The Poppy War

The trilogy's Trifecta, three sworn warriors who once ruled the Empire together, and its warlord politics of shifting alliances echo Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which R. F. Kuang has cited alongside the twentieth-century Chinese history its war is drawn from.

R. F. Kuang has been explicit that the Poppy War is the Second Sino-Japanese War with the names changed, and that the novel's central atrocity is the Nanjing Massacre. The map is recognisable on purpose: Nikan is China, Mugen is Japan, Hesperia is the Western powers who arrive late and with conditions. The Federation's invasion follows the shape of the 1937 campaign, and the chapter that turns the book is a direct account of what was done at Nanjing, written from research rather than invented. Kuang has said she wrote it because the period is taught in China and largely unknown outside it. The Trifecta, the shamans and the drug are hers; almost everything the war does is not.