Mahakhitan: A Chinese Buddhist Civilization in India
- Thread starter Green Painting
- Start date
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As I said I will gradually fix the compromised images, but there are a lot of maps that are perfectly good. Refer to the catalog (which is the 1st threadmark entry). I can’t update the threadmarks since I’m not the OP.
Oh yes, I do intend to. But those two chapters are even harder to translate than the newest few.
Currently I'm undecided to work on which. I wonder if there's a voting/poll system for readers to determine this.
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Original Historical Material: The Mahakhitan Chronicle (1856-1881)
原始史料：摩訶契丹年表（1856-1881）
Before there is a new chapter (coming soon!), this piece could serve as a background introduction.
Sorry for the long wait!
Major events during this period include:
原始史料：摩訶契丹年表（1856-1881）
Before there is a new chapter (coming soon!), this piece could serve as a background introduction.
Sorry for the long wait!
Major events during this period include:
- A rebellion that was started by feudal lords in the south out of purely economic reasons, which was in turn made into a myth of southern nationalist movements in the future (1857).
- Establishment of modern government systems and military reform(s).
- Temporary resurrection of the Caliphate, its complete collapse and semi-colonisation under the intenventions of the major powers (1860-1874).
- Long-term confrontation between Mahakhitan and Czarist Russia in Hezhong Khanate, War of Moghulistan (1867-1868), and (Liao's) expansion in Persia.
- Beginning of development of heavy industry and transportation.
- A constitutional movement with unclear future results but seemed to have succeeded (1880-1883).
Please react to this post to vote for which update(s) you'd like to see next:
LIKE:
Option 1 - Chapters 37 & 38 that I skipped earlier, the story of NT Mucilinda, a lengendary warship in the history of the Mahakhitan Navy.
LOVE:
Option 2 - Chapter 40, detailed depiction of the lively city of Duojia (多迦, modern Hanyu Pinyin transliteration, probably pronounced more like "Daka/Doka" in TTL; Dhaka) by the end of the 19th Century with Kara's own experiences living there as inspirations.
I will wait for a week for all of your reactions.
LIKE:
Option 1 - Chapters 37 & 38 that I skipped earlier, the story of NT Mucilinda, a lengendary warship in the history of the Mahakhitan Navy.
LOVE:
Option 2 - Chapter 40, detailed depiction of the lively city of Duojia (多迦, modern Hanyu Pinyin transliteration, probably pronounced more like "Daka/Doka" in TTL; Dhaka) by the end of the 19th Century with Kara's own experiences living there as inspirations.
I will wait for a week for all of your reactions.
Last edited:
Stay safe everyone! Everything cancelled here for virus containment.
I'm starting to work on Chapter 37 as we have a 5:1 vote but it will take some time.
Chapter 040, An Illustrated Guide to South City Wards.
Chapter 040, An Illustrated Guide to South City Wards
南城街坊图鉴
A new, formal update has finally returned! This time we will arrive at Bengal, or Shanyang Circuit, to take a detailed observation of the emerging Mahakhitan metropolis, the Duojia Prefecture (多迦府or Dhaka, Bangladesh IOTL), as it appears in the late 19th Century. (Although we’ve been using Dhaka previously, let’s use the proper Imperial translation in our official text.)
At the same time, I feel happy for not using knowledge from the books, and all the stories and details are taken from / re-written based on my own encounters in the recent years. Having completed writing and drawing at my birthday, it could be a flashback and memorial to the marvelous incidents since I was 20, including those that I encountered when I lived in Dhaka.
It’s too much to write about in a short passage, so forgive me if it’s too high in information density.
There has been a time period wherein young people by Ganges all were adamant about going to Duojia.
It was around the 19th year of Jiaying Reign (1881), when incidents happened within and without the capital city. First, I saw armies of each zhen marching back a forth along Camel Bell Street, and still felt unrelated to these events as a mere clerk, but as it happened, when things settled down, I got to know there would no longer be any more projects sanctioned by the Imperial Court for the Ministry of Works.
