Why did Qiu Dekao live so long?

Qiu Dekao, whose real name is Cox Hendry (Cox Hendry), is a character in the masterpiece "Notes on Grave Robbery" of Nanpai's three uncles. He has many intersections with Wu Sansheng, Jie Lianhuan and Zhang Qiling, and is an indispensable figure in the whole novel.

In the novel, during the Republic of China, there was a foreign missionary named Cox Hendrick, whose Chinese name was Qiu Dekao, who worked in a missionary school in Changsha. He was one of the Americans who came to China with the eastward tide at that time during the Kuomintang period. This man is impure since he was a child, but he is very interested in the culture of China. Perhaps in the American economic concept, cultural relics are just one of the commodities, which can be bought and sold freely and exported naturally. So in the third year in China, he occasionally did some secret cultural relics smuggling activities, when he was only 19 years old.

But Qiu Dekao is not a friend worth making. From the bottom of his heart, he doesn't regard grandpa as a friend or even an equal. My grandfather found out later and privately called me Grandpa Bug.

1949 Changsha was liberated and the Kuomintang was completely defeated. Then 1952, the church began to leave China, and many Americans stranded in China began to return home. He also received a telegram from the church asking him to come back when it was safe.

He realized that his business in China was coming to an end, so he began to make relevant preparations and transfer his property. Before he left, he had another sinister idea. He and his companions began to buy funerary wares. With the Chinese people's confidence in the old relationship, they took away a lot of cultural relics with extremely cheap deposits, including my grandfather's silk books of the Warring States period.

After all these goods were on board, Qiu Dekao knew that these people were a little annoying. In order to encourage future troubles, he sent a telegram to the police station at that time on the boat, revealing all the traces of more than a dozen landowners such as my grandfather to the temporary garrison of Changsha People's Liberation Army at that time. It caused the famous "Warring States Silk Case" at that time, which was not just a cultural relic smuggling case. Because Qiu Dekao's relationship with the Kuomintang generals before liberation involved many factors such as espionage and treason unique to that era, it became very complicated and almost shocked the central government. On that day, Qiu Dekao returned home with a full load, and the old clowns who had accumulated wealth for him were shot and imprisoned, crying.

Although it is culpable of punishment, it is really tragic to die like this. Later, cultural relics smuggling in China almost disappeared during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which was also related to the deaths of these people at that time.

At that time, my grandfather was clever. At first glance, the form was wrong. He fled into the mountains overnight, hid in an ancient tomb, slept with the dead for two weeks, escaped the limelight, and later fled to Hangzhou naked. This incident was a great blow to my grandfather, and silk books in the Warring States period later became his taboo. When he was alive, he always told us not to talk about it casually, so our family kept it a secret.

After Qiu Dekao returned to America, he auctioned those cultural relics and made a fortune. Silk books of the Warring States Period were sold to the Metropolitan Museum of New York at a high price, becoming the most expensive cultural relic at that time, and Qiu Dekao became a millionaire and upstart of the upper class. His story in China was written as a biography and widely circulated.

After getting rich, Qiu Dekao gradually turned his interest to socializing. 1957 was invited to be the consultant of the Far East Art Department of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, providing suggestions for the research of silk books in the Warring States period. At that time, the curator of the museum was the notorious Pu Allen. Both of them are China hands. They hired bandits to dig cultural relics in China and soon became friends. Qiu Dekao also sponsored a sum of money to the museum as a fund for purchasing folk China cultural relics.

Perhaps because of his leisurely life and love for China culture, Qiu Dekao became fascinated with the study of China culture. He presided over several large-scale projects of the Metropolitan Museum and achieved remarkable results. But what really made him famous in history was 1974, which solved the problem of the ciphertext of silk books in the Warring States period.

At that time, he had been studying silk books of the Warring States for more than twenty years. No one expected that an American like him could unlock the ancient code of China. However, Qiu Dekao did it.

It is said that he borrowed the inspiration from an ancient book "Embroidered Music" in China and discovered the decoding method of "Calligraphy and Painting in the Warring States". This decoding method is actually similar to the method of recording embroidery procedures in words in Embroidery Manual. Mathematically, it is a lattice mapping. It's not complicated to say complicated. This is a complete coincidence. You can think of it and solve it. Unexpectedly, even if you are proficient in ancient China cryptography. The decrypted password at that time was the serial number 02200059 of A Ning Company.

