Mountains and rivers never grow old, they just change the world. Xiazhou is still the same Xiazhou, and Xiashan is still the same Xiashan. It's just that the trees on the mountain have changed one after another.
The ambition of "Locks of Mountains and Rivers" is not to write a "beautiful historical novel", but to write a meditation on civilization that uses geography as its longitude and time as its latitude. It attempts to answer a fundamental question: How did the people who have lived on this land for more than two thousand years endure it from generation to generation?
The answer may be hidden among those mountains and rivers - in the smooth stone slabs of the ancient road, in the endless sound of waves at the ferry, and in the rammed earth faults of the city walls. Mountains and rivers cannot speak, but as long as you are willing to listen, they can tell you everything.
