Embers of the Broken River

Chapter 1 That Question

wedge

The Pearl River Estuary, 1840.

The shells fell, but Lin Zexu did not move.

It wasn't that he didn't want to move, it was that he couldn't. His knees felt like they were nailed to the stone slabs of the fortress. His personal guards were pulling on his arms, their fingernails digging into the silk of his patched uniform, tearing out threads.

The forts trembled, the stone slabs trembled, the entire Humen area trembled. British warships' shells plowed up the beach like a field, and the smoke was so thick that the river surface was invisible.

"Sir! Retreat!"

The guards' voices were muffled by the sound of cannon fire. Lin Zexu heard them, but did not reply.

His eyes were fixed on the nautical chart in his hand. It wasn't a chart issued by the imperial court; the court's charts were drawn during the Qianlong era, and the waterway at the Pearl River Estuary had long since changed. This chart was drawn by him stroke by stroke: asking fishermen, asking sailors on foreign merchant ships, asking pilots in Macau, tracing it from Western nautical charts that had been soaked in seawater.

How many years did it take? He hadn't counted. He only remembered that when he drew the last section of the route, the tip of his pen froze, not because of the cold weather, but because the ink was mixed with too much sweat from his hands.

The shell landed twenty paces to his side. Shards of rock slashed his face, cutting a gash. Blood streamed down his cheekbone, dripping onto the nautical chart, dripping onto the mouth of the Pearl River. He didn't wipe it away, only staring at the blood-stained chart, his mind replaying only one thought.

If that river hadn't dried up, what would I have in my hand?

If someone were to ask about Shen Kuo's magnetic needle, would my compass error be more than two degrees?

If Qin Jiushao's calculations hadn't rotted in the box, would I have three extra cannon tables?

If "Tiangong Kaiwu" hadn't gone out of print, and if someone had continued to test Song Yingxing's temper...

If the bamboo strips that Zhao Laojiu buried under the jujube tree are dug up, and I stand here, will I be holding more than just a nautical chart I drew myself?

Another shell landed. Closer still.

The guards knelt down. "My lord!"

Lin Zexu did not turn around. He pulled the nautical chart from the pool of blood, folded it neatly, and stuffed it into his inner garment. Then he stood up and placed his hand on the edge of the battlement.

"Go on, ask again."

The voice wasn't loud. It wasn't addressed to the guards, nor to the gunners on the gun emplacement. It was addressed to the broken river.

Fifty-four years later, in 1894, the Yellow Sea.

The Zhiyuan warship is sinking.

Deng Shichang pressed down on his beloved dog's head. The seawater reached his chest; the Yellow Sea in September already carried a chill. The ship listed thirty degrees, and the ironware on the deck clattered and slid into the sea, splashing water onto his face.

He won't leave.

When the Zhiyuan rammed the Yoshino, its boilers had already been breached. Steam spewed out from the breach, scalding half the crew in the engine room to death. The surviving engineers were still feeding coal into the furnace, their faces burned and their flesh stuck to the shovel handles. But the ship could no longer move.

Yoshino's rapid-fire cannons fired five rounds per minute, and there wasn't a single intact iron plate left on the deck of the Zhiyuan.

The dog struggled. It bit at Deng Shichang's sleeve, pulling it up, its teeth chattering. The seawater was too cold. It didn't know why its master wouldn't leave, but it wouldn't leave.

Deng Shichang pressed the dog's head down, and they both sank down.

Seawater washed over his chin, over his lips. Salty, icy, it filled his throat. His eyes were still open, looking in the direction of Yoshino, watching the smoke from the Japanese Combined Fleet stretch into a line in the distance.

he was thinking.

If the triangle diagram drawn by that guy Jia Xian hadn't burned to ashes in the brazier, would I have been able to calculate the trajectory one more step?

If Qin Jiushao had waited fourteen years for someone who could read his words, would I have been able to calculate Yoshino's flight path a quarter of an hour earlier?

If that person named Yang Hui stood in the bookstore all day copying that abacus book that no one bought, and then someone sat down in the chair behind him and continued copying, would my compass not be off by that half-degree?

Half a degree.

Right now. Right now, at that unbridgeable gap between the Zhiyuan and the Yoshino.

Forty-three years later, in 1937, Nanjing.

