Censored by Confucius (27 page)

A similar case of female impersonation was noted in the dynastic records during the Jiajing reign of the Ming dynasty. A transvestite by the name of San Chong lived a similar life and faced an identical death. It is a mystery that San Chong didn't seek revenge on his judge, as Hong had.

Tools of the Sex Trade

The third son of one of the junior secretaries at the Board of Revenue, surnamed Jiang, considered himself to be quite a sensual sort of fellow and an accomplished womanizer. One day as he was strolling near the Haidai Gate he saw a beautiful woman sitting in a carriage.

She saw him looking at her and didn't appear to take offense until he started following the carriage. She then grew angry at his impertinence, but when he persisted her anger turned to mirth and she gave him a wave.

Jiang was thrilled to have this positive reaction so he continued following the carriage. Every now and then the woman would turn back to look at Jiang as if she too was interested in a liaison.

Jiang was soon beside himself with anticipation and before he knew it his legs had carried him a distance of seven or eight miles.

Eventually the carriage stopped outside a large house and the woman went inside. Jiang, feeling rather foolish, stood dithering outside for a while. He didn't dare go in, but at the same time, he didn't want to leave when he'd come so close to realizing his fantasy.

As he paced back and forth trying to come to a decision, a young maidservant waved to him and then pointed in the direction of a small door along the side of the house.

Jiang took the hint and went in through the door only to find that it was just a toilet. The maid then whispered to Jiang that he should wait for a while. Jiang stood in the toilet and endured the suffocating stench.

Precisely at dusk the maid opened the door and led him through the house. They passed by the kitchen and various other rooms and eventually arrived at the entrance to the main hall of the residence. The doorway was decorated in luxurious style and hung with vermilion drapes, beside which stood two houseboys.

Jiang was feeling rather pleased with himself. It was as if he had entered a kingdom of angels. He straightened his clothes and patted
down his hair and went into the hall. At the southern end of the hall a large man with a thick black beard sat crosslegged on a brick bed, leaning back against a pillow. The hairs on his legs were as thick as the spines of a hedgehog.

The man shouted angrily at Jiang, "Who are you?! Why have you come here?!"

Jiang was so terrified that his whole body shook and quite unconsciously he dropped to his knees. Before he had time to answer he heard the rattle of jade bracelets, and there entering the room was the woman from the carriage.

The bearded man sat her on his knee and said to Jiang, "This is Zhutuan, my beautiful and treasured concubine. Your interest in her shows that at least you have good taste. But everything has an owner. You must be an idiot to think you could taste the meat of a dragon from heaven!"

He then began to kiss the concubine and fondle her breasts, deliberately taunting the young Jiang.

Jiang, helplessly embarrassed, kowtowed and requested permission to leave.

The bearded man said, "You must have been very interested to have come all this way. How can you leave without first satisfying your curiosity?"

He then asked Jiang about his parents, and Jiang answered quite honestly.

The bearded man replied, "What a reckless fellow you are! Your father was a colleague of mine so you are practically a nephew to me. How dare a nephew lust after his uncle's concubine?! What sort of disgusting behavior is that?!"

He then ordered his attendants to bring out a large stick and said, "I will teach my friend's son a lesson he will never forget."

An attendant returned with a huge pole and another pushed Jiang's head to the floor, ripped off his pants, and exposed his buttocks. Jiang wept and pleaded for mercy and eventually the concubine climbed off the bed and knelt down in front of her master.

"Please have mercy on him," she said to the bearded man. "His buttocks are even softer and whiter than mine! I don't think I could bear to see them beaten. Why don't you just treat him as a male concubine and sodomize him? He could probably cope with that."

"Sodomize the son of a friend of mine! I couldn't do that!" the bearded man retorted.

So the woman made another suggestion: "Everyone who comes to worship at a temple brings an offering. He has come to us with a specific deed in mind so he must have brought a tool of trade. Let's have a look at it."

So the bearded man ordered his two attendants to examine Jiang's penis. After delving around in Jiang's clothing for a while they reported, "It is as small as a silkworm and the foreskin has not yet retracted."

Stroking his bearded chin, the man bellowed, "Shame on you! Trying to knock off other people's women with such a pitiful tool! Huh!"

He then tossed a small knife onto the floor and said to the attendants, "This young fellow loves sex, so why don't you two fix up his sex tool for him!"

One of the attendants picked up the knife, grabbed Jiang's penis, and made as if to cut the foreskin. By this stage Jiang's face was awash in tears and mucus.

The concubine, her cheeks flushed, climbed down from the bed and spoke once more. "My lord, you've gone far enough. Any more and I would be embarrassed. Our donkey is sick and I would love to have some dumplings for dinner tonight. Although we have ample grain we still need someone to pull the grindstone. Why don't you make him replace the donkey and grind the wheat for us?"

The bearded man asked if Jiang was prepared to perform this task and the young man, lacking an alternative, promptly assented.

The concubine then embraced her master and the two of them lay back against the pillows while the attendants brought the grindstone and the wheat to a position just outside one of the nearby windows. Jiang was ordered to begin grinding and the attendants showered his back with lashes from their whips, just as if they were spurring on a donkey.

Jiang pulled the grindstone all night long, and the next morning he heard the man say, "He's had enough! Give him a dumpling and let him leave through the dogs' door!"

Jiang was bedridden for a month after this incident.

Stealing Ginseng

One of the larger ginseng stores in the capital is the Zhang Guang. One day a young man tethered his horse outside and wandered in to buy some ginseng.

