed the
entire history of China.

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It was unknown whether this had anything to do with Zhang Da Fo Ye.

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Chapter 4 Er Yuehong
Er Yuehong ranked second in the Mystic Nine. He was a famous
Huaguxi5 performer in Changsha.

Er Yuehong took the typical tomb-robbing approach of the old society. On

the surface, he was the leader of an opera troupe and took them with
him everywhere. They performed in the daytime and went grave robbing
at night.

The theater troupe was full of martial arts talents, and they put their
tools in their suitcases. They were a wondrous sight to behold once they
were in the tomb, and my grandfather said that he even got to see them
work underground once. Their feet didn’t even touch the floor when they
robbed the small tomb, because they used bamboo poles to walk along
the walls. Their movements were incredibly smooth, and he didn’t know
how they practiced that kind of skill.

Er Yuehong sang beautifully and possessed special skills, but it was also
said that he was a handsome man. He had a lot of love affairs, had
ambiguous relationships with many celebrities, and liked to go to the
brothel. But his most famous story had nothing to do with tomb robbery.
Instead, it was the story of how he redeemed a “girl” when he was young.

At that time, traffickers sold prostitutes from Yangzhou by walking

around the downtown area with the girls on their backs. This was to tell
the world that the girl was about to be sold.

If there were people who wanted to fight against injustice, they could
step up. But they had to pay money if they wanted to get involved so that
the traffickers wouldn’t push the girls into the fire pit. Once they entered
the brothel, however, it was too late and there was nothing they could
do.

In addition, this was also an advertisement telling those high-ranking

officials and nobles that there would be virgin girls who could be

5
Flower-drum opera. More info here

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deflowered that night, and they could prepare money to ‘beat the golden
stick’.

Er Yuehong wasn’t the leader of the opera troupe at that time. This kind
of troupe was hereditary, so when his father was around, he was just a
young master.

One day, when he was drinking morning tea in the Kuaihuolou, he saw a
teenage girl being carried on someone’s back. Er Yuehong knew the ways
of the world and wasn’t surprised at this kind of thing.

In that era, it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for a girl from a poor family
to be sold into a brothel, since they wouldn’t have to worry about
starving. If they somehow met good benefactors, they could even
become one of their concubines, which meant that they had the
opportunity to turn their life around. It was common to be abused when
out and about, after all.

But Er Yuehong was taken aback when he saw this particular girl because
he actually knew her. She was the daughter of a noodle shop owner,
whose shop he often visited. She was five years younger than him, so it
could be said that he was like her elder brother and saw her grow up
when they were little. She was very smart and well-behaved, so he
couldn’t fathom how she ended up here.

Seeing the little girl crying uncontrollably on the trafficker’s back, Er

Yuehong couldn’t help but sigh.

Since the girl was very smart and there were a lot of people around, she
looked into the crowd while crying, desperately searching for something.
These people may all become her one-night benefactors soon. She saw all
kinds of faces and tried to find an ounce of sympathy or pity from among
them.

At that moment, she saw Er Yuehong at the teahouse. When Er Yuehong

also looked at her, the little girl recognized him instantly. As if she had
seen the only hope in her despair, she suddenly tried her best to shout at
Er Yuehong, “Brother!”

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The desperate and pleading gaze shook Er Yuehong, and he remembered
the little sister who followed him around while holding his little hand. He
wondered if he could sit on the sidelines and bury a part of his memories.

People at that time had hearts made of stone, so it was fine for him to
stand by and watch. But humans had emotions after all. Er Yuehong was a
sentimental man, and would often do a lot of things because of a look
from others. He knew at that time that he had to save her.

But his father definitely wouldn’t agree to let him do this kind of thing, so
it was impossible for him to have enough money to save her.

Er Yuehong was very young and energetic back then. He took off his hat
and used his skills to walk down the wall of the tea house like a gecko,
stopping in front of the trafficker.

The trafficker was taken aback because it had been a long time since he
had met someone who would intervene. The trafficker naturally didn’t
want that to happen. The interceptor did this in the name of justice, so
the money the trafficker collected from him would be twenty percent
lower than the money he would collect from the brothel.

It was still early morning, yet the trafficker already found himself unlucky.
Where did this guy come from to stand in the way of him getting his
money?

But looking at this master’s skill and how he climbed down from the tea
house just now, the trafficker knew that he couldn’t be offended, so he
laughed and greeted him.

Er Yuehong also knew that this was one of the businesses in the
underworld, and this trafficker must’ve had a relationship with his own
family. There could be no conflict between them; otherwise, it would
bring trouble to the Mystic Nine. As a result, he didn’t dare kill the
trafficker. When he asked about the price, the trafficker gave an
exorbitant amount, meaning, “Get lost. You can’t save her.”

Er Yuehong had no other choice. He couldn’t get the money from his
father, and he couldn’t intervene. The only way to save this girl was to

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pay the exorbitant price, but he certainly couldn’t come up with that
much money.

The trafficker said to Er Yuehong, “This girl is being sent to the brothel in
Ping Er. If this master can’t pay the money, please turn away. If you want
to do something nice for this girl, then I suggest you order her tonight. It
will be a blessing to her if you are gentle on her first night.”

Er Yuehong became angry and said to him, “I have the money. I also want
to warn you that your money is ill-gotten. You need to think about
whether you can afford such wealth. If you feel that you can bear it, I will
get it for you, but I advise you to be careful of your wealth.”

That was it. The trafficker didn’t believe someone would pay that much
money for a little girl, so he said he could bear it.

Er Yuehong’s underlings kept watch over the trafficker as he went around

the downtown area again. Er Yuehong had to get the money ready before
the trafficker finished his round.

Er Yuehong hurried home, put on all his equipment, and rushed to the
western outskirts on a fast horse. He rushed back again with three gold
hairpins and loess on his body.

This girl later became Er Yuehong’s wife and bore him three sons. She
died of illness at the age of thirty-two. In just over ten years of happiness,
she had been in Er Yuehong’s arms and never suffered. After she was
gone, Er Yuehong became unruly.

As a woman in that kind of society, I felt that she had lived a happy life. It
was also because of this that women kept flocking to Er Yuehong after his
wife was gone. But no one could touch the dead emotions in his heart.

The ordinary girl in the noodle shop would always live in his heart. No one
knows when he first started to have feelings for her. Maybe it started
when he heard her call him “brother”, or maybe it started when he
rushed back to the city on the horse. But such a man was that girl’s
greatest fortune, and also the greatest misfortune for other women in
the world.

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Er Yuehong never married again. He lived to 102 and was buried with his
wife after death. The coffin was a bit taller than his wife’s so that the girl
who had been waiting for him for many years could finally lean on his
shoulder again, listening to his gentle singing.

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Chapter 5 Banjie Li
Banjie Li6, Third Master Li, had the best stories among the upper three
clans. He became disabled when he was young because his partners
broke his legs when they were in the tomb and left him trapped there for
a week. He survived by drinking water from the coffin.

After that, he couldn’t stand up again, so he put a pad made out of cattail
leaves under him, and then held two bricks in his hand to support himself.
Maybe this early experience stimulated him because he was the most
ruthless person in the Mystic Nine.

Even his wife didn’t know how many people he had killed. He was
extremely paranoid and distrustful of people. There were rumors that he
slept in an ancient tomb at night and was accompanied by zombies
because he thought that living people were more terrifying than dead
people.

Even so, Banjie Lie’s tomb-robbing skills were outstanding. His hands
were very strong and agile, and even though he was short and small, he
could climb trees faster than normal people with just his bare hands. He
could enter places where many people couldn’t, and retrieve things that
were hard to get.

Strangely enough, like Er Yuehong, the story that most people talked
about wasn’t what he did in the tomb, but the relationship between him
and his sister-in-law.

His eldest brother and both his parents had died early, so his sister-in-law
took care of him since he was a teenager. At that ignorant age, his sister-
in-law was like a mother to him. They were poor and his sister-in-law had
to suffer a lot to raise both him and her own children. Banjie Li grew up in
this kind of environment and had a sensitive heart, which was probably
why he had such an extreme personality.

During the time when his sister-in-law was helping to wash clothes in
someone else’s house, she was beaten and became deaf in one ear

6
It literally means “Half-body Li” in Chinese.

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because she ripped a cheongsam. After that, the house was burned to the
ground. The case was never settled, but everyone thought that Banjie Li
did it.

The two people were living under the same roof, and as Banjie Li grew up,
the gossip gradually increased. Indeed, in that kind of house, you could
always see something you shouldn’t if you looked behind the curtain.

His sister-in-law wasn’t much older than him, and the atmosphere slowly
became strange. Even the way he looked at her also changed bit by bit.

His sister-in-law was a person who had romantic experiences, so she

knew what Banjie Li was thinking. As a result, she sent him to other
places to become an apprentice, but he always wanted to come back.
That kind of atmosphere became stronger and stronger, and her many
years of widowhood made her fear her body’s strange reaction.

Banjie Li knew very well at the time that there was a problem between
the two of them, but he was very naive. His sister-in-law’s life was
hopeless, so he wanted to be strong and keep her from suffering. After
that, he thought he could marry her and take care of her for his elder
brother. This was the best ending he could think of at the time.

As a result, he secretly learned how to rob graves. He was just like many
kids back then, who dreamed of becoming rich overnight. In the end, his
legs were broken and he almost died in a tomb.

His sister-in-law was devastated. This was a man who was somewhere
between her husband and son, and now he was disabled. The pain she
felt was two-fold. She originally thought her days of suffering might come
to an end, but her hopes were dashed into darkness. She couldn’t face
her late husband.

At the same time, however, these fierce emotions also broke through
some of her psychological defenses, which was something Banjie Li
wasn’t expecting.

After that, she had to take care of Banjie Li more carefully, like wiping him
and helping him pee. The skinship between them became more and more

22
frequent, more and more ordinary, and more and more uncontrollable.
Even Banjie Li found that the way his sister-in-law looked at him had
changed.

One night after New Year’s Eve, the last straw finally broke the camel’s
back. There was a heavy snow outside the house, and the gasping sounds
of two people could be heard coming from inside. The passion that had
accumulated for many years burst out at once, and everything went
crazy.

Half a year later, Banjie Li recovered and returned to the tomb where he
had been trapped before so that he could retrieve the artifacts he had
hidden.

This time, he was no longer who he used to be. The hatred of being
betrayed, and the guilt he harbored towards his sister-in-law made him
extremely cruel to a point where he wouldn’t have mercy on anyone.

He found the partners who had tried to kill him back then, broke their
legs, dragged them to the tomb where he had stayed at that time, and
starved them to death.

Gods and ghosts were afraid of the wicked.

As Banjie Li became more and more wealthy, he bought a house and

started his own business. After that, he gradually settled down. Most of
his men were disabled, and one of them was dumb. They later became a
group of their own, but I’ve decided not to elaborate on them for now.

After he became well-off, Banjie Li once thought of marrying his sister-in-

law, but she hoped that he could marry someone else. She thought that
she was dirty. She couldn’t allow herself to marry him since she had
promised her husband to take good care of him.

His sister-in-law was very insistent, so there was nothing Banjie Li could
do. They never talked about it again, but Banjie Li was resolute in his
refusal to marry.

His sister-in-law wanted to find an honest man to remarry in order to

keep herself out of Banjie Li’s mind, but Banjie Li was the most ruthless
23
man in Changsha at the time, so no one dared to get close to her. Later, it
was rumored that his sister-in-law eventually gave birth to their son.

I really wanted to write a sad story about how his sister-in-law was killed
by someone or had a miscarriage and died in the end, but there was no
such decisive reality in the world.

There were so many misfortunes in the world that no matter how cruel
Banjie Li was, I still hoped he lived a long and healthy life because his
sister-in-law was definitely a good person. Although it wasn’t right, he
was still a courageous man if he could maintain that happy balance
between good and extreme evil.

Women would hope this abnormal love was fruitful, and men would want
to hear more detailed descriptions of that night, but we may never really
know what exactly happened.

The only thing that could be determined was that my grandfather had
said he had met Banjie Li’s sister-in-law when it was her fortieth birthday.
She was a very beautiful woman with a hint of glamour in her eyes, which
was why my grandfather could clearly remember what she looked like. If
he had a sister-in-law like her, he would never let another man marry her,
either.

I asked my grandfather, “Does Grandma know what you think?” And he

gave me a hundred yuan as pocket money.

Well, this story is gossip, but it also has some truth: If men want to
protect what they love, they have to be strong enough. No matter what
the outcome will be, don’t let women sacrifice themselves for men, or at
least let their sacrifices be rewarded.

24
25
Chapter 6 Chen Pi Ah Si
Among the middle three clans, we’re very familiar with Chen Pi Ah Si and
Old Dog Wu, but we’ve heard little about Black Back who reigns sixth.

I’ll only give a brief introduction about the first two people, and then give
a more detailed story of Black Back.

Chen Pi Ah Si

Chen Pi Ah Si, Grandpa Si, ranked first in the middle three clans and might
be the most skilled one in the Mystic Nine. He aimed his iron beads more
precisely than bullets, and his nine-clawed hook could grab raw eggs from
more than ten meters away.

Chen Pi Ah Si was Er Yuehong’s apprentice and was taken in as an

exception because he was extremely talented.

Generally speaking, the tomb robbers in Changsha never revealed their

skills to outsiders, not to mention how difficult it would be for people
from Zhejiang to learn Huaguxi. As a result, this kind of apprenticeship
was unheard of.

People speculated that Er Yuehong and Chen Pi Ah Si might have gone

way back, but the truth had been lost with the passage of time.

If the stories of the upper three clans sounded heroic, wonderful, and
gossipy, then the stories of the middle three clans sounded notorious.

This was especially true for Chen Pi Ah Si, who was the most infamous
person. If Banjie Li was a big gangster, then Chen Pei A Si was the aircraft
carrier of gangsters.

Almost everyone knew that he was capable of anything, but he was most
famous for murdering his apprentices. They often became rich one
second and were killed the next.

Chen Pi Ah Si was different from others. He was incredibly generous,

barely had any family business, and would immediately squander all of

26
the money he got from tomb-robbing, which meant his apprentices could
become wealthy overnight.

He also taught his apprentices functional skills. If he wanted to rob a

tomb, he would carefully plan it to the extent where he wouldn’t fail, find
some people he thought suitable, and then teach them something before
they robbed the grave. It didn’t matter whether they succeeded or failed
because he would never feel responsible for them. As a result, he was
often the only one who could get out of difficult situations when they
went underground. Even if he could save you, he wouldn’t reach out his
hand in case he got hurt. It was also obvious that he would let people
take the fall when he was in danger.

That was why working for Chen Pi Ah Si was like gambling. You never
knew when you would be betrayed, or when you would get rich.

But working with Chen Pi Ah Si did have one perk—he was a man of his
word. He would always make it clear to you about the danger you were
going to face, and he would definitely pay you the money if the operation
was successful.

Those who were rather skilled were very courageous, and many
desperate talents would work for him. These people weren’t afraid of the
dangers and were extremely skilled. When Chen Pi Ah Si was at his peak,
Banjie Li was the only one among the upper three clans who wasn’t wary
of him.

The most earth-shattering thing he and his men had ever done was
extremely vicious to the point that no one could understand how it had
happened, and no one was able to believe it.

When they had set up camp in a village, they found that the terrain was
very strange, so they inquired about the local legends. That was when
Chen Pi Ah Si learned that the snow in this village melted early.

If there was a problem with the geology below the village, it would cause
the ground temperature to be slightly higher than other places, and the
snow would melt faster.

27
Chen Pi Ah Si felt that there might be a tomb under the village, but he
couldn’t determine where it was because there were too many buildings
aboveground. They could only look for the tomb by going through each
house one at a time. But looking for tombs in villages wasn’t as easy as
looking for them in rural areas since there were a lot of people watching.
As a result, they hardly made any progress.

At first, they wanted to buy the most important house, but there were
too many people living in the big building, so it was too troublesome.
Chen Pi Ah Si made a decision and motioned with his hands: Kill all of
them.

That night, they entered the village and started killing all the people in
the big house with towels and scimitars used for hooking pineapples.
Then, they piled the corpses in the inner room, covered them with lime,
and lived in the house while they explored underground every night.

They searched for a long time but found nothing underneath.

It wasn’t the right place.

Chen Pi Ah Si shifted his eyes to the neighboring house, and the next day,
they snuck next door and killed all the people there. They tried the same
trick again, but it still wasn’t the right place.

They repeated this process over and over until the corpses from the first
family were already starting to stink.

Chen Pi Ah Si’s men were like boogeymen, and they stealthily killed
people every night. Eventually, they even rolled dice to determine which
family to kill.

There were fewer and fewer people in the village, and when they left half
a month later, most of the villagers had been killed. They found that they
had made a mistake in their judgment, and there actually wasn’t an
ancient tomb at all.

Chen Pi Ah Si was frustrated and returned home, but before leaving, he

and his men set the whole village on fire. Of the forty villagers alive at
that time, not even the children and pregnant women were spared.
28
This incident became a major case, and later, an apprentice got drunk and
spilled the whole thing. Everyone was captured and shot, except for Chen
Pi Ah Si who fled to Guangxi alone.

After that, Chen Pi Ah Si did things more subtly. In the end, the story of
the Upside-Down Mirror Palace at Reclining Buddha Ridge happened
when he was in Guangxi.7

We can’t imagine how vicious Chen Pi Ah Si was before Guangxi, but what
we can understand is that after Guangxi, Chen Pi Ah Si had changed a lot.
It seemed like that major case had changed some things for him after all.

7
There was a story about this in Chapter 2 Vol 4 “Palace of Doom”, when Lao Hai talked about Chen Pi Ah Si’s
background.

29
Chapter 7 Old Dog Wu
Old Dog Wu was my grandfather. He was the first generation of the Wu
family in Changsha. He was an orthodox grave robber who came from a
village full of grave robbers. He hurt his nose in the early days of
liberation. Everyone was too familiar with this story, so there’s no need to
elaborate on it.

My grandfather, like Chen Pi Ah Si, had also been through a major case,
but it was on an even higher level because it involved the Warring States
silk book. It was a scandal of cosmic proportions at the time, and there
were so many people involved that I can’t say too much about it.

In short, that case almost led to the entire reshuffle of Changsha’s grave
robbers. After my grandfather was deceived by Qiu Dekao, he came to
Hangzhou and that was how my family ended up here. The Mystic Nine
had fallen because of this, and they never managed to get back up again.
That was why Old Dog Wu was so famous, but it wasn’t a good
reputation. After all, so many people went to jail or died during that
turmoil, and only my grandfather survived. There were bound to be some
rumors.

In my opinion, this incident was the first time that people from the top
had paid attention to the Mystic Nine in Changsha, and they started to
look into it and arrest people. As a result, Grandpa kept a low profile
afterwards. That was why I was so surprised when someone suddenly
asked about him.

Old Dog Wu was the king of dogs. Of course, the most interesting things
were about the dogs he kept. My grandfather loved dogs and kept many
of them. He understood them very well, but at the same time, he also
enjoyed eating dog meat, which was very strange.

My grandfather had a favorite dog called “Three Inch Nail” that was a
very small Tibetan spaniel. This kind of dog wouldn’t grow too big and
only weighed a few hundred grams. My grandfather kept it in his sleeve
wherever he went.

30
He said that it was the most vigilant kind of dog, and really distrusted
strangers. It was difficult to gain its trust, and if someone meant harm,
the dog hidden in the sleeve would definitely warn its owner.

My grandfather didn’t trust people very much after the accident. The
cruel world made him feel very discouraged, so he always took this dog
with him. But Hangzhou was alright because it was home, and there
weren’t as many complicated things as those in the old Changsha.

However, my grandfather told me one thing that made me look at this

dog with admiration.

My grandfather might have been afraid of people’s hearts, but he wasn’t

afraid of gods and ghosts, although there were some exceptions.

He once went to Nanning in Guangxi and stayed in a guest house. That

night, when he went to the bathroom (all the guest houses at the time
only had public bathrooms), he found that part of it was strange. It was as
if the bathroom had been remodeled, for there were wooden boards
nailed around it.

He was suffering from diarrhea and was very bored, so he looked into the
gap between the wooden boards and found that there was an iron gate
behind them.

He thought about it for a while and finally understood what had

happened. It turned out that the boss had cordoned off a one- or two-
meter section of the corridor to make a bathroom. This door had
originally been at the end of the corridor.

My grandfather found it strange. Didn’t that mean there was a room

missing? Why would the boss do this?

The planks were warped, and the nails were rotten, so he broke the
planks and looked inside. He found that the iron gate behind the planks
was rusty. Strangely enough, there were some traces of ingot candles on
it, and the gate had been welded shut.

The iron gate was a kind of fenced gate with a wooden door inside.
Everyone should be familiar with this kind of setup since it was the
31
earliest anti-theft gate. When Grandpa stretched his hand over and
pushed it, he found that the wooden door inside was unlocked and could
be pushed open.

He thought it was a little strange, but he was so courageous that it was

impossible to be scared in such a place. He pushed hard, trying to force
the wooden door wide open.

But when the door had been pushed to a certain extent, it hit something
and couldn’t be opened any more. My grandpa pushed hard a few times
but found that it didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like something was stuck,
but like someone was blocking the door.

He took a breath, immediately closed the wooden door, and turned his
head and left. Behind him, he heard the sound of the wooden door being
opened by something.

Back in his room, he felt that things were strange, but after waiting for a
while, there was no other movement. He had encountered too many
weird things and didn’t want to think about it anymore. Maybe the boss
here was a voyeur.

In the middle of the night, he suddenly felt uncomfortable and smelled a

very strange odor. He opened his eyes in a daze and saw a strangely tall
person standing at the foot of his bed. The person had an unusually long
head, and that, coupled with his height, made him taller than two meters.
But he was as thin as a piece of firewood. He wasn’t wearing any clothes,
and the skin on his body seemed to be transparent under the moonlight
coming in through the window.

