katzenfabrik

(This isn't strictly about baihe but I'm posting this here anyway since I'll be using a couple of examples from baihe media.)

Let's say you're writing something inspired by on based on a c-novel. And you've come to the exciting part, which is choosing names for your characters. And you find yourself stuck.

Well, not to worry! We have a several-millennia-long tradition of poetry to assist us. All you have to do is this.

Take a line from a Book of Odes poem, or a Tang poem, or really any poem. Then pick out the name-like elements and smoosh them together. Voilà, you've got yourself a name.

Thus, from the Book of Odes the line 蒹葭苍苍, 白露为霜 (pinyin: jianjia cangcang, bailu wei shuang) (Legge's translation: 'The reeds and rushes are deeply green / And the white dew is turned into hoarfrost) gives us Bai Jianjia, which is suitable for either a refined young lady or a courtesan of the high-class, scholarly sort. Also from the Book of Odes, the line 昔我往矣，杨柳依依 (pinyin: xi wo wang yi, yangliu yiyi) (Legge's translation: At first, when we set out / The willows were fresh and green) gives us Liu Yiyi, also a good courtesan or high-class maidservant name (IMO the Book of Odes link might just about make it learned enough to be a young gentlewoman's name, but I don't usually like repeated-syllable names for upper-class or scholarly women, unless it's a nickname).

This trick is pretty commonly used in popular media. The drama version of The Message has a character named (or rather, re-named) He Jianzhu (何剪烛). This is clearly taken from the line 何当共剪西窗烛 (pinyin: he dang gong jian xichuang zhu) from Li Shangyin's poem 'Sending a Letter North on a Rainy Night'(夜雨寄北). The love interest from The Beauty's Blade is called Yu Shengyan (玉生烟), and so is a secondary character from the danmei novel Thousand Autumns, courtesy of the line 蓝田日暖玉生烟 (pinyin: lantian ri nuan yu sheng yan) from another Li Shangyin poem, 'The Brocade Zither' (錦瑟).

'But, douqi,' I hear you cry, 'what if I don't know any Chinese poetry or enough Chinese to know what are appropriate name elements to pick out of verses?'

Ah. Then I'm afraid this post will be of no help at all. Sorry.

Pre-orders are currently open for The World Knows (全世界都知道, pinyin: quan shijie dou zhidao) by Yu Shuang (鱼霜), serialised online as The Whole World Knows She Loves Me (全世界都知道她爱我, pinyin: quan shijie dou zhidao ta ai wo). This is a contemporary romance featuring a relationship between an artist and a professional pianist. Pre-orders can be made via the following bookshops:

• Kuwei (the publisher)
  
• Jinse
  
• Kuaile
  
• Wangou
  
• Xinshijiao

The web version of the novel can be read here on JJWXC.

Pre-orders are also open for What Era Do You Think This Is (都什么年代了啊, pinyin: dou shenme niandai le a) by Qi Xiao Huang Shu (七小皇叔). The publisher-provided English title for this was Kissing a Gardenia, but that seems to have been scrapped now. This is also a contemporary romance, set in baihe voice acting circles. Pre-orders can be made via the following bookshops:

• Fengrusong
  
• Hanlin
  
• Kuaile
  
• Kuaile (extra merch)
  
• Xinshijiao
  
• Xinshijiao (extra merch)

The web version of the novel can be read here on Changpei.

Across the Empire (纵横, pinyin: zongheng) is, by webnovel standards, an ancient relic. First published on JJWXC in 2005 (for reference, JJWXC itself was founded in 2003), it's one of the earliest court intrigue novels in the baihe genre. It was actually planned as a trilogy of novels chronicling the life and death of protagonist Lin Zong, but only the first volume was fully written. The author started the second volume, but discontinued it after eighteen chapters. In an addendum to the second volume, she provides an outline of how her planned story would have gone.

The protagonist Lin Zong is an interesting twist on the popular cross-dressing lead. She is, at the start of the novel, the only living child of Prince Chu, one of the emperor's brothers. We're told that, being a very sickly child, she was brought up as a boy in order to ensure her good health (this is a superstition/folk belief/tradition that's still extant in some communities; the idea seems to be that, if you raise a child as the 'opposite' gender, you confuse the malevolent forces responsible for their poor health).* So from a very young age, Lin Zong has been treated (and dresses as) a boy, and her father has even designated her his heir, but everyone knows that she was born a girl. This creates interesting tensions down the line.

