"This Chen Shou. He really knows how to curse a man out without reaching for a single foul word."
Zhang Fei let out a low whistle and shook his head, genuinely impressed. For the first time in a long while, a spark of motivation flickered somewhere deep in his chest.
No wonder Second Brother never stops pestering me to pick up a book. Compared to scholars like this, my own vocabulary for an argument is downright pitiful.
"Hold on." Zhang Song, the sharp-tongued advisor from Yizhou, adjusted his robes.
His brow furrowed in open confusion. "Sun Quan is remembered for his commanders and his generals. But this Cao Pi? He is remembered for what he ate? His talent for tasting food outshines his literary name?"
How could anything in this world carry more weight than the orthodox arts of war and statecraft? Zhang Song could not make sense of it.
Liu Bei, seated at the head of the table, let out a soft and knowing chuckle. His expression carried a strange mix of reverence and envy.
"Zichu, you are looking at this too narrowly." He leaned forward and rested his hands on his knees.
"Take that future university we saw on the Light Screen. Those descendants possess the true essence of science. They can harness the power of water. They can multiply the yield of the fields beyond anything we know. They understand the fundamental laws of nature, and they can read the heavens themselves."
He wanted to describe the flood of marvels he had witnessed, but the sheer volume of it was too much. He settled on a single sentence to carry the weight.
"Their methods are far more potent than the arts of any immortal from the old legends."
Zhang Song was still struggling to wrap his head around this, but he noticed that Kongming and Pang Tong had already locked their eyes onto the Light Screen with fierce concentration. Neither of them intended to miss a single character.
[Lightscreen]
[The romantic literati Cao Pi left behind a massive body of prose and poetry, which makes him surprisingly easy to research and evaluate. In his work Ganshi Fu , or Rhapsody on Touching Objects, he noticed a sugarcane growing in his front courtyard.
He lamented that it flourished in the summer heat but withered when the autumn frost arrived, drawing a parallel to the fleeting nature of human life.
The writing itself was genuinely beautiful. But let us be logical for a moment. The sugarcane withered because it is a tropical plant, and you planted it in the freezing north. Had you put it in the south, it would have kept growing for years without stopping.
In another masterpiece, Dian Lun , or The Comprehensive Discussions, Cao Pi boasted about his own swordsmanship.
He claimed that while drinking and eating sugarcane with his ministers, he got so fired up that he challenged them to a duel. Using a stalk of sugarcane as his blade, he defeated a man named Deng Zhan, who had been bragging about being able to disarm any opponent with his bare hands.
Cao Pi beat him three to zero. For this, later generations bestowed upon him the glorious nickname the Sugarcane Sword Saint.
The rock sugar Cao Pi sent to Sun Quan was also a product of this very same plant. Nothing more than raw sugarcane juice boiled and dried under the sun.
This crystallized sugar would eventually become one of the key stepping stones into the industrial age. Cao Pi might well be the earliest emperor in history to lay his hands on this sweet wedge of industry.
A shame he only used it to write poetry and show off his sword tricks. He never once thought about improving the sugar refining process.
So why does sugar actually matter? Let us look at a few simple examples. During the reign of Erfeng, there lived a legendary medical sage named Sun Simiao. In his monumental work Qianjin Yaofang , or The Thousand Golden Prescriptions, he used sucrose as the main ingredient in several healing formulas.
Toward the end of the Tang Dynasty, merchants traveling to Tibet to trade would carry coarse brown sugar blocks, commonly called bowl sugar, to ease the symptoms of altitude sickness.
On this particular front, we do have to give some credit to Erfeng. When sugarcane technology from India flowed into China during the Northern and Southern Dynasties, the Tang Emperor sent men to India to study their sugar-making techniques.
Unfortunately, the Indian artisans were a sly bunch and scammed the imperial envoys outright.
It was only after Wang Xuance conquered a foreign kingdom single-handedly and hauled the foreign sugar artisans back to the Great Tang that the Zhenguan sugar industry made a massive leap forward.
A century later, during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong, the monk Jianzhen traveled east to Japan, bringing the advanced sugar-making technology with him.
The Japanese ended up enjoying the fruits of his labor.
Most sugar during the Tang era was brown sugar. It was not until the Ming Dynasty that a decolorization process was introduced, transforming brown sugar into pure and crystal-white sugar.
The world-famous Tiangong Kaiwu , or Heavenly Creations, written by Song Yingxing, summarized the sugar-making process in its chapter on sweets, though their decolorization technique still had a minor flaw.]
Tiangong Kaiwu, Kongming forced down the surge of excitement pounding in his chest. Without lifting his head, he turned to Pang Tong and muttered, "I will take the left side of the text. You take the right."
