章 115: A Scholarly Banquet
Rain after a long drought. Meeting a fellow townsman in a strange land. Red candles lit at night in the nuptial chamber. To have one's name inscribed on a gold tablet. (1)
These were the four great joys in life and Tang Yuqin had had the pleasure of experiencing the first two before this evening. Growing up in farmlands as a child, he had been fortunate to not have had to live through the worst of the droughts as his ancestors had. But he could remember the disaster a decade ago that had claimed the life of his frail little sister. His only sister, now forever immortalised in his memories as a child that barely reached his knees. If he closed his eyes, he could still see the way the famine that had ensued after months of relentless sunshine had slowly etched starvation into the bodies of his loved ones.
クリエイターの想い 
Queeniecat
Queeniecat (1) The four great joys in life, as listed in a poem. Its origins are contentious, with some saying it was written at various time points of the Song Dynasty while others argue it was written in either the Tang or Ming Dynasties.
(2) Luming Banquet, literally Banquet of the Deer’s Cry. The name was taken from a poem. The tradition of throwing a banquet after imperial examinations in honour of the scholars goes back to the Tang Dynasty and continued on into the Song, Ming, and ultimately Qing Dynasties too. However, aspects of the banquet changed depending on the time period; for example, in the Tang Dynasty, the banquet was held to celebrate the success of scholars at an earlier examination. In the Song Dynasty, it morphed to become a celebration after the top graduates were announced and would begin straight after the results were out, where the three top graduates would wear their official hats and ride through the capital on horseback. Essentially, they were paraded in front of the entire city. (Also at some point renamed Qionglin Banquet? I cannot tell if this was the exact same banquet though…)
A/N: Sorry for the very long glossary today, the research for this was complicated and I feel like I had to highlight the parts I was uncertain about! x.x
Thank you very much for reading. This chapter took a while to produce as firstly, I still have RL work backlog from my health issues and secondly, I needed to read through a lot of the story plan again to ensure that I didn't mix up any of the plotlines >< there are a lot of threads running through the entire novel and I didn't want to get things wrong. Thank you for bearing with me and I hope you enjoyed this chapter too!
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