On a November morning in 1935, a woman named Shi Jianqiao walked into a Buddhist temple in Tianjin with a pistol hidden under her coat. The man praying a few rows ahead had ordered her father executed and his severed head displayed in public. She had waited ten years for this.

She shot him, then calmly handed out leaflets explaining why. The trial that followed gripped the whole country and ended in a pardon. You'll live through all of it across the season — and come out the other side reading your first Chinese.