History of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms

Chapter 515: Jin-Fujian Grudge 1
Clue 1: Missing due to illness

When Lu Sun, the envoy of the Later Jin Dynasty, arrived in Fuzhou, Wang Jipeng claimed that he was ill and avoided meeting him, and sent his younger brother Wang Jigong to receive him on his behalf.

Clue 2: The cold-shouldered VIP

According to common sense, Lu Sun, the envoy of the enthronement ceremony, should have received a high-level reception, but he was treated coldly.

First of all, Wang Jipeng refused to meet with me. This is understandable, after all, birth, aging, illness and death are inevitable.

Secondly, the reception staff was "careless" and "coping". The person in charge of receiving Lu Sun was Liu Yi, the secretary of the Central Secretariat of the Min Kingdom. Liu Yi came to Lu Sun's inn to visit and comfort him. He wore a gorgeous and solemn dress, and the servants around him were also dressed very elegantly to show respect and attention to the guest. Lu Sun was very happy, and the two had a good chat, and ended this informal meeting in a relatively pleasant atmosphere.

However, a few days later, Lu Sun took advantage of a break from work to go shopping for souvenirs and ran into Liu Yi. He found that Liu Yi was in rags, with ragged clothes, a torn hat and straw sandals. It seemed that this was Liu Yi's true face in life. He probably didn't even take off the tags from the suit and leather shoes he wore for the official reception that day, and he returned the money after work...

Lu Sun made a joke on the spot, saying, "You are such a good official, aren't you, a secretary of the Central Secretariat? It seems that you are really a clean and honest official!"

The attendants on both sides also laughed out loud.

Liu Yi was extremely embarrassed and his face turned red on the spot. He covered his face with his sleeves and ran away in shame.

In fact, Liu Yi was a person who was indifferent to fame and fortune. He yearned for a secluded life. He had already resigned and lived in seclusion in Fengshan. Because of his great fame, Wang Jipeng invited him to come out of seclusion to support the people of Fujian. Therefore, he comforted Lu Sun with his original position as "Zhongshu Sheren".

Lu Sun was unaware of the truth and ridiculed Liu Yi, which seriously hurt the feelings of the people of Fujian. As the saying goes, when you beat a dog, you look at its owner. You, Lu Sun, were not only mocking Liu Yi himself, but the entire Min Kingdom.

After Wang Jipeng heard about this, he was quite furious, and his "illness" was cured immediately. He finally summoned Lu Sun, the special envoy of the Later Jin Dynasty, and scolded him on the spot, and then told him to pack up his things and get out!
Here it is necessary to briefly introduce this Lu Sun:
Lu Sun was also born into a family of officials. He passed the imperial examination in the early years of the Later Liang Dynasty. However, his studies were not solid, and his character was also very worrying. He passed the imperial examination in the same year as Ren Zan and five other people, but they always slandered and cursed each other, and were ridiculed by people as the "mutual curse list". Later, Ren Zan and others were promoted one after another, but Lu Sun was the most different and was not promoted for a long time.

Later, Li Qi had a younger sister who was an older single woman and could not get married, so she found Lu Sun to be her savior. Later, Li Qi became the prime minister, and Lu Sun's career finally started to flourish.

Although Lu Sun also had the academic qualification of a Jinshi, his "rhetoric and logic were shallow", his scores were high but his ability was low, and he was often despised by scholars.

A blessing in disguise. It was precisely because Lu Sun was not highly valued during the Later Liang Dynasty that he avoided the reckoning during the Later Tang Dynasty. In the Mingzong Dynasty, he served as the deputy envoy of Jiaen and reported the good news to Li Congke, so Li Congke liked him more and regarded him as a mascot. When Li Congke ascended the throne, he promoted him to the position of Chief Censor. On the other hand, the old classmates such as Ren Zan who were on the "mutual abuse list" had their graves covered with tall grass.

During the reign of Li Congke, he and Lu Wenji made irresponsible comments on the central government, formed a small group in private, and became one of the core members of Li Congke's group, but his stupidity and incompetence saved him again. He was suspended from his post due to major mistakes in his work, and was kicked out of the core power circle. Li Congke was emperor for less than three years, and Lu Sun was able to seize the opportunity to withdraw from the "Li Congke Group". Therefore, after Shi Jingtang was enthroned, Lu Sun was still not liquidated, and became the Right Sanqi Changshi, and was sent to Fujian as an envoy to ceremonial ceremony.

A fool with a bad mouth, yet he was able to survive two changes of dynasties.

It was precisely because of his bad mouth that he publicly humiliated Comrade Liu Yi, who was indifferent to fame and fortune. However, his status as a ceremonial envoy made his verbal abuse a major diplomatic incident, and Wang Jipeng, the top leader of Fujian Province, characterized the incident as a political incident.

There are a few more things to say about Liu Yi. This man was not completely "indifferent to fame and fortune". Literati and poets always have some common hobbies, such as wine and sex. Liu Yi once went to some inappropriate places to fight against vulgarity, critically consumed health care, and got into a fight with other prostitutes over female technicians when he was drunk. After he sobered up, he felt ashamed and regretted it.

Liu Yi once lost important books after getting drunk. There was no Xinhua Bookstore at that time, and many ancient books were single copies. Liu Yi learned from his mistakes and finally gritted his teeth and stomped his feet, and never drank again. As for whether he abstained from sex... history books don't say, you know.

Liu Yi collected and compiled poems and essays related to "drinking and making mistakes" and compiled them into "The Book of a Hundred Regrets" to admonish himself and the world.

The Complete Tang Poems contains three of his poems. Most of his poems describe his life in seclusion, such as:

"When sweeping stones, clouds follow the broom; when ploughing the mountains, birds follow the man."

Later generations gave general evaluations of his poems, saying they were "weird, unruly, and not well-crafted."

Therefore, Liu Yi's poems are not widely circulated and are not well-known. Instead, his good friend, Zhan Dunren, wrote several poems about Liu Yi, which were widely circulated. Zhan Dunren's grandfather was an officer who followed the "Three Kings of Fujian" into Fujian. Three generations of his family served in the Wang family. Zhan Dunren was a well-known poet. Later, he selected a Feng Shui treasure land with majestic mountains and rivers and fertile soil and water, applied to build a city and a county, and named it "Qingxi County". In the Northern Song Dynasty, it was renamed "Anxi County", which is today's Anxi County, Quanzhou City, Fujian Province. Zhan Dunren is the ancestor of Anxi County. Today, the "Kaixian Temple" has been converted into the "Zhan Dunren Memorial Hall", located in Fengshan Scenic Tourist Area.

Zhan Dunren's "Sending My Son to Visit Liu Yi":
"Sweeping stones and tilling the mountain, the old man is true, with cloth clothes and straw sandals always on his body.

The place where the poem was written on the cliff, I know it was written by the Fengge people back then. "

After Lu Sun returned to China, he was quite upset about Wang Jipeng's neglect. So when he reported the situation of his mission, he exaggerated and said that Wang Jipeng was domineering and disloyal, and treated the envoy of the superior country with indifference. In particular, he made artistic processing of the "Liu Yi incident". In Lu Sun's report, the course of events was as follows:
As a minister of a superior state and a ruler of a subordinate state, the Min State should have welcomed me with a large crowd to show respect for the Jin State. However, not only did they not have police cars to clear the way and impose martial law on traffic, they did not even have a tour guide. The senior official who was responsible for welcoming me (Liu Yi) actually hurriedly avoided me when he saw me coming. This is really outrageous!
So under Lu Sun's deliberate instigation, Shi Jingtang began to reconsider his relationship with the Kingdom of Min.

(End of this chapter)