Bestselling Author Ma Boyong on History, the Writers He Likes, and Modern Education as He Sees It

We put a number of questions to "Prince Ma." Some he declined to answer; on others he told us what he thinks. Take what's useful to you.

"In the last years of the Guangxu reign, an American missionary in Beijing named Carroway took it into his head to go to Chifeng and build a zoo on the grasslands. He set out with a lion, an elephant, a parrot, a python, a pair of tiger-striped horses and five baboons. Out on the grassland, a girl who steals dreams sees the future, a boy who understands the speech of animals is reborn from the ashes, and a mysterious wolf-shifter appears by moonlight…"

That is the synopsis of The Grassland Zoo 《草原动物园》, the new book the novelist Ma Boyong published this year. Ma says the reason he wrote it was simple: he had a dream. "The images in that dream were so beautiful — a purely visual beauty that's hard to put into words. It would have been a shame not to write them down," he said at an event during this year's Shanghai Book Fair.

Born in 1980, Ma Boyong is a bestselling author whose real name is Ma Li. He comes from Chifeng, in Inner Mongolia, and his fans call him "Prince Ma," or just "the Prince." Online he is known for being both erudite and funny. His novels run through mystery, the supernatural, horror, history, detective fiction, wuxia, science fiction and fantasy, but historical fiction is what he is known for. His books include The Wind Blows from Longxi 《风起陇西》, Secret of the Three Kingdoms 《三国机密》, The Mystery of Antiques 《古董局中局》, The Dragon and the Subway 《龙与地下铁》 and The Longest Day in Chang'an 《长安十二时辰》.

The Mystery of Antiques alone has sold more than a million copies. It, Secret of the Three Kingdoms and The Longest Day in Chang'an have all been adapted for screen. This April, Yang Weidong, president of the Youku business group at Alibaba's Digital Media and Entertainment Group, said the per-episode rights to The Longest Day in Chang'an sold for close to 12 million yuan. Besides the TV series, Youku plans to turn the novel into a film and a game and to build a line of offline merchandise.

Online he is treated as a "Weibo wit," with 3.6 million followers, and he has written essays that circulated widely, among them "The Cruel Nature of Class Struggle, Seen Through Doraemon" 《从机器猫看阶级斗争残酷本质》 and "Young MA's Fantastic Historical Odyssey" 《少年 MA 的奇幻历史漂流之旅》. In life he describes himself as a man who "works in the low-voltage power distribution business" — he did in fact spend a full ten years at Schneider Electric (China) Investment Co., Ltd. — and he has also put out a board game called The Qing Dynasty Is Doomed 《大清要完》. As a writer he calls himself an "amateur enthusiast of history and letters," and his books are full of the sort of flight of fancy quoted at the top of this piece. Because he is so good at rebuilding history out of strange, vivid invention, he has also been called a literary wizard.

That habit of fancy goes back a long way. "In the days before mobile games and e-books, the only thing that got me through a long journey was mind games. A 'mind game' is the dignified name I gave my own idle daydreaming. The game is simple: you start from a premise — I've suddenly come into a billion dollars, the prettiest girl in school has suddenly fallen for me, I've suddenly written a novel that shakes the ages — and then you imagine what you would do next, in as much detail as you can, down to every gesture. When I was older I learned there's a plainer word for this: self-indulgent fantasizing," Ma wrote in an essay called "Books in My Imagination" 《想象中的书籍》.

As he sees it, imagination is a writer's source of life. Lu Xun, Wang Xiaobo, Liu Cixin, Ken Liu — what draws him to all of them is the richness of their imagination. But because he mostly writes historical fiction, Ma believes a writer cannot simply imagine anything he likes; the work has to square with basic historical fact. He is especially fond of a line from the 19th-century French novelist Alexandre Dumas: history is the nail I hang my clothes on. The story has history for a backdrop, but the story itself is invented. The large shape of history can't be changed; the details leave room to imagine.

Some critics say his novels contain things that contradict the historical record. One comment ran: "That Ma Boyong doesn't even have a basic grasp of Chinese history — just because he can crack a few witty lines, he gets held up online as a 'scholar'?"

In an interview with QDaily, Ma said reading historical sources and academic papers is how he finds ideas for his novels. Last year, writing a popular essay about the Huizhou silk-tax case, he drew on four papers by four different authors. To thank them, he decided to give all 100,000 yuan he earned from selling that essay to the four scholars. They all took him for a con artist. "Nobody imagines they could ever make money from writing an academic paper. To me it's simply respect for knowledge," Ma told QDaily.

