Yinshou, contract clerk of Aolai Town. Bounties, deeds, pawns, adoptions, land sales — anything that needs a written instrument comes to my desk: read aloud, signed, sealed, in triplicate.
People call me rigid. A contract must be read line by line, not one character vague. My father drummed it into me: an extra quarter-hour at the desk saves three years of litigation. In Ming and Qing times, every sale, loan, and lease among common folk rested on one sheet of paper and one square of seal-paste. When the seal comes down, heaven and conscience are both on the page.
This plague year, the contracts crossing my desk have changed in flavor.
Field deeds and leases used to dominate. Now there are three kinds: bounty contracts, safety contracts, and one I hate to name — extinction deeds. When a family line ends, its land sells outright to strangers. Every extinction deed I draw up weighs my brush down another ounce.
Last month an old man came to sign one: three mu of paddy to a foreign merchant — at forty percent of market price. I read the terms and asked: are you certain? He said: my son is gone. Who would I keep the field for?
I set the brush down.
I said: this deed will not be signed. The merchant threatened to report me. I said: no seal, no deed — and the seal is mine to withhold; take it to the county, you'll lose. He cursed his way out. The old man knelt to me. I raised him up and offered another way: don't sell — post a stewardship bounty on the board; someone works and watches the field until your grandson is grown.
That contract I drafted with more care than any in my career. The cinnabar paste came out of my own purse.
So don't call me rigid. I don't trust faces; I trust seals — but the seal is dead, and the hand that presses it is alive.