He dropped his gaze and began copying every word the Light Screen displayed.
When the narrator reached the decolorization process, the Light Screen zoomed in and showed a diagram. On the left, the yellow-mud leaching method sat marked with a large red cross. On the right, a revised sketch appeared, labeled with the sealed-mud method.
Kongming copied it all. His heart stilled like water at the bottom of an ancient well. At this moment, he told himself he was nothing more than a cold and unfeeling copying machine.
[Lightscreen]
[The craving for sugar is baked deep into the genetic code of every living thing on this planet.
Look back at modern history, and the first thing that jumps out is the Industrial Revolution. Its seeds were planted in the slave trade. And the root cause of the slave trade is embarrassingly simple. Sugar.
A pity that the Great Wei Emperor, swinging his sugarcane through the air, could never have imagined this simple plant could do more than show off a few sword tricks. It could turn the very gears of history.]
"Turning the gears of history."
Liu Bei's voice trembled as he spoke. Those few words pressed down with a weight so immense it felt like a mountain rushing straight at his face.
For a dizzying moment, he could almost see it. A handsome and delicate man clutching a stalk of sugarcane, only to be crushed into dust beneath the grinding wheels of time.
Liu Bei pulled himself back to the present and swept his eyes across the room, settling his gaze on the three Yizhou advisors.
"Zichu, are you familiar with sugarcane?"
Zhang Song glanced down at his notes, scanned the lines, and nodded with a grin.
"We have plenty of this plant in Nanzhong. The juice is sweet. Boil it down into a thick syrup and let it dry, and you get rock sugar. Though I have to say, this poem of Cao Pi's about sugarcane withering in autumn is rather amusing."
Zhang Song let out a laugh. The people of Yizhou were no strangers to sugarcane. Plant it once, and it grows for three to five years without dying in the winter. How could a slight chill in the air possibly kill it?
"Rock sugar is quite a lucrative commodity in the Yongliang region," Mi Zhu said, his merchant instincts snapping to attention.
"The Liaodong traders are always hunting for it as well. Travelers carry it through the deep winter. If they find themselves trapped in a blizzard, they say a single piece can hold starvation at bay and keep a man's courage up."
Mi Zhu's eyes began to gleam with an entrepreneurial fire.
"Let us set the rock sugar project in motion at once! Once we refine this red and white sugar the way the Light Screen described, it will sell like wildfire across the land. The profits will not trail the Shu silk trade by a single copper!"
Liu Ba, the faction's financial mastermind, nodded firmly. His own eyes had kindled with ambition.
"We must attempt to refine this sugar immediately! If the sweetness truly surpasses traditional rock honey tenfold, the profits could easily stretch to a hundredfold."
Kongming finished copying the notes alongside Pang Tong. He reviewed the text twice, then sank into deep thought.
His eyes traced over the figures. Yield per acre. The varieties of sugar. The medical uses. The emergency applications. And at the end, the dark term. The slave trade.
"This formula alone is enough to fund the prosperity of the Han Dynasty for a hundred years," Kongming said slowly, his voice grave. "But it could just as easily bring a century of chaos and colonization to foreign lands."
Pang Tong nodded. He knew Kongming was already looking far past the immediate horizon, tracing the hidden dangers coiled behind the wealth.
Zhang Fei, meanwhile, blinked in confusion. He could not untangle the complexities of global trade routes, so he turned to Zhao Yun to discuss something he could actually wrap his head around.
"Zilong, what kind of man do you think this Wang Xuance was?"
Zhao Yun paused. He stared into the distance for a moment before offering his answer.
"A man who used strategy to drive his enemies to ruin. But whatever the details, the martial might of the Great Tang can be summed up in those four words."
Meanwhile, in the capital of the Great Tang, the atmosphere had taken a sharp turn in a completely different direction.
"We must summon Sun Simiao to the capital to treat Your Majesty's headaches and ailments!" Zhangsun Wuji stepped forward first, his voice tight with urgency.
Fang Xuanling nodded in full agreement. "The Light Screen sings his praises this highly. Your Majesty must take care of your health."
"During the Sui Dynasty, they tried to summon Sun Simiao, but he refused to serve," Du Ruhui said, stroking his chin. "Now we should simply move his entire clan to Changshan. Grant them land and housing to show our imperial favor."
"Why go through all that trouble?" another minister cut in. "Just invite him to the Ganlu Hall and let him watch the Light Screen."
Hou Junji chewed on the idea for a moment, then broke into a grin. "That is brilliant. I hear Sun Simiao lives and breathes medicine. He has no interest in official rank. But if he learns the Light Screen holds the medical secrets of the future, the Medical King will not be able to say no."
