Why this book

This novel won the Mao Dun Prize and became modern China's national epic — the story a whole country tells about how its ancient Confucian order collided with the twentieth century. So hear it not as one family's quarrel, but as a plain remembering everything.

The Story

Bai Jiaxuan, patriarch of the Bai clan, buried six wives to fevers and childbirth before he was thirty. The village whispered he was cursed. But he took a seventh wife, Xian'cao, and she bore him sons and a daughter — so his line, at last, would not die.

One frozen dawn Bai Jiaxuan saw a white deer graze across a neighbor's field, and where it stepped the earth seemed to breathe. He believed it a sign of fortune. So he tricked his rival Lu Zilin into trading him that very plot — and buried his father there.

That swap made the Bai family prosper — but it planted a secret shame in Bai Jiaxuan and a hot envy in Lu Zilin. Where Bai was rigid and righteous, Lu was clever, greedy, and quick to flatter power. Therefore the two men would circle each other for a lifetime.

Above their feud stood Master Zhu, the plain's great scholar and Bai Jiaxuan's brother-in-law — a sage who read the sky like a book. He wanted only order and virtue. So when opium poppies spread through the fields, he walked out and plowed them under with his own ox.

Bai Jiaxuan rebuilt the clan's ancestral hall and carved a code of conduct on its wall, and he ruled his kin by it without mercy — flogging even his own nephew for gambling. He wanted the old Confucian order to hold. But the century outside would not obey his wall.

Loyal Lu San had served the Bai family for thirty years, and his son, called Hei Wa, grew up half-brother to Bai's own boys. But Hei Wa's heart was wild and proud. So he refused the safe servant's life his father had bowed to, and went off to labor elsewhere.

In a rich man's house Hei Wa met Tian Xiao'e, a young concubine used and abused like property. They fell into a fierce, forbidden love. But her master would never free her — so the two lovers fled together back toward the White Deer Plain to make their own life.

But Bai Jiaxuan would not let an unwed, disgraced woman enter the sacred ancestral hall. He barred Hei Wa and Tian Xiao'e from the clan rites. Therefore the couple were forced to live apart in a hollow cave-house at the village edge — inside the plain, yet cast out of it.

Then revolution swept up from the south, and Hei Wa seized it like a torch. He led a peasant association that stormed the ancestral hall, smashed Bai Jiaxuan's sacred code-stone, and humbled the old landlords. But the uprising was young and unguarded — so the reaction, when it came, was merciless.

The warlords crushed the peasant rising, so Hei Wa fled into the hills and turned bandit. Burning with old grievance, he sent his men to seize Bai Jiaxuan and break the patriarch's ramrod-straight back with an iron rod. Bai survived — but ever after he walked bent, his proud spine curved.

Meanwhile his rival Lu Zilin schemed to shame the Bai family's honor. Hei Wa had vanished into banditry, so Lu preyed on the abandoned Tian Xiao'e, taking her as his secret mistress. Then he aimed her like a weapon at the one thing Bai Jiaxuan prized most — his heir.

That heir was Bai Xiaowen, groomed from birth to inherit the clan's righteous name. But Lu Zilin pushed Tian Xiao'e to seduce him, and the disciplined young man drowned in her bed. So he was caught, flogged before the whole clan, disowned by his father, and cast out.

Stripped of land and name, Bai Xiaowen sank into opium and begging, sleeping among dogs in the winter ditches. His fall broke Bai Jiaxuan more than the iron rod had. But the old man would not bend to pity — so he let his ruined son rot at the door.

Remember Tian Xiao'e: a woman every man in this story used and no man protected. Hei Wa loved her but left her; Lu Zilin desired her but degraded her; the clan judged her and cast her out. So she stood utterly alone, blamed for the ruin of the men who ruined her.

Her final ruin came from the gentlest hand. Lu San, Hei Wa's loyal father, could not bear the shame his son's woman had brought on the family he served. So one night he entered her cave-house and drove a spear through her back, then knelt weeping over what he had done.

But Tian Xiao'e did not stay dead. A plague of fever and locusts fell on the plain, and Lu San began to rave in her voice, her spirit speaking through his mouth, cursing the village that had discarded her. The people trembled — so they turned to Bai Jiaxuan to bind her.

Bai Jiaxuan burned Tian Xiao'e's body and raised a six-sided tower over her ashes to seal her spirit beneath the earth forever. The haunting stopped. But sealing a wronged woman under stone is not the same as justice — and the guilt of her death would outlast the tower itself.

Now turn to Bai Ling, Bai Jiaxuan's fierce and brilliant daughter, who refused bound feet and arranged marriage alike. She hungered for the new world beyond the plain. So against her father's iron will, she fled to the city, cut her hair, and threw herself into the revolution.

In the city Bai Ling joined the Communists and gave everything to the cause. But the movement devoured its own, and in a brutal internal purge her own comrades condemned her as a traitor. So they buried her alive in a pit — the plain's brightest child, killed by the faith she served.

The very night Bai Ling died, far away on the plain her old mother woke screaming, and Master Zhu saw a white deer streak across the snow and vanish. The legendary spirit of the land had come to carry her home. So the plain mourned a daughter it never knew it lost.

Meanwhile the bandit Hei Wa grew weary of blood. He knelt before Master Zhu and begged to become his student, and the sage took him in and taught him the old books. So the wildest man on the plain was tamed by learning, married a good wife, and longed to come home.

And the ruined heir did not stay in the ditch. Bai Xiaowen clawed his way up, joined the Nationalist army, and rose to power as a hard, hollow official — no longer the righteous boy his father raised, but a survivor who had learned that shame could be traded for command.

As war with Japan and civil war ground the plain to dust, Master Zhu labored on, writing the county's history and plowing his own field to the end. Then the great sage died quietly. But before he passed he foresaw the chaos still to come — and warned that no side would stay clean.

When the Communists finally won, Bai Xiaowen switched sides at the last moment and was made county magistrate. Hei Wa, reformed and hopeful, expected mercy from his boyhood companion. But Xiaowen needed a scapegoat to bury his own dirty past — so he had the innocent Hei Wa condemned and executed.

So the wheel closed on Bai Jiaxuan. He had outlived six wives, a martyred daughter, a corrupted son, and every rival — his straight back broken, his righteous world swept away. Yet he still rose each dawn to walk his fields, bent but unbroken, the last keeper of an order the century had killed.

What it means

This is what White Deer Plain leaves in your hands: no revolution, no clan code, no single righteous man can master history — the plain simply endures, swallowing every faith and grudge alike. Chen Zhongshi asks not who was right, but what remains when the certainties men killed for turn to dust.

🎧 Read-along audio is being prepared — text-only for now.