Chapter 2 Descendants
Upon arriving in Qingshen, Qilang changed his name to Mengji. The people of Qingshen said Mengji was born with the ability to identify silkworm eggs, taste mulberry branches, and understand the language of silkworms. Perhaps he was actually a silkworm. After arriving at his father's silkworm farm, Mengji dismissed the workers and allowed the silkworm winnowing machine to infest with mites. One hundred thousand autumn silkworms died of disease and starvation on the silkworm trays, leaving only a hundred or so female moths to be selected. When the female moths laid their eggs, he cleaned the silkworm baskets, winnowing machine, and mulberry branches, sealed the doors and windows, and collected the eggs in mulberry and willow baskets, storing them in a warehouse for three months. The following year, he harvested the eggs, hatched them, and raised them to mature silkworms, which he took to the silkworm market to sell. He then planted a mulberry orchard.
The people of Qingshen say that during his five years of silkworm rearing in Qingshen, Meng Ji wove thousands of plaques, baskets, winnowing baskets, and tufts. The wooden furniture he used to build his house was a relic left to him by Meng Da. He crafted everything from silkworm medicine to mulberry fertilizer. Someone who traveled to Qingshen County to seek a recipe for feeding Meng silkworms argued with the Qingshen people: Mulberry leaves exposed to wind, rain, or accumulation are unsuitable for silkworms. They also advised that the silkworm room should be sprinkled with water, and the temperature and humidity controlled with lime and fire. They also advised that when the silkworms are about to wake from sleep, they should be fed mulberry ash to achieve the desired color. Today, people say Meng Ji is a master of silkworm rearing, and who in Qingshen isn't? However, five years later, at the Shuangxi Silk Market, Chengdu silk farmers everywhere sought Meng silkworm cocoons. The government also used Meng silkworm cocoons for silk production, including brocade and embroidery. Today, the people of Qingshen hold two theories about Meng silkworms. One claims that Meng silkworms produce silvery-white silk, so strong and tough it resembles the grain of stone. The secret recipe is a kind of silkworm medicine. Another story purports that a woman from Qingshen County passed on her family's secret silkworm-rearing techniques to Meng Ji. Five years later, when Meng Ji left Qingshen County, he carried a swaddling child, Meng Bao, the woman's own. Meng Bao grew up in Beima Town, Pengshan County, and it was widely known that he had no mother. According to the people of Qingshen, every October after the fall, Meng Ji would stay up late to watch over the silkworms. A helper named Zhang once saw Meng Ji meeting a woman in the silkworm room. When asked about her appearance, Zhang described her as a white mass, too pale to be seen clearly, resembling a silkworm.
Nowadays, some Qingshen people often visit a tomb in the mulberry garden to pay homage. This is the tomb of the "Silkworm Girl," who once assisted Mengji in raising silkworms and also blessed silkworm farmers with prosperity. Some say she was the daughter of a local Huang silkworm farmer. At the time, a descendant of the Huang family served as a yazhong assistant in Meishan, overseeing general affairs. The county annals record the death of the Huang silkworm farmer's eldest daughter. Volume 10 of the "Nongsang Tujing" (Agricultural Illustrated Classic) in the Yuhai, compiled in the third year of the Dazhong Xiangfu era, cites the Tongyi County annals, which mentions a woman surnamed Huang who was buried in the mulberry garden, with no family members attending the funeral. This line is also mentioned in the Huang family genealogy. If the mulberry garden once belonged to Mengji, and the Silkworm Girl was the Huang silkworm farmer's eldest daughter, then "burying her" is a misnomer, or it may indicate that she and Mengji were once married. The lack of a funeral attendee may be due to her relationship with Mengji, which prevented the Huang silkworm farmer from agreeing to her death. The "Huang farmer's eldest daughter died at the age of fifteen" may also indicate that she died after childbirth. As to whether this woman was Meng Bao's biological mother, the Qingshen people were unsure as to why no one from the Huangcan household attended the funeral. However, Meng Ji later returned to Pengshan County to farm, and was undoubtedly driven back by the Qingshen people.
