Sandalwood Death

At the height of the Boxer crisis, folk-opera singer Sun Bing leads local resistance against German railway construction in Shandong. His daughter Sun Meiniang is caught between loyalty to her father, marriage to the simple butcher Zhao Xiaojia and an affair with county magistrate Qian Ding. When Sun Bing is captured, official authority and foreign pressure converge on a punishment designed not merely to kill him but to turn his prolonged suffering into a public spectacle.

The execution is entrusted to Zhao Jia, an imperial executioner and Meiniang’s father-in-law, whose professional pride makes him both craftsman and servant of a collapsing political order. Alternating voices and opera-inflected narration connect intimate betrayal to German colonial expansion, Qing corruption and popular rebellion. The novel’s central contest is over who controls the meaning of Sun Bing’s death: the state, the foreign occupiers, the performer, or the crowd that hears his defiance.