The Ridge of the Eastern Temple

The Ridge of Dongmiao

Some of the characters and events in this book are based on the true recollections of veterans of the War of Resistance Against Japan.

In the spring of 1940, Dongmiaojie, a thousand-year-old town deep in the mountains of western Hubei, was wiped out by the Japanese army on an ordinary morning. A planned massacre left 527 people dead.

When Fuqiang, Guangyao, and the others hurried back from the county seat, their home had become a wasteland of scorched earth and piled-up corpses. They gathered the survivors and named their band the Dongmiao Soul-Reapers. They had no connections and no official designation. Their greatest advantage was not firepower, but the skills hunters had learned from the folds of mountain valleys and the habits of the creatures that lived there, the sensitivity of carpenters working with mortise-and-tenon joints, the cunning of thieves slipping through the earth, and the breadth and depth of Eastern tactics. They seized the advantage of time and shaped the terrain to their favor, wielding the mountains and forests as spears and the rivers as blades. They raided supply boats, stormed strongholds, and buried Japanese soldiers.

This book weaves hard-edged catastrophe together with ingenious techniques, balancing strength with wit. There are no golden fingers or divine weapons dropping from the sky, only a group of people who know how to hunt, steal, and rob graves, turning the skills they once used to survive into the means to defeat the enemy and defend their homes.

But this band is crushed again and again, only to rise once more from the cracks in the mud. Our long-suffering people have endured through the ages not because we counted on the enemy to show mercy or on some vague miracle, but because of people's indomitable hearts, their backs that would rather break than bend, and the Eastern wisdom that says,