Smallpox was once called "Pox of the Captives," supposedly brought back by soldiers returning from campaigns. Later, it was called "Pea Pox." The term "smallpox" emerged relatively recently, borrowed from a Buddhist expression referring to "celestial flowers of the heavenly realm, flowers scattered by fairies." Calling something inauspicious auspicious might have been a tactful way of speaking about illness. Europeans, meanwhile, lacked the Chinese people's patience in this regard. Their name for smallpox came directly from the Latin variola, meaning an infectious disease.
Whether it was a comforting euphemism or a blunt term meant to frighten people, it conveyed bad news all the same.
In the seventh year of Qianlong's reign, a strange disease appeared in a village near Jiayu Pass. First came a fever that burned like red-hot iron. Then the bones began to grow rapidly outward, piercing through elbows, knees, chests, and throats. The corpses were too horrific to behold. It was said that the disease had first been brought by a groom and a cook who had gone to Yinchuan to repair Ningxia's waterworks, which had been damaged in the earthquake of Qianlong's third year.
The authorities ordered rumors suppressed and sent soldiers to quarantine the villagers. Later, people discovered that not everyone who contracted the disease died. Some developed raised growths beneath their skin, but they eventually stopped growing and recovered without medicine.
About two years later, no one died from the strange disease anymore. When the war between Qianlong and Dzungaria began and the soldiers withdrew, the villagers no longer remained in their old village either, scattering in all directions.
This was a legend the ahong had heard while studying in Lingzhou, Gansu, in his early years. It was like the assorted "secret accounts" the graduate had heard in the palace. Some called them "secret