After My Flowers Bloom: The Tale of Huang Chao

He composed a poem about chrysanthemums at the age of five and was renowned for his talent from a young age, yet he traveled to the capital to sit the imperial examinations four times and failed every time. After failing for the last time, he wrote “When autumn comes, on the eighth day of the ninth month, my flowers bloom and every other blossom dies” in a Chang’an tavern, tore up the Analects, and rode east. From salt smuggler to General Who Storms the Heavens, from marching into Chang’an to proclaiming himself emperor in the Hanyuan Hall, it took him only six years. Yet when he put on the dragon robe and looked down upon the people, he realized that what he had rebuilt was the very cage he had once sworn to destroy. Using Huang Chao’s surviving poems as the key to his inner life, this book tells the tragedy of a genius abandoned by the old order: how he rebelled, rose to the pinnacle of power, and was ultimately consumed by it. His poems foretold everything, including his own end.