"Misplaced Revenge", by Liu Bo, published by Reading Library New Star Publishing House in September 2023, 180 pages, 28.00 yuan
"The Overlord of Retrograde", by Liu Bo, published by Reading Library Nova Publishing House in September 2023, 184 pages, 28.00 yuan
After 2,500 years of propagation and change, in the late Spring and Autumn Period, Chu, Wu, The grievances and hatreds of the Three Kingdoms of Yue have long since changed from a simple historical narrative to a standard fable: King Chuping was morally corrupt and married the princess of Qin who was hired for his son Prince Jian under the influence of his minister Fei Wuji, and persecuted Prince Jian and his staff; Wu Zixu, the son of Prince Jian's teacher Wu Hao, fled to Wu State, determined to take revenge, and finally dug up the grave of King Chuping and whipped his corpse; King Wu Lu defeated Chu State for Wu Zixu's revenge, and then was defeated by Yue State and died of wounds because of pride and complacency; Wu Wangfu made great efforts in his early years to defeat Yue State and became the overlord, but later favored Shechen, addicted to wine, especially the beautiful Xi Shi sent by the Yue Kingdom to corrupt him, extremely obsessed, and finally died and the country was destroyed; These fables are so popular that they leave many idioms on related topics.
Liu Bo's new works, "Misplaced Revenge" and "The Retrograde Overlord", discuss how historical materials are gradually deformed in the process of dissemination, and the possible historical truths behind these moral fables. In a way, the two books can be considered as the same new book. They all tell about the grievances and hatreds between Wu, Yue, and Chu in the late Spring and Autumn Period, but they differ in the choice of perspective: the first can be regarded as the first half, with Wu Zixu as the protagonist, and the second can be regarded as the second half, with Wu Wangfucha as the protagonist, and the content of the two books is closely connected. With a total length of nearly 200,000 words and the low price of a single book, this is also more like the upper and lower parts of a book than two small books.
A jigsaw puzzle game lacking original historical materials: where is the difficulty in writing the history of Wu Yue
Teacher Li Kaiyuan once put forward a "3+N" theory of history: the actual events in history that have passed in the past are the "historical truth" of the first dimension; the information related to the "historical truth" left by contemporaries through oral inheritance, written records and relics is the "historical materials" of the second dimension; the works of later historians who speculate on the "historical truth" based on the "historical materials" they have mastered, through factual statements and logical reasoning, belong to the "historical works" of the third dimension. In addition to these three dimensions, there are also historical books recompiled from historical works, historical dramas readapted from historical books, etc., and these derivative works are called "N". In this structure, the more layers of extension, the richer the detail, but the less credible. This is a very useful theory for historians who study and restore the grievances and hatreds of Wu, Yue, and Chu in the late Spring and Autumn Period.
In ancient times, "Zuo Chuan" and "Chinese" were widely recognized as written by Zuo Qiu Ming, who was almost a contemporary of Fucha and Gou Jian, and the relevant records can be roughly regarded as original historical materials. However, the mainstream view generally accepted by more and more scholars in modern times is that these two books were written in the middle of the Warring States period (about the middle of the fourth century BC), which means that 150 years have passed since they were written in the era of the reign of Lu and Wu and Yue, and the historiographical value of these two books has naturally declined greatly. The newly excavated artifacts of the same era as these two books, the Tsinghua Jane, also provide many useful records. "Zuo Chuan", "Chinese" and "Qinghua Jian" are about halfway between "historical materials" and "historical works". Unfortunately, although the writing of Zuo Chuan and Chinese has been pushed back by more than a century, this is still the closest to the original historical record of the materials we can grasp now. By the time Taishi Gong's "Historical Records" was written, four hundred years had passed since the story of Wu Zixu and Fucha, and the relevant records in Taishi Gongshu were already pure "historical works".
In the Eastern Han Dynasty, one or two hundred years after the death of Taishi Gong, two books appeared that interpreted this history in detail, "Wu Yue Chunqiu" and "Yue Jue Shu". There are many records in the book that do not come from unknown sources, and we cannot know whether the author found his own original historical materials, or whether he included folklore and legends, or whether he deduced and supplemented many historical details on his own. In general, it is difficult to judge the reliability of many of the contents of these two books, and the overall positioning is between "historical works" and "N" derivative works. However, it is precisely these two books, which have mixed truths and falsehoods, and whose literary color is greater than historiography, because they are rich enough in detail, often occupy the mainstream in the writing of Wu Yue history in later generations, surpassing the more reliable "Zuo Chuan" and "Chinese". After all, compared with the slightly concise and boring style of "Zuo Biography", the version with a stronger story and more detailed details will naturally have an advantage in the process of spreading and changing. For more than 2,000 years, the story of Wu Yue's struggle for hegemony continued to be superimposed and accumulated in the dissemination, and by the time of Feng Menglong's "Chronicles of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty" at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the standard fable story mentioned at the beginning had occupied the absolute mainstream.
