The warehouse loft where twenty-seven people were staying had an inspection slip that had been destroyed six days earlier.
They were still waiting for today's porridge, but the ledger said the beams that sheltered them from the rain had already been sold.
Yu Wenxiu, a historic-building surveyor, stepped out of an annotated facsimile of The Treatise on Architectural Methods and into Bianjing, the Northern Song capital. He brought no gold or silver, only a damaged ledger that revealed old plans, and a pair of hands unfamiliar with Song-era measurements.
To save the loft they called home, he first has to prove that what is written on paper did not necessarily happen, and that people missing from the records did not necessarily never exist.
A hollowed-out pillar, an old river channel that had been filled in, and eleven unclaimed but already paid-out allotments of money and grain draw him into the world of timber merchants, docks, and workshops.
The craftswoman Tao Mi helps him check his measurements, while clerk Cheng Zhen helps him go through the accounts. Li Jie is about to publish his new book, but Yu Wenxiu gradually realizes that ancient texts can teach people how to build a city without necessarily preserving the names of everyone who built it.
He wants to create another ledger for the names that were never written into the regulations.
