A Fortune-Telling Opera That Determines the Village’s Fate

In the early 1960s, the Republic was going through its most difficult years. Yet Yin Songnian, a carpenter from Dawan Village, was simply an “honest man” who kept his head down, worked hard, and paid no heed to the world around him. No one could have guessed that this “model worker” had once been the star of a country opera troupe, or that he was a remarkable man well versed in the Book of Changes and the art of feng shui. He sang the Book of Changes' formulas to the tune of Huangmei opera, measured the land's spiritual veins with theatrical steps, and carved geomantic symbols with his plane, secretly preserving ancient wisdom amid the campaign to “destroy the Four Olds.” The commune planned to tear down the village's century-old ancestral hall, a symbol of “old thinking,” and turn it into a model canteen for the Great Leap Forward. Yin Songnian was frantic with worry. Beneath the hall lay not only his master's peerless feng shui manual, but also a “dragon-subduing point” that had protected Dawan Village for centuries. He knew that if the ancestral hall were destroyed, disaster would befall the whole village! Faced with doubts and orders, Yin Songnian appeared to comply while secretly putting a plan in motion. He claimed the hall's beams were “feng shui treasures” that could draw up groundwater and ease the drought. The commune leader scoffed and was about to have the hall demolished when a severe drought struck. Not a drop of rain fell, the crops withered, and the whole village plunged into despair. After the drought eases, Yin Songnian discovers that changes in the land's spiritual veins have exposed the secret beneath the ancestral hall ahead of time. With an investigation team sent by his superiors on the way and the tides of the age growing ever more turbulent, how will Yin Songnian use his peerless mastery of “Huangmei geomancy” to forge an unprecedented path between tradition and reform, superstition and science? How will he combine ancient wisdom with the Republic's development and rise from an unknown carpenter to an indispensable “chief feng shui architect” in the building of the Republic?