Zhang Shiping's Son Hears the Tide of the Realm
From of old they said there was nothing hauled out of the sea that a man could not eat. I walked the shore of this age—a sea that poured forth seafood in absurd abundance—and my eyes snagged on what lay strewn before me.
"Hmm. That, there."
"You mean the whale-grass, young master? They say it's the weed whales feed on when they come in along the coast. Around here they also call it sea mustard, or coast-weed."
The stuff lay about as thick as rubbish in a street. One look was enough to tell me that, in this age, the notion of eating it had never once occurred to anyone.
"And they simply leave it heaped up like that?"
"The boatmen say it tangles in the lines of every fishing boat moored in the harbor, so they keep laborers whose only work is scraping it off. It's a salt-laden weed, useless even as fertilizer, and it grows so stubbornly that they gather it in one place and pile it just as you see."
"The people here don't eat it?"
"It's far too common a sea-weed for that, young master. In a famine they say folk will boil even this and choke it down, but in these parts, thanks to the old master, no one goes short of rice."
"Hmm."
"Now and then a wounded fisherman will clap it on a cut and claim it heals faster. And a few shameless sorts grind it up and stir it into their seafood paste when they want to stretch the batch... but that's the extent of it."
I had heard that seaweed only became everyday fare centuries from now, in the age of the Three Hans—Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla. Apparently that was true.
"Uncle Ak, this is a fishing village. There must be plenty of drying racks for fish and shellfish, and poles for hanging rope?"
"Yes, young master. Those, we have in heaps."
"Then have that sea-weed washed clean in fresh water and dried until it's bone-dry."
"That? You mean that?"
"Dry it well in the sea wind, and after about three days it will be brittle enough to crumble, shrunk down to a tenth of what it is. Pack it just like that into wooden casks, and fill every one as the stuff comes ready."
"Understood."
"We'll be hauling it a long way. If it isn't dried properly and mold takes hold inside, I will hold you strictly to account."
Dried sea mustard, at least, I had to lock in for certain.
Here it was nothing but a nuisance of a sea-weed. The moment it reached the interior, it would become a thing of far greater worth—and all the more so in a chaotic age so cruel that, when the food ran out, people ate tree roots and grass roots and, past even that, human flesh.
But one product would not be enough. I had said I would take three days, which meant I still had ground to cover. So I went next to a hamlet in the fishing village where the stink of fish and of fish boiling hit like a wall.
"What are they boiling, to raise a stench this foul?"
"Young master, that is fish oil. They're rendering the fat out of the catch."
I took Uncle Ak and walked straight in. The villagers knew my station; the moment they saw me they stopped their work, rose, and bowed.
"Young master, what brings you to a place like this?"
"Hmm. So this is how you render the oil..."
In this age, oil was truly precious—indispensable from war to cooking, from construction to the ordinary day, a necessity one simply could not do without. The villagers were boiling sardines and horse mackerel in great cauldrons, skimming off the fat that floated to the surface, straining it, and sealing it in jars.
A truly primitive method. And yet, watching that same rendering of fish oil, a craft that would endure all the way into the Middle Ages, I found myself thinking of the past. In my old life a friend of my father's had run a cooking-oil plant near our house. Inside the factory, modern machines pressed the oil out. But in one corner, for children's field trips, they still did it the old way: roasting beans, mixing them with straw and earth, packing the mash into wooden frames, hanging those frames on a wall, and suspending from them something like the wooden striker used to sound a great temple bell. All day long they pounded—thud, thud—crushing the bean-filled frames against the wall until the oil was squeezed free. What came out was a drop or two at a time, gathered and gathered again. Old oil was a thing made, quite literally, of human sweat and tears.
"Then or now, the oil trade ought to be where the real money is..."
"It is, young master. The more a place is wracked by war, and the more people crowd inside its walls, the more staggering the demand for oil becomes."
"And the oils of this age would be chicken fat, lard, fish oil, pine resin, sesame oil, perilla oil, and the like?"