Trace his career and you find that Ma Boyong grew up alongside Chinese online literature. In 1999 — the second year after the literary site Rongshuxia marked the birth of online writing in China — the 19-year-old Ma became one of its earliest authors. He was then studying at the business school of Shanghai International Studies University, and he would skip breakfast for a week to save up, then spend one hour every weekend at an internet café near campus.

Once online, he found chat rooms, but he felt he wasn't any good at chatting, and there wasn't much else to do. "I thought, I'll just write something. That's also a way of getting through to people. So I went to a forum — the Golden Lion Flag — and wrote there. When you finished something, everyone would praise each other and cheer each other on, and little by little I kept writing," he told QDaily.

He still remembers how short and how expensive that time online was: 20 yuan an hour. Because it cost so much, he brought a 3.5-inch floppy disk, spent the hour hunting down as many novels as he could and copying them over, then took the disk to the school's standalone computer room, which charged 1 yuan an hour, and read them all there.

That is how his writing life began. At first he did everything he could to imitate the writers he loved — Haruki Murakami and Wang Xiaobo — and posted the results online. "It was still traditional literature, only published on the internet. What exists now is made specifically for the internet age. It's a different thing entirely," Ma said.

In 2005 he published the science fiction story "The City of Silence" 《寂静之城》, which won the Galaxy Award, the top prize in Chinese science fiction. That same year he joined Schneider Electric.

Over the following decade the writing came more easily. "Storm Over the Rhapsody on the Goddess of the Luo" 《风雨〈洛神赋〉》, "Turmoil at Wan City" 《宛城惊变》 and "Case Solved: Southeast the Peacock Flies" 《破案：孔雀东南飞》 won him the People's Literature Prize for prose and the Zhu Ziqing Prose Prize. Then came bestselling novels such as The Mystery of Antiques, and with them a wider reputation.

In 2015, Ma left Schneider Electric after ten years to write full time. The reason was simple: writing paid better.

Asked what changed after that decision, he said: "I get more time to rest. I should have quit ages ago."

Asked whether he now has more time to write, he said: "No."

This year Ma published three new books at once — The Longest Day in Chang'an, The Grassland Zoo and As It Turns Out, the People Are Always the Most Lovable 《事实证明，人民永远是最可爱的》. The first two are historical novels; the third is a collection of essays.

At noon on August 17 we met him in the central hall of the Shanghai Exhibition Center. He answered a great many of our questions, guarded throughout and careful not to put a foot wrong. Here is the conversation. See whether there's anything in it for you.

Q = QDaily

M = Ma Boyong

"History Is the Nail I Hang My Clothes On"

Q: Your work covers a lot of ground — history, science fiction, film criticism — but historical fiction is what you're known for. Here's the big question I'm curious about: as a writer, how do you see the relationship between history and the historical novel?

M: It's really just Dumas's line — history is the nail I hang my clothes on. History serves the novel. The story I'm telling has history for a backdrop, but the story itself is invented. As the saying goes, "don't invent the large things, don't be bound by the small ones." On the large events you have to stay faithful to history; in the details you can stretch a little, imagine a little.

Q: That sounds close to your talk "How to Hang a Novel on the Nail of History" 《怎样把小说挂在历史的钉子上》 — hold to the principles of history, and the details in between are the novelist's job.

M: Exactly, exactly.

Q: In that talk you also said: "When we read a historical novel, what we're finally reading isn't history but the points of resonance with modern people that we dig out of history. If we can find that point, find where its meaning for the present lies, then the novel has its value." Can you say more?

M: It's simple. Take Dream of the Red Chamber — why do so many people read it? Some feel they're like Lin Daiyu, some like Xue Baochai, some think they're close to Jia Baoyu, and some even feel they're like Jia Zheng, because Jia Zheng managed his children so well. Whatever it is that draws each of us to Dream of the Red Chamber is bound up with our own lives.

Or take Harry Potter. Of course Harry Potter isn't a historical novel, but what we're reading there is also a resonance with our own childhoods. Or Eryuehe's trilogy — Emperor Kangxi, Emperor Yongzheng, Emperor Qianlong — what we actually see is how much of what happens in those books connects, faintly, to the present. We can read what sits underneath. Or Yao Xueyin's Li Zicheng: is it about Li Zicheng? Not really. What it carries is a flavor of class struggle. And in Dumas's The Three Musketeers, what we see is our own deep hunger for heroes; reading The Count of Monte Cristo releases our sense of the world's unfairness, and our fantasy of revenge.

