Northern School: Notes on the Hunt for the Dragon

Soil is alive. In the eyes of the northern "country masters", every piece of soil has its own language, whether it is dry or warm, and they tell the secrets buried underground for thousands of years. And Luoyang shovel is their ears that listen to these words. The life of Guan Shan (or Qi Xiangdong) is a life of dealing with soil. Ever since that ignorant boy in the 1970s, he followed his father and pierced the shovel head into the frozen soil for the first time, and saw mechanisms more unpredictable than human hearts and craftsmanship more dazzling than gold. He has dedicated his whole life to this "invisible" art. He measured the mountains and rivers with his footsteps and searched for traces of "dragon veins" in ancient tombs dotted here and there. He cracked countless ingenious mechanical springs with his hands, and had conversations spanning time and space with craftsmen from thousands of years ago. He was once famous in the world, but was also betrayed by his brothers; he abided by the ancestral rule of "taking" rather than "stealing", and with this pride, he witnessed the end of an era with his own eyes. When the roar of modernization drowned out the ancient legends, and when the candlelight of inheritance was swaying in the wind, this last descendant of the Northern School, holding the worn Luoyang shovel in his hand, was like a lonely stone statue, looking back at the half-life mountains and rivers he had shoveled.