The War Shelf

The History Behind The Poppy War

5 min read By Sandro Andreatta, historian With sources

Spoiler warning: this article discusses major events in The Poppy War, including the ending.

R. F. Kuang seems to have taken “write what you know” as permission to make her history degree more useful than the reader would like. The twists in The Poppy War have sparked some anger, but she’s translating human horrors into fantasy and showing us what our ancestors—and likely many of us, given the same circumstances—are capable of.

Just as Tolkien drew on Finnish, Norse and Old English languages and cultures, Kuang drew on Chinese history when writing The Poppy War. The plot, she has said, is “mirrored almost entirely on the Second Sino-Japanese War.”1 That war began in July 1937, when fighting near Beijing escalated into Japan’s full-scale invasion of China, and ended with Japan’s surrender in 1945.2 It became part of the wider Second World War, though the fighting in China began two years before the war in Europe. Book one draws directly on the Battle of Shanghai, the Nanjing Massacre and Unit 731, the Imperial Japanese Army’s center for biological warfare and human experimentation.3 You don’t have to look very hard to find Japan and China here. The Federation of Mugen, a small, militarized island empire, basically Japan, invades the Nikara Empire, a vast neighbor whose provinces answer to rival warlords as much as to the throne, basically China. The novel depicts the atrocities directly, including massacre and human experimentation.

Readers have criticized Kuang for her portrayal of the Nanjing Massacre, particularly because the story starts with a more traditional outsider-goes-to-a-magic-school arc that resembles Harry Potter. Readers and reviewers made that comparison,4 and it is easy to see why. It also leaves you rather poorly prepared for what follows. Just as war is sudden, disastrous and traumatic, so is Kuang’s turn in The Poppy War. The gruesome acts seem to come out of nowhere and, to my mind, that is exactly the point. It’s supposed to hit you and, judging from the comments I’ve read across the internet and the opinions I’ve heard in private, hit it did. Still, that explains the effect without changing the fact that the setup for both the Nanjing Massacre and Unit 731 analogues could have been better. That is more a craft question.

The ending brings in another historical parallel. Rin uses the Phoenix to trigger a volcanic eruption beneath Mugen, destroying its homeland and killing civilians as well as soldiers. The god supplies the power, but the decision is hers. The comparison is with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, though Kuang takes the destruction further, to the devastation of an entire island nation. By then, the reader has been given plenty of reasons to want Rin to win. Having to face what she does with that victory is rather less comfortable.

Asked about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki comparison, Kuang pointed to the familiar justification that the bombings prevented even more deaths by ending the war.5 The trouble is that we cannot know how many people would have died otherwise. Her own answer leaves that uncertainty intact: “Rin’s action was horrific; was it the best action? I honestly have no idea.”6 She condemns the atrocity while remaining unsure whether another choice would have led to less suffering. She also says the book was meant to ask that question and present different viewpoints, rather than settle it.7 You can argue with how she handles the ending, but the lack of a comfortable answer is deliberate.

Some of the craft problems might simply come down to this being a debut written at nineteen.8 Kuang graduated in history from Georgetown days after the novel came out.9 She wrote the first draft during a gap year in China while working as a debate coach.10 Without university homework waiting for her in the evenings, she found time to write a novel. Finishing one at nineteen is commendable enough; I’m not sure we need to pretend the rough edges aren’t there to give her credit.

Her sources included Western historians such as Jonathan Spence, John King Fairbank and Frank Dikötter, and the Chinese historian Ray Huang.11 On Nanjing she read Iris Chang, though she notes that many historians have since challenged Chang’s analysis.12 She also drew on her grandparents’ stories of the war in China.13 So that covers the “war” in The Poppy War. What about the poppy?

