Value Grain, Scorn Gold and Jade

Adapted from an original line in the preface to Song Yingxing’s Tiangong Kaiwu. Eight characters capture the theme of the entire book: technology should sustain the people, not serve princes and nobles. Dignified and classical, with cultural depth and echoes of history.

Alternatives: Ink-Line Pattern, The Unfading Tiangong, The Hundred Crafts Family, Gongshu Zhe

Book Description (200 words)

In the tenth year of the Chongzhen reign of the Ming dynasty, Song Yingxing entrusted secret pages from the newly printed Tiangong Kaiwu to the craftsman Gongshu Tie. “Bring them out again when the world is ready for this book.”

For the next three hundred years, the Gongshu family upheld the ancestral creed “Value grain, scorn gold and jade.” They hid their techniques under book-burning orders, destroyed crossbow plans, and drilled holes into warship keels. Every technological leap brought the same question of conscience: save lives or take them? The secret manuscript was divided among nine hiding places, passed down through the generations, with an ink-line pattern between the brows serving as their mark.

In 2026, amid the fiercest chip blockade, the thirty-ninth-generation heir, Gongshu Zhe, has a sudden insight after touching an object: a tempering method from three thousand years ago can solve a nanoscale etching problem. When the independent chip is successfully fabricated, he finally understands: what the Gongshu family has protected all along is not a book, but the right of civilization to survive.

A technological epic spanning three thousand years, and a millennia-long swan song to the conscience of artisans.