CH 51

The four newly promoted juren[1] returned from the Luming[2] banquet held in the Shuntian Prefecture, and then turned around to participate in the Luming banquet held by the county.

The County Magistrate, County Deputy, and the Dianshi[3], along with a few of the county’s management officials, personally presided over the banquet, inviting the four newly promoted examinees as well as the other talents who did not pass the examinations as a form of accompaniment. Among the various scholars’ backgrounds and scholarly honors they possessed, there was a single individual wearing white that could not don a rujin[4] on top of his head. Naturally, this was Cui Xie who was specially invited by the County Magistrate.

He was arranged to sit at a small table located under the veranda, merely a spectator enjoying the food and drinks. Musicians on both sides played 《The Deer Call One Another》and the elders of the County as well as the four newly promoted juren sang: “‘Yo yo’, the deer bleat to one another, as they eat the wild duckweed’ one after the other. The entire sequence of events was based on ancient rituals. The guests of honor repeatedly returned others’ toasts. After singing the song and making poems, once they started seriously eating, the served meal had long gone cold.

Cui Xie was extremely doubtful and suspected that since County Magistrate Qi hadn’t been able to become a juren or jinshi[6] in the past, he had hosted this little banquet in order to satisfy his own yearnings.

The County Magistrate da-ren instructed everyone to take their cups, and after drinking three rounds of wine, he said to the new juren: “Of the four juren, three of them are the talented critics of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Having distinguished such gifted scholars, the owner was also invited to the banquet. Why don’t these talented scholars compose a poem in honor of that bookstore, to commemorate such good memories?”

The four juren and six accompanying students who had not made it into the list glanced at Cui Xie sitting underneath the veranda. Cui Xie hurriedly got up to toast, congratulated them for passing their examinations, and then also thanked the County Magistrate for caring about him, allowing him with his body dressed in white robes, to also have the opportunity to indulge in a feast about deer and to drink and enjoy poems with such talented examinees.

County Magistrate Qi nodded and told him that there was no need to be so courteous and invited the four juren to compose some poems.

The order of composing poems was the same as the order of how one was seated at the banquet, arranged by rank and prestige. Guo Yong stood up first and toasted, “Thank you for da-ren pulling the strings from behind the scenes,  I have long wanted to toast a drink to little friend Cui, but I have never had a chance to do so. I was admitted as a juren this time and it is all due to that good fortune brought about by that book, 《The Six Talents and their Commentaries on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms》——after entering the capital, after being called a talent by so many people so many times, I was afraid of failing and feared that people would comment about how our Qian’an talents are inferior to others. With such suffocating air stifled up in my chest, I did not dare to fail the exam.”

After draining the cup in one gulp, he composed a neat and precise five-character-eight-line regulated verse on the spot. 

Tang Ning then stood up and exclaimed, “What Guo xiong[6] said is true, that Six Talented scholars’ book really gave us a lot of reputation and the patrolling guards on examination grounds treated us Qian’an talents a lot better than others——We also went to Young Master Cui’s library collection quite a few times to read and borrow his Neo-Confucianism classics. This time, Guo xiong, Wang xiong and I passed, and that Young Master Cui’s collection of books also deserves to be part of the credit.”

He also drained the cup in a single gulp, and after composing a verse, his face flushed red as he sat down.

Among the four juren, only Wang Pu had nothing to do with the Six Talented Scholars, but he had also received Cui Xie’s beauty prints at Shen Zheng’s Chongyang Poetry Gathering, so he smiled and praised, “Then I will have to thank Young Master Cui for that beauty print in Chongyang that day. The beauty print was printed exquisitely and is peerless. I was even afraid that my calligraphy would not be worthy of the drawing print, so I practiced my calligraphy for a long time before writing on it. I can’t say precisely, but perhaps my passing of the examinations is related to my carefully and neatly polished calligraphy.”

He was already accustomed to referring to the print as “Cui Beauty Print”, but County Magistrate Qi’s eyebrows twitched and he subconsciously glanced at Cui Xie——Unexpectedly, Cui Xie also had a face full of anxiety, his face turned slightly sideways, as if he was not happy to hear the name, “Cui Beauty”.

It seems the other was still aware of shame and had never been completely seduced by money, it seems that such a youth could still be saved.

Qi Sheng silently retracted his gaze and after listening to the poems of the two Wangs, he encouraged the four juren to not slack off so that for next year’s February huishi, or metropolitan examinations, they would put forth their best effort and pass. After that the County Deputy and Instructor Sun also offered a few words of encouragement and in passing, also consoled the other six individuals that had not passed this year’s examinations. They were told to not be discouraged and not lose one’s sense of purpose from failing the examination, but to treat the four who had passed as a model, and study hard for three more years for the next one.