He placed a bag of silver on the counter and took out a hundred taels as deposit for some samples of ginseng. He explained himself thus: "My master is extremely fussy about the quality of his ginseng, and if I buy some that he's not happy with, he's sure to punish me. I loathe buying ginseng because I'm always worried about making a mistake.

"Would it be possible for me to leave this money as a deposit on a range of samples and have one of your more experienced salesmen bring them along to my master's house so that the master can examine it personally?"

The storekeeper thought this a reasonable proposition, so he accepted the deposit and instructed an experienced, middle-aged salesman to accompany the young man back to his master's with several pounds of ginseng. Just as the salesman was about to leave, the storekeeper advised him, "Be sure to keep an eye on this ginseng. Don't let anyone else get hold of it."

The young man and the salesman traveled out of the city through the Donghua Gate and eventually arrived at the steps of a mansion. The master of the house, a well-groomed man in fur whose hat bore a sapphire, was upstairs and did indeed look extremely ill.

Resting against his pillow, he addressed the salesman, "This ginseng you bear—is it of the best quality from the northeast?"

The salesman said that it was, whereupon two houseboys standing in attendance came forward and took the ginseng to the master for his perusal. He opened the bundle, packet by packet, apparently quite an expert in judging the quality of ginseng.

Before he had completed his inspection a horse-drawn carriage stopped outside. Someone obviously familiar with the household entered the
hall downstairs, and the master, looking rather anxious, instructed his attendants to inform the new arrival that he was too sick to see visitors.

He then lowered his voice and said to the salesman, "This man has come to ask me for a loan. I can't let him up here now. If he sees me buying ginseng, I'll never be able to refuse him."

The shouts of the newcomer reverberated up the stairs. "Your master's just pretending to be sick! I'll bet the real reason he won't see me is that he's in bed with some luscious concubine or a young houseboy! Well, I'm going to go upstairs anyway to see for myself!"

The two attendants tried to stop him and a noisy argument ensued.

The master became even more anxious and said to the salesman in a worried whisper, "Quick, hide your ginseng! We must not let this rascal get even the slightest glimpse of it. There's a bamboo box at the foot of the bed. That should be a safe place for it."

The salesman was handed a copper padlock and key with which to lock the ginseng in the box.

"You stay here. Sit on the box and guard the ginseng. I'll go down and try to stop him."

The master staggered off down the hall and greeted the newcomer. Their relationship seemed to be fairly amicable since there was a lot of good-humored bantering. The guest, though, persisted in his request to be allowed upstairs. The master, however, continued to refuse. This point of disagreement led to a huge argument.

The guest said in anger, "You're worried that if I go upstairs I'll see all your money! You don't want to lend me any, do you? Well, I'll not be treated so callously! I'll never bother you again! Goodbye!"

The master pleaded for forgiveness and followed the guest out of the house to see him off. The attendants also appeared to have gone, since the house had fallen instantly silent.

The silence continued for quite some time while the salesman sat on the box waiting patiently for someone to return.

After a long while, the salesman's suspicions were aroused. He unlocked the box to take the ginseng back to the store but to his surprise it had disappeared. He then discovered that the box he had been sitting on had a false base. What he had assumed to be the bottom of the box was in fact the floor, whose boards opened like a trapdoor into the room below.

The noise of the argument had obviously muffled the noise of the floorboards opening, so the salesman hadn't noticed the theft of the ginseng he had been guarding so carefully.

Stealing a Painting

One day a burglar sneaked into the house of a wealthy man in broad daylight, planning to steal a scroll. He had just rolled up the scroll and was about to escape when the master of the house walked in.

Realizing he was trapped, the thief, clutching the scroll, fell to his knees and pleaded, "Kind sir, I am but a poverty-stricken man with no hope for the future. I have come to you today with a portrait of my ancestor in the hope that you will exchange it for a peck of rice."

The master burst out in a sneering laugh and with an impatient flick of his hands sent the man on his way. He didn't even bother to look at the scroll.

When he walked into his hall, however, he saw that his priceless Zhao Zi'ang scroll had vanished.

Stealing a Pair of Boots

One day a man wearing brand-new boots was walking around town when he was approached by another man, a complete stranger, who proceeded to bow and shake hands and chat as if he were an old friend.

Our fellow in the new boots said in a puzzled tone, "I'm terribly sorry, sir, but I don't believe we have ever met before!"

The stranger laughed testily. "So, now that you've got yourself some new boots you're too good for your old friends, eh?"

The stranger then snatched the hat from the puzzled man's head and tossed it onto the roof of a nearby building before walking off.

Our hatless man assumed that the fellow must have been drunk, and was just wondering what to do next when another fellow came towards him, saying, "That was a really nasty trick that man played on you! You really need a hat on a hot, sunny day like today, too. It'd pay to get your hat down off that roof."

The man wearing the boots replied, "You're right, but without a ladder there's really not much I can do."

His new acquaintance then made a generous offer. "Why don't you stand on my shoulders and I'll hoist you up? I'm a real do-gooder, aren't I?"

Gratefully accepting, the man with the new boots made as if to climb onto the other's back.

The kneeling man, for his part, shrugged his shoulders and turned away looking rather upset.

"Hang on a minute! Don't be in such a hurry. I know you're rather keen on that hat of yours, but what about my shirt? I'm rather keen on my shirt, too, you know, and even though your boots are pretty new they're still quite muddy. I'm sure you don't want to dirty my shirt, do you?"

This speech left the hatless man quite embarrassed, so he removed his new boots and left them on the ground in the care of his new friend.