Changing the Sky

Changing the Sky is an alternate-history time-travel novel by Duanren Tianya, a platinum author on Qidian, running to about 1.23 million Chinese characters and completed in 2009. The title comes from a line of Mao Zedong's — "With so many willing to sacrifice, we dare to make the sun and moon shine in a new sky" — and the author describes it as a journey of time travel, subversion, and "wish-fulfillment change of the heavens," aimed at readers who love history. At the story's opening, late-Qing grandees such as Li Hongzhang, Zhang Zhidong, and Zuo Zongtang are still struggling to prop up a collapsing empire while the foreign powers harbor designs on carving up China; the protagonist enters this world as a time traveler, beginning with encounters at the Zhili Governor-General's yamen involving Sheng Xuanhuai, Li Hongzhang, and others, first taking part in the Sino-French War and appearing on the front lines in Vietnam and at Zhennanguan, then making his mark in the Sino-French negotiations, gradually rising from local office to key posts such as Liangjiang, building up military and administrative power around the time of the First Sino-Japanese War and pushing reform, in an attempt to reverse the nation's fortunes from the top down. Overall it follows the route of a military-history power fantasy, emphasizing political intrigue and battlefield scenes, tightly paced and dense with conflict; it has also drawn criticism for coarse extrapolation and thinly drawn supporting characters, making it a late-Qing time-travel epic with a clear mark of its era.