A Silk Road linking East and West, a mighty pass guarding the Shu Road, and the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, flowing for a thousand years: these three great geographical landmarks are like lifelines, connecting China’s magnificent landscapes with the depths of its history.
In the present day, Lin Yuanzhou, a professor of historical geography, is appointed to lead a major national project to organize and preserve ancient texts. Faced with a sea of rare books and fragmentary manuscripts in the library, he assembles a special team that includes Su Tang, an expert in the restoration of ancient books. Su Tang’s great-grandfather, Su Jingzhai, turns out to have been the last “book peddler” to travel the Silk Road in the late Qing dynasty, a mysterious man who used book trading as a cover to secretly escort ancient texts back east.
As their research deepens, Lin Yuanzhou and Su Tang discover that what they face is more than yellowed pages. It is the memory of a nation, protected at the cost of countless lives over thousands of years. From a letter home carved by a Western Han soldier into a beacon tower to a quatrain inscribed by a Tang poet at Yangguan; from the final words of a Southern Song general who died fighting before Jianmen Pass to the canal boat songs copied down by a Ming merchant; and from the tragic story of a group of intellectuals who, during the War of Resistance, risked their lives to transport thirty thousand books through the perilous Jianmen Pass... Behind every page of every ancient book lies a story of the land and its people.
