Chapter 10 Qiu Dekao

(Uncle Three’s subsequent narrative was very convoluted and involved a lot of things that happened in old Changsha, but I actually found it very interesting—I’ve always liked old stories with a bit of a rustic air ever since I was a child. They made me feel like I was immersed in history, so I didn’t mind listening to them.)

The first thing out of Uncle Three’s mouth was the missionary’s name: Cox Hendry. His Chinese name was Qiu Dekao, and he worked in a missionary school in Changsha. He was one of the Americans who came to China with the eastward tide during the Kuomintang period.⁽¹⁾ But ever since he was child, he had never been free from human desires and passions, and he had no interest in becoming a foreign monk. He was, however, very interested in Chinese culture, although it was more in an economic sense—a very American concept. To him, cultural relics were just simple commodities that could be bought, sold, and exported freely, so in his third year in China, he occasionally smuggled some cultural relics out of the country. At that time, he was only nineteen years old.

Qiu Dekao conducted his smuggling business very carefully and kept it small. At that time, there were two kinds of smuggling operations. One was a high-turnover operation, where a large volume of transactions were done but the value of the goods was very low. Since it was based on the principle of completing one deal after another, the risk was very high. Qiu Dekao, on the other hand, was a “strike while the iron was hot” kind of businessman. In other words, he preferred dealing with high-value goods. The volume was low, but it was very safe and he made a good profit. His way of doing business was very appealing to Grandpa, so that was why the two of them had a good relationship at that time.

But Qiu Dekao was not someone worthy of friendship. From the bottom of his heart, he never considered Grandpa as a friend, or even an equal. Later, Grandpa found out that he used to call him a bedbug behind his back.

In 1949, Changsha was liberated and the Kuomintang were completely defeated. Then in 1952, the Christian church began to withdraw from China, and many of the Americans who still remained began to return to their homelands. Qiu Dekao also received a telegram from the church ordering him to return while it was safe.

Realizing that his business in China was coming to an end, he began to make preparations and transfer his property. But before he left, he came up with an evil idea—he and his accomplices began to buy grave goods on a large scale. Taking advantage of the Chinese people’s tendency to trust old relationships, they made extremely low advance payments and took away a large number of cultural relics, including my grandpa’s silk book of the Warring States Period.

At that time, my grandpa wasn’t willing to sell this thing that his family had sacrificed their lives for, but Qiu Dekao lied and said that the money would be used to start a charity. Grandpa, feeling that this was a good deed, reluctantly agreed to sell the book (of course, this was what my grandpa said, so I didn’t know if it was true or not. I didn’t think someone like him was so kindhearted).

Qiu Dekao knew that it was dangerous to cross some of these people, so in order to avoid future trouble, he sent a telegram to the police station after all the goods were loaded onto the ship. The People’s Liberation Army had a garrison temporarily stationed there, so he accused my grandpa and a dozen others of being grave robbers.

At the time, this became known as the famous “Silk Book of the Warring States Period Case”, but it wasn’t just a simple case of smuggling cultural relics—the relationship between Qiu Dekao and the former Kuomintang generals involved many factors unique to that era, such as espionage and treason, which made things very complicated and alarmed the government. On the day Qiu Dekao returned home with all that treasure, the group of grave robbers he had swindled were either executed by firing squad or imprisoned.

Although they got what they deserved, dying like that was too tragic. Later, during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution,⁽²⁾ the smuggling of cultural relics in China almost disappeared. This was also related to the deaths of those people at that time.

During this tumultuous period, my grandpa was very clever—seeing that the situation was bad, he fled into the mountains overnight and hid in an ancient tomb. He slept with the dead for two weeks until things died down a little, and then fled to Hangzhou with only the clothes on his back. This incident dealt him such a great blow that the silk book of the Warring States Period later became a taboo subject for him. When he was alive, he always told us not to bring it up, so our family avoided mentioning it.

After Qiu Dekao returned to the United States, he auctioned off those cultural relics and made a fortune. The silk book of the Warring States Period was sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York at a high price, becoming the most expensive cultural relic bought at an auction at that time. Qiu Dekao immediately became a millionaire and a new member of the upper class. His story in China was made into a biography and widely circulated.

Now that he was wealthy, Qiu Dekao gradually became interested in bolstering his social connections. Around 1957, the Metropolitan Museum invited him to be a consultant for the Department of Far Eastern Art, providing advice on the research of the silk book of the Warring States Period. The curator of that department at the time was the notorious Alan Priest.⁽³⁾ The two were experts on Chinese culture, and both had used bandits to loot Chinese cultural relics, so the two soon became friends. Qiu Dekao also donated a sum of money to the museum to be used for the acquisition of cultural relics from China.

Probably because of the leisurely life he acquired from his affluence, as well as his original love for Chinese culture, Qiu Dekao later focused on self-improvement and became obsessed with studying Chinese culture. He presided over several large-scale projects at the Metropolitan Museum and achieved remarkable results, but it wasn’t until 1974 when he truly became famous and left his name in the annals of history—he deciphered the ciphertext of the silk book of the Warring States Period.

By that time, his research on the silk book had been going on for more than twenty years. He had initially been doing it in order to raise the price, but later, he did it purely out of interest.

When he first started, no one thought that an American like him could solve the ancient Chinese ciphertext, but with his amazing perseverance, Qiu Dekao eventually succeeded.

