Ep. 27: Sex, Scams and Sorcery with Bruce Rusk and Christopher Rea

Tales of trickery were popular in the late Ming dynasty. The translators of a new collection explain how they still resonate today.

The China Books Podcast is a companion of China Books Review, a project of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and The Wire China. For any queries or comments, please write to info@chinabooksreview.com.

Transcript

ALEXANDER BOYD: Who was Zhang Yingyu and what is The Book of Swindles?

BRUCE RUSK: We don't know much about who Zhang Yingyu was because there's essentially nothing about him other than what appears in these pages. So we've had to reconstruct it from the book itself. How truthful it is, of course, we can't actually say, but he seems to have lived the early 17th century in Fujian province in the printing center of Jianyang, which was known for printing widely distributed and generally fairly cheap books of all sorts to a wide readership.

Although the heads of the chapters in the book suggest that he might have come from Zhejiang province on the coast further north, but beyond that, we don't know much about him except what we can reconstruct: that he was an educated man, but he also knew a lot about the underworld, or at least he claimed to know a lot about the underworld and the world of trade and commerce and how things were really done in this time and place.

CHRISTOPHER REA: This is the only book that is attributed to him. It's written in pretty simple classical Chinese. And there's a preface dated from the year 1617 by someone else who talks about him and says, he's a man who really knows the world. He knows just how criminals are running amok and has wise words for our age of peril.

So that's pretty much all we know about Zhang Yingyu. There's a little bit of Fujian dialect in some of the stories, but the stories themselves clearly come from a number of places, including hearsay and some earlier works.

What was this world where criminals were running amok and swindles were around every corner? What was the late Ming like?

It was a world in which people were moving around a lot, especially in South China, where they could move fairly easily along boats. That was much faster than land travel, so there's this world that's called the world of the rivers and lakes, jianghu, which you might be familiar with from, say, martial arts fiction, where it's the swashbuckling world of the heroes of The Outlaws of the Marsh, and so on.

But here, it's a little bit more oriented towards commerce. It's traders who are off. Making money far from home, for the most part, and taking risks because they're dealing with strangers and they have to figure out who they can trust. They, in some cases, can sell their goods from a long distance for a high profit, but they're also taking a lot of risks with carrying lots of money around, lots of precious cargo, and even with their lives because they can easily be taken for a ride.

There are a lot of scenarios in here about, if you run into a friendly person who speaks the same dialect as you and you're far from home and you're feeling homesick, it's only natural that you want to make a connection with them, but watch out. This could be somebody who's putting on an act trying to dupe you.

If you're lonely for female company. And you're heading on your way to take up your new post as an official. Be very careful if you try to take a concubine in another province because it could be a honeypot scam. So lots of useful advice about that.

For the late Ming reader, were people consuming this book in the way that people today might consume a gangster show where it's just basically titillating and interesting? Or were they reading this as handbook? This official, if he's looking for a second concubine, is he reading this like, you know, “Scams to Avoid While on My Hunt?”

All of the above, in the same way we might think about a true crime story: frisson of the thrill of the idea that there could be someone next door who's a murderer. And how do you identify that? So it has this practical side, but it is also a fun way of at least imagining you understand this world and some of the stories are arguably humorous and some of them are a little bit outlandish and even gory in their details. So there is that kind of thrill, but the book presents itself as offering practical advice and every story is followed by a moral, from it seems to be by the author, that tells you what lesson to take from it. 

So like one example, there's one story we translated for Book One, in which these poor families have been selling their sons to the local eunuch and not realizing that these eunuchs are not going to do what they say: I’ll see that your son gets a good education; has a good future; I'll adopt him. No, this guy is a sexual predator and in fact he even kills boys and makes a tonic of their essence to increase his young virility. 

And so you asked this question about, like, how practical is the advice? “Don't sell your sons to the eunuch seems to be the big takeaway from this story.” And so we were wondering, like, how plausible is this scenario for your average reader in, say, Fujian province. And there are indeed books, studies about, the culture of eunuchs, how many eunuchs were there in late Ming China? There were thousands. But it still seems a bit improbable. It seems that this is more like prurient details and fun thrilling fiction in a lot of cases.

