The Treasure Mirror Through Time: Beginning with Along the River During the Qingming Festival

This story follows Chen Zhao, an antiques expert, on a journey to protect civilization across a thousand years. When he accidentally activates the temporal code in his family’s jade thumb ring, he plunges into Bianjing during the Northern Song dynasty, armed with modern knowledge of cultural heritage preservation. The final three days before Along the River During the Qingming Festival is completed are unfolding. Faced with a hidden crisis in the grain transport system and the early stages of cultural relic smuggling involving corrupt officials and merchants, Chen Zhao uses rigorous reasoning to unravel the encrypted clues Zhang Zeduan concealed in his brushstrokes. At the site where the Rainbow Bridge is being repaired, he draws on the ancient wisdom of “exchanging materials for materials” to prevent a shipwreck that could have devastated Bianjing’s economy.

Time flows through the patterns of the jade thumb ring, carrying Chen Zhao through the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. At the Ming dynasty’s Nanjing Imperial Weaving Bureau, he deciphers the whereabouts of scattered sections of the Yongle Encyclopedia from the patterns of cloud brocade. In the mansion of a salt merchant in Qing-dynasty Yangzhou, he uses the art of repairing cracks in ancient guqin to prevent history from repeating itself, with the burning of Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains as a burial offering. Every choice he makes in each era tests his humanity. When the Yongle Emperor tempts him with an official post in exchange for the sea chart coordinates of Zheng He’s voyages, and when the Qianlong Emperor orders him to alter the inscription on Timely Clearing After Snowfall, Chen Zhao remains true to his belief: “Cultural relics belong to no one, and civilization knows no age.” He is even willing to endure the agonizing backlash of time itself to preserve the artifacts’ original historical traces.

The story uses the jade thumb ring’s patterns gradually coming into focus as a metaphor for progress in protecting cultural heritage, ultimately revealing Chen Zhao’s spiritual core. He is no cold observer of history, but a sentinel who uses his own flesh and blood to mend the cracks in civilization. In the final chapter, as digital technology seeks to reconstruct ancient civilization, he chooses to entrust the jade thumb ring with everything he has learned about identifying antiques, making the keepsake that has crossed a thousand years a link between past and present...