By now, the wharf had gradually grown noisy.
Although the bluestone steps connecting the distant wharf to the pier were still wet with dew, the porters had already begun stripping to the waist and carrying loads of goods and bundles up and down the steps.
Their sturdy backs glimmered bronze through the morning mist as sweat mingled with it, while their work chants began to tear through the hazy vapor over the river.
"Hey--"
"Yo-ho--"
"Cast off!"
"Off to Yangzhou!"
"Hurry!"
"Hurry!"
The tea stall stoves along the wharf road had also grown lively. Ginger tea simmering in an earthenware pot boiled with caramel-colored bubbles, and the old woman tapped the rim with a long-handled bronze ladle. The ringing clatter mingled with the toasted fragrance of sesame cakes and drifted far away, while she warmly served the boatmen and traveling merchants hurriedly eating their morning tea.
Not far away, an old fisherman in a green bamboo hat squatted beside a mooring stone, selling crabs and prawns. A mitten crab in his bamboo basket foamed at the mouth before suddenly clamping onto the finger of a hawker trying to pick through the catch. As the hawker cried out in pain, the old boatman squatting nearby and smoking a pipe let out a series of wheezing laughs.
On the other side stood the wharf official in a dark blue uniform. He was stationed before the tax booth, rubbing the frost on a steelyard weight with his fingertips and occasionally kicking the baskets of fishermen lined up to pay their taxes, as if he wanted to inspect something.
Before long, more grain ships appeared on the river. Their masts filled the view like a dense forest stabbing into the sky, and no one could tell which nearby wharves they had emerged from.
"..."