The Official Road of Medicine

The Official Road of Medicine is a long urban officialdom novel by the web author Shi Zhangyu (real name Ye Yong, a former practicing doctor). It began serialization on Qidian Chinese Network on November 23, 2009, and was completed in 2013. Running over ten million characters, it is one of the representative works of the "medical officialdom" genre. The story opens with a time-travel premise: Zhang Yizhen, the greatest physician of the late Sui Dynasty, whose medical skill was unrivaled, incurred suspicion for treating Emperor Yang of Sui's concubine when she suffered a difficult childbirth. Forced to drink poisoned wine, he was then shot to death with arrows. After death, his resentment crossed time and space, causing him to be reborn in the 1990s as a young man named Zhang Yang—a gynecology intern at Chunyang County People's Hospital. Thereafter, relying on the supreme medical skills and martial arts accumulated in his previous life, he starts from the grassroots level as a medical worker, gradually passes through posts such as acting director of the township family-planning office, and then moves from medicine into officialdom, rising and falling through local politics. The core premise of the work is "the lesser physician heals the disease, the greater physician heals the nation." Zhang Yang never treats healing as mere charity; he uses medicine as a key to open connections and defuse crises: whomever he cures, he befriends; whomever he has saved, he dares to ask a favor of. He maneuvers among medical disputes, local factions, and government-business dealings, able both to wield Chinese medical arts such as golden-needle acupoint therapy and to counter schemes with overt stratagems. The book is immense in length, with multiple plotlines advancing at once. It offers both a realistic depiction of the 1990s medical system and extensive elaboration of the protagonist's emotional entanglements with multiple female characters. The language is humorous and witty, and the dialogue is especially outstanding.