Goluan: Autumn without the Emperor

Author: Cheng Wei
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-11-01
Features: This is a new historical novel narrated by the renowned poet Cheng Wei with modern concepts, depicting historical facts. The story is set in the mid-Ming Dynasty, where the emperor was indulgent, eunuchs held power, and feudal princes sought to recreate the "purge of the side ministers" story from the early Ming period. —When the painter Yin, the traveler Gui Wujie, and the assassin Li Cang arrived in the Southern Capital almost simultaneously. The hereditary imperial prince of the Southern Capital was planning a large-scale armed rebellion and was tormented by an ancient sword imbued with the secret desires of a previous life's curse. The sword had mentally castrated him in his dreams. The painter came to paint the queen and fell in love with the beautiful queen. The assassin came to assassinate the king but was instead targeted by the traveler as a dangerous object. The king's personal guard and his intimate lover were in fact dangerous "recumbent ones." Swordsmen, hermits, bandits, merchants, geishas, and martial artists from various paths converged in the Southern Capital, falling into the maze. Even the onlookers could not escape the image of their nightmare in their eyes. At this moment, the king, the painter, the assassin, and the queen were all trapped in their own destinies. Killers and the killed, lovers and the beloved, bodies without souls, and souls without bodies. They entangled, lost, sank, and struggled in each other's misalignment. On one side was the bloody slaughter, and on the other was the fragrant love. Between them was the immense hesitation and vacillation of the king, the warrior, the beauty, and the scholar. The pain of castration was the century's pain of that era. An eunuch vented his private hidden illness and hatred onto the virile men and delicate women, in an era of swordsmen, he wanted to use a sword to make up for his eternal lack. Classical desires, love, plots, and confusion reflected the darkness of the tumor of the feudal society—the eunuch system. A brand-new modern concept thened a conspiracy and transformation that was as magnificent as it was filthy, as confusing as it was violent, a flamboyant yet decadent sorrow, a burst of blooming sorrow.