Chengdu Once More
Because it had never been Liu Ba's true heart to follow Liu Bei, he feared to draw suspicion upon himself, and so he lived with austere integrity. Later he tasted the douyun — the Bean Cloud — that Zhang Lan had made for her elder brother, and though he tried every means to obtain it, he could not.
In earlier days Liu Ba had refused Zhang Fei's visit and treated him with neglect, so that Zhang Fei, in great anger, cut off his steps and came no more. Yet Liu Ba, unable to forget the douyun, went of his own accord to seek out Zhang Fei's daughter. Truly, no one can know how the affairs of men will turn.
Word of the tofu spread with astonishing speed. Besides my own family and the attendants, only a handful of people to whom I had privately sent some had tasted it — and even so, it traveled far too fast.
Curiosity about a new food, and the tasting-verdicts of men of high repute, surely had their part in it. But the heart of the matter was the story the tofu carried. All through Chengdu the rumor ran that I had made it with my own hands for my brother. There was no need to hunt down the culprits. They came to me themselves and turned themselves in, heads high, declaring that in order to repay the grace of having been given tofu to eat, they had gone about proclaiming my virtue.
What was I supposed to say to eyes that glittered, plainly hoping for praise? I could only wave it aside. There was no need to do any such thing next time.
Thanks to the rumor, or so I heard, the tofu had even been given a name. Not the soft curd Zhang Bao had eaten and dubbed douyun — Bean Cloud — but ordinary tofu. They were calling it the Zhang Family Bean. Taken straight, it meant the beans of the house of Zhang; we were the first to eat the thing, so the name had followed. I was only glad it had not been stuck with something stranger.
I remained in Chengdu for several days looking after Zhang Bao, and by the end of it he had recovered a measure of his strength. I was just beginning to think I might go and attend to the king's affairs when a most astonishing visitor came to call.
"Ahem. Liu Ba, at your service."
The middle-aged man with the harsh, unyielding face was famous — famous beyond famous.
Liu Ba had originally served under Liu Biao. When Liu Bei arrived he went over to Cao Cao, and when Cao Cao was beaten back at the Battle of Red Cliffs he fled this time to Yi Province and attached himself to Liu Zhang. Such was his devotion to staying out of Liu Bei's hands that he had gone all the way down to Jiaozhou and come around by a long detour. In the end Yi Province itself fell to Liu Bei, and Liu Ba's flight was over. There was no one in the province who did not know of that tearful odyssey, undertaken wholly to escape Liu Bei; and the magnanimity and hunger for talent with which Liu Bei had nonetheless gathered him in as his own man stirred a great many people.
A flight through three lords — Liu Biao, Cao Cao, and Liu Zhang — to rival the Three Visits to the Thatched Cottage. At that point one might as well call Zhuge Liang the light, and Liu Ba the dark.
But it was not the episode with Liu Bei that struck me dumb at his visit. It was the incident with my father.
Didn't he slight Father to his face, openly?
Even when Zhuge Liang himself stepped in to mediate, Liu Ba ignored him, and Liu Bei, in a towering rage, rebuked him for it. And yet to this day Liu Bei kept him in high office and treasured him. Whatever else the man was, his ability alone was genuinely terrifying.
"What brings the Clerk of the Western Section here?"
"Ahem. Tell me — is your honored father at home?"
"He is out at present. If it is my father you seek, I will see that word is passed to him."
"No, no. This is better, as it happens. The one I came to see is you, General of Luminous Might."
"Me?"
My father, perhaps. I had no point of contact with Liu Ba at all. I had seen his face a few times and so I knew it, but we had never so much as exchanged a greeting, let alone a conversation.
"Please, come in first."
He was a guest who had come for me, so I showed him to my own room. As if something there were a great marvel, Liu Ba peered about in every direction, then sniffed at the air.
"The scent of tea. Do you take pleasure in it?"
"Ah — yes. I drink it often. Shall I have some brought?"
"Then I shall accept it with thanks."
That prickly face, and the quarrel with my father, had led me to expect a thoroughly stiff-necked man. Liu Ba, however, observed the courtesies well enough in his own way. When the tea was brought, he spoke with care.
"It is nothing else. Of late I tasted this thing they call douyun."
