Dance of the Purple Pole

Dance of the Purple Pole is the final chapter of Teng Ping's Ninefold Dance series, set in the jianghu of the Taiping Xingguo era of the Northern Song. Zhao Shangxuan, eldest legitimate son of the Prince of Yan, has long wandered the martial world with his wife Rong Peitian; the two were once lovers but were parted by pride, family affairs, and old grudges. Disguised as a man and fled from home in anger, Rong Peitian happens to save Bai Nanzhu, a man dressed as a woman who calls himself "Bai Hongmei." This figure of ambiguous good and evil falls for her at first sight, willing to don women's garb and guard her day and night, and willing to keep her secrets faithfully. Then the jianghu is thrown into turmoil, and a string of murders of heroes is pinned on Zhao Shangxuan; Rong Peitian and Shangxuan meet again amid suspicion and old feeling, while the demure-looking Bai Nanzhu proves far less simple than he appears. Who wins Peitian's heart and who finds redemption—the steadfast Shangxuan or the all-in Bai Nanzhu—is where the book's tension lies. The 2017 collector's edition from Baihuazhou Literature and Art Press was revised word by word by the author, who added some forty thousand characters plus an afterword looking back on the influence of The Smiling, Proud Wanderer when she wrote Dance of the Purple Pole, and on how she revisited the ill-matched couple of Peitian and Shangxuan and the character of Bai Nanzhu more than a decade later. The book runs 256 pages, about 179,000 characters, with a Douban rating of 7.8.