In 830 AD, Zhao Yi was born in Huangqu Gou, a place outside the city of Shazhou. His family made their living raising sheep, and the neighboring family, the A Yin family, had a vineyard.
For more than sixty years, the Tibetans ruled Hexi, exploiting the Han people like livestock. When Zhao Yi was fifteen, Tibetan soldiers raised the number of sheep his family owed from ten to fifteen. His father couldn’t make up the difference and fell to his knees in the mud. Zhao Yi remembered for the rest of his life the cry of the pregnant ewe as it was dragged away.
At eighteen, Zhang Yichao raised the banner of revolt in Shazhou. Zhao Yi enlisted. Before he left, A Yin wound a red cord around his wrist. “Just come back alive.”
He came back. But the road of the Guiyi Army was longer than any desert road he had ever traveled.
From Zhang Yichao to Zhang Huaishen to Zhang Chengfeng, from the Guiyi Army to the Jinshan Kingdom, from its height to its destruction. Over sixty-two years, Zhao Yi served as a courier and a soldier, was wounded, and eventually transferred to the rear. He watched Zhang Yichao disappear into the distance. He watched A Yin leave. He watched all his comrades go. In the end, only he remained, living in a mud-brick house in Huangqu Gou and raising a few sheep, counting them just as his father had.
The first character A Yin taught him to write was “Zhao.” All his life, he carved the things he had witnessed into wooden boards: sheep tax, kneeling, sugar, the red cord, Zhang Yichao, Wuzhen.
The last character was “ashes.”
This is not a story about emperors and generals. It is the story of a Hexi shepherd who spent his life witnessing a regime burn to ashes.
The sandstorm still blows. No one comes to open the door.
But the boards carved with words are still there, if anyone ever finds them.
