In Qingwu Dyeing House, a small town in the south of the Yangtze River, Shen Yan, the fifteen-year-old son of a salt merchant, was sent to "nurture his character". Xu Ting, the daughter of the owner of the workshop, taught him how to knead cloth, sizing, and stir in a vat for dyeing. The two secretly fell in love in the dense humidity. When she put her palm on the back of his hand to correct her strength, his heart beat wildly. He gave her a Mid-Autumn Festival fan and wrote a poem about it, "Indigo dyes a thousand layers of color, not as green as your eyes." But she sat in front of the dyeing vat until dawn.
But Xu Ting's mother died of depression after marrying into a wealthy family, and her last words were engraved in her bones: "If the family is not in the right place, the best silk will burn to ashes if it encounters fire." A servant of the Shen family said, "The sour taste of poverty cannot be washed away," which completely crushed her remaining courage. She took the initiative to persuade him to go back to her hometown for scientific research, and used a "Tongxin Blue" with mottled dyeing to prove that "we are not in tune".
When we met again three years later, he was already the salt transport envoy, and beside him stood a woman in gorgeous clothes; she guarded the dyeing workshop and reorganized the thirty-six dyeing vats from the "Tiangang Formation" into the "Four Seasons Reincarnation Formation". At the Baise Conference, he commented on her "blank color": "The beauty of love is not revealed yet." But she retreated even further. His request for marriage from the emperor was rejected. On the eve of the wedding, she soaked the last vat of indigo and named it "Farewell".
Many years later, when she became famous all over the world, he retired and returned to his hometown, but he only sat in the teahouse across the street for an afternoon, watching her show off her clothes. When she died, she held the fan he gave her and dyed the last piece of cloth called "First Seeing". When he arrived, the thirty-six dye vats were as quiet as tombs. Indigo can dye a thousand colors, but it cannot dye one person in your heart. The best craftsmanship and the greatest regret in the world are all on that piece of cloth full of breaks.
