There is a passage in the Ming History, in the biography of Ru Taisu, that I have read several times. Each time, I stop and think about a different part of it.
In the Hongwu years, Ru Taisu, then a secretary in the Ministry of Justice, submitted a memorial on the state of the realm. It ran to “ten thousand words and more.” The founding emperor, impatient with its length, had Wang Min, a drafting official of the Secretariat, read it aloud to him. Somewhere in the middle came this line: “Of capable men, scarcely one or two in a hundred have survived these past years; those now appointed are for the most part pedantic scholars and vulgar clerks.” It stung. The emperor was furious, summoned Ru to answer face to face, and had him flogged in open court.
That is where the story is usually left. It serves to urge brevity on writers, or to sneer at formalism.
But the Ming History goes on: “The next evening, he again had it read to him in the palace, and found four matters in it that could be carried out.” The following night he ordered the same document read once more, and picked out four things worth doing. Then he said his famous line — “To be a ruler is hard; to be a minister is not easy… Too many words obscure the hearing. What Ru set out could have been put in five hundred words” — and ordered the Secretariat to set a standard form for memorials.
I think the half that gets quoted is not the important half.
1. He did not beat the man for length
The History is precise about cause and effect: first “his words gave much offense,” then “the emperor was angry.” What provoked him was the content, not the word count. Yet what survives today is only “ten thousand words” and “the flogging.” The two words about giving offense have been quietly dropped. Once dropped, a punishment for what a man said turns into a critique of how he wrote — which sounds far more respectable.
This is not an isolated case. When we cite the past, we habitually keep the conclusion that is useful to us and cut away the process that is not. Cut long enough, and history becomes a pile of aphorisms: each one true on its own, all of them false together.
2. The second reading is the real weight of the story
He failed to get through it the first time because anger came before judgment. Once a man’s temper is up, everything that follows reads as provocation. The next evening he changed position and read again — not a different reader, but a different state of mind — and the four usable items were there, waiting.
I cannot do this. If a piece of writing does not suit me at first glance, I usually put it down; if someone’s manner grates the first time he speaks, everything he says afterwards carries that grating. What I lack is not judgment. It is the second reading.
3. A standard form is a good fix, but only half a fix
The “standard form for memorials” is a strikingly modern piece of design: rather than trust that a ruler will always be patient, it converts “you must finish reading” into “you must write clearly.” That is turning goodwill into procedure, far more reliable than counting on anyone’s personal virtue.
But a form guarantees legibility, not comprehension. Well-formatted nonsense passes more easily than badly formatted truth. The real filter is not in the form. It is in whether someone is willing to read a thing twice.
One more layer: by the emperor’s own account, Ru’s memorial “could have been put in five hundred words” — which means the useful part really was inside, only placed very far back. So the case was never about “no content.” It was about “content on page seven.” The writer put the most important thing at the end; the reader had no patience to reach the end; neither was greatly wrong, and both lost.
4. Two things I take from it
One for myself: put the important judgment early. Not to flatter the reader, but so that my words are not wasted. The other, also for myself: when something rubs me the wrong way, read it a second time before concluding. This is harder than the first, because it asks a person to return to the same spot while still angry.
The History records one more thing: that Ru was “upright and unbending, several times near death for his offenses, and the emperor time and again pardoned him.” At a banquet, the emperor offered him wine with the line “I drink from a golden cup with you, but the white blade shows no mercy,” and Ru, bowing, capped the verse: “With loyal heart I would serve the realm, and do not shrink from the emperor’s anxiety.” The exchange is too polished to be true; I suspect later hands. But he did in the end “die by the law” — pardoned many times, not all the way.
That memorial, read twice, saved exactly four things. That number is more solid than any discourse on “speaking plainly.”
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