In the second year of Xuantong's reign in Tianjin, the time-honored "Liu Ji Watch Shop" on Ziming Bell Street was defeated miserably by the challenge of Western "standard clocks". The old craftsman suffered a bloody head, and the dignity of traditional craftsmanship that he had adhered to for half his life was shattered to the ground. Nineteen-year-old apprentice Shen An took over the legacy of his master. In the desperate situation of debt and peer opposition, he picked up the broken "Dragon's Breath" bell from the dust - this creation embodies the pinnacle of Chinese mechanical skills and was once ridiculed by foreigners as a "pleasant trick."
When everyone thought he would guard the wreckage and mourn the old era, Shen An took the "style principle" of the Western bimetal compensating pendulum and forged it into a precision balance wheel intertwined with two dragons. He disassembled the gears under the kerosene lamp and deduce the Chinese and Western on the drawings. He let the thermal expansion and contraction of steel and copper become the breathing of the dragon's body, and used the bones of science to support the soul of tradition. Faced with the treacherous plot of British businessman Davidson, the tourbillon giant and local profiteer, he set up an arena in Quanyechang to allow the reborn "Dragon Breath" to compete with the industrial iron flow for a second time for one month.
This is not a trapped beast fight of the conservatives, but a ray of light carved out by a craftsman using gears and ingenuity in the torrent of the times - when the dragon's head spits out the white mist of sandalwood again, and the bell rings every second, it is the inquiry of the ancient civilization on the new life, and it is also the craftsman's dignified declaration tempered by blood and fire: the dragon is not dead, the soul still exists, and the ingenuity can shake the wheel of the times.
