The Legend of the Tattered King: Half a Lifetime of Dust and a Lifetime of Ink Fragrance

Wu Shoupu was born in 1933 and came from a family of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners in Guipu Village, deep in the plains of northern Anhui. My grandfather, Duke Huairen, hung a pot to help the world, and his family had several generations of handwritten medical classics in his collection. As a child, he grew up surrounded by the fragrance of medicine and the charm of ink. He was talented and intelligent. He began to be literate at a very young age and could memorize many Chinese medicine formulas and poems. He thought that his life would be stable. However, times changed dramatically, and ancestral medical books disappeared in the war and turmoil. As his beloved relatives died one after another, the family fortune collapsed. Shou Pu dropped out of school at the age of fifteen and went south to work at the age of sixteen. At Jiangcheng Wharf, he met noble people with his good calligraphy and switched from being a coolie carrying bags to keeping accounts. When leaving, he gave a piece of cursive writing to his close friend, inscribed "Wu Shoupu, an Ordinary Man." This calligraphy shocked the calligraphy world decades later. After returning home, he took on the family's livelihood. After farming, he made a living by picking up rags. His feet measured a radius of hundreds of miles, and his back was bent day by day. He used the change he collected from scavenging to support his younger siblings in their studies. The children he raised after his marriage were both talented and well-educated, and they were nicknamed the "King of Rags" by his neighbors. The eldest daughter Zhiwei was extremely talented, but she gave up taking the exam and took care of the family because he was seriously injured after falling from a bridge in the rain. A few years later, she married a hero from the same village who participated in the self-defense counterattack against Vietnam, and her life path changed forever. This is a legend written in a lifetime: about a man who lived out the noblest soul in the humblest place. With his bent posture, he lived like a bridge, crossing himself and others!