Chapter 184: Jude Kao, Bronze Furnace, Star Chart

(Third Uncle's subsequent account was quite tedious, touching on many old matters from Changsha, but these things were very interesting to me, since I've always loved those old stories with a bit of earthy flavor, carrying a sense of historical weight; it wouldn't hurt to listen.)

The missionary Third Uncle mentioned was named Cox Hendry at the time, with a Chinese name of Jude Kao. He worked at a church school in Changsha and was one of the Americans who came to China during the Nationalist era with the eastward tide. However, this man had been restless since childhood, with little interest in being a foreign monk, but he was very interested in Chinese culture. Perhaps in the American economic mindset, cultural relics were just another commodity that could be freely bought and sold, and naturally exported. So, by his third year in China, he occasionally engaged in underground cultural relic smuggling, and he was only nineteen that year.

Jude Kao's smuggling business was always conducted cautiously and on a small scale. At that time, there were two types of smugglers: one was the "flowing camp" type, moving large quantities but offering low prices, playing a high-risk game of making a deal when they could. Jude Kao, on the other hand, was the "blacksmith's trade"—he paid high prices, demanded fewer items, but it was very safe, and every deal was a sure thing. This way of doing business suited my grandfather's tastes, so their relationship was good back then.

However, Jude Kao was not a friend worth having. Deep down, he never considered my grandfather a friend, nor did he treat him as an equal. My grandfather later found out that in private, Jude Kao called him a "bedbug."

In 1949, Changsha was liberated, and the Nationalists were completely defeated. Then in 1952, the churches began to withdraw from China, and many Americans stranded in China started to return home. He also received a telegram from the church, telling him to return when it was safe.

He realized his business in China was coming to an end, so he began making preparations, transferring his assets. Before leaving, he had a sinister idea: he and his associates started buying up burial artifacts in large quantities, exploiting the Chinese tendency to trust old relationships. They used extremely low deposits to swindle away a large number of artifacts, including my grandfather's Warring States silk manuscript.

At the time, my grandfather was unwilling to sell this item, which his elders had exchanged their lives for. It was only after Jude Kao falsely claimed the money would be used to run a charity that my grandfather, thinking it would accrue merit, reluctantly sold it (of course, this is what my grandfather himself said, but I don't know if it's true; I doubt a man like him had that kind of kindness).

After all the goods were loaded onto the ship, Jude Kao knew some of these people were not to be trifled with. To avoid leaving trouble behind, he sent a telegram from the ship to the security office at the time, tipping off the Changsha garrison about the activities of my grandfather and about a dozen other grave robbers.

That day, Jude Kao sailed away with a full load, while the grave robbers who had helped him amass his wealth were either executed or imprisoned, their wails echoing everywhere.

Although they deserved their punishment, dying like that was truly too tragic. Later, cultural relic smuggling in China almost disappeared.

At that time, my grandfather was clever. Seeing the situation turn sour, he fled into the mountains that very night, hid in an ancient tomb, and slept with the dead for two weeks to avoid the heat. Later, he escaped to Hangzhou with nothing but the clothes on his back. This incident hit my grandfather hard, to the point that the Warring States silk manuscript became a taboo subject for him. While he was alive, he always warned us not to talk about it, so our family has always been tight-lipped about it.

After returning to the United States, Jude Kao auctioned off that batch of artifacts and made a fortune. The Warring States silk manuscript was sold at a high price to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, becoming the highest-priced artifact at auction at the time. Jude Kao was catapulted into being a millionaire and a new aristocrat of high society. His story in China was written into a biography and widely circulated.

After becoming wealthy, Jude Kao gradually shifted his interest to socializing. Around 1957, he was invited to serve as an advisor for the Far Eastern Art Department of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, providing consultancy on the study of the Warring States silk manuscript. The museum director at the time was the notorious Pu Ailun, both of whom were China experts who had made their fortunes by hiring bandits to loot Chinese artifacts. They quickly became friends. Jude Kao also donated money to the museum as a fund for purchasing Chinese folk artifacts.

