Chapter 158: Shuli

At the ceremony where the King of Wei surrendered to the Qin army, King Jia of Wei was a sorrowful loser. He imitated the ancient rites of Weizi Qi surrendering to King Wu of Zhou — baring his flesh and binding himself, leading a sheep and holding thatch, crawling on his knees to the front of Wang Ben's chariot to kowtow three times. Utterly abased, he placed himself as a subject and servant of Qin.

"Wei is to Qin as a Marquis Within the Passes, always giving whatever is demanded… Though I am without virtue, I have caused the King of Qin to harbor wrath and bring it upon my humble city — this is my crime…"

"Yet if the King of Qin could graciously care for our former goodwill, not extinguish Wei's altars of soil and grain, and follow the old precedent of the state of Wei, granting me a single county's land so that I may sustain the blood-offerings to my ancestors — that would be the King of Qin's kindness. It is my wish, though I dare not presume to hope for it. I dare only to lay bare my innermost heart, and I hope the General can report it to the King of Qin…"

In King Jia of Wei's heart, perhaps he hoped that this attitude of non-resistant submission could exchange for the King of Qin's forgiveness — that like King Wu of Zhou releasing Weizi Qi, or King Zhuang of Chu releasing Duke Xiang of Zheng, he could preserve Wei's blood-offerings and altars.

After all, he was different from King Xi of Yan, who had sent assassins against the King of Qin; different from King Qian of Zhao, who had employed Li Mu to repeatedly defeat the Qin armies; and different from King An of Han, who had sent Zheng Guo into Qin as a spy to attempt the scheme of wearing Qin out. In the three years since King Jia of Wei had succeeded to the throne, he had always obeyed Qin's every command. The year before, when Xinzheng in Yingchuan Commandery rebelled and a prince of Han, the Lord of Hengyang, requested Wei's aid, the King of Wei had hastily sold them out, even reporting the matter to Qin.

And when Wang Ben attacked Chenying in Chu, Wei sat with tens of thousands of troops positioned in the Qin army's rear, yet dared not make a single move — they even permitted the Qin army to cross their borders. Who could have guessed that Wang Ben would turn his head and strike like a blade, fiercely stabbing into Wei's very heart.

So King Jia of Wei felt somewhat wronged. Now he no longer dared hope that Qin would preserve his royal title; he only wished that, like his own former vassal the state of Wei, he might be relocated to some county as an enfeoffed lord. That would still be better than King An of Han, who was imprisoned and killed, or King Qian of Zhao, who was exiled to the remote, deep mountains of Hanzhong and vanished without a trace…

Yet, as the victor, Wang Ben's face was expressionless. Only after King Jia of Wei had finished speaking his wish did he descend from the chariot, help him up, and say with a smile: "Your wish, my lord, may be stated in person before the Great King once you reach Xianyang!"

King Jia of Wei's face instantly turned deathly pale. No matter how abased his posture, it could not change his fate of becoming a Qin captive.

The King of Qin was no King Wu of Zhou, still less a King Zhuang of Chu. That tender, warm-hearted act of destroying a state yet preserving its altars and blood-offerings was already an old tale from the Yin, Zhou, and Spring and Autumn eras. In this new age, Qin's strategy was unwavering: "Conquer a state — no pardon!"

Not only was King Jia of Wei to be escorted to Xianyang, but even the consorts and beauties within the various palaces of Wei were ordered to leave the city this very day.

Their days during the siege had not been easy, yet now, having to leave the familiar palaces, they were still utterly unwilling. But if even King Jia of Wei had resigned himself to fate like a frost-battered eggplant, what could they do? Under the threat of blades, these delicate, tender bodies accustomed to brocade and fine food could only weep and wail as they boarded the palanquin carts Wang Ben had long prepared, journeying west together with the King of Wei.

Standing among the Qin troops and watching this scene, Heifu could only recall a line from his textbook.

"Consorts and concubines, royal sons and grandsons, leaving their towers and descending their halls, were carried in palanquins to Qin. By morning songs and night strings, they became Qin palace women."

The rare treasures, precious vessels, and beautiful women that generations of Wei had greedily amassed — in the end, it was all merely making a bridal trousseau for Qin.

After that came the high ministers and great officers, the princes and royal grandsons, bearing Wei's sacrificial vessels to present. When they learned they were to be immediately escorted under guard into the Passes, it stirred a flurry of commotion and protest. But under the threat of Qin spears and halberds, they too quickly submitted. Only, as they trudged westward one deep step after another, from time to time someone would turn back to gaze at the city of Daliang, a sigh with every step, recalling the past, and unable to stop grief welling up from within, tears soaking their robes.

No one knows who started it, but these once-elegant and self-satisfied ministers and grandees, now utterly bedraggled prisoners, together began to sing a ballad.

"That millet hangs heavy, that grain is in seed. I walk so slowly, my heart is choked within. Those who know me, say my heart is troubled. Those who know me not, ask what it is I seek. O distant blue Heaven! What kind of man is this?"

…

"Those Wei ministers, princes, and grandsons — when they journeyed west, what was it they were singing?"

On the first day of the fifth month — the day after King Jia of Wei surrendered to the Qin army — Heifu, Chen Ping, and the others also left the city of Daliang, now become a vast flooded marsh, and began the journey back to Huyou Village.

While resting on the road, Heifu recalled the previous day's scene and asked Chen Ping this question. He only knew the lines "Those who know me, say my heart is troubled; those who know me not, ask what it is I seek." As for the meaning of the whole poem, he did not quite understand it.

"It is 'Shuli,' a piece from the 'Royal Airs.'" Chen Ping had already recovered from the shock of witnessing the collapse of Daliang, the destruction of Wei's altars, and the royal house being moved west.

