In the twenty-sixth year of Guangxu's reign, the Gengzi Revolution occurred, and the artillery fire from the Eight-Power Allied Forces shattered the last trace of dignity in the empire.
Eleven-year-old Pudong boy Shen Zhiyuan lost everything in the troubled times - his family business, his close relatives, and his old stability. On the way to escape, he met a mysterious old man, Qu Xuanming, who lived in seclusion in an alley. The rise and fall of fifty yarrows in the old man's hand could tell everything about the world.
During the day, he worked as an apprentice in a foreign trade firm in Shanghai, learning rules, reading foreign language, and reading cotton yarn quotations. At night, he squatted under the old locust tree in the City God's Temple and learned from Liu Banxian, a fortune teller in the world, to read a person's words and emotions - you can tell what a person is thinking by looking at his eyebrows. In Qu Xuanming's small, inconspicuous courtyard, he learned the most important thing in his life: it's not about you fortune telling, it's about fortune telling you.
Twenty-six years later, he went from a homeless boy to the most legendary businessman in Shanghai.
Cotton yarn war, official secret war, bank account crisis, industrial defense war - every life and death decision, others rely on intelligence, relationships, capital, he relies on a hexagram.
It's not metaphysics, it's not superstition, it's the truth about the world hidden in the sixty-four hexagrams of the Book of Changes: sixty-four hexagrams, three hundred and eighty-four lines. Every line is a crossroads in life.
Others live by luck, he lives by judgment.
This novel tells how a person finds his own way in troubled times.
Here are the official rules of the late Qing Dynasty, the bloody shopping malls of the Republic of China, the ten-mile foreign market in Shanghai, and the humiliation and unwillingness of the Chinese to live by other people's rules on their own land.
