Datang: from Dragon Seed to Dust

Turning to the first page of "The Tang Dynasty: From Dragon Seed to Dust", what hits your face is not the majesty of gold and iron horses, but a quiet and biting chill. "The spring of the thirteenth year of the great cause comes extremely late." The first sentence at the beginning sets the tone of the entire work - this is not a glorious chapter praising virtues, but an epic about choice, struggle and fate. What impresses me most about this book is that it pulls history off the altar and brings warmth back to those characters symbolized by history books. Fifty-two-year-old Li Yuan stood in the backyard of Taiyuan Liushou Mansion. His temples were gray and his back was no longer straight, but "his eyes were still bright, as bright as two deep wells." Eighteen-year-old Li Shimin "has an indescribable sharpness between his brows" - the author uses a few strokes to make the father and son step out of the textbook and become flesh-and-blood people. He will be hungry, scared, cry, laugh, and sit on the throne late at night and ask himself: Am I doing the right thing? This "de-deification" writing style runs throughout. There is a passage in the book that impressed me deeply: "How many things can happen in three hundred years? It is enough for a middle-aged man who came out of Taiyuan to bury his two sons with his own hands in a pool of blood at Xuanwu Gate. It is enough for a woman to walk back to the Daming Palace step by step from the ancient Qingdeng Buddha in Ganye Temple. It is enough for a Hu Jiedushi to raise troops in Fan Yang and destroy the Kaiyuan Dynasty. The four words "Prosperity" were smashed into pieces. "Three hundred years of the rise and fall of dynasties are compressed into a few lines of text. Behind each sentence is a thrilling history, and the author does not choose to judge from the perspective of God, but only presents it calmly - because history is never a black and white judgment question, but a series of multiple-choice questions with no standard answers. As a historical novel, the text quality of "Datang: From Dragon Seed to Dust" is also quite outstanding. There are no common exaggerations and routines in online novels, but instead there is a calmness and restraint of classical narrative. The author "Old Man Dai, an enthusiastic citizen" obviously has considerable knowledge of the history of the Sui and Tang Dynasties, but he is not bound by historical materials. Instead, he fills in the gaps in history with human details, so that readers can gain both intellectual satisfaction and emotional resonance while reading. The introduction of the book finally says: "The rise and fall of dynasties is never because of a dragon's throne, but because of a group of unwilling people. And you are one of them." This sentence points out the core of the book - history is not a cold chronology, but is written by countless "unwilling" people. Reading this book, you are not only reading about the Tang Dynasty, but also about every ordinary person struggling to survive in the tide of the times - including ourselves.

I am coming! Good looking, Chen Shang Jian Tu, please read!

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