New Soil, 1795

Guangzhou, 1795, the night before the Qianlong Emperor abdicated. A forbidden Western book that should never have existed fell into the hands of Chen Yuan, a down-on-his-luck scholar. Its words struck like thunder: parliamentary elections, separation of powers, civil rights and social contracts... It described a world the ancient empire had never imagined. Chen Yuan chose not to stay silent. Together with Su Huaijin, an orphaned young woman from a family of printers; Lin Jingzhi, a comprador who moved between Chinese and foreign circles; Luo Wenqi, a clerk well versed in the rules of officialdom; and Fang Tiesheng, a dock laborer, he formed a society in a cramped room on the eve of the Little New Year. They called it the Society of Reason. They thought they were sowing ideas, unaware that they had stepped into a deadly struggle. From an underground print shop in Guangzhou to a foreign printing house in the South Seas, from a hidden cave in Wuzhou to the waves of refugees along the Xiang River, these people who were “out of step with their times” used ink, blood, and their lives to carve the first crack in the empire’s most impenetrable iron curtain. Fang Tiesheng said, “We are the undercurrent.” Lin Jingzhi said, “The undercurrent will one day gather into a river.” And history looked down from on high in silence... Watching these tiny sparks light up the long, dark night; Watching the road no one had ever traveled lead, in the end, to who knows where.