This book uses the stark, restrained prose of historical fiction and cinematic imagery to portray a century of cause and effect in the Song dynasty.
In the ninth year of the Kaibao era, heavy snow seals the capital.
Candle shadows flicker red; the sound of an axe splits the night.
Song Taizu, Zhao Kuangyin, dies suddenly, and the realm falls into the hands of his younger brother, Zhao Guangyi.
Usurpation, the murder of nephews, the abuse of an empress: Taizong’s line commits an original sin that will haunt the next century.
Heaven’s retribution never misses its mark.
More than a hundred years later, during the Jingkang Catastrophe, the two emperors are taken north, and the Jin slaughter Taizong’s close descendants until his line is nearly extinguished.
Prince Kang, Zhao Gou, escapes south by chance and revives the dynasty during the Jianyan era. But terror leaves him without an heir, alone in the world.
On a freezing night in the inner palace, Taizu appears in a dream and rebukes him in anger: “Your ancestor took the throne unjustly. Return my realm at once!”
With no heir to succeed him, his branch dwindling, the people’s hearts turned elsewhere, and Heaven’s mandate shifting, Zhao Gou, at the prime age of fifty-six, willingly abdicates. He sets aside his own branch and chooses Zhao Shen, Taizu’s seventh-generation descendant, as his successor.
This is neither cowardice nor folly, but the coldest, shrewdest, and safest calculation a ruler can make.
A cycle of imperial power spanning 168 years.
A fated reckoning hidden in the depths of official history.
From the original sin of candle shadows and the sound of an axe, to retribution in the lingering nightmare of Jingkang, and finally to Heaven’s mandate returning to its rightful line through the abdication at Lin’an.
In the end, the realm of the Great Song returns to Taizu’s descendants.
A realm seized by force will eventually be returned.
A blood debt incurred will be repaid, no matter how many years it takes.
