Chapter 46: Morning Sights: The Thousand-Pound Bookbag on a Child's Back

Taiji Palace plaza.

The wind had died.

Even the rustle of leaves faded low.

Li Shimin stood at the very edge of the white jade steps.

He listened to Lin Xuan's words, gazing at the Tang-dynasty artifacts lit up one by one within the Sky Screen.

Looking at those calligraphy copies, those painted ceramics.

An unprecedented shudder shot up from his tailbone straight to the crown of his head.

Li Shimin raised his hand; his rough palm brushed past the corner of his eye, wiping away the lingering tear-stain.

He straightened his spine.

A faint, crisp pop ran through every bone in his body.

In that instant, this Tiance General, this Emperor of Great Tang, broke free once and for all from that lifeless, suffocating feudal obsession.

Daming Palace.

Zhaoling.

A thousand autumns, ten thousand generations.

Those vanities and shackles that had imprisoned emperors across the ages crumbled to ash in an instant before the two words "civilization."

Palaces heaped from stone and earth would, in the end, turn to mud in some heritage park.

A dynasty held together by slaughter and might would, one day, be overthrown by the armies of a new house.

That is called the Way of Heaven.

No human force can defy it.

But human hands can leave behind something else.

Something that could make people fourteen hundred years from now still build a sacred shrine for it, still tend it day and night.

"Civilization…"

Li Shimin chewed over those two words again and again.

The desolation at the bottom of his eyes was swept clean. What replaced it was an extreme, crystalline clarity that pierced through the mists of time.

Li Shimin turned around. He strode up the steps, walking toward the center of the great hall.

The dragon robe billowed. The emperor's oppressive majesty returned to Taiji Palace.

"Zhangsun Wuji! Wei Zheng! Fang Xuanling! Minister of Works! Minister of Revenue!"

Li Shimin roared in anger, calling out five high ministers in a row.

The five men hurried from the ranks and dropped to their knees in unison on the golden bricks.

"Your subject is here!"

"Hear my imperial edict!"

"First edict. From this day forth, all construction of Daming Palace on Longshou Plain is to halt in its entirety."

"Dismiss the convict laborers and conscripted workers, give them travel money, and send them back to their home registrations."

The Minister of Works jerked his head up, his face full of shock.

"Your Majesty, half the foundation of Daming Palace has already been rammed solid, and the timber has already been hauled to Chang'an."

"If we halt now, millions of strings of coin will simply be thrown to the wind!"

Li Shimin rejected him without the slightest mercy. "Thrown to the wind is still better than turning into a dirt mound where wild dogs defecate someday!"

"Not only is Daming Palace to stop being built—Cuiwei Palace, Jiucheng Palace, every imperial temporary palace, all repairs are to cease without exception."

"Even my own Zhaoling—fill in those lavish underground burial chambers for me."

"Beyond a few stone chambers, nothing is to be left!"

The Tang court officials sucked in cold breaths.

The Emperor had just flatly denied even his own posthumous pageantry.

Li Shimin paid no heed to the ministers' horror and looked toward the Minister of Revenue, Tang Jian.

"Second edict. Audit the National Treasury, audit the Imperial Privy Purse!"

"Take every last coin saved from halting the palace construction, together with my own private funds—don't leave a single one—and disburse it all for me."

"Use this money to build schools for me, in every prefecture, every county, every township of Great Tang."

"Buy timber, buy bricks and tiles."

"If you can't afford blue-brick tile houses, then build thatched huts."

He turned his head toward Wei Zheng. "Third edict. Recruit every carver of inscriptions under heaven."

"Take the Four Books and Five Classics, take the agricultural treatises and Arithmetic, take every fine poem written by Tang literati—carve them all for me onto jujube-wood blocks."

Li Shimin's eyes blazed; it was the fanaticism of a man who had found the foundation of an entirely new empire.

"Make paper! Print books! Print them by the tens of thousands of volumes!"

"Drive the price of books down to the lowest for me, and distribute them to every school under heaven."

"Daming Palace will not last fifteen hundred years."

"But so long as the script of Great Tang is printed into tens of millions of volumes and scattered among the people—"

"So long as every child of Great Tang can read, every one of them reciting Tang poetry—the soul of Great Tang lives on."

The emperor's roar echoed through the great hall.

"I will build no more palaces. I will build civilization."

"I will make the literary splendor of Great Tang, fourteen hundred years from now, not only displayed inside their light-piercing Glazed Ware cabinets, but grown inside the minds of every person under heaven!"

Zhangsun Wuji prostrated himself and kowtowed.

Wei Zheng, tears streaming down his face, cried out, "How sage!"