Therefore, even for someone as lazy and numb as me, I could only leave this job in the Eastern Capital, which I’ve been doing for countless years, and to crowd together with odorous men and women in a flat-bottomed cargo ship to Shanyang Circuit, appearing like a rice dumpling with cloth wraps and bag straps around me, I couldn’t sleep well en route, and this lasted till I arrived at the legendary city of opportunities.
The Prefectural city had been utterly filled by early-comers, so much so that it’s hard to find a dwelling place within the city. I could only search for a cheap-looking hut alongside the river, asking for price house by house, and, after briefly staying here and there, finally moved to this place in the south city, where I instantly fell in love with the neighborhoods there, and settled down.
Duojia Prefectural City isn’t large in itself, and up to the 17th century, it was an undocumented little county town, until the Monsieur Maison of the French East Indian Company, while inspecting the region of Bengal, selected Naluoyan (那罗延, or Narayan), which was 15 li downstream, as trading post. Duojia, owing to its access to water and land trade routes, gradually transformed into a hub for jute and cotton cloths, where the Britons, as well as other westerners, flocked to. Hereafter, as merchants grew in number, the tiny county magistrate could no longer look after this many immigrant peasants and their daily affairs. Then, during Changde Reign, the court sanctioned the establishment of a local council. In this way, this small city, together with The Seven Islands (i.e. Mumbai) and Goa, gained the status of a “Prefecture”. Dweller of the “Three Metropoles and Three Prefectures” felt as though they lost their unparalleled privilege, but indeed, with the exception of Debu Prefecture (the Southern Capital) remained a key trade post of the west sea, the heydays of other two metropoles were over.
A small county own now upgraded to a prefectural city, within no more than a year, the little empty space within the city has been occupied, with new textile factories, warehouses, dockyards, shipyards, workers’ dorm etc. built along the river, extending towards Naluoyan in the south. What was once a embankment is now filled with flashy facades of various firms. But flashy as they are, I would smilingly lead to to the side, and point to the true face of these buildings, hiding behind those flamboyant porches, panes, curtains and signboards: they are all the cheapest clay houses with thatched roof. The shopkeeper would snatch a patch of land with the highest speed, build a firm with the lowest price, and prettify his firm with a purely cosmetic front façade, and then invite a Venerable Monk from Dipankara Sangharama Monastery across the river to bless this firm. With all budget spent on the façade, much to the pleasure of me as a craftsman.
What I like to do the most was to, on my way home, along the embankment and streets parallel to the river, see these facades. Each day, it could be found out that a couple of the shops would change their owners, or a couple of them would purchase some marvelous new stuff. The first couple of years after I came, it’s been purely jute and cotton stocked at the front gate of these firms, later there would be more and more categories, as the city, and the desires of nearly a million people, attracts the influx of inventions from the Far West, Cathay, and this country. I could see a shop manager, sitting on his British-made toilet bowl, filling in his account book for the day. ( Jade Porcelain Throne with Running Water in a Far West Golden Hall，泰西金殿活水大玉雪隐), it’s written in Hanzi with Bengali script subtext to mark it meaning). It could be seen that there was a shopkeeper riding on bronze tube of the factory, wiping its valve in detail. Duojia’s Monsoon season had gotten this baby quite a lot of green rust, but the shopkeeper hasn’t got a quite elegant posture when cleaning it. It could be seen mountains of candles and boxes of ink, their shopkeeper seemed to be sitting on his ink box, chatting with his wife with tea and naan. The bosses would indeed their cargo boxes as furniture, as if to express the lack of any willingness to enjoy life, they might be the ascetics of their time, who practice on these streets.
