I've often thought history can't be trusted, even when it seems beyond doubt. Who came up with the claim that there are five thousand years of history, from the Tang and Song to the Yuan, Ming, and Qing? A few years ago, archaeologists unearthed Qixingdui, whose origins remain hotly debated. Doesn't that feel like someone slipped a page that doesn't fit into a history book already bound and printed? I've even wondered: were Yue Fei and Qin Hui really the names of a loyal minister and a treacherous one? Could a powerful traitor in history really have been unable to defeat someone he had killed on the charge of "fabricated crimes"? Qin Shi Huang burned books and buried scholars alive, but to this day there's no definitive explanation. The authoritative account is merely the most popular one, and the one that sounds most reasonable. But where's the evidence? The few words left behind in history are little more than toys we use to comfort ourselves. So the story I'm about to tell may well be a completely true history. It may not sound very believable, but who can say it isn't a history that was deliberately forgotten?
