Beijing is the capital setting that gathers several of the novel’s most consequential personal and institutional pressures. It is proposed as the destination for an academic conference, becomes the site of a hot-springs trip and a business meeting, and later serves as the place where hospitalization, family duty, romantic rivalry, and medical danger intersect. The city therefore operates as a threshold: characters enter it for leisure or work, but the visit repeatedly exposes concealed relationships and urgent vulnerabilities.

Definition and Setting

Beijing is presented as a major urban destination rather than a fully described physical landscape. The available scenes identify it through movement, accommodation, hospitality, professional gatherings, and medical institutions. Lu Xun and Su Xiangwan travel there after Hua Shuo suggests that Lu Xun attend an academic conference taking place over the weekend and bring the women with him. The city is consequently associated with both elite social circulation and practical business obligations, since Hua Shuo has proposed projects that make a meeting between them appropriate after the conference.

The journey also gives Beijing a more intimate register. After arriving, Su Xiangwan wakes in a hotel, where Lu Xun invites her to dinner and suggests visiting a hot spring. Her curiosity about soaking outdoors while snow falls reveals an imagined winter landscape, while Lu Xun corrects her by reminding her that it is autumn. Beijing thus enters the narrative through the contrast between her fanciful expectation and the season actually surrounding them: the capital is a temporary space for pleasure, but not a world detached from ordinary time.

Business, Travel, and Social Obligations

The trip to Beijing begins in a mood of sociability. Hua Shuo is the person who recommends that Lu Xun go to the capital, and the proposed academic conference creates a respectable framework for bringing companions along. The arrangement joins leisure to professional networking, allowing Lu Xun’s private life to travel alongside his public identity. His agreement is immediate, while the question of whether Lin Yanche will also attend shows that the proposed gathering is connected to the wider circle of friends, rivals, and business associates.

By the second afternoon in Beijing, Lu Xun and Su Xiangwan are supposed to meet Hua Shuo for a meal. The meeting carries an obligation beyond friendship: Hua Shuo has suggested the trip and put forward multiple projects, so failing to see him would be socially and professionally inappropriate. Lu Xun’s good mood after the previous night’s enjoyment makes the planned meal appear to belong to a period of ease, yet the city’s function is already double-edged. Beijing promises recreation while simultaneously drawing the characters back toward negotiations, alliances, and responsibilities.

Medical Crises Within the Capital Setting

Beijing’s apparent leisure is repeatedly interrupted by illness. Lu Xun’s respiratory condition suddenly recurs during one scene. He recognizes that something is wrong, takes a pill from his pocket, removes his mask, and sprays the medicine into his mouth; after several deep breaths, his condition improves. The episode makes his vulnerability concrete without removing his authority. Even a powerful figure who commands attention must carry emergency medication and manage the immediate demands of his own body.

The city also becomes the setting for news of Lin Yanche’s hospitalization. Lu Xun leaves without attracting notice and sends Su Xiangwan a message explaining that Lin Yanche is in the hospital and that he will wait there so they can take Grandfather home together. The message transforms the Beijing visit from a private hotel stay into a family and medical obligation. Su Xiangwan is surprised that Lin Yanche, whose physical strength seems nearly unbreakable, could be hospitalized; her impulse to display her own abilities before him adds a competitive and emotionally charged response to the news.

The danger surrounding illness becomes more severe when Lin Yanche warns Lu Xun about Su Xiangwan’s physical weakness. He describes her recurring vulnerability during menstruation and colds, including fevers that may last three days and three nights, and tells Lu Xun to be prepared to identify her body. The warning produces an immediate bodily reaction in Lu Xun: dull pain in his heart and a deathly pale face. In this sequence, medical information is not neutral exposition. It becomes a weapon, a measure of intimacy, and a means of forcing Lu Xun to confront how little he may know about the woman he protects.

Kinship, Rivalry, and Protection

Beijing’s social environment also clarifies the unstable boundaries between family language and romantic suspicion. Lu Xun explains that Shen Yiyun is the child adopted by his uncle and therefore his cousin, and that he arranged for her to live near the theater when she came to Cloud City to perform. Su Xiangwan remains displeased that he did not explain the arrangement sooner, comparing it with the earlier problem involving Song Yun’er. The capital setting thus becomes part of a recurring pattern in which accommodation, travel, and protection can appear indistinguishable from concealed intimacy.

The same instability appears in Chu Fei’s antagonism toward Lu Xun. Chu Fei says that a woman once dressed as a close relative had no actual kinship with him and that, more importantly, he liked her deeply. He then describes Lu Xun as an eyesore and says that he prefers the process of pursuit to immediate possession, especially when the chase lasts longer. Beijing’s atmosphere of conferences, visits, and social meetings therefore stands against a more predatory logic of romantic competition: people may arrive under respectable labels, but desire continually tests those labels.

Su Xiangwan’s own language eventually cuts through the uncertainty. When Lu Xun asks what their relationship is, she calls him her husband while pulling off his shirt flirtatiously. His uncertainty remains because he is not sure that she fully knows who he is, and the surrounding men are all capable of being treated as handsome husbands in her confused state. The scene makes marital identity both an intimate fact and a fragile recognition, while Beijing’s crowded social world supplies the conditions in which that recognition can be questioned.

From Leisure to Threat

The most dramatic reversal associated with Beijing is the collapse of pleasure into physical danger. Lu Xun’s plan to spend time with Su Xiangwan is repeatedly displaced by illness, hospitalization, and the need to protect her. In another confrontation, he ignores wounds on his face, crouches to embrace her, and reassures her that he is present; when she notices blood at the corner of his mouth and realizes that he has been injured, he kisses her rather than allowing the scene to be defined solely by fear. The city’s narrative pressure is therefore registered through the body: breathing becomes difficult, blood becomes visible, and affection becomes an act of immediate reassurance.

Beijing is also connected to the disclosure of Lin Yanche’s liver cancer. Yun Xiao quietly tells Su Xiangwan that Lin Yanche has received a diagnosis of liver cancer and is waiting for a suitable source of a liver; otherwise, he can only wait for death. The information changes the meaning of his earlier thinness and instability. What had appeared as aggression, exhaustion, or manic behavior acquires a terminal medical context, while the language of a suitable source turns survival into a problem of bodily exchange and limited availability.

Finally, the city’s medical associations extend beyond Lin Yanche. Su Qingrou is hospitalized after suffering acute appendicitis and undergoes surgery to remove her appendix. Her hospitalization threatens to delay the engagement ceremony, demonstrating how illness can interrupt family ritual and alter the timing of marriage. Beijing and the broader urban medical network thus connect private bodies to public schedules: an emergency operation can affect an engagement, a diagnosis can reshape rivalry, and a respiratory recurrence can interrupt the conduct of a powerful man.

Narrative Significance

Beijing’s importance lies in its repeated conversion of movement into revelation. The characters enter the capital for an academic conference, projects, dinner, and hot springs, but the city keeps redirecting them toward hospitals, warnings, kinship explanations, and violent protection. Its urban openness does not dissolve conflict; it gives conflict more rooms, contacts, and institutional consequences in which to surface.

As a location, Beijing concentrates the novel’s medical and relational politics. Illness determines who must be cared for, who may be protected, who can be manipulated through fear, and whose body becomes evidence of an approaching catastrophe. At the same time, adopted kinship, cousinhood, marriage, and pursuit are repeatedly placed beside one another, exposing how easily social titles can conceal or provoke desire. The capital consequently serves as both a destination and a pressure chamber: a place where leisure is never secure, public obligations are inseparable from private feeling, and the next medical or emotional crisis may already be waiting behind the hotel door.