Everything Under the Sky by Matilde Asensi Page A

traditions. Outside of this Westernized port city, there was surely a vast country, as big as a continent, still anchored to the old imperial values. After all, it was highly unlikely after two thousand years of living a certain way that things would have changed in just a decade.
    “I do, Mr. Jiang. And I gather that possibility has become a reality due to something related to the hundred-treasure chest, correct?”
    Paddy Tichborne stumbled up to get another bottle of scotch off the bar. I drank the last of my tea, tepid by then, and set the cup on the table.
    “Precisely, madame.” The antiquarian nodded, smiling. “You've touched on the last and most important point I wanted to make. Now is when the plot truly thickens. According to the legend of the Prince of Gui, on the night before the king of Burma handed Yongli and his entire family over to General Wu Sangui, the last Ming emperor invited his three closest friends to dinner: Wan the scholar, Yao the physician, and Yue Ling the geomancer and fortune-teller. He said to them, ‘My friends, since I am going to be killed and the Ming lineage ends forever once I and my young son and heir are dead, I must give you a very important document. The three of you are to protect it on my behalf. The night I was enthroned as Lord of Ten Thousand Years, I swore that should a time like this come, I would destroy an important jiance that has been in my family's possession for many years and contains the secret of the First Emperor's tomb. I do not know how we came to possess it, but I do know that I am not going to keep the promise I made. One day a new, legitimate Chinese dynasty must regain the Dragon Throne and expel the Manchu usurpers from our country. And so I give you these.’ Taking the jiance and a knife,” the antiquarian continued narrating, “he cut the silk threads that held the bamboo slats together, creating three pieces, and gave one to each of his friends. Before parting company with them forever, he told the men, ‘Disguise yourselves. Assume other identities. Go north; leave General Wu Sangui's armies behind until you reach the Yangtze. Hide the pieces in different places along the length of the river so that no one can unite the three parts until a time comes when the sons of Han can retake the Dragon Throne.’ ”
    “Well, he certainly made it difficult!” I exclaimed, startling Tichborne, who had remained standing with a full glass once again in his hand. “If no one else knew where the Prince of Gui's three friends hid the pieces, they could never be put back together. What madness!”
    The antiquarian nodded. “That's why it was a legend. Legends are lovely stories that everyone believes are false, tales told to children, a script for the theater. No one would ever have thought to look for three sets of bamboo slats that are over two thousand years old all along the shores of a river like the Yangtze, which is some four thousand miles long from its source in the Kunlun Mountains of central Asia to the estuary here in Shanghai. But—”
    “Fortunately, there's always a but,” the Irishman added before taking a noisy slurp of whiskey.
    “—the story is true, madame, and the three of us know where the Prince of Gui's friends hid those pieces.”
    “What? We do?”
    “We do, madame. Here in this chest is an invaluable document that recounts the well-known legend of the Prince of Gui, with a few important differences from the popular version.” Reaching out his right arm, the antiquarian placed the hand with one gold nail on the miniature edition of the Chinese book and pushed it toward me, separating it from the other objects he'd taken out of the chest earlier in our conversation. “For example, it clearly mentions where the prince told his three friends to hide the slats, and the choice is certainly very logical from the Ming point of view.”
    “But what if it's false?” I objected. “What if it's just another version of the