After Restoring A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains, I Transmigrated to the Tang and Song Dynasties
Chen Muye, a 28-year-old assistant in ancient painting restoration, has spent half his life haunted by the regret of failing his graduate school entrance exams, passing his days among fragmentary scrolls and ancient paintings.
During a routine relining, his fingertips touched the damp, bleeding-ink layer beneath A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains. As the cool fragrance of mineral blues and greens filled his nose, he fell from a restoration table in a museum straight into the banks of Qujiang Pond at the height of the Kaiyuan era.
Mistaking him, with his short hair and commoner's clothes, for a student from Silla, people around him spoke in a jumble of sour wine and foreign merchants' cries. Sweat from dancers blurred their heavy makeup, and the splendor of the High Tang, once no more than symbols in a textbook, became a vivid world he could reach out and touch.
From then on, a scroll of blue-and-green landscape painting became an anchor across a thousand years.
He witnessed the flames of war as Tong Pass fell and the panic of Emperor Xuanzong's flight west. In the night market of Bianjing, he recorded the bustle of everyday life alongside Meng Yuanlao; amid the Jingkang calamity, he saw the broken beams of Zhouqiao Bridge and weeds overtaking Fan Tower. He met Li Bai, fretting over his ambitions and living on credit at wine shops, revising a single word in “The Road to Shu” again and again. At the old site of the Southern Song painting academy, he also encountered the aged Wang Ximeng, who handed him an unfinished blue-and-green sketch and asked, “A thousand years from now, will the blue and green have faded?”
A day and night inside the painting lasts an hour in the human world. He cannot bring modern objects with him or alter the course of history. All he can do is use a restorer’s eye to witness the splendor and collapse of the Tang and Song dynasties, keeping the shattered landscape and faint glimmers of civilization one by one in his heart.
When the original A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains is about to be sent overseas, the danger of its aging mounting, Chen Muye finally takes up his brush. Using his discoveries as a restorer as his guide, he turns his firsthand experience of traveling across a thousand years into a declaration of love for the land.
