Zou Yan (approximately 324–240 BCE) was a native of the State of Qi in the late Warring States period. A scholar at the Jixia Academy, he founded and brought to maturity the theory of yin-yang and the five phases. He also delighted in discussing the heavens, earning the nickname "Yan Who Talks of Heaven."
Throughout his life, he used the mutual roots of yin and yang, and the five phases' cycles of overcoming, generating, restraining, overreaching, and insulting to reason out the workings of Heaven. He also established the theory of the Five Virtues' Cyclical Succession, using the combination, division, rotation, and transformation of the five virtues to explain the rise and fall of dynasties. Through the method of "examining small things first, then extrapolating to the great, until reaching the boundless," he proposed the theory of the Nine Provinces, Great and Small. He held that the Divine Province of Chixian was only one of eighty-one provinces, and that beyond the great ocean lay yet another ocean.
In his time, this was undoubtedly a shocking and outrageous idea.
He traveled through the states of Wei, Zhao, and Yan. King Zhao of Yan built the Jieshi Palace for him and welcomed him as a teacher, paying him the respects due a disciple. In his later years, he was imprisoned by King Hui of Yan. After the "June Snow" incident, he was exiled back to Qi. Later, he debated Gongsun Long over whether a white horse could be called a horse, refuting his argument about the "hard and white." In the end, he vanished from the historical record after the war between Yan and Zhao.
This novel is not a footnote to a body of theory. It tells how one person used his own footsteps to measure the world anew: the correspondence between tides and the sun, moon, stars, and light; arcs traced in charcoal on the backs of ship planks; academies and prisons becoming places from which a person sets out...
