Jiangnan Water Town 1900

In 1900, in the water town of Jiangnan at the turn of the century, a small river named Rouge River outside Suzhou still flowed day and night, as if time had never really moved forward. The river water is as turbid as a pot of soup that has been boiled for hundreds of years, laden with silkworm corpses, feces, foreign factory waste and countless dreams crushed by the times, but it is still called "like silk" by poets. In this land that has been repeatedly beautified by ancient poems and old paintings, tradition is dying in the most absurd and comical way, while the new world is coming in the most brutal and greedy manner. In this novel, there are no heroes, only mortals who have been repeatedly rubbed by the times; there is no redemption, only layers of webs - a web woven by silk, a web woven by opium, a web woven by railways, a web woven by revolution, and a web woven by escape. Everyone is struggling to escape, but they find that no matter whether they escape to Shanghai, Beijing, or a foreign ship, they are just falling from one net into another that is tighter and darker.