The miasma-ridden lands of Lingnan have been remote and cut off from the sea since ancient times. With towering mountains and long, difficult roads, the Central Plains literati have always dismissed the region as a barbaric backwater. For poor scholars to leave the mountains and join the ranks of respectable officials is harder still. Everyone says that village herbalists are merely practitioners of a lowly craft, destined to farm, treat patients, and spend their lives secluded in the hills.
But Yan Rongding refused to accept his fate. He wanted his grandson to study and change all that.
Born in the countryside and well versed in herbs and remedies, he practiced medicine with compassion and treated the villagers’ ailments, yet refused to be confined by his humble origins or trapped in one corner by prejudice. A doctor could save individuals, but not the people in a chaotic age. Only the Confucian path and the imperial examinations could break down the barriers facing the poor and establish the righteous way at court.
He cultivated Confucian virtue through a healer’s heart and refined his character through compassionate practice, breaking free of the stigma of being a lowborn country doctor and the label of practicing a mere minor art. With the sages’ books in his hands and the mountains and rivers of the world in his heart, he feared neither Lingnan’s long and arduous roads nor the prejudices of the scholarly elite.
Mountains cannot block the ambition to rise to greatness; a humble cottage can conceal the heart of a chief minister.
From this day forward, he would abandon the family’s generations-old path of practicing medicine and take the broad road to success in the imperial examinations. Rising step by step from the countryside of Lingnan, he would break through with his writing and enter officialdom as a Confucian physician. In time, he would leave the dirt roads behind and reach the capital, relying on his own talents to serve the world and bring peace to the people, until he rose to the highest office of chief minister.
I just discovered another new book by the author, and it's out of date! 😭
It looks good, it is still a civil engineering tire wear, and the family gets along very warmly.