Chapter 348: Clerical Script

Was Cheng Miao still alive? At noon the next day, when Heifu arrived at Yunyang County by light carriage with his subordinate Dong Yi and several Gentlemen Guards, he received a definite answer from Prison Assistant Cao Jiu: not only was he alive, he was living quite well.

Cao Jiu was the brother-in-law of Sima Xin, the jailer of Xianyang's South Market, and knew Dong Yi. As soon as he heard that Heifu had come by the Emperor's command to inspect, he immediately and most respectfully ushered him into the county prison.

"The bond-servant Cheng Miao is out on external labor; allow this lowly clerk to send someone to bring him back..."

Heifu sized up the small county prison; its layout was somewhat similar to the one in Anlu, giving him a sense of familiarity. He turned his head and asked, "How long will it take?"

"Half a shichen for the round trip; I must ask the superior clerk to wait a short while..."

He had someone serve broth to quench Heifu's thirst, and the County Assistant kept Heifu company in awkward conversation. Cao Jiu withdrew outside the hall and asked his acquaintance Dong Yi in a low voice, "Does His Majesty wish to see Cheng Miao?"

Dong Yi shook his head.

Cao Jiu's expression changed. "His Majesty wants to kill Cheng Miao?"

Dong Yi still shook his head. "The Chief of the Gentlemen of the Palace said His Majesty ordered him to come see Cheng Miao, to observe what this man is doing. As for whether it's to see him or kill him, the Chief of the Gentlemen didn't say, and I dare not recklessly speculate on the Emperor's mind."

Cao Jiu had just breathed a sigh of relief when Heifu summoned him back into the hall and began asking about Cheng Miao's deeds.

"In which year was Cheng Miao imprisoned, and what crime did he commit?"

Cao Jiu hurriedly said, "Reporting to the superior clerk, Cheng Miao has been imprisoned for ten years. The charge was the rebellion of Fan Yuqi. Cheng Miao had been recommended by him as a prison clerk and also entered the palace as a Gentleman. When Fan Yuqi defected, Cheng Miao not only failed to confess his own offense but even defended Fan Yuqi. His Majesty was furious, sentenced him to be a bond-servant, and dispatched him to Yunyang to serve his sentence..."

"So that's how it is."

Heifu suddenly understood. Qin allowed officials to recommend others for clerkships, but once the recommendation succeeded, the recommender and the recommended were bound together. If the recommended person committed a crime, the recommender was implicated for improper recommendation, and vice versa. Over a decade ago, when Lü Buwei and Lao Ai fell from power, their retainers serving as officials at court were almost entirely swept away.

What Qin Shi Huang detested most was betrayal. Fan Yuqi had once served as Chief of the Gentlemen of the Palace, and had repeatedly gone on campaigns to attack cities and seize territory, rendering great military service to Qin. Yet after being defeated by Li Mu, he chose to defect. The Emperor was naturally extremely furious, offering a heavy reward of a thousand jin of gold and a fief of ten thousand households for Fan Yuqi's capture.

Cheng Miao not only failed to draw a clear line in time but instead defended him; it was already fortunate he wasn't executed.

However, a person whom Qin Shi Huang still remembered after ten years could never be so simple.

Heifu asked again, "What labor has he performed in Yunyang these past ten years?"

Qin did not support idlers. Criminals sentenced to penal servitude, as long as they had the capacity to work, were forced to labor. Even prisoners condemned to death, so long as a day passed without their death, had to exchange labor for their food.

Thus, in Qin, penal convict and bond-servant could be considered synonymous.

Cao Jiu glanced at the County Assistant and answered honestly, "Although Cheng Miao is a bond-servant, because the 'Statute on Convict Labor' states that bond-servants possessing skills to serve as craftsmen shall not be made personal servants, provisioners, or wall-builders. Cheng Miao is well-versed in laws and ordinances and can also write an excellent hand. Therefore, the authorities did not assign him to hard labor, but instead had him work under the Ordinance Clerk, assisting in the pursuit and arrest of criminals. Apart from receiving no salary and having to return to the prison to stay each night, his treatment is no different from that of an ordinary minor clerk. After deducting clothing and food, he even receives four qian for each official task..."

Heifu laughed in spite of himself. "So, this 'external labor' you mentioned for Cheng Miao is actually following the Ordinance Clerk to handle cases?"

The County Assistant's expression soured, and he glared at Cao Jiu. Cao Jiu also wiped his sweat and responded, "Yes, that is precisely the case."

Letting Cheng Miao serve a light sentence was an idea he had proposed to the County Assistant. Although legally justifiable, if His Majesty's anger shifted, they would be implicated too.

"It's good to have a specialty."

Heifu thought to himself that this Cheng Miao had decent luck. The treatment he was currently enjoying was probably similar to that of Song Jiang in Water Margin when he was exiled to Jiangzhou. As long as he didn't write rebellious poems to court death, muddling along like this wouldn't be a problem.

But what exactly made Qin Shi Huang remember this man? Before coming, Heifu had asked some old close ministers around Qin Shi Huang. They said that when Cheng Miao served as a Court Gentleman Consultant, he had been ordered by the Emperor to revise Qin script. Unfortunately, he later committed a crime, and the matter was left unresolved...

