Carry it with you at all times.
LOMO Rule
The ease of old Chengdu is not something people merely speak of. It sinks all the way into the bones. The city was born with a life-attitude so calm and composed that every corner of it seemed to rest in an almost lazy state of comfort. Even white-collar workers in the forest of steel and concrete walked with a pace markedly slower than their counterparts in other cities.
Lin Fei lived in Yulin, the part of Chengdu most steeped in that temperament of leisurely ease. He was a thin, lanky man, an HR specialist at a headhunting firm, yet he always dressed in zip-up sports tops with stand collars and carried a bulging backpack. Whenever he chatted with clients, he always made a point of explaining that the “Fei” in his name was pronounced fei with the third tone rather than the first, lest people laugh that his name sounded too feminine. Every evening after work he passed the Parachute Tower crossroads, walked west into Yulin East Street, and turned right at the first parasol tree he saw. Beneath it stood a tiny bobo chicken shop called Jinmantang, so small that a few tables and stools had been crammed into it every which way. If you wanted to eat, you opened the refrigerator yourself, picked out your skewers, shouted “Boss!” and someone would bring over a basin of red chili oil. Lin Fei always ordered a generous handful of spicy beef, along with two liang of dumplings. In that way dinner was settled comfortably and completely.
Today, after work, he came to Jinmantang as usual. He ordered a heap of food and sat down. What was different from other days was that across from him there was already a second dipping dish of oil, though the seat remained empty until a small pile of bamboo skewers had grown before him. Only then did a plump middle-aged man waddle into the shop on short steps and sit down opposite him.
“Sorry, sorry. Had to pick the kid up from school. Nothing to be done,” the fat man said. He grabbed a duck tongue skewer, dipped it in the oil, stuffed it into his mouth, chewed twice, found the taste insufficient, and shouted over his shoulder, “Boss! Bring me a dry dip too!” When the waiter brought over a dish of dry chili and Sichuan pepper, he finally dug in with complete satisfaction.
Lin Fei watched patiently as the big fat man annihilated an entire basin of bobo chicken and wiped the oil clean from the corners of his mouth. Only then did Lin Fei slowly ask, “Mendenger, what is it this time? What could have made you come all the way out here looking for me?”
The man called Mendenger gave a greasy little grin. “What’s wrong? Can’t I come eat a meal at Jinmantang without you?” Then he drew a kraft-paper envelope from inside his jacket and handed it over. “The old man lost something. He wants you to help get it back.”
Lin Fei frowned and tore open the envelope. Inside were several close-up photographs of bronze vessels. At a glance they were clearly state-treasure-grade artifacts. “These are from Sanxingdui, aren’t they?” he asked.
The Sanxingdui site lies in Nanxing Town, Guanghan, Sichuan, no more than thirty-three kilometers from Chengdu. It takes its name from three abrupt mounds of yellow earth rising from the Chengdu Plain. It is a nationally protected archaeological site at least four thousand years old. Large quantities of bronze objects, jade pieces, gold items, and other artifacts have been excavated there, displaying to the world the highly developed and uniquely styled bronze civilization of the ancient Shu kingdom.
“Exactly. These are artifacts from Sanxingdui that have never been publicly exhibited. Look at this one, storage room number three.” Mendenger touched one of the photos with his thick finger. It showed a display case. Inside stood a bronze figure about sixty centimeters high. Lin Fei leaned toward the light outside the shop door and peered closely. “The protruding-eyed human figure from Sanxingdui, roughly forty-nine hundred years old. Looks authentic. What’s wrong with it?” Many Sanxingdui artifacts depict eyes in strange forms. The Chronicles of Huayang even record: “Cancong, Marquis of Shu, had protruding eyes and was first to call himself king.” This suggests the Sanxingdui civilization worshipped eyes. The figure in the photo had enormous eyeballs, with cylindrical pupils thrusting forward like the telephoto lens of an SLR camera.
