In the twenty-fourth year of Emperor Yong's reign, the three houses of the declining Jing'an Marquis Mansion were competing for property, and they invited Shen Yanqiu, who ran a dilapidated property-sharing bank. When the old accounting room that had been sealed for nine years was opened, the old steward of the Hou Mansion died in the house with the doors and windows locked, holding a monthly bill in his hand. The person receiving the money on the bill was Shen Lan, the female accountant who disappeared ten years ago and was registered dead by the government nine years ago - Shen Yanqiu's mother.
Shen Yanqiu checked the population based on grain consumption, checked house plans using wall rulers, and tracked the real beneficiaries using monthly money, makeup bills, genealogy and deeds of sale. She discovered that what was missing from the Hou Mansion was not eight thousand taels of silver, but an ancestral house in the south of the city that had disappeared from official deeds, genealogy and memory at the same time. Xie Linchuan, the chief registrar of the Registration Department, only believed in official documents, but she knew that official seals could also prove lies. The two went from being suspicious of each other to joining forces, and gradually came into contact with the "White Book Club", the largest hidden property network in Beijing.
The half of the "Hundred Houses Record" left by my mother has no answers, only the houses that have been rewritten and assigned. When a false deed can not only embezzle dowry, but also protect a place for the weak, Shen Yanqiu must find a more difficult liquidation method than "exposing everything".