The South City wasn’t meant for construction, but was still densely packed and fully filled with resident houses. It was where the river turned, with a low and wet terrain, full of paddies and ponds. In the olden days, the Ganges often overflew its embankment during floods, pouring into its tributaries which converge here, when people could only travel with boats. Even a normal year, when typhoon or flood doesn’t happen, the avenue to Naluoyan were intersected by numerous small rivers, so place names along the Duojia-Naluoyan road appeared very regular: people named the wards by the order of the bridges along the embankment and the avenue. From the First Bridge at the south of Prefectural City, to the Ninth Bridge where I lived, it was nearly halfway. When you reach the Fourteenth Bridge, you would already be breathing heavy under the hor Dry Season sun, that’s where the spread of Duojia’s resident houses stopped, where banyan trees and paddies were all over the place. At the Nineteenth Bridge, you could see masts from the huge ships in Naluoyan Shipyards. And if you make an effort to go further, when you climb up the tall, arching Twenty-third Bridge, the port-city of Naluoyan showed up before your eyes. These bridges used to have their own names, but nobody remembers them now, and the numbers gave people travelling in hardship some motivations. During Huitong Reign, more fashionable Uptown Trams replaced feet and ferries, these ancient stone bridges were extend, or disappeared altogether with the rivers, but these place names remained on station signboards.
When I first moved to the Ninth Bridge, there wasn’t any tram yet. Oxcarts and boats were too expensive, so I still had to travel for an hour on foot daily on my way home and to work, it made me covered in mud and dirt, but I still liked to walk. The wards of Ninth Bridge were not as flamboyant as the shops along the embankment, but still inviting. Near Ninth Bridge, there used to be a subsidiary monastery to the Dipankara Sangharama Monastery (燃灯大伽蓝), and Dipankara Sangharama, as the birthplace of Atisha The Venerable, was prestigious in both Shanyang Circuit and U-Tsang. A century ago, as the heydays of Sangha(monks’) influences were over, the subsidiary temple was abolished with an imperial decree, the grandiose buildings it let were still visible around Nine Bridge region.
Adjacent to the Ninth Bridge, there was a Public Craftsmanship School occupying an old monastery, where noisy students bringing extra popularity to this area. Now, in front of the school gate stood the remnant of the Subsidiary Temple Hall, where the Ashoka-style iron pillars erected by early Emperors are now decorated with prayer flags written with good wishes by the neighbourhood, and the three-hundred-feet-long courtyard is now divides into many segments, however, the veranda built to give the pilgrims a resting and eating place has kept some of their functions, now its recess time for Naluoyan Imperial Craftsmanship School, and they order a cub of milk tea, with half a cup of sugar, from the tea venders on the veranda, and started chatting around the neighbouring fried wanton stall. What was once the Temple Hall has now become a warehouse with tangling ivy, with its gate shut, newspaper of the day gets posted on a red-brick wall with bas-relief peeling off, and the Hall naturally becomes a place where students discuss political events. But as students heard that someone resembling a government functionary always sits beside a tonic water stall underneath the Vaisramana’s (多闻天王 ) broken arms within the doorway, they go to the other side of the veranda to say what they have to say after buying the trendy tonic water.
From the old temple courtyard, away from the school, crossing a glaze door with all its bronze nails taken, across a street of broken slabs, (when you are supposed to ignore those suspicious men standing in front of the wine shops) , jumping across two muddy pits and turn right into a small alley, you get to where I live, an isolated island in the midst of a pandemonium of a wine shops, where the bad condition determined cheap rents, but when you pushed open the gateway of this old mansion, you would realise why tenants refuse to leave here.
It was the remnant part of Grand Temple Monks’ House, where the three floors of the monks’ house stacked on each other around the central courtyard, where shaky wooden stairs and the platform gets sheltered by the enormous banyan tree in the middle of the courtyard. In March, during the dry season, under scorching sunlight, and dust everywhere, this courtyard is the cool and clean refuge. The cartwright living in the cellar is busy with his work under the tree, his sons, and other apprentices, offers help by the side. Some Ava workers of the second floor returns late from the dock every day, the old Brahman on the first floor would always sit by the doorway and read his Veda with his lamp on, until the workers return safe, then he would lock the door and go back to the room to rest. The drunkards and prostitute on the front street who sneaks in and commits indescribable acts would always be pushed away by me with swears, when those guys from the wine shops come to me to seek for trouble, it was the Shipyard workers from Bodhi Avenue who lives downstairs who were willing to act as my protector in front of me.
When monsoon rainstorm poured down in June, people returned home for rice harvesting, the mansion becomes half empty, and the streets become ravines, and the wine shops also quieted down. My room was on the top floor, it leaks every years, so I sit in front of my awning to explain with the coach-craftsman’s youngest daughter about the use of carpentry equipments (which his father her were unwilling to teach her), magpie-robins tweet on the branches, and through the leaves, fragrance of boiled food by the doctor’s wife diffuses.