The poppy gives us opium, which takes us back another century. The First Opium War ran from 1839 to 1842, the Second from 1856 to 1860.14 Britain fought Qing China in the first, joined by France in the second, forcing concessions over trade, territory and foreign access.15 “I’ve been obsessed with the Opium Wars for a long time,” Kuang has said, and she imagined a world where the drug is a source of power rather than humiliation.16

She drafted book one after reading about Nanjing, “from a place of rage and anger.”17 Later she came to see the danger in revenge stories, noting that the Chinese Communist Party uses such traumas to stir nationalism.18 Fantasy, in her words, is “a distorted mirror” for working through personal and family trauma.19 She also describes the trilogy as “what if Mao Zedong was a teenage girl?”20 You can probably see why this belongs in a guide to military fantasy.

Notes

  1. Interview with R. F. Kuang, BookPage, May 1, 2018, https://bookpage.com/interviews/22654-r-f-kuang-science-fiction-fantasy/. In the same interview she describes the war as “(World War II).” ↩

  2. “Second Sino-Japanese War,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/Second-Sino-Japanese-War. ↩

  3. Kuang lists “a fantasy version of the Rape of Nanjing, the experiments of Unit 731 and the Battle of Shanghai” in Interview with R. F. Kuang, BookPage, May 1, 2018, https://bookpage.com/interviews/22654-r-f-kuang-science-fiction-fantasy/. On Unit 731: Tsuneishi Keiichi, “Unit 731 and the Japanese Imperial Army’s Biological Warfare Program,” trans. John Junkerman, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, November 24, 2005, https://apjjf.org/?p=20588. ↩

  4. For example, Mark Yon, “The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang,” SFFWorld, June 16, 2018, https://www.sffworld.com/2018/06/the-poppy-war-by-r-f-kuang/: “Initially, it sounds like an Asian Hogwarts.” ↩

  5. Rebecca F. Kuang, interview by Gabrielle Mathieu, “Rebecca F. Kuang on Violence, History, and Writing a Female Warrior,” Literary Hub, November 15, 2019 (first broadcast on the New Books Network), https://lithub.com/rebecca-f-kuang-on-violence-history-and-writing-a-female-warrior. ↩

  6. Kuang, interview by Mathieu, Literary Hub. ↩

  7. Kuang, interview by Mathieu, Literary Hub: “I don’t think that the book was supposed to answer that question … it was supposed to ask it and present different viewpoints on it.” ↩

  8. “Kuang began writing the book when she was 19”: “How Rebecca F. Kuang Wrote The Poppy War,” Washington City Paper, https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/arts/books/blog/21014341/how-rebecca-f-kuangs-wrote-the-poppy-war. ↩

  9. “R.F. Kuang: Distortions,” Locus, July 2019, https://locusmag.com/2019/07/r-f-kuang-distortions; Washington City Paper (see note above); “Interview with R. F. Kuang,” Civilian Reader, May 29, 2018, https://civilianreader.com/2018/05/29/interview-with-r-f-kuang/. ↩

  10. “R.F. Kuang: Distortions,” Locus, July 2019, https://locusmag.com/2019/07/r-f-kuang-distortions. ↩

  11. Interview with R. F. Kuang, BookPage, May 1, 2018, https://bookpage.com/interviews/22654-r-f-kuang-science-fiction-fantasy/. ↩

  12. Interview with R. F. Kuang, BookPage, May 1, 2018, https://bookpage.com/interviews/22654-r-f-kuang-science-fiction-fantasy/. ↩

  13. “R.F. Kuang: Distortions,” Locus, July 2019, https://locusmag.com/2019/07/r-f-kuang-distortions. ↩

  14. “Opium Wars,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Opium-Wars. ↩

  15. “Opium Wars,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Opium-Wars. ↩

  16. Interview with R. F. Kuang, BookPage, May 1, 2018, https://bookpage.com/interviews/22654-r-f-kuang-science-fiction-fantasy/. ↩

  17. Alan Yu, “In The Poppy War Series, R.F. Kuang Asks: ‘What If Mao Was A Teenage Girl?’,” NPR (WHYY), November 24, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/11/24/937995479. ↩

  18. Yu, NPR. ↩

  19. “R.F. Kuang: Distortions,” Locus, July 2019, https://locusmag.com/2019/07/r-f-kuang-distortions. ↩

  20. Yu, NPR. ↩