In the fifth year of Wang Anshi's reforms, the most prosperous government office in Bianjing was the Municipal Trading Bureau. It had a million strings of cash from the emperor's inner treasury and ran the biggest business in the world: buying low, selling high, and lending money at interest.
That same year, the most despised trade in Bianjing was lifting the eyelids of the dead.
Shen Yan was involved in both. He owed money to the Municipal Trading Bureau, and he examined the corpses of people who had died working for it.
The court said that once households paid the exemption fee, they would no longer have to supply goods to the government or be extorted by officials from the Three Departments. In the past, twenty guild members could be punished at once just because the leather used for a batch of boots was poor quality. This was a gracious favor. But in Bianjing's neighborhoods and alleys, that favor took on a different form: the exemption fee was still collected, levies were still imposed, and anyone who couldn't pay had to borrow. The interest compounded: one part in ten every six months, two parts in ten per year, with another two parts added each month after a missed payment.
In the third month of the seventh year of Xining, the emperor asked Wang Anshi: Why had so many people recently become dissatisfied with the exemption fee?
The answer wasn't in the memorials. It was on the back of the corpse frozen beneath a bridge over the Bian River, in the lividity on his back that shouldn't have been there, and in the clean grains of sand in his fingernails, free of river mud.
Shen Yan didn't know Wang Anshi, and he didn't understand the new or old reforms. He knew only one thing: after a person dies, every part of the body has something to say. The question is whether anyone is willing to bend down and listen.
