Banyan Sedan Jade

An ancient village nestled in the mountains of Yunnan has a chilling rule: the night the clan chief dreams of a red sedan chair and a white-haired girl, disaster is sure to follow.

White-haired children die one after another, said to be “the offspring of the girl in the sedan chair.” The “petals” scattered by the red sedan chair make the villagers’ bodies rot into pus-filled sores. Bones of missing caravan travelers drift through the red waves of the Qingshui River. The patchwork clothes hung on the banyan tree always seep dark red water on nights of the full moon...

These sinister events have haunted the village for a century, but the year college student Qi Ying returns home, cracks begin to appear. A silver bangle beneath the incense burner in the ancestral hall, red cloth in the foundation of the mountain god temple, a boy’s diary in a sinkhole, peach-blossom marks in the caravan’s ledger... Together, they reveal not a ghost story, but a name deliberately buried: “Yao.”

A hundred years ago, she was an albino woman tied to the banyan tree by villagers, the promised bride of a caravan leader, and the sharpest thorn in the legend of the red sedan chair. Science can explain white hair as an illness, red waves as minerals, and disasters as natural phenomena, but it cannot answer these questions: Why does her silver bangle always grow hot on rainy nights? Why does her shadow always appear in the clan chief’s dreams? And why does the ancient banyan tree that once swallowed people still protect this village?

When the final piece of peach-blossom satin falls into place, the truth proves more chilling than the legend: the so-called “divine punishment” was nothing but human cruelty and kindness acting out an exceedingly long play beneath the shade of a thousand-year-old banyan tree. And the secret of the red sedan chair and the white-haired girl will, at last, take root in a new ring of the tree, through reverence and reconciliation.