A man named Yong Liang made a startling discovery—one that has shaken Chinese society to its core and left many asking, “What is real, and what is fake?”
It began with a simple request from Yong Liang’s father, Yong Sheng, who asked him to help his grandfather clean the family’s home in a remote village in Qinghai Province.
One weekend, Yong Liang left Shanghai and traveled west to fulfill the request.
When he arrived, he got to work—sweeping, mopping, dusting, doing yard work. Nothing unusual.
Then he came across a room cluttered with old boxes. He began moving them out so he could clean and rearrange the space.
One box sat open. Curious, he looked inside. It was filled with old books—bindings unlike anything he’d ever seen.
The texture, stitching, and covers immediately caught his attention.
Yong Liang had always loved to read, ever since childhood. And with a bit of time to spare, he picked up one of the books—and began to read.
But what Yong Liang found next shocked even him—so deeply that it would soon shake the small town of Gahaizhen to its foundation, captivate the entire Chinese society, and begin to quietly rewrite the story of China overnight.
At first, the book appeared mundane. Names, dates, locations, records of land use and public works—ordinary entries from what seemed like a governmental registry or bureaucratic ledger.
So Yong Liang kept reading.
There were references to administrative titles, descriptions of duties and functions, water rights allocations, land deeds, and what appeared to be early governmental processes.
He was impressed. Fascinated, even. It was a remarkable archive—something that suggested his family had once held a unique position in governance. A treasure trove of knowledge buried in dust.
Encouraged, Yong Liang reached for another book.
This one, however, was different.
As he read, the blood drained from his face.
His hands began to tremble. A cold sweat ran down his back.
What was written in those pages did not just hint at historical significance—it pointed to something far greater. The implications were staggering. If what he read was true, the history he and a billion others had been taught since childhood—was misrepresented.
As Yong Liang turned the pages of another volume, he began to recognize names—figures he had studied years ago in school. Familiar names. Names from the chapters of Chinese history every child in the nation was has learned.
But this was no school-issued textbook.
It was one of the books from the storage room in his grandfather’s home. Quietly preserved in a forgotten box, left to dust and time. A part of his family’s collection—overlooked, untouched, yet full of something deeper. The writing was deliberate and exacting. It contained titles, ranks, policies, decisions, personal details: speech patterns, regional dialects, travel routes, disputed treaties.
And curiously, many of the names he came across were not names he had ever seen in the public record.
He kept reading.
That’s when it became clear: