The day he donned his red robe, he declared that the imperial examinations should be abolished.
Overnight, the newly crowned top scholar Shen Hexuan went from the most honored man in the realm to its greatest traitor. Hunted and cursed, he fled to Jiangnan. There he saw towering chimneys and weavers starving to death. He also saw a child laborer with two fingers missing draw a circle in the dirt: the “ideal society” he had written about in his book.
As the child was dying, he crawled for two miles to deliver a sheet of paper bearing a bloodied handprint.
Later, someone asked Shen Hexuan, “What is an ideal society?”
He pointed to the people who had survived.
“They are.”
