A Four-Year-Old Cutie Lands in a Bronze Cauldron, Sending Qin’s Fortune Soaring

In the final years of the Qin dynasty, a plank road collapsed near Luming Village on the frontier, leaving its twenty-three residents without food.

The four-year-old orphan Nuonuo was so hungry she saw stars. Clutching the little jade cauldron her late mother had left her, she cried herself to sleep. When she woke, she was lying on a brightly lit night-market street.

People here casually tossed fluffy white buns into iron bins, dropped chicken legs after just a couple of bites, and poured half-finished cups of sweet drinks into the gutters.

Nuonuo: Are these people crazy?!

She wiped away her tears, opened her little bamboo basket, and started picking things up.

A tea egg saved an old woman's life.

A handful of coarse salt treated Tiedan's infected knee.

A bag of expired seeds gave the whole village hope of making a living again.

From scavenging to trading, from survival to enterprise, from one bowl of porridge to barns full of grain.

The cauldron was still the thousand-year-old relic at the village entrance, but the fortunes of the realm grew stronger by the day.