The most peculiar thing was that Three Inch Nail was lying on his body,
and staring at the two-meter-high monster very calmly. Not only did it
not bark, but it also wasn’t afraid at all.

After that, Grandpa fell asleep again. Everything was fine when he woke
up the next morning, but when he remembered what had happened last
night, he broke out in a cold sweat.

32
After he left Nanning, he thought about this matter constantly. What
exactly was that thing? And Three Inch Nail had also behaved very
strangely that night.

Grandpa told me that when he asked someone about it, that person told
him that what he had seen was a bit like a deformity sufferer. In Tibet,
the Tibetan dogs would pay respect to the Bodhisattva. They were usually
kept in a temple and would sit below the seat of the Bodhisattva statues.
Maybe the reason Three Inch Nail was lying on his body was to save his
life.

After that, my grandfather was impressed with Three Inch Nail, and it
became his favorite dog.

That dog was indeed a bit fascinating. Three days after my grandfather
passed away, the dog disappeared and never showed up again. I didn’t
know if it had been stolen and eaten among the chaos, or what.

33
Chapter 8 Black Back The Sixth
Before I talk about Black Back the Sixth, there’s a story that people need
to know.

It’s said that there are times when grave robbers don’t feel anything
unusual when they’re in the tomb, but when they’re about to leave the
grave robbers’ tunnel, they suddenly feel that someone’s hand is on their
shoulder, and it can’t be pulled off.

This was how the name “Black Back the Sixth” came to be. There was a
black handprint on his shoulder, which people said was from something
putting its hand on him.

Whenever grave robbers encountered this kind of thing, they had to close
their eyes before they could turn around and blow a puff of air at it to try
and blow the hand off of their shoulder. The greater the strength, the
higher the success rate. After that, they couldn’t look back, or they’d see
something unpleasant.

Black Back the Sixth was a very low-key person. Even my grandfather
didn’t know him very well. He only knew that he was a swordsman in
Shaanxi before.

Let’s take a look at a section of the Shaanxi county records:

The Swordsmen Association was a chivalrous organization unique to the

lower classes in the Guanzhong area. Its members usually carried a kind
of “Guanshan Machete” made in Lintong Guanshan Town (Guanshan
Town was now in Yanliang District). The machete was about three feet
long and less than two inches wide. It had a special shape and was
extremely sharp, which was why people called them swordsmen.

The swordsmen were around in the early years of the Xianfeng Era in the
Qing Dynasty, but there was no fixed organizational form or strict
discipline. There was only a figure similar to a leader, who everyone
called Brother XX. The people below him were like brothers and worked
hard for him.

34
The swordsmen were scattered into groups of different sizes. They were
self-proclaimed and distributed in areas west of Tongguan and east of
Xi’an along the banks of the Weihe River, and more in Weibei.

Swordsmen had the spirit of resisting and rebelling against the ruling
class, and they also had the loyalty to fight injustice and draw swords to
help each other. During the Revolution of 19118, a large number of
swordsmen participated and stepped onto the stage of history. They
were heroic and brave as they devoted themselves to the revolution.

In today’s Weibei Plain, the swordsmen had become a distant history, just
like what the Guanshan Machetes had been through for more than a
hundred years. The legends and stories of the swordsmen also slowly
faded away and lost their original appearance.

Most of the Mystic Nine leaders had a common attribute, which was
wisdom. When it came to conspiracies or normal strategies, these people
were sophisticated. It was a necessary skill in the environment at the
time, but Black Back the Sixth didn’t seem to have stories in this regard.
He was the only one who was born as a thug.

You didn’t need a brain to be a swordsman, since swords were always

faster than the swordsman’s brain. When Black Back the Sixth was in the
northwest, he lived a dangerous life trying to survive based on the old
way of doing things. It was really like he pinned his brain on his waistband
every day, and even after coming to Changsha, this was the only way he
knew how to do things.

The speed of his sword was so fast that it was like he could pass by a busy
street, and people’s heads would start to roll. He could walk by you on
the street, and your head would fall off, but no one would know who
swung the knife.

I didn’t know if this was an exaggeration, but Black Back the Sixth was
very unpopular in Changsha, because he did things in the northwestern
style, was taciturn, and couldn’t communicate with others at all.

8
The 1911 Revolution, also known as the Chinese Revolution or the Xinhai Revolution, was a revolution that
overthrew China’s last imperial dynasty (the Qing dynasty) and established the Republic of China (ROC). Wiki
link

35
His goal was to take things and sell them. He had no apprentice and was
all alone, which caused people to suspect that he would hack the zombies
underground on his own.

Such a lonely knight would often be immersed in the gentle arms of one
or two people, and he would get jealous and fight for them. This was also
the case for Black Back the Sixth. A woman was truly a hero’s grave.

He smoked opium and lived in a brothel all night, providing for a

prostitute. When she was forcibly sold later, Black Back went six thousand
miles alone before getting her back.

Because of the fact that he took opium, he often entered a state of

madness and had to practice swinging his sword every night until he was
exhausted. During the day, he shrank aside on the street like a beggar.
The whole person gave off a lunatic vibe.

In the second half of his life, he was accompanied by a prostitute and a

sharp sword, which was what happened in a lot of martial arts novels. It
was impossible to guess whether they needed each other or if there was
something else.

Grandpa said that the name “Black Back the Sixth” might be the reason
why he was sixth in the Mystic Nine. In the beginning, they even called
him The Sixth. Although Black Back the Sixth was a very taciturn person,
his special character made him stand out. All kinds of people knew him
and dared not provoke him. But it was also because of his character that
people had no reason to hurt him, either. As a result, he became a big
alien.

In the late liberation period, the Red Guards tried to criticize him. At the
age of seventy, he killed three people in a row and was later shot by the
army. He was the only one in the Mystic Nine who had no family and had
a miserable ending.

But it was rumored that he was already crazy before he was killed. He
never took protective measures when he was in the tomb, so his body
had deteriorated before he was fifty years old. In his last years, he was a

36
mixture of a beggar and Kong Yiji.9 Every few days, he would have some
scraps to exchange for wine and food, and when opium was banned after
liberation, he took to sucking rusty iron nails.

It could be said that this man may not be a tomb robber, but he wasn’t a
drifter or a ranger either. No one could define what exactly he was.

Black Back the Sixth was a weird existence. He was a typical kind of
person from the old society who had no pursuits, desires, or wisdom. If
there had been someone he could work for, Black Back the Sixth would
have been a good underling. Under the arrangement of his master,
maybe he could have gotten married and would have slowly learned to
love. Especially after having a child, he would have had a relative sense of
life.

But it was a pity that Black Back the Sixth didn’t have that kind of life. His
boss died when he was in the northwest, their swordsmen group was
disbanded, and he became a ship without a helm. After that, he had
nothing in his life, and all he was doing was just trying to stay “alive”.

I thought that the prostitute was his interface with the real world, and he
might have only felt his existence when he was making love to her. After
she died, however, he disconnected from the world and could only live in
his own world, which was why he went crazy.

“I’m not robbing a grave. Instead, I’m desperate.”

Here’s to Black Back the Sixth.

9
Kong Yiji, a character from a short story by Lu Xun, was an alcoholic failed scholar who frequented the tavern
where the narrator worked when he was a boy. Wiki link

37
38
Chapter 9 Huo Xiangu
The lower three clans.

The lower three clans had fewer stories because they were all business
people, and didn’t personally rob graves. Since the middle three clans and
the lower three clans had close business relationships with each other,
people from these two clans were often related by marriage as well. For
example, my grandmother was from the Xie family.

As the only woman in the Mystic Nine, Huo Xiangu from Baishajing
definitely wasn’t inferior to men. Granny Huo had a son who joined the
revolution led by Mao Zedong. During the Cultural Revolution, the Huo
family’s background was discovered, which resulted in their
disappearance. Rumor had it that they went behind the scenes and were
protected by powerful people.

Speaking of Huo Xiangu, my grandpa always had to see whether my

grandma was nearby when he talked about her since he and Huo Xiangu
had history. It was a sensitive topic in our family, so we had to prevent my
grandma from overhearing our conversations; otherwise, she would
pinch my grandpa’s ears and scold, “Old man, it’s been decades, and you
still haven’t forgotten about that temptress.”

That’s right. Huo Xiangu and my grandpa had an ambiguous relationship

in the past.

Since this topic couldn’t be discussed in detail, I didn’t know whether

their relationship happened before or after my grandparents got
together, but it would be a big problem if it was the latter. I couldn’t ask
my grandma about it, because she would hit me on the head with a
knitting needle and shoo me away.

Of course, it may not be what I think. Maybe grandpa just had some
business relationships with Huo Xiangu, but grandma got jealous because
Huo Xiangu was so beautiful.

Grandpa said that Huo Xiangu was indeed beautiful, as evidenced by her
nickname “Xiangu”, which means “fairy”. Her beauty was acknowledged

39
by people, and my grandpa said that she was really like a fairy. This
woman had a temperament that made people unable to look at her
directly or think dirty about her. It was the kind of temperament that was
innate and couldn’t be cultivated. Men who looked at her had no way of
producing any evil thoughts.

When I asked my grandpa if he meant that Huo Xiangu’s boobs were as

flat as a washboard, he replied, “Of course not.”

Huo Xiangu was 1.7 meters tall and liked to wear cheongsams. Her skin
was very white and she had short hair. Her temperament came from her
gaze, which was something out of this world. Her eyes were so clear that
it was as if she had never been polluted by the world. Once you looked
into them, you would be willing to do anything she asked of you.

That sounds a little like Poker-Face. Does that mean that Huo Xiangu was
a female version of Poker-Face? Then I started to imagine what Poker-
Face would look like in a cheongsam.

However, Huo Xiangu’s holiness didn’t last her entire life. When she was
about thirty years old, she fell in love with a military officer who later
became a capable man under Mao Zedong.

It was said that she once showed up at a political ball after the founding
of the country. Her appearance stunned all of the people who were
present, and even a few Soviet Union officials looked at her intently.

However, this may have also caused a lot of trouble to her husband, and
their family was overthrown in the Cultural Revolution. Fortunately, they
were rehabilitated afterwards, but Huo Xiangu had become Granny Huo
by that point. The last time my grandpa saw her was on TV. She was still
graceful, and her temperament was still the same, but she wasn’t a little
girl anymore. It really made people think about how ruthless time could
be.

40
For such a woman, I always felt that she was a bit like Ruan Lingyu.10 I
couldn’t imagine how she could be in the Mystic Nine, and she was even
ranked seventh. Could she also rob graves?

Grandpa said that Huo Xiangu didn’t go underground very often, but
when she did, she used a very special method to rob the grave, which was
similar to the early method used in salt mines. They would dig a big
tunnel, and then hook something on top of the tomb before hanging
upside down. This method required people to be very flexible and have a
lot of strength, which was why the heads of the Huo family were all
women, and the status of female underlings was very high.

But when there were more women, there would be more disputes. As a
result, the Huo family was also the family that had the most internal
strife. The process of fighting for power was very fierce, and since there
were many daughters in the Huo family, Huo Xiangu’s road to becoming
the head was very tortuous.

After the head of the family at that time passed away, several daughters,
sisters, and cousins all had their eyes on the leadership position. No one
knew the specifics, but everyone was watching because it meant that the
Huo family’s power would be reorganized. (The truth was simple. You
may have a business relationship with a woman who ranked second in
the Huo family, but if she couldn’t become the head in the future, you
might fall out of favor. Then, all your efforts would be wasted. In addition,
the other person who subsequently became the leader would have her
own interest group, so you couldn’t be sure whether you would benefit
from the change.)

In order to become the head of the house, the competitors would surely
try to form alliances with outside forces. Huo Xiangu’s ally just so
happened to be my grandpa, so he was very familiar with how she
became the leader of her family.

Among the Mystic Nine leaders, the upper three clans didn’t like to
interfere with trivial things in the underworld and wanted nothing to do

10
Ruan Lingyu was a Chinese silent film actress. One of the most prominent Chinese film stars of the
1930s. Wiki link

41
with any of it. As a result, they wouldn’t intervene in such a scheme, even
if it was likely to turn into a major incident.

The middle three clans and lower three clans, on the other hand, were
very enthusiastic since it was all related to their interests. Most of the
people in the Huo family wanted support from the Xie family because Xie
Jiuye was incredibly reliable. Moreover, the Xie family had a strong
foundation, and their underlings were skilled in every way. Whether it
was about fighting or plotting, you would likely succeed as long as you
had the Xie family behind your back.

But Xie Jiuye was a very shrewd man, and naturally wouldn’t let himself
join the game. Furthermore, the Xie family was so well-off that he didn’t
care who would become the leader of the Huo family in the future.
Whoever became the head of the Huo family would want to conduct
business with him no matter what, so he could stand aside and see which
way the wind would blow.

No one in the Huo family wanted to work with Chen Pi Ah Si since he was
too unpredictable. It was very risky to work with him, and he might even
steal your business away. But Chen Pi Ah Si wanted to have a stake in it
and tried to take advantage of the situation, which made things even
more complicated. People in the Huo family were afraid to work with
him, but they were also afraid that he would work with their opponents.

Black Back the Sixth was a mad man, so no one wanted to work with him.

Qi Tiezui had a small business, and it was impossible for him to talk other
people into stepping down, so they found it useless to work with him.

My grandpa turned out to be the only one who was the most reliable. He
was loyal and had a relatively high appeal in the underworld. There were
several excellent apprentices who were on his side, his underlings were
very obedient, and his workers had brilliant abilities. Not to mention the
fact that my grandpa had a successful business.

The most important thing was that my grandpa got along with everyone.
He could work with several leaders in the Mystic Nine and had a
particularly good relationship with the Xie family. Xie Jiuye was very fond

42
of him, so several sisters in the Huo family sent people to invite my
grandpa over for a cup of tea.

As for why my grandpa chose Huo Xiangu in the end, it’s actually very
intriguing. It was said that she sacrificed something in order to gain my
grandpa’s support, but they were the only ones who knew what exactly
happened between them.

In that era, women always had to pay a bleak price when they had to
bargain with men. Even for Huo Xiangu, her beauty was only one type of
leverage. This was still the case for women nowadays, although we as a
society had improved a lot. At least when women in this era took a step
back, there was no longer an abyss behind them.

I don’t know whether we should be glad or sad about it.

43
Chapter 10 Qimen Fortune Teller Qi Tiezui
The Eighth
Qimen11 Fortune Teller Qiu Tiezui12 the Eighth was a peculiar man in the
lower three clans.

The Huo and Xie families were big families, who devoted themselves to
expanding their businesses. From eastern Inner Mongolia to Lingnan,
both families had their tracks all over these areas, but Qi Tiezui went in
the complete opposite direction.

Ever since Qi Tiezui started his business, he had only one shop, which was
a fortune-telling booth in the old tea camp in Changsha.

This fortune-telling booth was in the depths of an alley, and behind it was
a small incense hall where he did the fortune-telling.

If people wanted to buy antiques, they needed to pay six pennies before
the fortune teller would take them into the inner hall. There was a large
hall in the back that was full of treasures.

Under normal circumstances, this kind of small shop would easily be

eliminated, but the Qi family’s shop had been open for several
generations. Business was booming, and the small incense hall flourished.

Some people found it very strange and didn’t know why his business was
so good. Later, they learned that Qi Tiezui had a strange rule.

If people wanted to buy antiques, he would do fortune telling for them.

He was the number one fortune teller in Changsha, and his predictions
were extremely accurate. He only did it for people who bought antiques,
and called it “Buy antiques, get free fortune tellings”.

Nowadays, we might call that competitive differentiation or derivative

value.

11
Qimen, which refers to Qimen Dunjia, is an ancient form of divination from China. Wiki link
12
The Chinese characters actually mean “Qi Iron Mouth.” “Iron mouth” is an idiom meaning someone who can
tell fortunes very accurately.

44
The people who robbed graves and sold antiques were rather
superstitious. Qiu Tiezui was very famous, so even if there were some
people who didn’t actually want to buy antiques, they would go to him
for fortune-telling and buy an item randomly. That was why his business
was always popular.

So, how accurate were his predictions? People said his skills were divine.

On the eve of liberation, a broker came to buy goods in Qi Tiezui’s shop.

He didn’t want anything except for an incense burner that was in the
incense hall.

This incense burner wasn’t an antique, so it was clear to see that the
broker didn’t know how to determine the value of items.

The underling at the time asked Qi Tiezui for instructions, but Qi Tiezui
was very disciplined. He was selling antiques, so how could he sell incense
burners? As a result, Qi Tiezui wouldn’t sell it.

His underling became greedy. He felt that the incense burner didn’t cost
much, so he could sell it himself and secretly buy another one to replace
it and keep the money. As a result, he secretly sold the incense burner.
He was afraid that Qi Tiezui would find out, so he asked the broker to
leave quickly.

At that time, Qi Tiezui was waiting to tell the broker’s fortune and found
it strange that the broker walked away without looking back.

When he asked the underling what happened, the underling got scared
and confessed to the whole thing. Qi Tiezui told him that he had offended
the gods and ancestors by committing such a big taboo, and he was afraid
that the underling would get retribution.

People would piss their pants when Qi Tiezui said something like this
because his words usually came true. As a result, the guy was so
frightened that he immediately took out all the money. He said that he
had only been greedy for a moment and asked if there was a way to
resolve it.

45
At that time, the underling was about to collect rent in the village. After
Qi Tiezui did the fortune-telling, he frowned and returned all the money
back to the guy. He had him carry the money on his body when he went
to the village and told him to put the collected rent at the bottom of the
box. Moreover, he told the guy that he shouldn’t collect rent from the
melon farmers.

The guy was puzzled as he began his journey. When he made it to the
village, he found that the heavy rains that year had caused a reduction in
the number of melons produced. There was no way he could collect the
money from the melon farmers, so he told them that they didn’t have to
pay the rent.

On the way back, he met a robber. All the money on his body was taken,
but strangely enough, he wasn’t hurt at all, and the robber ran away
without searching his box. Soon after he returned to the incense hall, the
robber was caught. It was a melon farmer from the village.

It turned out that the melons had been soaked by the rain, and the melon
farmer had no choice but to become a robber. When he saw that his
victim was the one who hadn’t made him pay rent, he couldn’t bear to kill
him. At the same time, he was afraid that he would get recognized, so he
took the money and hurriedly ran away.

If the underling had asked the melon farmer to pay rent, then he
definitely would’ve died. And if he didn’t have the money he got from the
incense burner, the money in the box would have definitely been taken.

Afterwards, the guy asked Qi Tiezui how exactly he had predicted it, and
Qi Tiezui told him that the money he got for selling the incense burner
was also the money the broker paid in order to buy the incense burner.

“Buy the incense burner” sounded like “Buy the road”13, which meant
that he would encounter a robber, who would steal the money he got
from the incense burner.

13
These sentences are pronounced similarly in Chinese.

46
And the broker hadn’t done the fortune-telling. “Didn’t do the fortune-
telling” sounded like “Didn’t count the melons.”14

Qi Tiezui said, “You’ve committed the sin yourself, but your ancestors
know that it’s your first offense, so they gave you a way out. You must be
careful in the future and not make this kind of mistake again.”

The guy listened and never dared disobey Qi Tiezui again. The story of this
incident was also spread, and soon, all of the people in the city had heard
about it.

14
These sentences are pronounced similarly in Chinese.

47
Chapter 11 Xiao Xiejiu
Xiao Xiejiu, Xie Jiuye,15 was the only orthodox intellectual in the
underworld back then, and he had also studied in Japan for a year.

The Xie family was a model family, and unlike all the people I had
mentioned before, the biggest feature of the Xie family was that they had
no special characteristics. They were average in every way, whether it
was manpower, routines, or connections. Although their performance
wasn’t the most outstanding, it was definitely adequate.

That was why the Xie family had the most stable business among those in
the Mystic Nine. They may not be the wealthiest family, but there had
never been any controversies. No one picked on them, and no one asked
them for help.

Moreover, Xie Jiuye was the type of person who did everything on a step-
by-step basis. He would think of every possibility before it happened, and
planned countermeasures in advance, which might have been the reason
why no one wanted to be their opponents.

This type of person was generally unremarkable, so there wouldn’t be

any strange anecdotes. If there was anything to say, there was only one
interesting story.

Xie Jiuye was good at scheming and loved playing chess in his free time.

At that time, a chess master in Guangzhou was invited to Changsha by an

officer who wanted to watch him play. The chess master played eight
games of chess with eight people at the same time. In the end, the
Changsha chess players lost.

Xie Jiuye was also a chess enthusiast. Speaking of this, during that ten-
year period, there were two people who were famously good at playing
chess. One was Xie Jiuye, the other was my Uncle Two.

15
“Xiao Xiejiu” means “Little Xie Nine”, and “Xie Jiuye” means “Ninth Master Xie” in Chinese.

48
Xie Jiuye was famous for playing unexpected games and was good at
setting up traps, while Uncle Two was good at solving traps. This meant
that one liked to attack, and the other liked to defend and counterattack.

But Xie Jiuye and Uncle Two were people from two different eras. When
Xie Jiuye’s skills were at their peak, Uncle Two’s skills hadn’t matured yet.

As a result, Xie Jiuye was the one who could go up against the chess
master, but he didn’t like to make public appearances.

They finally decided to open another one-vs-eight chess game, one of

which was directed by Xie Jiuye behind the scenes. The result was jaw-
dropping. The master won the chess game with Xie Jiuye but lost the
other seven games.

A few chess enthusiasts were watching the game and were amazed.

It turned out that even though it was full of flaws, the chess game with
Xie Jiuye was thrilling. Every time Xie Jiuye seemed close to losing, he
always found a way to stay in the game.

