The Curly-Bearded Stranger / 虬髯客传

Why a Bearded Warrior Walked Away From the Throne

From the Tang Tales of the Marvelous (唐传奇), a single-volume chuanqi

By Du Guangting (杜光庭, 850–933) · Translated and annotated by Cathay Tales

Three people meet in a single bad year at the end of the Sui dynasty: a penniless military strategist, a slave-concubine running away from the most powerful man in the capital, and a fierce stranger with a curly red beard who carries a severed head in his saddlebag. One of them will become the architect of Tang power. One will become the lady of the house. The third will look at the boy who is about to be emperor of China — and decide to go conquer somewhere else.

The Tale

When the Sui emperor Yang took his pleasure cruise down to the south, he left Yang Su (the Duke of Yue, his most senior minister) behind in the western capital to mind the empire. Yang Su was a clever, arrogant man who had decided, in the way arrogant men do, that the times were chaotic and the chaos belonged to him. He lived like a small emperor. He sat sprawled on a couch when officials came to brief him. He had beautiful women carry him out from his private chambers in the morning. Ranks of maids stood in rows around him while he ate. Toward the end, none of it embarrassed him at all.

One day a young man named Li Jing (a penniless out-of-work strategist in a plain robe, later Duke of Wei of the Tang) came to the palace and asked for an audience. He had a strategic proposal worth listening to. Yang Su received him sprawled on the couch as usual.

Li Jing didn't sit down. He bowed politely and said: "The world is falling apart and a hundred ambitious men are rising. You are an elder of the imperial house. You ought to be gathering the best minds to you. You ought not to be receiving them lying down."

Yang Su's face changed. He sat up. He apologized. They talked. By the end of the meeting he had quietly pocketed Li Jing's proposal and was looking at the young commoner with something close to respect.

What Li Jing didn't see — because his back was to her — was that one of the women standing in attendance, a slender girl holding a red horsehair whisk, had been watching him through the entire conversation. As he left, she stepped out from behind a screen, leaned over the railing, and called softly to a steward in the corridor: "That man who just left. The commoner. What is his name? Where is he staying?" The steward told her. She repeated it under her breath, twice, and walked back inside.

That night Li Jing went to his inn. Around the fifth watch — the cold hour just before dawn — he heard a quiet knock at his door. A figure was standing in the lane outside, wrapped in a purple cloak, wearing a man's hat low over the face, leaning on a walking stick with a small bundle tied to it.

"Who's there?"

"It's me. The girl with the red whisk. From Lord Yang's house."

Li Jing hurried her inside. She took off the hat, then the cloak. She was eighteen or nineteen years old, beautiful in a still and serious way, dressed underneath the man's clothes in a plain pale gown. She bowed to him.

He bowed back, completely lost.

"I have served the Duke of Yue for years," she said, "and in his house I've seen every kind of man come and go. None of them have been like you. A vine cannot grow by itself. I'd like to lean on a strong tree. So I ran."

Li Jing — Li Jing was not stupid, but he was a penniless out-of-work strategist who had been very politely chased out of every official's door in the western capital for months. He stared at her.

"Yang Su has half the capital in his pocket," he said carefully. "What about him?"

"He's a corpse with breath in it. He doesn't scare me. He doesn't scare a lot of his people. Concubines have been slipping out of his house for years and he barely chases them. I've thought it through. Please don't be afraid."

Her family name was Zhang. She was the eldest daughter. Looking at her — at her skin, her bearing, the steadiness of her voice — Li Jing thought to himself: This isn't a woman. This is a being from somewhere else. He couldn't quite believe his luck and he was so afraid of losing her that he could not sit still.

For several days they hid. There were footsteps in the lane outside, and once or twice the sound of a search going through the inns one block over, but it was a halfhearted search. Yang Su really didn't care.

So one morning, Lady Red Whisk (the runaway slave-concubine from Yang Su's household, now bound to Li Jing) put on men's clothes again. They got horses. They rode east — away from the capital, toward Taiyuan, where Li Jing thought he had a chance at finding work.

