Biography of New Horse Week

In the winter of the eighth year of Daye in the Sui Dynasty, in Chiping, Bozhou, Shandong, twelve-year-old Ma Zhou stood silently in front of his parents' new graves. After his death, his relatives are dividing up the last remaining property of his family. He left only two boxes of books, and from then on he experienced the harshness of the world alone. Making a living in the market, he glimpsed the exorbitant taxes in the account books of a wine shop; as a state official, he personally experienced the shortcomings of the system in the rigid officialdom. His loneliness and anger turned into the footprints of his travels across the mountains and rivers, and his writings recorded the true blood and tears beneath the folds of the prosperous age of the early Tang Dynasty. In the fifth year of Zhenguan, Chang'an. Living under a military general, he waited for the opportunity that would shock the world. Overnight, before the ink on "Chen Shizheng Shu" was dry, the commoner and poor man entered the palace. From then on, he became the sharpest scalpel in Li Shimin's hand, walking between the glory and shadow of the Zhenguan court for twenty years. From an orphan to a prime minister, he never formed a party in his life. He only used his meticulous wisdom and forward-looking insights to cure the empire's chronic diseases. When he finished dictating the last memorial on the sickbed, the fate of the entire Tang Dynasty was soaked in the candlelight burned by this "prime minister in civilian clothes" with his life. This is an epic about a genius from a poor family, a legend of a lonely reformer, and a sober and compassionate sigh in the prosperous age of Zhenguan.