Restoring a piece of history is very much like completing a puzzle, with both original and archaeological sources being the pieces that can be used to complete the puzzle. When understanding and reconstructing many historical events in modern times, we are often faced with the problem of too many pieces of the puzzle. A puzzle that can be completed with 2,500 pieces can often be completed with 10,000 or even 100,000 pieces, and thus restore a completely different picture. The older we get, the fewer pieces of the puzzle we can get, and many of them are not original historical records. According to the previous theory, these puzzle pieces can only be regarded as "historical works" or even derivative works classified as "N", and the degree of restoration of the entire puzzle with these puzzle pieces of questionable reliability is also questionable.
To restore the story of Wu Zixu and Fucha in that era, it is necessary to use a limited number of fragments of varying reliability to complete a whole puzzle, and the difficulty can be imagined. In recent years, with the new archaeological discoveries and interpretations of scholars represented by Zhang Xuefeng and Qian Gonglin in this field, the study of Wu Yue history has made great progress. The rapid rise and decline of Wu and Yue have been increasingly put into the general trend of the world, and the great role of Chu and Jin in the rise and fall of Wu and Yue hegemony has been fully valued. Zhang Xuefeng's theory of the continuous migration of the capital of Wu and Qian Gonglin's theory of Wu Dacheng in the west of today's Suzhou City have been more or less proved by archaeological results. The argument that the husband favored Xi Shi and trusted the ministers led to the destruction of the country now only appears in children's books and introductory books.
For the author, to complete the "puzzle" of this period of history is essentially to connect the "historical materials" and "historical works" left by ancient historians with the newly unearthed cultural relics in modern history with modern historiographical methods to construct a complete and self-consistent narrative. Liu Bo's two new works can be described as a very successful attempt: we can see a different period of Wu Yue Spring and Autumn in them.
"Misplaced Revenge": The history and geography behind the happy revenge "Shuangwen".
Today, we have the impression that Wu Zixu's deeds are probably the most refreshing revenge story in ancient history, and there is no one. In this story, Wu Yuan, the son of Zhongliang Wu Lu, who suffered innocently, went through a lot of hardships to successfully defect to Wu, the main enemy of Chu, and then helped Gongziguang seize the throne of Wu. Wu finally invaded the capital of Chu, and Wu Zixu searched everywhere and found the tomb of his enemy, King Chuping, and exhumed the corpse. This style of not being afraid of violence, being happy with revenge, and the legendary story of going through a lot of hardships and finally getting revenge is too much in line with the aesthetic nature of human beings, especially for readers who often swallow their anger in reality, so it has become one of the most widely circulated ancient stories.
Corporal
In his new book, Liu Bo does not intend to reread such classic stories. At the beginning of the book, he put forward his point of view straight to the point: Wu Zixu's revenge story was formed by the continuous addition of oil and vinegar by later generations. From the "Zuo Chuan" written by his contemporaries, to the "Chinese" written by the writer of the early Warring States period under the name of Zuo Qiuming, to the "Historical Records" of Sima Qian of the Western Han Dynasty, and then to the addition of a large number of literary descriptions in the two books "Wu Yue Chunqiu" and "Yue Jue Shu" in the Eastern Han Dynasty, Wu Zixu's story took shape. In the subsequent dissemination, this story continued to evolve, adding many new elements, until the late Ming Dynasty Feng Menglong's "Chronicles of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty" came out, more than 2,000 years have passed since the end of the Spring and Autumn Period, and Wu Zixu's revenge story can be regarded as fully formed.
