Extra 26 · The Bottom of the Box

1. The Box Arrives

Wen Ye arrived at ten at night. The rain had let up a little. He parked at the mouth of the alley and carried a cardboard box into the Chen Tan shop. The box was wrapped in two layers of old newspaper, dated the previous month.

“West end of the market, an old man with a secondhand book stall,” Wen Ye said, setting the box on the counter. “He said it was left by an elder in his family, sat around for decades, and he didn’t know if it was worth anything. I looked at the bottom—the two characters ‘Wen Ji’ are carved, not stamped.”

Liu Zhijiang did not rush to open it. He looked first at the newspaper, then at the cardboard box, and only then at the seal-paste box itself. The box was small, of Shoushan stone, with an old crack along the rim of the lid that had been repaired with lacquer. The two characters “Wen Ji” on the bottom were incised in intaglio, the cuts rounded and blunt, as if made by someone who did not often handle a knife.

“Republic era,” Wang Guanshu said, leaning in. “Ordinary carving, but the lacquer repair is very refined. Whoever repaired it knew what they were doing.”

“Look inside the lid first,” Qu Huaisha said.

Wen Ye turned the lid over. The label was still there, the paper yellowed and brittle, its edges curled. The pencil line beside the label was clearer than in the photograph:

Orchid dust three qian, cinnabar one qian, oil half a fen.

The small line below was there too:

In the compartment at the bottom of the box, there is something.

2. The Compartment

Liu Zhijiang took out a pair of fine-tipped tweezers and gently probed along the edge of the box bottom. The base plate was movable, held by three hidden tenons, the tenon heads sealed with a thin layer of wax. The wax was dark, at least seventy or eighty years old.

He held a warm towel over it for a moment; the wax softened and the base plate loosened. Wang Guanshu held the lamp beside him, the light pressed very low.

When the base plate came off, there were only two things in the compartment: half a bronze seal and a thin sheet of paper folded into four.

The bronze seal was missing its lower right corner; only the left half of the character “fen” remained on the face. A faded red cord was tied to the knob, its knot made in the same way as the binding thread on the cover of the surviving scroll of the Wen Ji Hexiang Lu.

“Half a seal,” Qu Huaisha said, taking the bronze seal and holding its face to the lamp. “Wen An’s handwriting says ‘the fen seal is stamped on the incense formula,’ but the seal is only half. Where is the other half?”

Wang Guanshu had already unfolded the thin paper. It was bamboo paper, the ink pale, the writing small and dense, in Wen An’s hand:

The seal is split in two: one half goes with the incense formula, one half with the seal paste. Together they can stamp; apart, each keeps its own. If a later generation finds this half seal, do not seek to join it—seek first the plaque. At the north end of Shudian Street, three old shops; behind the plaques there are records.

“Shudian Street again,” Liu Zhijiang said, turning the paper over. There was no writing on the back, only a water stain shaped like half a leaf.

3. The Meaning of Fen

Qu Huaisha placed the bronze seal on the table and took from his bag a photocopied transcription of Chu bamboo slips.

“The character ‘fen’ in the Chu slips is composed of ‘eight’ and ‘knife.’ Eight means to separate, knife means to divide.” He turned to a page and pointed to a traced copy. “To judge and separate, each having its own place. Wen An split the seal in two not to keep people from stealing it, but to keep people from joining it. Joined, it becomes ‘gathering.’”

Liu Zhijiang thought of the events in the main narrative and said nothing.

Wang Guanshu asked, “Records behind the plaques—does that mean something is hidden behind the plaques?”

“Old shops hang plaques, and behind the plaques there are often inscriptions left—the craftsman’s name, the year, sometimes the shopkeeper’s instructions,” Qu Huaisha said. “Wen An says ‘do not seek to join it—seek first the plaque,’ meaning first find where the other half of the seal is; don’t rush to put the seal together. If there really are records behind the plaques, they should record where the other half of the seal went.”

Wen Ye turned the bronze seal over and looked at the base of the knob. There, carved very small, was the character “An,” unrecognizable without close inspection.

“Wen An’s private seal,” Wen Ye said. “He carved his own name on the knob because he was afraid later generations wouldn’t know where this half seal came from.”

4. Sinking Dust

Wang Guanshu folded the thin paper again and was about to put it back in the compartment when her fingers touched something gritty in the base-plate groove. She stopped, probed with the tweezers, and drew out a small packet wrapped in oil paper.

The oil paper was only the size of a fingernail, wrapped in three layers. Opened, inside was a small pinch of sinking dust, dark brown, fine and even, about half a qian.

Liu Zhijiang took it and brought it close to his nose. The scent was extremely faint, almost exhausted by the years, but the base was still there—sweet with a touch of cool, and in the cool a very fine trace of spice. He closed his eyes and thought for a while, then opened them.

“Raised by Lan She Dai,” he said. “The same lineage as the batch of mother incense in the Shosoin. If Wen An had this kind of sinking dust, it means he had seen the mother incense, or a sample split from it.”

“He wrote on the label, ‘orchid dust three qian,’” Wang Guanshu said. “Is this half qian what was left, or deliberately kept?”

“Deliberately kept,” Liu Zhijiang said, wrapping the sinking dust back in the oil paper. “Three qian was the amount for mixing seal paste; half a qian was kept as seed. Wen An always left himself a step.”

Qu Huaisha placed the bronze seal, the thin paper, and the sinking dust side by side under the lamp. Three things: one pointing to the plaque on Shudian Street, one to the other half of the seal, one to a sample split from the mother incense.

“Tomorrow we go to Shudian Street,” Liu Zhijiang said. “Three old shops at the north end; we look at the plaques one by one.”

Wen Ye put away the cardboard box. “I’ll swap shifts tomorrow.”

5. Under the Lamp

The rain had stopped. There was standing water in the alley, reflecting the lights of the shop across the way.

Wang Guanshu put the lid back on the seal-paste box, her fingers pausing on the lacquer-repaired crack.

“You said Wen An split the seal in two, one half with the incense formula, one half with the seal paste,” she said. “The formula was in the iron chest, the seal paste in the wall crack of the bookshop. He broke one matter into two places, and only let people put it together decades later.”

“Putting it together isn’t for the sake of joining,” Liu Zhijiang said. “It’s so people know it can be used even when split.”

Qu Huaisha opened his umbrella at the door and turned back to say one thing: “The people of Chu revered the gods and divided the sacrificial meat to eat. Fen is not severance.”

Liu Zhijiang nodded. He put the half bronze seal into the drawer, together with the surviving scroll of the Wen Ji Hexiang Lu. As the bronze seal dropped into the drawer, it gave a soft sound, like someone knocking on a door very far away.

Wang Guanshu suddenly said, “If there are records behind the plaque, they record the other half of the seal. But what if the other half of the seal has long been gone?”

Liu Zhijiang did not answer. He turned off the light, leaving only the one on the counter. Under the lamp, the half qian of sinking dust wrapped in oil paper gave off a faint dark red.

—To be continued · Extra 27