Zhang Yan

Zhang Yan is Zhang Yuanchao’s grandson and one of the ordinary people through whom the novel measures historical change. He appears first as part of a family scene involving the return of rationing, and later as a hibernator whose memories preserve the human cost of the Great Ravine. His life connects everyday economic habits, intergenerational continuity, commercial adaptation, and the most devastating social consequences of humanity’s defense against the Trisolarans.

Family Background and Historical Continuity

Zhang Yan is introduced through Zhang Yuanchao’s family. When ration tickets return, Yan Yan asks whether the small pieces of paper are money, and Zhang Yuanchao explains that they are not money but are required, together with money, to buy nonquota grain such as bread or cake or to eat at a restaurant. Zhang Weiming contrasts the new system with the past by producing an IC card and calling it a ration card. The scene places Zhang Yan’s family line inside a society that has moved forward technologically while also reviving older mechanisms of scarcity and control.

That family continuity is later made explicit when Shi Xiaoming introduces Zhang Yan as the grandson of Zhang Yuanchao, the man Shi Xiaoming had once cheated. The reference turns a private act from the older generation into a social connection in the future. Zhang Yan is not presented as merely an inherited name: his identity is shaped by a family history that survives economic upheaval, hibernation, and radical changes in the organization of daily life.

Hibernation and the New Life Village

More than a century after the earlier era, Zhang Yan lives among former hibernators in New Life Village #5. Shi Qiang and Luo Ji encounter him at a welcoming lunch in Shi Xiaoming’s home, where local farm produce, chicken, pork, and home-brewed alcohol are served. The gathering brings together people who had entered hibernation relatively early, when the procedure was expensive and available mainly to wealthy people or their children. After awakening, however, they are simply ordinary residents among other ordinary residents.

Zhang Yan’s chronology is unusually layered. He is somewhat older in appearance than the others at the gathering, and Shi Xiaoming explains that he had already been reawakened once, lived for more than thirty years, and then returned to hibernation. His life therefore does not move through history in a single continuous stretch. It is divided into periods of waking and suspension, making him a living witness to social transformations that most people experience only once and that others know only through records.

The village itself has full legal standing as a modern residential area, counted as a distant suburb with a district government. It is not an isolated settlement of hibernators: modern people also live there, and city residents visit for recreation. Zhang Yan’s presence in this setting shows how once-exclusive technologies eventually become woven into ordinary civic life, while also leaving those who used them with an unusually intimate relationship to historical discontinuity.

Witness to the Great Ravine

Zhang Yan is the gathering’s most direct witness to the Great Ravine. When Luo Ji asks whether the predicted decline in living standards amounted to a return to conditions a hundred years earlier, Shi Xiaoming rejects the comparison as far too mild and points to Zhang Yan, who saw the Great Ravine during one of his awakenings. Zhang Yan drains his glass and speaks with blank eyes, a gesture that gives his testimony a physical residue of trauma rather than the tone of detached historical explanation.

He remembers millions of people fleeing famine across the great plains through sand that blocked out the sky. His account compresses the disaster into an image of environmental and human extremity: a hot sky, hot earth, and hot sun, followed by the dead being divided up on the spot. The phrase “hell on Earth” is not an abstract description for him but the conclusion of direct experience. He adds that many videos exist, yet the availability of recordings does not make the memory easier to bear; thinking about that period leaves him feeling merely lucky to be alive.

The scale of the catastrophe is then stated in demographic terms. The Great Ravine lasted about half a century, during which the world population fell from 8.3 billion to 3.5 billion. Zhang Yan’s testimony gives those figures a face and a voice. The event is not only an interval in a future history of technology but also the remembered landscape of displaced populations, hunger, death, and survival.

Work, Kinship, and Burial Commerce

After leaving hibernation, Zhang Yan became connected with Shi Xiaoming through the older man’s attempt to repay the money he had cheated from Zhang Yuanchao. Shi Xiaoming says that he began the repayment on the day he got out, and that this was how he met Yan, who had just graduated from college. Together with their neighbors, they entered the funeral business and founded the High and Deep Company.

The company’s name describes its two principal services. “High” referred to space burials: at first the firm launched ashes into the Solar System, and later it acquired the ability to launch entire bodies, for a price. “Deep” referred to mine burials, initially using abandoned shafts and later excavating new ones. These underground graves also served as anti-Trisolaris tombs, giving burial a double meaning: personal commemoration and preparation for a future in which human civilization might be destroyed.

Zhang Yan’s career therefore joins commerce to mortality and planetary defense. His business does not belong to the military programs that organize humanity’s largest technological projects, but it responds to the same historical pressures. Bodies and ashes become objects transported through space or sealed beneath the ground; ordinary funeral customs are redesigned around the possibility of the Trisolaris conflict, and family memory becomes dependent on technologies whose scale exceeds the old boundaries of Earth.

Narrative Function and Significance

Zhang Yan’s importance lies in the contrast between the vast systems surrounding him and the modest form of his appearance. He is not a principal strategist, commander, or scientific leader. Instead, he carries historical knowledge in fragments: a family’s encounter with rationing, a life interrupted by hibernation, a business built from inherited obligations, and a recollection of famine so severe that survival itself feels like luck.

His testimony also prevents technological progress from being mistaken for uncomplicated improvement. The completion of the space elevator and the breakthrough in controlled fusion encourage the world, while leaders recognize that building a space fleet requires foundations that may take a century and may force living standards backward. Environmental deterioration, intensified by heavily polluting industry, contributes to climate anomalies, desertification, collapsing agricultural production, and finally the Great Ravine. Zhang Yan embodies the human scale of that contradiction: he survives long enough to inhabit a legally ordinary suburb, enjoy a communal meal, and participate in a modern funeral enterprise, but he also remembers the price paid before that normality became possible.

Across the novel’s shifting eras, Zhang Yan thus functions as a vessel of historical memory rather than as a conventional hero. His family line preserves the passage from ordinary money and ration cards to hibernation and interplanetary burial. His blank-eyed account of the Great Ravine makes statistical collapse emotionally legible. Through him, the future is shown not as a clean ascent toward technological mastery, but as a layered world in which old habits, private debts, ecological ruin, and the search for survival remain inseparable.