In the second year of Zhihe in the Northern Song Dynasty, it had been seven years since the Yellow River broke through Shanghuxun. The river changed its course to the north, flooding the fields and destroying the city. The court wanted to open the Liuta River and block Shanghukou, using human power to draw a new river for the world.
Li Hengzhou, a clerk at Chongwen Academy, found a page of a river map that was not in the catalog in an old banknote of "Shui Jing Zhu" that had been rained down. On the back of the paper are eight words written by my late father: Rivers cannot be restrained, and pictures cannot be deceived. At the same time, the river worker in charge of the water gauge died in Biankou, holding the same ancient paper between his fingers; a river defense map that could determine the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of people was quietly rewritten in Tokyo.
In order to find out his father's stigma, Li Hengzhou and the decorator Kan Qingxiu started with the remaining paper, ink color and the center of the printing plate. They left Beijing along the Bianhe River and visited the old Shanghu Road, the construction site of the Six Pagodas and the border areas of Song and Liao Dynasties. They searched for old rivers in ancient books, corrected ancient books among mountains and rivers, and gradually understood: when a line of thick ink on the map fell to the world, it was villages, food roads and thousands of lives.
When controlling a river becomes a shortcut to power, who is willing to tell the truth for a river that refuses to obey orders?
