Chapter 6 — The Dou Family
Purple Streets of Chang'an · Page 1 of 5
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.