Perhaps because of the leisure of a wealthy life and a love for Chinese culture, Jude Kao cultivated his character and gradually became immersed in the study of Chinese culture. He presided over several large-scale projects at the Metropolitan Museum, with quite notable results. However, what truly made him famous in history was the deciphering of the cipher text on the Warring States silk manuscript in 1974.

At that point, he had been studying the Warring States silk manuscript for over twenty years. Initially, it was to increase its value, but later it was purely out of interest.

In the beginning, no one believed that an American like him could crack an ancient Chinese code. However, Jude Kao did it with astonishing perseverance.

By coincidence, he found the key to decoding the "Warring States book map" through a Chinese ancient book called "Xiupu" (a book on embroidery patterns). This decoding method was actually similar to the technique of using text to record embroidery procedures in "Xiupu." Mathematically, it was like forming a pattern from a dot matrix. It wasn't complicated; the whole trick was an ingenious idea. If you could think of it, you could solve it. If you couldn't, no matter how well-versed you were in ancient Chinese cryptography, it was useless.

After discovering the decoding method, Jude Kao was overjoyed and immediately assembled a team to conduct an extensive translation of my grandfather's Warring States silk manuscript. A month later, all the cipher text was deciphered.

However, to Jude Kao's surprise, what appeared on the decryption paper was not the ancient text about Warring States divination and calendars he had expected, but a bizarre, completely meaningless pattern.

It is hard to describe how strange this pattern was. Later, when I saw the sketch Third Uncle drew for me, I was still baffled. To describe it, I can only say the pattern was very simple, composed of six curved lines and an irregular circle. The lines extended into each other, somewhat like the veins of a river on a map, or the creeping stems of a vine plant, but with the circle around them, it didn't feel that way. If you looked at it from a distance, it seemed like an abstract character; up close, it was completely unrecognizable.

There was no other information. If you didn't know it came from a fragment of an ancient Chinese book, everyone would think it was just scribbles a child who had just learned to hold a pen had made on paper.

After all that painstaking effort, to translate it into such a nonsensical pattern, Jude Kao was very surprised. For a moment, he thought his translation method was wrong, but after repeated verification, he found it impossible. If it were wrong, then the text could not have seamlessly transformed into this shape. Obviously, what was recorded in the cipher text were these seven lines.

So what did these seven lines represent? Why did the owner of the silk manuscript hide them in text?

With his many years of experience in China, his intuition told him that something written in cipher on such expensive silk could not be an ordinary pattern. These lines must have some special meaning, perhaps even of great significance.

He became deeply interested and immediately started researching. He spent a lot of time, going through countless libraries, and also took the pattern to consult with Chinese-American sinologists at universities. However, the people in the US were limited in their knowledge. After half a year of hard work, there were no results. Even if someone offered a guess, it was far-fetched, completely unfounded, and obviously nonsense.

Just as his interest was waning and he was losing hope, a university friend pointed him in the right direction. He told Jude Kao that for such strange Chinese things, he should ask the old folks in Chinatown. It was the Cold War era, and in Chinatown, there were many old scholars from Taiwan, a hidden gem of talent, and there might be clues.

Jude Kao thought that made sense. With his last hope, he actually went to Chinatown to seek advice.

In Chinatown, there were libraries where old people gathered. Jude Kao went to such places specifically, distributing the pattern for viewing. Luckily for him, he was fated well, and he actually met a master.

This master was a thin, old man, a local celebrity. That day, he was listening to storytelling at a tea house when Jude Kao happened to show up distributing the pattern. He took a look and was greatly shocked. He asked Jude Kao where he had gotten it.

Jude Kao sensed progress and was overjoyed. He naturally had his own story and explained the whole thing to the old man, then eagerly asked if the old man knew anything.

The old man shook his head and said no, but he told Jude Kao that although he didn't know the origin of this pattern, he had seen something similar in a place once.

Jude Kao's heart stirred, and he quickly asked where he had seen it.

The old man said it was still when he was in mainland China. He had seen a bronze censer in a Taoist temple in Qimeng Mountain, Shandong, and this pattern was engraved on that censer.