Blood Jade

A fragmentary scroll of the Wu Gate Miscellany preserves a piece titled "Blood Jade"; the paper is worn and the characters wanting, and I have set it down here in present speech.

I. Proem

Our house once kept a jade, of half-disc shape, which my elders called the "Blood Jade." Its substance was white, warm and smooth to the hand, yet a single thread of red had seeped into it, winding from the head of the disc to its tail, the color of clotted blood; held to the lamp, it seemed faintly to pulse. Warmed by a man's breath, the red would deepen; laid in clear water, the red would drift with the ripple, like a living thing unfolding. In my childhood I once stole a look at it, and felt it warm as a human body, the red thread wandering with the warmth of my finger; I was startled and let it go. Handed down through the generations, those who kept it came mostly to no good end, yet none dared cast it away - for to cast it away brought knocking at the door in the night, or the kitchen fire dying of itself without cause, and this thrice over, until in fear they set it up again. There was once a certain clansman who, loathing its ill omen, wrapped the jade and threw it down a well; that night a fishy wind filled the rooms, and from the well came the faint weeping of a woman, and at dawn the jade had floated up of itself and stood upright on the well-curb, as if waiting to be taken. After that the whole clan was awed into submission and served it the more devoutly, burning incense at every new and full moon.

This jade was bound up with the wrongs of three houses - Shen, Tao, Zhou - through three generations. The matter is scattered in hearsay, broken and not wholly to be verified; I have gathered what is told and, with the fragmentary slips, set it in order.

II. The First Generation - Shen Wrongs Tao

In the Guangxu years of the Qing, there was a jade-merchant of Wu Gate named Shen Wanqing, who kept his shop by the river. Greedy by nature yet gentle of face, men called him "Goodman Shen." In the last month of a certain year, snow fell for ten days on end, and the river villages were all white, the boats stopped. A young scholar knocked at his door for lodging. He named himself Tao Huaiqing, a man of Kuaiji, bound for the provincial examination, who had been stopped on the road by snow and robbed of his traveling money, so that only a half-disc of ancestral blood-jade remained to pledge. Huaiqing wore a threadbare gown and his face was the color of vegetables, yet his speech was mild and refined, and though the snow-water soaked his shoes he still bowed with ceremony. He set the jade upon the table and said: "This my house has kept for generations; I would not part with it but for dire need. Take it at a fair price; when Huaiqing has buried his old mother he will surely come to redeem it, and will not fail you." Shen looked on the jade and his eye was taken - white as congealed fat, with a red thread alive within, such as he had never seen. He kept up a show of kindness and lodged him in the western wing, himself bringing broth and medicine.

While ill, Huaiqing would sit by the window and write to his mother, his hand fine and moist; Shen happened to glimpse it and rather respected the man. Rising at midnight, he saw Huaiqing sitting alone with the jade, murmuring as if to his dead father. Shen stood beyond the curtain and all but spoke to stay his deceit, but the thought of a hundred pieces of gold prevailed, and he sighed and withdrew. Huaiqing was ill some ten days, and when he mended asked to redeem the jade. Shen then, by lamplight, forged a note - the candle's tears dripped on his wrist and he did not feel it - falsely claiming that a month before a knowing buyer had purchased it for a great sum and the jade was no longer his; and he copied Huaiqing's mother's hand and forged a letter of her death, bidding Huaiqing hasten home to the funeral. Though Huaiqing doubted, he could not find the jade, and his search of the rooms found nothing; his money too was spent. Grief knotted in him and he lingered in the wing and would not go. Shen's wife privately urged: "The young scholar is pitiable; why deceive him so? If it comes out one day, what then?" Shen glared: "A woman knows nothing of livelihood. This jade is worth a hundred pieces of gold - how can one let it slip? With heaven cold and earth frozen, even if he suspects, where would he turn?" The wife held her tongue; at midnight she heard the sighing from the western wing, and wept into her sleeve.

