Thunder Over the Pass

In the winter of the third year of Xuantong, the thunder of the Wuchang Uprising shattered the snow on Shanhai Pass. Shen Yanzhi, son of a Qing-dynasty anti-Qing martyr, had lain dormant for twenty years. With three thousand local militiamen, he raised the banner of "Restore China" and cut off the Qing court's lifeline of reinforcements from beyond the pass. From then on, he led his troops into the revolutionary torrent sweeping across China—from bloody battles on the Liaoxi Corridor, to power struggles in the outskirts of Beijing and Tianjin, to charging through fire on the Northern Expedition. Amid the chaos of warlord conflicts, he held fast to his republican ideals. He formed a life-and-death alliance with Cheng Zhenbang, a New Army officer in Wuchang, and engaged in deadly games with Qing loyalists, restorationists, and foreign interventionists. He witnessed the passion and sacrifice of revolutionaries, the betrayals and compromises under power struggles, and the tearing between national duty and personal bonds, treading through mountains of corpses and seas of blood. From a beacon-fire youth at Shanhai Pass to a revolutionary general commanding a region, Shen Yanzhi's half-life mirrors the birth pangs of an ancient nation in transformation, writing a tragic epic of a generation that, with flesh and blood, knocked open the door to a republic.