A lot of things actually have no real threshold. For example, what kind of threshold do you need to be a tomb raider? If you can get into the underworld circles, as long as you’re ruthless and bold enough, you can do it. People coming out of hospitals perform surgeries; a butcher’s knife, heated in fire and then stitched up with sewing thread afterwards, is still a surgery. Thresholds are set by people—how much they teach you, where they stop, it’s all by design. Math and physics, you can learn as much as you want, but would they ever teach you how to rebel or start an uprising?

I think what Fatty said isn’t entirely correct, but it does make sense.

Humans are creatures with strong duality. Under the current social pressures, if there’s a chance to get a windfall of millions from an accident, that means you could solve your housing and car problems all at once. So, at the cost of a few mosquito bites and some moral condemnation, how many people could really resist? That’s still an unknown.

That’s also why some people are furious when they see national treasures lost, but what really angers them is that the treasures weren’t lost from their own hands.

Fatty always believes that a long and rich cultural history is often just a form of self-consolation for a nation. A palace filled with priceless treasures didn’t stop foreign invasions. Reputation is earned through action. If you could trade ten Guiguzi descent jars for American aircraft carrier technology, would you make the trade or not?

A century ago, when Stein arrived in Dunhuang, Wang Daoshi was using whitewash to paint over those priceless flying apsaras murals. Those magnificent artistic treasures were destroyed by lime in seconds. The only reason was that he wanted a white wall.

So even if those scriptures and blood sutras hadn’t been tricked away by Stein, they might have been burned as firewood by Wang Daoshi. And even if the murals weren’t torn down entirely, they probably wouldn’t have escaped being whitewashed.

In that era, the mistakes we made went far beyond just letting Stein take away the relics. Our problem was at the root. How could we expect Wang Daoshi to understand the value of those artifacts, and at the same time have the integrity not to bend for money? How could we ask a fake Taoist, fleeing for his life and barely able to eat, to do so much for us?

Even if our words could travel through time and reach his ears, how could we be sure he would agree with us? How much would our words be worth to him?

013 Architectural Analysis of the Cloud Top Heavenly Palace (with mountain ice layer illustration)

What interests me most is how Thomas Clark built this layer of ice shell. There’s actually an architectural paradox here: if the ice shell was built first, it would be like a castle in the air—without any supports, I really can’t imagine how such a domed ice shell could be completed without collapsing. If the wooden piles were set in place first, you’d find that both ends of the piles are only fixed by the ice. But just using ice, it’s impossible to secure such massive wooden piles.

After thinking it over, there’s really only one possibility: this was originally a huge glacier. Thomas Clark first had craftsmen dig tunnels in the glacier, insert the wooden piles into the tunnels, pour in water to freeze them in place, and then gradually carve out the dome from the inside.

It seems this would require precise calculations and very careful engineering planning, but in reality, this construction technique is the most time- and labor-saving, and you could even say it’s not particularly difficult. Compared to building with ice bricks, this method hardly requires the builders to have any craftsmanship experience.

014 The Corpse Storage Pavilion (with illustration)

Just like the ice-buried corpses found in the glacier, these are most likely the burial attendants or craftsmen from that time.

015 The Giant Bronze Gate (with illustration)

By my estimation, it’s about 30 meters tall. I have some basic chemistry knowledge—if it’s 5 meters thick, then these two giant bronze gates would weigh over 1,000 tons. There’s absolutely no force that could push them open. What’s behind them? What secrets are still hidden beneath the Changbai Mountain behind those gates?

The extremely intricate patterns reveal not a single clue. Back in the Eastern Xia Kingdom, they probably couldn’t understand what kind of place the birthplace of the King of Ten Thousand Slaves really was, either.

I really want to go inside and take a look.

Volume Three: Cultural Relics and Mingqi

001 Warring States Silk Manuscripts (with illustration)

During the Warring States period, there was a type of script written on silk called silk manuscripts. Silk is a white woven fabric; in the Han dynasty, all woven silk was called “bo” or “zeng,” or collectively “zengbo,” so silk manuscripts were also called “zeng manuscripts.” The earliest existing Chinese silk painting was discovered in a Chu tomb in Changsha in the 1930s. In recent years, a large number of bamboo and wooden slips have also been unearthed. For example, in 1951 at the Wuli Stele in Changsha, in 1954 at the Yantian Lake ancient tomb in Changsha, in 1954 at the Yangjiawan ancient tomb in Changsha, in 1957 at the Xinyangtai ancient tomb in Henan, in 1975 at the Yunmeng Sleeping Qin tomb in Hubei, and in 1980 at the Haojiaping earthen tomb in Qingchuan, Sichuan, large numbers of Warring States era bamboo and wooden slips were excavated. There were also silk manuscripts unearthed from a Chu tomb in Changsha in 1942 (which flowed to the United States in 1945), and the Houma alliance manuscripts in Shanxi, among others. Whether written on bamboo and wooden slips or on silk, these scripts are all handwritten works from the Warring States period. These slips and silk manuscripts are not only precious cultural relics, but are especially valuable historical materials for the study of calligraphy history.

The four silk manuscripts, also known as Chu zeng manuscripts, are divided into three parts: celestial phenomena, disasters and changes, the rotation of the four seasons, and monthly taboos. Their content is rich and complex, not only recording the myths, legends, and customs passed down in the Chu region, but also containing ideas about yin-yang, the five elements, and the interaction between heaven and man.