Chapter 401: The Forgotten Treasure
Zhang Siwei and his fellow townsman only sat for a short while before taking their leave. Although the Hanlin Academy was known for its leisure—drinking tea, glancing through the court bulletins, and letting the hours slip by—remaining absent from one’s post for too long was still unacceptable.
After the two men departed, several more visitors came to call. After all, Zhu Ping’an’s rank was right there for all to see: a genuine Sixth-Rank official. In this vast Hanlin Academy, only nine individuals outranked him—namely the Academy Chancellor, the Attending Scholars for Lectures and Readings, and the Sixth-Rank Readers and Lecturers. All the other Compilers and Critics were beneath his grade.
These visitors came to pay their respects, and they behaved with the proper decorum. Yet in their eyes, whether hidden deep or plainly visible, flickered either sympathy or a faint schadenfreude. Like Zhang Bo, every one of them knew the Academy inside and out; and every one of them knew perfectly well the infamous “worst assignment in the entire Hanlin Academy” that had been handed to Zhu Ping’an.
But Zhu Ping’an’s calm never wavered. His serene expression left them privately disappointed. They had clearly hoped to witness a look of grief or dejection on his face.
After they left, Zhu Ping’an quietly brewed a fresh pot of tea for himself. With the steam still curling from the spout, he rose once more and made a full circuit of the first, second, and third floors of the library pavilion. Thanks to the attendants assigned to clean the place, the floors and shelves were spotless—though the arrangement of books and archives was somewhat chaotic.
On the third floor, Zhu Ping’an found something that no one of later generations would ever lay eyes on again: The Yongle Encyclopedia. In later times, after storms of war and the wear of centuries, only seven hundred-plus fascicles survived. But here… here on this third floor was a complete and untouched set—22,937 volumes bound into 10,095 books, neatly arranged across all six massive rooms that made up the entire floor.
Zhu Ping’an remembered how he had once read web-novels on Qidian—stories about protagonists who possessed pocket universes of books or had encyclopedias embedded in their minds. Now, standing before this monumental treasure, he felt as if he had stumbled upon a real-life “golden finger.” This was the most comprehensive encyclopedia the world had ever seen. It contained the history, geography, literature, art, philosophy, religion, astronomy, medicine, and countless other branches of knowledge up until the early Yongle era. It was nothing less than a great ship carrying the accumulated civilization of a thousand years—and that ship now lay open before him.
Moments ago, Zhang Bo and the others had regarded this assignment as the absolute worst in the Hanlin Academy, a position with no equal in drudgery and tedium. But gazing at the mountain of books before him—especially this pristine Yongle Encyclopedia—Zhu Ping’an suddenly felt he had drawn the best assignment of all.
Unlike modern libraries, this encyclopedia was not organized using pinyin or Arabic numerals. Instead, its order followed the Hongwu Zhengyun, a rhyme dictionary, as pinyin had not yet existed. Using the rhyme scheme to navigate the volumes, one could easily locate any entry among the ten thousand books.
Zhu Ping’an took the very first book from the nearest shelf and examined it carefully. It was a duplicate copy. The outermost layer was yellow silk, and beneath it lay a sturdy and exquisitely crafted xuan-paper cover. A rectangular label on the silk read “Yongle Encyclopedia,” with two lines of smaller text below indicating the fascicle numbers.
As he held the book, Zhu Ping’an noticed a light film of dust on the silk. It suggested that this book—no, this entire set—had not been touched for a very long time.
This appeared to be the first volume. When he opened it, he found that it contained the background to the encyclopedia’s compilation. The very first page was an imperial edict from the Yongle Emperor himself:
“Matters of the world, ancient and present, are scattered across the various classics, vast and difficult to consult. I desire to gather all things recorded in books far and wide, organizing them according to rhyme, so they may be easily searched. Then knowledge shall be retrieved as effortlessly as reaching into a pouch… I command you to gather all writings since the beginning of recorded script—Classics, Histories, Masters, Anthologies of all schools, as well as materials concerning astronomy, geography, yin-yang, medicine, mathematics, Buddhism, Daoism, crafts—and compile them into a single tome. Do not fear the enormity of the task…”
After reading the edict, Zhu Ping’an sighed softly. It was said that the encyclopedia had taken years to compile, with over twenty thousand high-ranking scholars and officials participating. Once completed, more than a hundred calligraphers had taken another six years just to copy out a single duplicate set.
Such monumental labor… only to gather dust in obscurity. This Yongle Encyclopedia was truly a forgotten treasure.
He gently returned the volume to its place, then continued down the rows. From another shelf, he selected another book and opened it.
This one concerned military matters. The first page he turned happened to contain an illustration—a meticulously inked drawing of a crossbow. Though rendered with a brush, the image was startlingly vivid, almost as though the bolt could spring from the page.
Curiosity stirred. Zhu Ping’an flipped ahead a few pages and found, emblazoned across a chapter title: Divine Arm Bow.
“The Divine Arm Bow is a powerful crossbow. Its body is made of mountain mulberry, its limbs of sandalwood, its barrel of iron, its mechanism of steel. Hemp cords bind its fittings, silk forms its string. The bow is three chi and three cun long, its string two chi and five cun. When loosed, its arrows can travel more than three hundred and forty paces and pierce iron armor at three hundred paces…”
The scroll described the weapon in extraordinary detail—selection of materials, crafting methods, usage, and even battlefield formations. The accompanying illustrations dissected every structural component of the bow, each fragment drawn with painstaking precision. From this single chapter, Zhu Ping’an was certain one could reproduce a perfect Divine Arm Bow.
What a marvelous book—practical and profound.
After finishing it, he returned the scroll and picked up another volume from a different shelf.
This one concerned geography. Its pages were filled with illustrations—mountains, rivers, city walls—carefully drawn. Though far from the accuracy of modern maps, and though Zhu Ping’an noticed several inaccuracies in this tome describing Shandong’s terrain, he felt that for its era it was remarkably competent.
If an emperor were to study the entire geographic set, he could survey his whole kingdom without ever leaving his study.
Had lunchtime not arrived—and had Zhang Siwei not called up from below for him to come down so they could eat together—Zhu Ping’an would surely have lost himself in the Yongle Encyclopedia until hunger or exhaustion forced him out.
“Let’s go find Wen-sheng for lunch,” Zhang Siwei said as he grabbed Zhu Ping’an’s arm the moment he descended the stairs. “We may not get the chance tonight—the people at the Court of Judicial Review will be throwing a welcoming feast for their new probationary officials.”
“You’re saying our Hanlin Academy will hold a banquet for us tonight too?” Zhu Ping’an frowned. Another round of drinking? He had been drinking nonstop these past days and had no desire to continue.
“Of course. It’s tradition. Though honestly, calling it a ‘welcoming feast’ is misleading—since we’re the ones who’ll be footing the bill…” Zhang Siwei muttered, curling his lip.
That wasn’t even the main issue.
Zhu Ping’an’s eyelid twitched. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something troublesome awaited them at tonight’s banquet. Rubbing his eyes, he followed Zhang Siwei out of the Hanlin Academy and headed toward the Court of Judicial Review.