Tofu? The method should not have spread yet — my puzzlement lasted only a moment. I remembered that I had presented the second batch I made to Liu Bei, and I nodded. It was common enough for a lord who received a new and delicious dish to share it with the ministers he favored. He must have eaten it in company with Zhuge Liang, Liu Ba, and the rest.
"Have you come because you wish to eat douyun?"
"Just so. Never in my life have I seen such a food. That is one of my purposes, yes — but there is a matter of greater weight."
True to the man who had never hidden his nature even from Liu Bei or Zhang Fei, he made no effort to conceal his appetite for the tofu. And then he took one step past desire and saw the larger design.
"That the state should make the douyun, and sell it."
"Sell it? The state?"
"Just so. Done that way, it would sell as if it had grown wings — of that I am certain. Did they not say the douyun is good for the body as well? The treasury would grow ample, and the people would grow healthy. How, then, could the state fail to encourage it?"
At present every grain of salt in Yi Province fell under the Colonel of Salt — that is, the offices managed it. Beans were a secondary concern. But salt was indispensable if one meant to obtain bittern, the coagulant, and so large-scale production among the common people was out of the question.
"Establish a Douyun Directorate beneath the Colonel of Salt and sell it through that, and however dear the price, those who will buy shall buy. Set beside it the tale of sibling devotion that clings to the douyun, and even the literati will be pleased."
He was every inch Liu Ba, the economic mind of Shu-Han, and he had an eye for the selling of a thing as well. This was the same Liu Ba who had proposed the minting of the zhibai coin — cash made to pass at a value of one hundred — and filled a treasury that had stood rattling empty.
"In circulating the zhibai coin we have already drawn the people's wealth up into our hands. It is a sleight of hand. The budget was empty before our eyes, and so we had no choice but to do it — yet ought we not return at least a portion to the people? The douyun is more than sufficient to be one such return."
"Then you mean to give the douyun to the people for nothing?"
"We shall set different prices. Cheap for the common people. Dear for the great clans."
Price discrimination. If it went as Liu Ba said, the market for tofu would be one wholly led by a monopolist supplier. In that case the demand known to the supplier was all but the demand of the entire market. In theory there was no great problem. But would the great clans swallow it without a word?
"Will the great clans comply?"
People liked to say that Liu Bei had beaten down the great clans of Yi Province, that their power in Shu-Han was weak and a perfect central monopoly had been achieved. The great clans of this age, however, were not a class one removed so easily. Liu Bei himself had naturally chosen the course of taking Yi Province's clans into his embrace. Compared with Wei or Wu he had used the carrot and the stick rather well, and he had results to show for it, which was why the clans looked weak. They had not become toothless tigers.
"That is precisely why the tale is necessary. And we shall draw distinctions. I am told the douyun itself varies in quality. To the people we shall supply the lesser grade at a cheap price. To the great clans we shall sell, dear, and under the name of the finest grade, douyun made by the very same method you used for your brother. Prick their vanity, and they will be desperate to show off their filial devotion and their wealth."
I understood, then, why Liu Ba had spent so long fleeing Liu Bei. The man had a merchant's temperament. He weighed profit and loss, prized efficiency over justification, and cared more for results he could hold in his hand than for virtue no one could see. Liu Bei, who for no better reason than benevolence had led a hundred thousand common people even when anyone could see how inefficient it was — his nature must have been the exact opposite.
I understood, too, why Liu Ba had gone over the moment Cao Cao arrived. Cao Cao's temperament was like his, so of course they had gotten on. And Liu Bei, precisely because Liu Ba was his opposite, would have set him in high employ. Liu Bei knew well enough that one cannot chase virtue and nothing else.
Even so, he was not a complete sociopath. One had only to look at him devising a measure like this out of thought for the people whose real wealth had been harmed by the zhibai coin. Liu Ba rather resembled a calculating modern: a man who thought of himself first and yet kept hold of some altruism — the ordinary run of twenty-first-century humankind, who learn conscience and morality and try to live by them. Thinking of him that way made him a good deal easier to face.
"Then let us do so."
"Of course, for you as well there would be— hm?"
"I will teach the method to my attendants. You, Clerk of the Western Section, may submit a memorial to our lord."
"...May I truly do so?"
He had raised the matter himself, and yet he was the more flustered of the two of us. Swallowing the laugh that tried to escape, I tilted my head as if I could not imagine what he meant.
"You speak of aiding the people and filling the treasury. What reason would I have to oppose it?"
