Chapter 157: The Fall of Wei

On the second day after the northeast corner of Daliang collapsed, in a ward in the east of the city already backflooded with foul water and completely impassable, a group of Wei people gathered there, every one of them utterly exhausted and dejected.

After three months of siege by water, although there was still enough grain in the city to eat and the horror of people exchanging children for food had not occurred, the lack of any dry open ground meant they had to hang their cooking pots in the air to prepare meals, and the lack of firewood made getting that grain into their mouths the hardest problem of all.

First they burned the wooden furniture from the houses, then the costly lacquerware, and finally the gorgeous silks. These things, when used for cooking, could not match a single worthless stick of firewood. Once the silks and hempen cloth were also burned up, it was the tall caps and wide sleeves' turn to suffer.

That was how the wealthy households managed; the poor families had it far worse and could only survive by chewing raw grain.

So these once elegant and noble scholar-officials were all in tattered rags, their caps and sashes lost who knows where, their lower garments cut short. Like the mud-legged peasants they once despised, they stood barefoot in the foul water, though their speech and bearing still carefully observed the rites.

Their idle talk did not last long. As soon as something was carried out from within this courtyard, everyone went over to help. Though all of them were officials and literati who had never done productive labor, now each of them rolled up his sleeves and together lifted an unvarnished coffin, then waded through streets where the water reached their calves, heading toward the high-platform palace towering far above the ground in the distance…

That high platform was called "Fan Terrace," a palace built during the reign of King Hui of Wei. It stood on very high ground, with flowers and trees flourishing, birdsong and fragrant blossoms, pavilions and terraced towers — a scene of endless beauty. In those days, King Hui of Wei would bring his two most favored beauties, Bai Tai and Lü Xu, to Fan Terrace every day for pleasure and sightseeing.

Now, it was like a lone island in a vast sea, one of the few places in the east of the city where one could set foot. During the siege, King Jia of Wei had permitted the nobles and officials of the eastern city to bring their families there to take refuge.

The Wei nobles and officials rushed there like ducks to water, but there was one man who did not leave. Tang Ju, at ninety years of age, held fast at home, swearing to share hardship and life and death with the common people of Wei, resolutely refusing to go to Fan Terrace.

When his sons, grandsons, and disciples urged him, Tang Ju rebuked them:

"In my thirty-first year, the Yan army invaded Qi, taking over seventy cities in Qi territory in succession, leaving only Ju and Jimo. At that time, Tian Dan defended Jimo. He personally carried planks and spades, shared food and clothing with the common soldiers, shared their toil, and had his wives and concubines woven into the ranks! Only thus came the heroic feat of holding out for three years and then striking with full force to restore the state!"

"Now Daliang is besieged, more precarious than a pile of eggs. As a minister and noble, how can I abandon the common people and go to a high platform to take refuge myself? We must join our strength with one heart — ministers and nobles one body with the common people. Only thus can we gather the will of all and build it into a fortress!"

So he spoke, but while Tang Ju could persuade his sons, grandsons, and disciples to stay, he could not persuade the King of Wei and the high nobles, who ran to the royal palace on its high platform, shut the gates tight, and continued feasting and music, dead drunk all day long, numbing themselves and pretending not to know that Wei could be destroyed at any moment.

This conduct of the Wei nobility chilled the Wei people more and more, and morale sank lower with each passing day.

Now, the walls of Daliang had finally collapsed, and Tang Ju, the last pillar of spirit for the city's defending soldiers, at the very moment he heard in shock that the wall had crumbled, full of regret and unwillingness, breathed his last…

Inside this coffin carried by so many people lay the remains of Tang Ju.

…

The party trudged with difficulty to Fan Terrace. In previous days, there had still been many retainers and private soldiers of the high nobles guarding it, preventing commoners from ascending. Now, the palace gate was utterly deserted.

After the city fell, the King of Wei immediately proclaimed that the whole city should lay down arms and chose to surrender. Tomorrow, the high nobles would follow the King of Wei out of the city to capitulate, leaving this drowned city behind. The retainers and private soldiers had also scattered like birds and beasts, each going his own way.

