Ban Chao, courtesy name Zhongsheng, abandoned his writing brush to join the army. He entered the Western Regions with thirty-six men, won over more than fifty kingdoms, opened the Silk Road, and spent thirty years away from home. The history books fit the whole story into half a page. But this book is about what lay behind those half a page:
* During a chaotic battle at Pulei Lake, he knocked a man's helmet off. He picked it up and kept it pressed at the bottom of his baggage for thirty years.
* His wife was a Sogdian merchant. She traveled as far as he did, and in the end, she said, "See? I told you I could go as far as you did." Then she closed her eyes.
* Every time he stood at a crossroads of fate, another version of himself would sit across from him, looking at him through a scholar's eyes. "Do you call this winning?"
No one could walk those thirty years of loneliness for him.
Theme: Abandoning the brush for the sword, devotion to one's country, and bearing witness to loneliness