But when Xie Jiuye made his counterattacks, he didn’t have the obvious
advantage and was still pressured by the master. This went on until he
eventually lost the game.

Xie Jiuye said that it was “a chess game of courtiers”, which was invented
by those who had superb skills but had to play chess with those who were
of a higher status.

For example, if you were asked to play chess with the emperor, you had
to lose, but you needed to make it very difficult so that the emperor
would think that he won by his own strength.

It was very hard to play this kind of game spontaneously, so there were
some people who planned all the moves in advance in order to come up
with a difficult game.

But despite all the planning, the end goal was to lose the chess game.
Other people asked Xie Jiuye why he didn’t just win directly so that the
master couldn’t feel proud of himself.

49
Xie Jiuye said that the master made his way here from Guangdong and
had countless experiences playing chess. Naturally, he would have his
own methods for winning.

This kind of person only picked the easy games, so if one of the eight
people was as skilled as him, he would bypass that person. In the end, he
would win seven games and only lose one. That way, he wouldn’t be
ashamed because it would still look like he had excellent skills. But this
way of playing was a trap in itself.

Of course, the skills that the master exhibited were definitely brilliant. His
way of playing required a very strong memory and the ability to be
familiar with the chess games, but resilience wasn’t as important.

As a result, Xie Jiuye first used the “chess game of courtiers” strategy to
reveal some flaws, and then lured him into the trap.

The master must have thought that this person had the weakest skills, so
he would attack first to gain an advantage, and wouldn’t care too much
about the other seven games.

It was the basic method when playing one-against-many chess games. It

was impossible to guarantee that all sides would be on the offensive, so
you would decide which games to attack and which ones to defend.
Within a few rounds, the attention given wouldn’t be even.

Xie Jiuye took advantage of this. Seeing that the master was about to win,
Xie Jiuye turned the game around with another unexpected trick. He
continued maintaining this kind of situation where the master was about
to win, but couldn’t actually do it.

It may have seemed like there were many flaws, but none of them
allowed him to make a breakthrough. It was like when a girl teased you so
much that you had erotic desires, but she wouldn’t let you get close to
her. It was a really uncomfortable feeling.

As a result, the master wasn’t willing to lose that one game. He focused
on dealing with the others, but he also couldn’t get any further. He failed
the other seven games because one game dragged on for too long.

50
The players from Changsha had wanted to defeat him, and with one win
and seven losses, the master would obviously feel upset, but once he
reflected on it, he wouldn’t think that it was a conspiracy.

Everyone admired Xie Jiuye more than ever. They drank and celebrated
that night without mentioning it again, but when everyone left, his son
asked him again, “Dad, what happened exactly?”

Xie Jiuye laughed and said, “I sacrificed something in order to win in the
end.”

It turned out that every player was supposed to be in separate rooms, but
the master couldn’t see what was going on in those rooms. That “chess
game of courtiers” was actually played by the seven players in the same
room at the same time, and the other seven games were played by Xie
Jiuye alone.

Xie Jiuye’s skills weren’t as good as the master’s, so if they had played the
game in an honest manner, Xie Jiuye definitely would have lost.

With this method, the power of those seven players was bound to be
better than the power of one player, and they would subdue most of that
person’s energy.

On the other side, Xie Jiuye was on the offense in every chess game. He
wasn’t concerned about losing a game or two, because he could also take
advantage of the fact that the master’s energy was drawn, and could play
the other seven games without worries. The whole incident was neither
noticed nor flawed.

Master Xie set up one trap, solved another, played chess, and avoided
answering people’s questions. Every step he took was almost seamless
and showed the depth of his wisdom and how tricky his schemes could
be.

51
52
Chapter 12 About Our First Trip
Looking back, I’ve traveled to many places, from Shandong, Hainan,
Shaanxi, the Northeast, and now northwestern China. I’ve gone non-stop
the whole way, and seldom had time to stop and appreciate the customs
of these places.

But I’m gratified that I took a lot of photos and drew a lot of sketches
along the way. Now it seems that some of them can still describe how I
felt when I saw these places.

The things I helped prepare:

Shopping list (Copy from Uncle Three’s notes):

Item Quantity
────────────────────────────
Luoyang shovel 5
────────────────────────────
Climbing rope (200 meters)
────────────────────────────
Linder Machete 2
(Large and thickened)
────────────────────────────
Small Axe 3
(Less than two and a half Jin)
────────────────────────────
Hiking Backpack 5
────────────────────────────
Smokeless stove 9
(Solid fuel)
────────────────────────────
Jacket XXXL×1, XL×2, M×2
────────────────────────────
Threaded steel pipe 20 (50 cm a piece)
(need to give owners the design drawings to modify)
────────────────────────────
Tiger Head shotgun 4
(need to modify to make the guns shorter)

53
────────────────────────────
1.

Long-distance bus

Departure station: Hangzhou North Bus Station

Jinan ETA: 14:30

Bus Number: 1026 (ordinary bus)

Motor coach (high-class): 2

Cost: 295 yuan

Bus stopped at: Xuzhou, Tengzhou, Qufu, Tai’an, Jinan

Buy five tickets at Hangzhou North Railway Station

2.

Find Mister Li when going through the baggage security check

Money given to Mister Li: 1500

54
Chapter 13 Temple of Seeds
There were two theories as to why it was called the Temple of Seeds.

The first one was a local legend about a general in ancient times who
returned in triumph and seized many treasures. A horse plague was
afflicting the area when they arrived, and a lot of horses died, which
meant that the treasures couldn’t be taken away. In the end, the general
used kilns to melt the gold and then threw those precious gold pieces into
the river here.

The treasures he melted were in the shape of golden melon seeds.16 He

ordered the villagers not to harvest them and said he would kill the whole
village if he saw a golden melon seed in the market.

Because this general had an outstanding record and high prestige, no one
dared salvage the golden melon seeds when they were thrown into the
river. These golden melon seeds were gradually buried under the river
sand until the dynasty changed.

People who had heard of this legend came to salvage the golden melon
seeds one after another, so in order to deter these greedy people, the
local villagers built a statue of the general near the river. It actually kept
away those who wanted to create trouble. Later, to commemorate this
incident, they built a temple near the statue and called it the Temple of
Seeds.

The temple was long gone, but the legend of the Temple of Seeds had
been passed down.

The second theory was the complete opposite. It was said that the river
here produced golden sands, many of which were in the shape of melon
seeds. Many people came here to gather them, and those people later
settled down here and started to build ancestral halls and temples.
Generation after generation prospered, and people called this place the

16
“Guazi” means “melon seeds” in Chinese. The chapter could alternatively be called “Guazi Temple” but Vol 1
Ch. 3 of “Cavern of Blood Zombies” went with Temple of Seeds, so I’m being consistent.

55
Temple of Seeds because the golden melon seeds had originated here a
long time ago.

According to my research, it was very likely that the general in the first
story was Wu Zixu17, but there were many similar famous legends in
Liyang, Jiangsu. I had no idea why this kind of story appeared in
Shandong18, but according to general speculations, a considerable
number of the immigrants here may have come from Jiangsu and brought
their folklore to Shandong.

Wu Zixu and the Virgin Woman

Around 500 BC, at the end of the Spring and Autumn Period, King Chu
Ping wrongfully killed Wu Zixu’s father and brother. Wu Zixu escaped
from Zhaoguan, crossed the Yangtze River, and fled to the Wu Kingdom.

He was followed by soldiers who were trying to capture him. He walked

day and night for seven days before stopping in Huangshan Lishui in
Liyang (he went from Gucheng Lake in Gaochun, walked by Nandu,
Liyang, Xushe, Xijiu, Yicheng, Dongjiu and the Taihu River. The Yixing
section was also known as Nanxi River.)

He met a virgin woman who was washing clothes by the river and asked
her for food. She gave him the batter19 that was used to wash the clothes.
Wu Zixu ate it and asked her not to tell anyone that he had been here so
that the soldiers chasing him wouldn’t know his whereabouts. In order for
Wu Zixu to escape without any worries, and to preserve her chastity, she
picked up a big rock and threw herself into the water.

Later, Wu Zixu led the soldiers from the Wu Kingdom, defeated the state
of Chu, and avenged his father and brother’s death. On the way back to
the Wu kingdom, he went to Lishui to pay tribute to the virgin woman
and threw hundreds of gold pieces into the river.

17
Wu Zixu was a general and politician of the Wu kingdom in the Spring and Autumn period (722–481
BC). Wiki link
18
The Temple of Seeds is a fictional place, but the setting is in Shandong.
19
In ancient times, people didn’t have soap, so they used batter to wash clothes.

56
According to folklore, he made three buckets and filled each of them with
three liters of golden melon seeds. He sprinkled them into the water as
gratitude.

I don’t want to assume the worst of the heroes back then, but this
historical story still allows us to think of another cruel possibility.

When King Goujian of Yue asked for peace, Wu Zixu persuaded the new
king of the Wu Kingdom to seize the chance and destroy the Yue country
in order to unify Jiangnan. This story showed that Wu Zixu was the type of
person who was determined and never left room for mercy. He could
endure humiliation for decades before returning to the country for
revenge and could open graves to slaughter corpses. We can somewhat
imagine what his character was like. Just like many forced “sacrifices” in
modern Chinese history, we don’t know how many martyrs were actually
killed at the hands of enemies.

“I begged for food while you were washing clothes. I was full, and you
were drowned. Ten years later, you were rewarded with thousands of
gold pieces.”

Blimey, was the woman who was washing clothes forced to die by the
sword for a wonderful lie? Wu Zixu may have still felt somewhat guilty
about it after all, but could the gold subside the long-term guilt in his
heart?

Or maybe things weren’t as simple as I thought. Wu Zixu was a general

who was famous for tomb-robbing, so maybe the golden melon seeds
were scattered here for some other reason. Or, these golden melon seeds
had washed down from the ancient tombs upstream because the tomb
robbers accidentally spilled the golden sands as they were transporting
the treasures.

For the time being, I can only guess.

57
58
59
Chapter 14 The Map That Was Decoded
From The Warring States Silk Book
The key to translating the Warring States silk book was to take apart the
characters. You split a character and made it become a matrix, and then
all the details formed a huge matrix. That matrix was also divided into
dimensions, so we needed to find the appropriate points. These symbols
indicated the meanings of the lines after they were connected. This set of
symbology was very complicated, but it could be restored in a short
amount of time thanks to modern computers.

Later, this method was widely used in “Yanshi Lei” designs, but I don’t
know if it was also inspired by the Warring States silk book.

(TN Note: basically showing how the decoded book fits the terrain on google earth)

60
Chapter 15 Seven Star Lu Palace Floor Plan
According to my analysis, there may be a group of ancient tombs around
the Temple of Seeds area. The corpse cave was obviously a cave that
hadn’t been formed naturally. I didn’t know how the cavity in this
mountain came into being, but the roads on both sides must have been
dug when King Lushang20 was robbing the tomb.

We didn’t know which direction the water flowed in the mountain

range’s underground water system, but based on the current situation,
the cave led the stream across the mountain. It was probably easier to
transport the grave goods from the ancient tomb using the waterway.

In the Seven Star Lu Palace, the corridor between the sacrificial tomb and
the real tomb was a kilometer long. Those maze-like paths that
connected with the corridor all eventually led to the underground palace
where the snake cypress21 was. The ancients must have planted the tree
there a long time ago since its diameter indicated that it was at least a
thousand years old.

Because of its national power, most of the ancient tombs of the Western
Zhou Dynasty were small in structure, and only a few emperors could
enjoy the majestic fortress-like tombs. The structure of this particular
tomb wasn’t majestic, and after careful analysis, we found that there
should be three ancient tombs connected with each other. The sacrificial
tomb was a funerary tomb, the seven-star coffins were fakes that were
used to deceive grave robbers, and the inlaid path that led to the giant
cave was the real tomb.

If that was true, what was the purpose of those inlaid paths? Their degree
of damage indicated that they should have been built during the
construction of the ancient tomb. If they were the secret passages used
by the craftsmen to escape, then they were too complicated. And if they
were part of a maze to prevent outsiders from entering the tomb, I
figured it would be easier to just destroy the entrance.

20
Ruler of Dead Soldiers
21
They called it a “hydra-cypress” in Cavern of Blood Zombies

61
The text written in “The Book of King Lushang” told us that there was an
arrangement of numbers between these hidden passages. The ancient
people obviously took great pains to build these inlaid paths, which made
me even more confused. I couldn’t understand it until I discussed it with
Uncle Two afterwards.

I had been thinking that the use of these inlaid paths in the ancient tomb
was to prevent intrusion from the outside world, but the simplest way to
protect the tomb was to close these paths off entirely. This was a
contradiction, which meant that I was obviously thinking in the wrong
direction. If we thought about it carefully and in reverse, we would find
that the cave with the Nine-Headed Snake Cypress may not have been an
ancient tomb, but more like a religious site.

There were many alchemists in the State of Qi and the State of Lu.
Alchemists had a lot of secret practices and meeting places, and even the
monarchs had secret cultivation places.

At that time, alchemists often had religious and political backgrounds. For
example, Mohists22 also believed in ghosts and gods, but their disciples
were strictly organized, just like a modern-day cult. Later, Zhang
Jue23 teamed up with alchemists and staged a rebellion.

Since the ancient people saw alchemists going in and out of the
mountains in a very mysterious manner, there were many legends of
fairies in Shandong, and the trend of people cultivating themselves to
become immortals intensified. This cave may have existed because of
something like this.

I had hoped to learn some clues from the previous legends in Shandong,
and after reading many county records, I found that there were indeed
many points that fit into this, but they were all very obscure and
uncertain, so I could only try to guess what happened from them.

22
Wiki info on Mohism here
23
Zhang Jue was the leader of the Yellow Turban Rebellion during the late Eastern Han dynasty of China. He
was said to be a follower of Taoism and a sorcerer. Wiki link

62
63
From the book

64
A more close-up view

65
Chapter 16 Marine Salvage
Wang Meng sent an e-mail saying that he received the 2003 antique
auction yearbook. This kind of stupid thing was sent to us every year, and
I never knew who sent it. Anyways, common peasants like us couldn’t
afford any of the items in it.

I saw on the news that the Americans had sent a skateboard to Mars last
month, [Note: It was written exactly like that in the headlines] and the old
guys at NASA celebrated with each other. I comforted myself, they even
made it to Mars, so it shouldn’t be too difficult for me to try and find a
person under the sea.

I didn’t fully understand what A Ning told me, and I didn’t know their
company very well, either. I searched a bit and found that their company
did exist. The logo showed a soft triangular coral (Insert A Ning’s
illustration of the logo). This kind of AI-designed enterprise company
wouldn’t be too small-scale, so I should be able to trust their
professionalism at least.

Such large-scale salvage companies weren’t common overseas. Generally,

marine salvage projects were often carried out by teams that were sent
by the government since there were lots of secrets and wealth involved.
The governments of various countries weren’t willing to let private
companies conduct these legendary business activities.

The most typical case was the domestic marine salvage plan of the
Japanese shipwreck “Awa Maru”. Because it was rumored that the ship
carried Peking Man24 fossil skulls, countless foreign salvage companies
offered free assistance at that time, but the Chinese refused.

There was still an international controversy over why the Americans sank
this ship back then. The sighting report at the time indicated that this
huge ship was sailing at top speed in the heavy fog and seemed to be
eager to reach its destination. Many conspiracy theories believed that
there were other things on board besides the Peking Man skulls, which

24
Peking Man is a group of fossil specimens of Homo erectus, dated from roughly 750,000 years ago. Whether
there were skulls of Peking Man in the shipwreck of Awa Maru is not confirmed as of now.

66
forced the Americans to break the agreement and sink the Japanese
civilian ship.

History is full of mystery, so no one knows what secrets are in the ruins
under the sea. Naturally, it was better to keep those secrets under their
control than to expose them to the treasure hunters who sought nothing
but profits.

Even though every country had strict inspections for salvage projects, this
kind of supervision was actually very weak. That was why there was an
idiom, “The emperor is too far away to control what happens in the
mountains”. It was basically impossible to supervise marine salvage on
the far-away sea.

I heard from some of my friends who handled goods that Xisha had
almost become a battlefield. There were ships from various countries
coming in and out, and the coast guard couldn’t even catch up to them.
Moreover, the profit was too great. If a boat went out and returned with
ten million, they would only be sentenced to ten years or so if they got
caught. You would be an idiot to sell drugs instead of doing marine
salvage work.

This sounded very attractive to me. Even Li Ka-shing25 would have to

admit defeat in the face of making two or three hundred million in a few
days. Plus, the risk was much lower than losing your head trying to make
two hundred thousand from poaching hawksbill sea turtles.

The following are some famous marine salvage incidents at home and
abroad:

Awa Maru, a Japanese ocean liner, was loaded with forty tons of gold,
twelve tons of silver, forty boxes of jewelry, and a large number of
cultural relics the Japanese looted from China. There were also three
thousand tons of tin ingots, three thousand tons of rubber, and
thousands of tons of rice. The ship was sunk by a U.S. submarine in Fujian
waters on March 28, 1945. It was later salvaged from 1977 to 1980. At

25
Li Ka-shing is a Hong Kong business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. As of June 2019, he is the 30th
richest person in the world. Wiki link

67
that time, the salvaged items were worth fifty million U.S. dollars. (Fifty
million U.S. dollars in 1980!!).

Geldermalsen, a Chinese merchant ship26, sailed from Guangzhou to

Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands. In 1752, it sank in the waters
of Hong Kong. In 1986, marine salvor Michael Hatcher salvaged 239,000
pieces of blue and white porcelain from the ship and found a hundred
and twenty-five pieces of gold ingots, each weighing forty-five kilograms.
The value of the items was worth twenty million U.S. dollars.

Tek Sing, a Chinese merchant ship, was found in the South China Sea. It
was also Michael Hatcher who recovered more than a million pieces of
porcelain from the ship, of which he smashed six hundred thousand
pieces because their color was ordinary and he didn’t have the ability to
transport them. The remaining parts were sold for more than thirty
million U.S. dollars in Germany.

Nuestra Señora de Atocha, a Spanish colonial ship, sank in the waters of

Havana in 1622. It was discovered by the treasure hunter Fisher in 1985.
Eight tons of gold and five hundred kilograms of gems were salvaged! All
the artifacts pulled from the water were worth four hundred million U.S.
dollars. Because of this, Fisher gave up operation of the entire company.
At that time, treasure hunting had become the only thing worth pursuing
in his life. I thought his mentality was very similar to that of Uncle Three’s.

Because of the huge cargo capacity of ships, there was a saying that a
ship was worth ten ancient tombs. The number of porcelain items carried
on some large merchant ships was almost astronomical. Throughout
history, the number of giant ships that had sunk in the Maritime Silk Road
was far beyond people’s imagination, and these huge treasures were far
from being discovered.

But I could only find a simple webpage for A Ning’s company on the
internet, which didn’t reveal much information. This company didn’t
seem to carry out high-profile projects. I wasn’t familiar with foreigners’
antique business, so I could only tell myself to be careful.

26
Geldermalsen actually belonged to Dutch East India Company (VOC), but I have no idea why the author said
that it was a Chinese merchant ship.

68
Chapter 17 The Xisha Islands
The Xisha Islands, also known as Gem Islands, are one of the four major
islands in the South China Sea. They consist of the Yongle Islands and the
Xuande Islands. This group of large and small coral islands covers over a
thirty thousand square kilometer sea area and is beautiful and pure.
[Note: Some people say there are more than five hundred thousand
square kilometers.]

(See the below map of the Xisha Islands, pointing out the route from
Qinglan Harbor to Yongxing Island.)

69
Xisha has been China’s territory since ancient times. The Old Book of Tang
recorded that the Chinese government began to officially manage the
waters south of Hainan Island from the Tang Dynasty.

In ancient times, this place was called “A Thousand Miles of Changsha”,

and was the only route through the South China Sea. As early as the Sui
Dynasty, China had sent envoys to Malaysia through the South China Sea,
and the Tang Dynasty monk Yijing27 also passed through here on his way
to India. Merchant ships loaded with ceramics, silk, and spices sailed by
here, so it was also known as the “Maritime Silk Road”.

Because it’s far from the mainland and inaccessible to people, the sea
around the Xisha Islands is very clean, with a maximum visibility of forty
meters. It has several kilometers of coral reefs, which makes it an
excellent diving area.

──From Wikipedia

Our destination is Bowl Reef.

(The map of the Xisha Islands is below, pointing out the route from
Yongxing Island to Bowl Reef)

27
Yijing was a Tang-era Chinese Buddhist monk famed as a traveler and translator. His account of his travels is
an important source for the history of the medieval kingdoms along the sea route between China and
India. Wiki link

70
I’ve looked for some information and found that there are many so-called
Bowl Reefs in China, including Bohai Bay, the East China Sea, and the
South China Sea. The main reason why it’s called Bowl Reef is simply
because fishermen often fish out porcelain bowls near these reefs.

This is because most of the Bowl Reefs are submerged reefs that are
located on the main sea routes. Most of the ancient shipwrecks are
concentrated nearby, and a large number of shipwreck materials are
scattered. Based on this, I find that the name of the ancient reef is worthy
of careful study. The only well-known ocean expedition I’ve heard of in
China is Bowl Reef No.1.28 Our destination this time will obviously be
similar to that process.

28
A ship sank near Fujian Province, and it was discovered in 2005. Experts speculated that the sinking date of
the ship was around the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century. Lots of pieces of blue
and white porcelain were found. The ship was then called Bowl Reef No.1.

71
Chapter 18 Qinglan Harbor
I had already set off from Qinglan Harbor, and there was no
entertainment on the boat. Apart from watching the sea, I could only
listen to the radio.

