Sea of Regret
A Novel of the Boxer Uprising
Two families flee Peking in the summer of 1900. On the road one betrothal is
destroyed by loyalty and the other by weakness, and neither girl gets to choose
which.
About the Book
Wu Jianren published this in 1906, and it is the book that made the modern
Chinese love story possible. Dihua and Bohe are promised to each other. So are
Juanjuan and Zhong'ai. When the Boxer rising empties the capital, the four are
scattered along the road to Tianjin, and Dihua ends up nursing her sick mother
and travelling alone with the man she is engaged to but may not speak to
freely. What she does with those days, and what he does with his, decides
everything.
There is no villain. There is a war, a canal boat, an illness, an opium pipe, a
brothel, a convent, and two people who each behave exactly according to their
nature. Wu called it a novel of feeling, and then wrote a preface arguing that
feeling means duty and not desire, which is the argument the whole book is
having with itself.
About This Edition
This complete English translation presents all ten chapters, rendered directly
from the Chinese text. Because this is a late Qing novel and not a classical
one, the English is written as natural turn of the century narrative prose
rather than in an archaic register. The author's own interpolated glosses are
kept in brackets where the original has them. Nothing is abridged.
Themes and Legacy
- The Boxer Uprising of 1900 seen from the road, not from the legations
- Betrothal, chastity and the cost of a woman keeping her word
- Opium, ruin and the collapse of a good family
- One of the founding works of modern Chinese fiction
- The closing lyric that gives the book its title: the bird that cannot fill the
sea of regret
For Readers Who Love
The Travels of Lao Can - Flowers of Shanghai - Six Records of a Floating Life -
Late Qing Fiction - Chinese Literature in Translation - Historical Fiction
"She kept her promise. It cost her everything, and she would do it again."
At a glance
About the series
Rediscover the great epics, mysteries and chronicles of dynastic China: gods and generals, swindlers and scholars, courtesans, ghosts and emperors, in complete English translations.
