Fire and Flame Symbolism in She Who Became the Sun

The Fire Sermon: Suffering as the Novel's Opening Frame

The novel opens not with narrative but with an epigraph drawn from the Adittapariyaya Sutta, the Buddhist Fire Sermon. The passage declares that all things are on fire—with passion, hatred, and infatuation, and with birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair. This epigraph stands alone as the entirety of Chapter 1, with no characters or action introduced. It establishes fire as the novel's governing metaphor for the human condition: to exist is to burn.

This framing sets up a tension the novel never resolves. The Buddhist teaching presents fire as suffering to be extinguished—desire as the root of pain. Yet the protagonist, Zhu, embraces her burning desire as the engine of her rise. The epigraph's fire is a warning; Zhu's fire is a fuel. This tension between the Buddhist ideal of detachment and Zhu's relentless ambition runs through the entire narrative, connecting directly to the theme of desire as a consuming force.

The Red Flame of the Mandate: Divine Legitimacy Made Visible

The novel's most spectacular fire appears in Chapter 7, when Zhu witnesses the Prince of Radiance perform a miracle before a crowd of Red Turban rebels. The child holds a red flame in his palm—as eerily luminous as a blood moon—and the fire spreads up his arms and over his head until he stands shrouded in deep red. The narrative explicitly identifies this flame as the Mandate of Heaven: the physical manifestation of the right to rule, granted to the Son of Heaven.

The color carries political meaning. The Mongol emperors' light burned blue, which is why the Great Yuan's flag was blue. The Prince's red flame is the color of the vanished Song Dynasty emperors, the last native dynasty before the Mongol conquest. This explains why the rebels adopted red as their color and named themselves the Red Turbans. The flame is not merely divine—it is a claim to historical legitimacy, a visible assertion that the Mandate has passed from the Mongols back to the people they conquered. This is the novel's most direct engagement with the theme of power and legitimacy.

Zhu's reaction to the flame is telling. She feels a tingle run through the top layer of her skin as if in response to the charged air before a storm. The Prince of Radiance heralds change, and Zhu's desire grips her as strong and hot as it had been when she was flung from the monastery. Her thought—this is where it starts—marks the moment she begins to believe the Mandate could be hers.

Yet even here, the novel complicates the flame's meaning. The cynical captain Yuchun dismisses it: it's just a light; it doesn't do anything. And Zhu herself, a former monk who has read the dynastic histories, reflects that the Mandate promises nothing specific—there was nothing about it that promised the rebels this particular victory, or indeed any victory at all. The flame is spectacle as much as substance, a tool of mass persuasion as much as divine truth.

Zhu's Failed Summoning: The Gap Between Belief and Power

In Chapter 12, after killing Governor Tolochu, Zhu attempts to summon the Mandate herself. Standing on a dark staircase, she extends her closed hand, summoning her memory of the Prince's red flame hovering in his cupped palm. She believes so hard that for the first moment she thinks she does see that red flame, exactly as she had imagined. Then she realizes: there was nothing.

This moment is devastating for Zhu. She had believed the Mandate was her fate—that killing Tolochu was part of a divine plan. The empty hand forces her to confront the possibility that she has no Mandate at all, or that she has already done too much to claim it. She pushes the thought away: it wasn't that she didn't have it; it was only that she didn't have it yet. The flame becomes a symbol of the gap between desire and destiny—something she must earn, not inherit. This moment speaks directly to the theme of fate vs. self-determination.

Notably, Zhu's literal use of fire in this same chapter is entirely human. She kills Tolochu by spilling lamp oil and sweeping candles onto the floor, turning the governor into a human candle. This is not divine fire but mundane, murderous fire—the kind any person can wield. The contrast between the Prince's miraculous flame and Zhu's oil-and-candle arson underscores the novel's interest in how power is actually obtained: through violence and calculation, not divine favor.

The White Radiance: Zhu's Own Light

By the novel's end, Zhu's relationship with fire transforms. In Chapter 23, she kills the Prince of Radiance—the child who embodied the red Mandate—after he tells her that neither Liu Futong nor Zhu Chongba will rule. She then proclaims herself Zhu Yuanzhang, the Radiant King, and renames the city Jiankang as Yingtian.

In the final scene, Zhu lifts her arms and lets pure white light stream from her, bathing the crowd in a brightness to rival that of the sun. This is her own Mandate, and it is deliberately different from the Prince's red flame. Where the red flame was inherited—passed from the Song emperors through the child who embodied it—Zhu's white light is self-generated. It emerges from her own desire, her own struggle, her own willingness to do what needs to be done. Earlier, in Chapter 21, she had already demonstrated a white radiance from her hand to secure the engineer Jiao Yu's loyalty, suggesting this light was growing in her long before she claimed the throne.

The novel describes this internal radiance in Chapter 23, when Zhu feels a belief in her fate that shone brighter and brighter until the darkest cracks of herself were split open by light; until there was nothing left inside her but that radiance that was pure desire. The white light is desire made visible—not the Buddhist fire of suffering, but a new kind of fire that Zhu has created for herself.

