A Painted Boat Drifts on Misty Waves

“Every man can be tamed, every man can be used. A celebrated scholar? A wealthy merchant or high-ranking official? In the end, they're all just men with two legs.” When Zhen Niang was nine, she threw urine on a guest and sowed the seeds of disaster. At seventeen, a twist of fate made her a brothel madam. Ambitious and shrewd, how could she let others dictate her fate? Since she had become a madam, she swore to become the foremost madam in Qinhuai! She spent half her life struggling against men and resisting injustice. In a Ming Dynasty already rotted to the core, she watched the eunuch faction and the Donglin scholars tear into each other, gazed at the heaps of bones beneath the city walls, and sang of rise and fall, parting and loss. It all began with a headless corpse floating down the Qinhuai River. (A coming-of-age heroine, light mystery, long-term revenge, and the famous Qinhuai courtesans and their men of every kind.)