Dear reader,
Thank you for opening these light and slender pages. What you have opened is not
merely another book, but a parallel aperture—a doorway into a realm that runs
alongside the world you are familiar with. Out of long historical experience and sober
realism, I have folded away my former interest in commenting on the world as it is. Such
labor—costly, perilous, and often fruitless—demands too much sacrifice and too many
offerings for so little return. Instead, I would rather open for you a new horizon of how
else we might be, or how we might have been, had another path been chosen. Yes—what
lies before you is a genuine epic. It spans all the major dynasties on the land called
China, whether historically verifiable or shrouded in legend, beginning with the mythic
Xia and reaching into the contemporary age. Yet it is an epic unlike any ever written.
For a nation that has long called itself a “kingdom of poetry,” yet has produced no true
epic in the strict sense, this work indeed fills a vast absence, a historical hollow. But that
is not what interests me. As I have said elsewhere, I do not concern myself with
overthrowing or repairing the existing world. My work is the construction of a parallel
realm—independent of inherited structures. Thus, this epic was not written to fill the
vacancy of a “national epic.” Were that my purpose, I and my poetry would still be
seated at the old feast, drinking the diluted remnants of Li Bai and Du Fu, drifting on
the afterglow of the New Culture Movement, and packaging all of that into one more
conveniently marketable compendium.
This epic narrates a history behind the history of the state. It constructs, alongside the
nation’s discourse, a parallel linguistic territory—an independent republic of
speech—from which history is retold from another vantage entirely: the history of
human beings long obscured beneath the shadow of the state. In this sense, it is a
history of persons, not of nations. Must history not return to its true subject—the
human—rather than continue decorating the massive machinery called “the nation”
with lacquer and ornament? In this way, it also suggests a new model for epic writing on
a global scale.
Another of its departures is this: it recounts history not through actions and events, but
through metaphysical experiences and resonances of consciousness. It is therefore
high-dimensional, not low-dimensional; leaping, not linear. Artistically, it is dense with
images and metaphors—condensed, but not obscure; radiant, but never esoteric. It
strives for formal freshness and linguistic refinement; it rides the white horse of
language, rather than being ridden by it.
