In the West, poets like Virgil and Dante sought meaning in loss — turning exile and despair into immortal verse. In China, centuries before, Jia Yi stood beneath the same moon that once shone upon Qu Yuan's final walk into the river, and through grief, he found a mirror to his own fate.
Western Han Dynasty, around 170 BCE
The night air over Changsha was thick with mist. A lone scholar in plain robes stood by the banks of the Xiang River, his hands clasped behind his back.Before him, the dark waters whispered like voices from another age."Qu Yuan," he murmured softly, "you fell for loyalty — yet Heaven did not save you."
Jia Yi had once been a rising star at court — young, brilliant, unafraid to speak truth. But truth, in the palace of emperors, is a dangerous light.Banished to distant Changsha, he carried the weight of ideals unfulfilled. Tonight, he had come to honor the poet whose tragedy mirrored his own.
He knelt and placed a bundle of orchids upon the water. "If the world cannot bear integrity," he said, "must the honest man flee it?"The river swallowed the flowers, carrying them into darkness.
The moon rose higher, casting silver upon the ripples. In that pale light, Jia Yi seemed to glimpse Qu Yuan's reflection — calm, sorrowful, unyielding.For a moment, the centuries between them dissolved.
When dawn broke, Jia Yi returned to his study and wrote "Fu on Sorrow" , a lament not only for Qu Yuan, but for every soul caught between wisdom and a corrupt age.
He wrote:
"The loyal perish, yet their spirit endures;the world forgets, but Heaven remembers."
And in that line, he transformed despair into understanding — that the struggle for virtue, though lonely, is the purest dialogue between man and destiny.
But where Jia Yi met sorrow with poetry, others would meet oppression with rebellion. Centuries later, one man — bold, unorthodox, and unafraid — would tear apart the conventions of thought itself, questioning not only the world's hypocrisy but the boundaries of belief. His name was Li Zhi.