Usurping the Qing

Usurping the Qing is a historical time-travel novel by the web author Angel Oscar. Serialization began on Qidian in 2008 and concluded in December 2009; from November 2008, Taibai Literature and Art Publishing House released it in volumes (the first being Usurping the Qing 1: Splendors of the Capital), totaling roughly 1.68 million characters. The protagonist, Xu Yifan, is a civil servant at the National Development and Reform Commission in the twenty-first century who unexpectedly travels back to the Guangxu era of the late Qing, when Empress Dowager Cixi held power, the Beiyang clique grew dominant, and foreign powers pressed from all sides. He meets the swordsman Wang Wu on the grasslands, befriends reformists such as Tan Sitong in the capital, and, armed with modern knowledge and strategy, maneuvers among the three forces of the imperial court, Beiyang, and the Qingliu. He deals with Cixi, Guangxu, Li Hongzhang, Yixin, and others; he sails the Zhiyuan on a visit to Japan and confronts the Japanese ronin Mitsuyama Mitsuru; he bombards natives and rescues overseas Chinese in Java; and he appoints talents such as Tang Shaoyi and Zhan Tianyou. Navigating officialdom, business, the battlefield, and romance, his ultimate goal is to rewrite the fate of the Qing empire. The novel interweaves fictional characters with real late-Qing historical events and figures, combining wish-fulfillment appeal with patriotic feeling. It is one of the early representative works of Chinese web historical fiction and was selected in 2018 as one of Jiangsu's 20 Outstanding Representative Works of Twenty Years of Chinese Web Literature.