In the winter of the eleventh year of Xianfeng's reign, on the first snowy night after the city was destroyed in Hangzhou, the books in Wenlan Pavilion were treated as waste paper and sent to the paper mill by the truckload.
Papermaking apprentice Xi Wangye fished out a page of "Si Ku Quanshu" from the boiling pulp pond. When the water covered the old ink, he heard half a sentence read by a long-dead schoolmaster, and also heard the whereabouts of thirty-six boxes of books secretly sent out of Gushan.
On one side are ancient books that can be exchanged for rice and save lives, and on the other side are mountains and rivers on paper that will disappear at any time. Xi Wangye and Ye Hengjun, the daughter of Guge's book editor, followed the broken pages, hidden seals and repaired papers to recover the lost books in post-war Hangzhou. They saw that book pages were used to wrap medicine, paste walls, and cushion coffins. They also saw that some people were willing to tear apart a book to live for ten families; some were willing to spend all their wealth to redeem the scattered words page by page. But the closer they got to the underwater catalog, the more they discovered: The disaster of Wenlan Pavilion did not start with the city's destruction. A theft that lasted for decades had already mixed the authentic copies, manuscripts and forged copies together.
Xi Wangye can hear the "old sounds" left in the paper, but every time he hears a page clearly, he loses a piece of his own voice. When he finally heard the warning his father left in the book, he realized that what he had to save was never just a library, but how the city had lived, how it had been remembered, and how it had passed on its memory to future generations.
