I Use Technology to Rebuild the Garden of Gardens

In 2019, the digital restoration project at the Old Summer Palace hits a bottleneck. Zhang Huaijin, a young scholar recently returned from studying in Britain, is stumped by the incomplete plans. When he accidentally touches a fragment of an ancestral half-sheet of tangyang architectural models, the modern laboratory before his eyes vanishes with a roar. He has become Lei Jinyu, a second-generation craftsman of the famed Lei family in the forty-sixth year of the Kangxi Emperor's reign. At this time, the young Fourth Prince, Yinzhen, has just named this desolate hill Yuanming and orders him to find a source of running water within three days, or face punishment. Zhang Huaijin can only combine modern geological surveying knowledge with traditional methods, using a bamboo tube to locate the underground watercourse. From then on, by day he is the architect leading the modern digital restoration project; by night, he becomes successive generations of the Lei family ancestors, experiencing the Old Summer Palace's founding under Kangxi, Qianlong's garden of ten thousand gardens, the raging fire of 1860, and the ruins of the Republican era. He cannot stop the collapse of that rotten empire, but he vows to etch the pinnacle of Chinese civilization into the nation's digital memory, brick by brick.

Main character: Zhang Huaijin, a contemporary scholar, architectural designer, and painter and calligrapher. His father is a Dunhuang studies scholar, and he comes from a family with a long scholarly tradition. He studied in Britain and visited museums around the world. He leads the Old Summer Palace cultural relic research and digital reconstruction project, and is also the secret inheritor of the Lei craftsmen's spirit. Steady and tenacious, he is deeply devoted to his country and its people. What he wants most is