The four newly promoted juren and the six shengyuan[7] all sat in place and listened respectfully, and made a toast to the three elders for their teachings.

After the banquet concluded, the county had prepared carriages and horses to send each individual home, but only Cui Xie was led to the Flower Hall[8]. The Bookkeeper served him dried lychee fruit soup as a sobering drink and also placed fragrant bergamot onto the table to disseminate the smell of wine.

Cui Xie drank the sweet and sour soup, but he could not understand how the County Magistrate decided this guest list——It was already a high honor to ask him to participate in this Luming banquet commending the newly promoted juren. Why didn’t he ask the juren to stay after the banquet, instead asking him this small, tiny shabby civilian to stay behind?

Did he ask Cui Xie to stay behind so he could instruct some teachings, tell him to study hard or was it because the County Magistrate da-ren had also looked at his commentaries on the Three Kingdoms, and was going to hasten him to release the next volume?

Even after thinking hard, he could not come to a definitive answer so Cui Xie asked the bookkeeper waiting on the side. The bookkeeper leaned towards his chair and whispered, “Those romantic affairs of yours have been probed out by others and da-ren has been thinking about how to admonish you these past few days. You should act cautiously.”

What romantic affairs do I have….my height has not even reached 170 cm (5’5 feet) yet.

Cui Xie vexedly scratched his head in puzzlement and shifted closer to ask the bookkeeper to explain the matter a bit more. The bookkeeper first glanced at the door before asking him enthusiastically, “Just what is your beauty at your bookstore like? Is she as pretty as the characters on the beauty prints? As pretty as Diao Chan? Is she really the outside mistress raised by that Young Master Wang?”

Cui Xie let out a ‘Ai’, “It turns out this matter is about her. I have never even seen what she truly looks like. To tell you the truth, that courtyard of mine is rented out to her, but nothing can be done about it. Is it possible that I would go visit someone else’s concubine’s courtyard? After knowing this, I never visited the bookstore again, and even Shopkeeper Ji and the clerks didn’t dare to go to the rear courtyard. Whatever trouble is going on inside, it really has nothing to do with me.”

He explained this all in a baffled manner, hoping that the bookkeeper would help pass on his explanation to the County Magistrate and reinforce his degree of credibility. However, the shopkeeper gave a sneaky smile and said, “It is possible for me to put in a few good words for you, but you have to give me some of that Cui Beauty’s paper. I want the newly published Three Kingdoms’ prints, the Emperor Zhaolie (Liu Bei), the Marquis of Wu (Zhuge Liang) or Lord Guan (Guan Yu) are all good, just none of the evil ones from Cao Cao’s faction.

Cui Xie assented and nodded, “Then I will ask them to save a set of Shu-Han Dynasty’s ruler and his ministers for you. The other volumes previously released only had a few paintings, so they could only be divided up by court officials or military generals. Once all the characters are printed and released, they will be grouped together according to the Three Kingdoms and the Han Dynasty, and each will have a set.”

Cui Xie had already talked, laughed and coaxed the child for quite some time, but unexpectedly, the County Magistrate who wanted to discipline him as a little brat had already entered from outside. He pushed open the doors and arrived with heavy steps, looking down at the sitting Cui Xie.

The bookkeeper hurriedly retreated to serve some more tea and Cui Xie stood up and saluted, respectfully calling out “da-ren” . Qi da-ren casually nodded in response, sat on the Grand Master’s Chair[9] and asked, “Do you know the reason as to why I have asked you to stay behind today?”

Cui Xie said, “Wansheng[10] does not dare to presumptuously guess. But now it is almost September, and there are only five months before the xianshi or county examinations next year. For da-ren to ask wansheng to stay, perhaps there are some matters pertaining to the examinations that need to be addressed.”

County Magistrate Qi continued, “How has your essay writing been going?”

Cui Xie now wrote three essays every day and each of them were written using the eight-legged format, and consistently added up to about three to five hundred characters for each essay. He didn’t dare to claim the content was particularly good, but at least the poti[11] was still a poti, the eight comparisons were eight comparisons and the composition was stable and tidy. As for the pair antithetical couplets, no shortcomings could be picked out.

Cui Xie stood up and asked, “This student has written a few new articles these past few days. If da-ren wants to listen to them, I can recite them from memory.”

Seeing Cui Xie’s acting as if he had a well-established plan, the rage in Qi Sheng’s heart calmed down quite a bit and he replied, “No need to recite them, I am not here to test and teach you today, no need to spend so much effort. I only have one question today, you only need to answer it.”

