The Place Without a Name

There are people you must not touch. Not because they break. But because they give it back. So begins The Place Without a Name, a historical novel by Georg F. Weidinger, a doctor of Chinese medicine who has taught the subject for twenty years. It is the story of a gift that is also a burden: to know, through the hands alone, what is wrong with another human being and to learn more than you ever wanted to know, about them and about yourself.London, today. Fong, son of Chinese immigrants, can feel illness through touch. For six years he has kept both hands in his pockets. Between Deptford, Peckham and Lewisham, in a kitchen at two in the morning, by the canal and on the wards of Kings College Hospital, the life he has kept at arms length presses in on him, in a story in which Ruth, too, has her part. China, two thousand three hundred years earlier, in the age of the Warring States: by a river in Bohai, in the state of Qi, where the stones lie from which blades are struck, sits a boy with the same gift. He will put his hand out. He will be right. And he will be beaten for it. His road leads past inns and carters to the market of Linzi and on to Handan, Luoyang and Xianyang, through the world of the wu and of the herbs, and his knowledge will one day flow into the Huang Di Nei Jing, the Yellow Emperors Classic.The two stories alternate chapter by chapter and answer each other across the centuries. The novel is divided into four parts named after the four diagnostic methods of Chinese medicine: looking, listening and smelling, asking, touching. Part by part the reader moves closer, from the gaze that observes at a distance to the hand that finally rests on the body. Beneath both timelines runs a quiet question: how does knowledge get lost? Not through prohibition or refutation, but because something does not fit into an order and is simply left out.In his afterword the author reveals what lies at the root of the novel: the sixteenth luo vessel. The textbooks count fifteen of these connecting vessels. Yet the Su Wen describes one more, Xu Li, the great luo of the stomach, which can be felt beating beneath the left breast. It has no point; it cannot be needled, only palpated and so it received no number, no name, and fell out of every system. A place, not a point. The German original is called Die sechzehnte Bahn, the sixteenth channel: that title names the thing. The English title names what is wrong with it.Georg F. Weidinger has practised acupuncture for almost forty years. The novel grew out of his work on his textbook The 72 Meridians, when he asked himself how such a thing gets lost, who first wrote it down, and what he thought when he noticed that it had no name. Following his first novel, Laufhaus, he writes in spare, rhythmic prose that speaks directly to the reader and asks them to feel the paper beneath their hand. The Place Without a Name is for readers of literary and historical fiction, for anyone drawn to ancient China and Chinese medicine, and for everyone who has ever shaken a hand and known something in that very instant.