In the end, if you follow it back, every one of these historical novels is a projection of what we want inside, of what we need to vent or say. It has simply been projected onto history.

Q: As a writer, do you feel your historical fiction is consciously answering the present?

M: I think that's the reader's job. As the author you can't sit down at the start and say, I'm going to allude to this period, I'm going to plant these points of resonance. It's more natural than that — you just want to write a historical story. Once you've written that stretch of history, its points of resonance come out on their own. Put that way it sounds a bit mystical, but really it's just following your instincts. As a matter of craft, if something in the present hasn't moved you, you can't write a historical novel. You won't even know how to start.

Q: Can you give an example?

M: The Wind Blows from Longxi is really a Cold War spy novel. It comes out of the admiration I had as a boy for the secret agents in World War II novels and spy novels, so I set it in the history of the Three Kingdoms, but its bones never changed. Or the new one, The Longest Day in Chang'an — that's really a counterterrorism story, about a small band of terrorists trying to wreak havoc in the capital. Everyone knows this kind of story; it happens often in the United States and China has run into it too. I set it in history, and readers still understand it.

Q: You said earlier that you see your readers as friends. Do readers tell you they've seen something about the present in your books?

M: They do, and I let them say it. Everyone reads in their own way.

Q: Are there readings you especially agree with?

M: I generally don't say much, because I don't think an author should signal how his own work ought to be judged. It misleads readers and takes away their room to think. How they read it is their business.

Q: Are there interesting readings, then?

M: Some are very interesting. They dig into the details in the novels — tracing which book a particular detail was researched from, which article a particular point came out of. I think that's wonderful. I planted those Easter eggs, and I spent time gathering the material for them. If readers are willing to dig them out, I didn't bury them for nothing.

"Young Chinese Change Too Fast — There's No Way to Build Up a Novel That Captures the Character of the Age"

Q: I saw a report saying that among dead writers your favorite is Wang Xiaobo, and among living ones Liu Cixin. Is that right?

M: Not right. In literature there's no such thing as a favorite. Among writers who've died there are many I like — Lu Xun, Wang Xiaobo, Mark Twain, Lao She. Among the living I certainly like Liu Cixin. I like Baoshu, and Ken Liu too. They aren't ranked against each other. I pick up their books from time to time.

Q: Can you say more about why you like these particular writers?

M: Their imagination — imagination showing itself in different ways.

Q: Lu Xun too, for his imagination?

M: Lu Xun is about imagination as well. Look at what comes through in Old Tales Retold 《故事新编》 and much of the rest of his work; set it back in the Republican era and you'll find it is remarkable. And that imagination isn't only in the pictures — it's in his choice of words and the way he builds a sentence. Lu Xun championed vernacular Chinese in the New Culture Movement. A Madman's Diary 《狂人日记》, the vernacular story he wrote, was itself a piece of imagination at the time. It's like this — (at this point Ma picked up his phone from the table and showed us the back of the case, printed with the words "You? Worthy of the surname Zhao?!") — that's a very good piece of imagination. It has life in it.

Q: But Lu Xun and Wang Xiaobo are also famous for their essays.

M: It's all the same. Imagination lives in the words themselves. It doesn't matter whether it's fiction or essays. Many of Lu Xun's essays turn on a metaphor. Many of Wang Xiaobo's essays are really stories — including the way he reasons with you. All of it is imagination at work. The same words and sentences: in one writer's hands they come out repellent, in another's they read like a spring breeze.

Q: And the ideas in their work, the critical edge?

M: That's too big a subject. Given the time today, let's leave it.

Q: As someone who writes historical fiction, are there historical novelists you particularly like?

M: Gao Yang and Alexandre Dumas. Those are the ones I really admire. There's also a writer named Christian Jacq, who isn't very well known. He wrote the pyramid trilogy, about Egypt, and those novels are admirable too.

Q: Why?

M: Imagination, again. Built on a foundation of history, their imagination is formidable.

Q: Some people feel our era badly lacks work that shows how young people actually live now — they can hardly name a single book. What do you think?

M: It's because young Chinese change so fast. China turns over roughly every two years. When people talk about writing the American middle class, the Japanese underclass, the manners of the British aristocracy, that's because those classes had been fixed in place for a long time. They had formed their own logic and their own cultural symbols, so of course they could be written. In China, from the 1980s on, a new generation arrives every two years, and every generation has a different style. With change that fast there's no way to build up a novel that captures the character of the age, because the age has no settled character. The character of the times keeps changing too fast. How would you get everyone to like it? So I think it will take another ten or twenty years before what that period was really like settles into place — and only then will we know whether that feeling can be written.

