Jia Ge Lu

The cabinet does not hold power, but it holds the world's information. Su Lian, a southern inspector who was at the bottom of the Yuan Dynasty system, spent thirty years secretly writing a "Jia Ge Lu" in the cracks of the imperial edict to burn and reform the government. From the time when Renzong opened the imperial examination and Yingzong was killed, to the collapse of Zhizheng banknotes and red scarves everywhere, he watched how the grassland ancestral system strangled the laws of the Central Plains and Han Dynasty, watched how the powerful ministers emptied the imperial power, and watched how the refugees gnawed at the foundation of the empire. When the Ming Dynasty's army came to the city, he buried the manuscript in the soil, leaving behind a sigh for future generations: "When it is here, the world will be there; when it is gone, even if the world exists, it will be a fake history." This is a novel about institutions, archives and forgetting, as well as an alternative history of the decline and fall of the Yuan Dynasty.