Ten Miles of Splendid Mountains

This is not a tale of conquest and battle, but the rise and fall of an ordinary family in the countryside.

Perhaps the mother and son were bound together by fate across lifetimes. Her life has been full of misfortune: orphaned, with no brothers or sisters, and unable to have children, she rescues and adopts him, another orphan. The future is hard to predict, and the road ahead is long. As the family endures one hardship after another, they save one another in turn. Yet life and death, joy and sorrow, reunion and parting are all part of life. The vast realm of “ten li of rivers and mountains” is simply the homeland beneath their feet: one generation swallows its hardships, the next struggles to make a living. For ordinary people, those ten li of countryside are their whole world.