The White Pagoda

White Tower is a novel that centers on a group portrait of six graduates of the first cohort of key universities after the resumption of the college entrance examination in the late 1970s. With the ivory-tower spirit of higher education as its narrative core and the development of Chinese university education since reform and opening up as its backdrop, it tells the story of a generation of young teachers and intellectuals as they grow and make life choices. In the early 1980s, the "six gentlemen of the liberal arts," each established in a different field and each with distinct future aspirations, are selected after graduation by the newly reestablished Jinling Zhongfu University to study abroad on government sponsorship. After returning home, they become young teachers at the new Jinling Zhongfu University. Through the trials and triumphs of the university's development, each grows into an academic backbone of the institution, and in the university's transformation from an ordinary college into a Project 211 institution, they contribute their youth and travel different, turbulent, and colorful life paths. The novel sets its narrative against the cultural tides of Chinese university education from reform and opening up to the twenty-first century. Taking the promotion, embodiment, estrangement, and return of the ivory-tower spirit as its thread, it presents, through one vivid story after another, the storms and bonds of university life, the human warmth of knowledge, and the paths of academic lives.