How exactly did I discover this place? There isn’t much to talk about. That’s when I was deceived by the middleman, signed a fraudulent contract, and it was a disgrace. But later, when I found out that my neighbours were also deceived by the same bunch, no longer feeling alone, a united front has hereby been formed. Hereafter, the rent collectors would take advantage of fringe term of the contract to rip us off over and over again. It wasn’t a pleasant memory, but I truly wish you to know how it was a few years ago like when it caused a havoc.
When goons employed by the Sherriff of Jiaye (伽耶郡公) came to drive us away, saying that they would no longer lease it to unruly people like us, and would turn the unruly remaining old sangharama into a red light district. The father and elder son of the cartwright, teaming up with young men of the neighbourhood, fended off the Sherriff’s men with wooden clubs. Meanwhile, the elderly and children collected wooden boxes from the each house to scramble together a barricade, and was planning for digging a well to be ready for a drawn-out resistance, when the cartwright’s daughter and I climbed over the window and ran in two directions to look out for outside aid. After two hours, I scrambled my way back from the Prefectural City alongside the Council staff, with a piece of record that says this land still is the property of the Dipankara Sangharama, I discovered the U-Tsang monks from the Dipankara Monastery were already meditating around the tree at the centre of the courtyard, saying that it’s planted in person by Atisha the Venerable (over which I shrugged), a group of Craftsmanship School students joined the Cartwright’s team with their shovels, with the Cartwright’s daughter standing on the side with pride.
Anyway, we continued living in this old house.
October, the rainstorm came to a halt. I, having caught asthma of humidity, and been fed up with the stifling heat on the top floor, moved all my cloths, furniture, books and blueprints to the little platform at my gateway, to let the sun eliminate its musty odors. On that day, when I was drawing, loud talking from constables at the courtyard gate could be heard. I became agitated, thinking it’s the Sherriff’s goons coming to provoke. What I saw instead was the son of coach maker running to me, saying: “Sis, I have something to hide with you.”
It couldn’t surprise me much, since this boy stopped following his daddy as an apprentice, and went over to the locomotive factory to learn repairing trains, pissing off his dad a great deal. The boy mingled all day long, together with workers and students from some schools adjacent or afar, and could always bring back some marvelous books, most of them Far Western books translated by a savant from the famed Baozangyuan University (宝藏馆大学, or Treasure-hall University), it’s not known what violations he committed, sigh.
I saw a little bundle of pamphlets, and have them wrapped, and then stuffed them under a pile of Ministry of Works’ guidelines and drawings. As expected, a few constables searched the cartwright’s house and went pass my mountain of books (extremely boring ones), they left after a brief search.
After the event, as I pulled them out for inspection, I found that these pamphlets are in wax printed and bound in accordion binding, with rough papers, and no book title on the cover. There was a slogan printed with movable type.
Workers of the World, Unite!
My hand trembled, as I never heard of these words.
南城街坊图鉴
A new, formal update has finally returned! This time we will arrive at Bengal, or Shanyang Circuit, to take a detailed observation of the emerging Mahakhitan metropolis, the Duojia Prefecture (多迦府or Dhaka, Bangladesh IOTL), as it appears in the late 19th Century. (Although we’ve been using Dhaka previously, let’s use the proper Imperial translation in our official text.)
At the same time, I feel happy for not using knowledge from the books, and all the stories and details are taken from / re-written based on my own encounters in the recent years. Having completed writing and drawing at my birthday, it could be a flashback and memorial to the marvelous incidents since I was 20, including those that I encountered when I lived in Dhaka.
It’s too much to write about in a short passage, so forgive me if it’s too high in information density.
There has been a time period wherein young people by Ganges all were adamant about going to Duojia.
It was around the 19th year of Jiaying Reign (1881), when incidents happened within and without the capital city. First, I saw armies of each zhen marching back a forth along Camel Bell Street, and still felt unrelated to these events as a mere clerk, but as it happened, when things settled down, I got to know there would no longer be any more projects sanctioned by the Imperial Court for the Ministry of Works.