The only stations that would come in were from Taiwan, Malaysia, and
Vietnam, but none from the mainland. I found it very strange. It may be
because the radio was made in Taiwan. Sometimes the old-fashioned
Taiwanese radios were welded to a few fixed frequencies.

Yesterday, I thought back over what that woman said to me and felt that
something was off about the whole thing. I told myself to think more
about it if I had a chance.

I didn’t know why I was unable to concentrate. Maybe it was because the
boat was rocking too violently. I really didn’t get many chances to ride on
boats, and several of the fishermen were impressed that I could get into
the cabin without feeling nauseous.

72
Chapter 19 Transcription of Yongxing Island
Yongxing Island is also known as “Woody Island” because of the dense
forests there. Yongxing Island got its name from the warship that took
over the Xisha Islands on November 29, 1946.

Yongxing Island is located at 16 degrees, 50 minutes north latitude and

112 degrees, 20 east longitude. The island is about 1,850 meters long
from east to west, about 1,160 meters wide from north to south, and
covers an approximate area of 2.1 square kilometers.

It is the largest island in both the Xisha Islands and in the South China Sea.
Yongxing Island is flat with an average height of about five meters. There
is a large sand dike about 870 meters long and 100 meters wide in the
southwest of the island with a maximum height of 8.3 meters.

It is also surrounded by sand banks and has a depression in the middle

that was formed after the lagoon dried up. It’s convenient to dig a well
there to get water, but the water is undrinkable due to the pollution of
black manure. Despite this, it’s still sufficient for washing.

Yongxing Island has a large surface area, lush vegetation, abundant fresh
water, no stagnant water in the central lowland, and high sand dikes to
block the wind. As a result, this is the most advantageous island in the
South China Sea.

Since Yongxing Island happens to be in the middle of the Xisha Islands, it

is considered the capital of the Zhongsha Islands in the southwest, and
Hainan Province sent a government agency (equivalent to the county
level) to reside there.

Yongxing Island is the transportation hub of the Zhongsha Islands in the

southwest. It has a modern airport, which can take off and land Boeing
737 aircraft, and the dock can hold five-thousand-ton ships. Other
infrastructures and reception facilities are also relatively complete.

73
Chapter 20 The Floor Plan Of The
Undersea Tomb
Sea burial was a type of burial method unique to the coastal peoples, but
unlike the Vikings’ sea burials, the same land burial custom was
performed when constructing ancient undersea tombs here. In fact, it
was just burying ancient tombs on the bottom of the sea.

Throughout history, there were many people who used underwater

ancient tombs for burial. The more famous ones were Concubine Chen’s
Water Tomb in Jinxi and Shen Wansan’s Underwater Tomb in Yinzibang.

The one I was most interested in was actually Cao Cao’s.29 He had
seventy-two fake tombs, one of which was rumored to have been found
in the Qinglu River in Xuchang.

There were a few legends, and the first two still had clues that could be
followed, but you could only get clues to the second one from Pu
Songling’s “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio”.30 After reading it, I felt
like there was some basis to it because the content didn’t sound like
something that people at the time could make up.

Cao Cao’s tomb in “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio”. The original text
of “Cao Cao’s Tomb” is as follows:

Outside Xucheng, the river was turbulent, and the water near the cliff was
deep and gloomy. In midsummer, someone entered the river to bathe
and was suddenly cut by an ax; their broken corpse floated up from the
water. The same thing happened to another person, which startled
people.

Upon hearing this, the town governor sent people to cut off the upper
flow of the river. Once the water was exhausted, they saw a deep hole

29
Cao Cao, courtesy name Mengde, was a Chinese warlord, statesman, poet, and 1 of the central figures of the
Three Kingdoms Period. Wiki link
30
Refresher: “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio” or “Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio”, also called
“Liaozhai Zhiyi” in Chinese, is a collection of Classical Chinese stories by Pu Songling, comprising close to five
hundred “marvel tales”.

74
under the cliff, where a wheel with blades as sharp as frost had been
placed in the middle.

They removed the wheel and broke in. There was a small tablet inside the
hole, with characters written in the style of Chinese seal script. Looking
closely at the words, they found that it was the tomb of Cao Mengde.
They broke open the coffin, scattered the bones, and took all the gold
and treasures.

The writer’s31 notes said: “A poet once said that there would definitely be
a real tomb among the seventy-two fake ones, but who knew that the
real one wasn’t among the seventy-two graves at all? Cao Cao was really
cunning! But after more than a thousand years, he still couldn’t keep his
bones intact. What was the point of being cunning? Alas, Cao Cao’s
wisdom was his own foolishness!”

The translated content was very legendary. The general meaning was that
someone was swimming in the river by a cliff and suddenly seemed to be
cut in half by a knife. The corpse emerged from the water, and the same
thing happened to the next person.

They felt that there was something strange at the bottom of the river, so
they stopped the flow of the water to check what was going on, and saw
a deep hole in the lower part of the cliff that had been submerged by the
water. There was a wheel full of blades at the entrance of the cave, and
inside was Cao Cao’s tomb.

I had seen many strange mechanisms in ancient tombs, so I knew that it

wasn’t difficult for ancient people to make something like this. The
difficulty was finding the driving force that could rotate the wheel. This
was probably the reason why this tomb had been built in the water.

In order to have a mechanism that could be used for a long time, a source
of power that could operate continuously for thousands of years was
essential. The river was the perfect source, but Wang Zanghai thought

31
The writer here refers to Pu Songling, the author of “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio”. He sometimes
added notes under the tale he recorded.

75
much further than that and utilized the ocean currents and tides at the
bottom of the sea.

However, there were flaws in this legend. I highly doubted that the
millennium-old blades were as sharp as ever, considering how the
underwater environment was very unsuitable for metal preservation.
Unless these parts were all made of gold, which wasn’t impossible.

Another flaw was that it was more reasonable to close the ancient tomb’s
entrance by some means than to install a mechanism.

If the person hadn’t been hurt while bathing, then the ancient tomb
wouldn’t have been discovered. Nevertheless, if you made a wheel that
could hurt people, there would always be a day of accidental injuries, and
someone would inevitably go down to see what happened. The skilled
craftsmen who could make this kind of mechanism should have been able
to think of this, so why would they make such a mistake?

I was afraid that there was another hidden story. The Central Plains had
developed at the cost of soil erosion. The Qinglu River in Cao Cao’s era
should’ve had more water, so the ancient tombs should be deep
underwater. By Pu Songling’s era, the water level dropped a lot, which
meant that the ancient tombs at the bottom of the river could be
infiltrated with human power [Note: sic].

These floating corpses were probably grave robbers who tried to explore
the tomb at that time, and were either killed by the mechanism or started
killing each other for profit, which caused the tomb to be exposed.

To be honest, this information had given me a lot of inspiration. I had

been thinking about how Wang Zanghai’s undersea tomb was built
because the human and material resources at that time made it almost
impossible to utilize other methods in watery environments besides the
shipwreck tomb. But this information did give me an idea.

It was possible that Wang Zanghai had built a dam in the seabed area to
form a roundabout and then drained the seawater to roughly form a dry
piece of land. After that, he dug a huge pit and released the water so they
could sail the ship. He then pumped the seawater out again, let the tomb

76
ship could slowly sink into the pit as the water level dropped, and then
destroyed the dam to allow the seawater to return.

From the floor plan, the structure of this undersea tomb was very
complicated. If they didn’t use this method, then they must have used
calculus to figure out how to accurately sink the tomb to the bottom of
the sea. But that was probably impossible. I couldn’t help but think, if the
ancients could stop a river from flowing, why couldn’t they build a
roundabout on the seabed?

I went back and checked the textbook and found that there was a
problem— ancient people didn’t know how to deal with water seepage.

The sand at the bottom of the sea was too permeable, and the manpower
and material resources needed to build this kind of dam were several
times more than that of the sunken ship.

When I asked an old professor who had taught me before, he thought

about it carefully and said that the key should be the huge stone anchors.
The stone anchors were distributed in a wide area of the sea and must
have served the same function as cable-tie structures. The countless
stone anchors played a role in regulating the ship’s balance as it sank to
the bottom of the sea.

77
Chapter 21 Drawings Of The Ship
Later, I discussed the ship’s structure with Fatty. We drew a lot of
sketches and felt that there would be problems with the overall structure
since the ship was so huge. It was impossible for a ship this size to sail,
which was why we felt that it functioned more as a huge tomb than an
actual seafaring ship.

The biggest problem with such a huge wooden boat was the keel. There
wasn’t a tree in the world big enough to make the keel of this ship, so
they must have combined different woods to form it. If that was the case,
then this structure was very intriguing, and we would need sonar to
determine whether the ship was actually this huge, a little smaller, or not
that shape at all.

I asked several ship engineers for their opinions, but they all thought my
idea was too exaggerated. Only one person told me that it wasn’t
completely impossible. Although it might have looked like a ship, it may
have actually been several ships spliced together. Moreover, since this
ship wasn’t for use, it only needed to be able to arrive at the sea burial
site when the wind and sea were calm. To put it bluntly, this was a huge
float.

Sometimes, I couldn’t help but wonder how many ancient people’s

efforts and brilliance had been devoted to this kind of ancient behemoth.

If this technology hadn’t been used exclusively by the royal family, or

secretly kept in the hands of a few outstanding craftsmen, it could’ve
been spread to the ordinary masses. At that point, maybe China might
have become a transoceanic empire.

If this kind of warship existed at that time, it could provide artillery

support along the shore as soldiers swarmed out. Who could stop them?

It was a pity that this giant vessel in the Ming Dynasty eventually became
the tomb of the shipbuilder. I didn’t know if it was ironic or sad.

78
79
Chapter 22 The Bronze Tree and “The Classic
Of Mountains And Seas”
The ancient people’s worship of the sacred tree could be learned from
the “Classic of Mountains and Seas”.32 In several chapters of the book,
there were records of the trees of life such as “Ruomu” and “Fusang”33,
but the only record of a bronze tree that could be found was in
Sanxingdui.34

32
“The Classic of Mountains and Seas”, also known as “Shan Hai Jing”, is a Chinese classic text and a
compilation of mythic geography and beasts. Wiki link
33
The “Classics of Mountains and Seas” has the places where the sacred trees were, or they could even be the
names of them. Info about Fusang here.
34
Sanxingdui, or “Three Star Mound”, is an archaeological site and major Bronze Age culture located in
modern Guanghan, Sichuan, China. They actually did find a bronze tree. Here is more info about it.

80
81
Chapter 23 Erdao Baihe
I’m now on the train to Erdao Baihe. The sorghum fields outside are
passing by in a flash and the people in the same carriage as me have
already fallen asleep. I tried, but I just can’t sleep.

I had been to Changbai Mountain once before. It was a few years ago
when I was a little boy. At that time, I never imagined that I would be
going there again in this way. I never thought that one day, I’d have to
write something before going to bed to calm down.

Seeing that the sorghum has been harvested and the snow hasn’t melted
completely, I can’t help but think of my last trip to Changbai Mountain.

Now that I think about it, something was strange about that trip. I vaguely
remember that there seemed to be some turmoil in the house at that
time, and my father and grandpa had a big fight.

My father was a gentleman or someone who had a lot of patience. He

had never fought with Grandpa before, so this quarrel made me feel very
strange. But I was too young at the time, so I didn’t really know what they
were arguing about.

After that, my father suddenly decided to travel to Changbai Mountain.

That year, I saw the snow-capped mountains. The white snow and
endless valleys were exactly the same as those in the movies.

Now that I think about it, I feel a little surprised. Why did I have such a
deep impression of the snowy scene at that time? And I can still associate
it with movies at a glance? My memory of the journey that year is blurred
now, and only a rough idea remains, but why can I only remember that
snowy mountain?

Maybe it’s because the mountain has a special symbolic meaning in the
local area? Or maybe it’s because of something else?

I really can’t remember, and don’t want to think about it.

82
Earlier in the morning, I chatted with Fatty about some topics other than
women and grave goods.

I keep thinking that Fatty is someone who has a lot of hidden depths, and
it turns out that my judgment was right. When I talk about various topics
with him, I find that it’s not that he doesn’t understand, it’s just that he
thinks more directly.

I have known all kinds of people in all kinds of professions. I know that
there are certain people who live in the simplest and most practical way,
and Fatty is undoubtedly one of them.

If you intend to challenge him, he can directly say something that you
can’t refute. Of course, I don’t know whether it’s due to his wisdom or
mere instinct. In other words, the principles of saints and fools are
originally the same. The difference is that saints use this principle to
benefit others, while fools benefit themselves.

The topic I discussed with him was mainly about the protection of cultural
relics. I used to wonder why archaeological teams kept chasing after
grave robbers.

Most of the tombs were found because of rescue excavations, not

because of grave robbers. Farmers and construction workers were the
first group of people to discover these ancient tombs since they often
accidentally discovered them while carrying out their projects.

Archaeological teams chasing after grave robbers was a bit mysterious,

and it seemed that grave robbers had some skills that archaeological
teams didn’t.

There was no fixed answer to this question. Pan Zi said that some of the
most basic skills couldn’t be learned in university, and it was unlikely that
a group of grave robbers would be invited to become professors at the
university. As a result, students could only learn some skills about
standard excavation.

83
As for the skills on how to smell the soil and locate the tomb, those things
required practicing on the spot. How could there be that many ancient
tombs to act as teaching aids?

Fatty shook his head and sighed, saying that that wasn’t the reason at all.

The current situation of archaeological teams chasing after grave robbers

was normal and couldn’t be changed. In the archaeology industry, a sense
of mystery had to be maintained. Otherwise, if all the skills of smelling
the soil and searching for dragon veins to find the right entrance to the
mausoleum were written straightforwardly in the textbooks, then these
skills would be equivalent to a public announcement to the world. Within
two years, there wouldn’t be any tombs left to dig up in China.

There are many things that actually don’t have a threshold. What
threshold is needed for tomb-robbing, you ask? You could be someone
from the underworld and become a grave robber. You could do it as long
as you were fierce and courageous enough.

It was like those people who studied medicine and knew how to perform
surgeries. They could put a knife that was used to kill pigs in the fire to
disinfect it, and then suture the wounds with normal sewing thread to
complete the surgery.

The threshold was set by people who consciously decided how much they
should teach you. You could learn mathematics and physics at will, but
would someone teach you how to rebel and start a riot?

I thought what Fatty was saying may not be totally right, but it did make
sense.

Humans are two-sided creatures. Under the current social pressure, there
are a number of accidents that can give people millions of windfalls at a
time, which means you can buy a house and a car. So, if you can achieve
all that at the risk of being bitten by mosquitoes and having your morals
judged, it’s unknown how many people would be able to resist the
temptation.

84
This is why people often hate hearing about the loss of national treasures,
but they’re angry because they weren’t the ones to sell the national
treasures with their own hands.

Fatty always believed that a long cultural history was often a

manifestation of a nation’s self-comfort. The imperial palace, which was
full of priceless treasures, wasn’t able to block foreign aggression.

You needed to create an image. If you could use ten pieces of blue and
white porcelain depicting “Guiguzi going down the mountain”35 to
exchange for the knowledge of how to build an American aircraft carrier,
should people make the exchange or not?

A century ago, when Aurel Stein36 came to Dunhuang, Taoist Wang37 was
using white paste to paint over the priceless “Flying Apsaras” murals.
Those magnificent art treasures were destroyed by lime in a few seconds.
The reason was simply that he wanted a white wall.

As a result, even if Aurel Stein didn’t cheat Taoist Wang out of those
ancient scrolls and blood scriptures, Taoist Wang might have burned
them as firewood. Even if people hadn’t torn the mural down in order to
preserve it, it’s unlikely it would have escaped the fate of being covered
in white paint.

In those days, the mistakes we made were far from the problem of letting
Aurel Stein take away the cultural relics. Our problem lies at the roots.
How could we expect Taoist Wang to understand the value of those
cultural relics, and at the same time have the character to not be
tempted by money?38 How could we ask a fake Taoist who had fled and
was starving to do so many things for us?

35
In 2005, a piece of blue and white porcelain from the Yuan Dynasty that painted the story of “Guiguzi going
down the mountain” was sold for US $27.7 million in London, setting a world auction record for an Asian
artifact. Guiguzi was a well-known philosopher, politician, and educator in the Warring States Period.
36
Aurel Stein was an archaeologist, primarily known for his explorations and archaeological discoveries in
Central Asia. Wiki link
37
Wang Yuanlu was a Taoist priest of the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang during the early 20th century. He is
credited with the discovery of the Dunhuang manuscripts. He first spoke of the manuscripts to the local
officials, in an attempt to gain funding for their conservation, but he was ignored. He later sold numerous
manuscripts to Aurel Stein. Taoist Wang was both “revered and reviled”. Wiki link
38
After being ignored by the officials, Taoist Wang first sold scriptures to the residents around Dunhuang,
claiming those scriptures could treat illness, which attracted interests from archaeologists from the West. At

85
Even if our words could travel through time and space and reach his ears,
how could we be sure that he would agree with us? Are our words worth
a few dollars?

that time, he was trying to restore and rebuild the cave and was short on money, so he sold more than tens of
thousands of scriptures to Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot, who was a French orientalist. He sold those scriptures
for a fraction of their value (£220 in 1907). (This is something that the Wikipedia page in English didn’t
mention, but the Chinese page did.)

86
Chapter 24 Analyze The Heavenly Palace
From The Architectural Point Of View
What I was most interested in was how Wang Zanghai built this ice shell,
because it was actually an architectural paradox. If the ice shell was built
first, then this was equivalent to a castle in the sky. If there wasn’t any
support, then I really couldn’t think of a way to complete the arc of this
ice dome without it collapsing.

If the wooden piles were put in place first, then that meant that the piles
were only supported by ice at both ends. But it was impossible to support
such huge wooden piles with ice alone.

After thinking long and hard about it, there was actually only one
possibility—it was originally a large glacier. Wang Zanghai first had
craftsmen dig tunnels in the glacier, insert piles into the tunnel, pour
water into it, freeze it, and then cut the dome out bit by bit.

It seemed that this required not only precise calculations but also very
careful engineering planning. But when I thought about it, I found that
this engineering technique was the most time and labor-efficient method,
and could even be said to not be very difficult. Compared to building the
palace with ice bricks, this method ensured that the workers didn’t need
to have a lot of experience like craftsmen did.

87
88
89
Chapter 25 The Bodies In The Alcove
Like the ice-burial corpses found in the glacier, these were probably the
personnel who were buried alongside the sacrificial goods, or the artisans
of the time.39

39
They found rows of frozen purple bodies back in “Palace of Doom.”

90
Chapter 26 The Giant Bronze Door
Based on my visual inspection, the bronze door is about thirty meters
high.

I have some basic chemistry knowledge, so if the thickness of the door is

five meters, then these two giant bronze doors weigh more than a
thousand tons. There is absolutely no force in the world that can push
them open.

What’s behind them? What secrets are hidden at the bottom of Changbai
Mountain behind these doors?

There isn’t a trace to be found on the extremely cumbersome patterns.

In the Eastern Xia Kingdom at that time, they probably couldn’t

understand what happened in the birthplace of King Wannu.

I really want to go in and have a look!

91
92
Chapter 27 The Warring States Silk Book
In the Warring States Period, there was a type of script that used silk as
the writing material. It was known as a “silk book” and was made of white
silk fabric. In the Han Dynasty, silk fabrics were generally referred to as
silk or “zeng”40, or collectively called zeng silk, so silk books were also
called zeng books.

The earliest known silk book in China was discovered in the tomb of Chu
in Changsha in the 1930s.

A large number of bamboo and wood slips have been unearthed in recent
years. For example, the Wuli Stele in Changsha, Hunan was found in 1951.
The Yangtianhu Tomb in Changsha in 1954. The Yangjiawan Tomb in
Changsha in 1954. The Xintaiwan Tomb in Henan in 1957. The Qin Tomb
in Yunmengsuidi, Hubei in 1975. The Tomb of Haojiaping in Qingchuan,
Sichuan in 1980. A large number of bamboo and wood slips from the
Warring States period had been excavated from these tombs. In addition,
there were silk books unearthed from the Chu Tomb in Changsha in 1942
(introduced into the United States in 1945), and Shanxi Houma Alliance
books.

Whether it was bamboo slips or silk fabrics, they were all handwritten
items from the Warring States Period. Not only were these bamboo and
silk ink markings precious cultural relics, but they also had important
historical value for studying the history of calligraphy.

Four Silk Book—also known as the Chu Silk Manuscript—was divided into
three parts, namely celestial phenomena, catastrophes, and rotation of
the four seasons and monthly taboos. The content was rich and complex.
It not only contained the myths, legends, and customs circulating in the
Chu region, but also contained thoughts on Yin and Yang, the Five
Elements, and the interaction between heaven and man.

40
“Zeng” was an ancient term for silk fabrics in Chinese.

93
There were twelve weird idols painted around the text, and the four
corners of the silk book had trees painted in four colors: red, green,
white, and black.

In terms of the calligraphy of the silk book, the order of the sentences
was generally neat, and the spacing was basically the same. It showed
natural and unrestrained colors while striving to be standardized and
neat.

The font of the text was flat and stable, balanced and symmetrical,
upright and serious. It was somewhere between a seal and a scripture. Its
brushwork was round and smooth with straight twists and turns and
challenging curves. It was beautiful in the changes in thickness and
displayed harmonious feelings in the way the characters were written. It
fully demonstrated the writer’s deliberate pursuit of art.

The images on the silk book were placed around the text, first drawn with
thin lines, and then painted in flat colors. They appeared to have been
drawn casually, but the twelve gods were depicted in different poses and
looked vivid. They either stood, lay down, ran, or jumped, all looking very
lifelike.

At the same time, the painted gods also showed strong realism. The
markings on some of the gods were painted in realistic detail, as if they
had been lifted straight from tigers and leopards. In particular, the trees
painted around the silk book were shaped like real objects, and the
numerous branches and leaves looked like they were swaying. It could be
said that the penmanship and strokes weren’t stingy at all.

