I wished that I could have seen him when he was ninety. Even now his leaps and capers were magnificent in the moonlight.
Part Two—THE FLUTE, THE BALL, AND THE BELL
12. Of Castles and Key Rabbits
At the suggestion of the abbot I will explain for the benefit of barbarians that my country is Chung-kuo, which can mean Central Country or Middle Kingdom, whichever one prefers. The point is that it is the country in the exact center of the world, and the only country that lies directly beneath Heaven. “China” is a barbarian invention that was coined in awe and honor of the first Duke of Ch'in, who took over the empire in the Year of the Rat 2,447 (221 B.C.). He was a remarkable reformer. Mass murderers are usually reformers, the abbot tells me, although not necessarily the other way around.
“We are being strangled by our past!” roared the Duke of Ch'in. “We must make a new beginning!”
What he had in mind was the suppression of every previous philosophy of government and the imposition of one of his own, called Legalism. The abbot says that the famous first sentence of the Book of Legalism is, “Punishment produces force, force produces strength, strength produces awe, awe produces virtue; thus virtue has its origin in punishment,” and that there is little need to read the second sentence.
The duke began his reforms by burning every book in the empire, with the exception of certain technical and divinatory works, and since the scholars were burned along with the books, there were vast areas of knowledge that vanished from the face of the earth. He disapproved of certain religions; temples and priests and worshippers went up in flames. He disapproved of frivolous fables; professional storytellers were beheaded, along with vast numbers of bewildered grandmothers. The leading Confucianists were decoyed into a ravine and crushed by falling boulders, and the penalty for possession of one line of the Analects was death by slow dismemberment. The problem with burning and beheading and crushing and dismembering is that it is time-consuming, and the duke's solution was a masterstroke.
“I shall build a wall!” cried the Duke of Ch'in.
The Great Wall of China did not begin with the duke, nor did it end with the duke, but it was the duke who first used it for the purpose of murder. Anyone who disagreed with him was marched away to the desolate north, and men died by the millions as they labored on the public-works project that insiders call the Longest Cemetery in the World. More millions died as they built the duke's private residence. The Castle of the Labyrinth covered seventy acres, and it was actually thirty-six separate castles connected by a labyrinth of underground passageways. (The idea was that he would have thirty-six imperial bedrooms to choose from, and assassins would never know where he slept.) Beneath the artificial labyrinth was a real one, running deep through a sheer cliff, and it was said that it was the home of a horrible monster that devoured the screaming victims of the Duke of Ch'in. True or not, the thousands of people who were tossed into it were never seen again.
The duke produced another masterstroke when he had the finest craftsmen in the empire fashion a great golden mask of a snarling tiger, which he wore on all public occasions. His successors continued to wear it for more than eight hundred years. Did a duke have watery eyes, a weak chin, and facial tics? What his subjects saw was a terrifying mask, “the Tiger of Ch'in,” and the abbot explained that the barbarian rulers of Crete had used the mask of a bull for the same reason.
Mystery and terror are the bulwarks of tyranny, and for fourteen years China was one vast scream, but then the duke made the mistake of raising taxes to the point where the peasants had to choose between starvation or rebellion. He had confiscated their weapons, but he was not wise enough in the ways of peasants to confiscate their bamboo groves. A sharpened bamboo spear is something to avoid, and when the duke saw several million of them marching in his direction he hastily abandoned the empire and barricaded himself in the Castle of the Labyrinth. There he was invulnerable, and since he still controlled the largest private army in the country it was tacitly agreed that Ch'in would exist as a state within the state.
Emperors came and emperors went, but the Dukes of Ch'in seemed destined to go on forever, crouched and snarling in the most monstrous monument to raw power known to man.
The Castle of the Labyrinth lies in ruins now, a great gray mass of shattered slabs and twisted iron scattered across the crest of a cliff overlooking the Yellow Sea. There the tide is the strongest in China, and the tumbled stones shudder with the force of the waves. Vines have covered the splintered steel gates, and lizards with rainbow bellies and turquoise eyes cling to the fragments of walls, and spiders scuttle through the eternal shadows cast by banana and bamboo. The spiders that currently occupy the castle are huge, hairy, and harmless. The previous occupants were equally grotesque but not so harmless, and when I first saw the Castle of the Labyrinth it was standing in all its glory.
The barge that we traveled on was inching through a dense morning fog toward the junction with the Yellow Sea, and harsh commanding voices seemed to be shouting right in my ears. The air vibrated with great metallic crashes and the clash of a thousand weapons, and the heavy tread of marching feet. Then the fog began to lift, and my eyes lifted with it up the side of a sheer cliff to the most powerful fortress in the world; vast, moated, turreted, impregnable. I stared in horror at towers that scraped the clouds, and at immense steel gates that glittered like terrible fangs, and at a central drawbridge that could accommodate four squadrons of cavalry riding abreast. The great stone walls were so thick that the men who patrolled on top on horseback looked like ants riding small spiders, and ironshod hooves dislodged rocks that tumbled down the cliff and splashed in the water around the barge. One of them banged upon the roof of the cabin where Li Kao was sleeping off an overdose of wine, and he stumbled out on deck and gazed up, rubbing his eyes.
“Revolting architecture, isn't it?” he said with a yawn. “The first duke had no aesthetic sense whatsoever. What's the matter, Ox? A slight hangover?”
“Just a mild headache,” I said in a tiny terrified voice.
As the fog continued to fade away, I gazed fearfully toward what must surely be the gloomiest and ghastliest city on earth, and I began to question my sanity when I heard the happy songs of fishermen and sniffed a breeze that was fragrant with a billion blossoms. And then the fog lifted completely and I stared in disbelief at a city so lovely that it might have been the setting of a fairy tale.
“Strange, isn't it?” said Master Li. “Ch'in is beautiful beyond compare, and it is also the safest city in all China. The reason, oddly enough, is greed.”
He took a morning-after sip of wine and belched contentedly.
“Every single one of the first duke's successors has lived only for money, and at first their methods of acquiring it were crude but effective,” he explained. “Once a year the reigning duke would choose a village at random, burn it to the ground, and decapitate the inhabitants. Then the duke and his army would set forth upon the annual tax trip. The severed heads led the way, mounted upon pikes, and the eagerness with which peasants lined up to pay taxes was a source of great gratification to the Dukes of Ch'in. Sooner or later an enlightened duke was bound to appear, however, and it is said that the one who has gone down in history as the Good Duke suddenly jumped to his feet during a council with his ministers, shot a hand into the air, and bellowed, ‘Corpses cannot pay taxes!’ This divine revelation produced a change of tactics.”
Li Kao offered me some wine, but I declined.
“The Good Duke and his successors continued to murder peasants for fun and profit, and the annual tax trip continues to this day, but the wealthy were allowed to fill the dukes’ coffers as a matter of free choice,” he explained. “The Good Duke simply transformed his gloomy coastal town into the greatest and most expensive pleasure city on earth. Ox, every luxury and vice known to man is available at Ch'in at exorbitant prices, and the cost is more than offset by the fact that the dukes will not tolerate crime, which might divert coins from their own
