“Marco Polo. It wasn’t easy to search him up. The Genoan prison where he was imprisoned gave me fairly precise times and coordinates. I located him there, then backtraced to that naval battle he was in to extract some identifying traits. Then I jumped much earlier and followed him here. This is in what used to be Persia, near the city of Bam in modern Iran, but I could have saved myself the effort.”

“That means he’s on his way to China. You should be able to follow him into Kublai Khan’s palace,” said Lu Wenming.

“He never entered any palace.”

“You mean, he spent his time in China as just a regular commoner?”

“Marco Polo never went to China. The long and even more dangerous road ahead scared him off. He wandered around West Asia for a few years, and later told the rumors he heard along the way to his friend in prison, who wrote the famous travelogue.”

His three listeners once again exchanged looks of astonishment.

“It’s even easier to look up specific people and events later on. Let’s do it one more time with modern history.”

The room was large and very dim. A map—a naval map?—had been spread out on the broad wooden table, surrounded by several men in Qing Dynasty military uniforms. The room was too dark to see their faces.

“We’re in the headquarters of the Beiyang Fleet, quite a ways to go before the First Sino-Japanese War. We’re in the middle of a meeting.”

Someone was talking, but the heavy southlands accent and the poor sound quality made the words unintelligible. Bai Bing explained, “They’re saying that for coastal defense purposes, given their limited funds, purchasing heavy-tonnage ironclads from the West is less worthwhile than buying a large number of fast, steam-powered torpedo boats. Each vessel could hold four to six gas torpedoes, forming a large, fast attack force, maneuverable enough to evade Japanese cannon fire and strike at close range. I asked a number of naval experts and military historians about this. They unanimously believe that if this idea had been implemented, the Beiyang Fleet would have won their battles in the First Sino-Japanese War. He’s brilliantly ahead of his time, the first in naval history to discover the weaknesses of the traditional big-cannons-and-big-ships policy with the new innovations in armaments.”

“Who is it?” Chen Xufeng asked. “Deng Shichang?”

Bai Bing shook his head. “Fang Boqian.”

“What, that coward who ran away halfway through the Battle of the Yellow Sea?”

“The very one.”

“Instinct tells me that all this is what history was really like,” the Senior Official mused.

Bai Bing nodded. “That’s right. I didn’t feel so aloof and ethereal after this stage. I started to despair. I had discovered that practically all the history we know is a lie. Of all the noble, vaunted heroes we hear about, at least half were contemptible liars and schemers who used their influence to claim achievements and write the histories, and managed to succeed. Of those who really did give everything for truth and justice, two-thirds choked to death horribly and quietly in the dust of history, forgotten by everyone, and the remaining one-third had their reputations smeared into eternal infamy, just like Song Cheng. Only a tiny percentage were remembered as they were by history, less than the exposed corner of the iceberg.”