Not only is the Chu Silk Manuscript a treasure of ancient Chinese art, but
it’s also a rare historical treasure of art worldwide.

──From Baidu Baike41

41
The following 2 pictures aren’t actually in Wu Xie’s notes as far as I could tell, but I figured you all would like
a visual. First pic is an original and the second one is a colored version I guess someone made.

94
The original

95
Just some random “restored” copy

96
Chapter 28 The Jade Coffin Cover
At that time, we didn’t get to take photos underground, so we didn’t have
any pictures. There are some similar things on Google that almost look
like what we had seen, but the one we saw was covered in mud.

There was a total of two hundred and thirty jade pieces of various colors,
connected by gold wires and weighing about forty jin. The texture of
these jade stones wasn’t very good, and their value was average. They
were only valuable because of the historical significance. The reserve
price was above one million, so if someone offered a price around that,
you should just sell it and go.

97
Chapter 29 The Book of the Ruler of
Dead Soldiers
About the text written in “The Book of the Ruler of Dead Soldiers”42, I
transcribed the parts that I could understand. Some of the writing was
unclear, and some of the characters were too warped for the computer
to display them, but I converted what I could to modern Chinese.

When King Shang was twenty-five years old, his father passed away and
he inherited the position of Grand Sima.43 He led the army and robbed
graves. The treasures obtained were used to pay the army and help fund
conquests.

One day, King Shang and his men found an ancient tomb, but they
couldn’t determine what dynasty it was from. When they opened the
coffin, there was a giant snake inside, which sprang up and tried to kill the
king.

But King Shang was courageous and strong, and he lifted his sword and
cut the snake. He thought that there must be something evil afoot since
the giant snake was lying inside the coffin, so he cut the snake’s stomach
open. There he found a purple-enameled box, but he couldn’t open it no
matter how hard he tried.

That night, a white-bearded man appeared in King Shang’s dream and

asked him angrily, “Why did you kill me?”

The king was a violent man by nature and had killed lots of people, so he
said in a reproachful tone, “I killed you because I wanted to! There’s no
other reason!”

The white-bearded man got even angrier and turned into the giant snake
the king had seen earlier that day. It opened its mouth and tried to eat
the king, but he wielded his sword and wounded the snake. He then
stepped on its head and said, “You didn’t die when I cut your stomach
42
Could also be called “The Book of King Shang”. This chapter is basically a summary of Vol 1 Chapter 26
“Cavern of Blood Zombies”.
43
Even though the text said “King”, his position was probably somewhere between marquess and earl. During
the Eastern Han dynasty, the term “Grand Sima” came to mean Minister of War. More information here

98
open earlier, so now I’m going to cut off your head. Can you survive
that?”

The snake spoke in the human tongue and begged, “I’m willing to give
you two treasures in exchange for my life.” The king agreed, so the snake
told him how to open the purple-enameled box and taught him how to
use the treasures that were inside.

After the king memorized it by heart, he had the thought that no one
should know about this secret except for himself, so he beheaded the
snake.

The king woke up in a pool of blood and realized that it hadn’t just been a
dream. He did as the snake had told him and opened the purple-
enameled box successfully, finding that the treasures inside were just as
the snake had described. The king didn’t want his men to know about it,
so he not only killed all of them, but their family members too. He spared
no one, not even those in their infancy.

With these two treasures, the king got out of every dangerous situation
safely and became invincible. The power of the country was gathered in
his hands, and the emperor44 relied heavily on him.

Many years later, however, the king was old and seriously ill, and all the
doctors said that there was no hope of recovery. One day, he dreamed of
the giant snake again, and it said, “It’s time for you to die.” All those
people the king had killed before appeared behind the snake, so
numerous he couldn’t tell how many there were.

He woke up terrified.

The king had an advisor known as Mr. Iron Mask, who was a master of
numerology and feng shui. There was no one in the world who could
compare to him. He said to the king, “I had heard that there were jade
burial armors in ancient times, which could help you gain immortality if

44
The emperor here referred to the emperor mentioned back in Sand Sea Chapter 133. It was established that
he was really just a “duke” at that time.

99
you wore them. Unfortunately, there aren’t any jade burial armors to be
found in the world. They can only be found in ancient tombs.”

The king would rather believe such things existed than not, so he read
through a bunch of ancient books and found a giant tomb from the last
dynasty. He suspected there was a jade burial armor inside, so he
deployed three thousand soldiers. They worked in the mountains for half
a year until they found the imperial tomb.

There was a giant tree inside the tomb that he named Nine-Headed Snake
Cypress, and a jade bed beneath the tree. There was a skeleton-thin male
corpse in black jade armor threaded with gold sitting on the jade bed.

Mr. Iron Mask said happily, “This is jade burial armor. The corpse may
look dead, but it’s not. It’s a blood zombie. He must have been a withered
old man when he was alive. Ever since the burial, he would shed his skin
every hundred years and grow new skin, making the corpse ten years
younger each time.”

Mr. Iron Mask used a strange method to subdue the blood zombie before
removing it from the jade burial armor. He then put the blood zombie in a
stone coffin in another chamber.

Based on Mr. Iron Mask’s plan, the king took a pill that could fake his
death and had word sent to the emperor. When the emperor learned of
his death and that he had a strange ability to come and go freely between
the human world and the underworld, he became fearful and bestowed
upon the king the posthumous title of “King Shang”.45 The funeral was
much grander than those of any dukes and was almost on par with that of
a prince.

The king’s tomb was built on top of the imperial tomb and many difficult
mechanisms were set up. There were seven fake coffins, while the king’s
real body was hidden in the thousand-year-old ancient tree in the
imperial tomb.

45
Shang here can mean someone who has died young, or someone who has died at war. (Also pulled from
Sand Sea Chapter 133)

100
On the day the construction of the tomb was finished, all the craftsmen
were killed and buried in the river, and the king’s followers were ordered
to take poisonous pills. Only the two followers that the king trusted the
most were left: one man and one woman. When the king was buried, the
two of them also poisoned themselves and died.

The other parts were either difficult or almost impossible to read because
after Qin Shi Huang46 burned books and killed scholars, many things from
the Shang dynasty, Zhou dynasty, and Spring and Autumn Period were
lost. There were a lot of especially rare words that were lost as well. Even
if we had people from the Chinese Academy of Sciences look into the
text, it may take them decades to completely understand the words.

At that time, I couldn’t understand what was weird about it until Uncle
Three mentioned that the above paragraphs were different from the
other parts of the text. To be honest, this could have been avoided if we
had a master of Chinese Studies with us. For people like us, we could only
admit that we fell into the trap.47

46
Qin Shi Huang became China’s first emperor when he was 38 after the Qin had conquered all of the other
Warring States and unified all of China in 221 BC. Wiki link
47
Since the ancient text was supposed to be difficult to read, there was no way Wu Xie could have understood
even parts of the text. Someone deliberately made this part of the text easy to read. It was a scheme.

101
Chapter 30 Zombies and Monsters
001 Corpse Bugs (The sketch of corpse bugs is attached below.)

Corpse bugs are insects with shells. They feel very similar to a combination
between a diving beetle and a water centipede, but the difference between
corpse bugs and diving beetles is that corpse bugs’ front feet are particularly
sharp and powerful. They are also larger, fond of darkness, and afraid of
light.

Corpse bugs are very fast and amphibious, feeding on carrion corpses and
small creatures that have strayed into the water. They often accumulate
around floating corpses, gather in piles, and prey on each other.

I have been attacked by this kind of bug before, and feel that they are
unlikely to pose a threat to animals with thick skin, such as rhinos bathing in
water. They are, however, a threat to humans because they have the
instinct to attack weak parts such as the abdomen. If people can’t get to the
shore in time, the corpse bugs will pierce their abdomen and cause massive
bleeding and death.

Corpse bugs mostly appear in the depths of mountains, rivers, canals, or

swamps, and also appear in large numbers during floods or mudslides.

102
002 Blood Zombie (The sketch of a blood zombie is attached below.)

There are legends of blood zombies in many places, but blood zombie tombs
actually refer to tombs that have a protective layer underground. For
example, when ancient tombs with fire roofs, acid roofs, or cinnabar roofs
are hit with a Luoyang shovel, something red will appear. This is especially
true when the shovels hit acid roofs. The red soil would look like blood, but
it’s because the soil contains a lot of cinnabar.

If ancient tombs have these kinds of structures, that means that the
specifications are very high. As a result, others will form the idea that blood
zombie tombs are full of treasures.

As to why they would think there would be blood zombies in blood zombie
tombs… on the one hand, it might be hearsay; on the other hand, cinnabar is
an object used for exorcism. If cinnabar is used in the soil layer of ancient
tombs, that means people definitely did it in the hopes of trapping certain
things in the ancient tomb. So, if tombs are sealed with cinnabar, there must
be something strange with the corpses in them. In fact, the color of blood
zombies isn’t a bloody red like the name implies. Instead, they are more of a
garnet purple.

103
003 Green-Eyed Fox Corpse (The sketch of the green-eyed fox corpse is
below.)

The ancient corpse was so creepy and terrifying that it was practically
indescribable. A human looking like a bald fox definitely wasn’t something as
basic as a deformity. I couldn’t imagine what this ancient corpse looked like
before it had decayed and dried out.

Fatty said that this happened because it was possessed, but based on a large
number of verified theories, it was more likely to be a rare deformity. If we
classified it, it would probably be a cerebellar disorder.

There were developmental deformities that could make people’s faces

extremely long, and it was also possible that the use of splints from an early
age deformed his head and face, just like the ancient Incan and Egyptian
civilizations used to do.

This was a man-made mythological phenomenon, and I believed that any

enemy on the battlefield would be frightened when seeing such a monster.

The main function of the mask was to symbolize the gods, so at least some
part of King Lushang believed in the fox totem. In history, it seemed that
only one branch of the Tibetans also worshiped foxes, which I found very
fascinating.

(The sketches of masks and various animal totems are attached below.)

104
105
004 Nine-Headed Snake Cypress (The sketch of the Nine-Headed Snake
Cypress is attached below.)

I couldn’t find any information about this plant. There was some
unconventional information about trees or other large plants that could
digest animal tissues, and the scientific name for them was: CARNIVOROUS
TREES.

In foreign legends, trees that were similar to the nine-headed snake cypress
were called “octopus trees”. They could entangle their prey before killing
and digesting it, and this kind of tree was often called “devil tree” by the
locals.

Eventually, German explorers wrote in their investigation journals that the

way this tree attacked animals originated from its instinct to spread seeds,
just like how cocklebur stuck to animals’ fur. This particular kind of tree
entangled and killed everything close to it.

I believed that if such trees really existed, they might be nine-headed snake
cypresses. It was possible that the ecological characteristics of this tree
made it so that it killed animals and then used the rotting carcasses to
attract insects to spread its seeds. Because of this, corpse bugs were
attracted by the corpses on the trees and gathered around the snake
cypress.

From my experience, the snake cypress couldn’t kill its prey and must have
relied on the corpse bugs to do so, creating a very clever symbiotic
relationship. At the same time, the corpse bugs’ excrement was excellent
nourishment for the tree, because it was more delicate and suitable for the
growth of plants than the decomposed corpses.

This kind of symbiotic relationship also existed among other plants and
animals, but I think the relationship here may have been designed by
someone. It was like the setup of fish farming or rice fields, which was a kind
of wisdom in the agricultural community.

106
107
005 Forbidden Woman (Sketches of the frontal view of the Forbidden
Woman, the Forbidden Woman mural in the undersea tomb, and the
Forbidden Woman crawling are shown below.)

The legend of the Forbidden Woman was widespread among the southern
ethnic minorities, from the Miao and Yao tribes in Yunnan to the fishermen
in Hainan. The Forbidden Woman had always been a concept that often
appeared in legends.

108
Among the fishermen in Hainan, the Forbidden Woman represented a kind
of disease and disaster. They were often depicted as having a big belly and
looking damp, which was similar to the large number of corpses that floated
up on the beach after a tsunami. Moreover, a large number of corpses
gathering together meant that it was easy for an epidemic to break out.

Because of this, I speculated that the Forbidden Woman was a product of

fishermen combining the impression of floating corpses and disasters for
thousands of years. People at that time didn’t understand the relationship
between dead people, disasters, and diseases, so they fabricated such a god.
[Note: In Taiwanese versions, the Forbidden Woman was depicted as a
“monster”]

We met the Forbidden Woman after we entered the tomb passage. She was
a monster with a lot of hair and looked exactly like a corpse that had been
soaked in water for a long time. Now I was scared every time I saw women
with a lot of hair.

109
110
006 Sea Monkey (The sketch of the sea monkey is attached below, it looked
very interesting.)

The legendary creatures known as sea monkeys that are often heard about
in coastal areas were said to have been discovered in a reservoir in Guangxi
when the reservoir was being cleaned up.

Sea monkeys are called outcropping ghosts in Changsha, and water lion
ghosts in Guilin.

The difference between these legendary creatures and other creatures is

that sea monkey legends can be found in almost all places, which is very
intriguing. Maybe it’s because people are afraid of the mysteries lying below
the water’s surface. According to the elders, this kind of animal is said to
exist in almost any place with water, such as wells and even tanks.

The details of all the legends are different, but they have one thing in
common—this kind of thing is in the form of a human, and is incredibly
powerful in the water. But to be honest, my imagination is far less horrible
than what I really saw.

007 Human-Faced Birds (Various sketches of human-faced birds are

attached below.)

111
Almost all civilizations in the world have mentioned human-faced birds, and
they appear in all kinds of religions and myths. This is especially true when it
comes to China and India’s history, and it isn’t because China was deeply
influenced by Buddhism.

Careful observations revealed that in the legend of China’s Yellow Emperor,

Jiutian Xuannü48 appeared in the form of a human-faced bird.

After that, Buddhism started to be introduced to China and began

developing in the Wei, Chin, and Northern and Southern Dynasties.

Based on this, Kalaviṅka49 in Buddhism shouldn’t be considered the

prototype of Jiutian Xuannü in Chinese mythology.

(Although there are lots of records of human-faced birds in “The Classic of

Mountains and Seas”, it’s been said that the last couple of volumes were
forged by later generations. As a result, I won’t include the book in my
theory.)

The earliest surviving image of a human-faced bird in China was discovered

at the “Hongshan Culture” site on the Mao Naohai Mountain in the
hinterland of the Laoha Hebei Desert in Inner Mongolia. It was from the
Neolithic Age, and archaeologists believed it was an ancient owl that
resembled a human-faced bird. This ancient owl was now extinct.

In ancient times, Inner Mongolia was far from the Central Plains culture and
belonged to the land of the Northern warlords. Since it was close to the
northeast, however, I wondered if we had seen this kind of owl at the
bottom of Changbai Mountain.

In a large number of legends, the human-faced bird played a role in

spreading the “gospel”. Whether it was Jiutian Xuannü awarding the Yellow

48
In Chinese mythology, Jiutian Xuannü is the goddess of war, sex, and longevity. Wiki link
49
Kalaviṅka is a fantastical immortal creature in Buddhism, with a human head and a bird’s torso, with long flowing
tail. Wiki link

112
Emperor war scripts, or Kalaviṅka spreading the wonderful news of the
Buddha, they all brought heavenly culture to the people of Earth.

What was even more strange was that there were mortals in China that
were depicted as human-faced birds. For example, the genius doctor Bian
Que50 looked like a human-faced bird, but I later discovered that this was
actually a misconception.

There were actually many Bian Que because that was what all the famous
doctors were called in the Spring and Autumn Period. The real Bian Que was
a mythological character from the Xuanyuan era that belonged to the same
line as the Yellow Emperor. Based on this, I highly suspected that the Bian
Que who looked like a human-faced bird was the same kind of creature as
Jiutian Xuannü.

It was difficult not to make associations like this since there were many
records of human-faced birds in Chinese mythology.

If we look at it from a realistic viewpoint, I feel like maybe there’s an ancient

civilization that we haven’t discovered yet. Maybe people from that time
domesticated and trained this kind of owl with a human’s face and bird’s
body, and the owls played very important roles in wars and transportation.

Moreover, this kind of owl might have appeared frequently in tribal wars
and may have transported a large amount of intelligence and medicine,
making other tribes mistakenly think that it was a kind of god.

This mysterious ancient civilization was obviously very low-key, or its

mystical character led to all the remaining materials about it in the world
being destroyed. The few remaining traces of these owls were at the giant
bronze door under Changbai Mountain. They went extinct after the
civilization had vanished, leaving only a few survivors underground to guard
the last traces of their masters.

50
According to legend, Bian Que is the earliest known Chinese physician. Wiki link

113
It sounded far-fetched, but I figured it made sense. Furthermore, using owls
to spread information had me thinking of the image of witches in Europe
during the Middle Ages. Every witch there had an owl as a pet. This was a bit
fun. Was it the magical world of Hogwarts behind the huge bronze door?

114
008 Thousand-handed Guanyin Zombie (The sketch of the Thousand-Hand
Guanyin Zombie is attached below.)

This is a zombie that gives people a lot of thoughts, and it’s not only because
of its many weird hands that make it look like a spider.

115
I have no idea if this is a rare deformity or some kind of disease, but the
hands looked very flexible and powerful, so the deformity at least didn’t
affect their quality of life.

Of course, I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to control so many hands,

but obviously, if you lived on a ridge or cliff, this deformity would make
things like fishing in the water easier.

Could it be some kind of evolutionary result or man-made choice? For

example, in King Wannu’s clan, maybe one’s status was determined by the
number of hands they had.

People with only two hands were considered relatively inferior, and as the
number of hands increased—and the degree of deformity became more
serious— the status of those people would become higher and higher.
Therefore, people in the clan hoped that their children could marry people
with more hands. Those people who had more hands had higher status, so
that meant they had more wives and concubines.

It was just like those African tribes whose indigenous people worshiped
albinism. Albinos received the same treatment as gods in the tribe. They
strove to make albinos intermarry and obtain a “god” with completely white
skin. As a result, when these indigenous people saw white people appear at
that time, it was as if they were seeing gods. They immediately gave in and
hardly dared to resist.

116
(The sketch of a thousand-handed giant fighting with the Mongolian army is
attached below.)

117
118
Chapter 31 The People I’ve Encountered
001 Poker-face

I met a very annoying kid. I’ve never seen someone like him before. He
must be a narcolepsy patient with a moderate condition, because I see
him sleeping wherever he can, except for when he’s walking. Even when
he’s walking, he doesn’t speak, and it still seems like he’s half-asleep.

(The sketches of Consultant Zhang and Poker-Face are attached.)

119
I gave him the nickname “Poker-face”.

I don’t like to criticize people privately, but this guy is really too much. I’m
what you would consider a sociable person, but his attitude gives off the
impression that he doesn’t think it’s important to have any sort of
relationship with me.

But I feel strangely safe whenever he’s around. Maybe people who are
silent always give people the illusion that they are really awesome.

I really want to know what he’s hiding under his indifference.

002 A Ning

(Attached is a nosebleed-worthy illustration of A Ning’s sexiness)

120
There is no denying that I have some good feelings towards her, whether
it’s because of her figure or her ambiguous attitude, but my sanity tells
me that I must stay away from her.

This woman is so energetic that I’m envious of her. She seems like the
kind of person who wouldn’t be left behind even if someone kicked her
into the water and told her to swim after the boat.

After looking at her vitality, I’m starting to wonder if I should use the time
I usually doze off on the recliner to start exercising.

But looking at her expression, I always think that she’s a little lonely.

003 Fatty

121
(The three sketches of Fatty doing “I’m king of the world” from the movie
Titanic are attached, one of which seems to show half of his face covered
by a piece of paper that was blown by the wind.)

I didn’t know we were picking up Fatty when we went to Yongxing Island.

Maybe I had already been mixed up with him in my previous life or
something.

It seemed that he was doing pretty well after the Seven Star Lu Palace
incident, and had gained some weight. As soon as he was on the boat, he
started complaining that his body would grow mushrooms if he kept
staying in a damp environment. After drinking too much, he even
pretended to be the king of the world.

This wasn’t the first time I had seen him, but I was only now interested in
getting a closer look at him. It’s a pity I have nothing to say about him.

122
123
124
Chapter 32 Ancient Countries In Shandong
1. Ji County

According to legends, people surnamed Ji were the descendants of the

Yellow Emperor. The people of Ji in the Shandong area were mostly
vassals of the same surname after King Wu of Zhou destroyed the Shang
Dynasty.

The vassal states were as follows: Lu, Cao, Teng, Cheng, Gao, Mao, Yang,
Jun, and Xing.51

1.1 The State of Lu

The first ruler (duke) of the State of Lu was Zhou Gongdan’s eldest son
Boqin. The capital was in Qufu (now Qufu City). It was one of the largest
vassal states in the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty. (People still
use “Lu” as the abbreviation of Shandong Province.)

They had numerous cultural classics and a complete system of rituals and
music. The famous thinker and educator Confucius was born during the
Spring and Autumn Period. The State of Lu’s culture was highly developed
and it was famous as a state of etiquette.

With Mount Tai in the north and the sea in the east, the vast area of
southern Shandong today was the important domain of the Zhou royal
family. From the Western Zhou Dynasty to the early Spring and Autumn
Period, it was a powerful state in the East and was quite likely to compete
with the powerful State of Qi at that time.

The Lu Kingdom had a total of twenty-six generations, thirty-four

monarchs, and the kingdom lasted about eight hundred years. After half
of the Spring and Autumn Period had passed, the national power
gradually declined. Lu Qinggong had ruled the kingdom for twenty-four
years (249 BC) before it was destroyed by the Chu and became Lu County.

