Xue Ke

Xue Ke is a full-length romance novel by Qiong Yao, set in the Xuantong reign at the end of the Qing dynasty. Xue Ke, a princess of the Yi Prince's household, falls in love with Gu Yameng, the son of her wet nurse. The two agree to elope but are caught by the household's men on the way. Yameng is sent to the frontier as a conscript, and Xue Ke, already pregnant, is forced to drink an abortion draught; it fails, and after giving birth to a daughter she is forced to marry into a wealthy family. The family of three are thus driven onto separate, hard, and sorrowful paths. Eight years later, Xue Ke and Yameng's fates cross again; the old love remains, and the entanglement of marriage, kinship, and ethics follows, with a succession of shocks and torments close behind. The novel takes class prejudice and feudal propriety as the core of its conflict, portraying the long torment of lovers forcibly torn apart by family authority, and showing how Xue Ke, in a forced marriage, holds fast to her love and protects her child. Qiong Yao deliberately draws her characters as "neither purely good nor deliberately evil," attributing the tragedy to human weakness and the times rather than to the malice of a single villain. This is Volume 44 of the Qiong Yao Complete Works from Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House. In 1990 it was adapted into a TV drama of the same name starring Liu Xuehua and others, and is regarded as an important forerunner of Republican-era tearjerker drama.