Lishan Notes

“Blue fields, jade-white bones, and soil soaked red with blood; all were built upon white bones to make the peace of Zhenguan.” Zhenguan: a golden age in the history books. Some are born to nobility; others rise to become generals and ministers. But in this age of prosperity, refugees collapse in the streets, human lives are worth no more than weeds, and every heavy snowfall leaves another patch of people by the roadside who will never rise again. A thirty-five-year-old stomach cancer patient opens his eyes once more in a mass grave outside Lantian, reborn as a seven-year-old refugee boy with no household registration. He makes his way to Chang’an, only to collapse beneath a wall in Anshan Ward. His goal for the first day: stay alive. Don’t die again. His goal for the first year: protect the people around him. But in this age, he can protect no one. That is, until a poem cursing Li Shimin brings him face-to-face with the emperor. He sets up the Chun Zhi Workshop, giving more than three hundred orphans a meal to eat. What exactly lies buried beneath the bluestone slabs of the Taiji Palace? What will he grow into upon those blue stones?