The title of Liu Bo's book is his evaluation of the story: "revenge" itself cannot be held for Wu Zixu. Wu Zixu's enemies are mainly two people: King Chu Ping, who plays the identity of "faint king" or "tyrant" in traditional aesthetics, and Fei Wuji, who plays the identity of "traitor" or "minister" under the same aesthetics. However, when the Wu army invaded Yingdu, King Chuping had been sick and died for many years, and Fei Wuji, who led to the killing of Wu Zixu's father and brother, was also a minister hated by other Chu people, and was killed by the Chu people many years ago, which means that Chu cleaned up the portal on its own. In the case that there is a debtor and a master, and the emperor and the minister are all dead, the so-called "Wu Zixu finally avenged the great revenge after all his hard work" or "Wu Guo's war against Chu for Wu Zixu" is completely untenable from a logical point of view, or in the title of this book, it is a standard "misalignment". On this basis, Liu Bo used "Zuo Chuan" as the main blueprint to tell the story of Wu Zixu's revenge in his mind: this book starts from King Chu Ping's overthrow of his brother King Chu Ling's ascension to the throne, and ends with the Wu army occupying the Yingdu of Chu State after it was burned and looted, and finally expelled by the Qin-Chu coalition army.
The author basically completely ignores the traditional face-painted concepts of "Ming Jun", "Faint Jun", "Loyal Minister" and "Traitorous Minister", and puts forward different understandings: King Chu Ling and King Chu Ping did not succeed to the throne naturally, but violently seized the throne by abnormal means. In the process of consolidating power, they tend to do whatever it takes, so they need black gloves to do the dirty work for themselves and eliminate dissent. The people who can serve as black gloves are usually either from foreign countries or from lowly backgrounds, which is also the only way for kings in the era of aristocracy to monopolize power. When King Chu Ling killed his nephew and became independent, Wu Zixu's grandfather and Wu Ju, the father of Wu Hao, played this role. By the time King Chuping ascended the throne, Fei Wuji became a more efficient black glove for the new monarch.
In Liu Bo's interpretation, King Chuping never imagined that he would be able to ascend the throne in his early years, so he left many traces of his life that Liu Bo called "sloppy" in the book, including his marriage to the daughter of a minor official of Cai Guo, and his son Jian, who was obtained from this marriage. After becoming the king of Chu, these "sloppy" early life trajectories also became a stain he wanted to erase. In the end, under the management of his henchman and black glove Fei Wuji, Prince Jian fled after being excluded, and Wu Zixu's father Wu Hao and brother Wu Shang were killed as princes' descendants. Some of the Wu clan fled to Chu's old enemy in the east, Wu, including the protagonist of this book, Wu Yuan (Wu Zixu), and a general named Wu Zhiji.
Based on the author's understanding of "Zuo Chuan", Wu Zixu made great contributions in helping Gongziguang assassinate Wu Wangyi and become a new generation of Wu Wanglu, but he was not a general who led the troops on the front line. Wu Zixu's strategic level is good, but he is more like a staff officer, and his specific ability to lead troops in combat is not as good as that of his clansmen Wu Zhiji. In the war that broke Chu into Ying, Wu Zixu had almost no sense of existence, neither a decisive victory on the battlefield like the brother-in-law of Lu Lu, nor the deeds of the corpse of the gravedigger whip (King Chuping). Tai Shi Gong poured a lot of personal affection into "The Biography of Wu Zixu" in the "Records of the Historian", and the inclusion of this story of grave digging and whipping based on folklore stories and literary cuts is likely related to his own injustice. Before the rise of modern nationalist narratives, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty was almost synonymous with tyrants in the eyes of dynastic historians, and the "Records of the Historians" was also called "slanderous books" by many ancient politicians and historians.
Sima Qian's revenge "Shuangwen" of exhuming the grave and whipping the corpse has been added more elements in a series of later historiography and literary works and even dramas from "Wu Yue Chunqiu" to "Chronicles of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty", and Wu Zixu has since been fixed as the image of the "God of Revenge" who is happy to take revenge. The clearer this image is, the farther it is from the truth of history, but the more it is in line with the natural artistic aesthetics of human beings.
The author finally sighed: "There are no lonely heroes here who are happy to enmity and hatred, change the fate of the country, and decide the direction of the times, but everyone struggles and struggles in their own position, but they still achieve a colorful history of meteors." Naturally, under the starlight, there are countless Chu people with white bones, and the snow falls silently. "But from a broader timeline, the disaster brought to the Chu State by Wu Shi's entry into Ying is only one round in the reciprocating cycle. According to the current archaeological results, after the Chu State defeated the Song State in the middle of the Spring and Autumn Period, it went down the Huai River and the Yangtze River, and gradually pushed its sphere of influence to the east. The center of gravity of Wu's operations was originally on the line from Nanjing, Jiangning, to Yangzhou, and Zhenjiang in Ma'anshan ("Guyu" and "Gusu" may be the same word in the ancient Wu language), but under the pressure of Chu, it had to gradually shift to the east and south, roughly along the present-day Shanghai-Nanjing line, until it entered the Taihu Lake Basin.
