Make no mistakes, and you will have no regrets in life; make the right choices, and you will have no remorse. Think in the long term, consider the world, and read people’s hearts. Know right from wrong, when to advance or retreat, and what to give up. To keep accounts is to calculate one’s fate, whether to make a living or to help the world. The Lady Fortune series tells the extraordinary stories of women who achieve happy lives through exceptional accounting skills and financial judgment.
Set during the turbulent final years of the Western Han dynasty, The Golden Inlaid Saber tells the story of Yin Lihua, a merchant’s daughter from Xinye who transforms into an extraordinary woman capable of shaping the fate of the realm. She wields her gift for accounting like a blade, advancing step by step through a perilous game of power: from precise calculations in the accounts office of Wanfeng Trading House, to exposing a conspiracy with a detailed map of trade routes at the West Market, to using an abacus to calculate the army’s grain needs for the Battle of Kunyang. Her financial acumen is always the key to breaking through a crisis. Yin Lihua’s “accounting” is never limited to money. She recruits soldiers and wins their loyalty with “a hundred coins in daily pay plus a sweet bun,” uses profits from overseas trade to break the Guo family’s monopoly on salt and iron, and balances powerful clans’ interests against the people’s livelihoods with a “three-pronged strategy” for the land survey edict. In her turbulent entanglement with Liu Xiu, her secret account book for the Bronze Sparrow Terrace, her rouge tax plan, and her Silk Road calculations are not merely economic strategies, but policies to secure the realm. From a map of Xiongnu trade routes hidden in a ledger to a disaster-relief plan that melts gold to make cooking pots, she measures the realm with her account books and uses financial forecasts to avert crises. She proves that a woman’s calculating mind can redirect the course of history, making the prophecy “He who wins Lihua wins the realm” a truth that endures through turbulent times.
