Governing the country, enriching the people, an unparalleled imperial tutor

The provincial library's rare book reading room was located at the far end of the third floor. At the end of the corridor was a double wooden door with a worn-out bronze plaque nailed to the door frame, inscribed with the words "Rare and Valuable Ancient Books - Entry with Permit". Lin Yanzhou arrived at 2:40 PM, twenty minutes earlier than the agreed time. He pushed open the door and went inside; there was only one person in the reading room.

At the end of the long table by the window sat a man in his sixties, with short, graying hair and old-fashioned metal-framed glasses, one temple wrapped with tape—clearly many years old. He wore a slightly worn, dark blue jacket, and a book lay open in front of him, next to an old-fashioned table lamp with a faded edge to its shade. Hearing someone enter, he looked up at the doorway, his gaze lingering on Lin Yanzhou for a moment before sweeping his eyes over him from head to toe, then returning to the pages of his book.

Lin Yanzhou sat down at the other end of the long table and waited for about ten seconds, but no one spoke.

"Professor Wu?" Lin Yanzhou said.

Wu Yuanqing didn't look up, turning a page of his book: "Are you the friend Xiaoya mentioned?"

"I am Lin Yanzhou. Sorry to bother you."

"Have a seat." Wu Yuanqing's tone was flat, his gaze still fixed on the pages, his thumb pressed against the edge, showing no intention of closing the book. "Xiaoya called to say you're interested in 'dynasties not recorded in official history.' I've been working on this for over twenty years, and not many people are interested. Most just read a few unofficial histories and think they've discovered lost civilizations. What do you do for a living?"

"I used to work in tower crane sales, but now... I run my own small business."

"Sales?" Wu Yuanqing repeated, his voice rising slightly at the end, carrying a tone of "I knew it," "Then why are you interested in this area?"

"Some people dug up some things at the construction site. I paid attention to them at the time, and later looked up some information and found that some parts did not match the official history."

Wu Yuanqing turned a page, the paper rustling softly. The words "doesn't match" passed by his ears without leaving a trace. After turning another page, he put down the book, leaned back in his chair, rested his hands on the edge of the table, and finally looked directly at Lin Yanzhou. His gaze carried a condescending scrutiny ingrained from years of teaching, first looking at the shoes, then the cuffs, and finally back at the other's face: "You said it doesn't match, what exactly do you mean?"

"The order of dynastic changes," Lin Yanzhou said. "In mainstream official histories, the transition between two major dynasties is continuous, without any obvious break. But after going through some local chronicles and private notes, I found that there are several decades of blank periods, as if someone had torn entire pages out of the book."

Wu Yuanqing's hand remained on the book page, his gaze lingering on Lin Yanzhou's face for a moment. Then, his lips twitched, not in a smile, but more like a suppressed reaction after being amused: "The historical value of local chronicles and private notes is two levels lower than that of official history. The 'blank' you saw could be due to missing records at the time, or it could be that the version you read was incomplete."

After saying that, as if he had already defined the nature of the conversation, he lowered his head again, preparing to turn the book back to its previous position.

"What about the copy of the 'Old Records of Sichuan'?" Lin Yanzhou asked.

Wu Yuanqing's hand stopped, the act of turning the pages paused in mid-air for a moment, then he slowly raised his head, his gaze changing from a condescending scrutiny to one of sudden, intense attention: "You've read a copy of the 'Old Records of Sichuan'?"

"I've read some of it," Lin Yanzhou said. "There's a passage that mentions a year, but the records before and after it are blank. Only that page has the words 'Xuan Shuo' written on it, as if someone forgot to include it."

Wu Yuanqing closed the book. He pushed it aside, placed his hands flat on the table, and leaned forward slightly, as if he had just noticed the person opposite him: "What you meant by the discrepancy earlier was the time gap between official history and local chronicles?"

"It's not just a gap in time," Lin Yanzhou said. "The blank space mentioned in local chronicles contains place names and engineering records, but there's nothing in official history."

Wu Yuanqing didn't speak, but his expression was changing—the impatience he had when they first met and the attitude of "another amateur wasting my time" were fading, replaced by a serious look that slowly emerged, his lips slightly pursed, waiting for the other person to continue.

Lin Yanzhou took the small tortoise-shaped seal out of the inside pocket of his jacket, placed it on the table, and pushed it toward him.

Wu Yuanqing glanced down at it but didn't reach out immediately. He first examined the surface of the bronze seal—the patina, the worn edges, the seam between the seal face and the knob—before picking it up, hefting it in his palm to feel its weight, then turning it over to look at the four seal characters on the bottom. His movements were a beat slower than when he had touched any other object before.

"Where did you get this bronze seal?"

"It was dug out of the construction site."

Which construction site?

"Outside the province, so I can't say the exact location."

Wu Yuanqing didn't press the matter. He placed the seal under the lamp, took out a magnifying glass from the drawer, and began to carefully examine the strokes at the bottom. He didn't speak, and after looking at it for a while, he put down the magnifying glass, but instead of returning it to the table, he held it in his hand, as if he had already changed the sense of distance between it and other objects: "I've seen similar seal script on this seal."

He stood up and walked to the bookshelf in the corner, pulled out an old book from the third shelf, turned to a certain page, and laid it open on the table. The pages were yellowed, and on it was a rubbing of an image, the lines blurred, only the left half of the outline clearly visible, but the structure of the characters at the bottom was highly similar to this bronze seal: "This is a fragment of a bronze seal unearthed ten years ago from a Han Dynasty tomb in Luoyang. The rubbing is incomplete; only the left half was rubbed at the time. Mainstream reports identified it as a private seal, belonging to a local minor official whose name is unknown."

He placed the bronze seal and the rubbing side by side, then picked up a magnifying glass and examined them twice more, each time more slowly than the last: "Your seal has ten more strokes than the rubbing. If that fragment is genuine, yours should also be genuine."