In the fourth year of Xianchun, a minor Maritime Trade Supervisor's Office clerk discovers three iron ingots speckled with rust and is forced onto a deadly voyage to smuggle Chinese civilization to safety.
In the final years of the Southern Song, Lin'an is still basking in the warm breezes of West Lake song and dance. Zhao Yanqing, an unassuming Maritime Trade Supervisor's Office commissioner, is a low-ranking bureaucrat who wants nothing more than to protect his salary and family. During a routine inspection, he discovers something that should not exist: three ingots of refined iron stamped with the imperial “Phoenix Flame” seal, being smuggled north aboard a merchant ship owned by the powerful Pu family.
In a single night, a bloodied arrow of warning strikes his doorframe, secret summonses from the Privy Council follow one after another, and his young son's life becomes a bargaining chip. Only then does Zhao Yanqing realize that he has stumbled upon more than ordinary smuggling. It is a web of vested interests, drenched in the blood of the entire empire and stretching from the imperial palace in Lin'an to the Mongol encampments. The appeasement faction is ready to trade away the country's resources for a brief reprieve, while the resistance faction secretly preserves the last sparks of hope.
If he retreats, he must become complicit to save his own skin. If he presses on, he and his family will be destroyed. Cornered, Zhao Yanqing makes a third choice: he will become the “smuggler.”
This is no escape. It is an expedition in the opposite direction.
Carrying evidence and secret letters bought with blood, he travels south to Quanzhou, then ventures into Champa and Chenla and among the islands of the South Seas. Before the empire falls, he must carry out a mission more desperate than defending the court and nobler than mere survival: to rescue the seeds of Chinese civilization, its classics, crafts, star charts, and convictions, from a sinking land. Across the vast South China Sea, he will seek a “tomorrow” for China that may never come.
