Jiangling

After Squad Leader Xue returned to his tent, he undid his outer robe and prepared to rest. A voice called from outside, "Squad Leader, is this a good time? May I come in?"

Recognizing the voice, Squad Leader Xue smiled. "Come in."

Black Han walked into the tent with a grin. Squad Leader Xue teased him, "Aren't you busy waiting on Young Master Wang, you old rascal? You still remember me?"

Black Han put on a frightened expression. "How could this lowly man dare forget you, Squad Leader? Isn't serving Young Master Wang also a way of easing your burdens, sir?"

"Enough, cut the crap! You think I don't know those little schemes of yours? You just want your name taken off the military rolls, don't you?" Squad Leader Xue lay facedown on his bed, and Black Han began expertly massaging him.

Squad Leader Xue closed his eyes, his voice languid.

"Have you seen how high grain prices have climbed this year? How many people are so hungry they're eating sesame and swallowing lotus roots? However poorly Soldier Households are treated, you still have flatbread to eat, don't you? Every couple of days, you even get a meal of crushed-wheat porridge. At least you won't starve to death. Besides, this year is an exception. In other years, you got three to five sheng of grain every day, and we never shorted you. What more do you want?"

Black Han kept massaging him attentively and gave a helpless smile. "If it were just me, anything would do. But I've still got a daughter at home. Ah, never mind that. Squad Leader, aren't you going to Jiangling tomorrow? Could you let me come along as a guard? I could stop by home on the way and take this month's leave."

"Didn't you just send grain home? You have more to send?"

"No more grain. I just want to go home and see my girl."

The massage felt so good that Squad Leader Xue drew out his words. "Do you want to go home and see your girl, or do you want to suck up to that little fop?"

Black Han chuckled. "Both, both."

"All of you think you'll gain something by attaching yourselves to the great clans. That Ding Jiu wants to go too. He even gave me five sheng of his grain ration for it. Let me tell you, don't get your hopes too high. He might step across his relatives' threshold with one foot and forget us before the other follows. Then all our work will have been for nothing."

Black Han kneaded the squad leader's shoulders hard. His dark face was faintly flushed with fatigue, but his eyes were full of hope.

Wang Yang slept badly that night. He drifted off in a daze while still thinking of ways to handle the situation. One moment, he dreamed that Squad Leader Xue was dragging him into a tent with a murderous expression; the next, Editor Xu was lying bloodied on the grass. He even dreamed that the handsome youth and the burly man had traveled forward to the modern world and accused him of murder before the media. He jolted awake three or four times during the night!

The constant tension and psychological pressure, unlike anything he had ever experienced, even made him physically nauseous. Fortunately, the lower classes of the time generally ate only twice a day: once around eight in the morning, called the "morning meal," and again around four in the afternoon, called the "evening meal." Thus, when Wang Yang arrived at camp, he had "successfully" missed mealtime.

Life in the military camp was hard, and Squad Leader Xue truly could not scrape together a decent meal to give Wang Yang an "extra helping." Otherwise, that wave of nausea might have made Wang Yang vomit outright.

Early the next morning, Black Han brought clean water to attend to Wang Yang as he rose.

After Wang Yang washed his face, Black Han offered him a small pinch of salt. Wang Yang thought for a moment and asked, "Is this... for brushing my teeth?"

Black Han nodded. The squad leader had specifically ordered it. What ordinary family could bear to use salt to brush their teeth?

Wang Yang had assumed that people of this era did not brush their teeth. Remembering the phrase "chewing tooth-cleaning wood in the morning," he asked, "Do you have any willow twigs?"

Black Han asked in bewilderment, "What do you need willow twigs for, young master?"

"Don't you use willow twigs to brush your teeth?"

Black Han was utterly confused. "You can brush your teeth with willow twigs?" He thought to himself, So the great aristocratic families all brush their teeth with willow twigs. I'll tell my daughter when I get home.

Wang Yang asked curiously, "Then what do you usually use to brush your teeth?"

"Our fingers," Black Han said.

Understanding dawned on Wang Yang. Only then did he remember a Tang Dynasty mural in Dunhuang's Mogao Caves depicting a monk squatting on the ground and brushing his teeth with his index finger. So this was what everyday life had really been like for people in ancient times!

In fact, aristocratic households had already begun using toothbrushes, but neither Black Han nor Wang Yang knew it. Brushing teeth with willow twigs had originated in India and later spread to China with Buddhism. At this time, only a few monks practiced it; it would not gradually become widespread until after the Sui and Tang.

The most common method among ordinary people at the time was to use their fingers, a practice also called "rubbing the teeth."

As a modern man, Wang Yang naturally was not accustomed to using his finger as a toothbrush. At such a tense juncture, he had no mind to bother with brushing his teeth anyway, so he simply asked for a cup of water, sprinkled in some salt, and rinsed his mouth.

Ding Jiu brought Wang Yang breakfast, his first meal since traveling back to ancient times: a bowl of barley porridge, a few small dried fish, a dish of salted vegetables, and a boiled egg.

Simple as the meal looked, Squad Leader Xue and Clerk Wang had cobbled it together. The dried fish came from Squad Leader Xue's "private stock." Also called "withered fish" or "dry fish" at the time, they had cost him considerable effort to obtain a jar, and he only occasionally ate one or two. Clerk Wang had brought the egg back the previous night. The hardest thing to provide, however, had actually been the bowl of barley porridge.

