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Lin Qiuping runs a stationery shop across from a middle school and has been on her own since her divorce twelve years ago. At a thirty-year class reunion she meets Lu Mingyuan, her old deskmate. Weeks later a stack of old books topples in her shop and she opens the class keepsake album again, and under the curled plastic cover, pressed into the binding, she finds a line of pencil writing she never lifted the corner to see.

After seven years running a breakfast stall in a city in the south, Ma Changshun and He Xiuying close it down and go back to their county town, because their son cannot get a school place without a local household registration. The new shop is quiet and the street runs a tab. Then He Xiuying finds a pencil drawing under her son’s pillow, and the two characters he pressed into the back of it.

Chen Yulan lends her younger brother the savings she put aside before she was married, so he can put down a deposit on a flat in the provincial capital. She keeps it from her husband, who is on the road with a truck most of the month. Two years later, looking for his laundry in the cab, she finds a notebook under the bunk, and a line in his handwriting that tells her he has known all along.

She escaped a locked shed as a girl, reached the far south of Hainan, and spent thirty years learning cotton weaving from the Li women of the island. When she came home she rebuilt the tools, taught the whole district, and made cotton cloth cheap enough for ordinary people. This is the story of Huang Daopo.

When an emperor was captured and half a million men were destroyed, the court wanted to run south. Yu Qian stopped them with one sentence, put a different emperor on the throne, and held the walls of Beijing with a patched together army. Eight years later the man he had brought home from captivity had him killed. This is his story.

He failed the highest examination, spent ten years in the capital living on scraps, came home to find his youngest son starved, and was taken prisoner by rebels in the fall of the dynasty. Out of all of it he made poems so exact that later ages gave him two names: the Sage of Poetry and the Historian of Poetry. This is the story of Du Fu.

He copied documents in the capital for a living, then threw down his brush and rode west. With thirty-six men he burned a Xiongnu camp in the night, killed a shaman, seized a king, and spent thirty-one years holding the western regions for Han. In the end he sent the emperor one line: I only hope to enter the Jade Gate alive. This is the story of Ban Chao.

He was sixteen when he took the throne and seventy when he died, and in between he doubled the size of the Han empire, broke the Xiongnu, opened the road to the west, and buried a fortune in wars. Then, near the end, he fought his own crown prince in the streets of the capital, lost him, and wrote an edict admitting that he had been wrong. This is the story of Han Wudi.

A conscript climbs an earthen platform at dawn and looks north across the desert. He and two other men hold one tower of the Han frontier, watching for dust, reading footprints in the sand, and waiting for the order to light a fire that will run tower to tower toward the capital. The wooden slips they left behind have outlasted the wall.

In the summer of 1140 his infantry broke the iron cavalry of the Jin at Yancheng, and for a moment the road to the old capital lay open. Then the orders came from the court in the south, one after another, telling him to pull back. A year later he was in a prison cell, and the men who put him there could not even name his crime.