Therefore, even for someone as lazy and numb as me, I could only leave this job in the Eastern Capital, which I’ve been doing for countless years, and to crowd together with odorous men and women in a flat-bottomed cargo ship to Shanyang Circuit, appearing like a rice dumpling with cloth wraps and bag straps around me, I couldn’t sleep well en route, and this lasted till I arrived at the legendary city of opportunities.
The Prefectural city had been utterly filled by early-comers, so much so that it’s hard to find a dwelling place within the city. I could only search for a cheap-looking hut alongside the river, asking for price house by house, and, after briefly staying here and there, finally moved to this place in the south city, where I instantly fell in love with the neighborhoods there, and settled down.
Duojia Prefectural City isn’t large in itself, and up to the 17th century, it was an undocumented little county town, until the Monsieur Maison of the French East Indian Company, while inspecting the region of Bengal, selected Naluoyan (那罗延, or Narayan), which was 15 li downstream, as trading post. Duojia, owing to its access to water and land trade routes, gradually transformed into a hub for jute and cotton cloths, where the Britons, as well as other westerners, flocked to. Hereafter, as merchants grew in number, the tiny county magistrate could no longer look after this many immigrant peasants and their daily affairs. Then, during Changde Reign, the court sanctioned the establishment of a local council. In this way, this small city, together with The Seven Islands (i.e. Mumbai) and Goa, gained the status of a “Prefecture”. Dweller of the “Three Metropoles and Three Prefectures” felt as though they lost their unparalleled privilege, but indeed, with the exception of Debu Prefecture (the Southern Capital) remained a key trade post of the west sea, the heydays of other two metropoles were over.
A small county own now upgraded to a prefectural city, within no more than a year, the little empty space within the city has been occupied, with new textile factories, warehouses, dockyards, shipyards, workers’ dorm etc. built along the river, extending towards Naluoyan in the south. What was once a embankment is now filled with flashy facades of various firms. But flashy as they are, I would smilingly lead to to the side, and point to the true face of these buildings, hiding behind those flamboyant porches, panes, curtains and signboards: they are all the cheapest clay houses with thatched roof. The shopkeeper would snatch a patch of land with the highest speed, build a firm with the lowest price, and prettify his firm with a purely cosmetic front façade, and then invite a Venerable Monk from Dipankara Sangharama Monastery across the river to bless this firm. With all budget spent on the façade, much to the pleasure of me as a craftsman.
What I like to do the most was to, on my way home, along the embankment and streets parallel to the river, see these facades. Each day, it could be found out that a couple of the shops would change their owners, or a couple of them would purchase some marvelous new stuff. The first couple of years after I came, it’s been purely jute and cotton stocked at the front gate of these firms, later there would be more and more categories, as the city, and the desires of nearly a million people, attracts the influx of inventions from the Far West, Cathay, and this country. I could see a shop manager, sitting on his British-made toilet bowl, filling in his account book for the day. ( Jade Porcelain Throne with Running Water in a Far West Golden Hall，泰西金殿活水大玉雪隐), it’s written in Hanzi with Bengali script subtext to mark it meaning). It could be seen that there was a shopkeeper riding on bronze tube of the factory, wiping its valve in detail. Duojia’s Monsoon season had gotten this baby quite a lot of green rust, but the shopkeeper hasn’t got a quite elegant posture when cleaning it. It could be seen mountains of candles and boxes of ink, their shopkeeper seemed to be sitting on his ink box, chatting with his wife with tea and naan. The bosses would indeed their cargo boxes as furniture, as if to express the lack of any willingness to enjoy life, they might be the ascetics of their time, who practice on these streets.
