Sandalwood Death: A Novel (Chinese Literature Today Book Series)

where the grass lies. People’s hearts are iron, laws the crucible, and even the hardest stone under the hammer dies. (How true!) I served the Qing Court as its preeminent executioner, an enviable reputation in the Board of Punishments. (You can check with your own eyes!) A new minister was appointed each year, like a musical reprise. My appointment alone was secure, for I performed a great service by killing the nation’s enemies. (A beheading is like chopping greens; a flaying differs little from peeling an onion.) Cotton cannot contain fire; the dead cannot be buried in frozen ground. I poke a hole in the window paper to speak the truth and admonish, prick up your ears if you seek to be wise.
    — Maoqiang Sandalwood Death. A galloping aria
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    My dear dissolute daughter-in-law, why do you glare like that? Do you not worry that your eyes will pop out of your head? Yes, that is my profession. From my seventeenth year, when I dissevered the body of a thieving clerk at the silver repository, to my sixtieth year, when I administered the lingering death to the would-be assassin of His Excellency Yuan Shikai, I earned my living at that calling for forty-four years. You still glare. Well, I have witnessed many glares in my life, some far more insistent than yours, the likes of which no one in all of Shandong Province, let alone you people, has ever seen. You need not even see them in person. Merely describing them could make you soil yourself out of fear.
    In the tenth year of the Xianfeng Emperor, a eunuch called Little Insect audaciously pilfered His Majesty’s Seven Star fowling piece from the Imperial Armory, where he worked, and sold it. A tribute gift from the Russian Tsarina to the Emperor, it was no ordinary hunting rifle. It had a golden barrel, a silver trigger, and a sandalwood stock in which were inlaid seven diamonds, each the size of a peanut. It fired silver bullets that could bring down a phoenix from the sky and a unicorn on land. No fowling piece like it had graced the world since Pangu divided heaven from earth. The larcenous Little Insect, believing that the sickly Emperor was rapidly losing his faculties, impudently removed the piece from the armory and sold it for the reported price of three thousand silver ingots, which his father used to buy a tract of farmland. The poor delusional youngster forgot one basic principle: Anyone who becomes Emperor is, by definition, a dragon, a Son of Heaven. Has there even been a dragon, a Son of Heaven, who was not endowed with peerless wisdom? One who could not foretell everything under the sun? Emperor Xianfeng, a man of extraordinary mystical skills, could see and identify the tip of an animal’s autumn hair with dragon eyes that appeared normal during the day, but emitted such powerful rays of light when night fell that he needed no lamp to put brush to paper or to read a book. It was said that the Emperor planned a hunting expedition beyond the Great Wall and called for his Seven Star fowling piece. A panicky Little Insect made up bizarre explanations for why that was not possible: first an old fox with white fur had stolen it, then it was a magical hawk that had flown off with it. Emperor Xianfeng’s dragon mien turned red with anger, and He handed down an Imperial Edict, ordering that Little Insect be turned over to the Office of Palace Justice, which was responsible for disciplining eunuchs. The standard employment of interrogation tactics secured a confession from the miscreant, so angering His Majesty that golden flashes shot from His eyes. He jumped to His feet in the Hall of Golden Chimes and roared:
    “Little Insect, We shit upon eight generations of your ancestors! Like the rat that licks the cat’s anus, you are an audacious fool. How dare you practice your thieving ways in Our home! If We do not make an example of you, We do not deserve to be Emperor!”
    With that, Emperor Xianfeng decided that Little Insect would be subjected to a special punishment as a warning to all, and He called upon the Office of Palace Justice to read him a list, not unlike a menu for an Imperial meal. Officials presented all the punishments used in the past for the Emperor’s selection: flogging, crushing, suffocating, quartering, dismemberment, and more. After hearing them out, the Emperor shook His head and said, “Ordinary, too common. Like stale, spoiled leftovers. No,” He said, “you must seek advice from the experts in the