Tang Ju's sons, grandsons, and disciples intended to bury the old man's remains here, because this was one of the few places that still had a patch of yellow earth.

However, a young man of seventeen or eighteen stood at the gate of Fan Terrace, stretched out his hand, and stopped the crowd.

"Great-grandfather cannot be buried at Fan Terrace!" he said loudly.

Tang Li was one of Tang Ju's many great-grandsons and had been at Tang Ju's side since childhood. In recent days, it was he who had been tending to Tang Ju's daily needs.

When Tang Ju was placed in the coffin, no one could find Tang Li. They assumed he was off somewhere weeping, but who would have guessed he had run here to block the coffin.

"Tang Li!" Tang Li's father, that is, Tang Ju's grandson, rebuked him angrily: "You unfilial descendant, you dare block the coffin? Get out of the way at once!"

Tang Li knelt down in the water, lowered his head, and said: "In his final moments, Great-grandfather kept saying that Boyi and Shuqi would not eat the grain of Zhou, and he too was unwilling to be buried in Qin soil!"

Someone said: "Within the city of Daliang, where is there any Qin soil?"

The young man pointed at Fan Terrace behind him and said: "Now the King of Wei has already taken the royal clan and all the officials, intending to leave the city and surrender to Qin. After today, Wei is destroyed. After tomorrow, this place will be Qin territory! Great-grandfather fought against Qin his entire life — how could he rest in peace beneath the Yellow Springs?"

"Furthermore, Fan Terrace was built by that fatuous ruler King Hui of Wei. King Hui wallowed in wine and women and neglected state affairs. Great-grandfather always disliked him, so even less can he be buried here!"

"Then where do you say he should be buried?" Tang Li's father, bearing the heavy coffin on his shoulder, tears in his eyes, said with grief and indignation: "For a hundred li in every direction, where is there even an inch of Wei soil left!?"

The others also began to sigh and lament.

"The altars of state are lost — how much more the national soil!"

"The city is full of water everywhere, utter chaos. There's no time to send him outside the city. Do we wait for the Qin people to come and humiliate the master's corpse?"

"Death is the greatest matter — one must always enter the earth."

"I…" For a moment, Tang Li had no good solution and could only watch helplessly as the crowd carried Tang Ju's coffin up onto Fan Terrace.

As a junior, his words carried no weight. In the end, he could only wipe his tears and follow, joining the others in burying the coffin in a corner of Fan Terrace and beginning a crude funeral.

Conditions in the city were crude, with no plain silk or black cloth, but there was no shortage of people chanting elegies, and those beating their chests and wailing came in an endless stream.

They were mourning not only for Tang Ju, but also for the altars of the state of Wei, soon to perish.

"Over four hundred years ago, the Jin noble Bi Wan was enfeoffed at Wei, thus becoming the Wei lineage. A diviner foretold that Bi Wan's descendants would surely be great. 'Wan' is the number of fullness; 'Wei' is a great name. The Son of Heaven speaks of a trillion people, the feudal lords speak of ten thousand people. Now the mandate is great, following the number of fullness — his line shall surely possess multitudes…"

"Just as predicted, two hundred years later, the descendant of the Wei lineage called Viscount Huan of Wei, together with Viscount Kang of Han and Viscount Xiang of Zhao, attacked and destroyed the Earl of Zhi and divided his lands."

"Another fifty years later, the grandson of Viscount Huan, called Marquis Wen of Wei, received the Son of Heaven's command, led Han and Wei to attack Qi, entered the Long Wall, fought at Bingqiu, took thirty thousand heads, captured two thousand chariots, took the Marquis of Qi prisoner and returned him to Chengzhou, and was thus ranked among the feudal lords — the state of Wei began to rise!"

