The Abandoned Capital

The Abandoned Capital is a novel by Jia Pingwa published in 1993. It has twenty-four chapters and runs to about four hundred thousand characters; it first appeared in the fourth issue of October in 1993 and was published as a standalone volume by Beijing Publishing House the same year. Set in Xijing (modeled on Xi'an), an ancient city of history and culture, the novel follows the daily lives of the "four great cultural celebrities": the essayist and writer Zhuang Zhidie, the calligrapher Gong Jingyuan, the painter Wang Ximian, and the artist Ruan Zhifei. It depicts their social engagements, dinners, buying and selling of calligraphy and paintings, personal favors, and their spiritual state as it gradually slackens and loses balance in the world of fame and profit. The main thread is Zhuang Zhidie's emotional entanglements with several women; secondary threads follow the other celebrities, painting a panorama of the city's varied urban types. The book is interspersed with numerous folk sayings, anecdotes, and local customs, and its language carries a clear flavor of Ming and Qing vernacular fiction; the square blanks left in the narrative became a widely discussed textual feature of the book. The "abandoned" in the title points not only to the city's appearance but to people's descent between material desire and spiritual emptiness. The work provoked enormous controversy after publication and was for a time withdrawn from circulation in mainland China. It won the French Prix Femina in 1997 and was republished and circulated again after 2009, and is regarded as an important text for understanding the social mentality and secular spirit of late twentieth-century China.