When the firelight of Chang'an licked the bluestones of Zhuque Street, the sixteen-year-old musician Shen Qingwu tightened her grip on the pipa in her arms. The old Qin engraved with "Eternal Peace" was the only thought she snatched from the war that destroyed the Tang Dynasty. Little did she know that in the next fifty years, it would become a pen and knife to record the troubled times.
In the war of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, political power changed like a revolving lantern. She had seen the river water of Baimayi stained the purple robes of the literati, heard the absurdity of Li Cunxu's transformation from the hero of "Three Arrows of Revenge" to the actor emperor, and personally experienced the wailing of the people under the iron heel of the Khitan when Shi Jingtang ceded Yanyun. A pipa, broken and then played again, its strings soaked in blood and tears, its body engraved with the names of places of exile - the glint of swords in Bianliang, the sound of music in Luoyang, the beacon fire in Taiyuan, the waning moon in the south of the Yangtze River, all solidified into fragments of history in the trembling of the fingertips.
The agreement with historian Chen Xun allowed her to change from a passive fugitive to an active recorder. We can see the resilience of survival in Feng Dao's "smoothness", touch the glimmer of troubled times in Chai Rong's reforms, but finally understand the helplessness of historical cycles after Chen Qiaoyi's yellow robe. She rescued Acao, an orphan who spoke Khitan, and hid the broken pages of "Jiaofang Ji" together with her blood and tears in the piano case, and finally condensed it into "Pipa Blood Notes".
This is not an epic about the machinations of emperors and generals, but a long scroll about a woman measuring the troubled times with her strings. When the sound of pipa dissipated in the moonlit night in Jiangnan, the handwriting soaked in blood still whispered: The so-called troubled times are never the rupture of time, but the struggle and perseverance of human nature in desperate situations - just like the never-fading blood plum blossom in the carvings of the piano body, blooming stubbornly in the ashes.