They stopped overnight at an inn in Lingshi, a town in the mountains. A bed had been brought into their room and meat was simmering on a small charcoal stove. Lady Red Whisk, whose black hair fell down to her ankles, was standing by the bed combing it out. Li Jing was outside in the courtyard, brushing his horse down.

A man rode in on a lame donkey.

He was middle-sized but heavily built. His beard was the color of a fox and curled out from his chin like a wire scrubbing brush — qiú rán, "curly whiskers" — which is the only name he ever gives anyone in this story^{[1]Qiú rán (虬髯) literally means "dragon-curled beard" — a beard that twists like a young dragon. The man in this story is identified throughout only by this nickname; the real name Du Guangting never gives him, on purpose. He is an archetype, not a person. By the late Tang, "the Curly-Bearded Stranger" had already become a stock figure in opera and street storytelling, the way "the Mysterious Stranger" works in American Westerns.}. He dropped a leather sack on the floor next to the stove, took a wooden pillow off the bed, lay down on it, and watched Lady Red Whisk comb her hair without saying anything.

Li Jing came back inside and saw a stranger lying on his bed staring at his woman. The blood ran into his face. He kept brushing the horse, slowly, deciding what to do.

Lady Red Whisk — who had taken one good look at the stranger's face from above — kept combing. With her free hand, behind her back, she made a small flicking motion at her husband. Don't. She finished her hair. She tied it up. She turned around, walked over to the stranger, and bowed.

"May I ask your family name?"

The stranger sat up. "Zhang."

"Mine is Zhang too. We must be related. I should be your sister." She bowed again. "Which child are you?"

"Third."

"And you, sister?"

"Eldest."

He laughed for the first time. "Then I've found an older sister tonight." Then, calling out: "Li, get over here and meet your brother-in-law!"

Li Jing dropped the brush and came in fast and bowed.

The three of them sat down around the stove.

"What are you cooking?" the stranger said.

"Lamb. It's almost done."

"I'm starving." Li Jing went out and bought flatbread. The stranger pulled a knife out of his belt, sliced the meat into the bread, ate, and tossed the leftovers — bones, fat, gristle, all of it — out to his donkey, which crunched it down in seconds. The man, the woman, and the stranger ate without talking for a while.

Then the stranger looked at Li Jing.

"From the way you travel, you're a poor man. How does a poor man end up with a woman like this?"

Li Jing told him. The whole story. The audience with Yang Su, the knock at the door before dawn, the ride east. He didn't see a reason to hide any of it.

"And now where?"

"Taiyuan."

"That's not bad." The stranger thought for a second. "Got any wine?"

"There's a wine shop next door."

Li Jing went and bought a jug. They drank a round. Then the stranger said, "I've got a little something to go with the wine. Care to share?"

Li Jing said politely that he wouldn't presume.

"You have the build and the bearing of a man," the stranger said to Li Jing. "Is there anyone unusual in Taiyuan? Anyone worth seeing?"

"There is one," Li Jing said slowly. "I think he might be a 'true man.'^{[2]Zhēn rén (真人) — literally "true man" or "real person." In Taoist usage, originally meant an immortal who had completed inner cultivation. By the Tang, the term also carried a political-prophetic charge: the zhen ren was the one person in a given generation whom Heaven had picked to receive the Mandate of Heaven and found (or refound) the dynasty. To call someone the zhen ren of an age was to say, in coded language, that one is going to be emperor.} The rest are just generals and ministers."

"What's his name?"

"My family name."

"How old?"

"Just twenty."

"And he is...?"

"The son of the regional governor."

The stranger nodded slowly. "Sounds right. I need to see him. Can you arrange it?"

"My friend Liu Wenjing (a Sui-Tang loyalist with the ear of the Li family in Taiyuan) is close to him. Through Liu, yes."

"There's a man who reads the sky," the stranger said. "He's been telling me there's a strange brightness over Taiyuan. I've been going to look. When do you arrive?"

Li Jing told him.

"The morning after you get there, at first light, I'll be waiting for you on the Fenyang Bridge."

He stood up, walked out, mounted his lame donkey, and rode off. The donkey moved like the wind. They watched until they couldn't see him anymore.

"A real outlaw doesn't lie," Lady Red Whisk said at last. "I think we're safe."