"Good Modern Education Comes Down to One Thing: Don't Make Trouble for Other People"

Q: More than half the year has gone. Looking back, which news events left the deepest mark on you, or did you follow most closely?

M: Trump taking office.

Q: Why?

M: Because nobody saw it coming. It's enormously dramatic. It's superb material for a novel.

Q: Would you write it?

M: Not this one. Trump's story will need a few decades to pass before it's worth writing.

Q: And at home?

M: At home it would mostly be cultural events, like Chinese Poetry Conference 《中国诗词大会》. I think the format is very good — a good way to carry traditional culture forward.

Q: What do you make of how popular it is?

M: I think it's fine. In my family at least, when it's on we all sit down in front of the television together. Every time a question comes up, each of us works out the answer and we see who gets it right and who gets it wrong. There's no prize, but it had been a long time since our family had a program everyone watched together and argued about.

Q: Do you have Xiaofan [Ma Boyong's son] memorize poetry?

M: Yes. Of course I do. How much, I don't know. He memorizes some, anyway.

Q: You think that kind of training matters?

M: I do. Every poem I can reel off without thinking is one I memorized as a child. The poems I learned as an adult I may understand better, but I can never produce them the same way. I have to think first, and only then can I recite. In any case, while your memory is good as a child you should memorize a lot; when you've grown up you'll see what it was worth.

Q: Any other events you've followed closely?

M: That's the biggest one. I can't think of anything else right now.

Q: Here's another one about education. This year the top liberal-arts scorer in Beijing's college entrance exam said in an interview: "The gaokao is a class-based exam. It's getting harder and harder for kids in rural areas to test their way out. I'm from a middle-class family, born in Beijing, and the educational resources you can reach in a big city like Beijing meant I could take a lot of shortcuts in my studies. You can see that many of today's top scorers come from families that are powerful and capable. So having knowledge doesn't necessarily change your fate, but without knowledge you certainly can't change it." Many people said this points to classes hardening into place. What do you think?

M: I think that's precisely where the current gaokao system has its meaning. Whatever else it does, it looks at scores. Looking at scores means everyone is measured against one standard. That, I think, still guarantees a channel upward. That's where the gaokao's meaning lies.

Q: Will you have Xiaofan sit the gaokao?

M: We'll see when he's older.

Q: So you do think the gaokao has problems?

M: It certainly has problems. Exam-driven education certainly has its costs. But you have to weigh which is greater, the good or the harm.

Q: So you think this hardening of classes is, to some degree, unavoidable?

M: That isn't something I can decide.

Q: Another history-related event this year — I saw you reposted it on Weibo — is the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television's ruling that costume dramas and idol dramas can't be broadcast during important propaganda periods. How do you feel about that?

M: I reposted a lot of things like it. I think we still need a flourishing cultural market, and a flourishing market means allowing every kind of genre production to exist.

Q: Following on from Chinese Poetry Conference and traditional culture — I've read an essay of yours called "How to Get Kids to Love Guoxue" 《怎样让孩子爱上国学》. Guoxue, the study of China's classical learning, is a hot subject now. How should we approach our own traditional culture? What do you think?

M: Three principles. First, guoxue supplements modern education; it doesn't replace it. You can't have a child receive only guoxue and no modern education, because guoxue is only a supplement. On top of a modern education, it's good for a child to study some guoxue as well. Second, what guoxue cultivates is taste, not moral rules. You read classical poetry, you read old essays, and you build up a feel for China's ancient culture. Reading that sort of thing naturally stirs a certain feeling in you, and that's the most important part — far more important than studying something like Standards for Being a Good Student and Child 《弟子规》 and memorizing a set of rules for behavior. And third, guoxue is an extension of modern education. It should be supplementary, something you take up in your spare time once you've finished your regular schooling. But whatever you do, don't be like the people who study only guoxue and nothing else. That's a disaster.

Q: So modern education is the foundation?

M: Modern education has to be the foundation. Guoxue can't replace it, and guoxue is an education in taste, not in morals. That distinction matters a great deal. Taste matters enormously. Modern education already covers all of it: respect your elders, look after the young, don't lie, don't steal… there's no need to go back to the ancients for that. If you want some extra reading, sure, study the story of Sima Guang smashing the water jar — but you can't study only that.

