This is a story about printing and destiny. It is also a story about the journey from a small town in the south of the Yangtze River to a Shanghai-style city, between old learning and new knowledge, and the story of people's stumbling in the torrent of the times. Zhao Muheng was born into a scholarly and merchant family in Huizhou. He was born at the turning point when the imperial examination was abolished and the railway entered the city. A flickering oil lamp in the ancestral hall pushed him into the lead and fire of Shanghai. Lin Han, a weaver girl who grew up in a silk machine room, cut her hair and disguised herself in order to escape from an arranged marriage, and embarked on the journey south with a salt team. Cheng Weishan, a veteran with the sea breeze of Sino-Japanese War and the smell of burnt gun barrels, protected goods and people during the chaos of war, and also protected his rusty beliefs. When the old city's ancestral halls, river docks, and theaters mirror each other with Shanghai's newspaper offices, patrol houses, and dock bells, their encounters are like letters falling on paper, sober, heavy, but printed step by step. The story goes through the salt tax suppression, the curfew of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, the warlord struggle, the strike in the concession, the roar of the Japanese plane... It tells about their love, farewell, and reunion amidst the sound of cracking silk, how they resist temptation and cowardice, and how to preserve the small kindness, like a typeface reflecting light on a printing table, cold and hard, but able to print warmth.
