Na Antiguidade, Nada Dava Certo

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In the spring of 1456, it was said that Emperor Zhu Zuo of the Liang Kingdom, while searching outside the palace for beautiful commoner women, accidentally got into a quarrel with some thugs outside the palace walls and ended up drowning in the moat, his death both humiliating and absurd.

This was a catastrophe, for this hapless emperor, whose very character defied description, had yet to designate a crown prince. After a series of power struggles, the nine-year-old Prince Zhu Quan, bewildered and unprepared, ascended the throne, changing the reign title to Kai Ping and formally commencing his career as a puppet monarch.

Compared to the death of the emperor and the momentous struggle for the throne, the matter of the two wives of Li Fu, the county magistrate of Long County under Hanyang Prefecture, Liangzhou—so very far from the Central Plains—going into labor one after the other seemed utterly insignificant.

This year, Li Fu was already forty-five years old, an age at which, in these times, not only would one have children, but likely a brood of grandchildren as well.

But Li Fu was different. Perhaps he had health problems, for whatever the reason, this was the first time he was to become a father.

By rights, at long last with children about to be born, he should have been elated. But Li Fu was a man unlike others. For instance, when his two wives went into labor one after another in the morning, he sent someone out at once to fetch an old Taoist priest.

And so it was that while the two women inside the house cried o