During the thirty years of war in Peking, the glass was fragile and the thornbirds sang.
In 1919, the May 4th Movement was bloody in Zhaojialou. Mingzhen, an orphan girl from the Su family, huddled in the ruins of the church. Father Fu Shijun wrapped her frostbite with glass rosary beads. A string of blood-stained beads linked three generations of sinful debts: the aunt's burned will, the celadon cup secretly kept by the birth mother, and the prophecy in the Italian translation of "The Thorn Birds" that "glazed glass is fragile, and the thorn bird will be sad" - the vault of the Su family's ancestral home actually locked up half a century of religious taboos and incest secrets.
The artillery fire of the Northern Expedition shattered the pupils of the Madonna, and Fu Shijun was torn between the promotion order and his emotions; in the beacon smoke of Marco Polo Bridge, Mingzhen jumped into the sea of fire with the treasury map in his arms; at the moment when the Nujiang River swallowed up the illegitimate son Huai En in the battlefield of Yunnan and Burma, the glass rosary was soaked in the blood of the priest's lifelong hypocrisy. When the flames of the siege of Peiping licked the celadon cup, the gilt inscriptions on the wall of the cup revealed the ultimate truth: "The treasury does not store gold, but it hides irredeemable sins."
The new generation Nian Zhen threw the fragments of glass onto the southbound train, and the blood-streaked pearls spelled out Ming Zhen's name on the rails - it was originally the code of civilization carved with his life by the gambler husband Zhou Zhenbang before he died in Taierzhuang.
From the May Fourth youth's cry to the anti-civil war student movement, from the setting sun of Shichahai Glaze to the cold moon on the Luohu Bridge boundary monument, three generations of people sang like thorn birds chasing thorns: the priest's torn robe turned into a spiritual flag, the rosary pawned by the orphan girl was recast into fire, and the gold bars sunk in the moat melted into stars before dawn.
