Turning words into gold

"It's interesting to note that the peninsula is one of the early bases when Christianity reached the country. The hospitals and schools helped to nurture new forces for the 1911 revolution," Zhang says.

"While conflict is one story, I went more with the exchanges and integration of different cultures and ideas at the time, which finally made today's China possible," he adds.

Chen Xiaoming, veteran literary critic with Peking University, says the era Zhang depicts in the book is the one when the older agricultural civilization is declining, and also is rocked by Western culture.

"Lots of world-class literature masterpieces are about such clashes at historical crossroads. Zhang's work shows similar excellence and his deeper insights into history," Chen says.

Zhang, 60, has published 20 novels in a 43-year writing career. But he still found it difficult to finish the new novel, saying it's hard to balance history and fictional stories.

"I spent some 20 years preparing for the story, two more years on writing. Then I put it aside for criticism and spent three more years on rewriting," he says.

Like a sower of seeds, he has a habit of preparing a story idea for decades, and he waits for the seeds to grow into real maturity.

He even tries three different approaches in the book: one with a fictional archivist of our time as the introduction, one with a first-person account of Master Ji as the text, and one with the housekeeper's diary as a postscript.

Zhang acknowledges that longevity and alchemists are much-loved themes for online fiction and popular stories.

He says stories for entertainment simply toss in answers for the questions raised, while a serious writer offers the passion, routes and methods of addressing those questions.