The Rare Good
At Handan, the merchant Lü Buwei finds a spare Qin prince held hostage and worth nothing to anyone counting the present — calls him rare goods worth hoarding, and spends his fortune to buy the boy a throne.
The thing worth most is the one no one else has thought to price.
At the hiring-corner the scrawny boy went last and cheap, and the Wu was the only one in the square watching the man who bought him.
The others had taken the broad-backed lads first. This buyer let them go, waited, and paid a few coins for the runt nobody wanted — a quiet boy with quick eyes and a bad cough — and led him off before the cough could lower the price further. He had not bought a labourer. He had bought what the boy would be worth in three years to a house that kept accounts.
"He's glad," Dog said, meaning the runt and not the buyer. "Nobody's wanted him before. He doesn't even know he was cheap."
"A merchant at Handan saw a prince like that once," the Wu said. "A spare son left as a hostage, fed thin, worth nothing to anyone adding up the day. Rare goods worth hoarding, he called him, and spent his whole fortune to make the boy a king, and rode that throne the rest of his life."
She heard herself say it and felt the old eye turn on the boy beside her before she could stop it — what he would be worth, three years on, with a name put back on him, and to whom. The sum began to run itself.
She dropped it the way you drop something hot, and walked on, and did not pick it up again, which was the one piece of the trade she had never been able to teach herself to finish.
The history. From the Shiji (chapter 85). Lü Buwei, a great merchant of Yangzhai, was doing business at Handan when he saw Zichu — a middling grandson of the King of Qin, sent to Zhao as a hostage and kept short of carriages and coin, neglected by everyone counting the present. "This is rare goods worth hoarding," he said, and staked his fortune on the boy: five hundred gold to keep the prince and his followers, five hundred more in treasures carried west to win over the childless Lady Huayang, who was persuaded to adopt Zichu as the designated heir. Zichu became King Zhuangxiang of Qin, and Lü Buwei his chancellor, enfeoffed with a hundred thousand households. 奇貨可居, "rare goods worth hoarding," is still the phrase for a long shot bought cheap and held for the day it is worth everything.
The figure. ䷱ The Cauldron (Ding) · line 1 — A ting with legs upturned. Furthers removal of stagnating stuff. Taking a concubine for the sake of her son. No blame. Turning the ting upside down before use clears it of refuse. In highly developed civilization, every person of good will can succeed. No matter how lowly, provided you're ready to purify yourself, you are accepted. You attain a station where you can prove yourself fruitful.
The reading. The thing worth most is the one no one else has thought to price. In the scene a grain-factor buys the runt of the hiring-corner for what he'll be worth in three years, and the Wu knows the eye because it is her own — the trade-daughter trained to find the mis-shelved thing called cheap. Then the mirror turns: she has kept a boy the world mis-priced, and the one merchant's sum she refuses to finish is the one that would set a number on him.
Source: Shiji 85 · State of Zhao (趙) · Hexagram ䷱ The Cauldron · line 1
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