At sixty, a modern-day retired director of the county gazetteer office dies in an accident and transmigrates four hundred years into the past, to the late Ming dynasty, a time of severe drought and war. She brings with her decades of hard-earned knowledge of her county's waterways, geology, family genealogies, and history of soldiers and bandits, and wakes in the body of a twenty-year-old young mistress from the county's largest clan, whose husband has just died.
Drawing on her knowledge of local history, her precise calculations of ancient tax laws, and the unconventional child-rearing and clan-management methods of a tough sixty-year-old Chinese mother, she leads a group of timid, selfish ancestors in reclaiming land and saving themselves amid the chaos, while negotiating with warlords.
In the end, against all odds, she saves a lone city from the fate recorded in the history books: “its inhabitants massacred, its bloodline wiped out.”
