The Five Brothers' Dream

The beginnings of the Dragon Kingdom lie in vast obscurity, so remote that no one knows how many thousands of years have passed.
The ancients said that before Heaven and Earth were divided, chaos was like an unbroken egg. When the clear qi, the vital energy rose upward and the turbid qi condensed below, the sun and moon came into brightness, and mountains and rivers took their appointed places. The Yellow River flowed like a dragon, the Yangtze stretched like a belt; Mount Kunlun stood as the bones of the land, and Mount Tai guarded its soul.
From the time of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, the descendants of Emperor Yan and Emperor Huang lived and multiplied between Heaven and Earth. They ploughed the fields, fished, hunted, tied knots, drew trigrams, looked upward to observe the celestial patterns, and looked downward to examine the forms of the earth. Little by little, from such beginnings, there unfolded the great lineage of Chinese civilization.
That long-lasting civilization was not only cities and palaces. It was not only bronze vessels and oracle bones. It was not only the old names of emperors, kings, generals, and ministers recorded in history. When Youchao first built dwellings for the people, there already arose the heart that wished to shelter living beings. When Fuxi looked up at the stars and drew the Eight Trigrams below, there already appeared the thought that would connect Heaven and Earth. When Shennong, the Lord of Medicine, tasted the hundred herbs and taught the people agriculture, there already shone the virtue of giving one’s own body to save the world. When the Yellow Emperor united the tribes, established clothing and ceremony, and set the calendar in order, there already emerged the first outline of all under Heaven as one family.
Thus the universe became clear and bright, and sun and moon gave light. When the Great Way, or Dao was practiced, the people were transformed and instructed, and all came to rest in the highest good.
Later, Laozi, the founder of Daoism, journeyed west through Hangu Pass and left behind five thousand words, like a single line of the Heavenly River—cold, clear, and immeasurably deep. Confucius traveled among the states, knowing his work could not be fulfilled and yet doing it all the same, planting benevolence, righteousness, ritual, and music into the hearts of men in a disordered age. Mencius spoke of the vast flood-like qi. Zhuangzi dreamed of the butterfly and wandered free. Mozi taught universal love and opposition to aggression. Sunzi hid war within strategy. Han Fei discoursed on law, technique, and authority. The Hundred Schools of Thought flowed like a hundred rivers into the sea, contending without ceasing, differing yet completing one another.
Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism were like three lights adorning the heavens: Confucianism like the sun, illuminating human relations and order; Daoism like the moon, shining upon mountains, waters, purity, and emptiness; Buddhism like the stars, guiding those lost at the ford between birth and death. For thousands of years, even when the people were foolish and stubborn, they still knew there was Heaven above when they lifted their heads, and Earth below when they bowed them. Even when greed and anger arose, they still knew that good and evil bore consequences, and that cause and effect were never empty.
Such should have been the bearing of the Dragon Kingdom.
When spring came, misty rains fell over Jiangnan, and peach blossoms reflected upon the water. At summer solstice, lychees ripened in Lingnan, and cicadas filled the trees with sound. In deep autumn, wild geese returned beyond the northern passes, and yellow leaves covered the frontier gates. When winter descended, Kunlun Mountain shone with snow, and ten thousand mountains became silver.
Beside the Yellow River, old farmers leaned into the plough. Upon the Yangtze, fishing lamps glittered here and there. At the foot of Mount Tai, scholars recited their books. Deep in the Qinling Mountains, Daoists watched the stars. In the halls of government, men spoke of self-cultivation, ordering the family, governing the state, and bringing peace to all under Heaven. In the marketplace, people honored a promise worth a thousand pieces of gold.
The common people, the countless living beings, hurried each day for clothing, food, livelihood, and money. Ordinary men and women struggled from dawn to dusk for firewood, rice, oil, salt, and the prospects of their children. Though customs might grow shallow from time to time, and morality might also decline, still, deep within the human heart, there remained some small thought turned toward goodness. People knew that the young should be nurtured and the old should have support. They knew that if one bullied others too cruelly, even Heaven would not tolerate it.
Yet the Way of Heaven has brightness, and also darkness. The dragon vein has times of flourishing, and also calamities.
