White Gate Willow (Complete in Three Volumes)

The historical novel White Gate Willow consists of three volumes—Sunset and Fragrant Grass, Autumn Dew and the Imperiled City, and Cockcrow in Wind and Rain. Written by Liu Sifen over sixteen years beginning in 1981, its first two volumes won the fourth Mao Dun Literature Prize. The novel compresses its timeframe into the brief span from the fifteenth year of the Chongzhen reign to the fall of the Hongguang regime, setting its stage in Jiangnan around the Jiashen cataclysm and depicting the choices and fates of the literati class at a moment when "heaven and earth were torn asunder." Two narrative threads interweave: one follows the partings and entanglements among Qian Qianyi and Liu Rushi, Mao Xiang and Dong Xiaowan, Gong Dingzi and Gu Mei; the other traces the factional strife and internal discord between the Restoration Society scholars and the remnants of the eunuch faction and the Southern Ming power-holders. As Qing forces press at the borders, Li Zicheng storms Beijing, Chongzhen hangs himself, and the Southern Ming is hastily founded and swiftly collapses, the novel meticulously renders Qian Qianyi and others' opportunism, hesitation, and weakness; Huang Zongxi and others' resistance and reflection; Chen Zhenhui and others' withdrawal into seclusion; and the endurance and sorrow of women like Liu Rushi and Dong Xiaowan within a male-dominated world of power. Deliberately avoiding the "emperors and generals" mode of narration, the author takes as his theme the emergence of early Chinese democratic thought represented by Huang Zongxi, Gu Yanwu, and Wang Fuzhi, and advances the plot through intricate psychological portraiture. The language strives for a "refined vernacular," and the work has been called "an epic of the political chaos wrought by traditional intellectuals of the old era." The three-volume paperback edition runs to roughly 1.3 million characters.