Peach Blossom Spring Manor

Peach Blossom Spring Manor is a long urban farming novel by the web author Dong Ren. The protagonist, Wang Zheng, is an ordinary internet marketing worker at a home renovation company in Beijing, earning a meager salary and living in a rented room in an urban village about to be demolished, squeezing onto four subway rides a day for his commute; his dream is merely to save some money, return to his hometown, buy a house, and start a family. While sorting through old belongings, he finds an old copy of The Divine Farmer's Materia Medica under his bedboard, unexpectedly becomes caught up in some kind of fateful opportunity, and later comes into contact with a mysterious "Divine Farmer System." The story then shifts to its main line of "returning home to farm": relying on the system's abilities, Wang Zheng returns to the countryside and, starting from a holiday manor, gradually builds up planting, breeding, catering, and tourism, turning a patch of rural land into an enviable "Peach Blossom Spring Manor." The title comes from Tao Yuanming's lines "Picking chrysanthemums by the eastern hedge, I catch sight of the southern mountains," and the work combines an easy, leisurely pastoral imagination with the satisfaction of business management and industrial expansion—as the synopsis says, "others at most get rich farming, but he farmed himself an empire." The book moves at a brisk pace, alternating between everyday minutiae and career ascent, and is a fairly representative work in the urban-rural farming genre; at the same time, as an early "lightweight power-fantasy read," it also has problems such as idealized plotting and occasionally loose subplots.