Later, the stars above the Dragon Kingdom suddenly changed.
An old Daoist at Qingcheng Mountain, observing the Milky Way at night, saw the Purple Star grow dim, the red star shift from its proper place, and in the east a streak of blood-colored light cut across the space between Dipper and Ox. It seemed like a gigantic red-scaled dragon coiled behind the clouds. That red dragon possessed none of the benevolence of ancient dragons. It did not move clouds and spread rain; it did not protect the country or bring peace to the people. It merely opened one enormous eye in the darkness, coldly overlooking the human world.
Mountains and rivers were still there. The streams still flowed. Cities and walls still stood. Yet the qi between Heaven and Earth had quietly fallen into disorder.
At first, people merely thought the times were difficult.
Only later did they realize that this had been the omen of a great calamity.
The red dragon rose from slogans and moved by iron command. It wore the outer garment of saving all under Heaven, yet wrapped itself in flames that devoured the human heart. It said it would smash the old world, and so it first smashed the ancestral tablets. It said it would make all beings equal, and so it first made people expose one another, hate one another, and betray one another. It said it would seek justice for the poor, and so it gave robbery a name, humiliation a banner, and beating others a merit.
Thus, good people no longer dared to speak truth, while wicked people suddenly gained courage. A coward, once draped in red cloth, could judge the decent and kind. A petty man standing upon a platform could instruct loyal and honest people how to confess their crimes.
This was not the evil of one person, nor the evil of one village or town.
It was the gate of institutional evil thrown open, and the evil in human hearts rushed out in swarms.
For a time, the land of the Dragon Kingdom shook beneath wind and rain. Books were burned. Ancestral graves were dug open. Shops were seized. Old houses were sealed. Those who understood medicine were cursed as practitioners of sorcery. Those who had studied were condemned as rotten pedants. Those who did business were called exploiters. Those who believed in Buddhism and Daoism were denounced as superstitious.
The old did not dare speak of the past. Parents did not dare instruct their children. Even brothers had to guard against one mistaken sentence. The incense in ancestral halls was cut off. The sound of reading in schools grew weak. The temple bells sank into silence. The Daoist abbeys in the mountains were left with only tattered banners swaying in the wind.
More strangely still, in those years, bizarre sights were often reported at night.
Some said that above deserted villages they had seen crimson wheels of light, like enormous iron eyes silently patrolling the sky. Some said that deep in the mountains they heard the roar of dragons, yet not as a sound of auspicious blessing, but as though ten thousand wronged souls were groaning beneath the earth. Others said that certain burned genealogies would turn their own pages at midnight, and within the ashes would faintly appear the names of those not yet dead.
Children did not understand. They only felt that adults had grown more and more afraid of the dark. But the elders knew: this was not ghosts and monsters causing trouble. It was that the resentment of the human world had become too heavy, so heavy that even mountains, rivers, grasses, and trees had remembered it.
After the lamps went out, the night was very long.
Yet no matter how dark the Dragon Kingdom became, there was still a light that had not been extinguished. That light was hidden in suffering, hidden in endurance, hidden in the family tradition of a household that refused to harm others. It was also hidden in the fates of children who had not yet grown up.
They did not know that what they carried upon their bodies was not only the wound of one family, but also the remaining spark of the Dragon Kingdom’s ancient civilization, still unwilling to die amid the dust of a chaotic age.
Truly, as your grandparents might have told, there was a time when the streets of the Dragon Kingdom glowed with countless small lamps.
Some hung outside tea houses where old friends gathered over fragrant cups. Some shone above herbal pharmacies where drawers of roots and blossoms carried the wisdom of generations. Others illuminated tailor shops, rice stores, bookshops, blacksmiths' forges, and family workshops where every tool had been polished smooth by the hands of fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters.
Each light belonged to a family.
Each family or clan carried a story.
Then, almost without warning, another wind began to blow.
It arrived carrying loud slogans instead of quiet greetings, banners instead of family signs, commands instead of conversation. The old rhythm of bargaining, laughter, and neighborhood trust slowly disappeared beneath the marching footsteps of a new age.
People were told that private businesses no longer belonged to those who had built them. Shops that had survived wars, floods, and famine were absorbed into new collective structures under the banner of public ownership. The wooden plaques bearing family names were removed. Account books that once recorded generations of honest trade were closed forever.