"In the time of Marquis Wen, Wei had Li Kui and Zhai Huang as chancellors, who promulgated the Canon of Laws. Ximen Bao governed Ye, and within the He Dong and He Nei regions every household was well-supplied, governance flowed and the people were at peace. Moreover, there were Zixia, Tian Zifang, and Duan Ganmu lecturing in Xihe, so that for a time the various masters and humanistic brilliance all gathered in Wei. And with Yue Yang and Wu Qi as generals, they raised the Wu Troops: east they broke Qi, west they pressed Qin, north they swallowed Zhongshan, south they defeated mighty Chu. The Wei of that era was beyond doubt the hegemon of all under heaven!"

"As for King Hui, he still continued the hegemony of three generations, holding the Meeting at Fengze where the twelve lords of the Si River region bowed their heads and declared themselves vassals, and Qin and Qi also paid court to Wei. It is a pity that King Hui was muddled and unenlightened. In his late years, he was defeated by Qi in the east, where his eldest son died; in the west he lost over seven hundred li of territory to Qin and lost tens of thousands of troops…"

"By the time of King Xiang, Wei had already lost its hegemony, caught between the three powers of Qin, Chu, and Qi, growing more humble by the day."

"Lord Tang was born in the very year that Mencius visited King Xiang of Wei," a noble with generations of ties to the Tang family said with a sigh.

"In Lord Tang's life of ninety years, he watched Wei being whittled away day by day. Though he assisted the Lord of Xinling in a brief resurgence, Wei still could not escape its fate of destruction."

"It is fortunate that Lord Tang did not have to witness, as we must, the sight of the King of Wei stripping himself bare and surrendering!"

The crowd grew larger and larger, most of them prostrating before Tang Ju's grave and weeping out the pain of their state's destruction. Seeing everyone's grief and indignation deepening, Tang Li could bear to listen no longer. After making three kowtows toward his great-grandfather's tomb mound, he silently left Fan Terrace.

…

The four gates of Daliang already stood wide open, but the Qin troops still had not entered. The city had been soaked in water too long, and epidemics were spreading — the Qin people would not take this risk.

They wanted the King of Wei to lead everyone in the city out to surrender. The Wei royal clan would then be taken as spoils of war to the Guanzhong region, and the Wei people within Daliang would be separated and resettled.

As a man of a fallen state, Tang Li did not know where he should go either. After being soaked in water for over two months, the demoralized Wei people of Daliang no longer had the spirit to resist. He could only wade through the water, walk home in a daze, and push open the door of the study…

This place was also flooded, the water covering his feet. To let the family eat a hot meal, everything dry in the house had been burned as firewood — even the bamboo slips Tang Ju had collected for many years could not escape. Yet in one corner of the bookshelf, a pile of ancient bamboo scrolls wrapped in kudzu cloth was something Tang Ju had absolutely forbidden to be burned.

Tang Li walked over and opened them.

Inside were the "Duans and Longs," the "Book of Zhangzi," the "Book of Suzi" — all records of the deeds of the School of Vertical and Horizontal Alliances, recording the words and actions of Zhang Yi, Su Qin, Su Dai, and others as they persuaded the feudal lords, maneuvering with mastery. These were required introductory reading for any youth who wished to study the doctrines of vertical and horizontal alliance.

Tang Li had once cherished such a dream. From the age of ten, he had leafed through these scrolls as if they were stories, admiring how Zhang Yi and Su Qin, by their own strength alone, could shift the balance of the feudal lords. He pondered their phrases, deliberately imitated them, and copied them out!

He hoped that one day, he too could forge such skills, inherit his great-grandfather's calling, persuade the feudal lords, initiate a Vertical Alliance, and turn Wei's danger into safety!

Alas, before he could finish learning his great-grandfather's skills, Tang Ju had passed away, and the state of Wei was about to perish as well…

Tang Li closed those bamboo slips and took out a few bamboo scrolls he had kept hidden in his robes all along and had not taken out even during the funeral. He had originally intended to burn these for his great-grandfather.

This was the "Book of Tangzi," which Tang Li had quietly begun writing before the war started. He wanted to use his own brush to record the deeds in which his great-grandfather had not failed his missions, so that his great-grandfather, like Zhang Yi and Su Qin, would be remembered by later generations…

But just as he finished writing, Daliang was already under siege.

