Dusting off a classic

At the end of the 1980s, as a high school teacher, A Lai became bored teaching the same texts year after year and began to focus more on writing poems and fiction in his spare time.

When he turned 30 in 1989, however, he found his work unfulfilling, so he began investigating the local Tibetan history of his hometown in Barkam county in the part of Sichuan where his novel is set.

One day, in May 1994, all the legends, religious and historical stories that he had collected over the years started to boil over in his head. He wrote down the first sentence and just kept writing. In July of that year, during the FIFA World Cup in the United States, he stopped for a month, but returned to it as soon as the final game had ended. By December, he had completed the novel.

"My biggest motivation to write the novel was to create a book about the history of the region. We all know the major points of Chinese history, but small local historical books are lacking," he says.

"Just like the Maichi chieftain's clerk in the novel, I continued his work to record the local history of that period of time," he says.

Besides Settling Dust, A Lai has published many other works, such as The Song of King Gesar in 2009, a novel based on Tibetan legend of King Gesar, the novel Empty Mountain in 2005, the novella Silversmith in the Moonlight in 1999, and the novellas Fairy Rings and Three Grassworms in 2015.