Chapter 6 — The Dou Family

The ancestor of Dou Zhiwei was a peddler with no property to his name, who by a stroke of luck married a maid from a merchant household in town. With the ten taels of silver that came as her dowry, he bought a mu and two fen of land in Beilou Village, Zhengding, and there settled down, took root, and multiplied.

Such was the origin of the celebrated Beilou Dou clan.

Dou Zhiwei's great-great-grandfather had been apprenticed at the age of ten to the silk and satin shop of his mother's former master. He completed his training at fourteen and by twenty had become the shop's second steward. The proprietor wished to marry him to his daughter's personal maid, but he, unwilling to spend his whole life and his descendants' lives revolving around the proprietor, resolved instead to wed Mistress Hao, daughter of a poor scholar from the west of town.

At twenty-one he used the eight taels of silver he had scraped together by living frugally as betrothal gifts, took Hao as his wife, and gave up his post as second steward.

He brought Hao back to Beilou Village and took up his father's carrying pole, along with the thirty mu of good farmland his father had amassed through a lifetime of bitter toil. In the busy farming seasons he worked the fields; in the slack seasons he went from village to village peddling his wares.

The following summer, Hao bore him a plump, healthy son.

At the head of the village he encountered a cotton merchant.

Zhengding Prefecture grew cotton.

The cotton merchant was looking for someone familiar with the local farmers to help him purchase cotton.

His father volunteered. Drawing on the skills he had honed in the silk shop, he could tell at a glance whether the cotton had been adulterated; hefting a bale in one hand, he could tell its weight in catties; and he could work an abacus and keep accounts.

When the summer passed, in addition to the agreed fee, the cotton merchant tipped Dou Zhiwei's great-great-grandfather another ten taels of silver and made a pact with him to seek his help again at the same time the following year.

By winter, Dou Zhiwei's great-great-grandfather had tramped through every village and hamlet within ten li of Zhengding County. By the following summer, he knew precisely which household had planted how much cotton, whether the crop was good or bad, and whether the cotton growers were easy to deal with; the purchasing, weighing, accounting, warehousing, and bookkeeping were all flawless. All the merchant had to do was sit in the shade of a tree, fan himself, and drink his tea.

"It seems I'm quite superfluous here, and I still have to pay for lodging and meals while I stay," the merchant said with a smile, taking Dou Zhiwei's great-great-grandfather aside. "I have an idea. I'll advance you part of the money, you purchase the cotton yourself, and then deliver it to me. We'll settle accounts according to the quality of the cotton. What do you say?"

That was how the Dou family rose — on cotton.

By the time the family had passed to Dou Zhiwei's great-grandfather, the Dou men were shipping cotton bought in Zhengding, Huolu, Wuji, Pingshan, Xingtang, and other counties down to Jiangnan, trading it for Jiangnan silk to sell in Sichuan, then carrying Sichuan medicinal herbs to the capital to be turned into silver, and fashioning that silver into novel trinkets to sell to the dignitaries and grandees of Zhengding Prefecture.

Dou Zhiwei's great-grandfather had only to apply himself quietly to his books and pass the examinations.

Yet for all his tying his hair to the beam and pricking his thigh with an awl, he attained no more than the rank of xiucai.

That did not prevent him, however, from marrying the daughter of Ju-ren Zhao of Anxiang Village in neighboring Xingtang County.

The Zhao family was nothing like the Dou family!

They had a genealogy.

Though they held only a hundred and twenty mu of land, their ancestry could be traced back to the age of King Mu of Zhou. Moreover, "Zhao" had been the imperial surname of the preceding dynasty, and the Zhao ancestors had moved here from the old capital of Bianjing when the dynasties changed.

The Zhaos of Anxiang were also Dou Zhiwei's maternal kin.

After Dou Zhiwei's great-grandfather wed Mistress Zhao, they had two sons: the elder, Dou Huancheng, and the younger, Dou Yaocheng.

The brothers were exceptionally clever from childhood. They studied under their maternal grandfather, Ju-ren Zhao, and when they came of age were sent to the Imperial College in the capital.

In the thirteenth year of the Zhide era, both brothers had their names posted on the golden roll.

The elder placed third in the second class; the younger, thirty-seventh in the second class.

From this point the Dou family became truly wealthy and honored.

The elder brother afterward passed the selection for shujishi and remained at the Hanlin Academy, observing administration in the Office of Messengers. The younger was posted out as a county assistant in Jinxian County, Nanchang Prefecture.

Dou Zhiwei's great-grandfather, alas, was short on fortune; after only a few years of glory, he rode the crane to the west.

Neither brother was at his side when he died.

The two brothers returned home to observe mourning; when the mourning period ended, they went back to the capital to await vacancies.

The elder, a shujishi who had served in the Office of Messengers, soon obtained a post as censor in the Censorate. The younger dawdled for over half a year before, through his elder brother's maneuvering, securing the position of registrar in the Registrar's Office of the Yunnan Provincial Surveillance Commission.

In the younger brother's impression, Yunnan was a land of barren mountains and foul waters, of miasmic rain and savage smoke, where officials had been known to fall gravely ill and die on the road to their posts; it was no place for human beings.

If he stayed on in the capital awaiting a vacancy, then, first, the two brothers had only just entered officialdom and might not be able to lay hands on a good post; and second, since capital officials were promoted once every three years, by the time he secured a decent vacancy, his elder brother would likely long since have risen to the sixth rank.

The more he thought, the more pointless it seemed, and he simply resigned his office and returned to Zhengding County.

Mistress Zhao's days were comfortable and dignified; if there was anything lacking, it was that both her sons were serving as officials far away, and she feared that when she died she would, like the old man, have no son to see her to the grave.

That Dou Yaocheng returned home was naturally what she wished with all her heart.

Her elder son's career was going smoothly in any case; with her second son back, he could do his filial duty before her and help manage the family's sundry affairs.

Dou Yaocheng, crowned with the halo of a metropolitan graduate, was naturally not to be compared with his forebears like Dou Juan when it came to doing business.

The silver exchanged in the capital was no longer used to make trinkets but as usury: lent to poor Hanlin scholars; lent to those lowly seventh-rank officials who had just obtained posts and been posted out, needing large sums to entertain colleagues and to outfit themselves with official sedan chairs and robes; or lent to frontier governors returning to the capital to report on their duties, needing money for banquets and gifts. Then, as these officials rose and fell, the Dou family began to reach into the stone for river works, the grain and fodder for the nine frontier garrisons, the salt certificates of the southern rivers...

Silver poured in like water, dazzling Mistress Zhao and Dou Huancheng and filling them with dread.

Dou Huancheng, now Right Assistant Censor-in-Chief of the Censorate, more than once admonished his younger brother: "When the moon is full it wanes; when water is full it overflows. You had best conceal your talents."