A Thousand Songs

A Thousand Songs is an alternate-history novel by the web author Xia Xie, serialized on Qidian.com from December 27, 2010, to its completion on August 8, 2011. It runs to 303 chapters, roughly 1.09 million characters. The protagonist, Ouyang, is a senior inspector of the international anti-fraud unit: twenty-seven years old, orphaned young, he entered the police academy at eighteen and half a year later was sent undercover into an international fraud ring, rising from an outsider to the upper ranks of the criminal organization within two years and luring all of its top figures to gather in the Special Zone to be rounded up in one sweep. He was subsequently promoted to sergeant, earned a university degree, and a year ago was made senior inspector. The novel opens with him outwitting a foreign suspect at the Special Zone airport over a suspicious diplomatic parcel; the airliner he then boards crashes, and his consciousness returns to the final years of the Northern Song, where he becomes a posthumous child of the Ouyang family. Because a comet appeared at his birth, his mother is branded a "broom star," and mother and son are coldly treated by the clan. The work is neither a conquest saga nor a story of iron-fisted rule. In his synopsis, Xia Xie offers the formula "40% IQ + 40% effort + 20% luck": brute power cannot dictate everything, and intelligence is the root of all things. Armed with modern police investigative thinking and logical deduction, the protagonist fights fraud with fraud and trickery with trickery amid a court of corrupt ministers and a benighted emperor: as a child he sees through a fake Taoist, as a youth he breaks a situation open with gambling skill and logic, and as an adult he places first in the provincial, metropolitan, and palace examinations in succession, only to be posted out of the capital, where he transplants a modern approach to public order, finance, armaments, and commerce to the provinces, entangled all the while with dealings among the Liao, Jin, and Western Xia and with court factional strife. The book's style is light and humorous, its set pieces delivered with deadpan absurdity; the author himself admits that "history fiction has bugs."