Chapter 16

Main text Chapter Sixteen Da Jin Ya

In a hot pot restaurant on Dongsi, the place was full of diners, steam from the hot pot filled the air, and the sound of cups clinking and glasses being exchanged, the chatter of 'one five, drink six' never ceased.

We found an empty table in a corner and sat down; Da Jin Ya kept pouring me drinks, I thought this guy wanted to get me drunk to pump me for information about my porcelain, so I quickly stopped him: "Jin Ye, this second-distilled liquor is too strong; I have a low tolerance, I'll stick to beer."

While eating and chatting, the topic turned to grave robbing. Da Jin Ya opened his mouth, tapped his own gold tooth with his fingertip, and said to us: "Gentlemen, please have a look—this gold tooth is what I acquired at Panjiayuan, dug out of a tomb, pre-Ming Fusang gold, pulled from the mouth of a zongzi. I couldn't bear to sell it, so I pulled out my own tooth and replaced it with this one."

This guy is really something—bringing that up during a meal, not letting people eat; if you don't want to spend money just say so directly; what he said is just the more you think about it, the more disgusting it gets, so I quickly changed the subject and talked about something else.

Money weighs on the servant's hand, skill outshines the current practitioner; we casually chatted about the ins and outs of judging feng shui for tombs, and about our experiences serving as engineers on Kunlun Mountain back then—Da Jin Ya kept clicking his tongue in amazement, admiring me so much he prostrated himself, all five limbs on the ground.

Before Da Jin Ya's father was conscripted by the Nationalists, he had been an apprentice to a grave-robbing master surnamed Cai from Hunan; he knew a lot about digging graves, but he never learned the skill of locating tombs. Because his master, Mr. Cai, himself didn't know feng shui techniques, it was only after 1923 that Luoyang farmer Li Yazi invented the North of the Luo shovel. Before that, the shovel hadn't become widespread; their school mainly used the nose to smell, and to keep the nose sensitive they all avoided tobacco, alcohol, and spicy foods.

Drive an iron chisel into the ground, pull it out, then sniff it with your nose; the various smells the iron chisel brings up from the underground soil, plus the feel when digging, indicate whether the ground is empty or contains wood, bricks or stone—those feels are definitely different.

Actually it's much the same principle as using the North of the Luo shovel to dig soil—only one uses the nose to smell, the other uses the eye to look. The soil brought up by the North of the Luo shovel can reveal the underground composition; if there are pottery shards, wood pieces, cloth fragments, gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, mercury, lead, including rammed earth, bricks and tiles, and so on, these are all signs of an underground tomb, and from these clues one can infer the age and layout of the ancient tomb below.

However, the skill of smelling earth was lost in Da Jin Ya's line; his father had disabled legs, and he himself had congenital asthma from childhood, so he no longer went out to work as a Grave-robbing Colonel. Those who make a living in this trade usually have seen plenty of genuine articles, and relying on that eye they have gone into the antiquities business.

I joked, saying your ancestors' skill had gotten a bit rusty; I've heard some grave-robbing stories from my family's elders. True experts don't use iron chisels or North of the Luo shovels—that's just clumsy; a capable person walks up to a spot, glances with their eyes, and immediately knows whether there's an ancient tomb underground, where it's buried, and what its structure is—all that is obvious at a glance. Wherever the feng shui is superb, there must be a major tomb; those worthy of being buried there were never ordinary people in life, and such tombs are filled entirely with treasure. True masters look down on the North of the Luo shovel and its like, because if the underground soil isn't dry enough, the effect is greatly reduced—especially in the fertile South of the Yangtze, where heavy rainfall means many ancient tombs have been submerged by groundwater, and the soil layers have been churned into a mess.

Da Jin Ya listened to my bombastic talk and admired me even more: "Hu Ye, I'm convinced— as the saying goes, 'To hear the Dao in the morning is to die content in the evening.' Having heard your lofty discourse, I feel I haven't lived in vain all these years. Someone like you, who understands feng shui techniques, has served as an engineer, and knows civil engineering operations, is truly rare to encounter; having your talent, it would be a shame not to become a Grave-robbing Colonel."

I shook my head and said: "That kind of wicked deed, I have no intention of doing; what I just said are things I heard from my grandfather—he too had worked as a Grave-robbing Colonel back in the day, but he ran into a big zongzi and nearly lost his life."

Da Jin Ya said the risk is certainly there, but carrying a few black donkey hooves makes one fearless; moreover, as the saying goes, 'Even thieves have their own code.' The bad reputation of grave robbing comes only from a bunch of lowlife scoundrels who give the trade a bad name—they aren't really part of the profession, they don't know the rules, and they go about wantonly destroying things; who wouldn't hate them? If you trace the history of grave robbing, it surely goes back more than three thousand years. Back in the Three Kingdoms period, Cao Cao had a unit under his command that specialized in digging up valuables from ancient tombs to fund the army, and that's how we got the alias Grave-robbing Colonel.

Before liberation, the trade was divided into four southeastern, southwestern, northeastern, and northwestern sects; by the 1980s talent had dwindled, hardly anyone remained, and the few who were left had washed their hands in a golden basin and quit. Nowadays the juniors are just idle country bumpkins who go about in gangs digging up graves. They don't understand the trade's rules—taking neither of the two, only one; the rule of three incense sticks, three bows, blowing out the lamp, and feeling for gold—alas, many fine things have been ruined by their hands.

Da Jin Ya sighed, then said to us: "I've been dealing in odds and ends at Panjiayuan for years; if you two ever have something good, I can take care of contacting buyers for you—you yourselves negotiate the deal, and once it's settled just give me a commission."

Pangzi kept busy eating and drinking; when he was about eighty percent full, he suddenly thought of something, took out the piece of jade on him and had Da Jin Ya appraise it to see how much it was worth.

Da Jin Ya took a look, then held it to his nose and sniffed a few times: "Pang Ye, this piece is fine jade—it's at least a thousand years old, hmm… possibly even older, probably from before the Tang dynasty. The writing on it isn't Han Chinese; I can't make out what it says, but it's definitely worth a fair amount. Still, before you know its exact value, you'd better hold on to it and not sell, or you might suffer a big loss. Where did you get this piece of jade?"

Pangzi brightened when talking about his family's history: "If you want the background, well, it's a long story—my dad's old comrade-in-arms from the Yellow Hemp Uprising gave him this piece of jade; that comrade was the chief number one of the Wild Office. When he led troops into the New Frontier, his unit ran into a band of bandits—those bandits were asking for death; could the guard regiment of the People's Liberation Army's number one chief possibly be just eating dry rations? In less than five or six minutes they wiped out all those hundred-odd bandits, and while cleaning up the battlefield they found this piece of jade on a bandit leader's body; the chief number one presented it as a keepsake to my dad. As for anything earlier than that, I don't know."

We kept drinking until past midnight before parting. At the farewell, Da Jin Ya gave each of us a curved hook-like object—over an inch long, lustrous black, extremely hard, engraved with two seal characters that look like the words "feeling for gold". The item is ancient, seemingly an antique; one end has a hole drilled through it, threaded with a red silk cord, so it can be hung around the neck as an ornament. Da Jin Ya said: "We really hit it off at first sight; these two are talismans made from pangolin claws, to keep as a memento for you two—drop by Panjiayuan whenever you have the time. Green hills remain, clear waters flow forever; until we meet again."