Fang Xuanling's hands trembled as he accepted this burden that would overturn national policy.

The massive wheel of history, because of a little girl's tears in a modern city, because of a half-day tour of a history Museum.

At this moment, it let out a deafening, ear-splitting roar of metal grinding.

The chariot of Great Tang completely veered off that dead end obsessed with civil engineering projects and the eternal security of imperial power.

The treads turned, crushing the vanity of old days.

Charging madly toward the glorious broad road of cultural popularization and educational enlightenment.

The first rain had just cleared.

The morning wind, carrying the faint earthy scent of mud, blew through the streets.

Lin Xuan pushed open the unit door, holding Xiao Sizi's hand as they walked out of the residential compound.

"Buy two steamer baskets of soup dumplings today, plus two cups of soy milk." Lin Xuan was calculating breakfast.

They reached the main gate of the compound.

Xiao Sizi stopped in her tracks.

She tilted her head back, her gaze fixed on the sidewalk not far away.

A group of children were hurrying forward with quick steps.

They were about the same height as Xiao Sizi, all wearing loose-fitting red-and-white garments.

The most striking thing was the square cloth bag on each child's back.

The cloth bag was huge, almost pressing down on their shoulders.

The weight was not light; it made several thin children's backs curve slightly, their steps extremely heavy.

Xiao Sizi's brows furrowed.

She grabbed Lin Xuan's finger and tugged him backward.

"Lin Xuan," Xiao Sizi lowered her voice, pointing at those peers rushing by, "what Tang Code law have they broken?"

Lin Xuan stopped, following her finger to look.

"Broke the law? Who broke the law?"

"Those children," Xiao Sizi looked distressed, "all wearing prisoner clothes, carrying heavy loads."

"At such a young age, subjected to this kind of exile and hard labor, like laborers moving stones."

"Did the adults in their families commit a crime of collective punishment?"

Lin Xuan was stunned for two seconds.

Finally, he couldn't hold back a laugh.

"Let's go, buy the buns first."

Lin Xuan took her hand and walked to the breakfast stall on the street corner.

He paid, then took the steaming hot paper bag.

Lin Xuan led Xiao Sizi to the flower bed by the roadside.

The water droplets on the bench surface had already dried.

The two sat down side by side.

Lin Xuan inserted the straw into the soy milk and handed it over.

"Have a sip of something hot." Lin Xuan took a bite of a soup dumpling himself, "What they are wearing isn't prisoner clothes; that's called a unified school uniform."

"What they are carrying isn't bricks."

Xiao Sizi sipped her soy milk, her eyes full of confusion.

"That cloth bag is so heavy; what does it contain?"

"Books, all textbooks and notebooks for class."

In Great Tang, a single scroll of paper book was as precious as gold.

For ordinary wealthy families, being able to hide a hundred scrolls already made them a scholarly household.

Those ordinary young children running on the streets, each carrying dozens of scrolls of books?

Xiao Sizi swallowed her soy milk, "So many books?"

"Are they all the offspring of kings, lords, and generals? Going to Hongwen Guan to attend classes?"

Lin Xuan shook his head.

"Inside there are children of vegetable vendors, children of company clerks, and children of street-sweeping sanitation workers."

"In the future, whether your parents are high officials or the super-rich, or peddlers and porters."

"As long as the child reaches school age, the state mandates it; they must go to school to learn to read and write."

"This is called Nine-Year Compulsory Education."

Xiao Sizi held the paper cup, the back of her hand pressing against the warm cup wall.

"Mandated? If a farmer's family is poor, unable to pay tuition, unable to buy brushes and ink?"

"It costs nothing."

"The state pays to build schools, the state pays to hire teachers."

"All tuition and miscellaneous fees are waived. If any parents dare not let their children go to school, the state will send people to investigate and forcibly send the children into the classroom."

Above the Sky Screen.

Lin Xuan's voice spread throughout Jiuzhou.

Accompanying his narration, the view pulled back.

His gaze swept across the street, settling on the vast modern campus ahead.

In the morning light.

Thousands of students in red-and-white school uniforms stood in neat formation on the playground.

The Yinyue of the calisthenics broadcast ceased.

A bright red flag rose slowly amidst the national anthem.

Thousands of children looked up, their youthful faces brimming with vitality.

The formation dispersed, and the children poured into the rows of bright teaching buildings.

Inside the spacious classrooms.

The incandescent lights flickered on.

Before the blackboard, a teacher wrote with chalk.

Below, dozens of children sat upright at wooden desks.

They opened brand-new, colorful textbooks.

The sound of recitation pierced through the Glass windows, merging into a wave of noise that shot straight to the clouds.

It was the thunderous roar of countless commoners' children awakening their minds.