Lu Yuan — A Chronicle of Yingbo 001 (English Translation)

Lu Yuan — A Chronicle of Yingbo 001 (English Translation)

Published on Mon Feb 16 2026 16:00:00 GMT-0800 (北美太平洋标准时间)

From A Chronicle of Yingbo 瀛波志 by Lu Yuan 陆源, 2025, China

Translated by Whisper / Mu Layla, date 2026/02/17

A Chronicle of Yingbo

Written by Lu Yuan
Published by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
2025/04/01

Within these pages, you shall find events derived from various phenomena from the wider universe. However, in the world we are accustomed to, these phenomena would oft be regarded as fictional. As such, if it bears resemblance to people or events the reader is familiar with, it is only natural. Do not be surprised.

In memory of Huang Xiaoyang

Translator’s Note: 黄孝阳 Huang Xiaoyang (1974–2020) was a Chinese writer of experimental, postmodern, metafictional novels and literary criticism. He passed away from illness on the 27th of December, 2020, at the age of 46.

000 ( )

[Not yet translated, epigraph of likely Henry Corbin about Yahya Suhrawardi—I will attempt to find it from the original source but if I cannot, I will translate it.]

001 (首) (Head)

Yingbo Manor

Situated amongst the Metropolis’ southern periphery lies Yingbo Manor. It is, in reality, an interstice, a spacetime looking-glass, a superimposition space between three dimensions. The brilliant architects—also known as the source-code programmers—of the Metropolis (no further determiner is required, for all, old and young, know the Metropolis is simply the Metropolis) transferred the form, parameterized in improvisatory evocation, of old Moscow’s architecture—as such, here, yearlong, swirls of shivering and solitary sparrowsong linger amidst sparse leaves, car crashes, callous faces, and sobering pipe-dreams(1), steeped in the autumnal eternities of old empire and caustic love, alongside suicidal nomads nestled amongst multistory buildings on mizzling days. Elsewhere, the women of the Metropolis, each and every one, are astonishingly alluring, hair combed into Audrey Hepburn-esque high chignons, their limbs slender, ever-long, elegantly swaying along with the undulations in artificial light, accentuating pridefully their eerily extravagant, strangely seductive physical features. On a daily basis, these young women take calcium and lie, in twilit hours, on torture beds: frigid machinery stretching their bodies, enduring starvation, their tears forming flowing rivers. They are like Labiatae plants, liplike, an assailing fragrance. Should you see a resident of Yingbo Manor with a vacant expression, taking no notice of the healthy maidens walking past, it is trivial to infer they have recently returned from the Metropolis, having had their eyes thoroughly scorched to blind confusion by that place’s flocking “angel” hosts. Indeed, regardless of the shifts of lunar phases, moonrise and moonset, their scorching and billowing holy ambiance unceasingly surges towards us like stormy waves, like a dense, non-Newtonian fluid…

To the northeast of the Manor, lightrail trains clatter constantly atop a viaduct. The light of night fades among the depths of the corridor just beyond an archway.

Sometimes, when the grand gears of disparate spaces grind, shift against each other, transient seasonal anomalies erupt. The azure stretch of sky suspended above Yingbo Manor, wherein the seven luminaries(2) are entirely absent, appears irreal and monotonous, like raw footage awaiting processing. But, the omniscient old Director, slow and indecisive, vacillates on how to refine the rough cut held in his hands, what special effects to use. This sort of sky, this sort of atmosphere, its airy lightness, always stirs a sort of uncertain, amorphous mood, as if something slowly accelerating, incrementally imposing itself… Sometimes, instantaneously, torrential rainfall befalls, and the myriad trickling streamlets springing from the Metropolis, all surging southward, swamp the southern suburbs, transforming the Manor into a synecdoche of the seas of the Devonian, the sea’s surface exposing interspersed, numerous Carboniferous stone formations.

Spring succumbs to Summer, and the town, compelled by gilded vines, grows rampant, expanding beyond the boundaries so lofty, remote and ethereal, of reality itself. While the Metropolis is a synthesis of the tonic and silhouette of Old Moscow, the Manor resembles not the small estate of Anton Chekhov, perennially littered with rotten apples, nor the grand mansion of Leo Tolstoy with its obfuscated, unwieldy name, nor any other Russian estate for that matter. It is something else entirely, new and novel. Along snaking, long lakeside shores, loiter learnèd literati, adherents of god-seeking theory(3)—they murmur amongst themselves, frowning, curled brows, of their prescient portents the pseudopregnancy of idea will soon collapse. Should you pursue these eccentrics through the wild-forests—secluded wastelands of dense clusters of leaves, diffuse spates of scaly stems’ scent, long drapes of mother-of-pearl bristlemane—and look up, you’d spot dispersions, liquiddense and octopoid, of intervallic moonlight.