Cui Xie quietly listened, and the question given by the County Magistrate was a xiaoti, a lesser theme. The sentence was extracted from 《Mencius·Li Lou II》in Chapter 33, “A man of Qi had a wife and concubine”[12] in addition to the phrase, “And yet no people of distinction ever come here”. This was a simple xiaoti[13] prompt that was obtained by linking relevant sentences from the same chapter together. Leaving these two sole punctuated sentences by itself was ambiguous and did not immediately display Mencius’ true meaning.

However, when answering these broken-yet-linked together phrases, one could only answer using the topic itself, and one could not link together the sentences used in between and accidentally use wording from the rest of the text that wasn’t mentioned in the prompt. That is to say, one could not write about the meaning of “A man of Qi”, or “Wife”, but rather dig deep into the implied suspicions lying behind the phrase, “And yet no people of distinction ever come here”.

Once Cui Xie found the focus of the question, he firmly clasped onto the themes of “doubt” and “ever come here” and then carefully replied, “What one has heard about but does not see, the longer this lasts, the more doubtful the heart becomes.”’

County Magistrate Wi’s expression relaxed and after savoring Cui Xie’s poti for a while, he sighed, “Such a mature response, it really does not seem like it would come from someone who has only started learning how to write essays for only a few months. I have seen many school children compose such essays, but the poti is an extremely difficult task, especially for such xiaoti that have been cut up and down, neither connected nor seemingly relevant to each other. To have answered the prompt with such precision, it is not like someone who has only started to study how to write essays for a few months. Truly a rare talent…..”

What County Magistrate Qi did not know was that Cui Xie was someone who had written essays for more than a decade and had been reading and comprehending for so many years as well as extracting the central ideas and themes from different articles. In the Ming Dynasty’s Imperial examinations, only three to five hundred word essays were required, but in the future, elementary students in the third grade of later generations would have already started to write small essays of 300 characters. The high school entrance examination essays required 600 characters, the college entrance examinations essays required 800 characters and after attending university, one would have to write essays with tens of thousands of words….

Even those who had just been admitted as juren would not have undergone so many years of professionally reading and composition training.

Cui Xie had merely been lacking in his foundation of classics and Ancient Chinese articles. In the past few months, he had studied hard and now possessed sufficient vocabulary, rhetoric and knowledge of the classics to start filling in the framework of essays. The essays he composed appeared sophisticated and well-organized, unlike those written by peers of the same age.

County Magistrate Qi could not help but sigh in his heart again: Such a good prodigy——

He had just begun to sigh, but then he suddenly remembered the reason why he had asked Cui Xie to stay behind in the first place. The exhaled breath was stuck in his chest and then he sighed again. Such a good child prodigy did not know how to cultivate prestige, and even made a frivolous name for himself.

His eyebrows raised and he lectured, “For the Imperial examinations, it is not only important to read articles, but one must also have good character. Having a reputation as a romantic talent may be interesting to you scholars, but in the eyes of the examiner, it is frivolous and licentious; to stand in front of the Emperor’s eyes, they are not steady or dignified enough, how could such a person be of great use?”

Cui Xie quickly got up and disputed, “Wansheng does not dare. Wansheng has always been clean and self-conscious and really never did such things.”

County Magistrate Qi’s beard quivered and he faintly said, “What did you think I was talking about? I am talking about your books——printing books is an elegant act for scholars, but one must have propriety in selling them. I looked at the colored portraits and prints you printed, they were all excellent things. But why must they land a “Cui Beauty” as part of their name? In the future, if you are able to pass the examinations, people will gossip that a certain county shengyuan Cui Xie, for the sake of business, disguised himself as the Cui Beauty, does such a thing sound good?”

….. Injustice ah, it seems that there is flying frost in June[14]!

Cui Xie frantically stood up and pleaded, “Replying to da-ren, this is really not this wansheng’s original intention, it is all a misunderstanding——”

He had brought Wanning’s drawing prints to the Chongyang Poetry Meeting and distributed them among the scholars. But because his prints had not been named yet, Guo Yong named it ‘Cui Paper’ on his behalf. But, because the portraits had been printed with beauties, somehow it got mixed up and after it was sold to the public, it had become the Cui Beauty’s paper. All the things printed in color and released by his bookstore were all subsequently called the Cui Beauty’s paintings or calligraphy by outsiders…

All misunderstandings!

Scholars have wronged me!

No wonder the founding forefather, Emperor Hongwu, forbade shengyuan from discussing politics, these shengyuan were really unreliable!

County Magistrate Qi sat and listened to this for a long time before asking, “Sure enough, it is  not because of that Wang mistress residing in your bookstore’s rear courtyard?”