“The problem is that this isn’t what used to be in that storage room at all,” Mendenger said, pronouncing each word carefully. “And besides, the Sanxingdui Museum doesn’t have this artifact anywhere. Yet it is undeniably something excavated from Sanxingdui. What was originally in this room was a huge three-handled bronze cauldron. Tell me, who swaps one real artifact for another real artifact? And in ordinary people’s eyes, that protruding-eyed statue is worth far more than the lousy old cauldron!”
Lin Fei narrowed his eyes. “Interesting. I thought the old man had stepped down already. He’s still sticking his nose into this?” The old man and Mendenger were both Lin Fei’s clansmen. The old man had been the previous clan chief.
Mendenger’s expression turned serious. “Don’t forget, boy. Dead or alive, we’re the last of the Shu.”
Lin Fei laughed awkwardly. “Why so solemn? Relax. I’ll look into it properly.”
“Did you bring your tools?” Mendenger asked anxiously. “The old man is really in a hurry this time.”
“Of course.” Lin Fei patted his backpack. “LOMO Rule Number One: carry it with you at all times.”
Time to use it, day or night.
LOMO Rule
The “Shu people” in Mendenger’s mouth did not mean modern Sichuanese, but the ancient Shu who had lived here more than three thousand years ago. As early as the Shang dynasty, the ancient Shu, big-eyed, straight-nosed, square-jawed, broad-eared, built here a highly civilized theocratic kingdom, the ancient Shu state, whose power extended across what is today Sichuan and Yunnan, and at times reached even western Hubei and Qiang lands. Around the era when Shang fell and Zhou arose, the Shu forces that had helped Zhou conquer Shang were themselves later turned on and crushed by Zhou. From that point on, the ancient Shu passed from overwhelming brilliance into a wandering and broken decline.
And yet the Shu did not vanish completely. Their orphaned descendants remained scattered across the Chengdu Plain, surviving stubbornly, watching over the relics and bloodline left by their ancestors, watching wave after wave of northerners moving south through the dynasties, mingling into them and quietly changing them. Generation after generation, outsiders came to Sichuan and were finally assimilated into genuine Shu people, inheriting Shu habits and the Shu spirit. Take modern Chengdu people: most are descendants of migrants who came during the “Huguang fills Sichuan” migration a little over two hundred years ago, and yet their grammar often follows a peculiar subject-object-verb order. Instead of saying “don’t know,” they like to say something equivalent to “know-not.” This, too, comes from the unique Shu mode of speech known as left-speaking.
Lin Fei was such a person, a pure-blooded ancient Shu. He was connected with other ancient Shu through a forum called Dingdingmao, sharing news, guarding, and transmitting the cultural relics of the ancient Shu kingdom. What Mendenger had handed him was troublesome indeed. Sanxingdui, after all, had left behind a great many unsolved mysteries. According to public materials, almost none of the bronzes excavated there were daily-use objects; nearly all were ritual implements. In truth, some daily-use items had survived, only they had not been made public for one reason or another. The unpublicized bronze cauldron in question, for instance, was the origin-vessel of ancient Shu food culture, and the unbroken line of Sichuan cuisine over thousands of years depended on it. Who would steal such a thing?
Ancient bronzes do not command especially high prices on the international antiquities black market. If an ordinary smuggler had stolen it, then having gotten into an unpublished storeroom guarded so heavily, he ought to have had an easier time taking the much more valuable gold scepter and the like from the public halls. And yet this thief had ignored the treasures in plain sight, stolen the bronze cauldron, and left behind a more “valuable” protruding-eyed statue. Clearly, he had not come for money. Which meant that the thief must know the cauldron’s special function. Everything, then, still had to be traced back through food.