"Yes. Quite so. But is it truly all right? In truth, everything I have spoken of was accomplished by you alone."
"What great meaning is there in my growing rich by myself? If something I made for my family's peace is put to the ordering of the realm and the succor of the people, that too is a good thing."
Liu Ba stared into my eyes as if he meant to bore straight through them — as if he were trying to read whether I had said it in earnest. I had nothing to hide, and I did not look away. A brief battle of gazes followed, and at the end of it Liu Ba broke into a snort of laughter.
"Ha — haha... Ha ha ha! The gray hawk has hatched a black crane!"
The light snort swelled into laughter that clapped from his palms, and out of nowhere he cried out in admiration and said that.
Taken straight, the gray hawk was a blue-gray bird of prey; the phrase was also used for an official of harsh and grinding temper. The black crane was its opposite, a crane dark in color. The character for dark carried the sense of what is remote and deep, and the crane was a bird akin to the very emblem of the scholar — a figure, then, for a gentleman of benevolence and righteousness.
It was far too grand a compliment. The praise was so generous I wondered whether the tofu he had eaten had gone bad, and this time it was my turn to be at a loss.
"I am nothing but a common military man myself. You do me too much honor."
I had borrowed the very words with which he had once shamed my father — that a true man ought to keep company with heroes and champions, not waste a meeting on some mere fighting-man. At that, Liu Ba's laughter ceased, and he asked,
"Heh. Have you heard what I said to your honored father?"
"A judgment passed upon the parent is a judgment passed upon the child."
I had only turned it around: if he meant to rate me so highly, he ought to see to my father as well. Liu Ba refuted me at once.
"One does not take up Emperor Shun in order to discuss his father."
I stared at him in silence, and he shook his head as a man does when he knows he has lost.
"Very well. Looking back on it myself, I went too far in that affair. I shall offer your father an apology."
"What? No. I am not telling you to apologize. Tell him why you treated him that way. You saw that he was harsh with those beneath him, and judged him no gentleman of benevolence and righteousness. Is that not so?"
While I was at it, I would see one of Father's bad habits soundly corrected. From a child's place I would not do this over any ordinary matter — but leave him as he was, and a second Zhang Da or Fan Qiang would surely appear.
All of it sprang from a heart that held him dear.
Liu Ba was quick to catch on. He composed his face at once, grinned, and took up my words.
"Indeed. Precisely so. To care for the weak, and to guide those who fall short — that is the very duty of a gentleman. I shall speak well of it to your father."
"I leave it in your hands."
"That aside — is there any left?"
"I'll have some brought. Dipped in soy sauce while it is still piping hot, the taste is extraordinary."
"Good. Very good!"
Liu Ba ate his fill of tofu and went home, and there he displayed the astonishing drive of his years in exile. The moment he returned, he proposed to Liu Bei that a Bureau of Douyun be newly established under the Commandant of the Salt Monopoly, who controlled the monopoly on salt, and that a Douyun Directorate be set beneath the Colonel of Salt so the thing might be sold as a state monopoly. Liu Bei accepted readily.
Liu Ba consulted Wang Lian, the Colonel of Salt, selected the officials to be assigned to the Douyun Directorate, and sent them to me.
"I am Lü Yi, appointed on this occasion to the Douyun Directorate."
Lü Yi was a man I knew. Incorruptible to the bone, and lucid in the conduct of his work, he had even acquired the nickname Qingneng — the Pure and Able. Not every nickname of the Three Kingdoms was a flattering one, but a nickname that survived into later ages was as good as a guarantee of ability. I could see, from that alone, how closely those above were watching this enterprise.
What caught my eye more sharply than Lü Yi, however, was the young official who had come with him.
"I am Zhang Yi, attendant officer charged with assisting Lord Lü Yi."
A great fish had swum, of its own accord, into a net I had never cast. Zhang Yi, whose life was set down in the biographies alongside Huang Quan, Ma Zhong, and Wang Ping, was a talent of the first rank in the later years of Shu-Han, without a flaw one could name in loyalty, ability, or character. We had no particular connection, and it would have looked strange for me to seek out an Attendant Officer of Yi Province and simply carry him off, so I had let the matter lie. But now that it had come to this, it was all or nothing.
"You."
The words burst out by instinct, never once passing through my mind.
"Will you not come and serve under me?"