An Answer Across Time: Echoes of the Emperors in China

The Words of Kings on a Bronze Slip

Provincial TV host Shen Yan takes on a history show that puts ratings first. In its script, emperors are either gods or monsters: Ying Zheng is a tyrant, Cao Cao a villainous hero, and Wu Zetian a wicked empress. Then one day, an accident sends the water he spills onto a bronze slip in the office, bringing it to life. As blue light flares, he finds himself standing on the jade steps of Xianyang Palace. Across from him is Ying Zheng, holding a draft of the book-burning decree, with traces of cinnabar still on his fingers.

“Posterity calls me a tyrant?” Ying Zheng pauses with his fingertip on a bamboo slip. Half a piece of uneaten wheat bread rolls off the corner of his desk and hits the floor.

From then on, Shen Yan's studio becomes a “time-travel interview room.” At the Bronze Sparrow Terrace, he warms old wine with Cao Cao, wine that holds a draft about Zhou Gong spitting out his food to welcome worthy guests. In Shangyang Palace, he helps Wu Zetian sew a doll for Princess Taiping, while a broken thread tangles around Princess Anding's tiny shoe. In a medicine shop in Yingtian, he watches Zhu Yuanzhang feed porridge to a sick child. The wild-vegetable scraps on the chipped bowl's rim are as jarring as the patches on the emperor's robe.

The bronze slip reflects past and present, letting him show viewers that when Yang Jian runs his fingers over the imperial examination regulations and weeps, they brush against the words “scholars from humble families”; when Zhao Kuangyin sets up a chessboard at Longxing Temple, he always leaves an empty seat across from him for Shi Shouxin's old military tally; and when Cao Cao burns a biography labeling him a villainous hero, sparks fall on the drawings of wheat seeds in the tuntian farming register. Those emperors reduced to labels in history books could feel pain and regret too, and hide the words left unsaid in the chips of jade tablets, the broken tips of phoenix hairpins, and the tear marks on wine warmers.

“Your Majesty, what has become of the world you left behind?”