Tracking Down the He Shi Jade

In 1978, young Chen Wei joined the Central Plains Cultural Relics Preservation Institute. Using his family’s inherited art of “reading jade by its aura,” he discovered what seemed to be fragments of the Imperial Jade Seal among a collection of old artifacts. The clues pointed to strange phenomena in three places: “jade-vein resonance” in an ancient tomb on the northern frontier, a “secret map woven into jade patterns” in a Jiangnan water town, and a “ritual jade chant” in the southwestern borderlands. Together with his childhood friend Zhang Pangzi and archivist Lin Wanqing, he formed an investigative team. They traveled far and wide, solving bizarre mysteries: a star chart hidden in the Dunhuang murals, a jade casket concealed in a Huizhou ancestral hall, and a thousand-year-old secret phrase preserved in the Bai people’s Torch Festival in Dali. But the overseas smuggling syndicate known as the Qingfu Society was closing in. Even more chillingly, someone always destroyed the evidence before they arrived at each location… The mole seemed to have an intimate knowledge of ancient Chinese arts. Once the nine fragments of the jade scepter were brought together, the truth emerged: the He Shi Bi had never disappeared. The ancients had embedded it in landmarks across the land, where it symbolized that “the nation lives among its people.” In the end, the three used their wits to protect the flame of civilization and ensure the spirit of the national treasure would endure on Chinese soil.