Q: When I interviewed Pai Hsien-yung, his view on traditional culture was that China now needs a renaissance like Europe's.

M: I think a thing like that has to happen of itself. No single person decides it.

Q: Another traditional-culture event this year was the "women's virtue lecture" at a college in Jiujiang. What did you make of it?

M: Women's virtue is a corpse climbing out of its grave. The worst dross in guoxue is women's virtue, and things like the so-called Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars. Women's virtue above all. It shouldn't exist at all, because it runs flat against modern civilization.

Q: But some people still support it.

M: Which is exactly why I stress that guoxue supplements modern education. Once you've had a modern education, you won't believe in that sort of thing anymore.

Q: So what do you think a good modern education is?

M: Good modern education comes down to one thing: don't make trouble for other people. Put plainly, it means staying tolerant. You do your thing, I do mine. I don't interfere with you, you don't interfere with me. Put more crudely, the rules of modern civilization come down to two lines: none of your damn business, none of mine.

Q: In other words, where the individual's rights end and the group's begin?

M: Something like that. Everyone lives their own life well and doesn't meddle with anyone else's.

Q: But what about public life?

M: That was putting it in extreme terms. Not interfering with other people's lives means not interfering in their private domain. In public spaces there's shared morality — under the modern moral system, if someone's in trouble at the roadside you should go help. But it doesn't mean that if you're watching porn at home I break into your house and beat you up. That's the idea.

"Listen More to Old People's Advice on Life, Less to Their Advice on Taste"

Q: From 1999 to now, 2017 — across those 18 years, when did you feel you'd made it?

M: I've never felt I'd made it. I think I'm still a long way from what "making it" traditionally means. It's just that I've had a lot of fun doing this.

Q: Why do you think so many people read you? Even if you don't think you've made it, a million copies is a remarkable result for a writer.

M: The way I see it, I treat readers as friends and I write what I like. Whoever likes a book of mine probably shares my tastes — same interests, same tastes — and then we can be friends. So I think of writing a book as a way of looking for friends. It gathers together the people who see the world roughly as I do, and that's why they like it. There may not be a huge number of them, but they're solid.

Q: So you feel you've found the group of people who see the world as you do?

M: Yes.

Q: And what does that outlook look like, exactly?

M: Being interesting. Being tolerant. Not too wrapped up in yourself.

Q: In As It Turns Out, the People Are Always the Most Lovable, I saw you say that over the past decade your thinking went from the far left, to the far right, to right-leaning-with-a-touch-of-left, to the center, and that you've now become an unaligned free-floater. Can you say more about how that change happened, and why?

M: Let's not ask this one. The way the wind is blowing now, it's easy to get into trouble over it. It's sensitive — too sensitive. Let's skip it.

Q: Do you think you can really be that kind of unaligned free-floater in this day and age?

M: I don't know. That's exactly why I told you not to ask the question. That alone should tell you something.

Q: Generally speaking, what wakes up your curiosity?

M: Things that can't be read. Or rather, things I don't know how to explain.

Q: Have you run into one?

M: Bamboo slips, for instance. I once read a paper about reading them. Bamboo slips come as separate strips, so they scatter, and once scattered they have to be put back in order. At the time I couldn't see how. I thought it was a terribly hard thing to do, exceptionally hard. Later, after talking to a few scholars, I learned that in the academic world there is a proper scientific method for ordering bamboo slips, a kind of sequencing grounded in philology. I found that fascinating. I got curious and downloaded a great pile of papers to read. That's a form of exploration.

Q: Do you have any advice for young people today?

M: Listen more to old people's advice on life, and less to their advice on taste.

Q: What question have you been thinking about most lately?

M: That one. My contemporaries keep saying that kids today don't understand anything and there's no telling what will become of them — glued to their phones all day and never reading, playing games all day. Not like us, who at least used to read books; now they don't even read. And honestly, I share the worry. But then I look back: our parents' generation was just as pained and just as critical of us. They said our generation had never been through hardship, that we were little emperors, all only children, playing video games all day, watching cartoons all day, and not reading either.

And we grew up all the same, and became pillars of society all the same. So I think every older generation looks at the next one with a mix of contempt and worry. But some of what that older generation said carries real life experience, and looking back on it now, once you've lived a bit, you find it makes a lot of sense. So, as I said: don't listen to them on taste, but do listen on life.

Cover image: a still from the screen adaptation of The Mystery of Antiques.