This book uses the historical background of the remnants of the Taiping Army who fled to South America in the 19th century and the Chinese people who took root in Iquique for hundreds of years. It tells the story of Weng Derong and a group of Chinese people who were forced to migrate across the sea in troubled times, survive in the saltpeter wasteland, open up wasteland, build towns, and inherit their cultural heritage. They brought with them the remnants of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, as well as Chinese farming, dialects, medical skills and clan memories, and gradually integrated with the Indian groups and the Chilean people under the Andes. From the Jintian Uprising to the Iquique Autonomous Town, from the Tang Talks to the cross-ocean search for roots, from survival in the wilderness to the roots of civilization, the novel writes an epic of Chinese immigrants obscured by the dust of history. It is not a simple war narrative, but a long historical novel about suffering, perseverance, integration and inheritance of roots.