And so a question that I've had reading the book is that obviously, there's the note saying it was written in 1617. So he couldn't have had the foresight to know the Ming would fall in a few short decades. But is the instability and criminality in the book intended as an indictment of the current political situation? Or is it more: this is how life is; this is human nature? 

The most part it's probably not directly meant as an indictment of the state is my reading of it. At least it's definitely warning you that the legal system, for example, is ineffectual. It's similar in some ways to stories that were very popular at the same time, which are sometimes called detective fiction, but are really court case fiction, in which the magistrate almost always gets his man and identifies the criminal through ingenious detection and punishes them accordingly. Very often, almost always, the magistrate is not necessarily a bumbling fool, but in some cases is deceived by underlings in the Yamen and does not rule in a very just way.

So, If you're potentially facing any kind of criminal or civil trial you best avoid it. You best stay out of the court because you can't rely on it. And that isn't framed as, for example, a failure on the part of the emperor or his leading officials to do anything wrong. It's just the way the world works. 

I’d say that most of the advice is about just avoiding bad situations and recognizing bad situations and extracting yourself because once the kind of mechanism of the scam is afoot it can be really difficult to save yourself. And as Bruce said, the stories say that if you get embroiled in anything dealing with government officials, you're likely to come to grief. It will be very expensive. The judgment may not go the way you think. So there's some cases of vigilante justice. That you see in this and there's some cases of no justice at all — just the bad guy gets away.

Bruce, in your answer, you alluded to a different type of fiction. So out of the mass of all the Ming fiction that we have, how did you guys find this book and why did you choose to translate it?

I first came across it actually for a little snippet that appears in one of the stories in this second volume, which is a pamphlet about how to identify fake silver. The main form of currency for large transactions was silver ingots and after a story about counterfeit silver Zhang Yingyu copies a pamphlet that he says he found in a bookstall that describes how to do that, and that's a topic I was interested in, but I was also more generally interested in deception, forgery and fakes in the Ming period, and I translated a few of the stories for a class I was teaching on deception and fakery of various kinds and students really got into it. And then Chris and I talked about it and decided to start translating more of the book. 

When Bruce mentioned that there was this book called The Book of Swindles, I was totally intrigued and when I read the stories, indeed a lot of them were really entertaining. They're very short. They tend to be quite short stories. And the commentaries are really fascinating. Because you get two voices, you get the storyteller voice and then the commentator voice saying:“Wow, that was a brilliant swindle, he really, set that up and executed it well” or “No, no, no, he just got lucky” or, like, “how could anybody be so stupid as to put themselves in that situation?”

We've both, I think, learned a lot about the conventions of storytelling. So Bruce mentioned that the swindle story is a little different from the court case fiction story. In the court case fiction story, the magistrate is trying to prove that this person did the crime. And there's sometimes some doubt about that. But in swindle stories, you always know who the swindler is. The way they tell there's no suspense about that. All the suspense is about how they did it.

Without further ado, let's hear one of these swindles. So for those listening,  I will pass it over to Bruce and Christopher and they're going to read you a story of a swindle that they have translated.

So this is from the second volume, More Swindles from the Late Ming and it's under type four misrepresentation, “Gulling People by Impersonating an Envoy from the Netherworld and Burning a Register.”

Changyuan is a major market township with over one thousand inhabitants.1 Among them was a horoscoper, a fortune teller whose prognostications since he arrived in town had proved remarkably accurate. His predictions about life expectancy were particularly uncanny. He could predict whether someone would die young or old, and townsfolk of all ages, male and female, thronged to have him tell their fortunes.

Over a period of three years, when he foretold that someone would fall ill or die, he would ask their name and secretly record it to verify the results. Every morning he would go to the marketplace and tell fortunes, and every evening he would return to his lodg- ings at a Buddhist monastery.

