Twenty years ago, Gao Jianqun's bestselling novel The Last Hun popularized ancient Chinese legend and renewed interest in the earliest periods of Chinese history and culture. In Tongwan City, Gao relates an epic saga of murder and compassion in the grassland kingdom of the ancient Chinese frontier, while telling a parallel story of knowledge blooming in the center of Chinese life. Gao weaves into this tale seminal themes of Chinese history and culture: the connection between the warlike Xiongnu and their cousins the Huns, the Great Wall that was built to separate the Xiongnu from the Han Chinese, and the philosophy that ultimately united them.
