Chapter 181: Snake Ghost Town Judeka

(The uncle ’s next narrative is very cumbersome and involves a lot of things in old Changsha, but these things are very interesting to me, because I have loved the old things with the smell of earthy scorpion since I was young. It ’s okay to listen to the sense of history.)
The name of the missionary in the mouth of the third uncle was called Cox. Hendry, whose Chinese name is Jude Kao, worked in a church school in Changsha. He was one of the Americans who came to China during the Kuomintang period with the eastward tide at that time. But this man has been unclean since he was a child. He has little interest in foreign culture, but he is very interested in Chinese culture. Perhaps in the American economic concept, cultural relics are only one of the commodities. They can be bought and sold freely, and they can also be exported. So in the third year of China, he occasionally did some smuggling of cultural relics in secret, that year he was only 19 years old.
Judeka's smuggling business has always been done with care, and the business is not doing much. At that time, there were two kinds of smugglers. One was a running camp, which took a large amount, but the bid was very low. It was a one-off transaction, which was very risky. Jude Kao is a "iron trading", that is, high bids, less things, but it is very safe, one by one. His way of doing business was very appetizing to Grandpa, so Grandpa had a good relationship with him at the time.
But Judeka was not a friend worth making. From the bottom of his heart, he did not regard grandpa as a friend, even he did not regard grandpa as a person equal to him. My grandfather knew afterwards that in private, he called my grandfather a bug.
After the liberation of Changsha in 1949, the Kuomintang was completely defeated. Then in 1952, the church began to withdraw from China. Many Americans stranded in China began to return to China. He also received a telegram from the church to keep him safe. return.
He realized that his business in China was coming to an end, so he began to make preparations and transferred his property. Before he left, he had another sinister idea. He and his fellow party began to buy the Mingqi, and used the Chinese's psychology of trusting the old relationship to take away a large number of cultural relics with extremely cheap deposits. My grandpa's Warring States silk script.
At that time, my grandfather was not willing to sell this thing that his parents had exchanged for. It was Jude's lies that the money would be used to open Shantang. The grandfather felt that this was Jade, and he barely shot it (of course, my grandfather said it himself Yes, I do n’t know if it ’s true. I do n’t think a person like him is likely to have this kindness).
After all the goods were on board, Judeco knew that some of these people were not easy to provoke. In order to avoid future troubles, he took a telegram on the ship to the police station at that time, and sent my grandfather to a dozen or so All the traces were leaked to the temporary garrison of the Changsha People's Liberation Army at that time.
This was the very famous "Warring States Silk Case" at the time. This is not just a case of smuggling of cultural relics, because the relationship between Judeco and the generals of the Kuomintang before the liberation involved a lot of factors that were peculiar to the era, such as spies and treason, and became very complicated and almost alarmed the central government. On that day, Jude returned home in full force, and the batch of natives who had accumulated wealth for him shot dead, jailed in jail, and wailed.
Although is also deserved of sin, but such a death is really too tragic. Later, the smuggling of Chinese cultural relics during the Great Leap Forward and the "Cultural Revolution" was almost extinct, and it was also related to the death of this group of people at that time.
At that time, my grandfather was clever. When he saw that the situation was wrong, he fled into the mountain overnight and hid in an ancient tomb. He slept with the dead body for two weeks, escaped the limelight, and later fled naked to Hangzhou. This incident hit my grandfather so much that the Warring States silk script later became a taboo for him. When he was alive, he always told us not to talk about things in this area, so people in our family have always been scornful about this.
After Jude's return to the United States, he auctioned the relics and made a fortune. The Warring States silk was sold to the Metropolitan Museum of New York at a high price, becoming the highest-priced auction at the time, and Jude's became a millionaire and a newcomer to the upper class. . His story in China has been written into a biography, which is widely circulated.
After becoming rich, Jude Kao gradually turned his interest to socializing. Around 1957, he was invited to serve as a consultant to the Far East Art Department of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, providing consultants on the research work of the Warring States silk script. The curator of the museum at the time was the infamous Pu Allen. Both of them were China Connect. They both hired bandits to dig the homes of cultural relics in China and soon became friends. Judeco also sponsored a sum of money to the museum as a fund for the acquisition of private Chinese cultural relics.
