Three Thousand Years of the Stone Drums

The people of Qin moved east to the Qian and Wei rivers, and used stone as their medium: they carved ten stone drums bearing the epic of Qin. From the first chisel stroke of Duke Wen, the stone drums endured three thousand years of wind and rain—buried in wasteland, unearthed again, moved into the Confucian temple, filled with gold, scraped of their gold by the Jin and abandoned in the wild, recognized by the people of Fengxiang among ruins, celebrated in poems by scholars of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, recarved anew under Qianlong, wrapped in cotton quilts and packed into wooden crates by the Palace Museum staff of the Republic, and carried south ten thousand li along railways and rivers, then north again ten thousand li. The stone drums cannot speak, but they remember every pair of hands that lifted them and every person who stood guard beside them. Through three thousand years of circulation, dynasties rose and fell, wars burned, and human affairs waxed and waned; the characters carved on the stone have grown shallow and chipped, yet they remain. The stone remains, so the characters remain. The characters remain, so the origins of the Qin people remain. This is a history of the stone drums' travels, and also the story of those who remembered them. — Description from novelcodex.orgFull novel: Three Thousand Years of the Stone Drums — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