A boy in a small town in Hunan once heard a soft, drifting melody and carried it with him for half a lifetime, not knowing it belonged to Teresa Teng. As the times tightened and loosened around him, the song faded and returned, until her passing, and a later echo, revealed that some voices never truly disappear. This is not just the story of a singer, but of a memory spanning three decades, quietly coming back to life.
Translator: Lara Lee
Written in Guangzhou, February 28, 2026, Published by All Dimensions Press™ on April 14, 2026.
This story is purely fictional. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
My forebears were remnants of the Southern Song navy.
In the aftermath of the Battle of Yamen, when the fleet was annihilated and the realm lay in ruins, a few of my ancestors, together with several kinsmen, forced their way out through blood and fire in a small boat. They drifted south for what must have felt like a lifetime before finally making landfall along the Jian River. There, they concealed their names, took root, and quietly carried on, generation after generation, until they came down to us.
Because of this, the people of our village, men and women alike, have always stood taller and carried themselves more upright than those in the neighboring settlements. There is a certain steel in the temper, something etched into bone and blood. I have always believed it to be the clearest trace left behind by those sailors of the Southern Song.
The land along the Jian River is not generous. The soil is poor, and to depend on the harvest is to gamble with the sky. A year’s labor can vanish with a single typhoon, the crops flattened into nothing. Dig a pond and raise fish, and one violent rain, driving the tide inland, will sweep them all away. On land, there is scarcely a way to survive.
So for generations, we have held fast to what our ancestors passed down: we take the sea as our fields and our boats as our homes.
A life at sea is never fully one’s own, and it is lived half in light, half in shadow. When there are fish, we fish. When there are none, we carry cargo. And when all roads close, we turn to trades that require no capital. There is no pride in saying so, but in troubled times, survival leaves little room for choice.
The most gripping chapter of the story unfolded in early 1901.
My great-grandfather, with several of his sons, intercepted a Portuguese merchant vessel near the Wanshan Archipelago at the mouth of the Pearl River, a ship that had sailed out of Macao. Its hold was filled with gold and silver, ill-gotten gains from the foreigners’ trade in opium and their gambling houses. My great-grandfather and his sons had always followed one rule: take the cargo, spare the lives. Once the job was done, they withdrew at once, vanishing into the vastness of the sea.
But this time, the target was a foreign ship, and the shock rippled across the entire province. Newspapers from Shanghai to Hong Kong carried the story, and it became one of the great headlines of the day. The Guangdong naval forces of the Qing court dispatched warships in immediate pursuit.
Though the main vessels of the Guangdong fleet had been destroyed in the Sino-Japanese War, what remained still far outmatched any civilian fishing craft. Moreover, under Li Hongzhang’s policy of mutual protection in the southeast, the region had retained a measure of stability, and the navy continued to operate in full force. The manhunt was relentless.
Driven into flight, my great-grandfather and others were forced southward until they reached a bay on the eastern side of Shangchuan Island. There, hidden within the cliffs, lay a natural sea cave. At low tide, its entrance revealed itself, but once the tide rose, it disappeared entirely beneath the water.
My great-grandfather made an immediate decision. Taking advantage of the ebb, he guided the boat deep into the cavern and concealed all the gold and silver in its most secret recess. At the far end of the cave, there was a narrow passage leading straight up to the mountain above. My great-grandfather and others escaped through that passage, emerged at the summit, and sealed the entrance with care before slipping away, returning in silence to their home by the Jian River. The matter had drawn too much attention. From that day on, no one dared speak of it, and no one dared go back for what had been hidden.
Within a few years, my great-grandfather fell gravely ill. Before his death, he drew the map with his own hand and passed down, by word of mouth, the verses that would guide the search. Thus the secret, immense and dangerous, was carried from one generation to the next.
After many turns of fate, one day in 2008, the map and the secret came into my hands.
I set out at once for Shangchuan Island and found the East Bay as I remembered it. But the moment I reached the summit, my heart sank. The place had long since been turned into a naval submarine base of the People’s Liberation Army, heavily guarded and utterly closed to outsiders.
What stung even more was this: the natural cave where the treasure had once been hidden had been widened, deepened, and reinforced by the military, transformed into a maintenance cavern for submarines. Such work cannot be done in the open. It requires a sealed cavern connected to the sea. The very refuge my ancestors had chosen, by instinct and desperation, had become the ideal military facility.
I was filled with regret, yet I could not let it go. I sought out elderly fishermen and villagers in the area.
Some of them had, in their younger days, been hired by the army to help expand the cave. They spoke vividly of the construction, every detail alive in their telling, yet not one of them ever mentioned a trace of gold or silver. That could only mean one thing. The treasure must have been hidden too well, sealed deep within the cavern and entombed behind thick layers of concrete during the reinforcement, never to be discovered.
Just as I was nearing despair, a village official brought me a piece of news. This base housed only conventional submarines, and the waters here were not deep enough. With the country now focusing on nuclear submarines, deeper seas were needed. The base, he said, was slated for decommission and would soon be handed over to local authorities.
Hope returned to me.
From that point on, I made two trips a year to Shangchuan Island. Each time I rode a motorcycle up to the summit and looked out from afar over that stretch of bay, waiting for the day of transfer.
But year after year, nothing changed.
In 2016, tensions rose in the South China Sea, and China and the United States faced off at sea. The nation moved to strengthen its navy across the board. With a single order, the base was not only preserved, but further reinforced and expanded.
At that moment, I understood. The century-old dream of buried treasure was over.
Even now, I still go once a year to Shangchuan Island. I ride my motorcycle up that same mountain and look out from a distance toward what was once the hidden cave, now a submarine harbor.
I cannot approach it, cannot search it, and cannot hope to retrieve so much as a fragment.
It is a story with no ending.
About the Author
Eddy Lee traces his lineage to Yashan, site of the last battle of the Southern Song dynasty in 1279. A member of the Third Front generation—families relocated during China’s industrial campaign of the 1960s and 70s, he now lives in Guangzhou, China.
© Eddy Lee 2026 Copyright
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Article Information
Category: Fiction / Essay
Tags: History / Family / Military
Engaging, imaginative, and it draws the reader right in. One cannot help but wonder whether the treasure is still there, and feel an urge to set off in search of it.
I found this essay so credible in its details, and so well formulated, that I assumed it to be non-fictional until I discovered that it was actually fictional. As I read the essay for the first time, I found the author’s geographical knowledge of details such as the Southern Song Navy and the Jian River to be not only precise, but consistent with the credibility of other details in the essay. What became more convincing to me, until I found otherwise, to believe it to be a real story, is the fact that the author would visit occasionally on his motorcycle to see from a distance, anxiously yearning to find out if the cave where his “supposed” ancestor had hidden the boat with its trove of gold and silver still exists.
