Liuli Qizhengyi

In the 29th year of Wanli in the Ming Dynasty, Matteo Ricci dedicated a self-ringing bell to the Forbidden City. That epoch-making bell not only told the time, but also signaled the start of a huge "civilization contract." Four hundred years later, Lu Jianwei, the Forbidden City's top cultural relic restorer, discovered that the collection of Western clocks and watches in the museum had strange anomalies. At the same time, Lin Yilan, the guardian of Macau's mixed-race cultural heritage, deciphered the civilization code left by Matteo Ricci in the ancient clock left by his grandmother. One north and one south, one palace and one city. Lu Jianwei, who originally believed in "returning cultural relics to their proper place", and Lin Yilan, who insisted on "sharing civilizations", were forced to join forces. They followed the clues laid by sages such as Matteo Ricci, Xu Guangqi, and Nan Huairen, from the star coordinates of the ancient observatory in Beijing to the inscriptions on the ruins of Ruins of St. Paul's in Macau; from the ancient churches in Lisbon to the mysterious underground palace in Goa... They discovered that this dialogue across oceans and continents was far from a simple "spreading of Western learning to the east" or "spreading of middle school to the west." It is an unparalleled game with countless magnificent cultural relics as chess pieces and the entire Eastern and Western civilizations as the chessboard. Behind the scenes, there is a capital giant who intends to monopolize the power of civilized interpretation, and an extremist organization that believes in "purity" and vows to cut off all dialogue channels... When the truth of history becomes a bargaining chip for power, and when the blending of civilizations is regarded as original sin, how do two young people protect the memory that has been deliberately forgotten in a global pursuit and obstruction? And how will the artifact that ultimately points to the destiny of mankind, the "Seven Political Instruments of Glazed Glass," see the light of day again and ask questions about the future?