Carved Dragons, Engraved Phoenixes

Xie Bin is just a vendor with a stall on the antique street, scraping by on woodcarving skills that are passable enough: he reads customers and quotes prices accordingly, yet keeps to the old rule of "no fakes, no swindling." After a carving knife accidentally cuts his palm, the jade pendant he has worn for years begins to behave strangely, and a warm current surges from within him, flowing through the knife into the wood, letting him sense a material's grain, hardness, and inner structure. With this "feel," he carves a vivid, true-to-form Galloping Horse Treading on a Flying Swallow from rosewood and gains a modest reputation in the trade. From then on, while honing his carving, he travels north and south: on the jade street of Nandu he encounters icy-type bright green jade, black jadeite, and the thrills of stone gambling; he learns seals, Chengni inkstones, and micro-carving from old masters, and also learns to maneuver among people at auctions and trade fairs. As his craft improves, he rises from a young man selling woodcarvings with a single knife at a street stall to the owner of the shop "Yipin Jian," and around him appear all sorts of figures—his landlord's daughter, a female urban management officer, a model, a daughter of an old family—bringing both romance and trouble. The book takes woodcarving as its main thread, weaving in the ways of the antique trade and everyday human ties, and tells how a craftsman from the bottom changes his fate through skill.