A long-overlooked Qing dynasty novel by Wang Ji (汪寄), appearing here for the first time in English.
The story opens in the moral wreckage of the late Tang and the Five Dynasties – a century of usurpation, broken oaths, and ruined houses, ending with the famous yellow-robe coup at Chenqiao that founds the Song. When the loyal Later Zhou minister Han Tong falls defending the doomed dynasty, his son Han Ziyou divides the family estate among his clansmen and turns his back on the new order. From this opening note of refusal, Wang Ji carries his surviving loyalists outward – across the seas, into kingdoms that imperial historiography never recorded, where the virtues abandoned in the central plains might still take root.
Part historical chronicle, part political allegory, part imagined oceanic geography, Hai Guo Chun Qiu belongs to a small but extraordinary tradition of late-imperial Chinese fiction that uses the unmapped seas as a mirror held up to the empire – and as a refuge for everything the empire forgets. Its title, literally Spring and Autumn Annals of the Sea Kingdoms, borrows the gravity of the Confucian chronicle to lend canonical weight to courts and dynasties that exist only within its pages.
This first English edition is published as part of an ongoing project to bring untranslated works of classical and late-imperial Chinese fiction to anglophone readers.