"Just so."
"If I could mass-produce a vegetable oil and sell it across the Central Plains at thin margins and huge volume, that would be the thing."
After the sea mustard, something sparked here as well. Standing in that reeking yard where they rendered fish oil, what came to me all at once was vegetable oil. Olive, sunflower seed, peanut, cottonseed—those were out of the question. But soybean oil would sell wherever it went. Not just any bean, of course. First I would need a good soybean, a variety that gave up its oil easily.
"Young master, it's about time you took your evening meal. The day is fading. Shall we go in?"
"Ah. Yes, we should. Very well."
I left the rendering yard with Uncle Ak guiding me, and at once a thick, cloying reek of blood rose all around us. Fishermen were coming in with carts loaded with enormous slabs of meat, sodden with it.
"And what is that?"
"Ah. They say they've taken a whale that came in along the coast."
"A whale?!"
"Whale oil is prized beyond measure in the Central Plains. And the ambergris that comes from a whale's belly is a treasure so renowned that even the imperial house makes use of it."
"They really do deal in every last thing..."
Setting aside the question of whether hunting a whale from a skiff was even possible in this age, every single item this house handled was, frankly, astonishing.
"Young master, please dine."
"Ah. Mm."
This was the age of the Three Kingdoms, and yet the side dishes were nothing short of fantastical. There was fresh whale meat bled clean in cold water; milk drawn, they said, from whatever cows they could find, with no improved dairy breed anywhere in sight; tender veal; goose brought down from the north; dressed sea cucumber; rice wrapped in lotus leaves; and pine mushrooms. And what shocked me most of all was the black pepper.
I had never dug into history at a scholar's depth. I only knew this Three Kingdoms age as well as a man who loved it. But pepper was a spice you truly could not buy even with money, wasn't it? And they had brought it all the way to Bohai Commandery, at the very edge of Hebei? They said that after Emperor Ling and Emperor Shao, the Han emperor now was Emperor Xian, seated in Chang'an. I rather doubted that fellow was eating half so well as this. A table like this was something only Dong Zhuo, at the height of his power, could have set.
"Well then. I'll eat gladly."
Every dish was rare, and every dish was delicious—and then I saw the soy sauce.
"The soy sauce is excellent."
"Young master, that is a sauce made from beans brought out of Liaodong. The fish pastes of the coast and the meat pastes of the interior are fine in their own right, but this comes from a particular soybean that grows in the north."
"Soybeans... yellow beans... soy sauce..."
"They do plant soybeans in northern Jingzhou as well, but whether it's the difference in weather, the northern bean is nothing like them—not in flavor, and not in how it ages."
"Then they aren't the same bean at all, only similar to look at. The variety itself is different... Ah, yes! Get me those Liaodong beans too, as many as you can lay hands on. Enough to plant by the lot."
"The northern soybean, young master? Understood. I'll have that prepared at once as well."
"With these two, if I write the proposal properly, I can pass the test and be done with the trial Lord Zhang Shiping—my father, in this world—has set me... No. Wait."
"Young master?"
Yes, of course. Born into the house of an absurdly great merchant, dining in luxury, and being tested on whether I could find the foods of the future—that was only natural. But this was the age of the Three Kingdoms, wasn't it? All I had heard since arriving was talk of Hebei specialties and the goods the trading house moved. Not a word of Liu Bei, Cao Cao, or Sun Quan. Sun Quan I could excuse; he was a child at this point. The thing that actually mattered was this.
I bolted the rare dishes and, through Uncle Ak, requested an audience late that night.
"The business of my father matters, yes. But I want to know how the world is turning at this moment."
In truth I had never even seen the man's face. Still, I had resolved to adapt to this age, so while I prepared for the test set by my father, Zhang Shiping, away in Zhongshan of Jizhou, I also had to grasp the situation as it stood.
"If you mean the way of the world this year, a great many things have happened."
"Tell me all of it."
