Daomu Biji: Wu Xie’s Private Notes - Chapter 3: Zhang Da Fo Ye

Da Fo Ye’s name was Zhang Qishan. The Zhang family was the number one family in Changsha. There was a giant Buddha statue in his house, but no one knew where it came from. That was how he got the nickname Da Fo Ye. (1)

Zhang Qishan was very good at studying feng shui, so the way he did things was rather different from that of the Southern tomb robbers. He was a northerner who moved to the south.

According to legend, Zhang Qishan could tell three generations of soil. Once he stood on a mountain, he would clearly know what it was like three hundred years ago, and what it would look like three hundred years later.

As a result, the valuable tombs that the Zhang family discovered couldn’t be found by others, and they often got some strange treasures. The bracelet that Zhang Qishan carried with him came from a zombie. It was called “the second ring bracelet” and was very precious. If you knocked on it, the solid jade bracelet would ring twice.

There was an inscription on the bracelet, which led Zhang Fo Ye to think that it was part of a pair, so he searched everywhere for the other one. He didn’t care how much money he had to pay as long as he could make it “ring three times”, which had everyone talking for a while.

The most legendary story of Zhang Da Fo Ye was how he brought his family from the northeast and fled to Changsha.

Before the Mukden Incident (2), Zhang Da Fo Ye was still a very young man. His father had already foreseen that the situation wasn’t good, so he sent his wife and family to his in-laws in Changsha. Meanwhile, he decided to stay and take care of the remaining things, preparing to leave with his son and a few men by boat, which would go down the Yangtze River.

Before the boat arrived, however, the Japanese came. Zhang Da Fo Ye was trapped in the countryside between villages in Liao Province. In order to break out of the encirclement, they tried to cross the border secretly, but his father was killed by a machine gun. He and a few buddies were all arrested and placed in a concentration camp.

Entering such a place at that time meant being taken to Heilongjiang to dig a coal mine. They were never going to be free, and there was no doubt that death was bound to happen. The Japanese were very strict, and all those who ran were basically caught and stabbed to death with bayonets. Few people could run away successfully.

Zhang Da Fo Ye lurked there, and after careful observation, he found that the reason why those people couldn’t escape was mainly because the dogs the Japanese had trained were too powerful.

The concentration camp was at the top of a mountain, and there were sentries both there and at the foot of the mountain. It seemed easy to escape and hide, but there were many shrubs in the mountains, and people would leave a heavy scent as they walked down. The Japanese-trained wolfhounds would find you no matter where you hid.

He also discovered that the Japanese only gave chase for two days. They would give up if they couldn’t catch you in that time frame, because two days were enough for people to get into the mountains where the trees were towering, and the area was too big. They couldn’t use the dogs by that point.

As a result, he knew that if he wanted to escape successfully, he had to find a place where he could hide for two days so that the dogs couldn’t find him.

The one condition that had to be met was that there needed to be standing water. Water was a blocking medium that could isolate one’s own odor, so the dogs couldn’t smell a thing.

But where would he find standing water that could hide a person? It wouldn’t work if the water was too shallow, and it was impossible to find deep water sources in the mountains.

The people in the concentration camp were taken away by the truckload and he became anxious. He couldn’t figure out a way until one day, while transporting timber, he found an ancient tomb on the west hillside of the concentration camp.

This ancient tomb was shaped like a ghost claw, and had been built in the shady part of the mountain. The owner of the tomb must have offended many people during his lifetime since the form was very poor, but the terrain around the tomb indicated that it was well preserved.

Zhang Da Fo Ye suddenly had an idea. First, he had to get near the ancient tomb and punch through the top, so that water would accumulate in the tomb when it rained. Then, as long as he escaped to the tomb and lurked in the stagnant water, the dogs wouldn’t find him.

But the ancient tomb was on the hillside outside the concentration camp. If he tried to leave the camp, he was likely to be found and beaten to death. He needed to plan out how to get there.

He thought hard and discussed it with some of his buddies. It would take two hours to smash through the top of the tomb, but that was too long and they didn’t have any tools, so it couldn’t be done secretly.

He had to think of a way to get the Japanese to take them out, and also do everything under their watchful eyes.

Finally, they came up with a risky approach. They used medicine to kill a wolfdog while the Japanese weren’t looking, dismembered the corpse, and then threw the pieces over the barbed wire where they would land around the ancient tomb.

Several days later, the Japanese found it strange that a dog was missing. By that time, the dog’s corpse was already stinking, so Zhang Da Fo Ye went and reported to the Japanese that he smelled a strange odor.

The Japanese followed him, and noticed a rancid smell coming from where he pointed. When they went over, they found that the corpse was already covered in maggots and centipedes.

Of course, the Japanese wouldn’t move the corpse by themselves, so they had Zhang Da Fo Ye take a shovel and bury it on the spot. They had guns with them and watched him work from a distance.

Zhang Da Fo Ye went out, picked an area by the ancient tomb, and carefully dug down until a deep hole was formed. Since they were in the mountains, the ground was full of tree roots, so he deliberately made the sound of a shovel cutting the roots from time to time.

When he reached the bottom of the pit, the Japanese could only see half of his body. He struck hard against the tomb wall more than a dozen times before it finally cracked. The Japanese became alert and came to see what was going on.

He immediately shoveled a piece of mud to cover the crack, and then came up and buried the dog. After that, he pried the crack a bit bigger and stacked the pieces of the corpse at the opening. He slapped mud into the seam, and then filled the hole.

God favored him. There was a heavy rain three days later, and it rained continuously for one day and one night. Zhang Da Fo Ye felt that the time was right and told the men that he was ready to escape.

They secretly waited for an opportunity. The best time to act would be when it was raining heavily, because the smell on their bodies would be washed away by the rain.

One day in September, after a heavy rain, seven people disappeared. The Japanese took the wolfhounds all the way outside the mountain, but they couldn’t find any traces. Since then, those seven people never appeared again.

In Changsha, a wave of anti-Japanese sentiment was suddenly set off among the people. A great man emerged from the trend and changed the entire history of China.

It was unknown whether this had anything to do with Zhang Da Fo Ye.

*****

TN Notes:

(1) Remember, “Da Fo Ye” means “The Giant Buddha”. Also, the Zhang family here had nothing to do with Poker-face’s family.

(2) An event staged by Japanese military personnel as a pretext for the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Wiki link