Hunting the Qing

Hunting the Qing is a Qing-history and Republican-era web novel by the author "Rifle Beats Mosquito," serialized on Qidian Chinese Network. It is complete at about 1.24 million characters. The story opens in the twenty-sixth year of the Guangxu reign (1900): the smoke of the First Sino-Japanese War has not yet cleared, the Qing court faces internal and external troubles, the Boxer Movement rises, and the Eight-Nation Alliance invades—a period known as the Gengzi National Calamity. At the same time, Tsarist Russia invades the Northeast, perpetrating the Blagoveshchensk Massacre and the Sixty-Four Villages East of the Heilong River Massacre, known as the Gengzi Russian Calamity. The protagonist, Liu Xinghua, is a young soldier guarding a national defense reserve base. By chance, he travels back to this turbulent era with a large quantity of secondhand defense equipment from the base. He first settles in a hunter village in the Greater Khingan Range of the Northeast, rising by training troops, bringing order to the region, and resisting bandits, gradually forming the prototype of his own force. He then enters the pass and goes to Beijing, placing himself at the heart of the Gengzi chaos, joining the fight against the foreign allied forces and attempting to change that humiliating history. The novel's declaration is "The Qing has lost its deer; I shall hunt it," chronicling the protagonist's journey from an unknown soldier to establishing his own domain and contending for the realm. In the final chapter, "A Life Without Regret," Liu Xinghua, now over a hundred years old, returns to the old site of the defense base, bids farewell to his old comrades and two wives, gives up the "divine artifact" that came with him, and passes away peacefully. The overall style is a male-oriented historical military power fantasy with heavy emphasis on equipment and combat description. The author notes three previously completed works.