Some owners surrendered their keys in silence.
Others protested softly before learning that silence was safer.
Shelves that had once displayed silk, porcelain, medicines, or handmade tools became symbols of another system. Family treasures accumulated over decades—paintings, antiques, jewelry, handwritten ledgers, ancestral furniture—were inspected, registered, or taken away. Wealth vanished not only from homes but from memory itself, for many people no longer dared to speak of what they once possessed.
The greatest loss, however, could never be measured by coins.
It was the quiet disappearance of inheritance.
A grandfather who had spent fifty years teaching the art of carving could no longer pass his craft to his grandson. A physician whose family had studied healing for centuries found that his books gathered dust behind locked doors. A silk merchant who knew every thread and every customer suddenly became a stranger to the trade that had defined his life.
Knowledge without students slowly fades.
Songs without singers become silence.
Across villages, another kind of fading began.
Ancient ancestral halls stood with empty courtyards. Festivals once marked by drums, lanterns, and shared meals became restrained or disappeared altogether. Genealogies that carefully recorded hundreds of years of family history were hidden beneath floorboards, buried in fields, or burned in fear.
Even the old storytellers lowered their voices.
Legends that had traveled from one winter fire to another were interrupted, as though history itself had forgotten the next sentence.
Children grew up learning new words while forgetting the old blessings their grandparents had once spoken.
I was told that in one mountain village there lived an elderly couple who had owned a tiny oil press. Their wooden mill was never large, but every autumn the fragrance of freshly pressed sesame oil drifted across the valley like warm sunlight. Travelers knew the village by its scent before they ever saw its roofs.
When the mill closed, the stone wheel stopped turning.
The silence that followed seemed louder than the grinding had ever been.
The old man still visited the building each morning. He swept leaves from the doorway although no customers would come. Sometimes he rested his hand upon the worn wooden beam polished smooth by decades of work.
He did not speak.
Neither did the empty mill.
His wife planted chrysanthemums beside the path each autumn, just as she always had. The flowers bloomed faithfully, unaware that the family business they had watched for half a century would never reopen.
Years passed.
The chrysanthemums continued to bloom.
The mill continued to wait.
Perhaps both understood something that people often forget—that seasons remember even when history chooses not to.
Throughout the Dragon Kingdom, countless families carried similar memories.
Some remembered locked doors.
Some remembered missing heirlooms.
Some remembered parents who rarely smiled again after surrendering the work of their lives.
Others remembered only fragments—a familiar smell from a workshop, the sound of an abacus, a grandmother quietly humming while folding cloth, a grandfather explaining how every honest bargain required mutual respect.
These memories became invisible heirlooms.
They could not be confiscated.
Time has moved onward like a broad river, carrying cities toward glittering skylines and new generations toward futures their grandparents could scarcely imagine. Markets have returned. Shops once again line busy streets. Young entrepreneurs dream dreams remarkably similar to those their ancestors once held.
Yet beneath every new storefront there sometimes lingers an older echo.
It asks gentle questions.
What is lost when generations cannot inherit the work of their parents?
What disappears when fear interrupts memory?
How much of a civilization lives not inside palaces or monuments, but within ordinary families who quietly pass skills, customs, kindness, and dignity from one generation to the next?
History is often written in proclamations and campaigns.
Life is remembered through kitchens, workshops, village paths, family ledgers, and the warm light shining from a small shop at dusk.
When those lights went out, countless families lost more than businesses.
They lost familiar rhythms, trusted identities, treasured traditions, and the comforting certainty that tomorrow would resemble yesterday.
Yet memory, like the first spring grass after a long winter, has a quiet resilience.
It returns softly.
It grows patiently.
And wherever someone remembers the fragrance of sesame oil drifting through a mountain village, the careful stitching of a tailor's needle, the gentle clatter of an old abacus, or the welcoming smile behind a family shop counter, those extinguished lamps are not entirely dark.
Their light continues, reflected in remembrance, carried forward by stories whispered from one generation to the next, like an old song whose melody survives long after the last note has faded into the evening sky.
It was in such years that the Ma family too was drawn into the calamity.