In 960 AD, there was a mutiny in Chenqiaoyi, and Zhao Kuangyin was "forced" to wear a yellow robe and established the ancestral motto "not to kill scholar-bureaucrats", which started a three-hundred-year ups and downs between the peak of civil and political affairs and the trough of martial arts.
Chanyuan City won the war but signed a pact to lose money; Fan Zhongyan was demoted from the capital before half of the reform; Wang Anshi's reform tore the Song Dynasty in half; Su Shi almost lost his life because of a few poems; Song Huizong's artistic talent was inversely proportional to his governance ability; Yue Fei fought consecutive victories but could not avoid twelve gold medals - it took three hundred years for a dynasty to complete the final step of the causal chain of "the price of civilized governance".
Prosperity is real, and humiliation is also real. Elegance is real, and so is the blade. This book is narrated in vernacular, without joking or fabricating, and restores a Song Dynasty that is both familiar and unfamiliar.
