Chapter 1350: Preparing to Leave Beijing 5
Feng Qingxue always felt that the old man looked familiar, and that was why she did not stop Lu Jiang from transacting with him.
When she saw the Ru Kiln dark-floral double-fish plate the old man took out, Feng Qingxue suddenly remembered, and said, "Old gentleman, aren’t you Qiao San-ye? The notorious Qiao San-ye who was well-known in and around Beijing and Tianjin back in the day."
Qiao San-ye, real name Qiao San, was a famous figure in the criminal underworld during the twenties and thirties, known for committing numerous misdeeds, although he also did a few good deeds.
In summary, he was a character whose wrongs outweighed his merits.
Reportedly, he was the adopted son of a eunuch, as well as the eunuch’s own nephew; leveraging the substantial fortune and ruthless determination left to him by the old eunuch, he became one of the prominent figures in the underworld. He had married four wives, had a slew of lovers, fathered many children, and after the revolution, he was audited; his wives and children all distanced themselves from him, and he was reduced to living beside a cesspool, sweeping streets and cleaning toilets.
His plight was quite pitiable, but he got what he deserved.
Unlike Father Lu, Old Master Xu, Jin Ruochu, and Wen Ruyu, who were innocently implicated, Qiao San was not.
This Ru Kiln plate appeared at an overseas auction decades later, where it fetched a sky-high price of over a hundred million. It was an item once used by the royal family, and its owner claimed to have obtained it from Qiao San in the seventies.
However, this Qiao San knew how to survive; he lived to be over a hundred years old, perfectly embodying the saying "Good men do not live long, a scourge lasts for a thousand years."