Xuanquan Office Diary

The website of Laiyuewen is located in Xuanquan, a post station located at the westernmost end of the Hexi Corridor by the Han Empire. Its daily routine consists of receiving envoys, inspecting places, preparing horses and changing carriages, and delivering documents - trivial, repetitive, and no one pays attention to it. Sefuhong is the webmaster of this site. He is in charge of the stove, the horses, the keys, and whether everyone passing by can survive in the Gobi. He has no ambitions. He just wants to do a good job, send people away, and get through the day. Until one day, a secret order came from Chang'an: escort a Wusun woman back to her country. This way, he walked out of Dunhuang and entered the power whirlpool of the thirty-six countries in the Western Regions. The snow in Chigucheng, Ni Mi's knife, Xu Bu's lame leg, Li Xian's silence, Zheng Ji's ambition - everyone is making moves on this chess game, and Hong discovers that he has never been a bystander, he has always been the piece on the chess board. From the Hexi Corridor to the foot of the Tianshan Mountains, from the peace mission to the establishment of the Western Region Protectorate, Hong recorded it all in a diary: who came in which year and month, what meals they ate, how many people died, and who never came back. Two thousand years later, archaeological team members brushed off the dust and read out a name from the slips unearthed from the Xuanquan site in Dunhuang - "The hanging spring houses the stingy husband." That was the first time this name was pronounced. The book is written in the first-person diary style of a webmaster, telling the story of a border official in the Han Dynasty who was swept away by the torrent of history, but always believed in "doing the job well" as his creed. Humor accumulates strength and ends with a single blow. Read more of my work