Fang Runin is a war orphan raised by foster parents who run an opium business in Tikany, a rural southern province. They plan to marry her off to a local merchant. She decides to take the Keju, the national exam, and score high enough to attend Sinegard, the empire’s most prestigious military academy. Nobody from Tikany has done it in years. She studies by candlelight and passes.
At Sinegard, Rin is an outsider. She’s darker-skinned, poorer, and less educated than her classmates, who are mostly children of warlords and generals. She works harder than everyone else because she has to. When she discovers she has shamanic abilities that let her channel the power of the Phoenix god, her teachers tell her this kind of power is dangerous. The shamans who came before her destroyed civilizations.
R.F. Kuang based Rin’s trajectory on historical figures from twentieth-century China. The first book parallels China’s experience leading up to and during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The second follows the fragmentation of power after the war. The third tracks Rin’s rise to something resembling absolute authority and the costs of wielding it.
Rin’s arc is about how ordinary people become capable of extraordinary violence when they believe their cause justifies it. Kuang does not let the reader off easy. Rin does terrible things for understandable reasons, and the books refuse to simplify the moral calculus.
Reading Order
See the complete Poppy War reading order for all books featuring Rin.