The ministers turned their eyes toward Li Shimin. The Tang Emperor turned the proposal over in his mind, then nodded.
"In that case, draft the imperial decree."
Before, Li Shimin had brushed off these health concerns as minor annoyances. Now, he meant to take care of his body so he could deal with the foreign kingdoms one by one.
Yuchi Jingde, who could not follow the finer tangles of statecraft, kept his gaze locked on the name Wang Xuance.
"What a hero. Truly impressive."
A man like Wang Xuance, an official of my Great Tang. A feat so astonishing it will echo through the ages. And my name shines all the brighter for it. Li Shimin felt a swell of profound pride rising in his chest.
"Have Da Zhou look into this man. Find him. Who knows, he may already hold a post here in the Zhenguan era."
Li Shimin spoke with high spirits, but his expression curdled a heartbeat later.
"This sugar-making technique is extraordinarily rare. How could this monk Jianzhen simply hand it over to the Japanese?"
The narrator had not named the country outright, but the clues left no room for doubt. An eastern crossing. A small island nation. Putting the two together made it painfully clear where the monk had gone. As for Jianzhen's identity, no one in the court was slow-witted enough to miss it. The name itself told them he was a Buddhist monk.
"He likely did it to curry favor with the locals," Du Ruhui said. "Grant them kindness, and the Japanese will respect the monks. Buddhism spreads more easily on their shores."
Li Shimin let out a cold snort. Buddhism again. It keeps surfacing in these discussions far too often for my liking.
But none of that mattered right now. He looked back at the bowl sugar and saw what lay hidden beneath. Immense military value.
"Issue the imperial decree for the development of sugarcane refining. Do it at once." The Emperor of the Great Tang had made up his mind.
[Lightscreen]
[In addition to moonlighting as the Sugarcane Sword Saint, Cao Pi also served as an enthusiastic hype man for northern fruits.
The Anyu dates, the Zhending pears, the Xincheng rice.
All of them received Cao Pi's public seal of approval. And while he was at it, he roasted the southern fruits without mercy.
He declared that southern longan and lychee had zero flavor. Trash.
He complained that Jiangdong oranges were so sour they cracked his teeth. Trash.
He even said Changsha rice from Jianghuai was famous in name only, nowhere near the fragrance of northern rice.
So what was Cao Pi's perfect fruit? The grape. Sweet without clinging. Crisp without puckering. Cool without freezing. Bursting with juice.
This was the poetic praise Cao Pi poured over grapes. When the Emperor of Wei put his literary talents to work describing a fruit, the result was basically untouchable.
He even wrote a consumption guide for it. End of summer, start of autumn. After a night of heavy drinking, the first thing you eat in the morning is a grape still beaded with morning dew. The absolute best cure for hangover and thirst.
That said, Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty would likely disagree with this verdict.
He might even pity the northern emperor. You Cao Zihan, are not worthy of the title food critic.
You do not even know that lychees lose their color in a day, their fragrance in two days, and their flavor in three days.
The lychees you ate up north were definitely spoiled or soaked in brine. How dare you claim lychees fall short of grapes?. Trash
If Cao Pi's spirit could hear this, he would probably be furious. I was in Luoyang. You were in Luoyang. How could you get fresh lychees and I could not? Stop talking nonsense.
The Lychee Road? Never mind. I withdraw the question.
As for whether grapes or lychees taste better, the one person who truly had the right to settle the debate was Yang Yuhuan.
When she was young, her father served as magistrate in Shuzhou, and that was where she first tasted lychee.
At ten, she moved to Luoyang.
At sixteen, Emperor Xuanzong made her the Princess Shou.
At eighteen, he summoned her into the palace and showered her with all his favor.
But Yang Yuhuan could never forget the lychee of her childhood. What could be done? For Emperor Xuanzong, this was not a problem.
At the height of the Tang Dynasty, to govern the sprawling empire, a relay station was set every twenty miles to carry documents and military intelligence.
The Great Tang boasted over seventeen hundred relay stations and twenty thousand messengers, ensuring the capital could hear a voice from any corner of the realm.
At the Emperor's command, the route from Fuzhou to Changshan was established. The Lychee Road.
The civil servants of the Great Tang were brutally efficient.
A fresh messenger every twenty miles.
A fresh horse every sixty.
Lychees could reach Changshan in just three days. Yang Yuhuan was happy. Emperor Xuanzong was delighted.
The relay messengers were rewarded by the emperor. Everyone had a bright future ahead.
Then the poet Du Fu stood up and ruined the mood by pointing out the suffering of the horses and the peasants.
Another poet, Du Mu, wrote a verse that would ring through the centuries.
'The red dust kicks up as the horse flies past. The imperial concubine smiles.
No one knows it is the lychee coming.']