Liu Sanxiu

This is a full-length historical novel by the Taiwanese historical novelist Gao Yang, originally titled Liu Sanxiu, serialized in the Taiwanese Minzu Evening News from March 1978 and published in book form in 1979 by Taipei's Nanjing Publishing Company. Mainland editions appeared under such titles as The Beautiful Widow, The Beautiful Widow Liu Sanxiu, and The Great Qing Consort Liu Sanxiu; in 2012 Jilin Publishing Group included it in "The Collected Works of Gao Yang, Collector's Edition," restoring the original title Liu Sanxiu. The novel draws on the legend of Liu Sanxiu, a widow from Changshu in the early Qing. According to the Qing-era notebook Guoxu Zhi by Shuxi Yesou, during the Shunzhi reign the Qing army advanced south of the Yangtze, and Liu Sanxiu was captured and taken north amid the chaos; because of her beauty she entered a princely household, and unofficial histories widely claim she became the principal consort of Prince Yu, Dodo, who had no sons before marrying her but had two after. Yet on close examination of early Qing archives and clan records, whether this "consort's" husband was Prince Yu Dodo or Prince Duanzhong Bolo, who also led troops south, has long been disputed. The great Qing historian Meng Sen noted that the materials behind the book were "very interesting" yet full of doubts. Gao Yang starts precisely from this gap in the historical record: on one hand he lays out the rise and fall of the Huang family, a great clan of Jiangnan, and the flames and plunder of the Ming-Qing transition; on the other he has his characters maneuver among the power and favor of the princely household. With an antiquarian's eye he compares unofficial histories with official ones, and with a novelist's craft he reconstructs that ambiguous past, embedding individual fates in the crevices of the early Qing power structure. "History into fiction, fiction into history" was always Gao Yang's most masterly method, and this book is among his most concise and most mystery-tinged works.