In the fifteenth year of Chongzhen's reign, heavy snow crushed the last wheat ear in the North China Plain. In Zhangjiagou, Zhending Prefecture, Hebei Province, when tenant farmer Zhang Laohan measured the land with his ancestral copper coin ruler, he found that the government measuring rope was three inches shorter than the old Wanli system. This discovery has torn apart a corner of the shady secrets of taxation in the late Ming Dynasty - iron rulers hidden with lead, yellow books mounted with paste, dendrobium buckets sandwiched between them, corrupt machines as sophisticated as spider webs, weaving the flesh and blood of small farmers into the last fig leaf of a splendid country.
The Zhang family's ten acres of ancestral land were designated as "land to send to the village." The daughter-in-law Liu hid the password of the land in the warp and weft of the loom, the second son Shuanzi secretly learned the landlord's yin and yang ledger, and the daughter Xiaohe used her night-blind eyes to peek at the bloody ink on the interlayer of the yellow book. And when the eldest son Zhang Dachuan fished up a copper ruler inscribed with "Made by Hongwu Yong" from the frozen Cao River, the family discovered that they were fighting not only the life-threatening abacus beads and the blood-stained measuring rope, but also the poisonous disease that had accumulated in the dynasty for two hundred years and was hard to recover from. In this masterpiece that combines textual research on the tax system and realism, a piece of plain silk with a secret code for a field, half a yellow book with ten layers of pasting, and twenty measuring rulers with different year numbers connect the tragic songs of ants that have been erased from history books. When institutional corruption becomes a blade more terrifying than natural disasters, the ordinary people struggling in the gaps of the fish scales are using the simplest survival wisdom to write folk justice that is more shocking than the "Law of the Ming Dynasty".