That winter was bitter cold. Huaiqing coughed blood at night and gradually could not rise. Fearing the thing would out, Shen secretly charged his old servant Ke to report him, when he died, as taken by sudden illness, and to bury him shallow in the paupers' field beyond the wall; and so the jade became his own. When Huaiqing died, his hand still reached toward the table, as if demanding the jade, and his eyes were slightly open, unclosed. Shen could not sleep at night, and at every sound of wind in the western wing fancied Huaiqing standing beyond the door; he would take a candle and look out, and find only snow on the steps. Years after, Shen would dream of a white-clad man standing by his bed, who spoke not but fixed his eyes on Shen's hands; he would start awake, and a coldness still lingered in his palm.

From the getting of the jade, Shen's shop daily prospered; within a few years he bought land, took a concubine, and fathered two sons. All congratulated his fortune, taking it for the reward of a good man. Yet the next year, in the last month, his elder son, Aman, five years old, played by the river at the door, sailing a boat of broken reeds; the wind snatched the boat and he slipped and drowned. His mother, hearing the cry, ran out to look, but he was already under; when they pulled him up the hand still clutched the reed, his face as if smiling, the game not yet done. Ten years on, his second son, Alin, homeward-bound from his studies, crossed Tai Lake and met a storm; the boat overturned, and the other drowned were all saved, but Alin alone was lost, and when they pulled him up he was hugging a book to his breast - it was a collected works of Tao Yuanming - as if guarding something. Shen's hair was white in middle age, and sitting alone in his shop he would see the red thread on the jade deepen a degree each year, as if a living thing were sucking blood, and suspected it the hate-blood of Huaiqing made manifest, and could not sleep. In his late years he gave the jade to his daughter Yueru as dowry, thinking privately: "If this thing returns to the Tao, the old wrong may be loosed."

III. The Second Generation - Tao Wrongs Yueru

Yueru was Shen Wanqing's elder daughter, quiet and clever, versed in the histories. She was married to Tao Jingming, a distant branch of the Tao house - Jingming being Huaiqing's grand-nephew. By then the Tao clan had fallen; Jingming traded in silk, was given to gambling, and cold of temper. He took Yueru for half her dowry. Shen Wanqing gave the jade to the Tao meaning "the thing returns to its owner, and the wrong may be somewhat amended" - but Yueru knew nothing of her father's deceit of Huaiqing.

Soon after the wedding, Jingming gambled away his stake and owed scores of taels to the gaming-house, and would have pledged the dowry to pay. His gaming he kept to the night, and the rattle of dice reached the bedchamber; Yueru urged him to stop and was berated for it. Yueru searched the case and found the blood-jade at the bottom of the trousseau, bright in her hand; handling it, she felt the jade warm and the red stir, and was puzzled, but said nothing. By chance she came upon a bundle of the Shen family's letters, among which lay the draft of the forged note and the false words of death, the ink still fresh, and so first saw the truth of her father's cunning getting; and in a folded page she found a sheet in Huaiqing's own hand, saying "Mother lies dead awaiting burial; the jade is at Wu Gate; redeem it on my return." Yueru read it and her tears fell and wet her collar; she knew then this jade had been the Tao house's own, taken by her father's trick. Yueru could not check her grief, and wept at night before the jade: "I am the daughter of the man who wronged your house - how can I wear you with any face? If the jade has knowing, it should be ashamed to be worn by me. Yet I too am born of Huaiqing's wrongdoer - I share your wrong, but to whom can I tell it?"

Jingming learned the jade was there and asked to see it, meaning to pledge it at the gaming-house. Yueru would not, and hid it under the pillow. Jingming in anger accused her of hiding wealth and not aiding her husband; Yueru, indignant, spoke the truth, and taxed him: "You are of Huaiqing's line; your grandfather's jade strayed into my house by my father's crime. Instead of righting your ancestor's wrong, you would sell his relic - what manner of man are you? My father's evil I cannot hide; your Tao gate's shame you may bear yourself." Jingming, shamed that his wife was "the foe's daughter" and angered that she held the jade to mock him, flew into a rage and drove her out, saying: "Take this foul thing and go; do not soil my Tao gate." Yueru returned to the Shen house; Shen Wanqing was already old, and hearing of it was ashamed to see his daughter; Shen's wife too feared Shen and dared not keep her, but gave her a little money and bade her live apart. Yueru took a cottage at the town's end, fell into a sickness of the heart, coughing and wheezing through the year, and on a snowy night at year's end called Zhou to bring the jade near her couch and said: "Return this jade to the Tao, and I am not in your debt." So saying she died; the daughter she bore prematurely also perished. The jade went with Yueru's trousseau-maid Zhou - Zhou, a bondmaid of the Shen house, who later married a servant of the Zhou family, and so the jade entered the Zhou.

