The Poppy War Study Guide

Kuang was born in Guangzhou, a major city in southern China. Her parents immigrated to the United States in 2000, settling in Texas when she was four years old. She received her undergraduate degree from Georgetown University. One summer during college, she took a job teaching debate to students in Beijing. She wrote the majority of The Poppy War during her time abroad. Kuang was inspired to write it in part because, while living in Beijing, she relearned how to speak Chinese and got to know her grandparents, who endured several of the historical events she fictionalizes in The Poppy War. The book sold when Kuang was 20, and it was published just before she graduated from Georgetown. While writing the next two books in the series, Kuang completed advanced degrees in contemporary Chinese studies in the UK on a Marshall scholarship. She’s continued to write fiction and is currently pursuing a PhD from Yale.

To create the fantastical Nikan, R. F. Kuang draws on the aesthetics of Song dynasty China (the Song dynasty ran from roughly 960–1279 C.E.) and the political environment of 20th-century China. During the Song dynasty, competitive civil service examinations (which the novel’s fictional Keju is based on) became the only path for a man to find a job in government. The plot of The Poppy War is a fictionalized version of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the war between China and Japan during World War II. The siege at Khurdalain is modeled after the 1937 Battle of Shanghai, which is often considered the first battle of World War II—and the longest. The atrocities Kuang describes at Golyn Niis are, in many cases, exactly what happened during the December 1937 Nanjing Massacre, when Japanese soldiers murdered and mutilated Chinese residents of the city. Current estimates suggest that between 200,000 and 300,000 Chinese people were murdered, while around 20,000 rapes occurred. The research facility where Altan was imprisoned as a child is modeled on that of Unit 731, a Japanese research facility in its mainland Chinese puppet state Manchukuo that conducted lethal human experiments on Chinese and Russian prisoners, as well as developed bioweapons. None of the imprisoned victims survived—any still alive at the end of World War II were murdered to conceal evidence.

The Poppy War is the first novel in a trilogy; follows Rin’s story in The Dragon Republic and The Burning God. Kuang has also written Babel, or the Necessity of Violence and Yellowface, both of which deal with competitiveness in academia and the western world’s relationship to China. Many reviewers consider The Poppy War to be part of the grimdark subgenre of fantasy or speculative fiction. The subgenre is characterized by violence, and it commonly portrays fantasy worlds where destiny doesn’t exist. In this sense, it’s sometimes described as being “anti-Tolkien” (referring to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series). George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is often considered peak grimdark. However, Kuang herself resents this characterization of The Poppy War, given that the novel draws heavily from the historical record and therefore doesn’t necessarily portray violence just for aesthetic reasons. Rather, Kuang has said in interviews that one of her goals with The Poppy War was to introduce American readers to Sino-Japanese history and particularly that of the Second Sino-Japanese War. She lists Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II and Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze by Peter Harmsen as good resources for readers interested in learning more. Additionally, The Poppy War includes references to the 16th-century classic Chinese novels Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en and Investiture of the Gods by Xu Zonglin, and The Art of War by Sun Tzu, a seminal work of military strategy written in the fifth century BCE.