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For four hundred years the Tang state taxed men by counting them: land, body, household. Then the registers stopped matching the fields, the rebellion emptied the rolls, and several hundred separate charges were being collected with no one to stop them. In 780 a chief councillor named Yang Yan tried something else. Count wealth, not heads. It held for eight centuries.

In 1004 the Liao army drove south to the Yellow River, and the Song court argued about running. One minister held the emperor to his post, and at the town of Chanzhou a single crossbow bolt brought down the Liao field commander. That winter the two empires swore a treaty: no land would change hands, and the Song would send silk and silver every year. It held for a hundred and twenty years.

In the summer of 756 the imperial guard halted on the road west of the Tang capital. The pass at Tongguan had fallen, the signal fire had not come, and the emperor had slipped out of the city before dawn. Two days without food later, the soldiers stopped at a post station called Mawei and would not move until the emperor gave up the woman at his side.

In the winter of 1873 a bridal chair carried a seventeen year old girl to a wedding in Shanghai. The marriage had her mother’s consent, matchmakers, a written contract and a betrothal payment. Then the clan complained, the runners arrived, and the whole thing was judged to be a kidnapping.

A monk on the road was refused a bed, saw thieves go over a wall in the night, and ran. He fell into a dry well with the murdered woman already at the bottom, confessed under beating, and was three days from execution when the prefect noticed that the stolen goods and the knife had never been found.

In 1557 a man was speared six times beside his family fish pond in Zhejiang. Three county magistrates called it murder and prescribed strangulation. The new magistrate in Chun’an re-examined the body, found pond mud in the dead man’s ears, and took the rope back off his neck.

In February 1998 a Kunming court sentenced Sun Xiaoguo to death. He was released from prison in April 2010 and spent the next eight years as a shareholder and bar owner in the city nightlife, until a single kick in a karaoke room put his name in front of a court clerk who asked how a dead man was still walking around.

In July 2015 a Peking University student killed his mother in their Fuzhou apartment. For the next six months he answered her phone, wrote her messages and resigned from her job in her handwriting, while taking 1.44 million yuan from relatives who believed she had gone abroad with him.

Wangdi, the first king of Shu, fell out of the sky, taught his people to farm, and could not tame the flood that filled the plain ringed by mountains. When a man floated up the river and cut the mountain open to let the water out, Wangdi gave him the throne and walked into the western hills, and came back every spring as the cuckoo that sings until its mouth bleeds.

East of the sea there is a bottomless abyss called Guixu, and above it float five mountains of gold and jade where the immortal sages live. Because the mountains have no roots, the Emperor of Heaven sets fifteen giant turtles beneath them in three shifts. Then a giant from the country of Longbo comes fishing, catches six turtles in one cast, and two of the mountains drift north and sink.