Wu Jin Zang. Pang Bei

hours later, Xiao Lin called again. Outdoor noises could be heard on the phone. He said that as I postponed the calling time, he went to town to buy something, as it was said in the weather report that there would be thunderstorms in a few days. This time, his tone was obviously more respectful. He said it was indeed difficult to imagine that as early as one thousand years ago someone had built a pontoon bridge across the Yangtze River and what a heroic undertaking that was! He said that Xu Xuan’s chess book mentioned was actually the first work on chess war in the history of weiqi, and that the story of the nun Master Geng was also backed up by the Painting about Master Geng Refining Snow collected in the Palace Museum in Taipei. He also mentioned a masterpiece of Zhou Wenju in Southern Tang, the Painting on a Weiqi Gathering in Front of a Double Screen, saying that the book revealed that the painting in the Palace Museum of Beijing was very probably an imitation, while the one in the Freer Gallery of Art of the United States was the genuine copy….

      During the three months from the receipt of his manuscript to his second call, I did not have a peep at his manuscript at all. In fact, I could no longer find his manuscript, and I was too lazy to look for it, or too busy to care about it. He suddenly cut off, saying that he would call another day and that “something seems to turn up ahead”.

      While I was lazy and busy, the hand of fate sped up the watch hand in the dark. One day after over one month, I unexpectedly received a call from a press in Shanghai. The colleague who called spoke without due civility in a voice of apparent anger. He said that Xiao Lin was murdered on his way delivering the manuscript to Shanghai.

      Apparently, Xiao Lin no longer entertained any expectation of me. Upon invitation, he went to Shanghai with the original book and his translation, as well as the expert testimonies of Nanjing and Beijing. He was attacked by an overflowing river. He jumped into the river after receiving several cuts by a sword. The pages of the manuscript were scattered in water. As the current was swift, the police failed to find his body and only found several pages of the ancient book among water grasses….

      Had I not postponed my talk with him on the phone, Xiao Lin would not have happened to see the scene of forced demolition of a house and grinding over a person (that was an old ancestral residence), would not have become a witness of that homicide case and would not have incurred his own fatal disaster; had I taken initiative to communicate with him, the second talk would not have taken place at such a time as a midnight; had I read over the manuscript in time, he would not have had to deliver his manuscript to Shanghai and would not have died in that river….

      Full of guilt, self-reproach and pains, I spent three hours searching for Xiao Lin’s mails from my pile of book manuscripts. I read through the translation at one go by staying overnight, and then spent half a day comparing it with the dozens of pages of the original text. I could hardly express the shock and surprise that it brought to me. My heart, which had been numbed for such a long time, throbbed mysteriously. On the title page is quoted a line of Siegfried Sassoon, a favorite line of Xiao Lin in his college years, “In me the tiger sniffs the rose.”

      The ancient text on these pages photographed is the surviving original text. In terms of style, the text seems to follow the biographical history of Sima Qian. In terms of subject, it resembles the legends of the Tang dynasty. The earliest “vernacular stories” in China were produced in the Northern Song dynasty. Legends of Tang before that were all written in classical Chinese. As Classical Chinese and modern Chinese are not distinctly different, Xiao Lin only gave a minimum rendering of the original text, which may be called a kind of paraphrase. Though the original text has no punctuation, the translation does not venture to add any sentence.

      I stared blankly at the appraisal reports of ancient book experts, including one page I missed in the past, that is, an appraisal by Mr. Shen Jin, former Director of the Rare Edition Office of the Harvard-Yenching Library. Mr. Shen, who has been following Mr. Gu Tinglong, a bibliographer, for over three decades, is a towering figure in the contemporary academic circles of ancient editions. Xiao Lin noted in particular in that appraisal report that upon the first glance over the original text, Mr. Shen concluded in one second according to the paper characteristics and typeface that the book was a “Masha edition” made of bamboo paper at the end of the Ming dynasty. The so-called “Masha editions” mainly refer to books printed in Masha Town of Jianyang, Fujian Province in history. During the Song and Ming dynasties, there were three major book printing centers in China: books printed in Hangzhou were called “Zhe editions”, those printed in Sichuan “Shu editions”, and those printed in Jianyang “Jian editions”, also called “Masha editions”. “Masha editions” originated in the Period of Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, prospered in the Song dynasty, culminated in the Ming dynasty and perished in the Qing dynasty. The “Masha editions” in the Song and Ming dynasties were the best and most influential. The number of books printed in Jianyang ranked top nationwide, and thus the place was reputed as the “Capital of Books”. Jianyang was also the hometown of Zhu Xi, a Confucian sage of the Song dynasty. It was recorded in history that Jianyang had a long street of 500 to 600 meters, where each household sold books, and numerous book traders came from all over China. Zhu Xi also once opened a store on that street to sell books. An “advertising slogan” is found in his works, “People from everywhere, no matter how far away, come to buy Masha books.”

      Mr. Shen Jin also pointed out in his comment that “Masha books” of the Song dynasty were rare relics now, and though a large number of “Masha books” of Ming were burned and destroyed during the “Cultural Revolution”, not a few rare copies were extant among folks, including “official prints”, “workshop prints” and “home prints”. “Workshop prints” were for sale, while “home prints” were for private collection. The Name of the Nun was a “home print”.

      The Name of the Nun is indeed a “family printed edition” and one volume of Lin’s Genealogy in Jianyang.

      This Masha edition of The Name of the Nun has nine chapters. Chapter IX has a title but no words, while the Ming print still retains its chapter number. The Contents of the Ming print also show that it has a preface, which is missing now.

      In a copy of the original, the afterword was authored by Qian Qianyi, a leader of the intellectual circle at the end of the Ming dynasty. Qian Qianyi (1582-1664), styled Shepherd and Old Man Yushan. All scholars nationwide, knowing him or not, called him “Mr. Yushan”. This “Great Master of the Literary Circles” was celebrated all over the nation for his poems and essays, and was also a historian and collector of unique insight. In his late years, he accidentally got this book, which he cherished all the more, having it re-printed and writing a postscript for it, with two alternative names signed at the end of the article, perhaps because this collector thought that “the book was originally printed by movable types in the Song Dynasty”! Xiao Lin especially pointed it out in his letter, which might be related with the “Nanjing complex”.

      I searched for that “Stone City” (alternative name of Nanjing) among ancient paper-piles, as that was the background of the events and people in The Name of the Nun. With the Yangtze River as its natural moat, the city is located in a strategic place. From East Wu to the Republic of China, the city had frequently been the first choice of capital city for those vying for power or content to retain sovereignty over part of the country. The Qinhuai River goes west, while the Yangtze River runs east. Today after one thousand years, the seven-tier stupa on the Qixia Mountain still retains its appearance after the reconstruction by Lin Renzhao. That is also the tallest stupa in China today. On the stupa is still inscribed a famous Buddhist verse in Diamond Sutra: All is conditioned existence ephemeral,Like a dream,an illusion, a shadow and a foam, Like a tiny dew drop or a flash of lightning, That’s the way that everything goes.” All are like shadows and foams, so is history. The Period of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms between Tang and Song, what a mess China was then! The last dynasty of the Five Dynasties was the Later Zhou Dynasty, and the most prosperous of the Ten Kingdoms was Southern Tang (937-975). From Liezu who proclaimed himself king to the surrender of Houzhu to the Song Dynasty, Southern Tang had three generations of kings, First King, Middle King and Last King, lasting for less than four decades, comparable to China’s earliest empire: The empire of the First Emperor of Qin lasted for only fifteen years! But the truly comparable