A Flower in a Sinful Sea (Chinese: 孽海花, Hanyu Pinyin: Nièhǎihuā, Wade-Giles:, Nieh-hai hua) is a novel by Jin Tianhe (also known as Jin Songcen) and Zeng Pu (also written as Tseng P'u). First published in serial installments beginning in 1904, the work is a roman à clef. The work was partially translated to English by Rafe de Crespigny and Liu Ts'un-yan in 1982. It was also translated to French and Russian.
Title
The nie () refers to retributions. The hua () for "flower" is a polysemy as it can also refer to "woman". In addition the word sounds similar to hua (), meaning China.
The title has also been translated as Flower in a Sea of Sin, Flower in the Sea of Retribution, Flower in the World of Retribution, Flower in a Sea of Karma, Flower in the Sea of Evil or A Flower in an Ocean of Sin.
Plot
In the earlier versions of the novel by Jin Tianhe, Sai Jinhua, a courtesan, travels to the west with her husband, a scholar. They meet Russian anarchists and the novel describes the history of the Russian anarchist movement.
In the revised version by Zeng Pu, the prolog describes an "Island of Happy Slaves" attached to the city of Shanghai that has a population of ignorant people who party and have savageness. This is sinking into the ocean, but island's residents die without realizing that the lack of air is killing them. Milena Doleželová-Velingerová, the author of "Chapter 38: Fiction from the End of the Empire to the Beginning of the Republic (1897–1916)", wrote that "the prolog foretells the theme of the whole novel by a synecdoche". In the main story, Jin Wenqing breaks a promise to marry someone, and this leads to the woman committing suicide. Twenty years later, Jin Wenqing, a high official enjoying a luxurious life, gets into a relationship Fu Caiyun, a sing-song girl. However Fu Caiyun is in fact an image of the woman who had committed suicide. Jin Wenqing makes Fu Caiyun his concubine. Over the course of the novel, a pattern of retributions, specifically Buddhist-style retributions, occur against Jin Wenqing, punishing him for his actions. Jin Wenqing becomes a diplomat and travels to Europe. There he is unsuccessful as a government minister and does not grasp the world outside of China. Meanwhile, Fu Caiyun, who cheats on him, wins favors of several royal families, including Empress Victoria of Germany, and becomes friends with the Russian nihilist Sara Aizenson.
Jin Wenqing returns to China and then falls into disgrace. When he dies, everyone around him has abandoned him. Fu Caiyun runs away from Jin Wenqing's family after his death. At the end of the story Fu Caiyun is engaged in a relationship to a Beijing opera singer. Ultimately the novel was never finished. The table of contents of the novel states that Fu Caiyun will reunite with Count Waldersee, but this portion was never written.
The revised novel describes the upper class of China resident in Beijing and Shanghai during final 25 years of the 19th century and compares the fate of the said upper class to that of Jin Wenqing.
Development
Jin Tianhe wrote the original five chapters of the project. It was originally a political novel criticizing Russian advances into China. Two of the chapters were published in Jiangsu (), a magazine that was published in Jiangsu and ran from 1903 to 1904. Zeng Pu wrote that the five Jin Tianhe chapters "concentrate too much on the protagonist, so they at most describe an extraordinary courtesan, and along with her, a number of historical anecdotes." Zeng Pu stated that if the original conception of the novel succeeded "it would be no more than the Li Xiangjun of Taohua shan, or the Chen Yuanyuan of Cangsang yan []."
In 1904 Zeng Pu took control of the novel. Subsequently, the first two volumes of the novel were published by the Grove of Fiction publishing company in 1905. Each of these volumes contained 10 chapters. Four additional chapters were serialized in The Grove of Fiction magazine in 1907. These chapters were intended to be in a third volume but this volume was never published. In 1928 Zeng Pu reworked the novel into a thirty chapter version and published this version. Ultimately Zeng Pu completed the novel, transforming it into historical fiction. Zeng Pu argued that in his conception "the protagonist functions as the thread which I attempt to link together the history of the past thirty years." The University of Hong Kong Libraries wrote that "Although Zeng Pu was an avid reader of French literature in the original, the influence of his Western models on NHH comes out most clearly in the transformations of traditional Chinese motifs."