Soft Cover:
ISBN: 962-8783-33-5
Dimensions: 200 pp (estimated), 200 x 140 mm
Price: HK$150/US$18

Hard Cover:
ISBN: 962-8783-39-4
Dimensions: 200 pp (estimated), 210 x 145 mm
Price: HK$195/US$23

[Publication Forthcoming!]

It is the year 138 BCE. Under Emperor Wudi, Chang’an, the capital of the great Han dynasty and the most splendid city in the civilized world, is bustling with prosperity. Confucianism, the new state philosophy, permeates culture and society. Yet the Xiongnu, a warrior-race of nomads controlling the deserts and grasslands to the northwest, continue to threaten the border from just beyond the Great Wall.

As part of his foreign policy, the Emperor sends Zhang Qian on a mission to Parthia in Inner Asia to locate the Yuezhi, a nomadic tribe driven west by the Xiongnu a generation before. His task is to unite the Han and the Yuezhi against the Xiongnu. For Zhang Qian, his is a mission of love: for his land, for humanity, for a woman, for a dream of enlightenment and civilization born in the teachings of Confucius. But Zhang Qian’s mission rides a frail equilibrium of uncertainties, and the involvement of elaborate political and economic intrigues leads to unimagined results.

The Saga of Zhang Qian is about the idealism of one man who witnesses the first unification of China and causes the birth of the Silk Road. A daring portrayal of the golden age when China’s strength peaked for the first time, it illuminates the history of central Asia and gives the protagonists of that history new personality and force of life after they have been buried in documents for two thousand years. Yet it is not simply history as fiction. The story transcends the period in which it is set, pursuing the essence of the humanistic cultural values that subtly emerge from clashes between the right and wrong, good and evil, the wise and the foolish.

Alex Sun is a newspaper columnist and luminary within the Chinese literary community of Hong Kong. The Saga of Zhang Qian, which he has translated himself, is the first English rendering of Sun’s On the Western Horizon: The Zhang Qian Saga, first published in Chinese in 1963.

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