The Land Lies in Ruins, and the Wind Blows the Catkins

This story is entirely fictional!!

In the twelfth year of the Kangxi reign, undercurrents swirl through Suzhou.

Shen Qingya is a gentle Han Chinese woman who works in a silk shop, but she is also the sharpest blade of the anti-Qing organization, the Ashen Remnant Society.

Bearing the blood feud of Yangzhou's fall, she walks every step on the edge of a knife.

Nalan Mingruo is the spoiled Manchu noblewoman of the Governor-General's residence in Liangjiang, yet she hides half Han Chinese ancestry and a hatred of confinement.

She masks her loneliness with arrogance, until she meets the woman who dares to catch her torn silk.

A carefully planned approach, and a teacher-student bond born of scheming.

One teaches the other Chinese literature and poetry; the other leads her to the borders of forbidden things.

Across the unbridgeable gulf between Manchus and Han, beside the blazing fire of restoring the Ming and overthrowing the Qing, two women who should have been each other's pawns become the only light in each other's abyss.

But the board has long been set:

When she finally confirms the other's anti-Qing identity, when she sees with her own eyes the familiar handwriting on a secret letter.

"I can burn it," Nalan Mingruo says, bringing the letter close to the candle flame, "but I want to hear one honest thing."

When news of the uprising spreads like wildfire, when dawn breaks through the darkness above Nanjing's walls.

Shen Qingya pins the last white plum blossom in her hair: "The Ming may be beyond hope, but you are the homeland I alone call mine."

This is a love destined to consume them both.

"In our next life, may we be born in peaceful times, with no hatred between nations or families, and grow old together for love alone."

Theme: May we be born in peaceful times, and grow old together for love alone