One hundred days after the great earthquake of the wuzi year in the Jin Dynasty, I joined a volunteer convoy delivering winter supplies to a certain town called Ping. Because the town lay far off in the mountains and had not suffered serious damage, it had never attracted much attention before. Only after arriving did I discover, to my surprise, that although by official standards its disaster truly did not count as severe, no houses had collapsed and no one had died, most of the buildings had suffered destructive shaking and were no longer fit to live in. The fields, battered by the torrential rains after the quake, had yielded almost nothing. The villagers’ lives appeared extremely hard.
And yet what puzzled me was that the cadre in charge of receiving us entertained us with minced meat fried in douban paste and with great slabs of roast meat. There were no fresh vegetables, but the meal was rich enough to make me doubt the truth of their living conditions. I asked the cadre why they were treating us to such extravagant food. In a kindly tone he explained that the town did not lack fresh raw meat, though it truly lacked vegetables and other daily necessities. I asked where the raw meat came from, and he only smiled and evaded the question. One of the friends traveling with me was horrified and suspected we might have eaten some unclean kind of flesh. Yet the meat tasted fresh enough. I knew it could not be carrion, so I guessed there might be a living tai sui there.
Tai sui, also called flesh lingzhi, is recorded as early as the Classic of Mountains and Seas, where it appears under such names as “seeing flesh,” “gathered flesh,” or “flesh fungus.” In the Compendium of Materia Medica it is placed under the “vegetable” section, among the various zhi, as one kind of lingzhi. It is said that if one eats it away, it soon grows back as before; it can be cut without ever being exhausted. In times of great famine throughout the dynasties, it is said to have saved many lives. Following the methods for seeking lingzhi recorded in old books, I searched through the town, but found nothing. Just as I was lamenting my failure, one of the students we had come to aid quietly sought me out and told me he knew what sort of meat the town was eating.
He led me behind the cookhouse of his home, to a livestock pen where two animals were tethered, unlike anything I had ever seen. They stood about as high as packhorses, with two long curved horns on their heads and nostrils as huge as a hippopotamus’s. Their hair was sparse and patterned in pale yellow and white blotches. From the hind leg of one of them a great slab of flesh had been sliced away, the blood only just dried. The other bore on its belly a wound so deep the bone could be seen. Yet they seemed to feel no pain at all, standing there quietly chewing straw. The student told me that there were seven or eight such beasts in the town. The elders all called them white oxen. If meat was cut from their bodies, it would grow back whole by the next day, and so no one in the village had ever starved to death. To keep them from being stolen, the secret of the white oxen was known only to a very few, and his grandfather happened to be one of the town’s clan elders.
I felt deeply glad for the villagers, but even more curious about the origin of such animals. After returning home, I consulted many ancient books and even made a special trip back to Tihu Hall in central Shanxi to search for traces of them, but found nothing except a few vague scraps. Not until recently did I come across a new book called Imagined Animals. What drew me was not the title, but the intricate totemic pattern on its cover, I had once seen a similar seal-cut design in a thread-bound book. The book was divided into four sections, birds, beasts, scaled things, and insects. In the tenth chapter of the insect section I finally found a clue to the white oxen. They turned out to be a kind of creature called the sun-returning ox, an animal whose flesh can never be cut away completely. Emperors of the Han and Jin were said to have raised them specially, though their meat was mediocre. The description in the book was still frustratingly vague, so, following the cover pattern, I returned to Tihu Hall and found a copy of the Yi Jian Ji stamped with a dark red seal. Yi Jian was a blind man from the age of Yu the Great who excelled at rapid notation. He recorded every living creature he was able to behold, arranging them by category into four hundred and twenty juan. Later these books were scattered and lost in the long river of history, and now one catches sight of them only when later texts happen to cite them. The copy of the Yi Jian Ji in my possession was itself only a fragment, and the page describing the sun-returning ox had long been missing. I thought that Xu Lai, the author of Imagined Animals, must possess a complete edition, so I went looking for him.
This compiler, who suffered from prostatitis, lived in a small place called Twisted-Neck Outlook. After receiving my letter, he replied that he was willing to lend me the book, but that I would have to come see it in person. Yet by the time I arrived, his humble dwelling had already been reduced to ashes. According to the villagers, it had been attacked by a group of mature adults. I could only return in frustration. Some time later, there came word that Xu Lai had moved to Phoenix. I decided not to seek him out again, lest I bring him unnecessary trouble. But I sincerely hope that the Yi Jian Ji will continue to circulate, and that before I die I may yet see the complete text. And as for its inheritor living in a place called Phoenix, one can hardly say that is not a kind of destiny.