Night of the eighteenth day of the third month, seventeenth year of the Chongzhen reign.
Beijing has fallen. The crooked tree on Mount Coal waits in the wind for its destined end.
Zhu Youjian lowered his eyes to the sword at his waist, untouched for seventeen years, and suddenly asked himself:
“What if I simply refuse?”
He did not die.
That night, he crawled through a hidden passage beneath Wenhua Hall and escaped the Forbidden City. Under the fragmented moonlight on the Yu River, he boarded a leaky, battered boat.
On board were an old eunuch, a military household fugitive, a soldier who didn't know where to go, and a feverish boy.
That was the entire entourage accompanying the sixteenth emperor of the Great Ming on his flight south.
He had to flee.
Not to save his life.
But to turn the period at the end of the history books into a string of unfinished ellipses.
Here were white-haired ministers beneath the Huangji Gate, feudal lords kneeling outside Yangzhou to receive silver tokens, an old servant who said, “Your Majesty is no saint,” and the governor-general of Fengyang, who had waited all night by the river.
Here were a broken sword, an old imperial seal, a waist saber with a chipped edge, old lacquer engraved with “owe nothing,” and an orphan studying account books in the eastern wing of the Huangji Gate.
And here was an emperor who had finally learned to say, “I was wrong.”
He was no sage ruler, no enlightened lord.
He was simply a man who had walked down from Mount Coal.
On his back he carried the people he had wrongly killed over seventeen years, the wages he had failed to pay, and the eyes he had been afraid to meet.
Tonight, beneath the clear skies over Nanjing, he spread out the account books.
Then he asked the assembled officials:
“If I want to save this rotting house without tearing down its beams and pillars, and simply open a window... should this door be opened or not?”