The city wall cracked.

It wasn't blasted open by cannon fire, but cracked by the impact of cannonballs. The outer brickwork of this 600-year-old city wall is scattered all over the ground, exposing the rammed earth inside, which is yellow and looks like a gaping wound in the earth.

A soldier crawled out of the rubble.

His gun was wrecked: the barrel was bent into an arc, half of the stock had been blown off, and the magazine was empty. The sound was still ringing in his ears—not from cannon fire, but from the last sound of his fellow villager, who had been crouching with him at the foot of the city wall, as shrapnel grazed his throat. His villager's body lay face down in the rubble just five paces away.

The soldier found a knife in the rubble.

He stood up. His legs were trembling, not from fear, but from the rubble that had hit him; his bones might be fractured. Tanks outside the city were moving towards the city gate, their tracks grinding against the broken bricks like a bone-grinding machine.

A thought flashed through his mind.

If "Tiangong Kaiwu" hadn't gone out of print, would I still be holding a knife?

If someone had continued to manufacture the firearms recorded by Song Yingxing, if the bamboo strips that Zhao Laojiu buried under the jujube tree had not been soaked and rotted by the rain.

If someone were to inquire about the fire pressure recorded by the salt workers at the artesian well, and ask what it could drive, would I have a cannon in my possession?

The tank's gun barrel turned around.

He raised his knife, pointing it towards the Japanese troops.

Three follow-up questions.

They rose from the waters of the Pearl River Estuary in 1840. They rose from the waves of the Yellow Sea in 1894. They rose from the rubble of Nanjing in 1937.

The question Lin Zexu asked while kneeling on the cannon platform.

The question Deng Shichang didn't finish asking before he sank to the bottom of the sea.

The thought that the Nanjing soldier had as he raised his knife.

They are all the same sentence.

What if the river hadn't dried up? What if we had continued to ask?

They flowed for 184 years. The Pearl River Estuary—the Yellow Sea—Nanjing. The questions posed in three desperate situations, like three underground rivers, flowed underground for nearly two hundred years, passing through the fall of the Qing Dynasty, through the flames of war in the Republic of China, and through the birth of the People's Republic of China. They did not disappear.

They are waiting. Waiting for someone to catch them.

Guangzhou, 2024.

Chen Wangqiu squatted down in front of the used bookstore.

Summer in Guangzhou starts acting up as early as April, and even at 10 pm it's still as stuffy as a sauna. A used bookstore is set up in the alley behind the university gate. The stall owner is an old man, fanning himself with a palm-leaf fan, Cantonese opera playing on his radio. Chen Wangqiu was drawn to the tattered copy of *Tiangong Kaiwu* (The Exploitation of the Works of Nature).

He was a doctoral candidate in the history department, specializing in the dissemination of technology during the Ming and Qing dynasties. However, he had actually been on hiatus for quite some time. His advisor was suspended pending investigation, reportedly for citing inappropriate sources in his dissertation. The department held several meetings, and the final conclusion was: the advisor was suspended, and the student's dissertation defense was postponed.

He no longer cared to count which part his thesis, "A Study on the Paths of Technological Dissemination in the Ming and Qing Dynasties," ended in. He only remembered that towards the end, he discovered that all the paths led to the same place—a dead end. Shen Kuo's "Dream Pool Essays" was not taken seriously in the Song Dynasty.

Qin Jiushao's *Mathematical Treatise in Nine Sections* was almost lost by the Ming Dynasty; when the Siku Quanshu (Complete Library of the Four Treasuries) was compiled from the *Yongle Encyclopedia*, one-third of it was missing. Song Yingxing's *The Exploitation of the Works of Nature* fared even worse; it was lost in China, reprinted in Japan, and only bought back from Japan during the Republic of China era.

None of the questioners waited for the next person to answer.

Each one.

He knew the historical facts were as they were. But each time, he couldn't help but write a small note in the margin of his paper: What if it doesn't continue? He would write it and then cross it out. That was the first line that failed academic review. He crossed it out three times, the ink seeping into the next page.

He opened the abridged edition of "Tiangong Kaiwu" (The Exploitation of the Works of Nature). It was a 1931 edition, printed by the Commercial Press. The spine had come unglued, and he could smell the musty odor of old paper when he opened it.

