In 1908, Shen Qingqiu, a poor girl from the south of the Yangtze River, carried her father's instruction to "make a living by writing and ink" and her mother's sacrifice as a secret servant. She went north to Peking and found a teaching position in a missionary school. Here she met Fu Yanshen, a son of an aristocratic family who had returned from studying abroad. She had a feeling of admiration, but was instantly crushed because of their different family backgrounds. Qingqiu was forced to return south, took root in the ancestral hall of his hometown, and devoted his life's efforts to the poor children who were displaced by the war.
Fu Yanshen, in order to break free from the shackles of his family and practice his ideal of saving the country through industry, resolutely went south and made a living on the historical stage not far from Qingqiu. The two are in the same turbulent history, but they are like parallel lines: he devoted all his money to establish a workshop to support the anti-Japanese war, and eventually sacrificed to protect supplies; she guarded the school in the mountains and countryside, and found the value of her life in the literacy movement.
She remained unmarried all her life and had many friends all over the world, but she never knew that there was once a person who loved the same land as her in a completely different way and died because of this love. This is a story about missing, protecting and reflecting. It tells how a woman used the most ordinary piece of chalk to carve immortal traces on a turbulent land; it also tells how in an era, two souls destined to be unable to intersect were forged together into the cornerstone of history. The old world collapsed in the flames of war, and the new world was rebuilt in the sound of books, but some glimmers of light never went out.
Purpose: Using the parallel and unconnected lives of the two protagonists as a mirror, it reflects a magnificent picture of how civilization can survive, how individuals can be noble, and how particles of dust can reflect the world in the broken mountains and rivers.