The Republic of China

Cai Dongfan's The Republic is the final installment of his monumental Popular Historical Romances of China's Dynasties, and also the most distinctive and important one. Unlike his earlier works dealing with ancient history, this volume recounts an era the author personally lived through—indeed, events still unfolding—which gives the book, while retaining the lively, accessible style and narrative-with-commentary format of the "romance" genre, an added sense of immediacy and urgency characteristic of a historian on the scene. Rather than merely cataloging the facts of warlord infighting and regime changes, the book, "taking romance as its form and the historian's brush as its soul," probes deeply into the ferment of social thought after the 1911 Revolution, the successes and failures of political experiments, and the rise and fall of the nation's fate. Holding to the principle of "using official histories as the warp, striving for accuracy; using anecdotes as the weft, avoiding fabrication," Cai offers highly personal assessments of major events such as Yuan Shikai's proclamation as emperor, Zhang Xun's restoration, and the Constitution Protection Movement, his historical insight and literary flair reinforcing each other. Reading this book not only clarifies the tangled historical threads of the early Republic but also reveals how a traditional intellectual observed, reflected on, and worried over an era of dramatic change—value far beyond that of ordinary popular history.