He spread the half-scroll of the Tangzi across the desk and saw that three stories had already been written on it: "Qin and Wei as Allied States," "Tang Ju Persuades Lord Xinling," and "Tang Ju Meets Lord Chunshen." All were true accounts of Tang Ju skillfully using Vertical-Horizontal rhetoric to lobby King Zhaoxiang of Qin and Lord Chunshen, and to admonish Lord Xinling.

By all logic, with Tang Ju dead and Wei destroyed, the Tangzi's stories should come to an abrupt halt.

But did it truly have to end here?

Large teardrops fell onto the bamboo slips, moistening the already yellowed strips.

"I can't accept this!" Tang Li gritted his teeth. Thinking of his great-grandfather, who had passed away with such regret, and that the state of Wei he had spent his entire life trying to save was now conquered, Tang Li's heart bled...

He was unwilling to accept this fact, and desperately wanted to do something to ease his own pain.

Driven by this unwillingness, as if possessed, Tang Li found his brush, ground ink using the muddy water below, rolled up his sleeves, and began to write a new, entirely fictional story on the bamboo slips...

"The King of Qin sent an envoy to the Lord of Anling, saying: 'I wish to exchange five hundred li of land for Anling. Surely the Lord of Anling will grant me this...'"

He set the story's beginning in Anling, a fief of Wei that Tang Ju had taken him to visit several years before. At the start of this war, the Lord of Anling had resisted the Qin army, but his small armed force was quickly crushed, and the Lord of Anling had no choice but to surrender.

Tang Li reshaped the Lord of Anling, turning him into the wise and virtuous lord the people of Wei had long yearned for...

Then, under Tang Li's brush, his deceased great-grandfather Tang Ju came back to life and entered the stage.

"Tang Ju replied: 'The Lord of Anling received this land from the former king and guards it. He would not dare trade it even for a thousand li — how much less a mere five hundred li?'"

With tears in his eyes, Tang Li could almost truly see his great-grandfather still sitting before him, teaching him the arts of Short-and-Long persuasion. He made the grandfather under his brush speak, when tempted by the King of Qin, the very words his great-grandfather had so often said to him.

The land of our ancestors — we dare not abandon it!

This formed a stark contrast with the successive Wei kings, who had treated their ancestral lands with so little regard, handing them over to Qin.

At this point, he hit a block, but after gnawing on the brush handle and thinking, then flipping through some passages in the Zhangzi and Suzi, Tang Li's eyes lit up. His brush moved faster and faster, and a breathtaking confrontation emerged starkly on the bamboo slips.

The King of Qin was domineering, wanting to seize every piece of land under heaven. Since soft tactics had failed, he would try hard ones!

He arrogantly called himself the Son of Heaven, and even claimed that the Son of Heaven's wrath meant "a million corpses lying dead, blood flowing for a thousand li," trying to intimidate Tang Ju!

Yet Tang Ju, at ninety years old, had seen the world and would not be cowed. He asked in return: "Has Your Majesty ever heard of the wrath of a commoner?"

Under Tang Li's brush, King Zheng of Qin, born with the face of a villainous nouveau riche, waved his hand dismissively and said: "The wrath of a commoner is nothing but baring one's head, going barefoot, and knocking one's head against the ground..."

The true climax arrived. Biting his nails, Tang Li lifted his brush and wrote Tang Ju's reply: "That is the wrath of a mediocre man, not the wrath of a shi..."

Then what was the wrath of a shi?

The images of those chivalrous assassins in history who never feared brute force surfaced in Tang Li's mind.

When Zhuan Zhu stabbed King Liao, a comet swept the moon; when Nie Zheng stabbed Han Gui, a white rainbow pierced the sun; when Yao Li stabbed Qing Ji, a grey hawk struck within the palace hall!

In Tang Li's view, the age needed such solitary heroes. When the army and state could not contend with Qin, one man, by his own strength, could kill that insatiably greedy King of Qin and tear out his wolfish heart!

The first Jing Ke had fallen, but there would surely be a second, and a third Jing Ke!

