For three years, disguised as a man, she led five hundred old and frail laborers to carve a way to survival into a sheer cliff.
The year her father died in the miasma, Shen Wan took over his trading license, disguised herself as a man, and traveled the Tea-Horse Road for three years.
On their eleventh journey, the caravan was detained in Yaozhou.
The local authorities needed a road built to the salt wells occupied by Burma. The map on the public notice was wrong, and she was the only one in the whole city who could tell.
The prefect summoned her to the government office. “You’ll build it. Get the road finished, and I’ll release your people.”
Five hundred laborers, half of them old and frail. A Yi hunter named A He could shoot a flying eagle from the sky with one arrow, but never trusted the Han. The Bai stonemason Old Duan could carve a lotus into a cliff face, but cared only about money, not people. And lurking in the shadows was a spy in their ranks, waiting to kill her.
Shen Wan stood at the edge of the Nu River Gorge, tying a rope around herself.
Below lay rapids that had swallowed countless lives; above was the only route to the salt wells. In three months, she had to lead this group through Mount Biya and build a bridge across the Nu River Gorge.
But she never expected that the hardest thing to carve through would not be stone...
It would be the human heart.
Nice! Fascinating!!
It's very compactly written and illustrated slowly, which is interesting. One road, three generations Shen Wan tied a rope on the cliff and dug a road, while Nian'an carved a monument and built the road under the moonlight. In between is Shen Guanghe's life, twenty years of searching, and letters sent from the capital one after another. This is not a happy-go-lucky story. When revenge is avenged, the person cannot survive; when the road is opened, the person is no longer alive. But it is more touching than revenge - those who have died are remembered by those who are alive; those who have walked on the road have been repaired by those who followed. The author writes very restrainedly, without sensationalism or exaggeration. Shen Wan said "it's too tiring to hate someone", Nian An said "people who don't like to talk are good people", Shitou said "it's not easy for anyone who builds roads". Every sentence is plain, every sentence is heartbreaking. Eight hundred thousand words, after reading to the end, you will find that this is not the story of one person. It is those who build roads, those who walk on mountain roads, those who tie ropes on cliffs, and those who carve monuments under the moonlight. They didn't talk, but they kept walking. When the road is open, more people will walk.
Okay, come on slowly, be steady, I hope the follow-up will be more exciting and attractive