Five Memories, One Corpse

Yongzheng era, 1726. The condemned scholar Wang Jingqi dies violently in his prison cell mere hours before his scheduled public execution. Five officials—an ambitious jailer, a cowardly physician, a proud executioner, a sanctimonious censor, and a lowly case archivist—each swear their own version of the death is absolute truth. As a young clerk from the Ministry of Punishments pits their testimonies against each other, he uncovers that the bureaucracy has already chosen which memory will become history, and anyone who remembers differently must be silenced.