51
This means that the rulers of these states had the surname “Ji”.

125
1.2 The State of Cao

The first ruler (duke) was Shi Zhenduo, the son of King Wen of Zhou. The
capital was founded in Taoqiu (now northwest of Heze Dingtao). The
state was in the southwestern part of today’s Shandong. It was located
between the Qi, Lu, Song, and Wei states, and had a relatively weak
national power.

The kingdom had a total of twenty-five generations but was destroyed by

the Song Dynasty in the fifteenth year of Cao Boyang’s rule (487 BC).

1.3. The State of Teng

The first ruler (duke) was Shu Xiu of Cuo, the son of King Wen. The
historical site of the ancient Teng City is fourteen li southwest of today’s
Teng County.

The state had a close relationship with the State of Lu and was dependent
on the Song and Jin states. It also participated in the alliances and wars of
major powers. The State of Yue destroyed the kingdom in 415 BC, but it
was soon restored. Later, it was wiped out by the Song (some say it was
the State of Qi). The state had a total of twenty-three generations.

1.4 The State of Cheng

The first ruler was Shuwu, the son of King Wen of Zhou. There aren’t any
records about his lineage or the monarch’s posthumous title.

In 1975, a Cheng Bosunfu52 Ge53 was discovered in Dongjia Village, Qishan

County, Shaanxi Province, so it was suspected that the state was located
in the territory of the Western Zhou Dynasty. One of the sovereigns was
sent to rule another place in Shandong during the Spring and Autumn
Period, which was northeast of today’s Ningyang County (some say it’s in
Fan County, Henan Province).

In the 8th year of Lu Zhuanggong (686 BC), Lu and Qi besieged the state
and it surrendered to Qi.

52
Chen Bosunfu was one of the rulers.
53
Ge was an ancient kitchen utensil. Pic can be found here.

126
1.5 The State of Gao

The first ruler (duke) was the son of King Wen of Zhou. His name is
unknown. The border was destroyed by the State of Zheng in the
southeast of Chengwu County in the early Spring and Autumn Period. The
artifacts handed down include Gao Shishuo Fu ding54 and Gao Zhong
jun.55

1.6 The State of Mao

The first ruler was Zhou Gongdan’s son, but his name is unknown. The
state was located southwest of today’s Jinxiang County. It later became a
territory of the State of Zou.

1.7 The State of Yang (also called Yan or Yu)

The old city was southwest of today’s Yishui County. In the second year of
Lu Min Gong’s reign (660 BC), the State of Qi forced its people to move
there so they could obtain land. Some say that it was originally southeast
of today’s Qingzhou City, and they had no choice but to move there
because of the Qi people.

1.8 The State of Jun

It was a vassal state of Lu, and slightly east of today’s Jinxiang County.
After Lu Yingong had ruled the state for two years (721 BC), it was
occupied by Lu.

1.9 The State of Xing

The first ruler was the son of Zhou Gongdan, and his name is unknown. It
was originally in Xingtai City, Hebei Province.

In 662 BC, Zhai attacked Xing, and Duke Huan of Qi56 later joined hands
with the Song and Cao states to help Xing. The state was then moved to

54
Ding was an ancient Chinese cauldron, standing upon legs with a lid and two facing handles. Wiki link
55
Gao Zhong Jun was an ancient wine glass of that time. Pic here.
56
Duke Huan of Qi was the ruler of the State of Qi from 685 to 643 BC. Wiki link

127
Yiyi (now southwest of Liaocheng) and was destroyed by the State of Wei
in 635 BC.

2. Ren Country

Those in this country surnamed Ren were also said to be descendants of

the Yellow Emperor. Before the Xia dynasty, they lived in the
southeastern part of Shandong. The vassal states are as follows: Xue, Shi,
Zhu, and Guo.

2.1 The State of Xue

The first ruler (duke) was Xi Zhong, who invented chariots in the Xia
dynasty. Today, the historical site of the ancient city is south of Teng
County.

Later, they moved to Pi57, so it also became known as Xia Pi. It was
northeast of today’s Pi County, Jiangsu and soon moved to Shang Pi,
which is now northwest of Weishan.58

After Xi Zhong, Zhong Hui lived in Xue and became one of the prime
ministers of Tang of Shang.59

King Wu of Zhou destroyed Shang and re-appointed his descendant to

rule the State of Xue.

After the Spring and Autumn Period, Xue moved to Pi again. The State of
Xue existed through three dynasties: the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties.
The state had sixty-four generations of rulers that we know of.

During the Warring States Period (or maybe the third year of King Qi
Min’s rule, which was 298 years ago), it perished and became Qiyi.

57
Therefore, the State of Xue was also called the State of Pi.
58
“Xia” in Chinese here means “Down”. “Shang” here in Chinese means “Up”.
59
Tang of Shang was the first king of the Shang dynasty in Chinese history. He overthrew Jie, the last ruler of
the Xia dynasty. Wiki link

128
The artifacts that have been handed down include Xue Houyu, Xue Hou
ding, and Xue Zhong Bronze fu.60

2.2 The State of Shi

The vassal state of Lu. The state was located fifty li south of today’s Jining
City.

In the thirteenth year of Lu Xianggong’s rule (560 BC), there was a civil
strife that resulted in the state splitting into three parts, which Lu took
advantage of.

The artifacts handed down include Shibo ding, Shiqian Gui, Shiji ding, and
Shiji gui.61

2.3 The State of Zhu (some say it’s the state of Qi)

The state was founded after King Wu destroyed the Shang Dynasty. It was
located on the north bank of Nendawen River in today’s Feicheng County.
It’s been suspected that it was later destroyed by Qi.

2.4 The State of Guo (some say it’s the State of Yi)

A tribal country in the Xia dynasty. It was located near the sea northwest
of today’s Ye County (Laizhou). It was later destroyed by Zhu of Xia.

3. Jiang Country

People surnamed Jiang were said to be the descendants of the Yan

Emperor. A part of the country was founded at the beginning of the Zhu
dynasty, and a part of it was established in the Xia and Shang eras.

The vassal states are as follows: Qi, Ji, Zhou, Lai, Zhang, Xiang, Xun, and
Feng.

3.1 The State of Qi

60
They are basically all bronze ritual artifacts. The picture of Fu is here.
61
Fus were square bronze artifacts, and guis were round ones.

129
A powerful state in both the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring
States Period. Ranked first in the “Seven Powerful States of the Warring
States”. The founding monarch (duke) was Jiang Shang (in other words,
Jiang Ziya in the novel “The Investiture of the Gods”.)

In today’s northern Shandong, the capital Yingqiu (later called Linzi) was
built, which is now in Linzi District, Zibo City.

Following Qi Xigong’s regime in the early Spring and Autumn Period, Duke
Huan of Qi appointed Guan Zhong to initiate reform, and the state
became wealthy and strong. The state had alliances with nine vassals and
was incredibly powerful.

In the fifteenth year of Duke Ling of Qi’s rule (567 BC), he destroyed the
State of Lai, thus expanding their territory to the present Jiaodong
Peninsula. The state’s territory extended to the coast of the Bohai Sea in
the east, the Yellow River in the west, Mount Tai in the south, and
Binzhou City (now south of Yanshan County, Hebei) in the north.

At the end of the Spring and Autumn Period, the monarchy was gradually
seized by the Chen family (also called the Tian family).

At the beginning of the Warring States Period, Tian He was listed as a

vassal and banished Duke Kang of Qi to the sea. As a result, Jiang Qi
perished.62

3.2 The State of Ji

It was established in the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty and
was located in today’s Nanjitai Village, Shouguang County.

It had always been a rival of the State of Qi and felt threatened by it.
After Duke Xiang of Qi ruled the State of Qi for eight years (690 BC), he
eventually managed to destroy the State of Ji.

The artifacts included Jihou zhong, Jihou gui, and Jihou Haozi gui.

62
It was called “The Usurpation of Qi by Tian”. For historiographical purposes, pre-usurpation Qi is referred to
as “Jiang Qi”, and post-usurpation Qi is referred to as “Tian Qi”. Wiki link

130
3.3 The State of Zhou (or Chunyu)

The capital was in Chunyu (now northeast of Anqiu). In the early Spring
and Autumn Period, it was annexed to Qi and became Qi’s capital.63

3.4 The State of Lai (also called Li)

The state existed during the Yin and Shang Dynasties. Nowadays, there is
Laizi City in the southeast of Longkou City, which was the ancient state of
Lai. Some say it was southeast of today’s Changyi County. The Lai and Qi
states were close to each other, so there were often contradictions and
conflicts.

During the Lai Gong era (567 BC), it was attacked by Duke Ling of Qi and
perished.

3.5 The State of Zhang

It was a vassal state of Ji, so it was also called Ji Yi. The ancient city of
Zhang was sixty li east of today’s Dongping County. In the twenty-second
year of Duke Huan of Qi’s reign (664 BC), the State of Zhang was forced to
surrender to Qi.

3.6 The State of Xiang

The ancient city of Xiang was seventy li south of today’s Ju County. In 721
BC, it was destroyed by the State of Ju.

3.7 The State of Xun (or Qi)

The state existed from the Yin and Shang Dynasties to the Spring and
Autumn Period. It was seventy li east of today’s Yishui County. The
artifacts handed down include Xungong Zhoshu Jian yi64 and so on.

3.8. The State of Feng

63
Some of the names of the states in English look the same, but they are actually different Chinese characters
in the original text, so this state of Qi (杞) was not the state of Qi (齐) mentioned previously.
64
A picture of yi is here.

131
The state was ruled by a Shang Dynasty duke. Zhou destroyed Shang and
it became a territory of the State of Qi.

4. Feng Country

According to legend, people surnamed Feng were the descendants of

Taihao. Taihao was said to be the leader of Dongyi, whose center of
activity was originally in Chen (now Huaiyang County, Henan), and then
developed northward until it gradually controlled the Jishui Basin.

The several vassal states were: Su, Ren, Xuju, and Zhuanyu.

4.1 The State of Su

The land was twenty li southeast of today’s Dongping County. In 684 BC,
the Song State sent troops to move its people and take their land, and it
became a territory of Qi.

4.2. The State of Ren

It was located in today’s Jining City and still existed during the Warring
States Period. Some said Ren first existed in the Xia Dynasty.

4.3 The State of Xuju (or Xugu)

It was in the northwest or southeast of today’s Dongping County.

In the twenty-first year of Lu Xizong’s rule (639 BC), it was exterminated

by the State of Zhu. The following year, the State of Lu used the excuse
that it was related to the State of Xuju through political marriage to
attack the State of Zhu. The State of Lu then had the ruler of Xuju go back
to his state and restore it, but the state perished at the hands of the State
of Zhu again.

In the seventh year of Lu Wengong’s reign (620 BC), Lu attacked Zhu

again and obtained Xuju’s land. The two states eventually became
territories of Lu.

4.4 The State of Zhuanyu

132
It was a vassal state of Lu. The ancient city of Zhuanyu was eighty li
southwest of today’s Fei County. Since its land was in the Lu State’s
territory, its monarch was a minister of the Lu State, and he was ordered
to host the Mengshan sacrificial ritual.

5. Ji Country

People surnamed Ji were said to be descendants of Taihao, the leader of

Dongyi (Dongyi was regarded as barbarian territory by Huaxia people).
The vassal states were Ju and Tan.

5.1 The State of Ju (some say it was Cao)

The founding monarch was Zi Yuqi. The old capital was Jiegen (also called
Jijin, which was southwest of today’s Jiaozhou City), but was moved to Ju
(now Ju County) in the early Spring and Autumn Period. There were cities
and counties such as Anqiu, Zhucheng, Yishui, Ju County, and Rizhao.

The monarchs had no posthumous title, and most of them used the name
of the place where they lived as their titles.

In the Spring and Autumn Period, the Qi State repeatedly attacked it, and
it was eventually destroyed by Chu in 431 BC.

5.2 The State of Tan (or Ying)

It was located north of today’s Tancheng County. The names of their

lineage weren’t passed down through history, but the monarchs once
paid tribute to Lu for allegiance.

In the early years of the Warring States Period (414 BC), it was destroyed
by Yue. It was suspected that the state restored its original status later or
reverted to the country after.

6. Cao Country

133
People surnamed Cao were said to be descendants of Zhuanxu. It was
said that Zhaunxu’s great-great-grandson Lu Zhong eventually had six
sons. He named the fifth son Ming An and gave him the surname Cao.

The vassal states were Zhu and Little Zhu.

6.1 The State of Zhu (also called Zhu Lou or Zou)

The first ruler was Cao Xie. It was said that the territory included today’s
Fei, Zou, Teng, and Jinxiang counties, and also Jining city and so on.

The capital was in Zhu (now Nanzou Village, southeast of Qufu), and in
614 BC, the capital was moved to Yi (now in southeast Jiwang Cheng of
Zou County).

Although Zhu was regarded as a small barbaric state by the Chinese

vassals at that time, its national power and cultural prosperity were
second only to Qi and Lu. It had participated in various states’ alliances
and wars and sent troops to attack neighboring states.

It was destroyed by Chu during the Warring States Period.

6.2 The State of Little Zhu (also called Little Zhu Lou or Ni)

It was originally a part of the Zhu State, but during King Xuan of Zhou’s
reign, Yan— the ruler of Zhu State, who was Cao Xie’s fifth grandson—
gave his son You (also known as Fei) the land of Ni as a vassal state (also
called Er, which was southeast of today’s Teng County).

You’s descendants and Duke Huan of Qi once helped support the royal
family, and the emperor of Zhou named it Little Zhu.

It had a close relationship with Lu State and was also destroyed by Chu
during the Warring States Period.

7. Yun Country

People surnamed Yun were said to be the descendants of Zhurong. The

vassal states were: Biyang, Yu, Yi, and Han.
134
7.1 The State of Biyang (also called Fuyang)

It was in the south of today’s Zaozhuang city and was next to Zhu and
Little Zhu. Looking at its historical site, the buildings that were within nine
li of the ancient city were magnificent.

In the tenth year of Lu Xianggong’s reign (563 BC), Duke Dao of Jin
worked with states such as Song and Lu to attack and destroy Biyang
State. The land was merged into the Song State, and the Biyang clan
moved to Huoren Town (now the eastern suburbs of Fanzhi County,
Shanxi).

7.2 The State of Yu

It was in the north of today’s Linyi City. In the eighteenth year of Lu

Zhaogong’s reign (524 BC), the Zhu people attacked and took the people
of Yu back to Zhu. That following year, Song used the excuse that it was
related to Yu by political marriage to fight against Zhu, making them
return all the prisoners, and thus restoring the State of Yu. The land later
became a part of Lu.

7.3 The State of Yi (also called Zi)

The ancient city Zhuangwu was sixty li west of today’s Mo city. Ancient Yi
artifacts included Yibo gui.

7.4 The State of Han

A tribal country in the Xia dynasty. It was located in today’s Hanting

District, Weifang City. Han Jun originated from the State of Han.

8. Gui Country

People surnamed Gui were said to be descendants of Emperor Shun. The

vassal states were Sui and Qi.

8.1 The State of Sui

It was located south of today’s Fei city and was destroyed by Qi in 681 BC.
135
8.2 The State of Qi (It was Tian Qi during the Warring States Period.)

In 386 BC, Duke Tai of Tian Qi, the minister of the Qi State, was named as
a vassal by the Zhou royal family. This completely replaced the regime of
the Jian family, but the duke kept the name “Qi” and used it as the name
of the state. The capital was in Linzi.

Qi was one of the seven powerful states during the Warring States Period,
and once lost to Wei and defeated Song.

It had long-term confrontations with Qin Dongxi and influenced the

political situations of the Warring States multiple times.

In the seventeenth year of Duke Qi Min’s reign (284 BC), Yan, Qin, and Jin
joined forces to attack Qi. The general from Yan took the lead by
capturing Linzi, and the state gradually declined after that.

Duke Qi Jian had ruled the state for forty-five years (221 BC), but it was
eventually destroyed by Qin Shi Huang.

9. Yao Country

People surnamed Yao were said to be the descendants of Emperor Shun.

The State of Min (also known as You Hun) was a tribal country in the Xia
dynasty. It was located twenty-five kilometers northeast of today’s
Jinxiang County. The old name of the city was Hun City.

Zuo Zhuan’s65 “Zhaogong Four Years” chapter said that Jie of Xia had an
arrangement with the ruler of the state, and married the ruler’s daughter.
In the “Zhaogong Eleven Years” chapter, it said that the state perished
because of the marriage.

10. Si Country

65
Zho Zhuan is an ancient Chinese narrative history that is traditionally regarded as a commentary on the
ancient Chinese chronicle “Spring and Autumn Annals”. Wiki link

136
People surnamed Si were said to be the descendants of Youyu. The vassal
states were: Qi, Zeng, Zeng Guang, and Zeng Xun.

10.1 The State of Qi

It was already established during Tang of Shang’s rule. After King Wu of

Zhou destroyed Shang, he found Feng Donglou, a descendant of Xia Yu,
and named him the vassal of Qi. As a result of this, it was also called the
State of Xia.

The first capital was Yongqiu (now Qi County, Henan). When they were
later threatened by Huaiyi at the end of the Western Zhou dynasty, they
began to move north. Some think that today’s Xintai City was once the
capital of Qi.

Qi Chenggong (reigned from 654-637 BC) was helped by Duke Huan of Qi

and moved his capital to Yuan Mausoleum (now southeast of Changle
County), but Qi Wengong (reigned 549-536 BC) moved it back to Chunyu.
King Chu Hui destroyed it in the first year of Qijiangong’s reign (445 BC).

The artifacts handed down included Qibo ding and Qibo dou.

10.2 The State of Zeng (or Ceng)

The ancient city was east of today’s Zaozhuang City and slightly north of
Cangshan County. It was once a vassal state of Lu.

After Lu Xianggong ruled the state for six years (567 BC), it was destroyed
by Ju. Zhaogong ruled the state for four years (538 BC) before Lu took the
land back. After that, it belonged to the Qi State again.

10.3 The State of Zeng Guang

It was a tribal country in the Xia dynasty and located northeast of today’s
Shouguang County. One of the emperors of Xia once lived here. It was
later destroyed by Jiao Gong, the son of Han Zhuo.

10.4 The State of Zeng Xun

137
It was a tribal country in the Xia dynasty that was located southeast of
today’s Weifang City. Xia Taikang once lived here. It was also destroyed
by Han Zhuo.

11. Zi Country

People surnamed Zi were said to be the descendants of Shang Zuqi. The

state of Tan— also called Zhang— was located west of today’s Zhangqiu
County. The site was excavated before the Anti-Japanese War. The land
served as the east-west passage of the Qi State, and the state was
destroyed by the Qi State in 684 BC.

12. Yan Country

People surnamed Yan were said to be the descendants of Gao Yao.

There was a state of Ge, which was a tribal country in the Xia dynasty that
was located north of today’s Dezhou city.

After Tai Kang, the emperor of Xia, lost his country, the Xia noble
ministers fled here to collect their remaining forces and assisted Shao
Kang to restore the Xia Dynasty’s regime.

13. Ying Country

People surnamed Ying were said to be the descendants of Yi. The State of
Yan, also known as Gai, was located east of the old city of Qufu.

It became an ally of Yin and Shang. King Cheng of Zhou rebelled against
the Zhou dynasty with Wu Geng, the son of King Zhou of Shang. As a
result, it was destroyed by the Duke of Zhou and became a territory of Lu
State.

138
14. Qi Country

People surnamed Qi were said to be descendants of Fangfeng. The State

of Souman was a branch of Zhangdi.

From the Western Zhou Dynasty to the Spring and Autumn Period, it was
located in Shandong, north of today’s Jinan City, and was at the transition
stage between tribe and state.

15. Dongyi Country

Dongyi had an ancient ethnic group of people that lived in Shandong in

ancient times, who gradually merged with the Huaxia ethnic group. The
vassal states were Jie and Genmou.

15.1 The State of Jie

Some say it was located southwest of today’s Jiaozhou City. Its monarch
Ge Lu once met with Lu Xigong and led his troops to attack Song Yi.

2. The State of Genmou

It was a vassal state of Lu. Its land was south of today’s Yishui County. In
the ninth year of Lu Xuangong’s reign (600 BC), it was attacked and
acquired by the State of Lu.

16. Those countries that didn’t have specific ancestral surnames.

16.1 The State of Guo

It was located northeast of today’s Liao city. It was around during the
Western Zhou Dynasty and the early Spring and Autumn Period. It
perished before Duke Huan of Qi got to be the ruler of Qi State.

Some artifacts were handed down.

16.2 The State of Yuyuqiu (or Yuqiu)

139
It was in today’s Linyi City, Zhangqiu County. In the second year of Lord
Luzhuang (692 BC), it was attacked by the State of Lu.

16.3 The State of Muo

The old city was twenty li east of today’s Laiwu City. It was a vassal state
of Lu, and they were related by political marriage. The monarch once met
Duke Huan of Lu.

16.4. The State of Zhuan

It was a vassal state of Lu. It was about thirty li northeast of Tancheng

County today. It was destroyed by Lu in the sixth year of Lu
Chenggong’s reign (585 BC).

16.5 The State of Shen

It was a tribal country in the Xia and Shang dynasties. It was located north
of today’s Cao County. It was related to Tang of Shang by political
marriage. Yi Yin was from here.

16.6 The State of Pugu (also known as Bogu and Baogu)

It was southeast of today’s Boxing County, Binzhou City. When King

Cheng of Zhou ascended the throne, it was destroyed by the Duke of
Zhou for participating in the Wu Geng and Dongyi rebellions, and the land
became a territory of Qi.

──From Lao Yao “Ancient Countries in Shandong”

140
Chapter 33 Notes and List of Xisha
Archaeological Members
The notes found on the ghost ship needed to be studied further. Uncle
Three was in the habit of taking notes and he did things very carefully as
well. After seeing the contents of the notes, however, I found that they
were too rigorous. Uncle Three probably wrote these notes under Wen-
Jin’s supervision.

