They also meet Key Rabbit, who is married to Lotus Cloud. Along with the Ginseng, they also find three handmaiden ghosts that repeated the same story, "The birds of China must fly!" One of the many people they meet in their adventure is Henpecked Ho, who tells them the story of how a god, Star Shepherd, fell in love with a human girl, who was given the title of Princess of Birds. Still, these are all ineffective in curing the children. After surviving the Duke of Ch'in's deadly games that consisted of labyrinths and terrible monsters, they succeed in gathering different parts of the Ginseng.
They begin by seeking it in the palace of the feared Ancestress.Īs it turns out, however, the Ancestress possesses only the lesser Root of Power, and the true Great Root is in the possession of the tyrannical and avaricious Duke of Ch'in. In order to cure the children, Ox and Master Li set out to find the Great Root of Power, which can cure anything. In Peking, he finds Master Li Kao, a drunken scholar with a self-described "slight flaw in his character", who immediately identifies the cause of the plague as ku poison, an incurable poison inflicted on the village by two dishonest villagers trying to corner the silk crop. Number Ten Ox, the narrator, is dispatched to find a wise man who can cure the children. In the beginning of the novel, the village of Ku-fu is stricken by a plague which kills its silkworms and sends its children between the ages of eight and thirteen into a coma. The real story of the Cowherd and Weaver Girl is referenced at the end of the book. It draws on and reinvents the traditional tale of The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl and other myths, poems and incidents from Chinese history. The book is set in a fantastical version of imperial China (Hughart subtitled it "A Novel of an Ancient China That Never Was"). Without mentioning names, the Taoists could use real emperors and real power structure in a fantasy form." Plot Confucians liked to castrate people who fought the establishment. Hughart called the novel "a modern version of a classical form of Chinese novel, which was an underground Taoist form designed to fight back against Confucians.
The original draft of Bridge of Birds is included in a special slipcased version of the omnibus collection, The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, released by Subterranean Press in 2008. It is the first of three novels in The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox series. Bridge of Birds is a fantasy novel by Barry Hughart, first published in 1984.
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