Tihu Notes | Snow Mastiff

Brother Chen, a trader from Golmud, once told me this story. In 2005 he and a coworker were returning from Haibei after buying cordyceps. Passing a small temple by Chaka Salt Lake, they went in to ask for water. It was a monastery of the White Sect. In the courtyard a Tibetan mastiff had just given birth to a litter of puppies, all of exceptionally pure blood. Among them was one that was pure white from head to tail, without a single stray hair. Chen’s coworker grew excited and said that this was the most precious of all snow mastiffs. He at once pulled out cash and tried to buy the puppy from the lama in the temple, but the lama refused flatly. Then he offered in exchange the finest cordyceps they had purchased, and still the lama would not agree.

Tihu Notes | Little New Year

When I was little, on the morning of the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month, there would always be a woman squatting beneath the spirit wall outside the gate of our family courtyard. She was short and stout, wearing an old red padded jacket with cotton wadding sticking out of the cuffs. Someone in the house would go out and give her a box of malt candy and half a tray of dumplings. The woman would leave in great delight, then run off toward the courtyards of other branches of the clan. My mother said she was a madwoman from the village, and because it was Little New Year, no household took offense and each simply gave her a little food to send her on her way.

Tihu Cipher

New domain name, new game, new plan. Collecting riddles.

How to play [tihu code]

[Tihu Cipher (tihu code)] is a web-based puzzle game. Players need to make flexible use of online tools and different modes of thought. As long as you can find the address leading to the next stage, you have cleared the level. The key may test common knowledge, may be no more than a spot-the-difference game, or may require some calculation. The process of thinking through the puzzle cannot be measured by ordinary logic. It may be a brainteaser, it may be a serious problem for study, or the answer may be right under your nose.

Tihu Notes | Electric Gu

One evening I was chatting on MSN with my fellow townsman Liu Hai. He had trained in computer science and was now a freelancer, earning quite well. Liu Hai told me that next month an especially powerful worm virus called “Pantao No. 5” would begin to spread, and advised me to upgrade my system early and patch it properly.

I asked how he could know about it in advance. He told me that sixty percent of the viruses circulating on the internet were developed either by him or by people like him. When a new strain of virus is successfully created, they either sell it to antivirus companies, which then add the virus information to their update packages, or sell it to specific clients, since special viruses have special uses. As for whether a virus is then actually released across the internet, that is another matter.

Tihu Notes | Su Ren and Red Ghosts

Su Ren

Su Ren was the deputy chief of the Nanhong Street police station. He was rich in investigative experience, yet never seemed able to win promotion. Once, residents of Building Seven in Yimin Residential Compound reported that Room C on the second floor was haunted: in the middle of the night there would be either a woman’s weeping or heart-rending howls. The officers who first received the report paid it no mind and decided the residents were talking nonsense. Su Ren, however, took it very seriously. After making inquiries, he reported the matter to the district public security bureau, conducted a surprise raid on Room C on the second floor of Building Seven, and arrested the owner. Sure enough, they seized five firearms and a number of prohibited weapons, cracking a major robbery-and-murder gang.

Tihu Notes | Six Fingers

My father once told me that when he was a boy there was in the Cao family of Jincheng a pair of twin brothers named Cao Chun and Cao Dun. They were astonishingly clever, able to memorize whatever they read at a glance. Most remarkable of all, Cao Chun had six fingers on his left hand, while Cao Dun had six on his right. Six fingers are not unheard of among newborn deformities, but most often the extra digit is only an underdeveloped flap of flesh, with none of the true function of a finger. The Cao brothers’ extra fingers, however, were no different from the others: fully formed in bone and muscle, and capable of moving freely. This made their hands more dexterous than those of ordinary people.

Tihu Notes | Spring Worms, Autumn Serpents

When I was working at the university network center, on one spring equinox the servers suddenly crashed, and after rebooting they ran abnormally slowly. Our system had been built in-house with C under Linux, and in theory it was quite secure. Our instructor immediately told us to investigate the cause, but we found nothing wrong at all. Later I discovered a file named earthworm.dll in the system directory. I first assumed it to be a worm virus, but when I opened it there was only a single line of code inside: 221122. After deleting it, the system immediately returned to normal. How so short a line could have such power, I could not guess. That evening, when I returned to the dormitory and turned on my own computer, it too booted with unusual slowness. Sure enough, in the system32 folder on the C drive there was another earthworm.dll file. Inside it there was likewise only a single command line, this time 112121. Once I deleted it, my computer also returned to normal.

Tihu Notes | Steamed Egg and Kombu

Steamed Egg

My fellow townsman Liu Lin worked at an internet company in Shanghai, rising early and sleeping late, laboring with great hardship. He came home for the May Day holiday to rest, but had no appetite at all, could not eat, and had even developed insomnia. The hospital was of no help. One day I went to his house to borrow a book, and he asked me about it. I went home, steamed an egg, and brought it over. When he saw it, he said, “I’ve already eaten. I have no appetite.” I told him, “Your problem comes from spending too long in front of computer screens. The radiation has thrown your spleen and stomach into disorder. So I set this egg behind the monitor until it was thoroughly warmed through, then steamed it in the pot. To use its force against itself: that is the principle behind curing this illness.” After Liu Lin ate it, his appetite indeed improved greatly, and his condition was more than half cured.

Tihu Notes | Dragon Slough

One spring I came down with mumps, and one side of my face swelled up alarmingly. It was the middle of the night. The dormitory doors were already locked, so there was no getting to a hospital, and after turning the dorm upside down we still could not find any suitable medicine. A roommate went next door to ask for help. Li Si, a classmate of ours, came over, took one look at me, and pulled a small packet wrapped in kraft paper from his pocket. He said it was a Chinese herbal medicine his mother had given him, and that it worked very well for mumps. My roommates quickly mixed it with hot water and had me drink it. It was bitter going down, with the faintest fishy taste. By early the next morning the swelling in my face had indeed subsided, and I was already more than halfway recovered. Li Si brought me two more packets and told me to take them over the course of another day.

Tihu Notes | Zhi

Last year, when we were preparing for the university anniversary, our law school erected a statue in the greenhouse-like indoor garden of the college building. People who did not know better all assumed it was a lion, but of course it was not. Why would anyone set up only a single lion? It was in fact a statue of a zhi (pronounced zhi, fourth tone), a divine beast known in the Record of Marvels as the xiezhi. In traditional Chinese characters, the character for “law” is made up of the water radical together with zhi. Legend says that the zhi bears a single horn on its head, and that when judging a case, if you brought it before the suspects, it would touch with its horn the one who was truly guilty.