Strangely enough, although Chen Ping always claimed to study the Yellow Emperor and Laozi, Heifu felt that he did not at all resemble a quietist, non-active follower of that school. Instead, he was a pragmatist, having studied more or less a bit of everything — whether the Confucian Odes, Documents, and Rites, or the sophistry and dark schemes of the School of Diplomacy.

Chen Ping told Heifu that this poem "Shuli" was composed after the ancestral Zhou was destroyed by the Quanrong barbarians. Some Zhou ministers and grandees were taken captive and led north; gazing upon the ancestral temples and palaces of old, now all turned to grain and millet, they grieved over the overturning of the Zhou house, pacing back and forth unable to bear leaving, and so made this poem.

"It matches the mood of Wei's ministers and princes extremely well," Heifu thought.

They were not part of the besieging army, so they had only watched the beginning of this surrender ceremony and could not observe the whole process. They did not even have the standing to enter the city, so they also could not see the Qin troops entering the Wei palaces to search for nobles hidden in every corner, or carting out wagon after wagon of ritual vessels and treasures.

Heifu only heard from people who had gone in, who came out holding their noses and saying that aside from the royal house, ministers, and princes who had taken refuge on the palace high platforms and basically all survived, the casualties among the city's population were extremely high. Most had died of plague; a smaller number had been swept away by the floodwaters that rushed into the city when the walls collapsed.

Because the water attack had made the grain stores moldy, many commoners had also starved to death. Nearly every household had lost someone, and with nowhere to bury the corpses, every ward and hamlet had rotting remains, the stench utterly unbearable.

"It's a good thing I didn't bring Gong Ao along," Heifu thought to himself. Seeing this scene, that angry young man would have been reminded again of the tragedy Bai Qi's attack on Yan had brought upon his family back then.

Thus, for the Qin army, a Daliang rife with plague had lost its value. They ordered those still alive and able to walk to leave the city on their own and disperse to various places. As for those too ill to move, there was no need to spend effort treating them — let them vanish together with this already dead city…

After the population gradually left, Daliang would be abandoned. Returning a few years later, the palace towers and high terraces of old Liang City would be desolate and uninhabited. The marketplaces and wards would surely have lost their urban bustle and glory, leaving only, after the floodwaters receded, a lush expanse of millet shoots, drawing nourishment from the corpses and growing unchecked. Perhaps, now and then, one or two mournful cries of wild pheasants would sound.

That millet hangs heavy, that grain is in seed.

But the destruction of a city and the annihilation of a state are not things easily accomplished. Wei did not perish purely from external violence; it perished from internal decay and the unceasing mistakes it itself made.

Those mistakes had now caused over a hundred thousand people within Daliang to be able only to flee their homes in panic.

So on the road Heifu and his group traveled, behind them it was also crammed with a crowd stretching as far as the eye could see — mostly people who had just fled from Daliang. There were ox- and horse-drawn carts of the wealthy, and more often the handcarts of the poor, loaded with whatever valuables they had managed to salvage from their homes. This made the road a clamor of shouting, cursing, and weeping.

Lost people stumbled and staggered through the crowd searching for their kin. There were even villains openly robbing goods and assaulting women. The Qin troops guarding them only occasionally came to maintain order, making this boundless procession of the displaced move with extreme slowness.

These people would be dispersed to places like Chenliu, Waihuang, and Yangwu to be resettled, but their future livelihoods were unknown. Nobles became commoners; royal grandsons had no food or clothing; peasants who had lost their land would become hired laborers and tenant farmers. Merchants and artisans fared slightly better — they could pick up their old trades in various counties and villages — but without the bustling Daliang, whether they could feed themselves and their families was still an unknown.

Riding on horseback, Heifu turned his head and watched the refugees slowly passing before his eyes — those numb faces and those pairs of blank, lost eyes. He gave a soft sigh…

Conquest and unification have never been tender or warm-hearted; they are mostly violent destruction. Only the common people suffer.

Fortunately, on the very day Daliang collapsed, Heifu had already sent Dongmen Bao and the others back first with the Huyou Village laborers. Now only seven or eight of them remained — himself, Chen Ping, Ji Ying, and a few others. At least they could ride ahead of the refugee column and reach Waihuang first.

As soon as they arrived at Waihuang, they found that porridge tents had already been set up outside the city to aid the Wei people resettled there. There were also several men dressed as physicians standing outside the city. Many of those coming from Daliang carried plague, and the physicians had to examine each one and block them outside the city.

The Qin statutes specifically stipulated that those with epidemic diseases must be quarantined. For example, those with leprosy, once confirmed, were to be immediately sent to a "pestilence relocation station" and isolated to prevent contagion. But if the illness was severe, they might be subjected to "determined killing." He had heard that Xiao Tao's mother had died that way.

Heifu and his group were not exempt. When they rode up to the gate, the physician inevitably came over to question them as well.

However, the physician at Waihuang turned out to be Heifu's acquaintance, Chen Wujiu. When Heifu had passed through Waihuang a few days earlier, he had been busy plotting the ruse to lure the enemy with Yang Xiong and had no chance to meet with him.

Now, seeing Heifu, Chen Wujiu exchanged a few pleasantries, then signaled with his eyes for Heifu to follow him behind the porridge tent. There he said to him: "Heifu, I happen to have something to discuss with you! It's about those suggestions for binding wounds to stop bleeding and for battlefield first aid. My master, Lord Xia, has sent a letter in reply!"

PS: Thanks to Tearful Rain All Over the Sky for the donation. The Alliance Master bonus chapters will be made up in April. In March, with three updates a day and having to revise my thesis to pass the machine check, I have no free time at all except for eating and sleeping.

(End of chapter)