Chapter 6 — The Dou Family
Purple Streets of Chang'an · Page 2 of 5
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.