LOTUS, MUD, BLADE

A tragicomedy of eloquence and error, set in the 16th-century friction between the Siamese and Khmer empires.

“A poet-butcher, a scholar-prince, and the beautiful lie that binds them across fifteen years of war and silence.”

1515, The Mun River Valley is a frontier of “Stone and Wood.” In the ancient city of Meuang Vimayapura, the ancestral Khmer laterite temples, hospitals and palaces are being slowly overshadowed by the “New Teak” built by the bureaucracy of the rising Siamese Kingdom of Ayutthaya. Into this landscape of cultural friction comes Preah Ponhea Chan, an exiled Khmer prince. He finds it in the talented but uneducated recruit Sorya, unaware that every eloquent words he worships is actually the work of her cousin, Mŭu Hrìng: the city’s formidable Butcher Poet.

What begins as a comedy of errors quickly turns into a brutal test of survival. Forced by a vengeful Governor to the starving frontier of Meuang Sema, Mŭu Hrìng must navigate a landscape of mud, blood, and betrayal. She survives the siege by the strength of her kitchen knife and her wit, just about.

Spanning five chapters from the vibrant marketplace of Vimaya to the silent, sun-baked green tiles of Wat Ban Tha Daeng, the novella explores the tragic gap between the “Word” and the “Flesh.” It is a sensory-rich immersion into a rarely explored era of Southeast Asian history, where the stroke of a stylus is as lethal as the strike of a blade. LOTUS, MUD, BLADE is a tragicomedy of eloquence and error that balances the sharp rhythmic banter of Siamese courtly wit with the crushing silence of a love realized too late.

Author’s Note

LOTUS, MUD, BLADE is a work of historical fiction that explores the complexities of identity, love, and cultural exchange in 16th-century Southeast Asia. I had a great time adapting one of my favourite French story.

Despite all the changes, I wouldn’t call it a re-imagining, a term in fashion in literary circles at the moment, for two reasons: one, it is very pretentious pseudo-word and sounds like floor-engineering expression, and two, because I made the concerted decision to keep the most famous set scenes—the Nose tirade, the duel as a ballade, etc.. Re-telling is an appropriate label, because the change in settings and genders modify the purtent of the tale.

At 24,000 words, it stands as a short novella. As I was writing in parallel the adaptation of several oral tradition Thai tales, I kept most of the characters and the settings common. Combining the Thai tales and the French story, it might yet become a full-length novel. We will see.

Publication Status

Genre: Historical Literary Fiction / Tragi-comedy
Tone: Lush, Atmospheric, Witty, and Poignant
Interest: 16th-Century Southeast Asia, Khmer-Siamese Cultural Friction, Literary Deception
Word count: 24,000

This work is currently being serialized on this site. You can read the first serial here.