Chapter 55: The Garden of All Gardens Turned to Ash

The wheel of history mercilessly crushed through black-and-white footage.

The television screen switched scenes.

The smoke of naval battle faded, and the camera pushed inland.

A majestic imperial garden appeared in view.

Pavilions, terraces, and towers were built beside water.

Traditional Chinese upturned eaves and bracket sets interwove with Western-style white marble columns.

Within the garden, rare flowers and exotic grasses, flying birds and roaming beasts, formed a breathtaking sight.

A low male voiceover began.

"As time progressed, the Eight-Nation Alliance breached Jingcheng."

"This garden, built over generations of Qing emperors' labor and hailed as the 'Garden of All Gardens,' met its end."

In the screen, violent kicks replaced the earlier silence.

Groups of soldiers, clad in colorful foreign uniforms, kicked open vermilion palace gates with rifles fitted with bayonets.

Their boots, caked with mud and water, trampled recklessly over gold-embroidered Persian carpets.

Greedy desire ignited in the eyes of these foreign soldiers.

One soldier swung his rifle butt, shattering a rosewood display cabinet inlaid with rubies.

He snatched the jade carving inside and shoved it into his bulky military coat pocket.

The half-man-tall blue-and-white porcelain vases they couldn't carry were smashed into shards with repeated rifle butts.

Several officers of foreign origin drew their sidearms and brutally slashed down centuries-old master paintings hanging on the walls.

They tore open the silk scrolls, ancient for a thousand years, merely to wrap and bind the looted gold, silver, and jewels.

The library doors were smashed open.

They rummaged carelessly through mountains of rare ancient texts and secret histories of previous dynasties.

As looting neared its end, torches were lit.

What they couldn't take, they destroyed.

This was the most primitive logic of bandits.

Torches were hurled toward beds draped in silk curtains, toward bookshelves piled with ancient texts, toward the exquisitely crafted wooden halls.

Flames surged skyward.

Dry ancient timber cracked with sharp, snapping sounds.

Fire rapidly merged into one vast sea, consuming everything.

Thick black smoke rolled upward, blotting out the sky over Huaxia's Jingcheng.

The television's narration vanished.

Only a dull, oppressive cello drone remained.

Accompanying this low-frequency string tone, a faint, ancient, mournful xun flute began to sound.

The xun's wail sobbed, as if ten thousand spirits slain on this land cried blood-curdling cries.

…

In the living room.

The floor lamp's glow appeared dim.

Xiao Sizi sat with her back to the television, curled tightly against Lin Xuan.

Her small hands gripped the front of Lin Xuan's shirt.

Her tiny body trembled uncontrollably with sobs.

Tears burst forth, warm liquid quickly soaking through Lin Xuan's cotton homewear, clinging to his skin.

She dared not turn back.

The sound of delicate porcelain shattering, the images of ancient texts curling and burning in flames—these exceeded the limits of a four-and-a-half-year-old girl's endurance.

The peak power of the Tang Dynasty had instilled in her an innate pride.

Now, that pride was crushed beneath the feet of those golden-haired, blue-eyed barbarians on the screen.

Lin Xuan. Left arm wrapped around the girl's slender shoulders, right palm pressed against her back.

Slowly, gently, he stroked.

Calming her fear.

Lin Xuan's face turned ashen.

His jaw muscles bulged sharply from clenched teeth.

He stared at the screen at the three-day-and-night fire consuming the Old Summer Palace.

It was a permanent scar etched into the blood of every modern Huaxia person.

"You may be afraid, but you must remember this history."

"This is the price of backwardness."

"This is why, in later generations, even at the cost of selling every pot and pan, tightening every belt, people fought desperately to climb the tree of technology!"

"They held guns and cannons; you held only poetry and songs."

"No matter how brilliant your culture, no matter how exquisite your porcelain—in their eyes, it was merely meat on a chopping block."

Lin Xuan took a deep breath.

His chest lifted.

He uttered the absolute truth distilled from a century of blood and tears.

"Dignity rests only upon the blade's edge!"

The Song Dynasty timeline, Bianjing.

Inside the Imperial Gardens.

Song Huizong Zhao Ji stood atop a high platform.

Hair disheveled, eyes wide open.

He was the Emperor, and also the world's top-tier artist.

He loved calligraphy and paintings more than the empire.

In the Sky Screen, the invading army used bayonets to pierce Gu Kaizhi's famous painting and threw Wang Xizhi's rubbings into a fire to warm themselves.

Every frozen frame of the scene was like a rusted, dull knife, sawing back and forth across the heart.

"Thieves... you barbarian thieves!"

Zhao Ji's lips trembled as his shaking right hand pointed toward the heavens.

