Explore the real-world places that appear in The Burning God by R. F. Kuang. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include Tikany, Khurdalain, Arlong, Sinegard, Golyn Niis and 9 more.
Rin's rural hometown in Rooster Province
Tikany is where Rin returns after her campaign to rally the south, seeking to reclaim the opium-farming village as both a strategic base and a personal reckoning. She witnesses the suffering her people have long endured under the empire and Federation alike. The village's misery fuels her rage and reinforces her conviction to burn everything that oppresses them.
Tikany is a small, impoverished village in Rooster Province known for its poppy fields cultivated under the empire's opium trade. It was never a place of glory, merely a place of survival. Its people lived in debt, forced to grow drugs to feed an empire that cared nothing for them.
Tikany is the wound at Rin's core — the origin of all her fury and shame. Her return demonstrates how her revolutionary path has both freed her from this place and made her responsible for its fate, embodying the novel's theme of liberation versus destruction.
Southern port city, site of brutal Federation occupation
Rin and the Southern Army fight to reclaim Khurdalain from the Hesperian Federation, whose gray-clad soldiers have occupied the city and subjected its people to horrific experiments. The battle for the city marks a turning point in the southern campaign, with Rin unleashing the Phoenix's fire to devastating effect. The Federation's presence here reveals their true genocidal ambitions for Nikan.
Khurdalain has historically been Nikan's most important southern port, a gateway for trade and naval power. During the Mugen Federation's invasion it was one of the first cities to fall and suffer mass atrocity. After the Third Poppy War it remained contested, becoming a symbol of Nikan's vulnerability to foreign powers.
Khurdalain represents the human cost of imperialism and Rin's conflicted liberation — she saves the city but her methods mirror the destruction she is fighting against. It forces the reader to question whether fire is ever truly a tool of freedom.
Capital of the Southern Coalition, Rin's base of power
Arlong serves as the headquarters from which Rin, Souji, and the Cike plan their campaign to overthrow Nezha and the Dragon Republic. Rin consolidates power here, building her army of southern soldiers who have long been oppressed by the north. Bitter political disputes erupt within Arlong's walls as Rin grows increasingly authoritarian.
Arlong was historically the administrative seat of the southern provinces, long resentful of Sinegard's northern dominance. The city has a proud martial tradition and a population deeply scarred by the Mugen invasion. Southern separatist sentiment has simmered in Arlong for generations.
Arlong is the locus of Rin's political ambition, where her leadership skills and her creeping tyranny develop in equal measure. The city embodies the novel's central tension between revolutionary justice and authoritarian control.
Imperial capital and seat of the Dragon Republic
Sinegard is the ultimate prize of the civil war — the seat of Nezha's Dragon Republic government, defended by his military and the resources of Hesperian backing. Rin's entire southern campaign is a march toward this city. Their final confrontation here sees Rin make the catastrophic choice to call upon the Phoenix god's full power, resulting in mutual annihilation of their dreams.
Sinegard is the ancient heart of Nikan, home to Sinegard Military Academy where generations of Nikan's greatest warriors and shamans trained. The city has been the seat of every dynasty that ruled Nikan and is considered sacred ground. Its fall and recapture have shaped Nikan's history for centuries.
Sinegard is the symbol of power itself — Rin burned to destroy it and seize it simultaneously. Her relationship with this city, where she was both elevated and humiliated as a student, crystallizes the novel's exploration of institutional power and the impossibility of reforming corrupt systems.
Fallen city, site of the greatest massacre in Nikan's history
Though the massacre occurred in The Poppy War, Golyn Niis haunts the narrative of The Burning God as the atrocity Rin references to justify her escalating violence. Rin invokes the memory of the Federation's crimes here to steel her followers' resolve. The city's ghost becomes a rhetorical weapon as much as a real grief.
Golyn Niis was once the second greatest city of Nikan, a cultural and commercial hub of the eastern provinces. The Mugen Federation perpetrated an unprecedented genocide there, slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians over weeks. Its name has become synonymous with the worst evil humanity is capable of.
Golyn Niis is the traumatic wound that justifies Rin's apocalyptic worldview and her willingness to commit atrocity in return. It represents the cycle of violence that the novel argues is both understandable and catastrophic — historical trauma weaponized into ideology.
Revolutionary stronghold deep in the southern mountains
Rin and Kitay retreat to Ruijin to rally guerrilla fighters and build the ideological foundation of the southern revolution. Here, Rin hones her strategic thinking under Souji's tutelage and encounters the network of revolutionary cells operating across the south. The hardships of Ruijin forge the core of her army.
Ruijin is a mountain stronghold that has historically sheltered rebels and outlaws fleeing the empire's reach. Its difficult terrain made it impregnable to large armies, and it developed a fierce tradition of independence. Local shamanic practitioners kept ancient rites alive here long after the empire suppressed them elsewhere.
Ruijin represents the purity of revolutionary idealism before power corrupts it — the place where Rin's cause still feels righteous. It serves as a thematic counterpoint to Arlong's political machinations, showing what the revolution was supposed to be about.
