Shen Guiwan, a top actuary, wakes up in the Tang Dynasty as a laundress condemned to servitude. In her eyes, Chang'an has no moonlit romance or poetic charm, only moving numbers and risk calculations.
With her extraordinary computational mind and financial savvy, she starts with a scrap of waste paper in the Western Market and uses modern techniques such as asset securitization, currency hedging, and credit systems to build a hidden financial empire in the Tang Dynasty. She takes on foreign merchants, stabilizes grain prices, issues government bonds, and opens sea routes. Not only does she become richer than the state, she also becomes the power broker pulling the strings behind the rise and fall of the empire. She has no desire to curry favor with the throne. She intends to set the rules, so that every coin in the Tang Dynasty bears the Shen family's mark.
Pei Xingjian, the aloof and proud junior minister of the Court of Judicial Review, was meant to be just another piece on her abacus. Yet through one deadly contest after another, he willingly casts aside the pride of his aristocratic clan to become the sharpest blade in her hand. As the golden age teeters on the brink of collapse, Shen Guiwan rises to nobility and high office through her own strength, writing a legend of “calculating the empire and the hearts of its people, while keeping one lifetime of deep devotion for herself.”
