My family's ancestral records begin with our forefather in the Qing dynasty, so the only link to other family genealogies bearing the same surname is the explicit record in our own genealogy that our branch descends from the Taiyuan Wang clan's Sanhuai Hall. Wang is the most common surname among the Han Chinese, now borne by more than a hundred million people, but the Wang clan's branches are so numerous and complex that they are impossible to count. The Wang clan has two main lineages: the Taiyuan Wang and the Langya Wang. Other branches mainly descend from these two lines. The Sanhuai Hall Wang clan comes from the Taiyuan Wang, and both the Taiyuan and Langya Wang clans trace their ancestry to three generations of Qin dynasty generals: Wang Jian, his son Wang Ben, and his grandson Wang Li. The Taiyuan and Langya branches split during the Han dynasty. Sanhuai Hall emerged in the Song dynasty, and during the Yuan dynasty, descendants of the Taiyuan Wang clan settled in Jingsheng, Shanxi, where they built China's largest Wang family compound. Wang Bi, a founding general of the Ming dynasty and Marquis of Dingyuan, was the founding ancestor of the Sanhuai Hall Wang clan's migration. Many Sanhuai Hall Wang families moved from Shanxi to Shandong during the Ming dynasty. Wang Changli, originally a descendant of the Langya Wang clan, was adopted by Wang Bi amid the turmoil of war and then married into the family. It was only after Wang Changli and his wife, Wang Shisan, moved to Shandong that they established the generation names in the Shandong Wang family genealogy. Drawing on extensive historical sources and dreamlike imaginings of transmigrating through time, this book attempts to reconnect the family lineage, severed after the Ming dynasty migration to Shandong, with the main Sanhuai Hall Wang line, tracing it back to the inherited genealogies of Wang Bi's eldest son, Wang De, and second son, Wang Zheng. This leads to the fantastic tale of the Ming dynasty's founding emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, granting Wang Bi an hereditary iron certificate and cinnabar-edict of immunity.
