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baihe_media2025-04-19 07:27 pm
douqi) wrote in baihe_media2025-04-19 07:27 pm
Across the Empire (纵横) by Lin Cuo (林错): Review
Across the Empire (纵横, pinyin: zongheng) is, by webnovel standards, an ancient relic. First published on JJWXC in 2005 (for reference, JJWXC itself was founded in 2003), it's one of the earliest court intrigue novels in the baihe genre. It was actually planned as a trilogy of novels chronicling the life and death of protagonist Lin Zong, but only the first volume was fully written. The author started the second volume, but discontinued it after eighteen chapters. In an addendum to the second volume, she provides an outline of how her planned story would have gone.
The protagonist Lin Zong is an interesting twist on the popular cross-dressing lead. She is, at the start of the novel, the only living child of Prince Chu, one of the emperor's brothers. We're told that, being a very sickly child, she was brought up as a boy in order to ensure her good health (this is a superstition/folk belief/tradition that's still extant in some communities; the idea seems to be that, if you raise a child as the 'opposite' gender, you confuse the malevolent forces responsible for their poor health).* So from a very young age, Lin Zong has been treated (and dresses as) a boy, and her father has even designated her his heir, but everyone knows that she was born a girl. This creates interesting tensions down the line.
*This was also the premise of the 2015 Taiwanese drama Bromance, the most accidentally(?) queer cross-dressing drama I've ever watched. Seriously, the protagonist is easily readable as non-binary up to the very last frame of the drama.
Prince Chu is one of those extremely competent, charismatic, loyalty-inspiring princes who are the bane of their emperor brothers' existences. The emperor therefore devises a loyalty test: he arranges for Lin Zong to be married to a high-ranking young noblewoman named Chu Yanran, to see how Prince Chu will respond. Prince Chu and Lin Zong don't really have a choice but to accept the match (the other option is to kick off and basically start a rebellion), and so we end up with the rather surreal scenario of a lesbian marriage sanctioned, nay compelled, by an otherwise institutionally homophobic state.
Despite some initial antagonism (mostly on Lin Zong's part), Lin Zong and Chu Yanran fall in love quite soon after their marriage. I would be tempted to say that it happens almost too quickly, but the fact that they're both only in their mid-teens at the time makes that extremely plausible, Romeo and Juliet-style. Their growing closeness, however, soon becomes a source of scandal, as both the common folk and high society start gossiping about the possibility that they might be engaging in (gasp) lesbian activity. During this part of the story, more than once I found myself wondering: what did the emperor think was going to happen, when he decreed that two attractive young women should marry each other? Plans are soon afoot to get them safely divorced and safely married off to actual men. A slew of ulterior motives surround these plans. The crown prince, Lin Zong's cousin, wants to marry Chu Yanran himself; Prince Jin, another of Lin Zong's cousins, would like to see Lin Zong 'reverted' to her female status so that she'll have to give up her claim to Prince Chu's title and lands, allowing Prince Jin to install his half-brother in her place. It's this which ultimately forces Lin Zong, who had previously been content to serve as a minister in her uncle's court, to set her sights on the throne.
This novel has been praised a lot for its sophisticated political plotting. But while I found that aspect of it largely consistent and believable, it didn't feel particularly fresh, and my interest in it was seriously diminished by the fact that the political plotters were mostly interchangeable men without very distinct personalities. It was particularly jarring to contrast it with To Embers We Return, which I'm currently translating, where all of the major characters are women (though I suppose, as a matter of evolution, the genre had to produce something like Across the Empire first, before it could come up with female-dominated court intrigue titles like At Her Mercy and Climbing High).
Where the novel does shine is in its depiction of Lin Zong and Chu Yanran, as young (and they feel believably young) lovers who are both desperately in love and fully aware of how doomed any romance they might have is. This isn't just because they're both women in an institutionally homophobic environment. It's also because they ultimately want very different lives. Lin Zong wants a political career, but Chu Yanran has no wish to be a political spouse, much less an empress. Instead, she dreams of travelling freely across the realm, taking in all the sights and experiences it has to offer, and writing about them. They're also both painfully aware that, if they were to attempt compromise on this — if Lin Zong were to abandon her political ambitions, or if Chu Yanran were to acquiesce to a life behind palace walls — they would soon cease to be the truest versions of themselves. Lin Zong would no longer be the Lin Zong Chu Yanran fell in love with; Chu Yanran would no longer be the Chu Yanran Lin Zong loves. Their awareness of how fundamentally irreconcilable their ambitions are weighs down every interaction they have, and the moment when they're able to cast it aside long enough to physically consummate their romance (way late in the second volume) is a very moving one.