"You were brought to Bohai in part to convalesce, young master, but also because a great war has broken out in Hebei. The struggle between Yuan Shao, the present Governor of Jizhou, and Gongsun Zan, General of the Front, has been the gravest of the troubles."
After the campaign to chastise Dong Zhuo in Luoyang failed, the lords of the anti-Dong coalition had scattered to their own territories and fallen to fighting one another. And the fight that mattered most was the one between Yuan Shao and Gongsun Zan, for mastery of Hebei.
"In truth, His Lordship does great business in both General Gongsun's Youzhou and Governor Yuan's Jizhou, and so he cannot patronize only one side. Even so, against the chance of trouble, he had you brought here."
"And the war—Yuan Shao won it, didn't he?"
"He did. You know it well, I see."
"That was the war in Hebei. And the south?"
"Sun Jian, Administrator of Changsha, went to war with Liu Biao, Inspector of Jingzhou, and fell in the fighting at Xiangyang and Fancheng. The power of Changsha has since come apart."
Those things had happened at the same time. In the south, Sun Jian and Liu Biao had fought, Sun Jian had died, and the Sun clan had scattered. In the north, Gongsun Zan and Yuan Shao had fought, and for the moment Yuan Shao had won—though they would go on snarling at each other for years yet.
"There is more I have not yet told you. While you were abed with illness, General Gongsun, even after his defeat against the Governor of Jizhou, gathered his army again, fell by surprise upon Lord Liu Yu—Grand Marshal, a power of Youzhou, and a man of the imperial clan—and cut him down. Youzhou is now wholly under his sway."
"Ha!"
At last the names I knew from the age of the Three Kingdoms were coming out, and the picture snapped into place. So I asked.
"Then Bingzhou has fallen to that pack of lawful bandits—the Black Mountain bandits, was it?"
"You know Zhang Yan as well. Even so, though the man lives by robbery, he has not dared lay a hand on His Lordship's caravans, and he answers when we come to trade."
Bingzhou belonged to Zhang Yan, whom the court had failed to suppress and so had swallowed into the government ranks instead—the chief of that bandit host called the Black Mountain bandits. Youzhou had been ruled by Liu Yu, imperial kinsman, Grand Marshal and Inspector of Youzhou, until Gongsun Zan, slapped across the face in Jizhou, took his temper out on Youzhou and made it his own. And Jizhou was Yuan Shao's. Seen from Hebei, Yuan Shao was the obvious favorite of this age. Did that mean I was to sponsor Yuan Shao, and carry the house forward that way?
That Yuan Shao would swallow Hebei was a fact every modern man knew. And after that?
The name had not yet been spoken—the man called a capable minister in an age of order and a treacherous hero in an age of chaos, the true protagonist of the Three Kingdoms, the future candidate for Chancellor...
"What of Cao Cao?"
"Young master, you know even that name? Only the other day you said you had no interest whatever in news from the Central Plains."
"Answer me, and quickly!"
"If you mean Cao Cao, Inspector of Yanzhou, he is gathering the troops of Yanzhou and striking at Xuzhou, saying he means to avenge his late father."
"Xuzhou? Now?!"
"As it happens, our trading house has eyes and ears in Xuzhou as well, so fresh word from there should reach us in about ten days. By the last report, three cities of Xuzhou had already fallen, right from the start."
In the south, Sun Jian, the Tiger of Jiangdong, had fought and died at the front with dozens of arrows in him, and the Sun family had thrown itself on Yuan Shu's mercy. In Hebei, Yuan Shao of the clan that had produced Three Excellencies for four generations, Gongsun Zan the White Horse General, and Zhang Yan of the Black Mountain bandits were tearing at one another. And in the midst of it all, Cao Cao—his father Cao Song and the whole of his kin slaughtered in Xuzhou—had invaded that province for revenge and was carrying out a blood-soaked reprisal dreadful to behold. I confirmed it all over again. I had dropped into the most dangerous hour of this maddening age of rival warlords.