The book’s Chinese title, 凿空 (Zaokong), is layered in meaning. Abudan is literally being “hollowed out” by oil drilling and the villagers’ clandestine tunneling. Yet the title carries an older resonance.
In 139 BCE, the Western Han envoy Zhang Qian set out under Emperor Wudi on a mission to the Western Regions (西域), an ancient name for lands west of the Han Empire, including much of present-day Xinjiang and beyond. Many centuries later, the Tang commentator Sima Zhen explained in his commentary on Records of the Grand Historian:
案谓西域险，本无道路，今凿空而通之也
The Western Regions were treacherous and without roads;
now they had been hewn out and opened through.
That old sense of hewing open a passage reverberates beneath Abudan. What reads like a loose chronicle of farmers, animals, rumors, quarrels, labor, absurdities, and dreams is woven around two hidden tunnels.
(Translated by Jun Liu and Bruce Humes, the novel will be published in English by West Link Books and released in 4Q 2026 or 1Q 2027. Working title: The Audible Annals of Abudan. )
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Altaic Storytelling 