With François Cheng: Walking His Path, Cultivating Our Own

Immersive Journey Through a Wounded and Timeless China

Reading François Cheng’s Novels Like Stepping Into a Living Landscape

“We take the pulse of the immense body that is China.” — François Cheng

Some books transport us; others transform us. François Cheng’s novels do both. In The River Below (Le Dit de Tianyi) and Eternity Isn’t Too Much, readers are drawn into a living, breathing China — rich with landscapes, scents, and rituals — yet marked by the scars of history and human suffering. To read Cheng is to walk alongside his characters, and feel, step by step, how memory and geography shape the soul.

A Land in Motion: China as Living Body

In Cheng’s fiction, geography isn’t background — it’s protagonist. The Yellow River and Yangzi aren’t just rivers, but symbolic poles: one rooted in Confucian tradition, the other flowing with Taoist energy. The long journeys on foot that fill both novels echo the rhythm of Chinese medicine: to heal a body, one must feel its breath, its pulse, its blockages.

Through these vast and textured landscapes — from the plains of Sichuan to the caves of Dunhuang — Cheng captures the sense of a country deeply ancient yet fractured by war, injustice, and spiritual longing.

Culture Through the Senses: The Power of Realia

What makes Cheng’s China unforgettable is the attention to detail — the realia — the cultural specifics that ground his fiction: a game of mahjong, jasmine tea, lotus root stew, the soft crackle of roasted watermelon seeds.

These aren’t just atmospheric touches. They are bridges between reader and world, between inner and outer realities. The smells, textures, and tastes evoke both nostalgia and the spiritual intimacy of daily life. Reading Cheng, we taste memory, and perhaps recover something of our own.

A Fiction That Is Both Map and Compass

The River Below unfolds like a bildungsroman — a coming-of-age journey amid China’s 20th-century turmoil. But its deeper map is metaphysical: it traces the evolution of a spirit tested by exile, betrayal, and love.

In Eternity Isn’t Too Much, the stakes shift: love itself becomes a terrain to explore — a force challenged by tradition, hierarchy, and silence. Yet both novels return to the same core idea: transformation. Not escape, but transmutation.

A Literary Dialogue: East Meets West

Cheng’s work is steeped in classical Chinese storytelling — bandits with hearts of gold, reclusive poets, wandering sages — but it also resonates with the Western canon: Stendhal’s mirror of the world, Proust’s memory through taste, Pascal’s fragile humanity. His fiction builds a bridge between literary traditions, inviting us to see the universal in the deeply particular.

The result is a fluid, rhythmic journey — one shaped by festivals, mythic figures, and shifting historical tides.

Why Read François Cheng Today?

Because his China is not only a place, but a question: How do we live with beauty and pain? How do we keep breathing when the world seems broken?

In his novels, François Cheng offers more than a portrait of a country — he offers a way of seeing, a way of healing. His fiction is a refuge for readers seeking wisdom in movement, and silence in the storm.

📖 Note on English Translations

François Cheng’s work has been partially translated into English. His celebrated novel Le Dit de Tianyi is available as The River Below, translated by Timothy Allen and published by Harvill Secker.

While his poetry and essays are less widely available in English, they occasionally appear in bilingual anthologies or academic publications. Readers fluent in French will find his full body of work rich and deeply rewarding. For English-speaking audiences, The River Below offers a powerful entry point into his literary universe — one where language, spirit, and geography converge.