Embers of the Broken River

When Shen Kuo wrote "Awaiting those who come after," he could not have imagined that these four words would become a question eight hundred years later. From the Song to the Qing dynasties, Jia Xian's salvaged calculations from the fire, Zhao Laojiu's buried bamboo slips, Lin Zexu's meticulously drawn nautical charts... countless questioners risked their lives to answer the questions of their predecessors, only to be crushed by the same plow—a plow that claimed to be "useful," rendering anger only capable of boiling salt, reducing mathematics to a lowly skill, and ensuring that nautical charts were never revised. Thus, there was the old locust tree on Coal Hill, where not only an emperor hanged himself, but also a dynasty without a network of questions to support it. Thus, there was the Sino-Japanese War of 1894, where the Zhiyuan warship's compass was half a degree off from the Japanese warship's—half a degree at sea is the difference between missing and being hit. Thus, there was Nanjing in 1937, where soldiers used their bodies to withstand the steel torrent, and civilians cried out names in pools of blood that would never be answered.