In the Longqing year of the Ming Dynasty, Hou Yao, a farmer from Jiading, studied hard in a cold window. Once he passed the imperial examination, he opened the door to the imperial examination family for the Hou family.
Over the next hundred years, three generations passed down the work, using the pen as the sword and the calligraphy as the order, and finally became a prominent family in the south of the Yangtze River with "three Jinshi in one discipline".
Until the Ming and Qing dynasties, the sky collapsed and the earth collapsed. Hou Tongzeng, the helmsman of the Hou family, took the whole family, young and old, to stand at the top of Jiading Gucheng. On the day the city fell, he and his two sons drowned themselves to die for the country; the younger members of the clan would rather die than surrender, or sacrifice their entire family, or run to fight against the Qing Dynasty, fulfilling the century-old family motto of "reading and serving the country" with their own flesh and blood.
This book completely restores the whole process of the Jiading Hou family from starting out as a farmer and studying to becoming a famous family, and then to becoming a loyal family. Here are the romantic stories of Jiangnan aristocratic families, the undercurrents of party strife in the court in the late Ming Dynasty, the tragedy of the troubled times when mountains and rivers were shattered, and even a family, with a century-old spirit, wrote the last letter to the Ming Dynasty.