Lin Fei did not go home. Instead he turned into an internet café and logged into the Douban group “Chengdu’s Utopia of Food,” intending to see whether anything was happening lately in the restaurant world. As soon as he got online he saw a fresh message:
Three Ears Hotpot heirloom stolen, suspected prank by rich youths (forwarded)
One of Chengdu’s most famous hotpot restaurants, Three Ears, suffered a theft last night. The shop’s treasure, a three-handled bronze pot said to have been passed down since the Qianlong era and kept at the flagship store on Nijiaqiao Road, mysteriously vanished. The inner wall of the pot was inscribed with the secret spice recipe of Three Ears Hotpot, and the pot still held the master broth used for more than a hundred years. According to the shop, what astonished them most was that the thief, after stealing the heirloom iron pot, left behind a gold pot of exactly the same size. They suspect the incident may have been some prank staged by a group of wealthy second-generation locals…
The news was unconfirmed, and the poster was using a sockpuppet account, but Lin Fei’s eyes lit up at once. The method matched the Sanxingdui cauldron theft almost exactly. Very likely, it was the same person. Nijiaqiao Road was close to Yulin, and Lin Fei quickly made his way there.
The flagship Three Ears Hotpot stood on the first floor of the Three Ears Tower on Nijiaqiao Road, decorated in opulent style and utterly unlike the humble roadside hotpot place it had once been. Lin Fei could not help sighing. Chengdu people love to eat, but what they love even more are the unremarkable little places hidden in alleys and back lanes. Chengdu dialect even has a special term for them: “fly restaurants,” those shabby-looking places unfit for elegant company, yet serving truly unforgettable food.
When he entered Three Ears, the dinner rush had long passed, yet the hall was still a roar of voices, every seat filled. He waited a long while before a small table against the wall opened up. He ordered a standard beef-tallow broth and a few of the commonest items, duck tongue, goose intestine, bean curd skin, omasum, crispy sausage, and so on. Then he leisurely dipped and cooked while quietly examining the scene in the hall.
Everything at first glance seemed ordinary, just like any bustling hotpot restaurant on any normal evening. Yet if one looked more closely, little irregularities emerged. Several strips of yellow police tape were tangled among the congratulatory flower stands behind the main door. Faint chalk markings could still be seen on the wall near the dish window. The upstairs private seating area was closed, and a few security men in black, normally out front parking cars, now stood at the foot of the stairs. Clearly the Douban rumor was true. A criminal case had indeed occurred here the night before, and the police had come. The question now was what exactly had happened.
Lin Fei took from his backpack a small camera with strap and leather case, palm-sized, with a silver lens ringed by tightly packed scales and numbers, and several rows of Cyrillic letters printed on the black front plate: Smena 8M. It was a 135 camera made in the Soviet Union in 1970, and a recognized LOMO model.
LOMO, short for Leningradskoje Opitiko Mechanitscheskoje Objedinenie, originally referred to the LC-A, a 35mm automatic-exposure rangefinder camera produced in the 1950s by the Leningrad Optical Mechanical Association, then the largest optical instrument factory in the Soviet Union. In 1991, two Viennese art students went to Prague and on a whim bought an LC-A that had already gone out of production. When the photos came back, they were delighted. The unique curve of the lens allowed it to shoot by day and night without flash, and it was especially sensitive to reds, blues, and yellows, producing extraordinarily vivid colors. Later LOMO became a fashion favorite. LOMO style spread rapidly among young people worldwide, becoming a darling of underground art and culture circles.
Lin Fei, too, was a devoted LOMO enthusiast. But the Smena 8M in his hands was no ordinary camera. Its greatest feature was that the film advance was manual but not forced, which meant that the same frame could be exposed again and again without limit, producing fantastically strange images. Lin Fei took a marker from his pocket, wrote several unintelligible sigils on a sticky note, pasted it to the camera back, then, using a trip to the restroom as cover, wandered through the hall of Three Ears, snapping away through an entire roll. After that he took out a Ricoh GRD II digital camera and used it to shoot close-ups of various corners of the hall. Only then did he return to his table and sweep the rest of the hotpot away like a storm. Chengdu hotpot is numbing but never scorching, hot but never drying, mellow and deeply fragrant, with an aftertaste that lingers. Burping contentedly from that lingering aftertaste, Lin Fei slowly made his way home.