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In 119 BC a Han cavalry column rode north for more than a thousand miles. The man leading it was twenty-one years old. Before he turned twenty-four he had driven the Xiongnu out of the Hexi Corridor, performed a sacrifice to heaven on a sacred enemy mountain, and became Grand Marshal of the Han armies. Then he died, and the histories recorded it in a single word. This is his story.

In the summer of 1900 a Taoist priest had sand cleared from the caves at Dunhuang, and the wall at the end of a passage turned out to be hollow. Behind it was a room about three metres across, packed to the ceiling with cloth-wrapped bundles: fifty thousand manuscripts, laid up in the dark since the eleventh century. He reported the find up the chain. Nobody came for seven years. Then the buyers arrived, and the cave began to empty.

In 100 BCE a Han envoy named Su Wu drove a knife into his own chest rather than be questioned in a Xiongnu tent. They saved him. When he still would not kneel, they sent him north to a cold lake to herd rams, and told him he could go home when the rams bore lambs. He kept the envoy’s staff in his hands for nineteen years, until the yak hair had all fallen off it.

In 338 BCE the man who had remade the state of Qin reached a frontier post and asked for a bed. The innkeeper wanted his papers, because the law of Lord Shang said that anyone who sheltered a traveller without checking his papers answered for it himself. He had none. He sighed, and went on. Twenty years earlier he had set a pole outside the south gate of the market and paid a man fifty jin to carry it across the square, so that the country would believe what he said next.

In 1405 a fleet of more than two hundred ships and twenty seven thousand men sailed out of Fujian under a eunuch admiral named Zheng He. Over twenty eight years it went to Calicut, Hormuz and the coast of Africa, took a pirate chief alive, brought a giraffe home as a qilin, and set up one stone in Ceylon inscribed in three languages. Then the emperor who sent it died, the records were hidden or burned, and the ships rotted in the harbour at Liujiagang.

On the first day of the new year in 960 a frontier dispatch sent the commander of the palace guards out of Kaifeng with the whole army. Three days later his own soldiers wrapped a yellow robe around him in the dark at Chenqiao. The robe was ready, folded, the right size. Four days after the dispatch arrived, a boy of seven signed away the throne and the dynasty changed its name without a single market closing.

In May 1923 a band of armed farmers unbolted a few steel plates from the Jinan-Pukou railway, stopped the night express, and took thirty-nine foreign passengers and about thirty Chinese ones up a mountain. Everyone knew who had done it. The problem was what anyone could do about it.

A farmer came to the county office to report that his ox had been mutilated. Instead of sending men to look for the culprit, the magistrate told him to kill the animal and sell the meat, which was itself a crime. The man he was waiting for walked in the door a few days later.

Princess Taiping lost two boxes of treasure from a locked storehouse, and the empress gave the city three days to find them or else. The man who solved it waited a month and a half without doing anything at all, and then watched a funeral procession for mourners who were not mourning.

Two small children fell from a fifteenth floor window in Chongqing in November 2020 and everyone called it an accident, including the father who wept on the pavement below. What turned it into a murder case was half a year of chat messages that the two defendants had deleted.