PDLP 016 The Spring Breeze in His Sleeves
016 The Spring Breeze in His Sleeves
When Zhen Xiaosi opened her eyes, she was met with a pair of eyes as deep as a pool.
The owner of those eyes held a copy of "The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons" in his hand, his sleeves tinged with the faint scent of pine soot ink.
"Xiaosi, you're awake?" His voice was like a stream thawing in early spring.
It took her three whole months to understand: she had become Han Jingyu's concubine in Luoyang, a woman whose only historical record describes her as "clever and shrewd, winning Han Gong's heart." This year was the second year of the Shengli era, when Han Jingyu was around thirty years old, treading on thin ice under Wu Zetian's rule.
Can we see the coordinates of an era through his shoulder? Zhen Xiaosi was initially just an observer.
He returned from the palace late at night, his purple robe concealing the proofreading manuscript of "The Pearls of the Three Teachings," with his vermilion annotations as red as blood.
The moonlight of Wu Zetian's court shone through the window lattice, casting a long shadow on him.
As she helped him change his clothes, she felt the tension in his back—the immense responsibility of a scholar undertaking an unprecedented task of compiling a book for the first time.
"The Han family of Fanyang, with Luoyang as their home." He murmured one night in a drunken stupor, his hand gesturing in the air, "But the Tang dynasty I want to write about is even greater than the ancestral home."
The night the news of her exile to Yuezhou arrived, she spoke for the first time: "I will go with you."
He stared at her in astonishment.
In the eyes of this usually quiet woman, there was a clarity beyond her years.
Amidst the roar of the waves of Dongting Lake, she watched him grind his political frustrations into poetry. One day, after writing "A lonely moon reflected on a cold river," he suddenly looked up.
"Xiao Si, do you know what literature is?"
She poured him tea and softly replied, "To establish a heart for heaven and earth."
He was stunned, then burst into laughter, tears welling in his eyes.
That night, with candles burning brightly, he rewrote the preface to "Nine Poems of Yuezhou".
Among the brilliant scholars and the constellation of literary stars of the Tang Dynasty, she gradually became an invisible hub in his literary network. She often recorded the gatherings of the brilliant scholars behind a screen.
She secretly compiled Li Qiao's opulence, Cui Rong's meticulousness, and Song Zhiwen's exquisiteness into a book, which she would discuss with him late at night.
“Song Zhiwen is highly talented but of low character,” she once said softly. “You should be careful in choosing your friends.”
He pondered the scroll, and from then on kept a distance of three feet from Song.
During the Kaiyuan era, he was in charge of the Jixian Academy, and his home gradually became filled with young faces.
I remember Wang Han's boldness mixed with the smell of alcohol when he came to visit, I remember He Zhizhang's frivolous recitation of poetry in Wu dialect, and I especially remember Zhang Jiuling—that scholar from Lingnan with clear and handsome features, whose hands trembled slightly when he presented his policy proposal.
"This boy has the makings of a prime minister," she later whispered beside her pillow.
He asked in surprise, "How did you know?"
“His eyes shone when he read ‘The Essentials of Governance in the Zhenguan Era.’” She paused, “Just like he did back then.”
The most subtle one is Wang Wan's poem.
That day, after court, Han Jingyu shook out a piece of paper with ink still wet from his sleeve. "The sun rises over the sea as night fades, spring arrives on the river as the old year begins..." He recited it repeatedly, his eyes gradually welling up with emotion.
She silently ground the ink, watching him copy the poem onto the plain silk.
When he hung his poem on the east wall of the government office, she planted a crabapple tree in the courtyard.
Later, when the flowers bloomed like snow, he pointed to them and said, "This is the grandeur of the Tang Dynasty."
She smiled without saying a word—only she knew that she had secretly buried a nail clipper she brought from modern times under the roots of the crabapple tree that day.
Confucianism is the foundation, Buddhism is the mind, and Taoism is the spirit.
She was the only witness to his secret of practicing the three religions simultaneously.
After returning from discussing Zen with Shenxiu's disciples, he sat in meditation with his eyes closed for three hours.
She copied the Diamond Sutra in the next room, accompanying Dao Lang as he sang and chanted.
"Buddhism speaks of emptiness, Confucianism speaks of reality," he suddenly said one night, "How can we have both?"
She put down her needle and thread: "One line, one observation; act with sincerity and observe with an open mind."
He gazed at her for a long time, then picked up his brush and wrote the four characters "half literary talent, half moral character"—which later became the guiding principle of the Jixian Academy.
That winter, when he was annotating the *Tao Te Ching*, she would always add charcoal to the study. She would watch him annotate "governing a large country is like cooking a small fish" alongside the *Rites of Zhou*, the red and black ink interwoven like veins.
"Xiaosi, do you believe in the immortality of the soul?" he asked occasionally.