Interestingly, Lin Zong is also (to me at least) the most strongly trans masc of the cross-dressing protagonists I've encountered. She actively resists, and is repulsed by, any external attempts at forcing her into the social, cultural, political or familial status of 'woman', though she seems to mind less when Chu Yanran, during their private moments, refers to her as a woman and treats her with the kind of tenderness one would conventionally associate with that label.
I read the Chinese original of both volumes here and here on JJWXC.
The protagonist Lin Zong is an interesting twist on the popular cross-dressing lead. She is, at the start of the novel, the only living child of Prince Chu, one of the emperor's brothers. We're told that, being a very sickly child, she was brought up as a boy in order to ensure her good health (this is a superstition/folk belief/tradition that's still extant in some communities; the idea seems to be that, if you raise a child as the 'opposite' gender, you confuse the malevolent forces responsible for their poor health).* So from a very young age, Lin Zong has been treated (and dresses as) a boy, and her father has even designated her his heir, but everyone knows that she was born a girl. This creates interesting tensions down the line.
*This was also the premise of the 2015 Taiwanese drama Bromance, the most accidentally(?) queer cross-dressing drama I've ever watched. Seriously, the protagonist is easily readable as non-binary up to the very last frame of the drama.
Prince Chu is one of those extremely competent, charismatic, loyalty-inspiring princes who are the bane of their emperor brothers' existences. The emperor therefore devises a loyalty test: he arranges for Lin Zong to be married to a high-ranking young noblewoman named Chu Yanran, to see how Prince Chu will respond. Prince Chu and Lin Zong don't really have a choice but to accept the match (the other option is to kick off and basically start a rebellion), and so we end up with the rather surreal scenario of a lesbian marriage sanctioned, nay compelled, by an otherwise institutionally homophobic state.
Despite some initial antagonism (mostly on Lin Zong's part), Lin Zong and Chu Yanran fall in love quite soon after their marriage. I would be tempted to say that it happens almost too quickly, but the fact that they're both only in their mid-teens at the time makes that extremely plausible, Romeo and Juliet-style. Their growing closeness, however, soon becomes a source of scandal, as both the common folk and high society start gossiping about the possibility that they might be engaging in (gasp) lesbian activity. During this part of the story, more than once I found myself wondering: what did the emperor think was going to happen, when he decreed that two attractive young women should marry each other? Plans are soon afoot to get them safely divorced and safely married off to actual men. A slew of ulterior motives surround these plans. The crown prince, Lin Zong's cousin, wants to marry Chu Yanran himself; Prince Jin, another of Lin Zong's cousins, would like to see Lin Zong 'reverted' to her female status so that she'll have to give up her claim to Prince Chu's title and lands, allowing Prince Jin to install his half-brother in her place. It's this which ultimately forces Lin Zong, who had previously been content to serve as a minister in her uncle's court, to set her sights on the throne.
This novel has been praised a lot for its sophisticated political plotting. But while I found that aspect of it largely consistent and believable, it didn't feel particularly fresh, and my interest in it was seriously diminished by the fact that the political plotters were mostly interchangeable men without very distinct personalities. It was particularly jarring to contrast it with To Embers We Return, which I'm currently translating, where all of the major characters are women (though I suppose, as a matter of evolution, the genre had to produce something like Across the Empire first, before it could come up with female-dominated court intrigue titles like At Her Mercy and Climbing High).
Where the novel does shine is in its depiction of Lin Zong and Chu Yanran, as young (and they feel believably young) lovers who are both desperately in love and fully aware of how doomed any romance they might have is. This isn't just because they're both women in an institutionally homophobic environment. It's also because they ultimately want very different lives. Lin Zong wants a political career, but Chu Yanran has no wish to be a political spouse, much less an empress. Instead, she dreams of travelling freely across the realm, taking in all the sights and experiences it has to offer, and writing about them. They're also both painfully aware that, if they were to attempt compromise on this — if Lin Zong were to abandon her political ambitions, or if Chu Yanran were to acquiesce to a life behind palace walls — they would soon cease to be the truest versions of themselves. Lin Zong would no longer be the Lin Zong Chu Yanran fell in love with; Chu Yanran would no longer be the Chu Yanran Lin Zong loves. Their awareness of how fundamentally irreconcilable their ambitions are weighs down every interaction they have, and the moment when they're able to cast it aside long enough to physically consummate their romance (way late in the second volume) is a very moving one.
Interestingly, Lin Zong is also (to me at least) the most strongly trans masc of the cross-dressing protagonists I've encountered. She actively resists, and is repulsed by, any external attempts at forcing her into the social, cultural, political or familial status of 'woman', though she seems to mind less when Chu Yanran, during their private moments, refers to her as a woman and treats her with the kind of tenderness one would conventionally associate with that label.
I read the Chinese original of both volumes here and here on JJWXC.