One day, an itinerant Daoist arrived at the monastery. The man’s face was half-shriveled and his skin had a sallow, blackened hue. He paid a call on the horoscoper, addressing him respectfully, “Master, I have heard that your fortune-telling skill is fantastically precise. I humbly request that you share with me the name and horoscope of every local, young and old, who is fated to die or fall ill this year. In exchange, I will share with you several proven medicinal remedies I have accumulated during my wanderings.”

“What use would such horoscope information be to you, if you don’t tell fortunes yourself?” asked the horoscoper.

“I have a different purpose in mind,” the Daoist replied.

The horoscoper duly wrote out a complete list of everyone he had predicted would fall ill or die that year. The Daoist then went to each of those families to beg for food. Whenever he encoun- tered someone who seemed like a gullible rube, he would say that he was an incarnation of a supernatural envoy, dispatched to escort the dying to the Netherworld. He and his ghost attendants had come to claim so-and-so from the area, whose time would be up this season. The rubes spread this story around but were mostly met with skepticism.

Then the Daoist secretly composed a formal document on a sheet of yellow paper. At the bottom of the paper, in large charac- ters, he wrote, “Government of the Netherworld.” In the middle, he listed in smaller characters the names of the people fated to die, which he had obtained from the horoscoper. On the upper portion he wrote the names of the offspring of rich local families and of cherished sons, which he had learned at the monastery. That night he went to the temple shrine and burned the lower part of the yel- low paper with no names on it, extinguishing the flame before it reached the top half containing the names. The next day, when someone came to pray at the shrine, they saw in the incense burner a partially burnt yellow paper. Picking it up, they could read the names of their fellow townspeople above the words “Government of the Netherworld.” Shocked, they retrieved the paper and told the whole town about their discovery.

Within a month, two of the named people had died. Word quickly spread that the emaciated Daoist was the incarnation of an envoy from the Netherworld, and that he would surely know about this yellow report to the Netherworld authorities. Every single per- son there named sought him out. Others whose names did not appear also came to him, fearful that their name had been on the bottom half, and the Daoist would confirm, after a show of reluc- tance, that their name had indeed been burned by one of his spec- tral attendants. The terrified mortals would then ask: Is there any way for someone whose name appears on a report to the Nether- world to escape death?

The Daoist would reply, “The government of the Netherworld is no different from the yamen of you mortals. If you have silver, you can always negotiate a temporary reprieve, and with a bit more you can extend a life by two or three years. Of course, silver is of no use once you have crossed over.”

Most rich families duly begged the Daoist to secure them a reprieve, bribing him with real silver and burning piles of spirit money. The Daoist cleared several dozen ounces of silver before skipping town. Most of those whose names supposedly appeared on the burnt bottom half of the papers did not die, and thus believed that they had been spared thanks to the Daoist’s intercession. What delusion!

Author’s Comment: Why exactly would the Netherworld authorities need to have the names of the condemned written on a paper report? And if they did, why burn it? And why leave certain names unburnt for all to see? It makes absolutely no sense. As for that scrawny Netherworld envoy bit, it was plainly to hoodwink the masses. Those who believe in ghosts and phantasms would do well to read this story and wake up. 

Thank you both for your reading. And for our readers, hopefully you have an understanding of  what sort of swindles we're dealing with here. So let's dig into the story and really trying to understand the different elements of it and what that would tell us about late Ming life. So let's start at the beginning of this story: What was a major market township like and is Changyuan a real place?

In this case, no, it's one of the places that either is made up, and there are a few that are made up, although most of the place names mentioned are real, or is perhaps a distortion of a real place name. In this case, it seems to be made up perhaps so as not to disparage its inhabitants who fell for this trick. And whatever Changyuan was like as a market town, it would have been the nexus of trade for a region. 