*This was also the premise of the 2015 Taiwanese drama Bromance, the most accidentally(?) queer cross-dressing drama I've ever watched. Seriously, the protagonist is easily readable as non-binary up to the very last frame of the drama.

Prince Chu is one of those extremely competent, charismatic, loyalty-inspiring princes who are the bane of their emperor brothers' existences. The emperor therefore devises a loyalty test: he arranges for Lin Zong to be married to a high-ranking young noblewoman named Chu Yanran, to see how Prince Chu will respond. Prince Chu and Lin Zong don't really have a choice but to accept the match (the other option is to kick off and basically start a rebellion), and so we end up with the rather surreal scenario of a lesbian marriage sanctioned, nay compelled, by an otherwise institutionally homophobic state.

( some mild spoilers )

I read the Chinese original of both volumes here and here on JJWXC.

yuerstruly and I came up with this (extremely short, and not all danmei) list for fun. We were seriously hampered in this task by the fact that neither of us reads all that much danmei (and in fact, such danmei I've read consists mainly of the Erha and MDZS sex scenes, at the instigation of friends who wanted to know if they were sexy in the original). There's also the usual problem that there are no non-MTL translations for most of the baihe novels in the list. But ANYWAY.

• If you liked Sha Po Lang, you might also like Minister Xie (谢相, pinyin: xie xiang) by Ruo Hua Ci Shu (若花辞树). In Minister Xie, teenage emperor Liu Zao tries to get to grips with ruling an empire while also doing her best to turn her prime minister Xie Yi (who is 14 years older than her, and also her sort-of aunt) into her wife. I have been reliably informed that she is even more Obsessed and Dramatique about the latter task than Changgeng is in relation to Gu Yun. Brief reviews are available here and here.
  
• If you liked Erha, you might also like the first 40% of The Abandoned (弃仙, pinyin: qi xian) by Mu Feng Qing Nian (沐枫轻年). Featuring extreme xianxia shizunfuckery and multiple rebirths, the first chapter of The Abandoned alone has the protagonist masturbating to a painting of her shizun, a curse that's basically the xianxia version of sex pollen, multiple instances of hurt/comfort, stratospheric levels of unhealthy disciple/shizun co-dependence, a double rebirth, the protagonist allowing her shizun to stab her in the shoulder so that she could get close enough to kiss her shizun, and the protagonist stealing her shizun's jade pendant for use as a masturbation aid. I say the first 40% because the remainder of the novel is unfortunately a bit of a drag (though for all I know, the back half of Erha also overstays its welcome). Brief review here.
  
• If you liked SVSSS, you might also like An Incantation for Subduing a Dragon/Dragon Subjugation Incantation (降龙诀, pinyin: xiang long jue) by Shi Wei Yue Shang (时微月上). Protagonist Luo Qingci transmigrates into a xianxia novel and into the body of female lead Ruan Li's evil, conniving shizun. Being genre savvy, Luo Qingci tries her best to avoid the character's canonical grisly fate, only to discover that her disciple might just be falling in love with her. Oh, and Ruan Li is also a dragon. Ongoing fan translation here.
  
• If you liked Qiang Jin Jiu, you might also like At Her Mercy (我为鱼肉, pinyin: wo wei yurou) by Ning Yuan (宁远). Except that everyone in At Her Mercy is evil. An English-language translation of At Her Mercy has been licensed by Rosmei (under the title At the World's Mercy), though the publication date is not yet known.

And now we come to the non-danmei though still danmei-adjacent comps:

• If you liked Nirvana in Fire/The Langya List, you might also like At Her Mercy, except that as noted above, everyone in At Her Mercy is evil.
  
• If you liked the Daomu Biji/The Lost Tomb series, you might also like Exploring an Empty Tomb (探虚陵, pinyin: tan xu ling) by Jun Sola (君sola) and Reading the Remnants (问棺, pinyin: wen guan) by Qi Xiao Huang Shu (七小皇叔). Obviously I don't know anything about the Daomu Biji series except that they're tomb-raiding novels, and both Exploring an Empty Tomb and Reading the Remnants are also tomb-raiding novels, so... close enough, I hope? Exploring an Empty Tomb is also literally millions of words long. A partial fan translation of Exploring an Empty Tomb is available here. A partial fan translation of Reading the Remnants is available here, and a fuller one here.

Comment with your own comps, if you have them! Also, feel free to post a danmei title, say what you liked about it and/or what its most notable qualities are, and people who read more baihe can hopefully find some comps for you!