Ordinary soldiers could have a bowl of wheat porridge only once every two days. Even then, it was not the thick, whole-grain barley porridge Wang Yang was eating, but a thin gruel made from ground wheat, known at the time as "crushed-wheat porridge." This one bowl of barley porridge for Wang Yang had used up several men's grain rations.

Wang Yang had no idea how hard-won his meal was. All his thoughts were fixed on visiting the Wang clan's "main family." When he smelled the dried fish, he found them unbearably rank and did not touch them with his chopsticks. He merely swallowed his porridge with the oddly flavored salted vegetables-mallow greens, perhaps?-using them for a little saltiness and nothing more.

After shoveling down a few mouthfuls of porridge, he looked up and happened to catch Black Han and Ding Jiu practically drooling. Remembering how Black Han had testified about the "gentleman attendant of the imperial retinue" the previous night, Wang Yang said, "Black Han, take this plate of fish and eat it."

Startled, Black Han hastily bowed. "This lowly man wouldn't dare!"

"I'm giving it to you. What is there not to dare?"

Black Han only shook his head.

Wang Yang had no choice but to put on the airs of a young nobleman. "This is your young master's reward. You may not refuse it."

Black Han knelt and kowtowed, then respectfully accepted it with both hands, but showed no intention of taking a bite.

"Why aren't you eating?" Wang Yang asked.

"This lowly man... would like to take it home for his daughter."

Wang Yang nodded. Seeing Ding Jiu staring fixedly at the dried fish, he said, "Ding Jiu, you've done well too. Your young master has nothing else to reward you with just now, so you may have this chicken egg."

"Chicken egg?" Ding Jiu froze for a moment.

Wang Yang realized that this term for "chicken egg" had originated much later. Apparently, he had used it ahead of its time. "Oh, you call it a 'hen's egg,' right?"

Ding Jiu nodded. "Or a 'hen's ovum.'" He assumed "chicken egg" was some novel expression among the nobility and paid it little mind. He thanked Wang Yang and accepted the egg. Although he had not eaten an egg in ages and badly wanted to eat it, there was little joy on his face.

It was not scarcity people resented, but unequal shares!

Wang Yang realized he had not handled that particularly well, but he had no energy to dwell on it now. A far greater crisis would soon be upon him...

The great city stood majestic, its walls like a long bank of clouds.

Wang Yang, Squad Leader Xue, Clerk Wang, Black Han, and Ding Jiu set out in the morning and reached the gates of Jingzhou City at noon.

Apart from Yangzhou, the province surrounding the capital, Jingzhou was the largest province of the southern dynasties. It spanned Southern Chu and governed ten commanderies. As a saying of the time went, "Of the great strongholds south of the Yangtze, none surpass Jingzhou and Yangzhou."

The foremost commandery under Jingzhou was Southern Commandery, and the foremost city under Southern Commandery was Jiangling.

As the central administrative seat of both Jingzhou and Southern Commandery, Jiangling was also called "Jingzhou City" and "Southern Commandery City" at the time.

This was the very city Guan Yu had lost through carelessness, and to which Li Bai had returned over a thousand miles!

Had he not been caught up in impersonating a member of the Langya Wang clan, Wang Yang would gladly have explored this famous historic city, steeped in quiet reflections on the past. But the thought of facing genuine members of the Langya Wang clan shortly drained away all his enthusiasm.

Throughout the journey, he had been inventing stories, devising explanations, and checking for holes in his logic. He had even fabricated a family genealogy in his head and forced himself to memorize the names of every relative within five generations. Yet now that the moment was upon him, he sorrowfully realized that if things truly reached the point where he had to recite five generations of genealogy, failure would already be all but certain.

Notes: ① In medieval historical sources, "hu hemp" meant sesame. Jingzhou was a sesame-producing region, so sesame could serve as a substitute food during grain shortages. For example, during the war between Yin Zhongkan and Huan Xuan in the Eastern Jin, "Jiangling was shaken with terror. Food was scarce within the city, and sesame was issued as rations to the soldiers." (Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government, "Annals of Jin.") An account of using lotus roots to stave off hunger when grain ran out can be found in the story of Yang Dun in the "Biographies of Good Officials" in the Book of Wei.

② Toothbrushes have been excavated from Han tombs, but none have yet been found among Six Dynasties artifacts. My portrayal of aristocrats using toothbrushes at this time was purely an inference from the situation in the Han Dynasty: there seemed no reason for such an everyday implement to fall out of use... Still, one never knows. Once great upheaval begins, certain things can be lost. Take the board game tanqi, which was very popular in medieval times. People in the Tang Dynasty played it with gusto, but by the Song, people no longer understood its rules. Thus Lu You wrote in Notes from the Old Scholar's Studio, "My only regret is that the art has not been passed down."

Therefore, this book's portrayal of aristocrats using toothbrushes is conjecture, with no solid evidence, and may be wrong. Even the identification of the supposed toothbrushes excavated from Han sites has yet to achieve scholarly consensus. Personally, however, I lean toward accepting it.

③ During the Northern and Southern Dynasties, a "zhou" was roughly comparable to a province; for now, imagine it as a large province. Below a province were commanderies, below commanderies were counties, and some counties also had townships beneath them. Yangzhou was not today's city, but a large province. In Southern Qi, Yangzhou was the great capital-region province, geographically covering roughly southern Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and some additional areas south of the Yangtze. Interested readers can consult volume four of Tan Qixiang's Historical Atlas of China.