Zhengde Dynasty

In the first year of Zhengde, it was a snowy night. Eight eunuchs knelt outside Qianqing Palace and cried all night. At dawn, the three elders went to the country, the chief of etiquette changed their surnames, and a red ink pen changed its owner from then on. The person holding the pen is called Liu Jin. He was sold by his family at the age of six and entered the palace for fifty years. In the next five years, he rearranged the dynasty: the memorials were sent to his private residence first, the price for official vacancies was clearly marked, and a list of fifty-three names was hung on Fengtianmen. The nursery rhyme of the capital is sung—sit one, stand one. In the same year, a twenty-year-old scribe in the Ministry of War was recommended to the newly established expert factory. He was a good calligrapher, and in the next five years, most of the most dangerous documents in the world were written by him: the base book of the traitor list, the complete volume of the Border Wall Case, and the seal of the Goblin Case. He copied it neatly and without changing a single word. There was only one exception. He left a name on a piece of scrap paper and hid it in the crack of the brick in the corner of the kang. That page became the first page of a book five years later. ——540,000 Words, about a powerful eunuch reaching the top and Ling Chi, and also about those who were run over by him: a censor who died in the garrison, a doctor who refused to change his words, a girl who played the pipa in the wall for five years, and a scribe who spent his whole life keeping accounts. History can write down things, but it cannot write about the nameless years underneath the things.