IV. The Third Generation - Zhou Returns the Jade

Zhou's grandson Yanqiu was born at the end of the Guangxu years. Grown, and fond of learning, he sorted an old chest and found the blood-jade with a torn note and a few lines in Yueru's hand, and was much struck. He went about visiting the old of the three houses: the Shen clan was scattered, only two old women left, one of whom had been Shen's wife's late maid, past eighty, and who whispered to Yanqiu: "The scholar of the western wing - it was no sudden illness; Old Shen buried him shallow, and the jade came of that. I myself saw the old man carry the body out at midnight, a drag-mark in the snow that I have never forgotten. As the scholar went, his eyes were not closed, and the old man covered them with a cloth, his hand still trembling." She pointed beyond the wall, saying the shallow grave could still be known; Yanqiu went and opened it, and indeed found rotten wood and broken slips, with a broken Tao-clan stele beside, its inscription worn away but for the two characters "Huaiqing" still to be made out. The Tao clan had removed to another county, and its issue too was sparse; Yanqiu traced the register and learned that Jingming in his late years lost all his estate and, drunk, fell into the river and died - meeting his end, by the same means, where Shen's elder son had. The Zhou, since the jade entered, had prospered no great deal; only Yanqiu by hard study took the xiucai degree, to the wonder of the village.

Yanqiu set the note and the letter side by side, and the truth of three generations stood clear - Shen wronged Tao at the first, Tao (Jingming) wronged Yueru after, the jade passed on, and at last came into Zhou's hand; yet all three houses ended in "loss": the Shen lost their sons, the Tao lost the jade and their line, the Zhou got the jade and lost their peace. Yanqiu sighed: "The jade is innocent in itself; it is men's greed and coldness that forged this chain. Now the three houses are all brought low and the jade alone remains - does it wait for one to return it?"

In the year Bing-yin, the spring waters were just risen and the river-mist not yet cleared. Yanqiu took the jade to the river's bank - the place near where Huaiqing had been detained long before, and where the Shen elder son had drowned - and addressed the stream: "The jade does not speak, yet three generations of blood are in it. Shen seized it, Tao cast it off, Zhou received it - none was its true master. Now I return it to the river; may the wrong be loosed?" So saying, he sank the jade in the water. The jade entered the wave, and its red thread loosed into a single wisp, like a thread of blood passing away with the current; a faint light floated on the river's face, and after a long while was gone. A fisherman saw it from afar and took it for a falling star; he cast his net and brought up only water.

That night Yanqiu dreamed of a white-clad scholar who bowed to him beneath the lamp, his countenance gentle and refined, seeming free of hatred, who only said: "I thank you for returning it. Huaiqing was stranded by snow and perished by deceit; yet his unworthy descendants again dishonored the jade - all is fate. Now that it returns to the water, may the river be calm." Asked his name, he gave no answer and dissolved, but left a sheet in his sleeve; Yanqiu picked it up, and it was the broken line from Huaiqing's letter of that year: "Mother's death brooks no waiting; the jade is at Wu Gate." Yanqiu woke, and a coolness still lingered at his wrist, as if the jade had but left his hand.

V. Afterword by the Translator

Though the jade is sunk, its red does not fade from the hearts of men. Afterward, the fishermen on the river would now and then see, at midnight, a light like a bean floating and not leaving the water's heart, which they told of as the breath of the Blood Jade; the fishermen would burn incense and pray to it, and the wind and waves would settle. The three houses, Shen, Tao, Zhou, are all brought low today; only this matter, by Yanqiu's brush, has been kept in the fragmentary scroll. The translation being done, I add a few words after it: that a thing brings men to ruin is not the jade's fault, but the doing of men's greed and coldness. The jade in itself knows nothing; the red is but a vein in the stone; yet three generations of wrong clung to that single thread of red, so that men dared not cast it away and could not bear to look on it - and this too is a mirror held up to man. Who looks on this jade should ask whether the red in his own heart is there. If the heart holds no red, then though the jade be in the hand, it is no more than a square of white stone.