About the Western Archives

We have ascertained that the Zhang family has several factions. The core faction is the Zhang family in the northeast, where the main branch and side branch of the family live together. But there are strict barriers and strict class divisions that separate the family. There are also many branches located outside the country. Among them is the South Sea Archives, which is a typical foreign organization managed by the family. Since the South Sea Archives is more well-known, people have traditionally considered there to be four archives: the central one, the northern one, the western one, and the eastern one. But these archives weren’t given names. The north was where the Zhang family was located, the east was managed by the overseas Zhang family, the south was the South Sea Archives, and the west was the Chama Sect, which was operated by a group of lamas and those outside of the family. In fact, the Central Archives didn’t exist. The Old Nine Gates essentially took care of the duties the Central Archives would have taken on.

For the convenience of understanding, we can think that the Western Archives mainly manages two things: the Tibetan sea flowers and the patriarch’s memory.

The Chama Sect carried out a lot of activities in Nepal, India, Bhutan, and Tibet. Due to its religious characteristics, it was still a system of inheritance, and it also maintained a relationship with the Kangbaluo people.

The Western Archives basically played a non-offensive role. It was generally believed that the Western Archives was originally the first place where the Zhang family studied the meteorites. The Western Archives was obviously very important to Poker-Face, but it was difficult to express what role it played in the Zhang family.

I knew that the western assets included a temple, a group of Chama businesses, and three sugar factories in Bhutan and Nepal. The Kangbaluo people were very capable, but they were not from the Zhang family.

Even so, the Western Archives’ disposable property made for an astronomical figure. I had seen tons of old gold in their cellars and hundreds of priceless Buddha statues, each of which was a national treasure-level masterpiece that could shake the market. The income of the three sugar factories over the past few hundred years was also amazing. The Chama businesses probably owned hundreds of properties and pieces of land.

Every time I saw those lamas, I wanted to call them sugar daddies.

Although there were no legal attributes, logically, these properties belonged to Poker-Face.

Of course, the lamas didn’t sell any of them. Instead, they just continued to hoard them. For them, Buddha statues were just Buddha statues and gold was a gift to Buddha, not property.

Most of the Western Archives’ cash was used to support local animal husbandry and education. Even though the Chama businesses and temple belonged to the same system, they actually had nothing to do with each other and didn’t communicate with each other at all.

Compared with the South Sea Archives’ bankruptcy, poverty, and existence in name only, the Western Archives was the glory of the Zhang family’s industry.

In the various temple records, there were also some of the previous patriarchs’ experiences, which were one of the main sources I used when I was conducting research on the Zhang family. I still remember the quiet atmosphere as I checked files in the meditation room on the snow-covered plateau, but that was so long ago. I probably won’t get such an opportunity again.

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I have scrounged up 3 more extras (1 is an introduction to Tibetan Sea Flower Part 2 that was online and not in the published version and the remaining 3 have to do with Wang Zanghai I think). Tiffany might have 2 more to send my way if they don’t overlap with the ones I mentioned above. If any of you have access to the author’s WeChat page and know of any extras I’m skipping, please send the raws my way. I’m totally willing to knock them out. After that, I plan on fixing Vol 8, Tibetan Sea Flower, those early New Years Extras, and maybe some of the earlier extras. Then I might see if I want to tackle the online versions of Volumes 1-6 from the daomubiji.org website (I’m kind of curious to see if they differ a lot from the published version). I do have the raws of Volumes 1 and 2 already copied so if you guys are interested, I can focus on translating those instead of fixing the things that are already done. Just let me know what you guys are in the mood for, I’m flexible.