Probably because of the laid back of the affluent life and the love of Chinese culture. Afterwards, Jude's self-cultivation and self-cultivation gradually became addicted to the study of Chinese culture. He hosted several large-scale projects in the Metropolitan Museum, and the results were quite remarkable. However, it was in 1974 that he was truly inscribed in the annals of history. He solved the matter of the ciphertext of the Warring States silk script.
At that time, his research on the silk books of the Warring States period had lasted for more than 20 years. At first he was to raise the price of the silk books, but later it was entirely because of interest.
At the beginning, no one believed that an American like him could unlock the ancient Chinese code. However, Judeco did it with amazing perseverance.
Is also a coincidence. He used the inspiration from an ancient Chinese book "Embroidery" to discover the decoding method of "The Book of Warring States". This decoding method is actually similar to the method of using text to record embroidery programs in "Embroidery Spectrum". In mathematics, it is a dot matrix to make a picture. It is not complicated to say that it is completely a coincidence. You can think of it and you can solve it. You ca n’t think of it, even if you are proficient in ancient Chinese cryptography.
After discovering the decoding method, Jude Kao was overjoyed and immediately summoned a staff to translate the grandfather's Warring States silk script on a large scale. A month later, all the ciphertext was solved.
However, to Jude's surprise, what appeared on the decoding paper at the time was not the ancient text that originally predicted the divination calendar during the Warring States Period, but a strange and completely meaningless pattern.
It's hard to describe what this pattern looks weird. I looked at the sketches that Uncle San had painted for me and couldn't figure it out. To describe it, I can only say that this pattern is very simple. It consists of only six curved lines and an irregular circle. The lines extend mutually, a bit like the veins of the river on the map, or the stems of some vines, However, giving the circle a circle feels no. When you look at it from a distance, it seems to be an abstract text; when you look at it closely, you don't know what it is.
Besides, there is no information. If you do n’t say that this is from a broken volume of an ancient Chinese book, everyone will think that this is a line drawn on paper by a child who just took a pen.
Has gone through thousands of times, and the translated thing turned out to be such an inexplicable pattern. Jude Kao felt very surprised. He once thought that his translation method was wrong, but after repeated verification, he found that it was impossible, if it was wrong, then it was impossible to successfully convert the text into a seamless pattern. Obviously, what is recorded in cipher text is these seven lines.
What do these seven lines represent? Why did the owner of this silk book hide it in the text?
With so many years of experience in China, his instinct tells himself that he can be written in cipher text on an extremely expensive silk silk, and it will not be an ordinary pattern. This line must have any special meaning, maybe it's not trivial.
He was very interested in it, and immediately began to consult the information. He spent a lot of time to turn through countless libraries, and at the same time, took this pattern to the Chinese sinologists at the university to consult. However, the group of people in the United States has a limited level, and tossing for half a year has no results. Even if some people say speculation, it is nonsense and totally unfounded. It is nonsense when it is heard.
Just when his interest waned and he felt that there was no hope, a friend from the university pointed him out. He told Jude Kao that such Chinese weird things should be asked in the old man's heap in Chinatown. At the time of the Cold War, in Chinatown, there were many old scholars from Taiwan, Canglong Crouching Tiger, and there might be clues.
Jude Kao was right when he heard it. With the last hope, he really went to Chinatown for advice.
There is a kind of library in Chinatown, where the old people gather. Jude Kao went to this kind of place specially, and circulated the graphics, but also lost his life, and he let him encounter an expert.
This tall man is a skinny old man who is a celebrity in the local area. He was listening to a book in a tea house that day and happened to encounter Jude Kao to send a picture. Zhang Na came to see him. After this look, he was taken aback by asking where Judeka got it?
Jude's examination showed that there was a door, but he couldn't help being overjoyed. He naturally had his own set of rhetoric. After talking to the old man, he asked the old man if he knew anything.
The old man shook his head and said no, but he told Judeco that although he didn't know the origin of the figure, he had seen something similar in one place.
After Jude's examination, his heart moved, and he asked where he saw it.
The old man said that while he was still on the mainland, he saw a red furnace in a Taoist temple in Qimeng Mountain in Shandong. The figure was carved on the red furnace.