During the Qianlong Era, I Set the Wilderness Ablaze

Having been reborn as the illegitimate son of a bankrupt merchant in Guangzhou in the fifth year of the Qianlong era, Chen Qian is immediately confronted with a dead-end: his creditors are trying to seize his sister to settle the debt. He tries to survive by making sugar, only to be squeezed dry; he seeks a way forward by selling salt, only to be exploited. When he watches tenant farmers freeze to death in the snow and his sister is dragged into a living hell, a fragment of Selected Works of Mao surfaces from the depths of his memory.

By an oil lamp on a freezing night, he writes the six characters “Overthrow the landlords and distribute the land” on a tattered padded jacket. Wrapped in this bloodstained “manifesto,” he storms into a charcoal burner's shack. “Do you want to eat your fill? Then come with me.”

A “Charcoal Party” pamphlet suddenly appears at the Guangzhou prefectural yamen. Ten wooden boards covered in subversive slogans are plastered across the county yamen's wall, enraging even the Qianlong Emperor, who orders a ruthless crackdown. But Chen Qian has already vanished into the vast mountains of the Nanling range with the first group of people he has awakened.

As the fig leaf of a feudal golden age is torn away, and a modern spark meets centuries of deep-rooted ills, a prairie fire that will sweep across the Qing dynasty is quietly kindling in the barren mountains of Lingnan…