White Gate Willow

White Gate Willow is a long historical novel that Liu Sifen worked on for sixteen years. It consists of three parts, Sunset and Fragrant Grass, Autumn Dew Over a Doomed City, and Cockcrow in Wind and Rain, and runs to roughly 1.4 million Chinese characters. Set against the dynastic transition from the Ming to the Qing, with Nanjing (known in antiquity as White Gate) as its central stage, the novel unfolds through the intertwined fates of Restoration Society scholars such as Qian Qianyi, Mao Xiang, Huang Zongxi, and Hou Fangyu and famous Qinhuai courtesans such as Liu Rushi, Dong Xiaowan, and Li Shiniang. Part One, Sunset and Fragrant Grass, depicts the collapse of the Chongzhen reign, when the Restoration Society splits over Qian Qianyi's bid to regain office and his efforts to shield Ruan Dacheng, a remnant of the eunuch faction, as factional strife and romantic intrigue intertwine. Part Two, Autumn Dew Over a Doomed City, covers the fall of Beijing to Li Zicheng, the Chongzhen Emperor's suicide, and the rise and fall of the Hongguang court, with the struggle among factions to install a new emperor rendered with breathless tension. Part Three, Cockcrow in Wind and Rain, follows the remaining Southern Ming forces as they retreat to eastern Zhejiang to resist the Qing until their final defeat, with each character choosing among loyalty, mere survival, and collaboration. Hailed as a work that "uses the partings and reunions of love to write the sense of rise and fall," it reveals the sharp social contradictions of the mid-seventeenth century through the struggles and divisions of the scholar class, and traces the historical roots of China's early democratic enlightenment thought. With the rigor of a historian and the delicacy of a painter, the author pursues a sense of historical truth in which "not a single word is without provenance," polishing his language with care and striving to refine vernacular prose, so that the book has been praised as a model of historical fiction. Parts One and Two received the fourth Mao Dun Literature Prize in 1998.