At that time, Meng Ji sold not only silkworm seeds but also mulberry trees. He owned a hundred acres of mulberry orchard and employed many long-term laborers. The people of Qingshen said he was driven out by a Cao official. The gentry in the south of the county united and took him to court, perhaps accusing him of occupying the county's cemeteries and farmland. The Cao official was originally an official of Meizhou Prefecture. He did not handle judicial matters, but was in charge of the warehouse and cashier, and had no involvement in agricultural and sericulture matters. However, the Cao official's brother-in-law served as the Chief Justice in Qingshen County and was in charge of the trial of this case. In the eyes of the locals, he was the master sitting on the high seat. When locals clashed in court, it was unknown what the master had the power to rule, but it was clear that it was useless to ask the master to understand their disputes. A tongue twirling in its mouth could never contain what was happening outside, so even a thousand volumes of knowledge in its chest were useless. To make things clear, they had to leave the court and go to the living quarters. Arriving at the living quarters, they realized the master's silence in the hall wasn't due to lack of understanding, but rather a desire to consolidate the law and official authority. So, the official, leading the gentry, led them into the master's backyard vegetable garden. Not long after, Meng Ji left Qingshen and returned to Pengshan, where he bought twenty acres of silted land in Beima Town, planting some with sugarcane and some with sandy soil and coptis chinensis.
There are two rivers in Mazhen, one of which is a wild river. Sandy soil mixed with pebbles stretches ten miles from the riverbank toward the shore; that is Meng Ji's silted fields. To the west lies a cemetery. At the easternmost point of the cemetery, a mound rests on a turtle-shaped river stone. That is Meng Ji's tomb. Meng Ji died in the second year of the Jingde reign. That year, Meng Bao was three years old, and Emperor Zhenzong and Yelü Longxu of the Liao Dynasty signed the Treaty of Chanyuan. Meng Ji's wife, Ma, gave birth to another son, named Meng Cun. Meng Cun died in the second year of the Dazhong Xiangfu reign, and Ma raised Meng Bao. When Meng Bao was nine, eleven acres of his family's silted fields were washed away by the river, leaving only nine acres. His family was relegated to a fourth-class household, paying less tax and freeing them from labor and labour. A single natural disaster could wipe out the Meng Ji line. Yet, people today say that this was precisely when the Meng family's prosperity began. The rise of Meng Li and Meng Ji only proves the Meng family's aptitude for business. To achieve lasting wealth, one must be predestined. You can't see the beginnings of prosperity in Meng Li and Meng Ji's experiences, because the Meng family's destiny of wealth and prosperity is still obscured by the gloom of the village and county. Nothing can lift the curtain-like haze like a pole lifting a veil, and you can't see the glitter of pearls and precious stones. Only in Meng Bao can you see the beginnings of this destiny, a small event, like a spark of fire on the tip of a piece of earthen paper. This spark burns a chamber of charcoal, and the flames grow stronger and stronger, carrying the red of gold and the white of silver into the ground, illuminating the tombs of ancestors, and then rushing like a whale to the sky, illuminating the eyes of immortals, and the path appears: one leading to the Three Mountains, the other to Qingcheng. The two paths almost overlap, as if they are one and the same. Over a hundred years later, Meng Xiao, a descendant of the Meng family, returned to Baisha along this very road. However, the locals today still don't know where the road ends. They still speak of Meng Bao, as if he were someone who had walked through that time.
Some say that in the fifth year of the Renzi reign of the Dazhong Xiangfu era, Meng Bao went through the mountains and forests for the last time to visit the graves of his father Meng Ji and his brother Meng Cun, and encountered a rainstorm on his way home. Meng Bao hid in the shrine of the land god to avoid the rain, but the rain only got heavier. When it was getting dark, Meng Bao was afraid that Ma would worry, so he braved the rain to go home. After entering the mountains and forests, he got lost. He watched as lightning struck, and clusters of fire ignited the ground. Clusters of fire, large and small, connected to each other, illuminated a group of willows and a muddy road. After circling the road several times, Meng Bao finally returned home. Ma saw blood on his hands and asked him where he was injured. Meng Bao said, "The forest." Ma asked how he got there, and Meng Bao said, "Ghost fire."
Ma looked at the heavy rain outside and thought that he had scraped his teeth and bled while climbing up. She said, "I don't believe you."
Meng Bao said, "Mom, I met a ghost."
Ma said, "To fool the ghost."
Meng Bao said, "I really encountered a ghost."
Ma said, "Nonsense, wash up and go eat some fish buns."
Meng Bao said, "Really."
Ma said, "What a joke."