"Those are the ink treasures of our Huaxia sages! Those are the crystallizations of our Eastern cultural lineage!"

"You coarse beasts, how dare you desecrate them so!"

Rage surged to his heart.

A rush of rebellious blood surged upward, bursting through his throat.

Pfft!

Zhao Ji spat out a mouthful of bright red blood.

His legs gave way, his vision went black, and he fell straight backward.

"Your Majesty!"

"Quickly summon the Imperial Physician! Your Majesty has fainted!"

The eunuchs and maids around him scrambled in chaos, their terrified cries echoing through the inner gardens.

The Great Tang, Taiji Palace.

Inside the main hall, the lights burned bright.

Yet the atmosphere was so oppressive it was nearly solidified.

Li Shimin felt his chest hollowed out.

The atmosphere was so oppressive it was nearly solidified.

Li Shimin felt his chest hollowed out.

His heart, liver, spleen, lungs, and kidneys were all ripped out by the great fire that burned down the Old Summer Palace.

Those were Huaxia's treasures.

They were the flowers of civilization watered by the wisdom and sweat of generations of ancestors.

The secret-color porcelain fired by our Tang craftsmen, the quatrains written by our scholars, and the gardens that future generations labored to restore.

All of it was gone.

Robbed clean by a band of pirates who crossed the oceans, in the most barbaric and brutal manner.

What they could not carry, they burned to ashes.

There was no honorable confrontation between two armies.

There was no dignified transfer of power from victor to vanquished.

There was only slaughter.

This was a one-sided plunder by a higher-dimensional civilization against a lower-dimensional one.

Thud.

Chu Suiliang dropped to his knees.

This great Tang calligrapher struck his head heavily against the cold ground.

"Heaven has no eyes... Heaven has no eyes!"

Chu Suiliang burst into loud weeping.

Tears mixed with snot ran all over his face.

There was not a shred of the dignity of a court official.

He saw the scattered fragments of calligraphy rubbings lying in the mud and water within the Sky Screen.

Those were the cultural foundations he held dearer than his own life.

Fang Xuanling, Du Ruhui, Wei Zheng.

The Tang's most elite civil and military officials were now all prostrate on the ground.

Within Taiji Palace, wails of grief merged into a single sound.

It was the despairing sobbing of a collapsing faith.

The Chinese civilization they took pride in, the Celestial Empire they believed stood at the center of the world.

Before ironclad ships and heavy cannons, they had become mere fish and meat for others to butcher.

Li Shimin closed his eyes, squeezing two clear tears from the corners.

He drew a deep breath of the cold air in the hall, forcibly suppressing the grief and anger in his chest.

He opened his eyes again.

In the Emperor's gaze, there was now a bone-deep clarity that pierced through the mists of history.

He turned his head, looking at the ministers kneeling all over the floor.

Then he looked at the empty Dragon Throne.

Before this.

In this great hall, they plotted day and night.

Plotting the factional strife between Crown Prince Li Chengqian and Prince of Wei Li Tai.

Plotting the balance of power among Zhangsun Wuji and other aristocratic clans. Plotting how to ensure the bloodline of the Li Tang imperial house endures for a thousand generations.

Imperial power crushed and crushed back; factions united to attack outsiders.

To fight over that limited slice of the power cake, they battled each other to the death.

But now.

Li Shimin felt these plots were laughably small, even pitiable.

"All rise."

The ministers stopped their weeping, helped each other up, and stood.

"Ministers. Do you see clearly now?"

"Those barbarians do not speak of benevolence, righteousness, or morality; they do not speak of the Way of Confucius and Mencius."

"They recognize only the firearms in their hands, only the caliber of their cannons."

"Previously, I believed that changing dynasties was merely a matter of changing the surname on the Dragon Throne."

"The world would still be Huaxia's world; the literature would still be Huaxia's literature."

Li Shimin clenched his teeth, his face twisted.

"But I was wrong, utterly and completely wrong."

He looked at Fang Xuanling, looked at Zhangsun Wuji.

"If our Huaxia does not seek change, if we continue to cling to the Four Books and Five Classics, playing with political schemes and factional strife in this court."

"What awaits us is not the question of who will become Emperor."

Li Shimin stepped forward; killing intent and resolve exploded with a boom.

"It is the entire Huaxia civilization, your descendants and heirs, being completely and utterly erased from this round sphere by those bandits wielding firearms!"

The entire court of civil and military officials trembled violently.

A panic of national extinction and racial annihilation, never before felt, coiled around the heart of every single one of them like a venomous snake.

This was no longer the survival or destruction of the Li Tang family alone.

This was the life or death of an entire civilization.