Spring Returns to Longshang

Shen Zhiwei, a doctoral student in history, had spent her life researching disaster relief at the end of the Ming dynasty. She knew better than Chongzhen when to open the Ever-Normal Granaries, when to submit petitions for tax exemptions, which groups of refugees needed relief, and how to weather each disaster. Sitting in the library, she read the words “people eating people” in the Gazetteer of Yan’an Prefecture, her eyes reddening as she wrote a note: If the Ever-Normal Granaries had opened three months earlier, this might have been somewhat less severe. Then she opened her eyes and found herself a fifteen-year-old girl in Yan’an Prefecture in the first year of the Chongzhen reign. Her father was Yan’an’s military commissioner, a fourth-rank official who also oversaw grain supplies. He had soldiers and authority at his disposal, yet couldn’t keep a pot of thin gruel simmering in the soup kitchen until sundown. Shen Zhiwei thought, I know how to solve this. Sweet potatoes, land reclamation, commercial taxes, local militias. Over the next nine years, she drove each of these measures into the parched earth, and turned a city surrounded by a thousand li of barren land into the only island in the chaos where no one had to lock their doors at night. Yan’an’s granaries filled up, the sound of children reading rose from the charity schools, and the lights on the city walls burned through the night. People said the Shen family had produced an extraordinary daughter. But this world had never intended to remember her. The grain accounts she prepared for her father became “a well-managed household.” The city she defended earned her praise as “the legacy of a virtuous wife.” In the end, the court brushed aside with a single edict the very land she had poured her heart and soul into saving. Even her name was to be entered in the imperial register and locked away in the palace, where she would become a clay statue wrapped in brocade. Shen Zhiwei suddenly felt that she could no longer save this Ming dynasty. That autumn, she stood atop Yan’an’s city wall, watching rank after rank of soldiers march south, dust blotting out the sky. The fate she had fought so desperately to prolong for this dynasty was slipping away, thread by thread, through her fingers. Chongzhen hanged himself in the inner palace. The officials died defending the city as it fell. Shen Zhiwei stood on the wall all night. Just before dawn, she turned to the people behind her and said, “The realm is in chaos. Someone has to set it right.” Many years later, the historians of the new dynasty opened the first volume and asked her how they should begin. She said, “Just write four characters: Spring Returns to the Long Lands.” “Spring returns before the traveler does; mountain apes share the dawn and dusk, river willows the wind and haze. I am like the Exile of Changsha once more; how many years will it be this time?” She was no traveler. These loess highlands were her roots; this scorched land was her country. Spring would not arrive behind her. It lay ahead. Theme: An opening note: Why I wrote Spring Returns to the Long Lands This book isn’t meant to be a power fantasy about “a female historian saving the Ming dynasty through foresight.” I want to write about how a woman is stripped of her name, achievements, and freedom within the vast web woven from patriarchal and imperial power, and how she ultimately tears that web apart with her own hands. Shen Zhiwei spends ten years getting things done. Any one of her achievements would be enough to make a man’s name endure in the history books. But what does she get? Her accomplishments are credited to her father, and her accolades are framed as “the legacy of a virtuous wife.” Even the emperor’s way of valuing her is to bring her into the palace and make her a consort, transferring her talents from her father’s hands to her husband’s, never letting them belong to her. This world recognizes her usefulness but refuses to acknowledge her existence. For ten years of achievement, all she gets are titles like “the Shen family’s daughter” and “Imperial Noble Consort.” The more weighty her title, the less she herself matters. What I want to write about is precisely this erasure. A woman can be strong enough to sustain an entire region, yet still be treated like an object to be passed around, bestowed, and given titles. Even her refusal must be spoken on her knees as “my parents’ command.” This isn’t because any one person is evil; it’s because the entire system only allows women to exist in that way. It dresses up plunder as favor and beautifies imprisonment as imperial grace. If you don’t give thanks, you’re ungrateful. If you do, you cease to be yourself. Shen Jingxiu is a good father, and that’s true. But even a good father is part of the patriarchy. He loves and protects her, yet never thinks to let her stand apart from the identity of “daughter.” He accepts the benefits of her achievements and feels for her grievances, but cannot give her a title that truly belongs to her. Only at the very end, when he gives her the name “Weiyan,” does this father finally free her from the shell of being “the Shen family’s daughter.” This is one of the few passages in the book I wrote very slowly, scarcely able to bring myself to set it down. As for Chongzhen, I don’t want to portray him as a foolish ruler. He is diligent and frugal, laboring day and night, and that only makes the situation more despairing. Faced with a capable woman, even a good emperor’s first instinct is still to bring her into the palace. That is what makes imperial power so terrifying: it has nothing to do with whether a person is good or bad. It simply turns everything into the emperor’s property, including people. So Shen Zhiwei’s final choice is neither revenge nor a descent into darkness. It is self-rescue. She will strip the name “Shen Zhiwei” of every dependency, use the dynasty’s fate to forge a path for herself, and pay an incalculable blood debt so that her name can stand independently in the history books. The road is agonizing, but turning back means the phoenix palanquin, and a lifetime spent living for someone else. “Spring returns before the traveler does; mountain apes share the dawn and dusk, river willows the wind and haze. I am like the Exile of Changsha once more; how many years will it be this time?” Jia Yi was disillusioned, but at least he could be remembered as a scholar. She isn’t even granted the distinction of being “unrecognized”; she is merely a footnote in someone else’s biography. I wrote this book because I wanted to turn that footnote into a history of her own. May every girl who works herself to the bone only to realize she’s paving the way for someone else live to see her own spring return.