We can't say exactly how large a place like this would have been, but it probably would have been a node along a very complex network of trading relationships, and people would be wandering through like this. They would engage in different trades and Taoists would be one of those groups who wander around, offer their services to different people, along with artisans and, of course, long distance traders. In this case, it seems to be a fairly settled town rather than one that is only visitors.

There's one term that appears early on, “horoscoper.” We actually have two figures here, right? Horoscoper may be an unfamiliar term, but it's clearly a type of fortune teller. It's one that actually is mentioned in the Shiji, The Records of the Grand Historian. There's a whole section of biographies of this profession. So it's one that's been around for a long time. It's hundreds of years old. 

And it's important to recognize that in this story world, fortune telling is a real thing. People really can see the future, but in this case we have one person who actually can and is using it for good, and then one who can't and is using it for ill.

And in Book Two, we translate a lot of the stories in the sorcery section, and in all cases the sorcery is real. It's just you do have some bad practitioners and some bogus practitioners competing. And so part of what this book is about is: How do you tell the good from the bad? But in, in few cases is the author saying magic doesn't exist or fortune telling doesn't exist. It's just accepted as part of the real world.

One thing that I found interesting is that this story, unlike other stories, doesn't have a very specific victim. Usually, we see the avarice but in this one, we have scams, but in all the stories too, you almost always have a unwitting accomplice. So these are in this story: the local rumor mongers — who this Taoist is, like, “I think you're pretty gullible. I'm going to tell you this story and you're going to run around and you're going to seed the scam for me across the town.”—  so I'm very curious, how did you view the scammer and their accomplices and what tricks do scammers use to get otherwise wise and intelligent people to buy their stories?

There's definitely a lot of psychology involved in predicting other people's behavior. And so that's why one of the simple but very effective types of scam that appear, for example, early in the book are distractions of various kinds — classic one — by simply drawing people's attention with a noise while you're stealing something. And that's just a very predictable reaction. And it works because you know that people are only able to focus on one thing. This is in some ways a more involved version of that. There's also things like the bag drop, where you drop a bag of money and you claim later that it was stolen there.

There are all kinds of variations on playing with people's expected responses to things. And so this shows us at least what somebody thought the collective rather than individual response to a development, like somebody who is giving you a message from the underworld about people's future death, which obviously is a little bit like avarice, avarice for extra years of life. So it's really playing on the same thing as the ones based on greed. 

You can find swindle story collections from the UK, from the US, from different eras, that also have bag drop swindles. So it seems to be one that a lot of swindlers around the world hit on independently from one another where, it's fake money in there, but then somebody says, “Hey, I saw it at the same time. I deserve a half share and they get real money from their mark.” But in that one, I remember the author's comment said, “If he hadn't given them the money, these two guys would have beaten him up. They were in an out of the way place. So they, he would have come to worse grief. He would have lost his money and maybe his life as well.”

 So The Book of Swindles is curious because sometimes it is guile , pulls the ruse off, but other times it's force. So there's a lot of violent stories in here as well. It's not just cunning. And it's the gun (棍) , that's the main protagonist, the main criminal type is guanggun, these bare sticks.We just translate it as crooks. Because sometimes they trick you, sometimes they beat you up and there's a fluid boundary between the two.

So another question that I have about these crooks, right? When you have an itinerant Taoist arrive at a monastery, I'm wondering what frame of mind is the main reader thinking when they hear there's an itinerant Taoist? Is it similar to, you know, if Flannery O'Connor says, “I have a traveling preacher here or a Bible salesman” where you're already a little bit worried about what's going on, or are you thinking to yourself, “Oh, my friendly local wandering Taoist has arrived. I wonder what he's got?”

Probably depended who you were. Some people were probably very, just like that preacher did find an audience, even if some people were a little suspicious. Probably some people were very happy to give alms to a religious person and others were more suspicious. It was perhaps partly, not exactly, class based, but status based, that he sometimes, Zhang Yingyu, presents himself in a somewhat elite Confucian tone, where these clerical types are not to be trusted, and the values that he espouses when he does cite classical texts tend to be from The Book of Changes, the early books of Confucianism, like The Analects and Mencius, and he seems to be at least framing his values around those sources and so there would be a stratum of people who would be a little wary or suspicious of rubbing shoulders with these religious types, especially Buddhists. 

