Volume 6 Chapter 10 Jude Cow

(The next part of the story told by Uncle San is very tedious, involving many old Changsha stories. However, these stories are very interesting to me because I have liked the old things with a bit of a smell of earth since I was a child. They have a sense of historical weight, so it’s not a bad idea to listen to them.)

The missionary in Uncle San’s mouth was called Cox Hendry, and his Chinese name was Jude Kao. He worked at a church school in Changsha and was one of the Americans who came to China with the tide of the Eastward Movement during the Kuomintang period. But this person had been confused since childhood, and he was not interested in being a foreign monk, but was very interested in Chinese culture. Perhaps in the economic concept of Americans, cultural relics are just one of the commodities that can be freely traded and naturally exported. So in the third year of his arrival in China, he occasionally engaged in some secretive cultural relics smuggling activities.

Jude Kao’s smuggling business has always been very careful and the business is not very big. At that time, there were two types of smugglers. One was the “floating camp,” which had a large volume of goods but low prices, and played a one-off game with high risks. The other was the “iron smuggler,” who offered high prices and wanted small quantities, but was safe and reliable. His way of doing business was very much to my grandfather’s liking, so he and my grandfather had a very good relationship at the time.

But Jude Kao was not a friend worth keeping. Deep down, he did not consider my grandfather a friend, and he did not even consider him an equal. My grandfather learned later that in private, he called my grandfather a bedbug.

In 1949, Changsha was liberated and the Kuomintang was defeated. In 1952, the church began to withdraw from China, and many Americans who had stayed in China began to return home. He also received a telegram from the church, asking him to return when it was safe.

He realized that his business in China was coming to an end, so he began to make preparations and transfer his assets. Before leaving, he had another sinister idea. He and his accomplices began to buy Ming Dynasty artifacts in large quantities, using the Chinese people’s trust in old relationships to swindle a large number of cultural relics with extremely low deposits. Among them was my grandfather’s Warring States silk book.

At the time, my grandfather was reluctant to sell this item, which his ancestors had risked their lives to obtain. It was only after Qiu De’s false claim that the money would be used to open a charity that my grandfather reluctantly agreed to sell it (of course, this is what my grandfather said, I don’t know if it’s true, I don’t think someone like him would have such a kind heart).

After all the goods were loaded onto the ship, Qiu De-kao knew that some of the people in the group were not to be trifled with. To avoid any future problems, he sent a telegram to the local police department from the ship, informing them of the whereabouts of my grandfather and the other dozen or so tomb robbers.

This was the famous “Zhan Guo silk book case” at the time. This was not just a case of cultural relics smuggling, because of Qiu De’s relationship with the Kuomintang generals before liberation, it involved many factors that were unique to that era, such as espionage and treason, which made it very complicated and almost alarmed the central government. On that day, Qiu De returned home with a full load, and the group of tomb robbers who had accumulated wealth for him were shot and imprisoned, wailing in grief.

Although they deserved it, it was really too tragic to die like this. Later, during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the smuggling of cultural relics in China almost disappeared, and this was also related to the deaths of this group of people at the time.

At that time, my grandfather was smart. As soon as he saw that the situation was not right, he fled into the mountains at night, hiding in an ancient tomb and sleeping with the dead for two weeks. This incident had a great impact on my grandfather, so much so that the Warring States Silk Manuscript later became a taboo for him. During his lifetime, he always told us not to talk about this kind of thing, so our family has always kept it a secret.

After returning to the United States, Jue De Kao auctioned off the artifacts and made a fortune. The Warring States Silk Manuscript was sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for a high price, becoming the artifact with the highest auction price at the time, and Jue De Kao also became a millionaire and a newcomer to high society. His story in China was written into a biography and widely circulated.

After becoming rich, Judd Kao gradually turned his interest to socializing. Around 1957, he was invited to serve as a consultant to the Far Eastern Art Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, providing consulting services for the research on the Warring States Silk Manuscripts. The then-director of the museum was the infamous Paul Allen, and the two were both China experts who had made their fortunes by hiring bandits to dig up cultural relics in China. They soon became friends. Judd Kao also donated a sum of money to the museum as a fund for the acquisition of Chinese cultural relics from the private sector.

