A Portrait of Republican-Era Jianghu: The Nine Interlocking Rings of the Thousand Gates

In the early years of the Republic of China, a mysterious book known as The Seventy-Two Tricks of the Qianmen circulated through the underworld. It recorded the definitive collection of every scam from ancient times to the present. Eight years ago, Jiang Guiqing, the Qianmen's leading practitioner known as "Seventh Master Ghost," suddenly vanished. Pages from the seventy-two tricks scattered far and wide, and rival underworld factions plunged into bloody conflict over them.

In the autumn of 1917, Yu Jingshan, proprietor of the Hengtai Pawnshop in Shanghai, was drawn into the struggle over the missing pages by the case of a "vanished bride." He joined forces with Yu Hongxiao, a female con artist; Hu Tiezui, a fortune-teller skilled in physiognomy; and Dou Xiaoliu, a dockside ruffian. Together, the four formed the "Qianmen Revival Group" to recover the pages. Yet every move they made was part of a much larger game. Puyan, a former Qing prince, had built a vast empire of scams under the name "New Qianmen," raising funds to restore the Qing dynasty. And the "disappearance" of Seventh Master Ghost eight years earlier turned out to be the start of an eight-year-long "scam to end all scams."

From stock swindles in Shanghai's foreign concessions to coded fortune-telling phrases in Suzhou teahouses, from media manipulation at newspaper offices to intelligence battles between dockside gangs, all seventy-two Qianmen tricks unfold one by one. When the missing pages are finally brought together, Yu Jingshan understands that the end goal of the seventy-two tricks is not to "complete the book," but to "put an end to scams."