Assassination 1905

Assassination 1905 is the debut historical suspense novel of Wu Tong (real name Yi Wei), published by Haixia Book Company in 2015 as part of the Dook Knowledge Fiction Library. The novel is set against the turmoil around 1905 in modern Chinese history known as the "Age of Assassination": the Tongmenghui established an assassination department, the Restoration Society led by Cai Yuanpei used assassination as a revolutionary method, Chen Duxiu took part in planning assassination squads, and even the writer Lu Xun had ties to such groups. The author reweaves a great deal of real historical assassination material and invents an assassin named Hu Ke, who is swept up by the tide of the times into a series of political assassinations and becomes a key figure in the multi-sided struggle among the Qing court, revolutionary groups and the jianghu assassin organization known as the Assassin's Way: he moves between the Forbidden City and Yingtai, caught up in a plot to kill Cixi; he crosses the ocean to Tokyo, entangled in the threads of Sun Yat-sen and the Restoration Society's secret gathering; and later he is drawn into the rescue of Wang Jingwei and friendships with anti-Qing activists such as Wu Yue. The book advances along three interlocking lines—jianghu assassinations, court manhunts and revolutionary operations—with layer upon layer of reversals, placing the tense atmosphere of late Qing, when "everyone feared for their safety," and the characters' chivalrous choices on the same chessboard, so that readers reexamine that real turning point amid the twists of the plot. This is the first volume of the Assassination 1905 series, in eleven chapters, about 258,000 characters.