In the spring of the seventh year of Qingli under the Northern Song, a strange vision appeared in the Ziwei Hall of Tianqing Temple. While studying under the Taoist Zhang Yijian, nine-year-old Su Shi witnessed the Thousand-Year Ranking of Dragons and Tigers emerge from the heart of an ancient cypress. Names of outstanding figures from every age flowed across the gilded list. As the names of brilliant contemporaries such as “Wang Anshi” and “Sima Guang” lit up one by one, the final name, “Su,” flickered like a candle in the wind. From that day on, the prophetic vision haunted the young Su Shi’s destiny.
Nineteen years later, Su Zizhan, famed throughout Bianjing, encountered the Ranking of Dragons and Tigers again beside Jinming Pool. This time, the list had become a thirty-zhang scroll of colored glass floating in the night sky. He watched with his own eyes as his name was swallowed by black mist on the eve of the “Crow Terrace Poetry Case.” When a lone boat carrying him toward exile in Huangzhou reached Red Cliff, the moonlight on the river revealed Cao Mengde from eight hundred years earlier, his figure overlapping with Su Shi’s own. Only then did he understand that the Ranking of Dragons and Tigers was a mirror of the world, reflecting the fate of literary figures through the ages.
From the bamboo streams of Qingshen in Meishan to the betel-nut groves of the Li villages in Danzhou, three unforgettable women witnessed his struggle against fate. Before Wang Fu died, she embroidered the broken pattern of the list in blood on a handkerchief. In Huizhou’s pestilential rains, Wang Chaoyun helped him complete a poem of enlightenment. Along with the surviving pages of the Book of Changes that his older sister Baniang clutched as she sank into the river, these memories finally helped him break through the mystery, guided by the Chan teachings of Master Foyin at Jinshan Temple. The list’s power of prophecy, he realized, was the spiritual spark forged through hardship by the souls of literary figures across the ages.
In the height of summer in the third year of Yuanfu, sixty-six-year-old Su Shi saw the Ranking of Dragons and Tigers transform into a river of stars from the boat carrying him north. As moonlight at Gutang Bridge in Changzhou caressed his graying temples for the last time, the memorials that had once illuminated Bianjing, the wine steeped in Huangzhou, and the immortal song carved into Red Cliff all became stars scattered across the sky, falling into the South China Sea.
