Dream of the Red Chamber: I Can Tell Real Pawn Tickets from Fakes

He was fourteen the year the Zhen family was stripped of everything. Two years later, at the counter of Hengshu Pawnshop in the capital, a boy pushed forward a silver hairpin left by his late mother and exchanged it for two mace of silver: enough for six days of steamed flatbread. No one knew that every old object he handled revealed a pawn ticket: who had pawned it, how much they had received, and where it had really come from. No one knew his name was Zhen Baoyu, and that he had the exact same face as Baoyu, the young master of the Rongguo Mansion. He was simply missing a piece of jade that could communicate with spirits. So when he said he belonged to the Zhen family, everyone took him for a fraud. A hollow gold hairpin, a solid-gold qilin whose trail had been deliberately cut, and the Zhen family’s true account book. The things smuggled out of the Zhen Mansion back then were now flowing into the Jia Mansion, one piece at a time. The Jia Mansion had no idea it would be the next Zhen Mansion. When falsehood seems true, truth itself seems false. I won’t plead the Zhen family’s case. I’ll simply lay out the evidence, one piece at a time.