In the capital city during the Qianlong period, the morning fog always had a fatalistic consistency, like an invisible giant net covering the stern palaces under the glazed tiles and the curling smoke in the alleys. It was from a big dream three hundred years later that I fell into the center of this spider web. At first, I thought I had gotten a huge bargain—a college student who was well-versed in Qing history and full of modern ideas turned out to be Niu Hulu Shanbao, the Heshen who would later be known as the "Treacherous Minister" and his teacher when he was young and his family was in trouble. The pages of history books were buzzing in my mind, and those judgments about corruption and the destruction of the country, and those enlightenment ideals about the goodness of human nature, turned into a hot impulse: I want to draw completely different lines on this white paper, and lead this butterfly destined to stick to the spider web to another bright sky.