But according to Jin Wen's guess, I still believe that "it" helped Qiu Dekao unlock the password.

This Embroidery Manual entered the library on 1974. In the same year, China discovered the Terracotta Warriors and Horses Pit, which shocked the world. Because of this incident, the news that the silk script of the Warring States period was decoded did not attract too much attention. God seems to have deliberately given Qiu Dekao a chance to act silently.

Qiu Dekao was overjoyed when he found the decoding method, and immediately called for large-scale translation of silk books of the Warring States Period. It was not until a month later that all the secret texts were solved.

However, to Qiu Dekao's surprise, what appeared on the decoded paper at that time was not the ancient prose he expected to record the divination calendar of the Warring States, but a strange and completely meaningless pattern.

This design is very simple, with only six lines and an irregular curve. Other than that, there is no information. If you don't say that it is a remnant of an ancient book from China, everyone will think that it is a scribbled line on the paper by a child who just can hold a pen. No matter how you look at it from different angles, this model makes no sense. Even if you want to use your imagination to guess something with a similar design, you really want to imagine what this painting is.

Looking at the strange graphics in front of him, Qiu Dekao was surprised and confused. With his experience in China for so many years, he intuitively told himself that this must be a great thing, and it can be written in ciphertext with expensive silk, which will not be an ordinary design.

However, what is this? In all my years in China, I have never seen anything like it.

He consulted countless materials, but there was no result. He had to adopt this model to consult China sinologists in the university at that time. At that time, a scholar from Taiwan Province Province who went to the United States recognized this model. He told Qiu Dekao that this pattern is really serious. In China archaeology, it is called "ghost map".

An old expert told Qiu Dekao: From the Wuding period of Shang Dynasty, maps were absolute military secrets, and even in ancient tombs, maps were rarely found. At that time, for the sake of confidentiality, most people split a map into two parts, one part was Sichuan and the other part was mountainous, and transported separately. This has advantages. If the courier dies or is captured during transportation, it can prevent the map from leaking, and if he arrives at the customs or is questioned, there are also such patterns. So this silk book should be part of the map.

Qiu Dekao listened and was speechless for a long time. Before him, these simple lines turned out to be a map. This is really unexpected. China's culture is indeed profound, but where is this map?

He asked the old man again, and the old man shook his head to show that he didn't know.

After this incident, Qiu Dekao became more and more interested in silk books of the Warring States period. He and the Pu family raised funds to set up the Metropolitan Ancient Art Company, the predecessor of the company, and began to search for silk books and rubbings in the Warring States period on a large scale. In just half a year, Metropolis has collected more than a dozen rubbings of various colors.

Qiu Dekao spent nearly a year sorting out these things. By Christmas of 1975, when he was 54 years old, a package from China had a breakthrough. He opened it and found a picture of silk fragments during the Warring States Period.

This fragment in the photo is only the size of a palm. It has been broken into numerous small pieces and kept in glass. According to his experience, he knows that this fragment is only one-fifth of a silk book, and there are more than 300 ancient characters written in fine print on it. Many of them are unrecognizable, but the rest are very clear.

The sender of the photo is a cultural relic smuggler in Changsha. In the letter attached to the parcel, he told Qiu Dekao that this silk from the Warring States period came from a famous mess in Changsha, and one piece was four copies. The other party offered to let him take one of them. As evidence, he asked Qiu Dekao if he would consider buying it. When he saw the photo of silk, he couldn't judge the authenticity of silk for a while. So I translated the words I could see in the photo in my own way, and wanted to see what was in this silk book. After intensive reading, he opened his mouth wide, and it took a long time to realize that maybe he finally found what he was looking for. He was ecstatic and trembling all over. What can make him so excited? Chenpi tells us that it vaguely records something about immortality. What is it? He said he would talk about it later.

At that time, Sino-US relations had loosened, making it difficult for Americans to go to China, but it was not impossible. China people's concept of American "imperialism" has also improved. Thus, during the Spring Festival of 1976, 54-year-old Qiu Dekao returned to Changsha, China after being away from China for nearly 30 years. Soon after, he got on the phone with the cultural relics smuggler who contacted him. That is a middle-aged balding fat man. Under the recommendation of this person, Qiu Dekao met the person who sold silk scraps. That is a white young man named Wu Sansheng.

Chapter 24 of the finale of Tomb Raiding Notes (Part II) describes: "After Qiu Dekao came back from Banana, he lived for three months and then drove the crane to the west."