Cui Xie helplessly explained, “It really is not. Da-ren, think about it, during the 17th year of business for my bookstore, a huge flood hit and thus the courtyard was rented out to his family. There had been no such gossip before, and it wasn’t it only after the portrait prints were published, that such gossip spread? The first time I heard about this matter, it was two or three days after I had given the beauty prints away at the Chongyang Poetry Meeting. Because there was a beauty printed on the drawing prints and then Guo Yong had named it Cui paper, those who had seen the drawing prints confusedly called it as such and thus came up with the name, Cui Beauty paper.”

At the beginning, he had even asked the clerks and Young Master Wang to refute such rumors, but the rumor had become more and more intensified and it had spread directionally into the capital. It was unknown whether it had spread as far as to the South.

This was the so called it only takes three men to make a tiger[15] and Zeng Shen committed murder[16] , turning a a good old youth like him into a beauty!

Cui Xie was full of grievance and indignation and County Magistrate Qi was also dumbfounded. He originally thought Cui Xie’s reputation had been ruined by the womenfolk in the bookstore, but if he told Cui Xie to change the location, then the matter would be settled; However, he did not want the rumors to spread to other places. Even if the owner refuted the rumors personally, such rumors could not be fully stopped.

Originally, such rumors spread faster than those that could refute them and there were so many people that believed them, not to mention this kind of glamorous gossip. Even if one were to exert great efforts to refute rumors everywhere, others would still have an extremely deep impression of this “Cui Beauty”. When looking at Cui Xie, it was inevitable to think of such things, and it was damaging for his reputation.

Qi Sheng could not think of a solution for a while, so he proposed, “Then why don’t you stop using the same residence as that woman. I will help you find another shopfront for you, you can open another bookstore in another location.”

Cui Xie said, “There is no need to….Young Master Wang came over and said that he would be transferring to the Yongping Garrison and working as part of the troops under the Earl of Anshun. He planned on taking that mistress to the Yongping Prefecture and resettling her there. This way, my bookstore will have been freed up and there are no taboos when running a business in the future.”

County Magistrate Qi frowned, “After living in such a place for so long, how could the neighborhood not know? That store naturally has traces of fragrant beauty, as a scholar, you should not be associated with such things. Since she is no longer residing there, simply sell the bookstore and with this Magistrate pulling the strings, I can help you find a storefront on North Street. Let you open a new bookstore cleanly, how about it?”

Cui Xie thanked him and cupped his hands together, “Da-ren is considerate of me, how can I be unable to differentiate the good from the bad? It is just that the store is part of the dowry left to be by my late Mother, and I cannot bear to sell it. I will no longer use it to engage in business, but rather, I was thinking about tidying up the place and organizing the books by categories. This way, visitors can go in, sit and read a few books.”

County Magistrate Qi subconsciously asked, “You want to keep it to make it a storehouse?”

Cui Xie slowly clarified, “Not only storing books, but for anyone who loves reading, they are allowed to visit. They can read the books inside the store or the books can be loaned out. I am not able to do so now since there are not many books in the shop at the moment. But, after a few years, the amount will gradually increase. At that time, our Qian’an Confucian scholars, schoolchildren and even ordinary people who only know a few characters can read poems and books without spending much. By then, how can our county’s literary culture not flourish?”

Before he had transmigrated, he was also on the verge of becoming a librarian. So what if his past self hadn’t had the money or location to become one? But now, he had a readily available courtyard, why couldn’t he transform it into a library, and continue the incomplete undertakings that existed before his transmigration?

Moreover, although rumors spread quickly, they were also quickly forgotten. As long as the library was open for around two or three years, everyone’s deepest memory of this place would be that this was a place where one could read books for free. By the 23rd Year of Chenghua, when the huishi, or metropolitan examinations were held, the traces of Yue niang[17 who had onced lived here and that Cui Beauty that had once sold paper would be almost nonexistent. Even if someone were to unveil such old accounts, the reputation of this collection of books would cover up the bad aspects.

Footnotes:

TN: New chapter for the week, hope you all are doing great and have an amazing week! I am just about to go on spring break and hopefully I can get some new advanced chapters out for ya’ll!Stay safe and healthy 

Huge Announcement: We have set up a kofi and patreon account! If you would like to support us or get early access to advance chapters for Blood-Sucking Empress OR TMD, those options are available for you (in support us page)! I have just added a patreon tier for Transmigrating to the Ming Dynasty’s Imperial Examinations in which patreons can have access to a google document with ALL of my advanced translated chapters for the novel. Since I am a college student, there should usually be at least 10 advance chapters in the document at a time, but depending on my schedules, there may be fewer or more. I’m currently extremely busy, but I have translated out some new chapters for you all! But, I will still post each week with the same schedule. Thanks!