(Note: The content of the Taiwanese version is “Wen-Jin was obviously in

the habit of taking notes. The notes she left behind were found on the
ghost ship and needed to be studied further.”)

Copy from the notes:

The map of archaeological areas of the undersea tomb:

There are a total of seven areas. The porcelain is scattered in an area of

about three thousand square meters and the sunken ship is located thirty
meters to the left of the reef in the center.

Date One

Considering the fact that we are at the bottom of the sea, the traditional
methods of field archaeology aren’t going to work completely. We can
only use our own creative methods.

Even though ocean and land environments are completely different, the
results are the same even after we use different methods.

We aren’t sure about the specific size and shape of what is buried at the
bottom of the sea. The first step should be using Luoyang shovels to
determine the approximate exploration area. The seabed isn’t like land
and we have no idea what result will come out of this, but I don’t think
we will have any major problems.

141
We’ve determined that the porcelain we salvaged previously is from
Yongle’s regime.66 This is encouraging news. According to the location, we
estimate that this batch of porcelain came from an official kiln in
Jingdezhen. The style is mainly blue and white with a golden color. Some
of them were buried deep in the sea sand, so they were well preserved.
The style of this batch of porcelain was supposed to be shipped to Manila
and eventually to Mexico at that time. If our judgment is correct, then silk
should have been the largest cargo carried on this sunken ship.

It’s a pity that we have little hope of seeing traces of silk fabrics that have
been preserved in the sea until now.

Date Two

We’ve encountered some problems using Luoyang shovels. Working

underwater requires more strength and the original wooden hammers
we brought can’t be used. We have to use rocks we found in the water.
The oyster shells are very sharp and many people’s hands have been
injured.

I recommend working on the boat if people want to use Luoyang shovels

in more shallow water. There should be two people on the boat and one
person in the water, which will make things more efficient.

If people want to work in deep water, I recommend using machines. Since

it’s underwater, the Luoyang shovels will mainly be used to judge the
geological composition under the seabed and define the boundary of the
“problematic area” so that our inspection can be done more effectively.
As a result, people can choose to use modified geological drills to do the
work. We only need to determine the approximate composition of the
sample brought back by the drilling.

If there is a shipwreck under the seabed, there will be calcified or

coralized wood. Unlike land, we don’t need to judge the age of the
shipwreck based on the condition of the wood.

66
Yongle Emperor was the third Emperor of the Ming dynasty. Wiki link

142
At this stage, there’s not enough manpower or material resources in
China to protect or excavate the remains of the sunken ship as a whole.

Surprisingly, the shape that was discovered wasn’t the shape of a boat at
all, but a “土” shape. A hard object in the shape of “土” was buried at the
bottom of the sea. The size is amazing. There shouldn’t be any kind of
foundation on the seabed in this place so far from shore, so what is this
huge object buried under the sand?

For the time being, we’re afraid to make a conclusion, but I have a hunch
that if it’s as I expected, then things will be fun.

Date Three

The marking strips the archaeological team is equipped with can’t

function in an environment full of seawater.

The strips are too wide and will pull the flag poles fixed in the seabed out
of the sand due to the turbulent seawater. We eventually used the
anchor ropes on the fishing boat.

We should be equipped with professional marking strips for underwater

operations in future marine expeditions.

The anchor ropes are very heavy since they can absorb water, so they
aren’t easily influenced by the current. People can use similar materials to
anchor ropes and paint them with conspicuous colors to better observe
the bottom of the sea even if they’re on the boat.

Based on the final shape of the marking strips, I am basically certain that
this should be a huge sea burial tomb. Its scale is completely incalculable.
Plus, at a place so far away from the sea, whose tomb will it be?

Date Four

Based on the sample we’ve gotten from the wooden planks at the bottom
of the sea, traces of grout, fishing nets, and stucco were found. This
means that it was the adhesive used to seal seams and repair cracks in
the hull of a fishing boat.

143
In this case, this ancient tomb may have taken some sealing measures, so
it’s very likely that there’s still some air in there. The most likely locations
for air are at points A and B. These two distribution points are relatively
small and the spaces are relatively independent.

The biggest problem now is how to enter the ancient tomb without
destroying the air-tight environment under all that water pressure. In the
traditional sense, an air-tight cabin is needed to achieve such a function.
Maybe we’ll have to scuttle a ship. In order to do so, we’ll have to work as
a boatswain.

Date Five

July 21st

We’re going to enter the sea tomb for the first time. I’ve found the
entrance, and after thinking this through, I’ve found that this ancient
tomb isn’t very complicated.

July 24

We went in once and found a strange phenomenon inside. It appears the

tomb isn’t “clean”67 either.

List:

Name Gender

Wu Sanxing Male

Chen Wen-Jin Female

Zhang Qiling Male

Xie Lianhuan Male

Li Sidi Male

The man who took the body Male

67
It means that there might be ghosts or monsters in the tomb.

144
Qi Yu Male

Huo Ling Female

Unknown Person No. Two Male

Unknown Person No. Three Male

Unknown Person No. Four Female

145
Chapter 34 Other Related Information
001 I Have The Fish

(A group photo of ten people with the words “I have the fish” written on
it is attached below)

How many mysteries are hidden in this photo?

002 Qimen Dunjia

The diagram of the eight gates is below. The eight gates are: Rest
(Xiumen, “休门”), Life (Shengmen, “生门”), Injury (Shangmen, “伤门”),
Failure (Dumen, “杜门”), Pleasure (Jǐngmen, “景门”), Death (Simen, “死
门”), Fear (Jīngmen, “惊门”), and Prosperity (Kaimen, “开门”).

146
The legends of Qimen Dunjia:

What is “Qimen Dunjia”? It is composed of three concepts: “Qi” (奇),

“Men” (门), and “Dunjia” (遁甲).68

“Qi” includes three things: Yi (乙), Bing (丙), and Ding (丁).69

“Men” includes eight things: Xiu (休), Sheng (生), Shang (伤), Du (杜), Jǐng
(景), Si (死), Jīng (惊), and Kai (开).70

“Dun” means “hiding”.

“Jia” refers to the six Jia (六甲): Jiazi (甲子), Jiaxu (甲戌), Jiashen (甲申),
Jiawu (甲午), Jiachen (甲辰), and Jiayin (甲寅).71

68
“Qi” means “mysterious or strange” but can also mean “valuable or holy” in this context. “Men” means
“gate”. “Dun” means “hidden or escaped”. Jia is the 1st of the 10 Heavenly Stems and means “bud— the sign of
growth”. It’s element is “wood yang”. The Heavenly Stems are a Chinese system of ordinals that first appeared
during the Shang dynasty as the names of the ten days of the week. Wiki link. A very thorough breakdown of
Qimen Dunjia is here
69
“Yi” is the 2nd Heavenly Stem and means “sprout – the spread of growth, bursting forth from Earth”. Its
element is “wood yin”. “Bing” is the 3rd Heavenly Stem and means something along the lines of “concentrated
growth like fire in a house”. Its element is “fire yang”. “Ding” is the 4 th Heavenly Stem and means “maturity,
solidity, Heaven’s kiss”. It’s element is “fire yin”.
70
Basically repeating the 8 gates from above: Rest, Life, Injury, Failure, Pleasure, Death, Fear, and Prosperity.
71
The “Six Jia” refers to how ancient Chinese used to calculate the time according to the rule of heaven and
earth. They regarded sixty years as one cycle and Jia should appear six times in that 1 cycle.

147
“Dunjia” is the most noble among the ten Heavenly Stems and has hidden
meanings. It is hidden under the “Six Yi” (六仪), which include: Wu (戊), Ji
(己), Geng (庚), Xin (辛), Ren (壬), and Gui (癸).72

The principles of Dunjia are that Jiazi hides under Wu (甲子戊), Jiaxu
hides under Ji (甲戌己), Jiashen hides under Geng (甲申庚), Jiawu hides
under Xin (甲午辛), Jiachen hides under Ren (甲辰壬), and Jiayin hides
under Gui (甲寅癸).

They also come with nine planets: Tianpeng (天蓬), Tianren (天任),
Tianchong (天冲), Tianfu (天辅), Tianying (天英), Tianrui (天芮), Tianzhu (
天柱), Tianxin (天心), Tianqin (天禽).73

72
Yi means rituals, so “Six Yi” means there are “six rituals”.
Wu (戊)—5th Heavenly Stem and means “flourishing and nurturing”. Its element is “earthy yang”
Ji (己)—6th Heavenly Stem and means “full bloom”. Its element is “earthy yin”
Geng (庚)— 7th Heavenly Stem and means “harvesting and abundance. Fullness leading to changes”. Its
element is “metal yang”
Xin (辛)— 8th Heavenly Stem and means “dead heading, reformation”. Its element is “metal yin”
Ren (壬)—9th Heavenly Stem and means “sustenance, supporting life”. Its element is “water yang”
Gui (癸)—10th Heavenly Stem and means “regenerating roots and preparation for spring”. Its element is
“water yin”
73
These are also referred to as stars.
Tianpeng (天蓬)— has the water yang element. Considered an inauspicious star because it indicates theft/loss
Tianren (天任)— earth element. Sometimes called the “disease star”. People should receive teachings or
admonishment, make friends, stay home, abstain from military deployment, postpone marriage, refrain from
quarrels, long distance travel, new construction, etc.
Tianchong (天冲)— wood element, yang. Considered an auspicious star. Indicates charity & donations, doing
kind deeds, or agricultural activities. Good for military action, battles, or legal issues, but inauspicious for
everything else.
Tianfu (天辅)— wood element, yang. Considered a very auspicious star. Auspicious for travel, business,
marriage, construction, especially study progress, increasing social status, cultural and educational
development.
Tianying (天英)— earth element, yang. Considered auspicious for all things
Tianrui (天芮)— metal element, yin, relates to leadership capability, scheming, medical treatment, and military
deployment. It’s an auspicious star.
Tianzhu (天柱)— metal element, yin, indicates death, strange occurrence, mysterious matters, damage. It is an
inauspicious star.
Tianxin (天心)— earth element, yang, an auspicious star. It’s good for beneficence and studying, settling
disputes, and legal enforcement. Also good for business, marriages, and social status.
Tianqin (天禽)— fire element, yin, indicates outrageous behavior, heated situations, fire and blood. It is a
neutral star. It’s good for planning, visiting high officials, but it is unlucky for wealth, social status
improvement, marriage or travel.

148
The divination of Qimen Dunjia is mainly divided into three parts: Heaven
plate, Gate plate, and Earth plate. They symbolize three styles.

The nine palaces in the Heaven plate have the nine planets.

The eight palaces of the middle plate (the second circle according to the
picture) have eight gates.

The eight palaces of the Earth plate represent eight positions that can’t
be moved.

At the same time, each palace in the Heaven and Earth plate is assigned a
specific Qi (Yi, Bing, Ding) and Six Yi (Wu, Ji, Gen, Xin, Ren, Xing, Ren).

As a result, people can use the Six Yi, Three Qi, and Nine Planets to
predict things like relationships, traits, the future, or even choose
auspicious times and places according to the specific time and date.

This constitutes a unique category in Chinese mystical culture — Qimen

Dunjia.

149
003

Human-faced snakes (with related illustrations)

Looking at these things, I highly suspect that humans are descendants of

snakes.

There is a strange phenomenon in ancient Chinese history where a large

number of records about gods and spirits are related to snakes.

In the “Classics of Mountains and Seas”, of the 454 figures that are
recorded in the text, 138 are in the shape of a snake. Some of the gods
and spirits mentioned who have snake-like bodies include Fuxi, Nüwa, the
Yellow Emperor, and even the Queen of the West.

(I was particularly surprised that the Queen of the West had a human
head and a snake body in the original records, and was depicted the same
as Fuxi and Nüwa.)

According to current general speculations, this image of human-faced

snakes was derived from tribal totems. It was possible that the Queen of
the West changed from having a human head and a snake’s body to
having a human head and a leopard’s body because the attributes in her
tribe had changed.

In other words, maybe the Queen of the West was originally a member of
Fuxi’s tribe, but something happened and she started her own tribe in the
west where she reigned.

Whatever the case, we won’t be able to know what exactly happened.

Human-faced snakes also represent the male genitalia, especially a very

large one. Sure enough, the bigger, the better. It would be better to have
two such big ones. You could even tie them in a bow.

150
004 She Country

An ancient country called “She Country” was located between Shaanxi

and Hubei in ancient times. But this country suddenly disappeared two
thousand years ago.

The history of this country appeared sporadically from time to time in

many ancient bamboo slips. It seemed like there was a period of sudden
prosperity in She Country during the early Western Zhou Dynasty, but
then the country suddenly disappeared in the middle of the Western
Zhou Dynasty. Within ten or twenty years, the country in the primitive
jungle seemed to quickly vanish.

They existed in many myths and legends, and there was also a large
number of records in the “Classics of Mountains and Seas”. The “snake
country” mentioned in the text that was outside of Sichuan should be
about this country.

“She” is a homonym for snakes. This nation treated human-faced snakes

as gods, so many decorations had that kind of pattern on them.

Most people who study the history of this country now believe that
people in “She Country” were descendants of the mysterious “Huaxu
Ancient Country”. This dates back to when it was a matrilineal society.
This country used human-faced snakes as its totem mainly because the
“Huaxu Ancient Country” had the legend of the “human-faced, snake-
bodied Fuxi”.

Since these materials are all from ancient books and unearthed
documents, the question of whether this country existed or not has
always been a controversy among academic circles.

151
005 Murals Of The Heavenly Palace

(Six sketches of the murals are attached with paragraphs of brief

explanations.)74

74
I’m sorry, I couldn’t find the paragraphs to translate. Just enjoy the pictures.

152
153
154
155
006 Murals Of The Undersea Tomb

Some of the pictures that A Ning had taken in the undersea tomb are
shown.

(Eight sketches of the murals are attached with eight paragraphs of brief
explanations.)75

75
Same as #74, just enjoy the pics

156
157
158
Captured Wang Zanghai

The giant crater

159
160
Chapter 35 Other Related Information 2
007 Dongxia

Information:

Books seldom mention the existence of Dongxia76, which was under

Jurchen77 rule. At the time of the decline and fall of the Jin Dynasty78, this
national entity had existed for more than seventy years in order to
rejuvenate Jurchens and get them to stand on their own.

The territory was comprised of Jilin and the majority of the two
Heilongjiang provinces. Along with Mongolia, it once received tributes
from Goryeo.79 It ruled the eastern Liaoning region. The country was
originally called Dazhen, and then Dongxia, and it was even called
Dongzhen in Korean historical records.

1. Puxian Wannu

First of all, it’s necessary to introduce its founder, Puxian Wannu. He was
a prominent figure in Northeastern China’s history, but neither “History
of Jin”80 nor “History of Yuan”81 mention much about him. Some of his
sporadic deeds could be found in “Ji” and “Zhuan”82, but that may be
related to historians’ prejudice against him since they saw him as a
“rebel” and a “traitor”.

It could also be a result of there not being enough materials for them to
compile his history, so it wasn’t until hundreds of years later that a special

76
Dongxia. “Dong” means “east” in Chinese, so it was also called Eastern Xia in English. Also known as
Dongzhen. It was a short-lived kingdom established in Manchuria (today’s Northeast China) by Jurchen warlord
Puxian Wannu in 1215 during the Mongol conquest of the Jin dynasty. Wiki link
77
The Jurchen is a term used to collectively describe a number of East Asian Tungusic-speaking peoples who
lived in the northeast of China, later known as Manchuria, before the 18th century. Wiki link
78
The Jin dynasty, officially known as the Great Jin, lasted from 1115 to 1234 as one of the last dynasties in
Chinese history to predate the Mongol conquest of China.
79
Goryeo was a Korean kingdom founded in 918. Wiki link
80
“History of Jin” (Jin Shi) is a Chinese historical text. It’s one of the “Twenty-Four Histories”, which details the
history of the Jin dynasty founded by the Jurchens in northern China. Wiki link
81
“History of Yuan” is the compilation formalizing the official history of the preceding Yuan dynasty. Wiki link
82
“Jizhuan”, a literary form in East Asian history books, is basically biographies of prominent figures. Those
about emperors are called “Ji”, and those about royal families, relatives, and ordinary people are called
“Zhuan”.

161
independent biography was written in “New History of Yuan”, “the Book
of Yuan”, and so on.

Note: It still doesn’t make sense. Since there weren’t enough materials
when they were writing “History of Jin” and “History of Yuan”, how were
they able to write an independent biography for him hundreds of years
later? Was the supplementary biography mostly fictitious? It wasn’t as
rigorous as the previous sporadic records.

In addition, blaming it on the prejudices of historians didn’t make sense,

either, because history is all about recording the positive and negative.
There could only be one reason why there was no record of someone—
they were irrelevant. If this man was truly so despicable, people should
have been writing of his misdeeds and smearing his name for thousands
of years.

This part of history was either deemed irrelevant by historians, or there

was no information at all, making it impossible to even fabricate it.

Puxian Wannu was a descendent of the Liao people. Throughout history,

two things have always been said about him. One was negative and said
that he should be criticized because he was a careerist who engaged in
rebellion, divided the Jin Dynasty, and weakened the resistance to
Mongolia. The other was positive and praised him as a “strange hero of
Liaodong”, even going as far as to say he was almost as good as Aguda.83

Due to the lack of historical records, there was even a debate about his
name. Some recorded him as Wanyan Wannu, Fuhe Na, Fuxian Wannu,
Buxi Wannu, Tuzhu Dashi, Wan Jianu, Yenu, Xiao Wannu, Wan Sunu, etc.

“Fuhe”, “Fuxian”, and “Buxi” were alternative names of “Puxian”, and

“Ne” was shorthand for “Wannu”. It’s possible “Wan Yan” is his given
surname.

Note: In other words, the recorded history may be a collection of

countless names that were mixed together because of similar

83
Emperor Taizu of Jin, personal name Aguda, was the founder and first emperor of the Jurchen-led Jin
dynasty. Wiki link

162
pronunciations. This is a typical historical fallacy, which mistakes two
people with similar names for one person.

He first appeared in the historical records as a deputy minister of Shangjiu

Bureau (Shangjiu Bureau was an institution in charge of training horses) in
the sixth year of Emperor Zhangzong of Jin’s reign (1206). He was also the
lieutenant of right-wing general Wanyan Saibu, and fought against the
Song army (from “History of Jin”, Volume 12, chapter “Zhangzong
Ji84 Four”).

According to Volume 113 of “Wanyan Saibu Zhuan”85, Wannu launched a

sneak attack in conjunction with Wanyan Saibu’s frontal assault and
achieved a huge victory over tens of thousands of horsemen from the
Song Army’s main force that was led by Huang Fubin.

In Wanyan Yongji’s third year of rule during the Jin dynasty (1211),
Wannu was appointed as supervisor of the senior officers and stationed
in Yehuling. Due to the general’s incompetence, they were defeated by
the Mongolian army and the soldiers completely lost morale. In the same
year, Yelü Liuge raised troops to rebel against Jin, and the Khitan people
also responded and stood with them.

In 1213, he was appointed as a senior officer at Xianping Road (Kaiyuan,

Liaoning) and stationed there to suppress the rebellion. He was defeated
in a battle that took place in Diji Naoer (near Changtu, Liaoning). Wanyan
Yongil forgave him again and appointed him as a senior officer in
Liaodong, where he became the highest military officer in the region. He
fought against Liuge again, but underestimated the enemy and ended up
losing. As a result, they retreated to Dongjing.

2. Founding his country and establishing himself as a king

In 1214, Emperor Xuanzong of Jin fled to Nanjing (Kaifeng). The central

capital (Beijing) was occupied, and the fall of the Jin Dynasty was a
foregone conclusion. Since land transportation had been disrupted,

84
Ji refers to what note 7 mentioned—biographies of emperors.
85
Zhuan refers to what note 7 mentioned— biographies of royal families, relatives, and ordinary people.

163
Liaodong had become a lonely enclave overseas, and the situation
became even more difficult.

“At that time, the new emperor of Jin was very strict. Wannu felt insecure
because he had failed, but when he heard that the emperor had moved
to Kaifeng and was too busy to mind what happened in the east, he
thought about taking the eastern lands as his own.” (From “History of
Mughal Empire/Puxian Wannu Biography”)

Losing to Liuge twice made him realize that there was no possibility of the
Jin dynasty coming back from this. The only alternative was to change
plans and start a new country, which may inspire the people and free him
from the constraints of Jin.

In the spring of Emperor Xuanzong of Jin’s third year of rule (1215),

Wannu staged a mutiny. He divided the troops into two divisions: one
went all the way south as a partial division, while the other went all the
way north as the main force with the strategic goal of controlling
Shangjing. His troops quickly occupied Xianping, Dongjing, Shen, Cheng,
and other prefectures, and then attacked Posufu Road and took over
Shangjing and other places.

Liuge took the opportunity to attack Kaifeng and started his own country,
which he named “Liao”. Wannu’s wife, Li Xian-Er, was forced to marry
Ketege, but Liuge had no intention of staying there for long, so he left
soon after looting it. That was how Wannu was able to regain Dongjin.

Note: Poor Li Xian-Er. “Forced marriage” is an ambiguous term. Everyone

knows exactly what happened.

Even though he gained “Shen, Cheng, and other prefectures, and people
also abided by the Meng’an Mouke system”86, he soon encountered
many difficulties.

86
“Meng’an” was a tribal unit, and “Mouke” was a clan unit. One meng’an consisted of seven to ten mouke.
Theoretically, each mouke commanded three hundred households, but it was actually less than that in reality.
This kind of organization hunted with guns in peacetime, but fought in war when the situation required. It
gradually developed into a military organization. It later became an organizational structure that had dual
nature of military and local administration.