She draped a fur coat over him, saying, "I know not the gods, but I believe that literature is immortal."
He held her hand tightly.
Those hands, which had written petitions and reviewed memorials, were now trembling slightly.
From the jade steps of the palace to the misty rain of the martial world, she was the first reader of all his poems.
She would always sigh softly when she finished writing her early poems for official occasions, praising their exquisite beauty. It wasn't until her landscape poems written during her exile that she wrote the first "good" in her annotations.
“In the poem ‘Xia Gan Shi’,” she tapped her fingertip lightly, “‘Green mountains like swords cleaving through the clouds’—the author’s pen has finally been unsheathed.”
The "Qingzhuang" model he pioneered actually originated from a certain conversation.
“The landscapes of the Six Dynasties are too gentle, and Chen Zi'ang's are too forceful.” She pointed to the first draft. “How should it be done?”
"Add a touch of Dongting mist," she smiled, "to let the strength and gentleness dissolve in the mist."
Later, the poem "A Night Stroll on the Lake with Yin Maoqiu" spread throughout Chang'an, but no one knew that the imagery of "the mist rising and a thousand peaks hidden" came from a metaphor used by a woman when she was brewing tea late at night.
Frontier poetry was one of his few weaknesses. Until one day she hummed a tune from a foreign land—a Turkic folk song she had heard by chance in her previous life.
He captured that desolate rhythm and wrote "Written While Patrolling the Border in Hebei". On the night the manuscript was completed, he suddenly asked, "Xiaosi, where exactly do you come from?"
She looked out at the Milky Way: "From a very far place, I have come to see how Gong Cheng has brought about an era."
Between the parallel and free-flowing lines, there are gaps in history, as well as the inscriptions he forged.
During the most difficult stage of compiling the Tang Liudian, she became his living encyclopedia.
She could always pinpoint the volume number of those scattered fragments of regulations found in works like the Tongdian and Yiwen Leiju.
The editor privately referred to him as "Master Wei," and he tacitly agreed with a smile.
"Why are you so familiar with me?" he asked, leaning on her shoulder when he was tired.
“Because of future generations…” she swallowed the rest of her sentence, then continued, “Because this is your achievement.”
The reform of epitaphs was the area she promoted most deeply, yet most discreetly.
On one occasion, he was writing an epitaph for a general, using the old style. She put down a volume of the Records of the Grand Historian late at night: "The Grand Historian writes about people as if sculpting bronze." He rewrote it all night, and from then on, the Tang Dynasty stele came to life.
The most adventurous genre is the legend. In the first draft of "The Green-Clad Messenger," she added a scene where a parrot witnesses corruption in officialdom. He was horrified after reading it: "Too explicit."
“Then let the parrot starve itself to death after it finishes speaking,” she whispered. “Silence is sometimes the most powerful sound.” On the day the manuscript was completed, he stared at her: “These methods don’t seem like what women learn in their youth.”
She straightened his clothes: "As history itself teaches."
She was the invisible wind in his sleeve.
In the winter of the eighteenth year of the Kaiyuan era, his body collapsed like a mountain.
She knew her time had come—historical records state that Han Jingyu died that year, but make no mention of Lady Wei. Perhaps she was simply a soul that had strayed into history.
On his last night, he managed to sit up and look at the newly submitted poems from the Jixian Academy.
She read aloud to him, her voice steady, until she turned to the page with Wang Wan.
"...Wild geese return to Luoyang."
He held her hand: "Did you plant the crabapple tree in the Political Affairs Hall that year?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
“Because when the crabapple blossoms,” she said, tears streaming down her face, “it’s like a lamp that refuses to go out on a snowy night.”
He smiled, a smile that returned to the scholar in the blue robe he wore in Yuezhou. As the candlelight dimmed, she softly hummed that Turkic folk song. In the song, she saw her fingers gradually become transparent—the time limit for the time traveler had reached its end.
But she left behind three things: a box of manuscripts arranged in an academic style, hidden on a beam somewhere in the Jixian Academy; a five-character quatrain mixed in with lost poems in the "Collected Works of Zhang Yangong", signed "Anonymous"; and a more complete and humane Han Jingyu.
One night, he suddenly said to his son Han Jingjun, "The way of writing should be as your Aunt Wei said—find a third path between historical writing and poetic sentiment."
Many years later, in an editorial office of Zhonghua Book Company.
While collating and annotating the collected works of Han Jingyu, the young editor Zhen Xiaosi discovered a few lines of small characters tucked away in the margins of a Yuan dynasty manuscript:
"As the saying goes, Zhen Shi is like the spring breeze, bringing forth all things without being seen."
Editor Zhen looked up and saw that the crabapple blossoms were in full bloom outside the window.
She suddenly realized that the academic debates about the transition from the early to the high Tang Dynasty might be missing a gentle variable—
How does a love that transcends time subtly infuse modern academic understanding into the roots of history?