A piece of paper fell out from between the pages of the book.

Handwritten paper. Very thin, very brittle, the edges already charred yellow, as if snatched from the edge of a brazier. On it are brushstrokes, tiny characters, written hastily. Only two lines.

Saltpeter 7:3 sulfur, fry far away. Saltpeter 6:4 sulfur, fry until crushed. Recorded in the twelfth year of Jiading.

The twelfth year of the Jiading era (1219 AD). Southern Song Dynasty.

Chen Wangqiu's finger stopped on that year. He knew what had happened in the twelfth year of the Jiading era: the Mongol-Jin war had advanced south, and the Military Equipment Bureau had ordered a retreat south, burning all the archives that couldn't be taken. On that day, someone, by the fire, on a piece of paper, had written down these two proportions.

He turned the piece of paper over.

There were words on the back. Smaller and more scrawled than on the front, as if they were hastily added after the front was finished, or perhaps written carelessly to avoid being discovered. He held the paper close to the streetlight, trying to decipher each word.

This method may be useful. I leave it for future generations.

Leave it to those who come after.

Chen Wangqiu couldn't stand up. Not because his legs were numb. It was because these words were too heavy. So heavy that his knees wouldn't bend, so heavy that the air in his chest was forced out. That man from the twelfth year of Jiading, he didn't know if this piece of paper would be burned, didn't know if his name would be remembered, didn't know if anyone would open this book eight hundred years later. He simply wrote it. Leaving it for posterity.

He bought the book. Ten yuan.

He didn't go back to his dorm. There was a dessert shop still open at the alley entrance, so he went in, ordered a bowl of mung bean soup, then opened his book and placed the handwritten paper under the lamp. The dessert shop's light was yellow, different from the desk lamp in his dorm, but the light shining on the paper was the same.

He suddenly wondered, who was that person? What did he look like? What was he thinking on that night in the twelfth year of Jiading, when he wrote those two lines with his frozen fingers holding a brush by the fire? Did he have any family? In what year did he die? Was his formula ever used?

No one knows. History has erased his name. Only these two lines remain, along with the inscription on the back: "For posterity."

Chen Wangqiu finished the mung bean soup. It was cold.

He walked back to his dorm. The hallway light was broken, so he used his phone for illumination and struggled to open the door with his key. He sat on his bed and turned on the desk lamp. The white light shone on the handwritten paper.

Those two lines of text were clearly visible under the lamplight. "Seven parts saltpeter, three parts sulfur, blast far. Six parts saltpeter, four parts sulfur, blast to pieces." Recorded in the twelfth year of the Jiading era. A man, eight hundred years ago, amidst the flames of war, wrote the formula on paper, tucked it into a book, and then died. His name was not left behind. His questioning flowed down this river, to Lin Zexu, to Deng Shichang, to the soldiers on the Nanjing city wall, and then to him.

He looked at the paper.

Lin Zexu knelt on the Humen Fortress, his nautical chart showing a two-degree error. Deng Shichang sank into the Yellow Sea, his compass showing a half-degree deviation. Nanjing soldiers raised their swords, facing tanks.

Like the man by the bonfire in the twelfth year of the Jiading reign, they all asked questions in dire straits, they all lingered in dire straits. Lin Zexu stuffed the nautical chart into his clothes. Deng Shichang forced the dog's head against the Yoshino. The Nanjing soldiers raised their knives. They did not receive an answer. But in the moment they waited for the answer, the river, in their hands, did not break.

Chen Wangqiu picked up the old, worn-out fountain pen he hadn't thrown away from the pen holder and wrote a sentence in the upper right corner of a blank sheet of printing paper.

What if that river hadn't dried up?

The lamp flickered for a moment. The filament snapped, and it went dark for half a second. In the darkness, he felt the tear stain on the handwritten paper. It wasn't his; he hadn't cried yet. It belonged to the craftsman who wrote down the recipe eight hundred years ago, the stranger who found this paper centuries later. The tear stain clung to his fingers, warm.

The Pearl River flows outside the window. The lamp's beam shrinks to the corner of the table, illuminating half a page of paper, a tear stain, and ten words.

Chen Wangqiu's eyes blurred and mist filled his vision, his mind racing.