Li Zicheng’s Treasure (simplified: 李自成的宝藏, traditional: 李自成的寶藏, pinyin: Lǐ Zìchéng de Bǎozàng, jyutping: lei5 zi6 sing4 dik1 bou2 zong6) was the hoard of gold, silver and jewels that the Storming King Li Zicheng’s army extorted in Beijing. He had it hidden in a cave behind Jade Brush Peak in Liaodong, where the treasure lay sealed in ice. Finding it needed both Li Zicheng’s Treasured Dao and the treasure map. Its secret was handed down in the Hu family for a century, and in Flying Fox of the Snowy Mountain the guests of Jade Brush Peak fought over it in the cave.
Description
The treasure lay in a large cave. Gold bricks, silver ingots, pearls and gemstones were heaped against all four walls, too many to count, but all of it lay behind clear ice. Those who had hidden it had poured water over it, and in the year-round cold of the place the ice never melted, so the treasure looked as if it were set in crystal (ch. 8). A wall of ice divided the cave into two chambers (ch. 8).
The way in began at a low round hill some twenty li from Jade Brush Peak. A passage under the snow wound through several turns, lined with ice that jutted out like blades, until two round boulders, one resting on the other and frozen together, closed it off. Once the ice between them had been melted with fire, the upper boulder could be rolled aside like a door (ch. 8).
History
Origin
After Li Zicheng took Beijing, the Ming imperial kin, ministers and generals surrendered, and his officers forced them to hand over gold, silver and jewels to buy their lives. Within days the treasure had piled up like mountains. When Li Zicheng withdrew from Beijing, he sent trusted officers to hide it somewhere remote, as pay for his army when he returned. Quoting Sunzi, that an army thrown into a place of death will survive, he chose the one place the Manchus would never search: their own homeland. He drew a map of the site and placed the key to reading it in his dao (ch. 5). When the guests on the peak learned of it, they recalled the old tale that his general Liu Zongmin had tortured Ming princes and ministers for their wealth, and that this wealth and the Ming palace stores had vanished when his army was defeated (ch. 6).
The four families
After his defeat at Jiugong Mountain, Li Zicheng gave the map and the dao to his bodyguard, the Flying Fox (飞天狐狸). Both later passed to the Flying Fox’s son, and after a century of feuding the dao ended with the Tian family of the Tianlong School and the map with the Miao family. Neither family knew what the two together could find. The Hu family kept the secret from generation to generation, but without the dao or the map it could not reach the treasure (ch. 5).
The fathers of Miao Renfeng and Tian Guinong set out beyond the passes together and were never seen again; the jianghu blamed Hu Yidao (ch. 5, 8). Hu Yidao searched for them himself and found the cave. There he met the woman who became Madam Hu, cousin of Du Ximeng, who had followed him inside. After they had fought and come to admire each other, he asked her to marry him. She told him he could have her or the treasure but not both, since taking it would wrong her cousin. Hu Yidao laughed that a hundred thousand treasures were not worth her, wrote an account of the choice and sealed it inside the cave (ch. 10).
When Hu Yidao came to Cangzhou, the third matter of the message he sent to Miao Renfeng through Yan Ji concerned the treasure. He asked Miao to dig it out and use it to relieve the poor, or even to raise an army and drive the Manchus back beyond the passes (ch. 5). Tian Guinong intercepted the message (ch. 7).
Seekers
Du Ximeng had learned enough to guess that the treasure was near the snow peak, and he lived on it for decades searching, without ever finding the place (ch. 8, 10). According to Hu Fei, when Ping Asi brought him to Du Ximeng as an infant, Du tried to get hold of Hu Yidao’s martial manual and searched the child’s belongings, suspecting that the Hu couple knew the secret of the treasure (ch. 10).
Tian Guinong seduced Miao Renfeng’s wife, Nan Lan, to get the Miao family’s map (ch. 10). In Side Story of the Flying Fox, as Miao Renfeng confronted the pair, Tian Guinong was thinking of the Storming King’s inexhaustible wealth and of Nan Lan as the key to the treasure trove (SIDE ch. 2), and Nan Lan herself came to suspect that he wanted her for power or treasure rather than for love (SIDE ch. 11). She saw through him and, before she died, had the hairpin holding the map returned to the Miao family (ch. 7, 10). Tian Guinong also went to Beijing and offered the treasure to the Qianlong Emperor through the commander of the imperial guard, Saihetu, with a plan to capture Miao Renfeng for the map (ch. 7, 9).
The hunt on Jade Brush Peak
On Jade Brush Peak, Liu Yuanhe took the phoenix-head pearl hairpin from Miao Ruolan and opened the map, which read “behind Jade Brush Peak, Wulan Mountain, Liaodong”: the treasure was on the very peak where they stood (ch. 8). Liu Yuanhe promised that whoever helped him present the treasure to the emperor would be rewarded, and that each could quietly keep a small heap for himself (ch. 8). Using the ridges below the peak, the carving on the dao’s scabbard and the arrow hidden under its ruby, Baoshu led the party into the cave (ch. 8).
Inside they found the frozen bodies of Tian Anbao, Tian Guinong’s father, and of Miao Renfeng’s father, each with a dagger in the other. Ruan Shizhong recognised his late shifu, whose gold pen had been found in the passage. The pair had killed each other decades earlier and were preserved by the cold (ch. 8). Tao Baisui observed that this bore out Hu Yidao’s message that the two men had died too shamefully to be described (ch. 8).
The party hacked at the ice with their weapons and stuffed their clothes with gems, then fell to fighting each other over the treasure (ch. 8, 10). Hu Fei had entered the cave several times after reading his father’s writings, and had taken out his parents’ sealed account and Tian Anbao’s gold pen, but out of respect for his parents’ wishes he had never dug for the treasure (ch. 10). When Baoshu attacked him with his iron prayer beads, Hu Fei flicked the cave’s own jewels at him until he could not stand. Then he rolled the boulder back into place and sealed the others in with the treasure (ch. 10).
See also
- Li Zicheng, the Storming King
- Li Zicheng’s Treasured Dao, the key to reading the map
- Treasure map, which marked the site
- Jade Brush Peak, below which the treasure lay
- Flying Fox of the Snowy Mountain items