Secret Fragrance, 1937

In the depths of the apricot grove, flames of war lie hidden; with medicine, one heals the world and saves the nation

In 1937, the smoke of the Battle of Shanghai had yet to clear, and the foreign concessions had become an isolated island. Young Xu Lanzhou was the heir to Jishengtang, a century-old family business dealing in traditional Chinese medicine. An expert in pharmacology, he was devoted to helping the world through medicine. But after witnessing the atrocities committed by the Japanese army’s bacteriological warfare unit at Nanjing Pharmaceutical University, his peaceful life was shattered beyond repair. His mentor used a prescription, “Ephedra and Cinnamon Twig Decoction, Half and Half,” as a password to bring him into an underground intelligence organization. From then on, the clatter of an abacus behind the medicine cabinet concealed codes, while the steam rising from boiling herbs carried top-secret orders.

To destroy the Japanese army’s “Pine Wind Project,” a plot to cultivate drug-resistant bacteria using traditional Chinese medicine, Xu Lanzhou posed as a medicine merchant and maneuvered among the high-ranking Japanese and puppet-government officials. Beneath his gentle, refined exterior lay meticulous calculations: the principal, deputy, assistant, and envoy ingredients in a prescription were actually intelligence codes, and the glint of an acupuncture needle could also take a life. Lin Mo, a doctor at a missionary hospital and his partner in life and death, bore the codename “Forsythia.” She could save lives with a scalpel, or destroy enemy strongholds with explosives. The two posed as husband and wife, weaving an invisible web amid the foreign concession’s glittering nightlife.

Yet one crisis followed another: the KMT agent Chu Huaisha put him to the test, Japanese spy Sato Xuehui grew suspicious, and the traitor Wang Zhaoqian closed in step by step. When Xu Lanzhou severed a finger on his left hand to win the enemy’s trust, when Lin Mo pulled the trigger beneath a church bell tower, when the old apothecaries drank poisoned tea and met their deaths without flinching, the fragrance drifting through the air was not that of herbs, but of a faith that would not die amid blood and fire.

“A healer saves one person; a spy saves a nation.” In this city without