“Long Life holds the cipher to Liu Liangcheng’s own family history—and reflects his profound lament about the role of literature today. He is, perhaps, the tireless Chang Ming himself: the clairvoyant Aunt Wei, the bell-caster, even the wandering spirit in the hills. When the bell tolls, souls return. Here, the personal meets history; nature coexists with the uncanny. Through enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment, Liu completes yet another dialectic of life.”

—David Der-wei Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature, Harvard University

★ Liu Liangcheng is hailed as “the last essayist of 20th-century China” and a “rural philosopher.” He is the recipient of the Lu Xun Literary Prize, the Baihua Literary Award for Prose, and the Mao Dun Literature Prize—China’s highest literary honor. A defining voice of 21st-century pastoral writing, he stands as a spiritual guardian in an age of materialism, blending Tao Yuanming’s serenity with Miyazaki Hayao’s lyrical sense of time and space.

★ Long Life is Liu’s first full-length novel since winning the Mao Dun Prize—a work he long envisioned as his “book about ghosts,” finally completed at age sixty as his “destined masterpiece.”

★ For the first time, Liu crosses the boundary between life and death, unfolding a world where the living and the dead coexist—where heaven and earth, people and spirits, birth and loss intertwine. The novel traces a family’s tragedy and rebirth across generations, a timeless teenage love that brings readers to tears, and a buried chapter of history from China’s northwest.

★ Designed by renowned book designer Jin Quan, this paperback features a dual-cover format for portability and includes an exclusive bookmark hand-calligraphed by Liu Liangcheng.

The "Liu Liangcheng Works Collection" includes:
Novels: "Bomba", "Drifting Soil", "Hollower Out", "Bearing Word", "Long Life"
Prose collection: "A Village of One's Own"
Interview and essay collection: "Chatting about Earthly Matters in the Sky"

Long Life is Liu Liangcheng’s “book of destiny,” completed at age sixty and his first novel since Bomba won the Mao Dun Literature Prize.

Rooted in a true story, the novel recounts how, over 130 years ago, an entire clan was wiped out—except for one mother who fled with her five-year-old son from central China all the way to Xinjiang, where their descendants later grew into a large family. Liu’s own lineage carries a similar rise and fall, a childhood haunted by ghostly fears, and a journey back to ancestral graves where he reclaimed the memory of his lost father. This story of fear, death, and life lay dormant in him for ten years, waiting until he aged enough to feel its “eternal emotion.” At sixty, it finally opened its eyes.

Set in a small village beneath the Tianshan Mountains and deep in the Gobi Desert, the narrative begins in 1982: when the whirlpool of the Shirenzi River swallowed the youth of irrigation worker Han Liansheng, sixteen-year-old Wei Gu gained the gift of clairvoyance through his final gaze. Over the next thirty years, she soothes the dead and sustains the living—her eyes bridging the human and spirit worlds.

In nearby Wandi Spring Village, veterinarian Guo Changming asks Wei Gu to heal his father, the old herbalist Guo Daidao, who suffers from an inexplicable “fear illness.” Beneath the dappled shade of an elm tree, Wei Gu senses that the sickness stems from a century-old family catastrophe.

Their quest leads them west—from Kuquanzi to Yizhou, Guazhou, Suzhou, and finally to Jiuquan’s Zhongta County—tracing a path across the Hexi Corridor to uncover buried roots. Thus opens a world where heaven and earth, people and ghosts, life and death all exist together.

Long Life marks Liu Liangcheng’s boldest expansion of literary territory. Born from his own life and ancestral memory, the novel explores how a village moves from “believing in spirits” to “disbelieving,” and how one man comes to understand his “shallow fate” versus his “long life.” We stand between ancestors and descendants—extended by time into longevity. This is the eternal path of life.

Liu Liangcheng

Born in 1962 in Shawan County, Xinjiang, he is a Chinese writer. Currently, he serves as the deputy director of the Prose Committee of the Chinese Writers' Association, a member of the 10th National Committee of the Chinese Writers' Association, the chairperson of the Xinjiang Writers' Association, the part-time vice chairperson of the Xinjiang Federation of Literary and Art Circles, and a director of the China Written Works Copyright Society. He is also a senior cultural advisor to the Xinjiang Wild Camel Protection Association. He is hailed as "the last prose writer of the 20th century in China" and "the philosopher of the countryside". He has won the Lu Xun Literature Prize, the 16th Hundred Flowers Literature Award for Prose, and the 11th Mao Dun Literature Prize.

His work A Village of One's Own caused great sensation both at home and abroad. His otherworks, including Hollowed Out, Drifting Soil and In Xinjiang, have all focused onthe village in Xinjiang where he lived for years - hence his reputation as a "bucolicphilosopher".

Table of Contents
Part I: Liansheng
Part II: Changming
Part III: Bell Tolls
Part IV: Reckoning
Part V: No Spirits
Author’s Note