The Emperor sending Heifu on this prison visit this time was perhaps related to this matter.

Just then, Cao Jiu also mentioned that the small amount of money and cloth Cheng Miao received from each official assignment was all used to buy brushes, ink, and bamboo slips. Whenever he had leisure time, he was always writing ceaselessly in the prison...

Heifu's interest was piqued. Not wanting to just wait idly for Cheng Miao to return, he had Cao Jiu take him to see Cheng Miao's quarters in the prison.

Upon entering the Yunyang prison, Heifu discovered that the cells here were also divided into different grades.

The lowest grade housed the wall-builders, with no bedding, no windows, just some moldy straw on the ground. Ten men were crammed into a narrow space, which emitted an unpleasant odor.

The middle grade held the rooms for convicts like firewood-gatherers, rice-sorters, robber-guards, and grain-pounders. Though the food was coarse and the bedding damp, they could at least find shelter, five men to a room — an interesting thing was that grain-pounding used to be a heavy punishment on par with wall-building. In recent years, treadle-operated and water-powered trip-hammers had become widespread, making grain-pounding much less strenuous, so it had become a middle-grade punishment.

The highest-grade area was on the second floor of the prison. Apart from the door being bolted from the outside and bars installed on the windows, it was not much different from ordinary civilian dwellings. Cao Jiu led Heifu in, unlocking the door. It was afternoon, and sunlight streamed in through the window, filling the entire room...

"Superior clerk, this is Cheng Miao's dwelling."

Heifu's mouth fell slightly open. What prison cell was this? It was clearly a calligraphy exhibition hall! On three mottled walls hung hundreds of bamboo slips densely covered with black characters.

"These are..."

Cao Jiu smiled. "Exactly what Cheng Miao has written over the past ten years. He used the reward money from each official case assignment to buy brushes, ink, and writing slips. There is nothing improper in what he wrote, so we did not interfere."

After carefully stepping around the bamboo slips lying helter-skelter on the floor, Heifu approached the wall and looked closely. What was written on them were not rebellious poems, but The Way of Being an Official, which every Qin clerk had to memorize.

"In all the ways of being an official, one must be precise, pure, upright, cautious, prudent, steadfast, thoroughly impartial, meticulously observant, calm and not harsh, and judicious in rewards and punishments..."

With just one glance, he immediately noticed that the script form on these bamboo slips was quite different from what he saw daily!

It was not the most common Qin seal script. Although Qin seal script had already been improved from the complex great seal script of the Zhou dynasty, it still retained some habits of bronze inscriptions, with rounded strokes, horizontal and vertical lines, and basically uniform thickness, requiring slow writing.

Even less was it the variously formed scripts of the six states like Wei and Chu that Heifu had seen before.

"It somewhat resembles the shorthand style used by Nan Commandery clerks when recording case details..."

The Qin bamboo slips excavated by later generations were basically all in this shorthand script. To gain speed, clerks often subconsciously simplified the seal script, reducing strokes and changing the character shape to a square, flat form.

No, the script before his eyes had transformed even more thoroughly than that shorthand small seal style. Almost every character had been simplified from complex to simple, from round to square, from curved to straight.

There was no mistake.

Heifu felt a small surge of excitement, because he was actually seeing here a script form that would be passed down to later ages, rather than ancient seal characters that always felt foreign no matter how much he studied them.

"This is..."

"Clerical script!"

"Many thanks to the superior clerk for bestowing a name!"

Just as Heifu blurted out these two words, a middle-aged man wearing the reddish-brown convict's garb, with graying hair, also appeared at the doorway. He looked at the room full of ten years' painstaking effort and sighed with emotion:

"Clerical script, clerical script — the script written by a bond-servant; clerical script, clerical script — also assisting where seal script falls short! A fine name!"

With that, he bowed deeply to Heifu. "Everything Cheng Miao has written in ten years is all here. Even if His Majesty were to grant me death, Cheng Miao could meet his end with a smile!"

"Master Cheng, you speak too gravely."

Heifu walked over and supported Cheng Miao, while simultaneously looking at the other two walls, which held comparison charts of seal script characters and clerical script — four thousand seal characters, nearly all with a one-to-one corresponding clerical form. He fell into thought.

He understood in his heart why Qin Shi Huang remembered this man Cheng Miao so persistently. It was perhaps related to a state policy the Emperor had recently intended to implement!

"Unifying the cart tracks, unifying the written script!"

This time, the Emperor had moved to Linguang Palace and had even brought along the three great calligraphers Li Si, Zhao Gao, and Hu Wujing, and then sent him to check on Cheng Miao. The purpose was very clear.

"Why not ride this favorable wind and get that matter done?"

An idea that had long lain hidden in Heifu's heart, lured forth by a roomful of clerical-script documents, could no longer be suppressed at this moment…

PS: For similar examples, see *The Qin Bamboo Slips Housed at the Yuelu Academy (Vol. 3)* — "Bondservant Ai" and "Bondservant Wuzhi" also had freedom of movement and, under the direction of a Prison Clerk or Ordinance Clerk, engaged in tasks such as apprehending criminals.