Embers in the Cold Pond: Four Sorrows of the Tang Clan

In the late Qing, during the Guangxu era, famine struck Jiangnan's Runzhou year after year, disease spread, and harsh taxes and corrupt officials left the common people struggling to breathe. The impoverished scholar Tang Shouyi and his family of four were trapped in their old home by the half-acre pond. His elderly father was sick, his children were hungry, and his eldest son, Tang Chengzong, was honest and hardworking but constantly bullied. His second daughter, Tang Wanqing, was gentle and timid, yet could not escape the clutches of evil. From their fields being flooded and their livelihood cut off, to selling all their ancestral property to survive and enduring humiliation, then being forced into a corner by the wealthy Master Zhang as one calamity after another befell their loved ones, the Tang family struggled in the mire of the times and the darkness of human nature. There was no salvation, no turning point, only hardship and despair piling upon hardship and despair. In the end, the parents and children all perished, some freezing to death, others dying horrifically or sacrificing themselves. The family of four was wiped out, leaving only the desolate pond, whose mournful waters bore witness to the tragedy of ordinary people crushed by their era and by the powerful.