After that day, Meng Bao often ran into the mountains and forests, Meng Cun's belt tied around his wrist. When he returned home, he'd shout for fish buns. The forest was filled with Sichuan safflowers, clustered together in large and small clumps. They looked like fire, but they couldn't burn anyone. Besides watching the safflowers and eating fish buns, Meng Bao loved to listen to the sounds of pigs being castrated. He'd listen and watch, and then he'd go crazy. Whenever a family slaughtered a pig, Meng Bao would go outside and listen. Sometimes he'd tie Meng Cun's belt around his eyes to hide the blood, and sometimes he'd just stare at the blood. Meng Bao's eyes and ears were incredibly sharp. People in Chengdu said that until Meng Bao's death, the Sichuan red dyed at the Meng family dyeing workshop hadn't faded an inch. In those days, among the silk fabrics purchased by bureaucrats and wealthy merchants from Jiazhou and Qiongzhou and shipped to Qinzhou, there was always a lot of silk dyed by the Meng family. These silks were exchanged for military rations and shipped to Lizhou, and the Meng family also received a share of these rations. Ever since that rainy night at the grave, Meng Bao had acquired supernatural powers: his eyes could discern a million colors. A drop of water falling into a wok of oil, just by the sound, could reveal its color. Hearing a song, he could see over a hundred colors. He could see fluttering crimson and emerald green, yellow flags and purple umbrellas amid the shouts of the hawkers in the Jin market; he could smell the scents of various colors, or see form and color in their scents. The fire he saw on rainy nights wasn't red flowers, but the hues of lightning and thunder. The rain soaked that color, gradually immersing it, like clusters of fire. This fire was the silk red from the Meng family's dyeing workshop. There were two varieties, both called Sichuan red, but both were actually richer than Sichuan red: a golden red that shimmered in the light; a purple red, though black with a hint of red, but looking directly at it was like watching a sunset—a flash of light before one's eyes.
In the year Jichou of the Huangyou reign, an official wanted to produce a batch of brocade and hired Meng Bao to dye the silk in Yizhou Prefecture. Meng Bao selected 100 kilograms of cocoons from the silk market, reeled and reeled the silk, then used large clam shells to twist and polish it. He then traveled to Yizhou Prefecture with dozens of dyers. Some say he was dyeing silk for Wen Yanbo. Wen Yanbo dyed the silk and wove it into brocade for Concubine Zhang, and two years later was appointed Grand Secretary of the Zhaowen Academy. That same year, Meng Bao also purchased a loom in a flower building and hired over a hundred workers, including flower weavers, weavers, loom weavers, and trainers, thus entering the brocade industry. Two years later, Meng's brocade workshop developed a wintersweet pattern, featuring white flowers on an ochre-red background and skein-dyed, which was highly favored by officials and dignitaries. Later, a transparent back pattern was developed, and three bird patterns became part of the brocade worn by officials and ministers. The Meng Family Brocade Workshop consumed tens of thousands of ounces of silk and dyed tens of thousands of tons of dye annually. The hundreds of brocade patterns they wove were either presented as tribute to the court or found their way into the imperial palaces, becoming rewards and even becoming the garments of imperial concubines. In western Sichuan, Meng Bao became a renowned brocade merchant. Later, locals claimed that Meng Bao's lifelong trade in tribute brocade wasn't actually profitable. This was based on regulations revised during Emperor Taizong's Chunhua reign, which stipulated that "in the Sichuan and Xia provinces, merchants may not market or sell silk, silk cotton, and ramie cloth suitable for military uniforms," and that "merchants must return any goods they have purchased to the local government, who will compensate them at the market price. Those who conceal these goods will be punished." Since the "market price" Taizong referred to was determined by government statistics, these two statements alone effectively blocked half of the Shu brocade merchants' financial resources. The remaining half was left to supply the fabrics to the government at low prices as tribute. If the craftsmanship and patterns were mediocre and the tribute was not accepted, the brocade would be shipped to places like Zizhou and Pengzhou, where it could be "sold in the market." However, the Meng family's brocade could only be sold to the government. The locals of Mazhen said that when Meng Bao returned home, he told the local gentry that he would weave 10,000 bolts of brocade, so that the palace and the imperial court would not be able to produce enough. This was, of course, a boast. Even if the palace and the imperial court could not produce enough, the civil and military officials would still need to wear it, their government offices and mansions would still need to be decorated, and the wives and children of the nobles and relatives would also need to wear it... Therefore, the people of Chengdu believed that Meng Bao, who had spent decades creating exquisite works and accumulated 500,000 strings of cash, had achieved little more than a lifetime of service as a brocade craftsman for the imperial court.
