In the autumn of 1962, a green train carried Lin Zhiyuan from the frozen fields of the Great Northern Wilderness to a small county town called Nanjiang. A Tsinghua graduate who had once worked in a central ministry, he was a man repeatedly dragged to the depths by his times—yet somehow, time and again, he found his footing in the cracks.At the counter of the county credit office, he processed one ordinary loan after another: draft oxen, grain rations, production equipment. Caught b...

Xing Mozhi has spent forty years perfecting his ink paintings — his brush, his mountains, his quiet studio. At sixty-five, he has everything a master painter could want, and nothing left to paint for. Then his old friend Boss Li, a gold-chained businessman with more schemes than sense, bursts into his studio with a camera drone, a livestreaming influencer named Linda, and an outrageous proposal: drive the legendary Route 318 across the Tibetan Plateau to Lhasa.For Xing, the trip is...