Half of a dragon-and-phoenix jade pendant, binding two souls in a love that spans three lifetimes.
At the cliff at Mawei Slope, the instant Yang Yuhuan falls, the jade pendant on her finger suddenly burns hot. When she opens her eyes again, she has become Zhu Yanrong, daughter of Emperor Chongzhen at the end of the Ming dynasty. Beneath the pear trees in the Forbidden City, she encounters Gu Jingheng, an adviser to the Imperial Astronomical Bureau. The cinnabar mole at the base of his left thumb is exactly like the one on Li Longji in her memories. When the two halves of the pendant come together, the word “Chang'an” burns into the eyes of two people reunited amid chaos. Li Zicheng's cavalry crushes their brief peace, and amid the flames at Coal Hill, he takes an arrow meant for her. The pendant's red light sweeps them into an even deeper stretch of time.
In Republican-era Shanghai, she is Lin Yan, an orphan lured into a jade-pendant scam by a beauty in a qipao. He is A Fu, a street sweeper with amnesia, clinging only to the faint memory that “red silk pastries should be eaten warm.” In 1998, villagers find a comatose girl, Lin Luoyan, in a Qinling mountain stream. The jade pendant in her arms fits perfectly with the half-pendant beside Lu Jingming, a homeless man living under a bridge. When the scar on his forehead and the arrow wound on his chest recognize each other, they finally realize that from Tang dynasty robes to late-Ming court dress, from Republican-era dresses to modern work clothes, they have been pursuing one another through time all along.
At a Xi'an street-food stall, she awakens his taste buds with traditional sauces. Beside an antiques stall, he pieces his memories together by repairing old objects. When the scent of osmanthus from “Chang'an Food Chronicles” reaches the world, and the remnants of the Forbidden City's red silk pastries resonate with the jade pendant, they finally understand: the white silk of Mawei Slope, the fire at Coal Hill, and the cannons of the Republican era were all trials set by fate. The real Chang'an isn't in faded history books. It's on Zhuque Avenue, where trains rumble through, and in the everyday warmth of countless homes lit up at night.
Their story is not over, just as every era on this land brings new legends of perseverance and renewal.
