Hollow Mountain tells the story of Ji village, and the events that occurred there between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1990s. This book is the first part of the trilogy. As China teetered at the brink of an oncoming era of madness and mass confusion, a child named Gela, a bright young soul as pure as the driven snow, meets a lonely death. The boy’s death is only the beginning of the disaster awaiting Ji village. Several years later, a huge wildfire ignites the forests surrounding the tiny settlement. Amidst the bestial fury of the flames, a web of connected stories emerges... The Author, Alai deftly weaves together complex themes: the relationships between humanity and nature, the massive social change that marks the coming of a new Epoch for a minority ethnicity, and the excuses of the Cultural Revolution, which is represented in the novel by a devastating forest fire.