The Angry Railway

The anti-German railway protest movement that took place in the early 1890s in Gaomi, Shandong, was rooted in my hometown. Its leader was a man from my own village. I grew up hearing about it, surrounded by its stories, passed down from one person to another. They have always moved me deeply and taken root in my heart. The novel imagines the events that led anti-German protest leader Shi Changwen and martial artist Liu Jinbang to confront foreigners surveying their hometown fields to build a railway. Seeing their land seized and crops destroyed, they went to demand answers. This brings to light Germany’s long-planned scheme to use the Juye Incident in Shandong as a pretext to occupy Jiaozhou Bay and seize the rights to build railways and mine in Shandong. The novel also recounts the tragic, grueling struggle led by Shi Changwen, who rallied the people of the western countryside to fight the enemy.