Red Sorghum

Mo Yan's Northeast Gaomi Township is a fictionalised version of his own home county on the Shandong plain: a country of red sorghum, distillery villages and the Black Water River, where in 1939 a ragtag band ambushes a Japanese convoy at a stone bridge. The map runs from the county town of Gaomi out across the fields to the north-east, where the real Dalan district, the distillery-town sets and the river all sit near the Jiaozhou border.

Dai Fenglian, the narrator's grandmother

Northeast Gaomi Township, the sorghum country

Part 1

The family saga unfolds across a plain of red sorghum in what the narrator calls Northeast Gaomi Township. The name is fiction, but the landscape is Mo Yan's own: the fields, footpaths and villages of the old Dalan district in the north-east corner of Gaomi county, where he was born and where he set most of his work.

Part 1, 'Red Sorghum'

inferred The township of the novel is a literary invention, but Mo Yan built it from his own home ground, the former Dalan district and Ping'an village in the north-east of Gaomi. No village-level coordinate is published in the open sources we found, so this marks a representative point in that Dalan area, out toward the Jiaozhou border.

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Dai Fenglian, the narrator's grandmother

The Black Water River and the stone bridge

Part 1

The book's central battle happens where a road crosses the Black Water River on a stone bridge: a home-made militia lies in the sorghum and ambushes a Japanese motor convoy in 1939. The river is real, the Moshui He of Gaomi's north-east, and the scene draws on a documented 1938 ambush by local fighters at the Sunjiakou bridge. The grandmother is cut down on the road here, carrying food to the men.

Part 1, 'Red Sorghum'

inferred The Black Water River of the novel corresponds to a real river of the same name, the Moshui He, which rises in southern Jiaozhou and runs north through Gaomi's north-east to the Jiaolai. We could not verify the exact bridge, so this marks a representative point on that river near the historic Sunjiakou ambush site rather than a surveyed span.

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