Time is the warp, and people the weft. The bronze thunder of Qin’s conquest of the Six Kingdoms has yet to fade when the flames of Red Cliffs burn Cao Cao’s warships to ashes. The devastation of the An Lushan Rebellion smothers the Song of Rainbow Skirts and Feathered Robes, while the thunderclap of the Xinhai Revolution shatters two thousand years of imperial shackles.
The old locust tree on Coal Hill, where Chongzhen hanged himself, hears the jade cups shatter at the Kaiyuan-era banquet beside Qujiang Pool.
The bones of the convicts who built the Lishan Mausoleum and the wheel ruts of handcarts on the Huaihai battlefield are joined by blood beneath the earth.
Bamboo blinds at Cai Lun’s papermaking workshop filter the morning haze of the marketplace, while the pulp preserves the salt merchants’ slang. Those voices finally awaken in the lead type of New Youth. The treasure ships of the Three Eunuchs sink into the depths of the Strait of Malacca, and the last glimpse of their sails becomes the smoke of the Humen forts. When the blood of nameless soldiers drips into the Grand Canal beneath the willows of the Sui embankment, their spirits at last roar from the cliffs of Pingxingguan. When the brush of an exiled scholar snaps amid the waves at Yashan, that broken half of a bamboo pen somehow sprouts mimeographed leaflets from Yan’an’s Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts. In the folds overlooked by the history books, a nation, through its most humble bodies, draws its grandest breath.