As Liu Bo said, Wu Zixu's revenge story has been continuously processed and enriched by later generations, and it can be said to be "misplaced" compared to his original deeds. When the Wu army was tyrannical in the territory of Chu, King Chuping and Fei Wuji had been dead for a long time, and it was King Zhao of Chu and the vast number of civilians of Chu who Wu Zixu did not know at all. But from another point of view, after being geographically suppressed by the Chu State for more than half a century, the Wu State took advantage of the internal contradictions and weakness of the Chu State to attack its capital in one fell swoop, which can be regarded as a justifiable revenge.
The process of Wu shifting the center of gravity to the east and south under the heavy pressure of the Chu state was also a process of gradually squeezing out the living space of the local Yue tribes. This is the story told in the second little book, "The Overlord of Retrograde".
"The Retrograde Overlord": Wu Yue's attempt to reconstruct the history of hegemony
In the book "Misplaced Revenge", the protagonist Wu Zixu is more of a disenchantment, and the image of the "God of Vengeance", which was originally full of demonic beauty, has become blurred. In contrast, the treatment of the protagonist husband in "The Retrograde Overlord" is another effect: the husband cha portrayed for us in various literary works from "Wu Yue Chunqiu" to "The Chronicles of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty" is a virtuous monarch who works hard in his early years, but in the later period, he is addicted to wine and trusts traitors, and he is a standard monarch of the dead country. In Liu Bo's writing, the husband is always the husband, energetic and ambitious, hoping to integrate into the Chinese world according to the mainstream game rules of the Spring and Autumn Period. Fucha lost in consecutive victories, not because he had changed, but because the rules of the game and the geopolitical situation had changed dramatically. This depiction gives Fucha an alternative charm that is very different from the traditional aesthetic, and also makes the book more readable and holistic than "Misplaced Revenge".
Attributing the demise of the Wu Kingdom to the beauty Xi Shi, which may not exist in history, can be described as an outdated concept mixed with the decadent ideas of "red face and trouble". Liu Bo completely rejects this notion in two places in the book, as well as the deeds of Xi Shi itself. When talking about Wu Yue's peace talks, Liu Bo quoted the original words in the "Chinese", "Please practice the female daughter to the king, the female daughter of the doctor to the doctor, and the female daughter of the scholar to the scholar." Even when they were forced to sue for peace, the Yue monarchs and ministers who sacrificed their children still firmly adhered to the concept of hierarchy. Liu Bo commented: "If you offer a folk beauty to Wu Wangfucha, I am afraid that not only will you not be pleased, but you will also anger the other party: Sending a woman from such a low background to me, are you insulting me?" At the end of the book, Liu Bo said: "To put it simply, there is no Xi Shi who destroyed the Wu State in history, but the legendary Xi Shi is enough to make people forget the real history of the Wu State." ”
Like "Misplaced Revenge", Liu Bo summed up his evaluation of Wu Wangfu's life's career with a highly concise title in "The Retrograde Overlord": In the late Spring and Autumn period, the traditional hegemonic model of "big countries leading small countries to act collectively" was outdated, because the economic cost of maintaining hegemony was too high. Most of the small states were largely annexed in the early to mid-Spring and Autumn period, and the remaining vassal states were either large in size or in the middle of the major powers. Similarly, due to the cost problem, large-scale wars aimed at destroying the country and expanding the territory were difficult to become mainstream among medium and large vassal states at this time. Therefore, the Central Plains powers, represented by the Jin State, have long lost interest in hegemony. However, Wu Wangfucha, who came from the land of "barbarians", still tirelessly pursued the position of overlord in the Central Plains, which was slightly outdated, which is what the author calls "retrograde". In the eyes of those dilapidated traditional Chinese countries in the Central Plains, Fucha, as a barbarian, strives to demand himself according to the norms and standards of the Chinese overlord. As a result, he sometimes performs a slightly pompous ritual guard, sometimes a rampaging barbarian, and switches between the two modes at any time.
