The Empty City tells the story of Qin Tian, a criminal police officer who takes a leave of absence to clear his head on the Yunnan border after his partner dies in the line of duty. By chance, he joins a tour group of sixteen. Along the way, torrential rain and a road collapse force the group to continue on foot, and they mistakenly enter a deserted old city called Zhiziluo. Its Soviet-style buildings date back to the 1980s, old tin cookie tins sit in the windows of the supply and marketing cooperative, and a rusted loudspeaker suddenly broadcasts a weather report from decades ago. The eerie sense of time being out of joint sends a chill through them.
Their quiet is soon shattered as mysterious deaths occur one after another. The victims’ fates seem strangely connected to an old report from 1986, when everyone in the city was evacuated because of the risk of a landslide. Qin Tian’s professional instincts tell him something is wrong: the so-called “landslide prediction” may be a lie, and an undisclosed secret lies beneath the empty city. As clues emerge from places such as the abandoned library, the air-raid shelter, and the old prefectural government archives, he discovers that the city was once a secret route for a smuggling ring called the Camellia Society. Amid fear and a crisis of trust, Qin Tian leads the survivors in pursuit of the truth, only to gradually discover that each of them has a hidden connection to the secret from decades ago. A retired teacher used to work as the city library’s administrator, a businessman’s father was the head of the supply and marketing cooperative, and the grandmother of Xiaoxue, a university student, was a key witness to the events. As the shadow of the Camellia Society grows clearer, the struggles of human nature and the ties between families behind the truth also come to light. Meanwhile, another abandoned city across the Lancang River hints that this search for the truth is far from over.