Part of his success could also be attributed to coincidence—he drew inspiration from an old Chinese book called “Principles of Embroidery”.⁽⁴⁾ With its help, he finally discovered a way to decipher the “script map of the Warring States Period” by using the same method that was used to record the embroidery steps in “Principles of Embroidery”. In mathematical terms, this was called a bitmap.⁽⁵⁾ While not complicated, it still depended entirely on chance—if you were able to guess what it was, you could solve it without any problems, but if you couldn’t, then it was completely useless, even if you were proficient in ancient Chinese ciphertexts.

Excited after finally discovering the method to decipher it, Qiu Dekao immediately summoned his staff to conduct a large-scale effort to decipher the rest of the silk book. After a month had passed, the ciphertext was finally decoded.

But to Qiu Dekao’s surprise, what appeared on the paper at that time wasn’t the ancient text he had been expecting about the divination calendar of the Warring States Period, but an odd and completely meaningless pattern.

It’s hard to describe how strange this pattern was. Even after I looked at the sketch Uncle Three drew for me later, I still couldn’t figure it out. If I had to describe it, all I can say is that this pattern was very simple, with only six curved lines and an irregular circle. The lines eventually connected, kind of like the veins of a river on a map or the tendrils of a vine, but there was something off about the circle. If you looked at the pattern from a distance, it almost seemed like some abstract image, but if you looked closely, you couldn’t tell what it was at all.

Other than that, there was no other information. If you didn’t know that it came from the remnant of an ancient Chinese book, you probably would have thought that it was something scribbled by a child who had just learned how to hold a pen.

After going through all that hardship, Qiu Dekao was shocked to find that the deciphered text turned out to be this inexplicable pattern. He initially thought that his method was wrong, but after repeated verification, he found that it was impossible. If it really was wrong, then it would have been impossible to successfully convert the text into this pattern so seamlessly. The person who recorded these seven lines obviously meant for them to be encrypted.

But what did these seven lines represent? Why did the owner of this silk book hide them in the text?

After spending many years in China and gaining a lot of experience, his intuition told him that a simple pattern wouldn’t have been written in ciphertext on such expensive silk—these lines must hold some special meaning.

Intrigued, he immediately started researching it. Not only did he spend a lot of time scouring countless libraries, but he also took the pattern to various universities, hoping to find a Chinese sinologist who would be able to help. However, those in the United States had limited skills, so he ended up running around for half a year without getting any results. Even if some of them came up with theories, it was useless in the end—they had nothing to base them on. As soon as he heard them, he could tell right away that they were complete nonsense.

Just as his interest started to wane and he felt that the whole thing was hopeless, a friend who worked at the university suggested that he ask the old people in Chinatown about it. It was the height of the Cold War, so many talented scholars from Taiwan had settled in Chinatown. If he asked them, he might be able to find some clues.

Qiu Dekao felt that the suggestion was reasonable, so, hanging on to his last hope, he really went to Chinatown to ask for advice.

There was a kind of teashop in Chinatown where the old people liked to gather to listen to stories,⁽⁶⁾ so Qiu Dekao went there and showed them the pattern. Fortunately, he really did end up finding an expert.

The expert was a wizened old man, who appeared to be a bit of a local celebrity. He was listening to a story in the teahouse that day, and happened to see Qiu Dekao showing the pattern around. After examining it, his expression turned surprised and he asked where Qiu Dekao got it.

Thinking there was hope, Qiu Dekao immediately became ecstatic. Naturally, he had already come up with a believable explanation for how he got it, so he quickly told the old man and asked him if he knew anything.

The old man shook his head and said that he didn’t, but he told Qiu Dekao that even though he didn’t know this thing’s origin, he had seen something similar before.

Qiu Dekao’s heart started racing, and he quickly asked the old man where he saw it.

The old man said that when he still lived in mainland China, he saw a furnace for making immortality pills in a Taoist temple on Qimeng Mountain in Shandong. This pattern had been engraved on it.

<Chapter 9><Table of Contents><Chapter 11>

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TN Notes:

(1) The Kuomintang (KMT) is a Chinese political party that ruled mainland China from 1927 to 1949 prior to its relocation to Taiwan as a result of the Chinese Civil War. The name of the party translates as “China’s National People’s Party” and was historically referred to as the Chinese Nationalists. Info here.

(2) Great Leap Forward was an economic and social campaign led by the Chinese Communist Party from 1958 to 1962. CCP Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to reconstruct the country from an agrarian economy into a communist society through the formation of people’s communes. The Cultural Revolution was a sociopolitical movement in the People’s Republic of China launched by Mao Zedong in 1966, and lasting until his death in 1976. Its stated goal was to preserve Chinese communism by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society. Chinese traditional arts and ideas were ignored and publicly attacked, and academics and intellectuals were widely persecuted. It caused a huge humanitarian crisis, with massacres and even cannibalism. (Needless to say, it was not a good time).

(3) Not sure how 普艾伦 becomes Alan Priest, but I did a super deep dive into Google and he’s the only guy that seems to match the story. Not a lot of info on him, but he lived from 1898-1969 and was known for taking part in the removal and restoration of two bas-reliefs from the Binyang Central Cave at the Longmen Grottoes.

(4) “Principles of Embroidery” was an embroidery guide written in 1821 by Ding Pei, a famous embroidery master in the Qing Dynasty.

(5) Bitmaps are defined as a regular rectangular mesh of cells called pixels, with each pixel containing a color value. The rows of different colored pixels grouped together can form an image. Kinda like this:

(6) Chinese characters are 书馆. It’s a teashop with performances by pingshu (评书) story tellers. Pingshu is a folk art where a single performer narrates stories from history or fiction (kinda sounds like they might read books aloud to an audience or recite the text from memory).