The South City wasn’t meant for construction, but was still densely packed and fully filled with resident houses. It was where the river turned, with a low and wet terrain, full of paddies and ponds. In the olden days, the Ganges often overflew its embankment during floods, pouring into its tributaries which converge here, when people could only travel with boats. Even a normal year, when typhoon or flood doesn’t happen, the avenue to Naluoyan were intersected by numerous small rivers, so place names along the Duojia-Naluoyan road appeared very regular: people named the wards by the order of the bridges along the embankment and the avenue. From the First Bridge at the south of Prefectural City, to the Ninth Bridge where I lived, it was nearly halfway. When you reach the Fourteenth Bridge, you would already be breathing heavy under the hor Dry Season sun, that’s where the spread of Duojia’s resident houses stopped, where banyan trees and paddies were all over the place. At the Nineteenth Bridge, you could see masts from the huge ships in Naluoyan Shipyards. And if you make an effort to go further, when you climb up the tall, arching Twenty-third Bridge, the port-city of Naluoyan showed up before your eyes. These bridges used to have their own names, but nobody remembers them now, and the numbers gave people travelling in hardship some motivations. During Huitong Reign, more fashionable Uptown Trams replaced feet and ferries, these ancient stone bridges were extend, or disappeared altogether with the rivers, but these place names remained on station signboards.
When I first moved to the Ninth Bridge, there wasn’t any tram yet. Oxcarts and boats were too expensive, so I still had to travel for an hour on foot daily on my way home and to work, it made me covered in mud and dirt, but I still liked to walk. The wards of Ninth Bridge were not as flamboyant as the shops along the embankment, but still inviting. Near Ninth Bridge, there used to be a subsidiary monastery to the Dipankara Sangharama Monastery (燃灯大伽蓝), and Dipankara Sangharama, as the birthplace of Atisha The Venerable, was prestigious in both Shanyang Circuit and U-Tsang. A century ago, as the heydays of Sangha(monks’) influences were over, the subsidiary temple was abolished with an imperial decree, the grandiose buildings it let were still visible around Nine Bridge region.
Adjacent to the Ninth Bridge, there was a Public Craftsmanship School occupying an old monastery, where noisy students bringing extra popularity to this area. Now, in front of the school gate stood the remnant of the Subsidiary Temple Hall, where the Ashoka-style iron pillars erected by early Emperors are now decorated with prayer flags written with good wishes by the neighbourhood, and the three-hundred-feet-long courtyard is now divides into many segments, however, the veranda built to give the pilgrims a resting and eating place has kept some of their functions, now its recess time for Naluoyan Imperial Craftsmanship School, and they order a cub of milk tea, with half a cup of sugar, from the tea venders on the veranda, and started chatting around the neighbouring fried wanton stall. What was once the Temple Hall has now become a warehouse with tangling ivy, with its gate shut, newspaper of the day gets posted on a red-brick wall with bas-relief peeling off, and the Hall naturally becomes a place where students discuss political events. But as students heard that someone resembling a government functionary always sits beside a tonic water stall underneath the Vaisramana’s (多闻天王 ) broken arms within the doorway, they go to the other side of the veranda to say what they have to say after buying the trendy tonic water.
From the old temple courtyard, away from the school, crossing a glaze door with all its bronze nails taken, across a street of broken slabs, (when you are supposed to ignore those suspicious men standing in front of the wine shops) , jumping across two muddy pits and turn right into a small alley, you get to where I live, an isolated island in the midst of a pandemonium of a wine shops, where the bad condition determined cheap rents, but when you pushed open the gateway of this old mansion, you would realise why tenants refuse to leave here.
It was the remnant part of Grand Temple Monks’ House, where the three floors of the monks’ house stacked on each other around the central courtyard, where shaky wooden stairs and the platform gets sheltered by the enormous banyan tree in the middle of the courtyard. In March, during the dry season, under scorching sunlight, and dust everywhere, this courtyard is the cool and clean refuge. The cartwright living in the cellar is busy with his work under the tree, his sons, and other apprentices, offers help by the side. Some Ava workers of the second floor returns late from the dock every day, the old Brahman on the first floor would always sit by the doorway and read his Veda with his lamp on, until the workers return safe, then he would lock the door and go back to the room to rest. The drunkards and prostitute on the front street who sneaks in and commits indescribable acts would always be pushed away by me with swears, when those guys from the wine shops come to me to seek for trouble, it was the Shipyard workers from Bodhi Avenue who lives downstairs who were willing to act as my protector in front of me.
