Edition note: An independent English rewriting of the Chinese argument, shaped for English-language readers.

There is no gold in the Gaochang labyrinth. Its chambers hold tables, beds, writing brushes, a go board, a zither, cooking vessels, books, and images of the Buddha, Confucius, and Laozi—the objects the Tang court once sent while demanding Gaochang's submission. The king rejected them. Chinese things might be excellent, he said, but his people simply did not like them. He sealed everything inside, and no one looked at it again.

A thousand years later, treasure hunters kill for the map. Li Wenxiu's parents die in the desert; others pursue the secret for decades. When the chests finally open, they contain things common throughout central China. One group has sacrificed lives to possess what another group refused even to see.

Li grows up among Kazakhs and loves the young Su Pu. His father hates Han people because Han bandits killed members of his family. That hatred has a history, but it becomes a rule for the son: what the father has learned to hate, the child is forbidden to love. Su Pu eventually chooses Aman. Li, now a formidable fighter, saves them both and returns Aman to him.

Her own relationships resist easy judgment. The man she knows as an old grandfather is actually a young Han disciple who has spent decades in disguise after stopping his Kazakh teacher from poisoning an entire tribe. Both teacher and disciple care for Li; both carry histories that do not fit a clean division between peoples. At the labyrinth, they die together.

Li rides east toward Jiangnan. She knows it contains handsome young men, fine horses, eloquence, and prosperous towns. “They are all very, very good,” she thinks, “but I simply do not like them.” The phrase echoes the ancient king, but the acts are opposites. He spoke for a whole people and removed their chance to encounter what he rejected. She speaks only for herself. Jiangnan remains, undiminished, for anyone who wants it.

A refusal can defend a person's own direction without becoming authority over another's. Li does not need the world she declines to be false, ugly, or destroyed. The white horse carries her toward it anyway, into a place the novel calls more dangerous than the labyrinth, with her sentence belonging to no one but herself.

Based on the Sanlian Bookstore edition of Jin Yong's White Horse Neighs in the Western Wind, whose serialized and revised versions differ substantially.