“History ultimately falls on ordinary people”: an exclusive conversation with Miao Zixi (苗子兮)

Interview highlights

It has been reported that Chinese outlet Huxiu (虎嗅) published an exclusive interview with Miao Zixi (苗子兮), the rising non‑fiction historian whose recent work excavates the lives of history’s margins. Her books — The Last Envoy of the Ming (《大明最后的使臣》) and Another Wukong’s Journey to the West (《另一个悟空的西游记》) — turn brief archival fragments into intimate narratives: a 19‑year‑old envoy to Rome, a Polish missionary threading three empires, and a Tang dynasty military man stranded in the western steppes for four decades. Short facts; large consequences. Who gets to stand for an era?

Miao, trained in South Asian and Sino‑Western exchange history at Peking University, says traveling the Silk Road transformed dry map lines into lived landscapes and pushed her from scholar to storyteller. She explained how scarcity of sources forces imagination, but with strict rules: plausibility in time and place, emotional and logical coherence, and narrative meaning. She also reportedly flags invented passages in different type when she uses them — an attempt to keep fiction accountable to fact. Scholar Zhao Dongmei praised her restraint: plain language that lets events and persons speak for themselves rather than theatrical rhetoric.

Why it matters

Miao frames the late Ming embassies and Tang frontier lives as part of an “early globalization” — networks that connected South Asia, Iran, the Ottoman world and Europe — and argues that the Ming‑Qing transition must be seen in that global frame. In her telling, the sweep of empires is proven by what it does to single lives: migration, bewilderment, loyalty, loss. It has been reported that The Last Envoy was named among Jingguan Book Review’s 2025 Top Ten books, a sign that such microhistories are finding mainstream readers in China.

Her work raises a contemporary question: in an age of geopolitical friction and cultural decoupling, who writes global history and from what vantage point? Miao’s answer is simple and provocative — listen to the ordinary. If macro‑events are ultimately borne by individuals, then recovering their voices reshapes not only our past but how societies imagine their place in a connected world.