My third uncle’s following narration was quite tedious, involving many matters related to old Changsha. However, these stories were very interesting to me because I have always had a fondness for tales with a bit of local flavor, which carry a sense of historical weight. It was worth listening to.

The missionary my third uncle mentioned was named Cox Hendry, with the Chinese name Qiu Dekao. He worked at a church school in Changsha and was one of the Americans who came to China during the Nationalist period as part of the eastward movement. However, this man had a troubled past; he was not particularly interested in being a foreign monk but was fascinated by Chinese culture. Perhaps in the American economic mindset, cultural relics were merely commodities that could be freely bought and sold, and naturally exported as well. By the third year of his stay in China, he occasionally engaged in clandestine smuggling activities involving cultural relics, and he was only nineteen at the time.

Qiu Dekao conducted his smuggling business very cautiously, and it was not very large-scale. At that time, there were two types of smugglers: one type operated large-scale, high-volume businesses with low bids, engaging in risky transactions. Qiu Dekao, on the other hand, engaged in what could be called a “blacksmith’s business,” meaning he offered high prices for fewer items, but it was safer, making one deal at a time. This way of doing business suited my grandfather’s taste, so they had a good relationship at that time.

However, Qiu Dekao was not a worthy friend. Deep down, he did not regard my grandfather as a friend, nor did he see him as an equal. My grandfather later learned that he referred to him privately as “the cockroach.”

In 1949, when Changsha was liberated and the Nationalists suffered a complete defeat, the church began to withdraw from China in 1952. Many Americans who had remained in China started to return home, and he received a telegram from the church instructing him to return when it was safe.

Realizing that his business in China was coming to an end, he began to make preparations to transfer his assets. Just before leaving, he had a sinister idea: he and his accomplices began to buy up Ming Dynasty artifacts, exploiting the Chinese people’s trust in old relationships to acquire a large number of cultural relics at extremely low deposits, including my grandfather’s Warring States silk manuscripts.

At that time, my grandfather was unwilling to sell the items that had been obtained through the sacrifices of his ancestors. Qiu Dekao falsely claimed that the money would be used to establish a charitable hall, and my grandfather, believing this would be a good deed, reluctantly agreed to part with it (of course, this is what my grandfather said; I find it hard to believe that someone like him would have such a benevolent heart).

Once all the goods were loaded onto the ship, Qiu Dekao, aware that some of the individuals involved were not to be trifled with, sent a telegram to the local military police, leaking the whereabouts of my grandfather and about a dozen other local figures to the temporary garrison of the Changsha Liberation Army.

This incident became the infamous “Warring States Silk Manuscript Case.” It was not merely a case of cultural relic smuggling; due to Qiu Dekao’s connections with Nationalist generals before the liberation, it involved espionage, treason, and many other factors unique to that era, making it extremely complicated and almost alarming to the central government. That day, Qiu Dekao returned home with a full load, while the local figures who had helped him accumulate wealth faced execution or imprisonment, resulting in widespread lamentation.

Although it can be said that they got what they deserved, the manner of their deaths was indeed quite tragic. Later, during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the smuggling of cultural relics in China nearly disappeared, which was also related to the deaths of this group of people at that time. My grandfather was clever; when he saw that the situation was not right, he fled into the mountains overnight and hid in an ancient tomb, sleeping alongside corpses for two weeks to escape the turmoil. Eventually, he managed to escape to Hangzhou. This experience had a profound impact on my grandfather, to the extent that the study of the bamboo slips from the Warring States period became a taboo for him. While he was alive, he constantly reminded us not to speak carelessly about such matters, which led our family to treat the topic with great caution.

After Qiu Dekao returned to the United States, he auctioned off that batch of cultural relics and made a fortune. The bamboo slips from the Warring States period were sold for a high price to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, becoming the most expensive cultural relic at that auction. Qiu Dekao thus became a millionaire and a new aristocrat in high society. His story in China was written into a biography and widely circulated.

Once wealthy, Qiu Dekao gradually turned his interests toward socializing. Around 1957, he was invited to serve as an advisor for the Far Eastern Art Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, providing consultation for the research on the Warring States bamboo slips. At that time, the museum director was the notorious Pu Ailun, and both of them were experts on China, having made their fortunes by hiring bandits to excavate cultural relics. They quickly became friends. Qiu Dekao also sponsored some funds for the museum to acquire Chinese cultural relics from private collectors.

