In the history books, they get only a single line.
Some die amid the chaos of war. Some disappear along the road of migration. Some are swept up in the fall of dynasties. Others are merely names in the biography of some great figure. But before that single line, they too had parents, loves and hates, fears, ambitions, and choices they had no choice but to make.
This book tells the stories of those ordinary people whom the history books hurriedly pass over.
History provides the bones, and imagination the flesh and blood. Where the records speak, we follow them closely; where they fall silent, we light the lamps again. From the end of the Qin dynasty to the end of the Qing, this book follows the fates of ordinary people, taking you into the darkest, most turbulent, and most human corners of two thousand years of Chinese history.
Great history has never been only the history of emperors.
It is also the story of countless ordinary people who lived, suffered, and struggled.