This transformation is also a rejection of the Buddhist frame. The Fire Sermon teaches that desire is the fire that consumes and causes suffering. Zhu's white radiance is desire that does not consume her—it empowers her. She has taken the fire of the epigraph and remade it in her own image.

Fire as Desire: The Consuming Force

Throughout the novel, fire is consistently linked to desire. The epigraph identifies passion as fire. The Prince's red flame ignites Zhu's ambition. Zhu's failed summoning is an act of desperate wanting. And her final white radiance is described as pure desire.

This connection is most explicit in Chapter 23, when Zhu tells the Prince of Radiance that Liu Futong never ruled because he never wanted it enough. She says that if you want a fate other than what Heaven gave you, you have to want that other fate—you have to struggle for it and suffer for it. The flame of desire is what separates those who achieve greatness from those who merely hope for it.

But the novel also shows the cost of this fire. Ma Xiuying watches Zhu receive the Prince's benediction and shudders, seeing the red light consuming her kneeling figure in a corona of dark fire. She remembers Prime Minister Liu wreathed in that same fire—a man who desired and was ambitious, yet couldn't control the power that was the basis of his leadership. The fire that grants power can also destroy those who wield it. Ma's perspective offers a counterpoint to Zhu's embrace of desire, connecting to the theme of the body as a site of identity and power.

Fire also recurs in smaller, telling moments. Jiao Yu's fireworks bloom red above Anfeng—exactly the same color as the Mandate, as Zhu observes. The bonfires and drums that roar all night after the Prince's arrival are described as the voice of the end of the world—or perhaps the new one, already come. Even the red candles in the Prime Minister's throne room smoke and bleed. Fire is everywhere in this novel, from the mundane to the miraculous.

The Changing Meaning of Fire

Fire in this novel is not a static symbol. It shifts meaning across the narrative:

The Fire Sermon's fire is suffering itself—passion, hatred, infatuation, and the conditions of human existence.
The Prince's red flame is the Mandate of Heaven—political legitimacy made visible, tied to the Song dynasty and the rebel cause.
Zhu's failed summoning reveals fire as something that cannot be willed into existence—a gap between belief and reality.
Zhu's literal arson shows fire as a human tool of violence, stripped of divine meaning.
Zhu's white radiance is a new kind of fire—self-generated desire that creates its own legitimacy.

This progression mirrors Zhu's own arc. She begins as a girl told her fate is nothing, assumes her dead brother's identity, and rises through violence, calculation, and sheer wanting. The fire she ends with is not the inherited flame of the Mandate but something she has made herself—a light that is pure desire. Her journey from the red flame of the Prince to the white light of her own making also reflects the theme of identity as performance, as she sheds one identity after another to become the Radiant King.

For more on the characters who embody these different relationships to fire, see the pages for Zhu, Ma Xiuying, and Ouyang.

Study Questions

1. How does the Fire Sermon epigraph frame the novel's treatment of desire?

The epigraph presents all existence as burning with passion, hatred, and infatuation—desire as the source of suffering. The novel complicates this Buddhist teaching through Zhu, who embraces her desire rather than extinguishing it. Where the Fire Sermon warns that desire consumes, Zhu's desire empowers her, culminating in her white radiance. The epigraph thus sets up a tension between the Buddhist ideal of detachment and Zhu's relentless ambition, a tension the novel never fully resolves.

2. Why is the color of the Mandate's flame politically significant?

The Prince of Radiance's red flame is explicitly tied to the vanished Song Dynasty, whose emperors' light was red. The Mongol rulers' light burned blue, hence the Great Yuan's blue flag. The red flame is therefore not just divine power but a claim to historical legitimacy—a visible assertion that the Mandate has returned to the conquered Nanren people. This explains why the rebels adopted red as their color and named themselves the Red Turbans.

3. What does Zhu's failed attempt to summon the flame reveal about her relationship to the Mandate?

When Zhu extends her hand and finds nothing, she confronts the possibility that the Mandate is not hers by fate. The moment reveals that Zhu's belief in her own destiny is a choice, not a given—she must decide to keep pursuing greatness despite the empty hand. It also distinguishes her from the Prince of Radiance, whose flame appears without effort. Zhu's Mandate, when it finally comes, is white rather than red, suggesting it is earned through struggle rather than inherited.

4. How does Zhu's white radiance differ from the Prince's red flame, and what does this difference signify?

The Prince's red flame is inherited—passed from the Song emperors through the child who embodies the Mandate. Zhu's white light is self-generated, emerging from her own desire and struggle. The red flame is tied to historical legitimacy and the rebel cause; the white light is purely personal, a radiance that is pure desire. This difference signifies Zhu's rejection of inherited power in favor of self-created power—a transformation that mirrors her broader arc from a girl with no fate to a self-proclaimed emperor.

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