Dabo, Part Four

Dabo is the culminating work of Li Jieren's "Great River Trilogy" (Ripples in Dead Water, Before the Storm, and Dabo). The 1937 Zhonghua Book Company first edition, the "old edition," was published in three volumes; in the 1950s the author rewrote it from the beginning, producing a new four-part version published by Writers Publishing House between 1958 and 1963. The new version centers on the 1911 Sichuan Railway Protection Movement, from the founding of the Railway Protection Comrades' Association and Zhao Erfeng's suppression, through the uprisings of the various comrades' armies, Duanfang's entry into Sichuan, and the successive independence of Chengdu and Chongqing, bringing the society, officialdom, and street life of Sichuan before and after the Xinhai Revolution into a panoramic narrative. This volume is the fourth part of the rewritten version. It turns to the turning point after the uprising, continuing to depict the daily lives of ordinary people in Chengdu and western Sichuan on the edge of regime change and the maneuvering of various forces under the new situation: officials like Huang Lansheng, the gentry-merchants and revolutionaries moving among them, and ordinary townsfolk all must find their place anew in the "new situation." The narration still unfolds through dense details of daily life and dialect dialogue, in no hurry to conclude, breaking the great wave of history down into the human affairs of one city and one day. Part Four completed only the first few chapters; Li Jieren died of illness in December 1962, and the work was thus interrupted, becoming a famous unfinished work in modern literary history—the point where the story abruptly stops is precisely where the work is most ruefully felt.