On top of this tone, Liu Bo compared and referred to works such as "Zuo Chuan", "Chinese", "Tsinghua Jian" and "Shiji", and continued the book "Misplaced Revenge", and made a speculative restoration of the early history of the Yue Kingdom from a geopolitical perspective: since the Jin State could support a Wu state behind the side of the Chu State, the State of Chu could also support an ally behind the side of the Wu State to fight against the Wu State that had become a climate. It was on this background that the Yue Kingdom stepped onto the stage of history and became the elbow and arm trouble of the Wu State.
In addition to Xi Shi, whose existence itself was basically denied, Liu Bo also researched and speculated on more legendary stories: Wu Yue negotiated peace and Goujian only surrendered conditionally, which was also a common practice for defeated vassal states at that time, and destroying the country was not the mainstream. The key is that Gou Jian before and after the peace talks still has a lot of strength. There is no record of him becoming a slave in Wu at all in the early records, these are all literary recreations of works such as "Wu Yue Spring and Autumn" five hundred years later. Fan Li, the biggest beneficiary of later literary re-creation, did not appear at all in "Zuo Chuan" and "Chinese Yue Yu", and only appeared as an ordinary general in the final stage of the destruction of Wu in "Chinese Wu Yu", and had not yet completed the military task and was broken through the defense line by Fucha. In "The Affair of the Yue Gong", Fan Li was only mentioned once as a Wenchen. But in "Under the Chinese Yue Language", Fan Li became the core figure of Yue Annihilation Wu, the absolute protagonist from strategic planning to specific implementation. However, after comparing the records of other calibers, Liu Bo believes that this is just a "good story" full of Zonghengjia style: with Fan Li as the absolute center, and for the first time adding elements such as Gou Jian and Wu as slaves, but the narrative in it is completely outside the historical materials that corroborate each other.
It is a very difficult task to decipher the semi-barbaric and semi-civilized regimes in the border areas between the ancient civilized world and the "barbarians". The limited accounts often come from the more civilized regimes around them, which on the one hand carry a sense of the self-centered superiority of the civilized world, and on the other hand, they do not allow for a proper interpretation of many things: both the logic of the rulers of these semi-civilized regimes and the details of the more brutal adversaries around them are full of fog beyond the comprehension of the historians of the civilized world. Contemporary European and American classical scholars, represented by Frank Lee Holt, tend to determine the main line and analyze the geopolitical situation in practice. As an author with a literary background, Liu Bo showed his talent in historiography in the face of similar interpretations, which can be said to be in line with everyone.
Under Liu Bo's interpretation, as an extension of the Jin-Chu Central Plains hegemony on a secondary stage, the nature of the geopolitical game was greatly enhanced, while the nature of the legendary story was minimized. In addition to the great overseas in the east, the state of Wu was already attacked on three sides by the middle and late stages of Fucha: in the north was the state of Qi that was defeated by the state of Wu on the way to the hegemony of Fucha and fought against each other, in the west was the old enemy of the uncommon enemy of the state of Chu, and in the south was the state of Yue, which was superficially subservient. The Jin State, which once supported the Wu State all the way, is still nominally an ally of the Wu State, but the Fucha is keen to dominate the Central Plains, and the two sides are essentially competitors, and they are even on the verge of fighting each other in the Huangchi Alliance. Even the small states of Song, Lu and Sishang, which were sandwiched between the major powers, probably did not have a good impression of the new overlord of Wu. "Historical Records: The Family of King Goujian of Yue" records that when Goujian destroyed Wu, "the land of Song invaded by Wu in Song, and it was a hundred miles east of Lusi". It can be seen that compared with overlords like Duke Huan of Qi and Duke Wen of Jin, the state of Wu has a lot to gain, and after hegemony, it is necessary to occupy a large area of land as a protection fee for a small country.
As a newly rising nouveau riche country, Wu was almost insoluble in the face of the hostile geopolitical situation in which the upstream Chu State continued to coerce and the Yue State in the rear was difficult to completely eliminate. As the monarch of a barbarian country with a heart for China, Fucha went against the times and tried to dominate, which exacerbated the outbreak of internal and external contradictions, and the whole Chinese world fell into a sad state of only enemies and no allies, and finally died and the country perished. Such a contradictory image of a husband and wife not only has more charm, but also more logical historical authenticity than the allegorical protagonist who "worked hard in his early years, indulged in wine in the later period, and finally failed".
From this point of view, Liu Bo's history of Wu Yue's struggle for hegemony can be regarded as an excellent historical puzzle.