In the winter of the seventeenth year of Yongchang, six-year-old Ah Nan was sold to the Prime Minister's Mansion by her father for five taels of silver. A flame-shaped birthmark on his forehead was dismissed as "bad luck" and sent to a remote old library, where he would be accompanied by thirty-six solitary lamps throughout his life. In the darkness, she met the first light in her life - her concubine Liu who had fallen out of favor. Mrs. Liu secretly taught her literacy and gave her the simplest truth: "A woman who is illiterate is like a bird with broken wings." Between the dust and the account books, A-nan glimpsed another world: numbers are like swords, and accounts reflect people's hearts. Relying on her self-taught accounting skills, she dug out the truth of the three hundred taels deficit from the mess when she was twelve years old. Three years later, under the name "Jiang Deng'er", she took advantage of water transportation to save a huge amount of money for the prime minister's government, which attracted the attention of the third son, Xie Yunyuan. A test of false accounting turned her from a maid holding a lamp to a dark accountant under his command. She saw through the false reports of the farm and the fraud in the village, and also saw through the hardest truth in the world: "Money does not distinguish between men and women, and accounts do not distinguish between master and servant."
"Floating Deng Embroidery Shop" quietly opened in the West Market, specializing in taking in abandoned women and widows. Amid rumors and suppression, they embroidered not only patterns, but also their own names and ways of living. From the desperate survival of "borrowing betrothal gifts to earn interest" to the encirclement and suppression by industry giants, Deng'er used account books and embroidery to open the first gap in survival for countless "grandmothers".
Many years later, history books called her the "Lamp Deliverer".
Purpose: The core purpose of this article is to explore how women can light themselves up in shackles and ignite millions of sparks through the history of a maid's counterattack.