They rode hard the rest of the way to Taiyuan.

He was waiting on the bridge at dawn, exactly as promised.

The three of them went together to Liu Wenjing's house. Li Jing introduced the stranger as "a friend who reads faces" — Liu was the sort of man who could not resist anyone who read faces — and Liu sent a quick message to the regional governor's son to come over for an informal cup of wine.

The young man came in.

He was not wearing court robes. He was not wearing shoes. He walked into the room in a loose fur jacket over a plain inner tunic, the way a confident teenager walks into a friend's kitchen, and he sat down. His face was bright and his eyes were calm and the air around him changed slightly.

The Curly-Bearded Stranger was sitting in the lowest seat at the back. He went very quiet. He drank a few rounds and then he leaned over to Li Jing and said, in a low voice:

"That is the real emperor."

Then he stood up and announced that he had to go.

Outside, on the road, he spoke to Li Jing again. "I'm eighty or ninety percent sure. But I have a Taoist brother I want to bring in for a second opinion. Take your wife and go back to the capital. On the appointed day, around noon, meet me at the wine shop east of the horse market. My donkey will be tied outside. So will a thin mule. That means I'm upstairs with my brother."

Li Jing and Lady Red Whisk rode back to Chang'an. On the day, they found the donkey and the mule tied at the door. Upstairs, the stranger was drinking with an old Taoist priest. They sat down. They drank a dozen more rounds. The stranger told Li Jing: "There are a hundred thousand coins in a chest downstairs. Take them. Get your sister a safe place to live. Then meet me at the Fenyang Bridge on this date."

On the date, Li Jing went back to Taiyuan, found the bridge, found the stranger and the priest. The three of them went again to Liu Wenjing's house. Liu was playing chess. He sent an urgent message to the young governor's son — known to history as Li Shimin (the regional governor's son, the future Emperor Taizong of Tang), but at that point just a clever teenager — to come over and watch the game.

The priest played Liu. The Curly-Bearded Stranger and Li Jing stood off to one side and watched.

The teenager arrived. He bowed and sat down at the board. The light in the room changed again. The priest, who had been playing a careful game, suddenly set down his stone and pushed back from the table.

"The whole position is lost," he said quietly. "I lost it at this move. There's no way out. Nothing more to say." He stood up and asked to be excused.

Outside, on the street, the priest turned to the Curly-Bearded Stranger. "This world is not your world. Try another country. Don't think about this one again."

They all went down to the capital together.

On the road, the Curly-Bearded Stranger spoke to Li Jing. "I've worked out your travel time. You'll arrive on such-and-such day. The day after, bring your sister to my little house in such-and-such ward of the city. My wife wants to meet her. You two have been living thin. Don't refuse."

When they arrived in Chang'an they followed the directions and came to an unassuming wooden door in a quiet alley. They knocked. Someone opened the door bowing.

Inside the door was another door. Then another. Forty maids in rows in the courtyard. Twenty male servants led Li Jing into the east hall. The room was full of treasures of a kind he had never seen — jewelry boxes, mirror stands, hair ornaments, things that did not look like they had been made by human hands. They were given fresh clothes. The clothes also were extraordinary.

Then a voice said: "The Third Master is coming."

The Curly-Bearded Stranger walked in. He was wearing a gauze hat and the same fur jacket. He still looked like a man who could kill someone and eat his organs, but he also, now, looked like someone with a court behind him. He greeted them warmly. He called for his wife to come out and bow. She was — like Lady Red Whisk — not entirely of this world.

They sat down to a banquet that the household of a duke could not have matched. Twenty female musicians played music that did not sound like any music heard on earth. When the food was finished and the wine was being poured, servants carried in twenty low tables and set them down in rows. Each table was draped in embroidered silk. The stranger gave a signal. The silks were lifted. Under each cloth lay nothing but ledgers and keys.

