The title comes from the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1956–57, when writers and intellectuals were briefly encouraged to criticise the Chinese Communist Party.

 Once that criticism became politically uncomfortable, Mao distinguished acceptable “fragrant flowers” from dissenting “poisonous weeds”; the latter works were condemned, their authors branded rightists, and many were silenced, imprisoned or sent for labour reform. These stories survived as records of the social realities the state had attempted to classify out of existence.

Set largely inside workplaces, Party offices and provincial communities, they examine the intimate machinery of bureaucracy: institutional cowardice, self-criticism, concealed grievances, frustrated workers and the dangerous distance between official language and ordinary experience.

Published in Hong Kong in 1983, amid the post-Mao rehabilitation and republication of previously banned writers, this was an early English-language collection of that recovered literature. The translations are by Geremie Barmé and Bennett Lee, with an introduction by historian and translator W. J. F. Jenner.

First edition. Joint Publishing Company, Hong Kong, 1983. Paperback. Good condition, with rubbing, creasing, edge wear and light marking to the covers.