Chapter 174

"Look at this treaty time." Her finger guard scraped against the water clock's scale on the palm-leaf manuscript. "This season of the 'frost's descent in the twenty-eighth year of Yongli' was precisely the night before Mu Tianbo burned the Luchuan archives..." Sudden thunder cracked over the snow mountains. As five Angkor war elephants bearing banners of the Ming surged through the tea plantations, their gilded elephant bells inscribed with "Wanggong Factory Special Supply, Seventeenth Year of Chongzhen" gleamed like blood in the Lancang River gorge, crushing six centuries of border loyalty from the Mu Mansion into sacrificial offerings for the shifting hegemonies of the Indochinese Peninsula! Morning mist veiled the tea groves in the Mengxian River Valley of Puer Prefecture, Shen Xitang's leather boots crushing the charred edges of the *Chronicles of Yunnan Tea Tariffs*. Xiao Heng's Xiuchun Saber split the rotting roots of a centuries-old tea tree, and bundles of aged tea bricks burst open in the mountain wind—the tea dregs did not contain Puer, but rather twelve volumes of Champa's *Essentials of Agriculture*. Along the bamboo slips' margins, beside Champa script reading "Thirty-Fourth Year of Yongli," was engraved a diagram of Khmer elephant training!