Ge Hong pushed open the rotting wooden gate and listened. He expected a dog to bark or a farmer to call out, but the courtyard gave back only dry wind. Years of border clashes in the fourth century had turned this Eastern Jin county into a quiet stretch of cracked earth. His heavy bamboo ledger felt useless when no one was left to fill it. He kept walking down the dirt path, knocking on every door. Each strike echoed against the flagstones. Nine times, silence answered him.
He needed a way to pin down the emptiness before the capital demanded another report. Sitting on a low stone, he laid out a fresh bamboo slip and pulled a charcoal brush from his sleeve. He sketched two rows of five small squares, matching the ten courtyard gates he had just passed. The input was simple: one gate, one square. His operation was just as straightforward. He tapped the brush against every silent threshold and filled a square with heavy black ink. When he reached the tenth gate, he saw a thin line of cooking smoke drifting up. He left that final square blank. The output landed on the slip immediately. Nine black squares out of ten total meant nine out of ten households were gone. You don't need complex arithmetic to see that the ratio sits at ninety percent empty.
The charcoal still felt gritty on his fingers as he reached for the official seal. Red paste smeared across the carving stone, and he pressed it down firmly onto the bamboo. The crimson stamp settled right beside his grid. That stark ratio wasn't just dry paperwork for distant ministers. It laid out exactly how prolonged warfare and crushing taxes strip a region down to its bones. He watched the ink dry into a familiar pattern: ten homes, nine empty. He knew these numbers would eventually anchor the heavy warnings he penned in his Baopuzi manuscripts.
A lone farmer across the courtyard stirred his fire while the morning wind carried the smell of burning pine. Ge Hong rolled the ledger tight and secured it with a strip of hemp. He tucked the bamboo slip into his robe, carrying the ninety percent figure back toward the county office. The single column of smoke kept rising against the grey sky.