Perhaps due to the leisurely lifestyle of wealth and his love for Chinese culture, Qiu Dekao gradually immersed himself in the study of Chinese culture. He led several large research projects at the Metropolitan Museum, achieving significant results. However, what truly secured his place in history was the fact that in 1974, he deciphered the coded text of the Warring States bamboo slips.

At that time, he had been studying the Warring States bamboo slips for over twenty years. Initially, he aimed to raise the price of the bamboo slips, but later it became purely a matter of interest. In the beginning, no one believed that an American like him could decode ancient Chinese scripts. However, Qiu Dekao accomplished this with remarkable perseverance.

It was a coincidence that he drew inspiration from an ancient Chinese “embroidery pattern” book and discovered a method to decode the “Warring States bamboo slips.” This decoding method was similar to the way the embroidery pattern recorded stitching procedures using text. Mathematically, it involved creating images from a grid. It wasn’t particularly complex; it depended entirely on a clever idea—if you could think of it, you could solve it; if you couldn’t, no matter how proficient you were in ancient Chinese cryptography, it would be of no use.

After discovering the decoding method, Qiu Dekao was overjoyed and immediately gathered a team to conduct a wide-ranging translation of his grandfather’s Warring States bamboo slips. A month later, the entire coded text was deciphered. However, to Qiu Dekao’s surprise, what appeared on the decoding paper was not the ancient text he had originally anticipated, which recorded the divination calendar of the Warring States period, but rather a strange and entirely meaningless pattern.

The pattern is so bizarre that it’s hard to describe. Even after looking at the sketch drawn by my uncle, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. If I had to describe it, I could only say that the pattern is incredibly simple, consisting of just six curved lines and an irregular circle. The lines extend into each other, somewhat resembling the veins of rivers on a map or the sprawling stems of a vine. However, giving that circle a boundary feels different. From a distance, it looks like an abstract character; up close, it’s completely unrecognizable.

There is no additional information. If you didn’t say that this came from a fragment of an ancient Chinese text, everyone would assume it was just a child who had recently learned to write, scribbling random lines on paper. After all the effort, the translated result turned out to be such a perplexing pattern, which left Jude Kao feeling quite astonished. He initially thought his method of translation might be wrong, but after repeated checks, he concluded it was impossible. If it were incorrect, he wouldn’t have been able to seamlessly convert the text into this graphic. Clearly, what was recorded in cipher was precisely these seven lines.

So what do these seven lines represent? Why did the owner of this silk manuscript choose to hide it within the text? Based on his many years of experience in China, his intuition told him that something valuable enough to be recorded in cipher on such an expensive silk would not be an ordinary pattern. These lines must have some special significance, perhaps something of great importance.

He became deeply interested and immediately began researching. He spent a lot of time sifting through countless libraries and took the pattern to consult with Chinese scholars at the university. However, the scholars in America had limited expertise, and after half a year of effort, there were no results. Even when someone offered a guess, it was completely off-base and clearly nonsense.

Just when his interest waned and he felt hopeless, a friend at the university pointed him in a new direction. He told Jude Kao that for such strange Chinese artifacts, he should ask the elders in Chinatown. At that time, during the Cold War, there were many scholars from Taiwan in Chinatown, hidden talents who might have clues.

Jude Kao thought this made sense and, holding onto his last hope, really went to Chinatown to seek advice. In Chinatown, there was a type of bookstore where elderly people gathered. Jude Kao specifically went to such a place to share the pattern. Fortunately, he was lucky enough to encounter a wise person there.

This wise man was a thin old man, a local celebrity. That day, he was listening to a story in a tea house when he happened to come across Jude Kao showing the pattern and asked to take a look. After seeing it, he was taken aback and asked Jude Kao where he had gotten it.

Seeing an opening, Jude Kao was overjoyed. He naturally had his own narrative and explained everything to the old man, eagerly asking if he knew anything about it. The old man shook his head, saying he didn’t, but he told Jude Kao that although he didn’t know the origin of the pattern, he had seen something similar somewhere before.

Upon hearing this, Jude Kao’s heart stirred, and he quickly asked where he had seen it.

The old man said that when he was still on the mainland, he saw an alchemical furnace in a Taoist temple on Qimeng Mountain in Shandong, and this pattern was engraved on that furnace.