Red Poppies

Narrated by the supposedly idiot second son of a Tibetan chieftain, Alai's novel follows the last days of the feudal chieftain system in the Gyalrong borderlands of eastern Tibet in the 1930s and 40s, as opium poppies bring sudden wealth, guns and ruin, and the Chinese armies close in. The world of the book is that frontier: the chieftain's fortress-estate, the poppy fields that transform it, the market and border where Han traders and warlords come, and the mountains beyond which a whole way of life is about to end.

Chieftain Maichi

The chieftain's fortress

Part 1

From his walled estate the Maichi chieftain governs his lands, serfs and household by the ancient tusi system, in a world where a chieftain's word is law and life. His idiot younger son, the book's clear-eyed narrator, watches the whole feudal order from within its stone walls, half-fool and half-seer.

Part 1

inspired by The Maichi chieftain rules from a fortress-estate in the Gyalrong region of eastern Tibet (western Sichuan); the specific fortress is invented and sited in that real Tibetan borderland.

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