The Second Ledger

The Imperial Archives were a city of the dead. Not of dead bodies, but of dead moments, a vast and silent necropolis of paper and ink. Here, in a sprawling, dusty complex of interconnected halls, the entire recorded history of the Qing Dynasty was interred. Millions of scrolls and thread-bound volumes containing tax records, census data, court proceedings, and astronomical observations were stored on towering shelves that rose into the shadowy gloom. It was a place of immense historical value and profound, soul-crushing boredom.

It was here that Weng Tonghe, the former Imperial Tutor, now spent his days. His "reassignment" was a form of living burial. He had been given a small, drafty office and a monumental, meaningless task: to begin compiling a new, comprehensive history of the early reigns of the dynasty. It was a project that would take a century to complete. He was a ghost, haunting the tomb of his own career.

But the beautiful Duan inkstone that sat on his new desk, the parting gift from the young Emperor, had become his secret lifeline. It was through this device, through the invisible messages he embedded in the pages of his "history," that he now served a new, more mysterious master.

One morning, an official court directive arrived, delivered by a junior eunuch. It was a new commission, an addendum to his work, bearing the imperial seal. The directive, penned in the Emperor's own childish script, requested that Weng Tonghe's history pay special attention to the establishment and development of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service.

To any outside observer, it was another dry, academic task. But Weng Tonghe understood. This was his next set of orders.

The Imperial Maritime Customs Service was a strange and unique beast within the Qing government. Established in the aftermath of the disastrous Opium Wars, it was the one branch of the administration that was widely considered to be efficient, modern, and almost entirely free of corruption. This was because its senior leadership was composed almost entirely of foreigners, led by a shrewd and respected Englishman named Sir Robert Hart. The service collected tariffs on all foreign trade, and because of its efficiency, it had become the single most reliable and significant source of hard currency for the beleaguered Qing treasury.

Cixi and her conservative faction despised it. They saw it as a humiliating concession, a part of their own government run by foreign barbarians. But they were also addicted to the steady, massive flow of silver it generated. It was a necessary evil they could not afford to dismantle.

This was Ying Zheng's next target. After striking at Cixi's secret spy budget, he now aimed to understand the true source of the empire's wealth. He needed to know precisely how much money was flowing in, and where it was going.

Weng Tonghe dutifully began his research, requesting access to decades of customs records and trade reports. He spent his days poring over the ledgers, and his nights secretly summarizing his findings. The information he gathered was then passed on during clandestine meetings, facilitated by the silent, imposing figure of Meng Tian, who used his authority as an imperial bodyguard to move through the palace at night without suspicion.

The recipient of this information was Shen Ke. The brilliant young scholar, working in a hidden room provided for him by Prince Gong's network, took Weng Tonghe's raw data and began his own masterful analysis. He was no longer merely a scribe; he had become the head of Ying Zheng's secret intelligence unit. And as he cross-referenced the official customs revenues with the stolen financial records from Li Lianying's green-bound ledger, a stunning picture of grand larceny began to emerge.

He worked late into the night, his brush flying across the paper, his mind a whirlwind of numbers and names. Finally, he drafted his report, a concise and devastating summary of his findings. The report was written in the invisible ink, on the back of a seemingly innocent treatise on Song Dynasty poetry, and passed back to Weng Tonghe, who then had it delivered to the Emperor's study hidden within a stack of historical texts.

That night, Ying Zheng sat alone in his chambers, carefully brushing weak tea over the pages of the treatise. As the paper dried, the faint, brownish characters of Shen Ke's secret report appeared, a ghost text revealing a profound betrayal.

Shen Ke's analysis was breathtaking in its clarity.

"Your Majesty," the report began. "The official revenues reported by the Maritime Customs are immense. However, my analysis shows a significant and consistent discrepancy between the gross tariffs collected at the southern ports—particularly Guangzhou and Shanghai—and the net amount that is remitted to the Board of Revenue in the capital."

The report went on to detail the scheme. "A significant portion of the customs revenue, as much as twenty percent, is being diverted at the source. It is being funneled through a series of private, local banks and trading houses. These institutions are, without exception, secretly owned or controlled by officials and merchants deeply loyal to the family of the Empress Dowager Cixi."

Ying Zheng's eyes narrowed. He was reading about the existence of a second, secret treasury.

The report concluded with its most damning finding. "This off-the-books treasury, which I estimate to be in the tens of millions of taels of silver, appears to be the primary source of funding for Her Majesty's most lavish personal projects and, more significantly, the operational budget for Li Lianying's intelligence network. The money from the stolen green ledger corresponds directly to withdrawals from these southern accounts. She does not fund her secret police from the public purse, which is nearly bankrupt. She funds it from this secret river of silver, siphoned from the empire's trade before it ever reaches the capital."

Ying Zheng leaned back, the pages of the report trembling slightly in his small hand. He now had the second half of the puzzle. The green ledger had shown him how Cixi's network spent its money. This new intelligence showed him where that money came from.

It was a brilliant, self-sustaining system of corruption. She used the foreigners she publicly despised to generate a massive, reliable income, then siphoned off a huge portion of it into a private slush fund, which she then used to pay the spies who enforced her power over the very government that was being kept afloat by the official customs revenue.

If he could find a way to disrupt or, better yet, seize control of this secret flow of money, he could cripple her power base far more effectively than burning down one spy headquarters ever could. He now had a new, much larger target. He would not just attack a single spider; he would find a way to burn down her entire web.