When Emperor Yang of Sui went down to Jiangdu, he left the Minister of Works, Yang Su, in charge of the western capital. Yang Su was proud beyond measure. In a time of rebellion he considered himself the weightiest man under heaven, and lived like an emperor: he received ministers sitting on his couch, with beautiful girls to bring him things and maids drawn up in ranks, and as the years went on the presumption grew worse.
One day a man in plain cloth came to the gate and asked to speak with him. His name was Li Jing.
They brought him in. Yang Su sat on his couch and did not rise. Li Jing stepped forward and bowed and said: “The empire is in chaos and strong men are rising everywhere. You are the pillar of the imperial house. Your business is to gather heroes to you — not to receive visitors sitting down.”
Yang Su rose. He apologised. He had Li Jing seated and they talked, and the talk went well.
And standing behind Yang Su’s couch, holding a long whisk, was a girl.
She watched Li Jing the whole time he spoke, and when he left she asked one of the servants where he lodged. That night, at the second watch, a young man in a purple coat and a cap knocked at Li Jing’s door carrying a bundle. Li Jing opened it — and it was the girl, and she was laughing.
“I have watched the visitors to that house for years,” she said. “Not one of them was worth a straw. You were. I am Hongfu, a girl of Yang Su’s household. I have come with you.”
Li Jing, who was a fugitive and poor, looked at her for a long moment and then said: “Then come.”
They rode north out of the capital together.
At an inn on the road, while Hongfu combed her hair by the window, a man with a great curly red beard rode up, threw his leather bag on the floor, took a pillow, lay down, and stared openly at Hongfu combing her hair.
Li Jing’s hand went to his sword. Hongfu, without turning, put her own hand on his arm.
The man laughed. “I am no one you need to fear. My name does not matter. I saw you two on the road and I want to drink with you.”
So they drank, and the hairy stranger ate — pulling a human heart and liver out of his bag, slicing them, and eating them, and saying calmly that they had belonged to a man who had betrayed him, and that he had been hunting the man ten years and had finished today. Li Jing and Hongfu drank with him anyway, because the alternative was worse.
“I am told there is a young man in Taiyuan,” the stranger said at last, “who may be the true emperor. Take me to him.”
They went. In Taiyuan, at the house of an official, Li Jing brought out a chessboard and sent for a young man of eighteen or nineteen in a plain coat — and the moment Qiu Ran Ke, the curly-bearded stranger, saw him walk into the room, his face changed.
He threw down his chess pieces.
“This is the one,” he said. “The empire is his. I am finished.”
He did not say it bitterly. He said it the way a man says that the arithmetic has come out.
Days later he invited Li Jing and Hongfu to his house, and gave them everything: the deeds, the accounts, the keys, the silver, the servants. “Take it,” he said. “You are going to serve the man who will be emperor, and you will need money. I am going southeast. There is another throne down there, and it has no one on it yet.”
He took his wife and his retainers and sailed away. And years afterward, word came back from a kingdom across the southern sea that a red-bearded king had taken it with a handful of ships, and that he ruled it well.
Li Jing served Li Shimin, who became Emperor Taizong, and rose to be one of the greatest generals of the age. Hongfu went with him. And the three of them — the general, the girl with the whisk, and the man who wanted the empire and gave it away — are called, to this day, the heroes of the wind and the dust.