When monsoon rainstorm poured down in June, people returned home for rice harvesting, the mansion becomes half empty, and the streets become ravines, and the wine shops also quieted down. My room was on the top floor, it leaks every years, so I sit in front of my awning to explain with the coach-craftsman’s youngest daughter about the use of carpentry equipments (which his father her were unwilling to teach her), magpie-robins tweet on the branches, and through the leaves, fragrance of boiled food by the doctor’s wife diffuses.
How exactly did I discover this place? There isn’t much to talk about. That’s when I was deceived by the middleman, signed a fraudulent contract, and it was a disgrace. But later, when I found out that my neighbours were also deceived by the same bunch, no longer feeling alone, a united front has hereby been formed. Hereafter, the rent collectors would take advantage of fringe term of the contract to rip us off over and over again. It wasn’t a pleasant memory, but I truly wish you to know how it was a few years ago like when it caused a havoc.
When goons employed by the Sherriff of Jiaye (伽耶郡公) came to drive us away, saying that they would no longer lease it to unruly people like us, and would turn the unruly remaining old sangharama into a red light district. The father and elder son of the cartwright, teaming up with young men of the neighbourhood, fended off the Sherriff’s men with wooden clubs. Meanwhile, the elderly and children collected wooden boxes from the each house to scramble together a barricade, and was planning for digging a well to be ready for a drawn-out resistance, when the cartwright’s daughter and I climbed over the window and ran in two directions to look out for outside aid. After two hours, I scrambled my way back from the Prefectural City alongside the Council staff, with a piece of record that says this land still is the property of the Dipankara Sangharama, I discovered the U-Tsang monks from the Dipankara Monastery were already meditating around the tree at the centre of the courtyard, saying that it’s planted in person by Atisha the Venerable (over which I shrugged), a group of Craftsmanship School students joined the Cartwright’s team with their shovels, with the Cartwright’s daughter standing on the side with pride.
Anyway, we continued living in this old house.
October, the rainstorm came to a halt. I, having caught asthma of humidity, and been fed up with the stifling heat on the top floor, moved all my cloths, furniture, books and blueprints to the little platform at my gateway, to let the sun eliminate its musty odors. On that day, when I was drawing, loud talking from constables at the courtyard gate could be heard. I became agitated, thinking it’s the Sherriff’s goons coming to provoke. What I saw instead was the son of coach maker running to me, saying: “Sis, I have something to hide with you.”
It couldn’t surprise me much, since this boy stopped following his daddy as an apprentice, and went over to the locomotive factory to learn repairing trains, pissing off his dad a great deal. The boy mingled all day long, together with workers and students from some schools adjacent or afar, and could always bring back some marvelous books, most of them Far Western books translated by a savant from the famed Baozangyuan University (宝藏馆大学, or Treasure-hall University), it’s not known what violations he committed, sigh.
I saw a little bundle of pamphlets, and have them wrapped, and then stuffed them under a pile of Ministry of Works’ guidelines and drawings. As expected, a few constables searched the cartwright’s house and went pass my mountain of books (extremely boring ones), they left after a brief search.
After the event, as I pulled them out for inspection, I found that these pamphlets are in wax printed and bound in accordion binding, with rough papers, and no book title on the cover. There was a slogan printed with movable type.
Workers of the World, Unite!
My hand trembled, as I never heard of these words.
An update.
I am aware that many members of the forum has a " better dead than red" attitude, but still translated according to what's written, and make no value judgement. As, for an newly-industrialized city in 19th century Mahakhitan, with a huge working population, I'd say it's hard for leftist ideas NOT to spread.
I am aware that many members of the forum has a " better dead than red" attitude, but still translated according to what's written, and make no value judgement. As, for an newly-industrialized city in 19th century Mahakhitan, with a huge working population, I'd say it's hard for leftist ideas NOT to spread.
Funny, just yesterday I checked to see if this had updated. Seems I was a day early!
Glad to see this back! It is a truly wonderful work.
You're not wrong on that, those things happens a lot in RL too. It's inevitable that it happens whenever there's dissatisfied workers and intellectuals unhappy with status quota of being under 'dirty capitalists'.