Yang Du

Yang Du is a long historical novel by Tang Haoming following his Zeng Guofan, originally titled A Genius of His Age, published in three volumes totaling about 1.04 million Chinese characters. Taking the life of Yang Du, a remarkable figure of the late Qing and early Republic, as its main thread, the novel uses him as a lead stringing together Yuan Shikai, Yuan Keding, Cao Kun, Wang Jingwei, Sun Yat-sen, Huang Xing, Cai E, Liang Qichao, Wang Kaiyun, and many other historical figures, weaving a panoramic picture of Chinese efforts to save the nation in the early twentieth century. Yang Du was extraordinarily talented and ambitious: in his early years he studied the "art of emperors" under the renowned scholar Wang Kaiyun, then went to Japan to study constitutional monarchy; he took part in the Gongche Shangshu, associated with Liang Qichao, and worked for Qing constitutional reform; in the early Republic he headed the Chou'an Society and strongly advocated Yuan Shikai's accession as emperor, and after the collapse of the Hongxian monarchy he turned to help Sun Yat-sen, and in his later years was closely connected with the Communists. The novel does not reduce him to a simple villain or buffoon; following his studies, service as a retainer, party organizing, exile, Buddhist devotion, and shifts of position, it peels back layer by layer the contradictions among his ideas, emotional motives, and fateful opportunities, bringing to life the tragic character who "had the heart to save the nation but backed the wrong man, and possessed vast learning yet could not grasp the pulse of the times." The narrative stops in the mid-1920s, and in a style blending fact and fiction with dense, unhurried scene-setting, it recreates the Gongche Shangshu, the Hundred Days' Reform, the Dingwei political crisis, the Hongxian monarchy, and other major historical moments, while interweaving Yang Du's emotional entanglements with Jingzhu, Yizhu, Shuji, and others and episodes of his Buddhist inquiry. The book has won the 10th China Book Award, the 3rd National Book Award, and the National Award for Outstanding Novel, and is regarded as a major representative work of the "literary Xiang army" and of contemporary historical fiction.