Title: The Poppy War
Author(s): Rebecca F. Kuang
Release year: 2018
Publisher: HarperCollins
Why in Database: This book is set in the fictional Empire of Nikan, which, however, is completely unambiguously modeled on ancient China and draws from its history and culture, including beliefs, so,the black turtle could not be missing as one of the four key deities. Below is a detailed list of all turtle mentions in this volume:
The first piece we mention is a bit unusual, we usually try to follow the chronology and show the fragments in the order in which they appear in the book. In this case, however, the quoted fragment, the exclamation, appears in the text as many as 11 times, it is the first turtle piece we come across, it also appears between the quoted elements below – but we decided, that we will not paste an identical fragment eleven times:
Great Tortoise!
The next piece is the aforementioned listing of the four main deities:
Rin hesitated before them. She was not entirely certain which one she ought to pray to.
She knew their names, of course—the White Tiger, the Black Tortoise, the Azure Dragon, and the Vermilion Bird. And she knew that they represented the four cardinal directions, but they formed only a small subset of the vast pantheon of deities that were worshipped in Nikan.
Another piece mentions the turtle shells, used as currency:
Tutor Feyrik chuckled. “You really have never left Tikany, have you? There are probably twenty kinds of currency being circulated in this Empire—tortoise shells, cowry shells, gold, silver, copper ingots . . . all the provinces have their own currencies because they don’t trust the imperial bureaucracy.
Another mention is about turtles in the nutritional context:
“You could act less like a dazed peasant, you know,” Kitay said as Lan laid out a spread of quail, quail eggs, shark fin soup served in turtle’s shell, and pig’s intestines before them. “It’s just food.”
The next three cuts are about the turtle and the Gatekeeper:
And the Gatekeeper.” The Gatekeeper was the thinnest of the three, a stooped figure wrapped in robes. By his side crawled a large tortoise.
The three heroes now approached a gate similar to those that guarded the entrance to the Academy. The doors were twice the heroes’ height, decorated with intricately curling patterns of butterflies and tigers, and guarded by a great tortoise that bowed its head low as it let them pass.
“The third hero was the humblest among his peers. Weak and sickly, he had never been able to train to the extent of his two friends. But he was loyal and unswerving in his devotion to the gods. He did not beg a favor from any deity in the Pantheon, for he knew he was not worthy. Instead he knelt before the humble tortoise who had let them in.
“‘I ask only for the strength to protect my friends and the courage to protect my country,’ he said. The tortoise replied, ‘You will be given this and more. Take the chain of keys from around my neck. From this day forth you are the Gatekeeper. You have the means to unlock the menagerie of the gods, inside which are kept beasts of every kind, both creatures of beauty and monsters vanquished by heroes long past. You will command them as you see fit.’
The next three fragments are minor mentions of the Great Tortoise (different than the excerpt mentioned at the very beginning):
Gods in Nikan were the heroes of myths, tokens of culture, icons to be acknowledged during important life events like weddings, births, or deaths. They were personifications of emotions that the Nikara themselves felt. But no one actually believed that you would have bad luck for the rest of the year if you forgot to light incense to the Azure Dragon. No one really thought that you could keep your loved ones safe by praying to the Great Tortoise.
The Nikara practiced these rituals regardless, went through the motions because there was comfort in doing so, because it was a way for them to express their anxieties about the ebbs and flows of their fortunes.
“Nikara religion is too haphazard to hold any degree of truth,” Rin said. “You have the four cardinal gods—the Dragon, the Tiger, the Tortoise, and the Phoenix. Then you have local household gods, village guardian gods, animal gods, gods of rivers, gods of mountains . . .” She counted them off on her fingers.
“But if nothing is divine, why do we ascribe godlike status to mythological figures?” Jiang countered. “Why bow to the Great Tortoise? The Snail Goddess Nüwa?
The last two fragments mention turtle shells in the context of divination from them:
The Hinterlanders have been interpreting the future for years, reading the cracks in a tortoise shell to divine events to come. They can fix illnesses of the body by healing the spirit. They can speak to plants, cure diseases of the mind…”
She married the hunter. She taught the men of the hunter’s tribe many things: how to chant at the sky for rain, how to read the patterns of the weather in the cracked shell of a tortoise, how to burn incense to appease the deities of agriculture in return for a bountiful harvest.
