A Philosophical Romance in Latitude and Longitude

When a woman with a doctorate in philosophy meets a surveying professor, a contest spanning a thousand years and the boundaries of time and space begins to unfold in the vortex of a bronze hourglass.

Twenty-eight-year-old Shen Zhiwei has cool, fair skin and wears silver-rimmed glasses. The ancestral jade pendant at her neck is engraved with a fragment of the Canon of Inquiring into the Heart. At a Shanghai auction house, she competes with thirty-two-year-old Gu Heng for a bronze hourglass inscribed with “Mastering the World.” The man in the navy-blue shirt has cuffs embroidered with designs from the Treatise on Architectural Methods, and a portable surveying instrument hidden beneath the mechanical watch on his wrist. Gu Heng sneers, “Dr. Shen, you deconstruct artifacts. Why not start by deconstructing how your family lost its secret inheritance manual?” Shen Zhiwei pushes up her glasses and fires back, “Professor Gu can’t see through the existentialist trap of the auction house. Fixating on the object only makes you lose sight of what matters.”

Before she can finish, the hourglass erupts in blinding light. In the vortex of time and space, Gu Heng grabs Shen Zhiwei by the wrist. On the auction house security cameras, they turn into “human-shaped spots of light” and vanish from twenty-first-century Shanghai.

When Shen Zhiwei wakes, she has become a lowly laundry maid in the Minister of Rites’ household in the Great Sheng Dynasty. She argues that “maids aren’t born inferior” and says, “Existence precedes essence,” only to be slapped by the head matron and sentenced to be drowned in a pond. Meanwhile, Gu Heng is wearing the uniform of the Eastern Depot, with a “proof of castration” hanging at his waist. It is actually a scar disguised by a fragment of modern body armor. Ordered to search the laundry quarters, Gu Heng is recognized by Shen Zhiwei, who spots a component of his surveying instrument and whispers in Latin, “Your ‘measuring tool’ would count as evidence of treason in ancient times.” Gu Heng replies without changing expression, “What crime does a commoner commit by speaking of an official’s belongings?”