Xiangling

The young lady Wenzhen was known throughout Xiangling Prefecture as impossible to marry off. She read the Record of Transmission and Practice, ran a charity school, and drew plans for new farmhouses for the tenant farmers. All she wanted was to find a righteous, enduring principle that could bring happiness to an entire village. At nineteen, she married a highly revered master of classical scholarship. Only after the wedding did she learn that her husband wanted not a wife, but a female disciple to copy books for him. The year she was widowed, her late husband's final note revealed that she would lose her property if she remarried Lan Weisheng. Lan Weisheng was the young chief editor whose background was a mystery and whom the whole city gossiped about. On one side was twenty years' worth of family fortune. On the other was a once-in-a-lifetime love. And in Xiangling, on the eve of the abolition of the imperial examinations, a foreign doctor borrowed money to pursue his dream, a young heir to a prominent family entered school only to drop out, and a respected local benefactor concealed a dark old crime. Everyone was caught up in their own ambitions, debts, and reputations, waiting for either sundown or sunrise.