164
Eleven meng’ans who had already followed Wannu— including Bin Ge,
Chutai, and Anchi— turned to follow Geshilie Huanduan, whose position
was much lower than Wannu’s.

The more serious matter was the loss of his base, Dongjin. After several
months of experiences and lessons, Wannu realized that the name of the
highest military officer in Liaodong was no longer useful and things had to
change. He decided to start a new country and make himself king in order
to lift the spirits of the Jurchen people. That way, he could recruit more
Liaodong soldiers and win the hearts of the people.

In October 1215, (the third year of Emperor Xuanzong of Jin’s rule), he

made himself king and appointed Dongjin as the capital. He called his
country “Dazhen”, and named the era of his reign “Tian Tai”. He sought
the prosperity of the Jurchen people.

Note: Based on these paragraphs, he didn’t have much military talent.

Instead, he seemed like the kind of despicable person who took
advantage of the chaos to make small gains. After taking advantage of
things, he had no ability to keep what he had, so he had to give up all the
previous principles he possessed. He belonged to the type of careerist
whose ambition was greater than their ability. He was naturally a hero to
me, but in that era at that time, his brilliance only showed how great
others were.

3. Surrendering to Mongolia

When Dazhen was first established, it was in a difficult situation. It was

surrounded by Mongolia, Jin, and Liao, so the land access to the outside
world was blocked.

The Jin Dynasty in the southern and eastern parts of Liaodong became its
nearest enemy and most imminent threat. The Jin dynasty used the
strategy of pardoning high officials at Liaodong Road in an attempt to win
over senior officers and disintegrate its army, hoping that it would
collapse from within. Jin even went and adjusted soldiers’ deployments in
Liaodong and issued an edict that ordered generals in Liaodong to “try
and take over Dazhen together.”

165
As for Liao, the internal conflicts, the move to Liaoxi, and Liuge
surrendering to Mongolia meant that they had become Mongolia’s vassal
state. Even though it still posed a threat to Dazhen, it wasn’t as
important.

Therefore, the biggest and most dangerous enemy for Dazhen was
Mongolia, which was on the upswing. If Wannu fought against Mongolia,
he would definitely be defeated, but if he pretended to surrender, he
could save strength and bide his time.

As a result, in October 1216, Wannu handed out a surrender statement

and sent his son Tiege to Mongolia’s imperial camp as a hostage.

Note: I wasn’t surprised.

4. The eastward journey and starting Xia country

Since Puxian Wannu had surrendered, Mongolia let their guard down.

Not long after his surrender, he seized the opportunity and “led a crowd
of more than a hundred thousand people and escaped to the island”
(From “History of Yuan”, chapter “Mu Huali Zhuan”). He pretended to be
cornered and weak with no intention of making a comeback when he was
actually carrying out a major military transfer. This way, his subordinates
were preserved and well-rested.

In February 1217, the commander of the Liaodong Mongolian Army, Mu

Huali, turned to the southern expedition and tried to enter the central
plain, leaving no corresponding troops to defend.

Wannu thought that the opportunity had arrived, so he sent his troops to
kill Yelu Nie’er Ge, an army supervisor. He then embarked on the
eastward journey, roughly proceeding from both the north and the south
at the same time.

He first attacked the areas around the lower reaches of the Yalu River and
then broke through the Dafu encampment in April. He led the main force
north to attack Long’an Mansion (Jilin Nong’an). Pucha Yila, who was a
local senior officer and deputy marshal of Jin Liaodong, Shangjing, and
other places, abandoned the city and fled to Bianjing.
166
Wannu then marched to Shangjing and conspired with Tai Ping, an official
in Shangjing. He burned temples and took down the marshal named Chen
Chong before occupying Shangjing. Wen Dihan Lao’er—who stayed
behind and guarded Shangjin—was killed.

But Chen Chong’s daughter stood firm on behalf of her father and ended
up gaining reinforcements. As a result, Wannu didn’t succeed and had to
withdraw to the east, going to the area at the junction of Helan Road and
Supin Road.

The main force basically finished their eastward journey in December

1218, but other forces continued to be active in the southern part of
Liaodong for a period of time.

In June and July of 1217, Wannu again started a new country. He changed
the name to Dongxia but still used Tian Tai as the name of his reign. The
capital was Kaiyuan City (there are various opinions as to where the site is
in today’s time).

It was also said that the country’s name was originally Daxia, but since it
was located in the east and its name didn’t match Xixia (Western Xia), he
decided to name it Dongxia (Eastern Xia). Korean historical records called
it Dongzhen.

Note: He bided his time during this period, which was a very good plan.
Puxian Wannu apparently had the ability to get things done. If he played
his cards right, he could use this chance to rest and get better resources
to quickly strengthen his country’s defenses and expand the army. By the
time the other countries realized what he had done and reacted, a
formidable opponent would have already appeared.

5. Deterring Liaodong

Once Dongxia was established, the Jin Dynasty ordered Pucha Wujin—
who originally worked in Liaodong’s state affairs department—to transfer
to Shangjin. At the same time, they captured the family members of
those officials who had conspired with Wannu and ruthlessly killed them
all.

167
If the Jin army failed, they only had one place to retreat to—Posu Road.
As a result, they were trying to get through the crisis with a lot of
difficulties. How could they have the proper strength to fight Dongxia toe
to toe?

Meanwhile, Mongolia had armies in Xixia and was also fighting against Jin
for the Central Plains, so they had no time to focus on Liaodong, which
gave Dongxia time to develop and become strong.

After just a few years of constantly deploying troops, Wannu had finally
reached Jin’s Helan Road, Suping Road, and Huligai Road.

Their territory roughly included the Bohai Sea in the east, Huligai City in
the northwest (Yilan in Heilongjiang), Zhang Guangcailing in the west,
Posu Mansion in the south, and Qingzhou in Korea (North Hamgyong
Province in North Korea).

At its peak, the southern part of its territory reached the eastern section
of the ancient Great Wall of Korea, which started from Dalin in the west,
covered Dingping, and ended at Dulianpu in the east.

The northern part of its territory stretched from north of today’s Bayan
and Yilan in Heilongjiang to the lower reaches of Heilongjiang.

The western part of its territory started from the west side of central Jilin
to the south of the Heilongjiang area (including Jin Shangjing City in the
later period). The eastern part reached the Sea of Japan.

After Yelü Liuge rebelled against Jin, his people persuaded him to start his
own country, but he ended up surrendering to Mongolia. Many of his
subordinates revolted, and some of them even entered Goryeo’s territory
and threatened the royal capital multiple times. Goryeo hoped that
Mongolia and Dongxia would “lead troops to rescue them and sweep
them away” (From “History of Korea”).

In 1218, Genghis Khan sent marshals Hazhen and Zala to help Goryeo.
Both of them led ten thousand troops and met with Liuge’s remaining
soldiers before marching to Goryeo. Puxian Wannu also had marshal Hutu
lead twenty thousand troops, which brought the total up to a hundred

168
thousand people. Goryeo sent four hundred thousand troops, and they
went after Jiangdong City together.

It was the first month of spring in 1219 when the leader of the rebels,
Hanshe, killed himself. The rest of his followers surrendered.

As a gesture of gratitude, Goryeo presented their annual tribute to the

two countries and also agreed that both countries would send envoys to
receive the tribute. Since then, all the envoys Mongolia sent to Goryeo to
receive the tribute would travel through the borders of Dongxia. They
would often travel with Dongxia’s envoys, so they became as close as a
family.

The Mongolian army marshal Hazhen once said to Goryeo: “If you want to
have a good relationship with my country, you should first pay respect to
the Mongolian emperor, and then pay respect to the emperor Wannu.”
(From “History of Goryeo”). This shows that Mongolia recognized Puxian
Wannu as an emperor at that time.

Dongxia displayed a lot of etiquette by sending envoys thousands of miles

to the place where Genghis Khan was stationed in the west. This friendly
relationship only lasted for six years, when it ended in 1224.

Note: Unfortunately, Wannu was deceived by Mongolia’s soft policy. At

that time, he probably couldn’t dare imagine what would happen if he
fought against them, so he focused all his efforts on maintaining this kind
of balance. But Goryeo at that time wasn’t reliable. In the face of
Mongolia’s toughness, Goryeo was indecisive about its position, so it also
caused a dilemma for Wannu.

6. Dongxia ceased to exist

But this friendly relationship between Dongxia and Mongolia was only
superficial and was actually just a temporary political truce. In fact, they
were both cheating and plotting against each other. Both of them were
trying to attract and oppress Goryeo in an attempt to isolate or attack
each other.

169
Faced with Mongolia’s might, Dongxia didn’t dare join forces with Goryeo
to fight them. Instead, Wannu kept sending troops to invade and loot
Goryeo’s borders, causing the two countries to often be engaged in small-
scale wars that consumed national power without any gains.

In 1223, Mu Huali’s invasion of the Central Plains was unsuccessful, and

he ended up dying in Shanxi.

In 1224, there was a new development between Dongxia and Mongolia.

In January, Dongxia wrote two notices to Goryeo. One stated, “Mongolian
Genghis doesn’t have any teachers or elders to teach him manners, and
doesn’t know what he’s doing. In addition, Echixin is greedy, violent, and
inhumane. Dongxia no longer has any good relationships with Mongolia.”
The other one stated, “My country is in Qingzhou, and your country is in
Dingzhou. They have their own markets and trade according to what we
have done previously.” (From “History of Korea”).

From then on, Mongolian envoys no longer passed through Dongxia’s

border but went through Posu Road instead. The relationship between
the two parties worsened, mainly because Dongxia judged the situation
incorrectly. But the greedy and violent behaviors of Genghis Khan’s
brother, Wochjin (Echixin), were also one of the reasons. The relationship
between the two countries broke down but didn’t intensify.

In 1227, Genghis Khan passed away and Ögedei Khan ascended the
throne. After the battle of Sanfengshan, Jin country’s main force
perished.

Mongolia changed its foreign expansion policy and started using troops in
the northwest, which caused the relationship between the two countries
to become tense again.

In February 1233, Ögedei Khan “ordered many dukes to attack Wannu’s

territory. He then commanded the prince (Güyük Khan) and Duke Alchidai
to lead the army from the left wing.” (From “History of Yuan”)

There were also many people participating, and their affiliations are as
follows:

170
(1) Prince Güyük

(1-1) King Tarsi

A. Shimo Chala

B. Shimo Beidier

(1-2) Uriyangkhadai

(2) Duke Alchidai (Alchitai)

Yila Mainu (From the Left-wing army)

(3) Wang Rongzu (He attacked “Goryeo” first, and then “went on to
attack Dongxia and capture Wannu”)

The Mongolian army took the route through Goryeo and headed north
into Dongxia’s territory. In September 1233, Nanjing was surrounded.
Although “the city was as strong as steel” (from “History of Yuan”), it was
outnumbered and fell.

Puxian Wannu was captured (some believed he was killed). The

Mongolian army continued to advance and ended up attacking “Kaiyuan
(Eastern part of Mudanjiang in Heilongjiang Province), Xiepin (Middle and
lower Suifen River Basin), and Xiping in the east” (from “History of Yuan”).

After nineteen years, Dongxia ceased to exist.

Note: This was the last battle depicted on the murals of the Heavenly
Palace. For a small country like Dongxia, the fight at that time carried the
final dignity of the entire nation and was bound to be a deadly battle
across the whole country.

It was conceivable how fierce the confrontation would be between

Mongolians, who were in their strongest form, and the Jurchens, who
wouldn’t leave any opponents alive. This bloody memory must have
dwelled deep in the hearts of those Jurchen people who were fortunate
enough to survive.

7. Regime still existed

171
In the past, it was thought that Dongxia had perished with the capture of
Wannu. But when the official seal engraved with “Datong”87 was
discovered in the twenty-fifth year of Kangxi (1686), new ideas about
Dongxia’s survival emerged.

According to Wang Guowei’s88 textual research: “There are many

references in ‘The History of Korea’ about Dongzhen (Dazhen) and the
negotiations between Dongzhen and Goryeo. There were more than
twenty references of Dongzhen from Ögedei Khan’s regime (1233), up
until Kublai Khan’s regime at the end of the Yuan Dynasty (1294).

This meant that Mongolia still used the seal even after Wannu was
captured in order to placate the people of the land. Future descendants
of the Mongolian emperor inherited the land, making it clear that it had
become a vassal state that was still known as Dongzhen. (From
“Mongolian Affairs”)

In addition, it was recorded in “History of Goryeo” and “History of Yuan

Dynasty” that the titles “Distinguished Country” and “Dongxia Wannu
Country” were still used many years after 1233.

In February 1234, “Mongolia left more than a hundred soldiers in

Dongzhen, while the rest returned to Mongolia. (From “History of
Goryeo”)

In 1235, twenty thousand households were established in Kaiyuan and

Nanjing. The latter may have been under the supervision of the king that
had been placed in Dongxia.

Those who used to be officials in Dongxia continued to manage the

government affairs of the area, and the reigning era was called “Datong”.

Various official seals of this Datong reigning era had been unearthed,
which was enough to prove that Dongxia had been obedient to Mongolia
ever since it became a vassal state. It also appeared to have assisted the
Mongolian army in suppressing Goryeo’s rebellion.

87
Datong (1224-1233) was the era name of Dongxia’s regime.
88
Wang Guowei was a Chinese historian and poet. He made important contributions to the studies of ancient
history. Wiki link

172
Note: Wang Zanghai lived in the late Ming Dynasty. This obviously meant
that the regime didn’t disappear overnight, but gradually reduced from a
country to a city-state, and from a city-state to a tribe.

In 1235, the Mongolian army attacked Goryeo three times. The Dongxia
army took the lead and occupied Longjin Town, Zhenming City, and other
places. (From “History of Goryeo”)

In 1236, the Mongolian army re-entered Goryeo and sent more than a
hundred troops to invade Goryeo’s northeastern territory. They moved
from Yaode and Jingbian to Yongxing Cang. (From “History of Goryeo”)

During Möngke Khan’s reign, Mongolia once again sent a large-scale force
to Goryeo and used Dongxia as a channel for their troops to advance.

According to “History of Goryeo”, from 1249 to 1259, soldiers from

Dongxia entered Goryeo’s territory and caused disturbances every year.
By 1257, there were as many as three thousand soldiers in Dengzhou. In
1258, Dongxia sent soldiers on boats to besiege Songdao in Gaocheng
County and didn’t stop until Mongolia intervened. After Kublai Khan
ascended the throne, he started to gradually strengthen his control over
Dongxia.

By February 1266, the military divisions of Dongjin, Kaiyuan, Xupin, Helan,

Posu, and other places were established. In May 1283, a Punishment and
Judgment Division was added in Haixi Liaodong.

Xupin and Helan were territories of Dongxia, and Haixi was naturally
thought to be in Dongxia, which showed that they were all under
Mongolia’s domestic regional rule. After 1287, it seemed that there were
no mentions of “Dongzhen” or “Dongxia”, which raises the suspicion that
its status as a vassal state was withdrawn.

Note: Poor Goryeo. At this time the remnant forces of Dongxia must have
retreated into Changbai Mountain and lived a hidden life.

8. Historical sites

(1) Chengzis Mountain City

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In order to prevent Mongolia’s eastward invasion and because of the
nature of the region, most of the cities in Dongxia were built in the
mountains and became mountain cities.

They were located at the junction of Yanji City and Tumen City in the
eastern suburbs of Yanji City. There were a few relics of Bohai Kingdom
and a large number of relics of Dongxia Kingdom in the city.

The city wall was built with stones along the mountainous terrain and had
an irregular oval shape with a circumference of 4,454 meters. There were
four gates, three of which had barbicans.89 The city had an open terrain
with a palace in the center. There were nine flights of stairs, with each
step as wide as ten meters and as long as seventeen meters. The
foundation stones were arranged in an orderly fashion.

There was also a large number of building tiles scattered around the
palace. Jade belt ornaments, jade mandarin duck ornaments, agate
ornaments, official seals of Dongxia Kingdom, bronze mirrors, divination
devices, small bronze statues of mother and child, and hundreds of Tang,
Song, and Jin coins were unearthed in the city.

This Dongxia city was called Nanjing, and it was where the King of
Dongxia, Puxian Wannu, once lived. In 1233, Mongolian soldiers captured
Puxian Wannu in the city, and Dongxia was destroyed.

When it comes to studying the politics, economy, and culture of Dongxia,

this city is the most important cultural relic and has a uniquely strong
historical and scientific value.

(2) Bath Mountain

It is located about ten kilometers east of Yanji City and faces Chengzi
Mountain across a valley. There is a circular pool on top of the mountain
where a tower was placed. The pool is rumored to have been Puxian
Wannu’s bathing place.

(3) Krasnoyar Mountain City

89
Fortified outpost or gateway, such as at an outer defense perimeter of a city or castle, or any tower situated
over a gate or bridge which was used for defensive purposes.

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It is located on the Krasnoyar Mountain near Ussuriysk, Russia, on the
southern bank of the Suifen River. It has a circumference of sixteen li and
was built on a hill in the shape of a ring. There are three layers of five-
meter high city walls from the base of the mountain to the top. There are
even auxiliary facilities such as trenches near the walls. The highest point
is a “forbidden city”, which is surrounded by an inner wall. There are also
many relics of luxurious palace-style buildings in the city.

(4) Ancient Great Wall of Yanbian

The Ancient Great Wall of Yanbian is located on Shuangfeng Mountain in

Badaogou, near the ridge of Pingfeng Mountain in the north of Yanji City.

It starts west from the slope of Erdaogou, Dongshan Village, Tushan

Township, Helong County and winds through Xicheng in Helong City,
Longmen Township, the Xilin River in Longjing City, Taoyuan, Tongfo,
Badao in Yanji City, and the lofty mountains of Chang’an Township. It
disappears fifteen kilometers east of Yanji City near Mopan Mountain.

The great wall was mostly constructed using earth, but it was also built
with stones. It has a total length of about a hundred and fifty kilometers,
and seventeen towers have been discovered. The longest section is about
ten kilometers long and stretches between the Xilin River and Laotugou
Town. The most preserved section is in Guanchuan Village in Laotugou
and is about three meters high.

There is no documentation of the ancient great wall, but according to

research, it is believed to be Dongxia’s border along the river. It is also
believed that it was built in the Bohai Sea, and together with Hunchun’s
“frontier trench”, it was the defensive wall surrounding Zhongjing and
Dongjin in Bohai.

It was later used by the Dongxia Kingdom and converted into a defense
project. Some also believed it to be the Great Wall of the Jin Dynasty or
the Great Wall of the Goguryeo Period.

(5) Jingpo side wall

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It is located on the east bank of the south-central section of Jingbo Lake
and is in the construction area of Jiangshan Jiao Forest Farm. The earth-
rock structure winds along the mountain to the southeast for four and a
half kilometers.

There are rock piles in the western section of the lakeshore area, but the
rest is mostly a mixture of earth and rock. The stone section is well
preserved, as evidenced by the protruding walls every fifty to eighty
meters that are about two meters high, one and a half meters wide at the
base, and 0.8 meters wide at the top.

The masses reported that this side wall could reach Jilin.

The preliminary investigation identified that it was the remains of

Dongxia Kingdom at the end of the Jin Dynasty, and should be the small
Great Wall of the Jin Dynasty. It was a military project to prevent the
Mongolian army from going south.

It was approved as a provincial cultural relic protection item in 1990.

(6) Feiyou City

It is located on the left bank of the beautiful Tumen River, in Dongcheng

where the ancient city village of Sanjiazi Manchu Township is located.
North Korea’s Sebel County is across the river.

The city has a circumference of 2023 meters, a wall height of three to

four meters, and a base width of nine meters. There’s a gate in the north,
south, east, and west, and it has the typical characteristics of the ancient
Liao and Jin cities, such as turrets and protruding walls. Among the
ancient Liao and Jin cities that have been discovered, it’s one of the more
intact ones.

Ten bronze seals were unearthed in the city. One was from the late Jin
Dynasty, one didn’t have a year engraved on it, and two of them were
small bronze seals. The rest were Puxian Wannu’s bronze seals from
when he founded Dongxia.

There were two types of bronze seals: one was the bronze seal of
Dongxia’s “Tian Tai” reign; the other was the bronze seal of Dongxia’s
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“Datong” reign. As a result, it was believed that the city was the site of
the late Jin Dynasty and Dongxia Kingdom. Some people have even
verified that the city is the “Dongjin” of Dongxia Kingdom.

── From “Historical Materials of Dongxia”

Endless Journey

In the basement of Golmud, it can be said that I learned a lot of secrets

for the first time since I got involved in this huge puzzle.

(Attached are some illustrations and floor plans of the corridors, rooms,
and basement of the sanatorium.)

Corridor
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Room

178
Floor Plan

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180
I always wanted to write something, but I never dared to.

I don’t know if what I’m doing now is right, or if it should be known by

others.

If someone enters this vortex through these words of mine, it would

mean an unexpected disaster for them. And as the author of these words,
I’m afraid I can’t escape the notoriety of initiating it.

I find myself both inside and outside of these various convoluted

mysteries, and can’t even determine whether I’m an insider or an
outsider at this point.

Everything is like this. Behind the layers of lotus petals, I always see
everything lying there as before. I may have taken a step further, but I
haven’t made much progress after all. It all seems endless, as if it were
reincarnating.

No one knows what will happen in the future, so I can only keep going.

Wu Xie ── 2005 in Golmud

Note: This is the last chapter I wrote. Next, I’ll be setting off to the depths
of Qaidam. I don’t know if I can make it back. If I can’t, then this book will
let others know what happened to me.

Remember, if you can’t understand what I’ve written down, please don’t
think too hard about it. There’s a huge abyss after it anyways.

＜The End＞

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