Plum Blossom Tribulation

"Plum Blossom Tribulation" takes the Liyuantun mission case at the junction of Shandong and Hebei in the 24th year of Guangxu's reign (1898) as an incision to tell the story of the struggle and separation of a group of lower-class refugees at the time of the rise of the Boxer Movement. Zhao Dazhu, a former disciple of Plum Blossom Boxing, led the remnants of his troops into exile after his senior brother Yan Shuqin was shot dead by a foreign gun. He raised the banner of "helping the Qing Dynasty and destroying foreign countries" and gathered hundreds of refugees. He refused to attack the parishioners, refuse to be appeased by the imperial court, and refused to capture the church in Wei County. He led his team to encounter a wall outside Zaoqiang City and temporarily settled in an abandoned village, losing people's hearts in endless waiting. In order to repay loan sharks and protect his sister Chen Qiaoer from debt repayment, his junior brother Chen Shuanshuo entered the Catholic church to work as a bookkeeper and was trapped in the order inside the door. When Zhao Dazhu entered the church at night and wanted to take him away, the two confronted each other across the threshold and failed to cross each other's boundaries. The novel describes the violent era in minimalist terms. There are few head-on confrontations throughout the novel. The real conflicts occur in silence, waiting and unspeakable choices. The images of "door" and "threshold" are used throughout - city gates, iron gates, and counting house doors. Inside and outside the door are two worlds that cannot communicate with each other. At the end, the curled-edged Yanling knife was excavated from the ruins of the church. The writing on the sheath was rusted and difficult to read, and it was finally sold as scrap metal. It implies that the names of "Plum Blossom" and "Yihe" have been wiped out by history, and the fate of the underlying individuals is nothing more than the dust of the times. About 30,000 words, historical theme, suitable for serious literary publications.