In 2025, a mysterious app called “Myriad Ages” projects short videos into the river of history. As fragments of the modern world intrude on millennia-old eras, the course of civilization shifts with a roar.
A pipa player in Chang’an’s entertainment district gazes longingly at a top-tier star dancing on her screen, tears up her sheet music, and cries, “This is what real freedom looks like!” An emperor in the Forbidden City watches footage of an intercontinental missile streaking across the sky and is so shaken that he drops the Imperial Seal. Du Fu, starving and curled up in his thatched hut, plays a video about growing hybrid rice again and again, his cloudy tears soaking the tattered pages of “Three Officials and Three Farewells.” Bolder viewers even come across a “Guide to Peasant Rebellions,” and suddenly unrest stirs among the masses across the dynasties. Emperors dispatch imperial guards overnight to seal off the postal stations...
From brothels to the imperial palace, from frontier fires to smoke rising over city streets, the values of past and present collide fiercely as the algorithm delivers its recommendations. As Qianlong writes an edict in wild cursive ordering officials to “investigate and punish those spreading heresy,” a programmer in the twenty-first century types the final line of code. Will this flood of information crossing dimensions ultimately annihilate the old dynasties, or reshape a new era?
First review! Dayu'er's 1986 "Tampering with the History of the Dynasty in the Era of Screen Resurrection" is an ancient historical novel. The work caused a torrent of short videos in 2025 to pour into Chang'an Jiaofang, the Forbidden City and Du Fu's thatched cottage. When ancient people encountered hot dance anchors, intercontinental missiles and the "Guide to Peasant Revolt", the awakening of the pipa girl tearing up the music score, the panic of the emperor breaking the jade seal, and the crisis of the undercurrent of the refugees, together constituted a carnival and shock in the dimension of civilization. The novel uses absurd jokes to wrap up the proposition of deconstructing tradition through technology. In the collision of ancient and modern values, it asks whether we in the information age are reshaping history, or whether the future is being tampered with by algorithms. Readers are invited to think and join in the discussion.
First review! Dayu'er's 1986 "Tampering with the History of the Dynasty in the Era of Screen Resurrection" is an ancient historical novel. The work caused a torrent of short videos in 2025 to pour into Chang'an Jiaofang, the Forbidden City and Du Fu's thatched cottage. When ancient people encountered hot dance anchors, intercontinental missiles and the "Guide to Peasant Revolt", the awakening of the pipa girl tearing up the music score, the panic of the emperor breaking the jade seal, and the crisis of the undercurrent of the refugees, together constituted a carnival and shock in the dimension of civilization. The novel uses absurd jokes to wrap up the proposition of deconstructing tradition through technology. In the collision of ancient and modern values, it asks whether we in the information age are reshaping history, or whether the future is being tampered with by algorithms. Readers are invited to think and join in the discussion.