Auditor of the Tang Dynasty: Using Ink as a Blade and Writing as a Doubt

In the late Tang Dynasty, the mountains and rivers were in decline and the system was in decay. The sharp handle of salt and iron fell into the hands of powerful officials, the court and the vassal town struggled, the documents became paper fig leaves, and human lives were as cheap as dust. Zhang Buyi, courtesy name Mo Sheng, is the most inconspicuous copy clerk in the Salt and Iron Division. He has no grades and no grades. He only has a pen in his hand and a pair of eyes that can see through the loopholes in documents. When others take advantage of loopholes in the system for personal gain, he insists on nailing these loopholes into interlocking and ironclad evidence; when others rely on power, money and connections to break the situation, he insists on using evidence as a tenon to twist the rules into a process that his opponents cannot avoid. Stroke by stroke, he turned the flaws in the operation of power into a chain of evidence that could be reviewed and non-repudiated; word by word, he nailed the irrefutable evidence into the process that must be implemented, forcing his opponents in high positions to follow the regulations he wrote and follow the process step by step to self-destruct. From an error in the account books, to the tribute paper dedicated to the emperor; from the oral instructions that no one dared to check, to the "insider gestures" that only the inner circle of the palace understands. This low-level official, who couldn't even stand in the front row of the court hearing, followed the lines of a piece of paper and forcibly uncovered the power line that ran through the court, the palace, and the feudal town. In this game, he used pen and ink as a blade and rules as a shield. In this rotten chess game of the late Tang Dynasty, he wanted those who covered the sky with their hands to see with their own eyes that the rules he had set turned into a life-threatening noose.