Wu Zhuang's Questionnaire

Shanghai, the central port city of all Asia. Here, thousands of artifacts from all over the east flow into the hands of Master Zhuang. Living here is a matter of convenience as well as his familial home. Having a lineage tracing back to the Han dynasty, his family owned various libraries and "tea shops". His home is in one of these tea shops, usually clouded with the smoke of opium and low lighting bleeding from covered up windows. His office, which doubles as his study, bedroom and kitchen is cramped. Not because of the size of the room, rather the towers of books, scrolls, and parchments. With trinkets and relics sprawled about the floor and atop the towers. While some would find this particular living situation annoying or below them. Wu Zhuang thrives in the privacy, silence and overall ambiance of smoke and dust.

Through the before mentioned "tea shops" which have been passed down through generations of opium den handlers, of course the current tea shop Wu Zhuang runs also doubles as a opium den for Shanghai's addicts and criminals. The profit of this venture along with other ventures like smuggling go directly into buying relics and documents from treasure hunters and traffickers. Other spending habits consist of buying bricks of tea, tobacco, and trinkets from all over the world. Vices are foreign to Wu, odd considering the constant exposure to opium. Thus money is only used on the previously used.

Reach the mystical land of Shambhala and chronical the coming of Kalki, the incarnation of Vishnu. For when he arrives, the new era will begin, Satya Yuga. This will usher in the age of truth and all evil in the world will vanish. A golden age of gods ruling over humanity. Wu believes this to be a fact, a prophecy. A prophecy that if he doesnt witness unfold, his work would be useless. This obsession has caused Wu to buy and scour for records that will prove its existence, from Mughal, Han and even Nazi documents. To find Shambhala, Wu has organized various expeditions into the Himalayas, nearing death trying to reach his goal is common. To fulfill his self anointed destiny, he will kill, suffer, and brave any wilderness if it means validating his beliefs, if it means witnessing a new age. 

As a renown traditional Chinese healer, Wu faced death multiples times, women, children, soldiers, gangsters. If there was a wound in Western China, he knew how to cure it. Helping the wealthy and poor alike, Wu found his wife in a village ravaged by a massive flood in Vietnam, ailing and starved, he helped her flee North Vietnam to Shanghai. She (soon to be wife), Xia Hua Tang, fell in love with her savior. Within 2 months, they were engaged. However 5 years later, after the birth of their child, she became ill with post partum depression. This Wu could not cure; a wound, laceration, the plague, pneumonia, yes. However, this ailment was not physical, this was something he could not cure with a tea, salve, or potion. She took her life, severely wounding their kid in the process. Wu, more than even saw the fragility of life, of well being. And thus, his obsession of paradise begun, a way to prevent this from happening ever again. Finding Shambhala would be his verification that in the end, when the new age comes, illness, toil, danger, and so on, will be purged from the world.