Introduction to the work
A Song Dynasty painting. A night of elegant gatherings. The lives of four people.
At the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, the sky collapsed and the earth shattered. Upstairs in Jiangyun Tower, Nanjing, a seemingly elegant gathering for appreciation of paintings turned into a life-or-death dilemma due to the appearance of a manuscript of "Ten Diaries of Yangzhou".
Painter Yang Wencong's fingers lingered on the scroll for a moment longer. The famous prostitute Liu Rushi saw that breath through the screen. Literary leader Qian Qianyi sat alone all night with an empty sheet of paper in front of him. Disciple Huang Zongxi hid paper in his sleeve and wrote blindly with his fingertips.
They all thought they had the truth. They all held onto only fragments.
Years later, Liu Rushi traced the truth of that night in his memoirs. Qian Qianyi wrote the secret manuscript "North Wind" in Beijing after the Qing Dynasty. Huang Zongxi learned carving in the mountains and fields. After the city of Yangzhou was destroyed, the survivor who hid in the wall and wrote a letter in blood handed over a secret to a stranger on Jurong Road.
A "Water Picture" by Ma Yuan was torn into seventeen pieces and carefully placed in a nanmu box. There is tissue paper sandwiched between each piece - like a person who knows it is precious but does not allow it to be complete again.
Three hundred years later, a book history researcher discovered the box of fragments in the wall of an old house at the foot of Yushan Mountain. From this, the narrations of four people are juxtaposed: the bewilderment of "South Branch", the coldness of "North Wind", and the third person who hides the deepest - the engraver who knows everything but says nothing.
