Reining In the Barbarian Horse

Le Hu Ma (Reining In the Barbarian Steeds) is a historical time-travel novel by the web novelist Chi Jun, first serialized on Qidian and now complete at roughly 2.88 million Chinese characters. The story opens with the Battle of Ningping City in the fifth year of the Yongjia era (311 CE), during the reign of Emperor Huai of Western Jin: historical records tell of the Jin army surrounded and annihilated at Ningping in Kushen County by the Hu cavalry under Shi Le, with nobles, ministers, officers, and common soldiers alike left dead on the field. From this landscape of corpses and rivers of blood, a young man named Pei Gai, who has traveled back from nearly two thousand years in the future, rises to his feet, seizes a ruyi scepter, and strikes down a Hu commander—and with that, steps into an age of chaos in which the Central Plains fall to barbarian rule and the Chinese elite flee south across the Yangtze.

As the time-traveling Pei Gai, he assumes the identity of the second son of the renowned Western Jin minister Pei Wei, yet possesses neither martial prowess nor the power and influence needed to protect himself. Surrounded on all sides by Hu cavalry, he can rely only on his foreknowledge of history and his reading of the political situation to fight for survival and a foothold amid clashes between Hu and Han and the cutthroat intrigues of the great aristocratic clans. Centered on the core theme of "reining in that raging Hu steed that tramples civilization underfoot," the novel unfolds against the historical landscape of a devastated north and a fledgling Jiangdong regime in the aftermath of the Yongjia Disaster, offering both the brutality of battlefield slaughter and the machinations of court and military command.

The work is regarded as one of the more rigorously researched and realistically written historical web novels set in the Two Jin period, a representative work of the Two Jin–Sui–Tang historical fiction genre alongside titles such as Han Zuo Gao Men. It was selected in a 2019 annual review of Chinese web literature as an outstanding work in the Two Jin–Sui–Tang category, and holds a reader rating of approximately 9.5 on the review site Youshuwang.