Stone Embers

Synopsis

The epic novel Stone Ashes is set in the rural community of Lanzhou over more than a century, from the Qianlong era to the early Republic of China. Through the fortunes and misfortunes of a strange stone, it unfolds the full rise and fall of a northwestern family.

During the Qianlong era, a farmer keeping watch over a wheat field at night happened upon a strange stone. A connoisseur bought it for a fortune, and this unexpected windfall allowed his impoverished family to turn their lives around. They bought irrigated and dry farmland, built a family home, and devoted themselves to educating the younger generation. Their descendants repaid their efforts: several passed the imperial examinations and became officials, and the family rose to prominence in the region. For generations, they enjoyed the prestige and respect that came with wealth and reputation, living amid their lands and scholarly traditions in a time of unrivaled splendor.

But riches bred idleness. By the late Qing and the Republican era, the descendants had begun to fall into corruption. Opium spread to the northwest, and some members of the clan became addicted, squandering money without restraint. Their fields were gradually pawned away, their mansion divided up and sold off, and their titles and family fortunes slowly dissipated. After years of erosion, the once illustrious family fell back into the dust. Their descendants became tenant farmers once more, living off rented land and completing a cycle from poverty to wealth and back to poverty.

Rooted in Lanzhou, the novel vividly recreates the rhythms of old agrarian life, rural customs, local dialects, and human relationships. Droughts, warfare, folk medicine, and other details of the era are woven throughout. Rather than playing up the extraordinary, it focuses on the choices ordinary people make and the price they pay amid the tides of history, exploring wealth, family values, and human nature.

The novel is approximately 450,000 words long and is a work of literary fiction.