Antique book conservator Wen Yansheng takes on an unsigned, incomplete manuscript. Its title has worn away, leaving only the words “Rivers and Mountains Shining Through the Night” on the cover. But the seventh leaf has been cleanly removed from the spine. The donor left one instruction: Do not replace that page.
Wen Yansheng assumes the collector is being mysterious for effect, until the paste on the back of the paper forms a river that has yet to dry. At its end is the name of an unfamiliar man from the Song dynasty, the ink as fresh as if it had just been lifted from an inkstone. Whenever Wen uses his conservator’s techniques to align the fragments, he can step through the gaps in the paper into the riverside world of Bianhe in the fourth year of Yuanyou, where he meets people absent from official histories: a female scribe copying river charts, laborers measuring the banks, and boatmen guarding their lantern registers as they await the return of their loved ones.
The ancient book is not a doorway to the past, but an archive waiting to be completed. The missing seventh leaf held the names of hundreds of river workers who died in a flood. Someone altered the records through the government to cover up a mistake in a river chart; others believed that erasing the names was the only way to keep the whole realm from being held accountable. Without disturbing the course of history, Wen Yansheng must recover the evidence scattered across different pages.
As he works, he discovers that the third handwriting in the book is exactly like his own. And the old collector who never shows his face at the modern restoration studio seems to have known all along that “Rivers and Mountains Shining Through the Night” would open its doors again in Wen’s hands. Beyond the pages is another group of people keeping watch over what is blank; within them is another group waiting to be remembered. In the end, Wen Yansheng must answer not whether he can change history, but whether he is willing to keep a light burning for the truth when all it can leave behind is a line of tiny print.
