A single edict stripping her of her title as empress did not send her to the Cold Palace. Instead, it gave her the widest battlefield of all.
Shen Yanqiu took off her phoenix crown and wedding robes and picked up a surveyor's chain and measuring tools. Palace intrigue? Political machinations? No. Her battlefield lay among river embankments, roads across the wilderness, and the countless lives about to be swallowed by floodwaters.
From firing the first kiln of bricks among the ruins of the Cold Palace to uncovering a forty-year-old blood debt beneath the rivers of Jiangnan; from building the first settlement for displaced people with the help of three thousand refugees to crushing the court's scholars with a single set of engineering blueprints; from taming the mighty Yellow River to laying railway tracks toward the distant, snowy northern frontier...
She wielded engineering like a blade to cut through deep-rooted corruption.
She used data as a ruler to reshape the empire's mountains and rivers.
The emperor on the dragon throne once thought he held all the pieces in his hands. But little by little, he realized that the blueprint she was drawing was grander than his empire.
"Your Majesty, you may guard your ninefold palace."
She stood atop the towering dam she had built across a treacherous gorge, the river wind filling her sleeves. Behind her stretched a new city, its lights shining for thousands of miles.
"As for me, I will build a world for the people."
This is the story of a deposed empress who has no interest in palace intrigue or romance. All she wants is to build.
It's about how, with a precisely calculated line, a heart that respects life, and a shovel for tamping earth and stacking stones, she builds a new world, one with greater dignity, on the soil of an ancient empire.
