Song Wanwan wakes from a nap to find she has become Song Wan’er, the least favored concubine-born daughter of the Song family in Northern Song Bianjing.
Her legal mother makes life difficult for her, her father is cold and distant, and her older brother urges her to accept her fate. Her family treats her as a pawn in a marriage alliance, planning to wed her to a powerful man more than half a century old as his second wife.
Everyone in the capital says, “A woman is born to know her place. Marrying and bearing children is the proper path.”
But Song Wan’er refuses to believe she is bound by fate.
She opens a perfume shop, starts a poetry society, and establishes a school for women. She teaches sheltered young ladies to read and do accounts, helps widows reclaim their dowries, teaches merchant women to run businesses, and shows women whose backs have been bent by rigid social rules how to hold their heads high again.
Then she meets the young Li Qingzhao.
Li Qingzhao is dazzling and proud, with extraordinary talent, yet she is still trapped by the conventional belief that every woman must eventually marry.
Song Wan’er takes her hand and tells her:
“Qingzhao, a woman’s life should not be spent waiting for marriage.”
“We can write poetry, do business, study, save lives, and choose the path we want to take.”
And so, beginning with a poetry gathering for young ladies, the two women join hands to stir a storm in the fate of women across the Great Song.
With poetry as their blade, the written word as their banner, and women’s education as their light, they forge an unprecedented path for women throughout the bustling capital of Bianjing and across a land torn by chaos.
Along the way, Song Wan’er also meets a young man who does not ask her to bow her head or confine herself to a household, but only wishes to walk beside her.
He says:
“I love you not because I want you to become my wife.”
“I want to see you become yourself.”
This is a female awakening that spans a thousand years.
It is also the story of a woman trapped by her era who joins forces with Li Qingzhao and countless women of the Great Song to rewrite their destinies with their own hands.
