The Qinghe Ledger

In the seventh year of Zhenghe during the Northern Song, a copy of the Qinghe Ledger is stolen, exposing a shocking conspiracy involving tea and salt tax revenues. Li Xiaoda, a county yamen accounts clerk, and Li Pinger, Ximen Qing’s sixth concubine, become bound by their conflicting interests and swear an unbreakable pact, secretly stirring the turbulent undercurrents. Bones recovered from a sunken canal boat are wrapped in Ximen’s permits for the private salt trade. Even more sinister, the Ding kiln white porcelain jar Li Pinger received as part of her dowry conceals a deadly secret: a blood-written message on its base points to the massacre of the Yuanyou faction twenty years earlier, while the crackle pattern on its sides maps the underground silver vault tunnels beneath Qinghe County... When the cold-faced clerk’s calculating abacus meets the deep-house concubine’s rouge-stained dagger, these sworn enemies discover that Ximen Qing is nothing but a pawn. The true mastermind behind the ledger has long since reduced the great realm of the Song to a mere rounding error in a book of filthy lucre! Watch as an accounts clerk and a double-faced beauty shatter the splendid lies of Along the River During the Qingming Festival. When Li Pinger tears off her mask and draws a poisoned flexible sword, can Li Xiaoda use the bloodstained carpenter’s ruler from the Yingzao Fashi to hack through this silver mystery?