Yeah, and he's quite categorical that just stay out of the Yamen, stay away from monks and nuns. They're all scammers. They're all idlers prone to mischief. So he's very clear about that, and implies that his readers maybe share his prejudices, but yeah. 

It's so categorical about those professions. It's very sexist. It's all from a male perspective. No women are to be trusted. They're all corruptible. So if you meet friendly women out there, just, avoid them. It could be a honeypot scam. And there are some that, contemporary Chinese people will talk about like fattening up a pig for slaughter (杀猪盘), and there's a lot of examples of that in this book.

Do you see these same archetypes in modern Chinese humor? Is this Ming literary tradition continuing today?

It's really funny. So we didn't just look at The Book of Swindles. We also tried to find out what other similar works are there in the Chinese literary tradition and other literatures and you just find tons of swindle story collections in the early Republican period, so like the 20s and 30s. You find a lot from the 1990s onward.

So the Reform and Opening period in China, you start to get again money sloshing around, regulation struggling to keep up and apparently a lot of bad actors around. So many that it's come to public attention and turned into a literary thing. And so people are now commoditizing these stories and selling them into the 21st century as well. And you'll get some where they will actually, they're aware of The Book of Swindles. And they will have one story from The Book of Swindles. And then another story from a contemporary, like ripped from the headlines, and say this is a modern iteration of what you found back in the Ming Dynasty. So this is definitely a thing and it keeps coming back. And people keep making these relations to the early archetypes.

When I was reading this book, I was thinking of the film Blind Shaft, where they meet a friendly miner and convince them to pretend to be brothers to get into the mine and then stage a mining accident and then take the insurance payout. Again and again. That's their swindle. That's the formula. 

So Bruce, then a question for you is why are you attracted to hoaxes and scams in antiquity? Why does that spark your academic interest?

There's a lot you can do with swindles because, and all kinds of deception, because it shows you some of the cracks in society, first of all, the spaces that people can exploit, the uncertainties people have, the fears they have, and also how they establish truth how they establish trust with other people and how they know what is and isn't true. Because in the normal course of things, people simply take things at face value and don't give it a second thought, and whether it is something like a forged text or forged object, which I'm particularly interested in, or someone who is not what they purport to be, people have to pause once they are suspicious, or perhaps its too late once they realize they've been taken, and figure out how they made that judgment in the first place, and what are the foundational grounds for believing something?

And so by looking at both how people deceive and then how stories of deception, whether it's within society among people like this or around things and books and art, how those stories get told tells you something about the way truth is constructed, even under normal circumstances, that's hard to see otherwise.

I was struck, there's one story about a very peculiar way of building trust where it's in a sorcery section and there's a monk that can actually make himself appear in someone else's dream, right? Is it toumeng 投梦 or something? It's like a particular method of ou can implant a dream in someone's head and so he does this, then he actually shows up physically on the person's doorstep the next day. The person's like, “I just saw you in a dream. I can't believe it. And like, I'll do anything you say.” And so immediately, then he takes them for money. 

You know, you could make, I don't know if this is too much of a stretch, analogs to this mysterious and magical world of algorithmic living that we do online, where it's like things just magically appear that the algorithm has provided for us. I was just writing an email about that and now there's an ad for this product that I need. It's like magic. So I feel like there, there's some ways you could look beyond the surface details of the story to make connections to other eras.

I love that. The algorithm as our digital toumengzhe [投梦者, dream implanter]. A question I had in reading this book and listening to different media appearances of your two is that this book. I know was not popular in mainland China, or maybe it wasn't. It's basically disappeared from the historical record, but remained very popular in Japan. Was it in Japanese translation or was it in classical Chinese still?

