It was a few minutes before midnight. Under the moonlight the bronze lions outside the Forbidden City's Shenwumen Gate gleamed with a steely chill. At their supervisor's insistence, cultural-relic conservator Lin Qianzhou and a colleague had come to inspect a hairline crack in a jade seal marked "Bestowed by the Qianlong Emperor."
The complaints began as soon as they set out. Lin disliked a grave-yard-shift as much as anyone, but the nonstop grumbling finally snapped his patience. "If it's that bad, head back. I'll finish it myself," he blurted. His partner, looking as if a private scheme had just paid off, agreed at once, tossed out a breezy "Catch you later," and disappeared into the night.
In the restoration studio Lin spread a silicone mat on the bench and set the seal squarely in the center. To study the crack he lifted the piece and tipped it toward the light. The balance shifted, a fingertip slipped—and the seal crashed onto the mat. The box thudded once, then rang with a sharp, brittle clink.
Lin's heart stopped. Frantic, he snatched up the seal. No new damage. He exhaled. Then he noticed that the jolt had popped open a tiny panel hidden inside the base. Behind it, a brass stud tumbled free and rolled across the mat.
The inner face of the stud was etched with characters. Through a magnifying glass he made out a Republic-era date and a string of mysterious latitude-and-longitude coordinates. At that exact moment the belfry that had been silent for a century let out a single hollow dong. One stroke—then nothing.
By Ming-and-Qing tradition the third watch of the night should have been marked by 108 peals. And in twenty-first-century Beijing, who rang bells at all? Maybe he'd imagined it. Yet the nagging unease told him something was wrong. When the inspection paperwork was done, Lin angled himself so the security camera saw only a routine assessment, slipped the brass stud into his pocket, and went home.
At dawn the director of the historical archives was found dead among the stacks. Cause of death: still under investigation, though foul play was provisionally ruled out. Only one thing marred the wall above the body—a smear of blood spelling:
39° 55′ N, 116° 23′ E – One solitary bell at midnight.
Lin heard the news from coworkers as soon as he clocked in. The numbers jolted him: they were the very coordinates engraved on the stud, pinpointing the long-demolished Cold Palace deep inside the Forbidden City.
A memory surfaced. A year earlier Lin had pored over a pseudo-diary called Chronicle of the Jia-Shen Year under Chongzhen. The set remained intact—except for one sheet torn from Volume XXXV, covering roughly the sixteenth year of Emperor Chongzhen. The missing page happened to be the seventh day of the seventh lunar month. He remembered because the spine still showed half a vermilion marginal note: "Midnight, a lone bell tolls; palace guards lose color …" The rest was illegible.
Police did not treat the blood-written coordinates lightly. The first person to discover the body—a student intern—had dialed emergency services immediately. The authorities kept the director's death under wraps and clamped down on any mention of the blood message. But word had already trickled through the conservation institute, and everyone knew where those numbers pointed:
Qixiang Palace—the Cold Palace of the late Ming court.