began to form on everyone's back. After finishing her third bowl of rice, Sister Seven Pounds glanced up and her heart began to beat violently when she saw fat, short Mr. Chao the Seventh coming toward them across the single-log bridge. What distressed her most was the fact that Mr. Chao was wearing his long gown of blue cotton cloth.
Mr. Chao was the proprietor of the Mao Yuan wine shop in the neighboring village and the most distinguished personage within a radius of thirty li. Because he was something of a scholar, he had about him the air of a man who had seen better days. He owned some ten odd volumes of the Romance of Three Kingdoms, with commentaries by Chin Sheng-t'an, and used to sit over them and read aloud word by word. The extent of his erudition was such that he not only knew the names of the Five Tiger Generals but also their derived names.[1] He knew, for instance, that Chao Yun's derived name was Tzu-lung, Chang Fei's was Yi-te and so on. After the Revolution he coiled up his queue on top of his head, like a Taoist priest. He used to say with many a sigh that if Chao Tzu-lung were alive today, the world would not have come to such grief. Sister Seven Pounds had good eyes; she immediately noticed that Mr. Chao had not coiled his hair on top of his head like a Taoist priest but wore it in a queue with the familiar, closely shaven circle around it. From this she concluded that the Emperor must certainly have mounted the Dragon Throne, that wearing the queue was obligatory, and that Seven Pounds' position was most surely of a very precarious character. For Mr. Chao never wore that
- ↑ That is, their tzu, usually translated as "style." The connection between the name and the derived name is obvious in the cases of Generals Chao and Chang (as indeed in most cases): the former's name means "cloud," his derived name "Sir dragon"; the latter's name means "to fly," his derived name, "virtue of wings."
