At the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China, in the troubled times of the Beiyang warlords, Beiping craftsman Su Wenqian held a wolf hair that had been passed down for three generations, but he could no longer paint the peaceful mountains and rivers of the past. He is the last map master of the Su family. He can use pen and ink to engrave thousands of miles of mountains and rivers on rice paper, but he cannot protect his sick daughter An An.
The iron hoof of the Fengtian marshal Zhang Zonglin crushed his study and his pride. With An An's life as a threat, he was imprisoned in the Governor's Mansion. Within three months, he was required to draw a military map of the entire Shanxi Province with only a pile of broken ancient books, contradictory information and a few words of refugees' oral narratives, and help Zhang Zonglin destroy Yan Xishan's armored army.
This is not a drawing, it is a deduction of life and death using pen and ink. He dug into the pile of old papers, looking for traces of river diversions in "Shui Jing Zhu", identifying the "dragon lair" of Tibetan soldiers in "Geographical Instructions", and even reading the human heart and murderous intention behind the mountains and rivers from a piece of blood-stained coarse cloth and a rusty sickle. He was forced to cooperate with Lin Zhaosheng, a young scientist who had returned from studying abroad, to use arithmetic and physics to deconstruct mountains and rivers, allowing the traditional "planning and drawing" and the Western "longitude and latitude" to collide on paper to create fatal sparks.
When the map soaked in the scent of ink and blood was finally completed, Su Wenqian stood on the top of the Taihang Mountains and watched the artillery fire tear apart the valley he painted, and then he realized: the so-called map never depicts the land, but the millions of creatures trapped in troubled times. And his pen is no longer a tool for describing the country, it is a knife, a shackle, a craftsman's bloody choice between saving his daughter and saving the world.