By this point, Tang Li was completely intoxicated. For the sake of the plot he desired, he disregarded facts and logic, and directly had Tang Ju raise his sword and rise!

"If a shi must be wrathful, then two corpses shall lie, blood shall flow for five paces, and all under heaven shall wear mourning white — and today is that day!"

What? You cannot carry a sword into an audience with the King of Qin? No matter — this "sword" of Tang Ju's was not smuggled in, nor carried in, nor taken from another. It was the sword of the heart, born of the people's sympathy for the weak, a sword of justice descending from the heavens!

"Magnificent!"

He burst into loud laughter, as if truly seeing his great-grandfather, though white-haired, radiating the heroic spirit of a commoner-shi, terrifying King Zheng of Qin into losing his composure and kneeling in prolonged apology...

Tang Li, a man of a conquered state, had, on this scroll of bamboo and by his own brush, won for the people of Wei a victory they could never achieve in reality.

"Hahahaha, exhilarating, exhilarating! Even the wolfish-hearted King of Qin was driven to such a sorry state by Great-Grandfather!"

But his laughter grew smaller and smaller, more and more wretched, until finally it turned into loud, broken sobs.

Did Tang Li not know that it was all false?

The ancestral lands had long been carved away piece by piece by the Wei kings. His great-grandfather had never in his life met King Zheng of Qin. The Lord of Anling had long since surrendered, and there was no commoner-shi drawing a sword to threaten a king...

Fabrications — all of it was his fabrication!

Faced with his great-grandfather's passing, faced with the agony of a conquered state, faced with the ruins of Daliang, faced with this cruel and bone-chilling reality, Tang Li could only comfort himself with exaggerated, sensational stories and flamboyant, overwrought prose.

"What use is it?"

Before the surging great waves, before the momentum built over a hundred years, what a single person could do was far too little.

He snapped his brush, spilled his ink, pounded the desk, and shouted at the top of his lungs:

"The capital of Liang has fallen! Tomorrow, the King of Wei will lead the entire city out to surrender to the Qin army!"

"Two hundred years of the Wei state's altars — gone! Gone! After today, we shall all be Qin captives!"

Returning to reality, Tang Li began searching everywhere for a scraping knife and a candle flame, wanting to destroy what he had just written.

But when he pressed the scraping knife against the first inked character, he hesitated. After a painful struggle, he finally threw the knife aside, rolled up the bamboo scroll, and placed it together with the other three chapters of the Tangzi.

So be it, so be it. Whether true or false, Wei was destroyed and Tang Ju was gone — what did truth or falsehood matter now? Let it remain.

Perhaps, if it were to spread, it could bring balance to the hearts of many whose states were conquered or about to be conquered.

Perhaps, just as it had inspired him today, it could inspire more people, telling them that even if the state perishes, the altars crumble, and the homeland lies desolate, never forget that heart of a shi that fears no brute force!

Tang Li clutched the bamboo scroll tightly and swore: "So long as this heart does not die, I believe that one day, the people of Wei will restore their state, retake Daliang, and then upon the Fan Terrace, it will be Qin soil no more, and Great-Grandfather can rest in peace!"

Then let this story be given a title.

Tang Li had already thought of one.

"Tang Ju — He Did Not Fail His Mission!"

Unlike the bold and stirring story under Tang Li's brush, the victors were still the victors, the defeated still the defeated. The strong made kings, the weak made bandits — reality would not change one bit because of a strategist's essay or a diary.

On the third day after the fall of Daliang, outside the city walls, bells and drums sounded in unison. The Qin army was arrayed in perfect order, and their general, Wang Ben, majestic and imposing, rode at the front in a four-horse chariot.

Heifu, standing among the mass of soldiers to watch the spectacle, kept rising on tiptoe. At last, he saw it: through the wide-open western gate of Daliang, the last King of Wei, stripped to the waist and bound, leading a sheep with his left hand and holding thatch with his right, crawled forward on his knees through knee-deep water, all the way out of the city gate to surrender to the Qin army...

(End of Chapter)