The Sixteen Characters

Above the recess in the stone door are 4 lines of seal script, 4 characters to a line, 16 in all. They are cut so fine that unless you drop the lamp into raking light you take them for the natural grain of the stone:

Those who enter this gate Know the dragon and turn back Hold the mirror and enter The soul returns at thirty-one

The first 2 lines read like a rule and like a warning: whoever can recognize the 'dragon' should turn back. In the Fenjin rhymes the word 'dragon' carries several senses at once — it can mean the run of an earth-vein, it can mean the True King bloodline, it can mean a species no longer in any surviving classification of animals. The door does not say which. The brushwork of the characters is early, of a piece with the recess and with the mortise-and-tenon joining the door to the tunnel wall; there is no sign of later cutting.

The third line sets a condition. The round recess at the center of the door is 15 centimeters across and about 1 centimeter deep, finely ground on the inside, a seat left for an object of one particular shape. And under the mound of earth at the first small cross-mark on the way into the mountains, beneath a scrap of xuan paper marked First, a bronze mirror lay half buried: exactly 15 centimeters across, about a tael in the hand, with a raised boss at the center of its back coiled in exactly the posture of the winged scale pattern on the shaft of the broken stone pillar. Someone prepared the key to that door for whoever came after, long ago.

The last 4 characters are the ones that chill you. In that figurine array, the opening in the crown of the thirty-first figure has been opened, and inside it sits a woman's head, the face turned toward the tunnel ceiling. White powder for a base, a pale red left by cinnabar on the lips, a half-moon floral ornament at the center of the forehead with a tiny piece of gold leaf, and a silver pin with a crane's-crest head set in the high coiled hair — the makeup, the ornaments, the hairstyle all belong to a southern gentry woman of the late Ming or early Qing, a person from 400 years ago. Yet the face is as fresh as if it had just been put in, the lips wet, the cinnabar unblurred.

The mirror matches the recess, and the door's rhyme matches the thirty-first figure. As for what happens when the mirror is pressed into that seat, Shen Zhaoye did not test it.