Original Text
In Lijin County, there lived a man named Jin Yongnian, who at eighty-two years of age still had no child, and his aged wife was already seventy-eight; they had resigned themselves to the hope of ever having an heir. Suddenly, he dreamed that a spirit came to him and said, "You were destined to have no posterity, but in consideration of your fair dealings in trade, I grant you a son." Upon waking, he told his wife, who replied, "This is but a vain fancy. We are both near the grave—how could we possibly bear a child?" Not long after, however, the old woman felt a stirring in her womb, and after ten months, she gave birth to a baby boy.
Commentary
This is a short story about business ethics.
It is indeed a most extraordinary thing for a man to beget a son in his old age, especially when he has reached the advanced years of seventy or eighty; yet it is not entirely without precedent. According to a report in the Times of India on the fifteenth day of October in the year 2012, a ninety-six-year-old man named Raghav from the state of Haryana in India fathered a second son with his fifty-two-year-old wife when he was ninety-four.
However, within this tale, the blessing of bearing a son in old age is linked to "fair and honest trading," regarded as a divine reward. On one hand, this serves to explain what is physiologically inexplicable; on the other, it illustrates the esteem and value placed on integrity in commercial ethics during China's Ming and Qing dynasties.