Perhaps because of the leisure of a wealthy life and his love of Chinese culture, later on, Jue De Kao cultivated his character and gradually became obsessed with the study of Chinese culture. He presided over several large-scale projects at the Metropolitan Museum, with remarkable results. However, what really made him famous in history was the fact that in 1974, he solved the secret text of the Warring States silk book.

At that time, his research on the Warring States silk book had already lasted for more than 20 years. At first, he did it to raise the price of the silk book, and later, it was purely out of interest.

At the beginning, no one thought that an American like him could solve the ancient Chinese code, but Jue De Kao did it with amazing perseverance.

It was also a coincidence that he found the decoding method of the “Warring States Book Map” by borrowing the inspiration from an ancient Chinese “embroidery manual”. This method of decoding is actually similar to the method used in the ancient Chinese embroidery manual to record embroidery procedures using text. In mathematics, it is a method of mapping points into a picture. It is not complicated, it all depends on a stroke of luck. If you can think of it, you can solve it. If you can’t think of it, even if you are proficient in ancient Chinese cryptography, it is useless.

After discovering the decoding method, Jude Kao was overjoyed and immediately gathered a team to conduct a large-scale translation of his grandfather’s Warring States silk book. After a month, the entire secret text was deciphered.

However, to Jude’s surprise, what appeared on the decoded paper was not the ancient text he had originally expected, which recorded the divination calendar of the Warring States period, but a strange, meaningless pattern.

It is difficult to describe what this strange pattern looks like. I later looked at the sketch my third uncle drew for me and still couldn’t figure it out. If I had to describe it, I would say that it was a very simple pattern, consisting of six curved lines and an irregular circle. The lines extended from each other, somewhat like the veins of a river on a map, or the spreading stems of a vine, but it didn’t feel like a circle. From a distance, it looked like an abstract character; up close, it was completely incomprehensible.

There was no other information, and if you didn’t tell people that it was from a fragment of an ancient Chinese book, everyone would think it was just a child who had just learned to hold a pen and scribbled the lines on paper.

After much difficulty, the translation turned out to be such a strange pattern, and Jude felt very surprised. He thought for a while that his translation method was wrong, but after repeated verification, he found that it was impossible. If it was wrong, then it would be impossible to successfully convert the text into this pattern. Obviously, the secret message was recorded in these seven lines.

What did these seven lines represent? Why did the owner of the silk book hide it in the text?

With his many years of experience in China, his intuition told him that something so valuable as silk could not be just a normal pattern. These lines must have some special significance, perhaps something very important.

He became very interested in this and immediately began to look for information. He spent a lot of time going through countless libraries, and at the same time, he took this pattern to the Chinese sinologists at the university at the time to ask for advice. However, the level of the people in the United States was limited, and after tossing around for more than half a year, there was no result. Even if someone said a guess, it was nonsense and completely groundless.

Just when his interest was waning and he felt that there was no hope, a friend at the university pointed him in the right direction. He told Jude that this kind of Chinese oddity should be asked of the old people in Chinatown. At that time, it was the Cold War period, and in Chinatown, there were many old scholars from Taiwan, and there might be clues.

Jude also agreed, and with his last hope, he really went to Chinatown to ask for advice.

There was a kind of library in Chinatown, a place where the elderly gathered. Jude Kao went to such a place specifically to circulate the drawing. Fortunately, he was lucky and he really met a great man.

This great man was a skinny old man who was a celebrity in the area. That day, he was listening to a story in a teahouse when he happened to meet Jude Kao distributing the drawing. After looking at it, he was shocked and asked where Jude had got it.

Jude was delighted to see that he had a chance to explain himself, and he told the old man the whole story. He then asked the old man if he knew anything about it.

The old man shook his head and said that he didn’t, but he told Jude that although he didn’t know where the pattern came from, he had seen something similar in a place.

When he heard this, Jude Kao was also moved, and hurriedly asked where he had seen it.

The old man said that when he was still on the mainland, he saw a furnace in a Daoist temple in the Qimeng Mountains of Shandong, and this pattern was engraved on the furnace.