In the twenty-fifth year of Guangxu's reign, the Ministry of Punishment was imprisoned.
Lu Huaisheng knelt at the foot of the steps and listened to the sentence read by the judge: "Without his nationality, he will be an official and will be handed over to the British Embassy in Dongjiaominxiang for hard labor." His father was executed for sympathizing with the reformers, which affected the family. Overnight, he was no longer a young master from a family of poets and writers, but a sin slave who didn't even deserve a name.
In the embassy, he was called "A Chang".
He thought his life was over. Until the British young man appeared in front of him. William Underwood, the son of the Second Secretary of the British Embassy in China, was nineteen years old. He had just dropped out of Oxford University and entered Beijing with an imagination of the East and a sense of superiority. He didn't understand the rules and couldn't see hatred. He just stubbornly asked Achang to teach him Chinese and Achang to accompany him to dinner. In the night when the gunfire was loud, he asked him in jerky Chinese: "What do you live to remember?"
In 1900, the Yihe Group besieged the embassy area, and the Qing government declared war on the eleven countries. Dongjiaominxiang became the center of the storm. When a group of Chinese people held up torches and rushed into the embassy, shouting "Exterminate foreigners and exterminate religions", Achang stood in the crowd as if he was standing on the edge of the entire era.
On one side is the country where he was born and raised, and on the other side is a foreigner who makes him feel "alive" again.
"Huai Sheng" is a story about "choice". How does a sin slave keep his father's last words, and how does he meet someone he shouldn't have met. From master and servant to confidant, from Beijing to the coastline thousands of miles away, the two lives met and separated in the final storm of the late Qing Dynasty, and then reunited many years later.
Concept: How do two people from different worlds find their mission while standing in the same era? The core of this story is not only the previous emotions between the two, but also a lifetime of understanding who they are, and in the process they understand each other and the reasons why they want to continue living. Living is meaning, remembering is resistance.