The Yuan River Reflects Past and Present for a Thousand Years

The Yuan River, an ancient river that flows through the Five Streams region of western Hunan, surges down from the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau. It holds the lingering echoes of ancient shamanic rites and the spirit of the mountains of Xuefeng, and is also a river of time that links past and present and carries the legacy of culture.

It bears the spiritual light of the Qin-era scholar Fu Sheng, who used a Chenzhou talisman to subdue a book demon while hiding and protecting books. It reflects the faint traces of the Dao left when great Neo-Confucian thinkers of the Song and Ming dynasties held lectures and sealed mountain spirits. It carries the battle spirit of modern revolutionary heroes, who kindled the protective arts with their blood. It holds the power of a seed that awakened the Rice God as it brought blessings to all. And it preserves the gentle echoes between the spirit realm and the human world in the ink-wash landscapes of western Hunan described by Shen Congwen. The faith of countless sons and daughters of western Hunan, who guard the riverbanks, the waters, their homeland, and their hearts, has long since become an invisible protective barrier beneath the river, resisting the evil spirits that have coveted the mountains' spiritual essence for millennia.

A modern young man accidentally stumbles into a secret realm on the Yuan River and touches an ancient talisman sleeping on the riverbed. In an instant, the power of millennia-old shamanic rites and the cultural spirit of the Five Streams people awaken within him. Following the course of the Yuan River, he travels between past and present. He seeks the secrets of mountain spirits in the incantations of Miao villages, unlocks the power of ancestral souls amid the traces of Panhu in the Yao mountains, battles a witch's sorcery by the merchant lamps of the ancient Hongjiang ferry crossing, and awakens the spirits of soldiers from a thousand years ago beneath a broken sword on the ancient battlefield of Chenxi. At last, he sees the true face of the shamanic script again in the book caves of Mount Eryou.

Using Chenzhou talismans as his guide and the Yuan River as his medium, he gathers the cultural spirit of a thousand years. He listens to the whispers of the gods behind the masks of Nuo opera and unravels the mysteries of poison spells in children's songs along tributaries of the Wu River. He vows to protect this land from the invasion of evil spirits from beyond its borders, so that the mountains and rivers may remember, history may retain its warmth, and the legacy of shamanic culture may thrive in the new age. The Yuan River, flowing through the land, reflects past and present,