So near yet so far, amidst the Metropolis, skyscrapers anticipate the brisk north wind brushing away the dust and haze. Mass media vies constantly for attention over stories of sudden suicide attacks, arising some instilled sense of apathetic insensitivity. Melancholy gas burns: cold smoke and soul fragments ascend up into the faint violet(4), people of all sorts carelessly careening into death’s abyss by way of road accident. ‘Round the clock, passengers inside errandrunning luxury coaches whisper and hypothesize about insider affairs, court intrigue, political powers-that-be, along with new situations in fiscal matters. Multifarious wayfarers, all tuned into the National Station’s morning broadcast:

“As per a report from the Nikkei, Roland Busch, president of the German industrial magnate Siemens AG, has announced the machinery industry is recovering faster than anticipated……”

The residents of Yingbo Manor often dream of strolling on the Moon. Tracing wayward paths around indifferent lunar craters, exchanging cold greetings, before absentmindedly leaping, like long-hair lune-hares, into the distance. (5)

Rumor has it: the composers of the magical city further utilized peripheral parameters of the third iteration of Buenos Aires, and as such the Manor’s environs contain traces of the Argentine poet Evaristo Carriego. His images of suburbia evoke a certain somber and downcast, occidental hue, but alas, I have not visited the city of old Borges, so the truth remains elusive. Regardless, whether it’s the Paris of South America or the eastern Slavic City of a Thousand Domes, in the end, it is but an exercise in clumsy influence from poor sci-fi films, fatigued to the level of exhaustion, soon asphyxiation.

On a certain duskfall between autumn and winter, a dozen or so whitebeaked crows descended from the dreary northwest. This group of fanatic vagrants, Lightsect members, had, for generations, travelled from the distant snow territory, in pursuit of the heretical clans who worship the Black Sun, with an oath to destroy them. They had, over the course of their journey, traversed past the mountain-passes of thousands of hundreds of constellations, voyaging towards the settling sun as if scattered ashes dissolved in a stream of strong winds, sifting towards Yingbo Manor—this peach-blossom Arcadia(6) of low-rent, this ataraxic, Anarcho-Communal birdnest—presumably in a new stage of assiduous search for their sinful sworn enemies. However, there was no remote chance this group of myopic, already near-featherless corvids could’ve ever envisioned this land, so utterly vast, spacious and sprawling, boundless to the point of sheer confusion. Yingbo Manor was quite possibly an ordinary corner of a vast and grand, celestial map-painting. That expansive masterpiece, that massive opus which was once suspended up in the dark star-dome, which collapsed over the course of a single day so many years ago, with each section, in succession, descending from space, disintegrating into the mortal realm. Those who worshiped the Machine God, bearing secrets, came and went from the silence, for they were neither machine-dancing hippies of antiquity, nor mechanical wrist-watched yuppies of contemporaneity. Set beneath spans of listless sunset, abandoned artifacts, eerie, shattered stumps, skulls inscribed with stardials, are all scattered, dispersed across the atavistic remnants of these ancient ruins. But to the distant edge of this wilderness, there spans an enigma-gray forbidden military zone; within view, beyond reach.

Translator’s Notes:

(1) Originally 黄粱梦 huangliangmeng, lit. yellow millet dream, a saying referring to an unattainable and unrealistic dream, with pipe-dream being a comparable English idiom. It is a reference to an influential short story from the Tang dynasty era, Shen Jiji’s 枕中记 zhengzhongji, the Record within a Pillow, which describes an unhappy scholar, steaming millet who is gifted a magical pillow by a Daoist monk. After the scholar falls asleep, it induces in him a dream of utmost success, but when he wakes, he realizes his millet porridge has not even been cooked to completion; a fable about obsessing over fame & fortune.

(2) 七曜 qiyao, the Seven Luminaries in Tang-era Chinese astronomy / astrology corresponding with the days of the week, as well as with the seven classical celestial bodies, and the five classical Chinese elements (additionally with the Sun and Moon). It was likely introduced in the 8th century through Manicheans from Central Asia traveling on the Silk Road, first recorded in the Chinese language in transliteration a Buddhist text, the “宿曜经 Suyaojing,” from the Sogdian kingdom-state of Kangju or Kangguo (take note of this name, it is very important in later chapters of the novel,) likely synonymous with Sogdiana, in the Transoxania region, (that is, between the Sur Darya and the Amu Darya,) spanning modern day Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

(3) The original text is 寻神论 *zhaoshenlun (*lit. God Seeking Theory), a reference to the Russian religious / philosophical movement of the late 19th & early 20th century (anterior to the October Revolution) known in Chinese as 寻神说 zhaoshenshuo (lit. God Seeking Preachings) and known in Russian as богоискательство bogoiskatel'stvo (lit. Searching for God). Primarily consisting of the Intelligentsiya, it looked to combine progressive, revolutionary and social thought with faith and religious meaning, opposing both the atheist materialism of Marxism as well as the stagnation of the status quo. The movement’s approach was heavily criticized by Lenin for overlooking class struggle in favor of bourgeoisie pursuits of religion.

(4) 紫冥 ziming, lit. purple darkness, is a poetic image famously used by Tang-era poet Li Bai referring to the sky; 冥 ming has an additional association with death and the afterlife.

(5) This passage alludes to the mythological Moon / Jade Rabbit associated with immortality in Chinese culture, neologized here as Lune-hare.

(6) 世外桃源 shiwaitaoyuan (lit. peach spring outside of this world) an allusion to the Peach Blossom Spring, a fictional, idealistic utopia as described in Tao Yuanming’s poem, the Record of the Peach Blossom Spring (桃花源記). “Arcadia” here is used as a shorthand for a idyllic and idealized, pastoral vision.