In the year of Guimao during the Jiayou reign, the ninth year of the Qingning reign of the Khitan. At the end of March, Emperor Renzong passed away from Funing Palace, and his successor was the Duke of Lu. Although Duke of Lu, Zhao Shu, had long been the crown prince, he exclaimed at this moment: "I dare not do it, I dare not do it!" The ministers dressed him in imperial robes, summoned the generals and officers, and issued an edict in front of the palace. They also summoned Wang Gui to draft the rules and regulations. Officials mourned outside the Chuigong Palace. When the prince ascended the throne and met with the officials in the east pillar, the officials mourned again. Amidst this deafening wailing, Meng Bao was buried in a tomb outside the Jiangdu Temple. Meng Bao was the first member of the Meng family to be buried outside the Jiangdu Temple. Today, half an acre of the tomb remains, which is the ancestral tomb of the Meng family. Now, this tomb is one of the most troublesome things for Meng Xiao, the great-great-grandson of Meng Bao. Ever since he went to Jiangjin County, Meng Xiao wanted to move the ancestral tomb there. However, his brothers and sisters, Meng Jian's nine wives and concubines, his brother's wife, his sister's husband, and the maids in charge of the yard, all refused to allow him to pull out a single blade of grass from the tomb.
Back then, Meng Bao's efforts to build a tomb on this land not only cost him a fortune but also incurred the wrath of a Jiangdu Temple monk. During the groundbreaking, the monk arrived carrying a hoe, claiming to have come from Huanhua Creek. He circled the pit twice and pointed out the workers were working on a "clumsy" (ugly) xue. The attendant asked what "clumsy xue" meant. The monk replied, "Ugly, that's the ugly xue."
The attendant said, "My acupoints will definitely feel dizzy when they are formed. You see, they are high in the middle and low around them. The head rests on a flat, round mountain, with veins on the top and lips at the bottom. The jaws are symmetrical, and the protrusions are oval. There must be vitality fused in the middle."
The monk looked at the seven-foot-deep pit again, shook his head, and said, "Not good, it looks like a vagina." He added, "It's ugly, but if you bury your head of household in it someday, your descendants will suffer the consequences of the vagina."
The attendant asked, "Then how do you repair it?"
The monk left without saying anything. The next day, he returned, carrying a basket on his shoulder, saying he wanted to help fill the soil. The attendant, believing him to be a swindler out to get his money, ordered the earthwork crew to shovel him away. As the monk left, he cursed, "You filthy fool! Your son is being eaten by women! Your son is dying of scabies!"
This monk later became a dharma master at the Wuxian Temple. During the Zhiping period, he was invited to the Huayang Fan family to repair a tomb. He later prospered and became a patron saint of a certain Xue family. Locals claim he repaired the tomb of Fan Kai, the brother of Fan Zhen and one of Fan Zuyu's uncles. Others claim he repaired the tomb of a relative of the Huayang Fan family. Regardless, he ultimately received support from a wealthy family. Locals have also documented that the Xue family was a distant relative of Ouyang Xiu's father-in-law, Xue Kui. Though a commoner, he held considerable prestige in Chengdu. The Xue family later produced a Chengjielang (Chengjielang) who served under Wu Lang in the war against the Great Xia. It remains to be seen whether the subsequent contact between the Meng and Wu families was related to the monk's support from Xue.
The locals believed the monk in the temple was no ordinary person, and his predictions of "cutting off one's wrist and eating flesh" and "dying from ulcers" were all fulfilled by Meng Bao's son, Meng Yin. Meng Yin was Meng Bao's third son, born to his first wife. He was eloquent from a young age and possessed foresight in business. During Meng Bao's lifetime, Meng Yin worked alongside his father in the business for five years, dividing the Meng family's brocade workshop into silk mills and brocade courtyards. Fifteen silk mills were established around Chengdu, all managed by local silk merchants. In addition to the one brocade courtyard in Boshi, a larger one opened in Zizhou, and three smaller ones in Qiongzhou and Huaian. These so-called Meng family properties—houses, courtyards, shops, and halls—did not involve the Meng family in hiring workers, purchasing property, producing, and selling goods. Meng Bao hired fifteen financial stewards to collect profits and offset losses at various locations. To prevent the financial stewards from colluding with the mill owners to steal the surplus, he also hired local celebrities, prominent figures, and unemployed individuals to conduct open and secret inspections of the mills. By this point, the locals were certain that the Meng family all possessed business acumen, with later generations being even more so than their predecessors. Meng Yin, being Meng Bao's son, was therefore even more adept at making money than Meng Bao. When Meng Yin realized that silk could no longer bring the Meng family further wealth, he set his sights on medicine and went to Baiyu Manor in Mimu Town.
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