Peerless Scholar

Peerless Scholar is a long historical romance novel by the web novelist Xiaoqi Xiao, first serialized on 17K.com. It runs to about 2.7 million characters and is complete. Along with The Orange-Red Era and The Underdog's Counterattack, it belongs to what readers call the "Orange-Red Trilogy," and in terms of chronology it can be read as a prequel to The Orange-Red Era. The story opens at the Qianmen railway station in Beijing in the winter of the eighth year of the Republic. Chen Zikun, a youth from the Northeast bandit camps who goes by the name "Two-Gun Quicklegs Little White Dragon," comes to the capital to seek his kin, carrying the marksmanship and martial skill he honed beyond the Pass. At the station he saves a child from falling onto the tracks and meets the Jiangnan girl Lin Wenjing for the first time. From there he begins at the bottom of city life, pulling rickshaws and brawling with local thugs, and goes on to cross paths with historical figures such as Wu Peifu, Gu Hongming, Sun Yat-sen, Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu, and to be swept into a string of great events, from the May Fourth Movement and the warlord wars to the Northern Expedition and the War of Resistance. He rises from Northeastern bandit and Beiyang officer to local power broker and then to high office, and is several times cast down by the tides of the age before fleeing to Hong Kong, living out a life of dramatic ups and downs. The author adopts the method of "threading a span of history on a single fictional character," weaving many real people and events of the Republican era into the protagonist's path, so readers often call it a "Republican-era Forrest Gump," and some treat it as a novel that can be read as modern history. The book contains both the flash of blades in the jianghu and the smoke and fire of city life, and also the pain of nation and family and the disillusionment of ideals; its mood rises before it falls, thrilling and heavy by turns.