In the tenth year of the Jiading era, Jin forces advanced on the border. When Huang Gan took office as prefect of Anqing, he discovered that the so-called “first bastion of the river defenses” was nothing but an earthen wall less than three li long. One surge of the river could wash it away, and one charge by the Jin cavalry could breach it.
Funding from the court? Nowhere in sight. Local gentry? Secretly obstructing him. The people? Sick of being conscripted.
To make matters worse, Zhao Shi, the finest stonemason in the city, hated the government. His father had died repairing the old embankment, and the authorities had compensated the family with just twenty strings of cash.
Huang Gan slammed the table. “We’re done waiting! We’ll raise the money and provisions ourselves, and start work today!”
Zhao Shi sneered. “Another official come to get himself killed.”
But neither of them had any idea that the autumn floods would come, that spies would come, and that ten thousand Jin cavalrymen would come.
Nor did they imagine that a sixty-seven-year-old scholar would beat the war drums and defend the city with his own hands, or that a stonemason who had hated the authorities for twenty years would brace the wall with his broken ribs.
A hundred days of hard fighting. Seven nights of bloody battle. On the day the new city’s monument was erected, Zhao Shi secretly carved four characters into it:
“The people are the foundation.”
Huang Gan saw them. He did not erase them.