"These are the accounts of everything I own," the Curly-Bearded Stranger said. "It is now all yours. I'll tell you why. I came to this country meaning to take it. I had a fight in mind that was going to take twenty or thirty years, with maybe a small kingdom at the end of it. But the country already has its man. Staying would be foolish. The Li of Taiyuan is the true ruler. Within three to five years, the war is over. You — with your talent, helping the right master, with all your heart — will rise as high as a subject can rise. You —" he turned to Lady Red Whisk — "with your gifts, supported by his rank, will be a great lady. Without you he would never have recognized himself. Without him, you would never have shown what you were. The two of you finding each other — the meeting of dragons and tigers — was not an accident.

"Take what I'm giving you. Use it to support the true ruler. Build the new dynasty." He paused. "Ten years from now, in the southeast, far across the sea — when you hear unusual news from out there — that will be me. Pour a cup of wine to the southeast, the two of you, and toast me."

He called the servants in to bow. "Lord Li and Lady Zhang. They are your masters now."

Then he, his wife, and a single attendant walked out into the courtyard, mounted their horses, and rode away. After a few paces they were no longer visible.

Li Jing took possession of the house. He became a wealthy man overnight. The fortune financed the rise of the Tang.

In the tenth year of the Zhenguan reign — twenty years later — Li Jing was Left Vice-Director of the central government and had earned the title Duke of Wei. A messenger from the far southern frontier came into court one day with an unusual report: "A fleet of a thousand ships, ten thousand armed men, has sailed into the kingdom of Fuyu^{[3]Fuyu (扶余) — an old kingdom located in what is today the borderland between northeastern China and the Korean peninsula. By Du Guangting's lifetime in the late Tang, Fuyu had not existed as a polity for several centuries; the choice is deliberate. By placing the Curly-Bearded Stranger's eventual realm in a real but extinct, half-mythic frontier kingdom across the sea, Du Guangting lets him exist forever in a place no contemporary reader could go check on.}, killed its king, and set up a new one. The country is now under that new ruler."

Li Jing went home, told Lady Red Whisk, put on ceremonial robes with her, and the two of them poured a cup of wine into the southeast wind and bowed.

Translator's Reflection

The thing I love about this story — and the thing that makes it different from almost every other Tang dynasty tale — is the moment when the Curly-Bearded Stranger looks at Li Shimin, the future emperor of one of the greatest dynasties in Chinese history, and immediately gives up.

He doesn't fight. He doesn't sulk. He doesn't try to undermine. He looks at the boy for one round of drinks, decides "that's the real one," and quietly transfers his entire war chest — a literal twenty-table fortune — to the strategist who is going to help the boy. Then he sails off to conquer somewhere else.

In Western terms, this is roughly: imagine a 30-year-old Genghis Khan walks into a tavern, sees a teenage Charlemagne sitting at the next table, and immediately hands him his army, his treasury, and his estates, and then heads off to colonize Iceland because that's still up for grabs. It's a wild story.

The other thing I had to keep adjusting to, on rereading, is that this is also one of the most romantic Chinese stories ever written, but the romance is sideways. The man and woman who fall in love are barely on the page together. The center of the love is all three of them, and especially the recognition between Lady Red Whisk and the Curly-Bearded Stranger — two people from "somewhere else" who immediately become siblings the moment they see each other across a charcoal stove. That triangle, in classical Chinese literary tradition, became the founding image of the wuxia genre: the "Three Heroes of the Wind and Dust" (风尘三侠), three outsiders who shape history precisely because they're outside the system that's trying to shape them.

And then there's the head in the saddlebag. I'll be honest, the first time I read this story I assumed the head and the heart-and-liver dinner was a later horror embellishment. It isn't. It's in Du Guangting's original from the 9th century. The Curly-Bearded Stranger is introduced eating his enemy's organs while explaining to his new friends that he's been holding the grudge for ten years, and the story treats this as a normal personality trait of a man like him. Tang readers liked their heroes scary.

There's a small editorial note at the end of the original that says, "Some say Lord Wei's military manual is half the Curly-Bearded Stranger's work." That's the part of the story I find quietly beautiful. The famous historical military theorist Li Jing, whose strategy treatise the Tang court genuinely used for centuries — well, half of it might be from a man with a red beard who looked at China, said "not mine," and went to sea.

Next tale: The Ghost Who Left Footprints — Qing dynasty, a high judge, a midnight visitor with blood on his face, and a clerk who knew his ghosts didn't climb walls.