Shen Zhanning was a personal effects curator.
Other people saw old belongings left behind by the dead. She saw testimony that had been burned, signatures that had been altered, clothes that had been borrowed, shop deeds that had been swallowed up, and names erased from documents.
After Helan Wei, the young wife of the Marquis of Yongning, "died of illness," the whole household rushed to burn her belongings, close her coffin, and declare that no objections had been raised. But on a rainy night, Shen Zhanning snatched a broken hairpin from the brazier. A white thread inside it led to the first layer of truth: the woman in the coffin was not her, and the death recorded on paper might not be true either.
From the inner chambers of the marquis's estate to the palace's old effects repository, from dowry deeds to control of the trade-route accounts, from a death certificate to a city's master register of unopposed declarations, Shen Zhanning kept investigating and discovered that many people had not simply vanished. Someone had written them down as "never having existed."
She would restore their names.
Not to mourn them, nor to seek belated justice on their behalf.
She would put every keepsake, every page of accounts, and every handprint back where it belonged, and make those who tried to write the living out of existence confess their crimes on paper.
