Tales of the Chinese Banyan Blossom

Quanzhou, Southern Song dynasty. A moonlit night of flowers.

A sixteen-year-old camp prostitute is dragged before a hall full of powerful officials and ordered to calculate thirty-seven sets of accounts for ships leaving port. If she fails, she’ll have to serve them wine tonight.

She doesn’t touch the abacus.

In the time it takes to drink half a cup of tea, she gives them 111 figures, all accurate to the last coin.

Then she turns a page in the ledger and says, “My lord, these books are short by 1,600 strings of cash.”

Silence.

That night, she makes enemies of every official in Quanzhou. After three days of torture, they demand she frame the only person who ever helped her. Her answer never changes: “This humble woman will not sign.”

In her cell, an old woman with indigo-stained hands bandages her wounds and says, “A broken hand can heal, but once your backbone bends, it will never straighten again.”

Later, she invents a kind of cloth that can soak in seawater for three days without spoiling. She takes in a group of women no one else wants and turns weaving into a system of arithmetic. She defeats Quanzhou’s greatest merchant and builds a trade alliance with thirty-six ships. Each of their thirty-six sails bears an embroidered bauhinia. The day they leave Quanzhou Harbor, the streets are packed with people.

An old fisherman on the docks says, “Thirty-six sails, every one blooming with brocade.”

It takes her fourteen years to go from camp prostitute to “Madam Citong.”

But the story is only halfway over...

The Mongol cavalry sweeps south. Pu Shougeng betrays the Song, surrenders to the Yuan, and massacres three thousand members of the imperial family. Under cover of night, she leads four hundred people aboard their ships and sails into the unknown sea.