Of course, this image is volatile and nebulous – dependent on political currents as much as on cultural artifacts to name only two important factors, recent U.S.

Add to it Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, DreamWorks’ Kung Fu Panda series and Disney’s Mulan, and maybe some bits and pieces of more contemporary information regarding Chinese communism coupled with the evidence of the irrefutable economic success, and the vision of China in popular culture is more or less complete.

The mythos, and stereotypes, are fairly easy to enumerate: martial arts’ prowess, Chinese zodiac and a large pantheon of demigods and demons, feng shui rooted in a belief of holistic spirituality, snippets of a heroic age long gone, when emperors ruled and Great Wall and Silk Road were built, and a vague concept of a collective social outlook, linked to Confucius. The enthusiasm was not without merit: for the reader from Western sphere of influence, Kuang’s novel presents an undeniably attractive image of China, fueled in equal measures by the elements of Chinese mythos already popularized in Western pop-culture and by the impression of mystery surrounding China as a fabled, distant land. The Poppy War was one of the rare books bound to become a bestseller, with publishers outbidding each other for the rights to the book. Everybody and their uncle seems awed by Kuang’s debut novel, which reimagined the history of 20 th century China into a vengeful fantasy of violence. This turned out to be one of the more difficult reviews to write for me.

The poppy war author