The whole family had spent a year hoping for the sugar lion. When the bidding reached three strings of cash, Bing Hexu raised his wooden mallet and knocked off its head.
The outside gleamed like amber, but inside there was a damp, sandy foot.
The lion was ruined, and the high price was gone, but the two strings of cash due on the fifteenth day of the tenth month would not be reduced by a single coin. His father was still hoping a vat of good frosting would turn things around. His mother had already written down the costs of food and wages on a wooden board. The sugar merchant was willing to lend them money, provided the Bing family sent all their goods to his warehouse for the next three seasons.
Nineteen-year-old Bing Hexu was determined to find another way. He repaired the pressing bed, sold raw sugar, and carried rejected samples around, asking buyers why they didn't want them. He also gradually realized that some of the rules sugar makers had followed for years could indeed protect a season's hard work, but others couldn't be explained away as simply a matter of life and death.
Just then, his fellow townsman Wang Zhuo was collecting accounts of sugar making, and a book called Treatise on Sugar Frost was still taking shape. At the foot of Yushan, a vat of sugar had to make it through winter and spring before anyone could tell whether it would pay off. What Bing Hexu wanted to try was sending it to Baishui Town, widely considered a place where good frosting could hardly be made.
This time, he dared not promise success. He would only record what he did, how he failed, and how he started the stove again.