There was some of both and something in between. So there were copies of the original Ming edition that circulated in Japan and people in the Edo period between 1600 and 1868 could educate people, at least many of them could read classical Chinese. So they would also have a way of annotating the text in classical Chinese to make it more readable for Japanese readers, which marks verb endings and sentence order so that even though the text was in Chinese, it was readable for Japanese readers. And then there were also translations, as well as adaptations, some of the stories were retold in other fiction collections in Edo Japan. 

And were they reading it as the same way that Americans might read something about “Florida man,” right? Where it's a parody of a distant neighbor that you find to be foolish or silly? Or were they reading it for the same reasons that a Chinese person of the Ming era might read the book, too, because of its warnings and literary merit?

I honestly have not looked closely enough at Japanese responses. Overall, the way that they read Ming fiction was maybe a little bit like the way that Americans read British fiction, that it was a familiar but still different world. It was in a language that was accessible but still a little bit different. And it was also heavily integrated into Japanese popular culture so that some of the novels from the Ming, like Outlaws of the Marsh became just deeply integrated into Japanese popular culture. And this technique of converting a text in classical Chinese to make it readable had to be adapted a bit for Ming fiction because the vernacular had changed and there was a lot of terminology that the ways that Japanese were used to reading older classical Chinese texts just didn't work for.

So it was a bit, keeping up with popular culture in this broader East Asian sphere that this would have been part of. People were also reading this kind of court case fiction and other texts like drama in Edo Japan. And so it would have been part of that huge wave of books that were imported and maybe also identifying with some aspects of it because there was also a flourishing of domestic trade in this period, and so some of the same kinds of tricks would have made sense whether there was an exact parallel or not. 

If any of your listeners are fans of late imperial Chinese fiction, Dream of the Red Chamber or The Scholars (儒林外史). When you read these works, you can keep a lookout for swindle stories that are nested in these longer narratives because we found quite a few that are in super famous works. And it seems like, whoever was writing them realized that there's a market for this stuff — that these are engaging stories. And the stories that appear in The Book of Swindles may be just one version of stories that circulated earlier and were also taken just one at a time or two at a time and put in another work. So there was some circulation, but there's still a lot of mysteries about how we got from 400 years ago up to when you start to get new scholarly editions being republished in the 20th century.

That actually brings me to another question, we've asked a lot about Ming readers. I'm curious about Ming publishers. How did Ming Publishing work?

It was complicated in that there were lots of local centers of publishing. This was, as far as we know, only published in Fujian province, as I mentioned, in Jianyang. And the person who wrote the preface in 1617 was part of a well known family of publishers there in Jianyang, the Xiong family. And we know directly of one edition, indirectly of another, that has its preface copied in a manuscript copy that's in Japan, but it's possible that it's exactly the same wood blocks because the wood blocks themselves, so it was printed from rectangular blocks of wood into which the text is carved in reverse and then inked and a sheet of paper is placed on it and then pulled off and you can make thousands of copies of a book in this way. And that made books extremely cheap. 

Jianyang was known as a centre of book carving and distribution and this process made books affordable to not the poorest people, but people with a fairly limited income. So it became possible to have bestsellers and for ordinary people to have at least a few books in their house. And the publisher who printed this, at least one of the editions of this, was also a publisher of detective fiction. And of what are sometimes called daily use encyclopedias. These are miscellanies usually containing dozens of chapters on all the basics you would need to at least seem like an educated, cultured person, at first glance.

So there would be basic geography of the realm, tips for trading, history of China and the world, strange foreign creatures, the basics of music, drinking games, how to paint a plum painting, how to do calligraphy — about three pages on each of these things — but the basics so that you could either learn about or pass yourself off as someone expert in what the educated did. And so it seems to be part of a general involvement in literate culture of a broad, roughly speaking, middle class. Later, this gets denigrated in the Qing Dynasty as a hucksterish kind of publishing, that it is not up to scholarly standards by any measure, and it mixes things from the actual classics with very popular and sometimes lewd culture. So it was definitely the kind of thing that the literati would sneer at. 

And I think it would be fair to say that The Book of Swindles is not highbrow.

No, I didn't mistake it for that.

Yeah, please read it and make your own determination.

From your knowledge of The Book of Swindles, what piece of advice would you give to our listeners to avoid a swindle in these modern days?

Leave your wallet at home. No, I would say that this is back to something Bruce was talking about. Be aware of ways that people, institutions and algorithms , establish trust and establish plausibility. I think that is the sensibility that Zhang Yingyu keeps coming back to again and again. About you got to be mindful of that. You have to be mega metacognitive of “I'm feeling this and thinking this about the person that I'm dealing with. What exactly is the thing that is making me think that?” 

And that's a very much a soft skill. And you could err on either side, you could be too gullible, you could be just reflexively skeptical and certainly we're in an era where a lot of people talk about there's fraud here and fraud there with no evidence whatsoever. Like they're totally unreflexive about that. And it does a lot of damage. But I think that would be one, one thing from The Book of Swindles about how is trust being established in this situation that I'm in right now.

Yeah, I could even g eneralize that a step further is that you need a theory of mind. You need to have an image in your head of how other people are thinking, but you also need a theory of mind in the sense that you need to understand that everyone else is doing that to you at the same time and probably going to exploit it. So it's not put in those terms in the book, but If you have a very healthy skepticism about everything that people are saying to you, you can also be aware of your own presentation to the world, and that's something he also reminds people of, is how to look at somebody and figure out who they really are, to the best you can but also be aware of how you're presenting yourself to the world, and what that means what kind of exploitation that leaves open.

So what is a question you wish I had asked you?

Well, one thing that's distinctive about the second volume, More Swindles from the Late Ming, is that we decided to include and analyze the images that appear in the first page of each of the four original volumes of the book. This also gets into this world of late Ming publishing, in that they are full page illustrations with textual captions at the top that are not illustrating particular stories, but were probably added by the publisher to make the book more saleable.

And this was a very common practice that a lot of books are illustrated at the time, sometimes in ways that are directly illustrating the content and sometimes in a sort of decorative way. This is somewhere in between in that the images are about the general theme of the book without actually being drawn from the content itself, and they give you kind of general ideas about how to avoid swindles with the core theme running through them being be aware of your own mind and that is the source of your power that is your firewall against the intrusive hackers of swindles. The first is an image — and I'll just really talk in depth about the first because it's a very interesting case — is an image of a man who is probably wearing a general's uniform, and a soldier beside him is burning an object that turns out to be a rhinoceros horn.

And this is a reference to a story that at this point was over a thousand years old, about using a rhinoceros horn to reveal hidden demons that were lying underwater. And the bottom of the image has a group of demonic creatures in the water who seem to have been revealed by this process and it's being translated into the detection of swindles. That if you can, just like this magic rhinoceros horn, light as a torch because rhinoceros horn is his rare magical substance, reveal the dangers of the underworld in a similar way in your mind, your perception. 

I'll read the caption that appears under: “Burning rhinoceros horn illuminates monsters: Demons abound among aquatic beings; once lit, the glow from the rhinoceros horn reveals them all/ Awareness fills the mind;  swindles of every sort find no way in.” This obviously is not one of the particular stories in the book, but it illustrates at least what the publisher seems to have understood about the lesson of the book as a whole. 

You could say that The Book of Swindles is essentially like the book of rhinoceros horn. So you just you read it, you burn it, you buy another copy, you burn it, you buy another. But yeah, that's this is mentioned in the preface. It's like essentially the book is functioning like rhinoceros horn. It's going to show you the truth. And there's a lot, you should take a look at these images because there's so much going on.

We even think there may be allusions to the kind of rivers and lakes context, because there's water in several of them. And some of them look like they were made on Canva. Because there's some, clearly some copy paste elements there, with like minor variations. So if you're interested in how books were made and put together, the illustrations are pretty interesting.

Thank you, Bruce and Christopher, for your time.

Thank you. Thanks, Alexander.