Strategic mountain pass and battle site
The battle of Varikku is one of the Southern Army's critical military engagements against Dragon Republic forces, where Rin's tactical use of shamanic fire turns the tide of a seemingly lost fight. Kitay's role as Rin's anchor is tested to its limits as the Phoenix threatens to overwhelm her mind. The victory comes at enormous cost to both sides.
Varikku pass has been militarily significant for centuries, serving as the primary northern invasion route into the southern provinces. Multiple dynasties fought over its control, and the bones of soldiers from past wars allegedly still lie unburied in its rocky defiles. Local legend holds that the pass is cursed.
Varikku illustrates the military dimension of the north-south divide that defines the novel's conflict. The battle here marks the moment when Rin's army transitions from desperate rebel force to genuine military threat — a shift with both hopeful and ominous implications.
Hesperian Federation military staging grounds
The Federation lands additional forces and supplies along the southern coast, establishing encampments that Rin's forces must constantly harass and eventually overrun. Rin captures Federation officers here and learns the true scope of the Hesperians' plans — not merely occupation but complete population replacement. This revelation transforms her anger into something approaching genocidal in its own right.
The southern coastline had long been a point of contact between Nikan and the Western powers who arrived by sea seeking trade and eventually dominance. The Hesperian Federation established its first Nikan foothold on these shores, and the colonial enterprise began with seemingly benign missionary and trading activity before revealing its violent core.
The coastal camps embody the colonial imperialism that the novel frames as Rin's primary external enemy — and the mirror to which her own violent methods are constantly compared. The Hesperians' genocidal plan provides the moral context that makes Rin's extreme measures understandable, even as the novel refuses to fully endorse them.
Secret base of the shamanic assassin unit
The remnants of the Cike regroup here in the novel's early sections, with Rin attempting to hold together a fractured unit grieving Altan's death and their own shattered identities. Baji, Suni, and the others struggle to accept Rin's leadership. Their debates about the nature of their shamanic powers and their obligations foreshadow the ideological splits that will define the book.
The Cike have always operated in secrecy, their bases shifting constantly to avoid both enemies and the empire's own suspicion of uncontrolled shamanic power. This particular camp in the northern borderlands served as a waystation for shamans who needed isolation to commune with their gods without endangering civilian populations.
The Cike's hidden camp represents the fragile fellowship that Rin is simultaneously trying to lead and losing her connection to. As Rin grows into a political and military leader, her bond with these comrades — the only people who truly understand her — becomes strained, tracking her isolation and the cost of power.
Lake stronghold, seat of Speerly shamanic memory
Rin journeys to Aratsha seeking knowledge of her Speerly heritage and the true nature of the Phoenix god's power. The visions she experiences here reveal the full history of shamanic genocide — how the gods were weaponized against their own people. Kitay accompanies her and the experience deepens their bond while revealing the terrible price of Rin's power.
Aratsha is an ancient lake settlement believed to be a place where the boundary between the human world and the gods' realm grows thin. Speerly shamans once made pilgrimages here to commune with ancestor spirits and receive visions of past and future. After Speer's destruction, the place fell into obscurity but retained its spiritual resonance.
Aratsha is where Rin confronts the full horror of what she is — the last inheritor of a tradition destroyed by the empire that made her. It deepens her nihilistic trajectory while also showing her the humanity she risks losing, making it central to the novel's meditation on inherited trauma and chosen identity.
Northern trade city, Dragon Republic stronghold
Rin's forces clash with Dragon Republic defenders at Lusan as her northern campaign accelerates. Nezha deploys Hesperian-supplied weapons here, including arquebuses and cannons that devastate Rin's shamanic warriors. The battle forces Rin to adapt her tactics and reveals the growing technological gap between the Federation-backed Republic and the southern army.
Lusan developed as a crossroads city where northern and southern trade routes intersected, making it prosperous and cosmopolitan by Nikan standards. Its merchant class had always maintained ties to outside powers, which made it an early adopter of Hesperian goods and ideas — and an early collaborator with the Dragon Republic's modernization agenda.
Lusan embodies the novel's critique of modernization-as-colonialism: the Dragon Republic's embrace of Hesperian technology is portrayed as a form of capitulation that ultimately serves foreign interests over Nikan's people. The battle here forces Rin to confront modernity on its own terms.
Northwestern frontier city near the Barstow Range
Adlaga changes hands multiple times during the civil war, its strategic position making it vital to controlling the mountain passes. The Cike conduct operations from this city's outskirts, and Rin makes a difficult decision here to burn a Dragon Republic supply depot, killing civilian contractors as well as soldiers. The event marks a moral turning point in her campaign.
Adlaga sits at the foot of the Barstow mountains and has historically been a garrison city, its population accustomed to military presence and violence. The city has been conquered, liberated, and occupied so many times that its people have developed a pragmatic fatalism about whoever currently holds power.
Adlaga is the site of one of Rin's earliest clear moral transgressions in this novel, where military necessity and personal rage blur together. It functions as an early warning of the atrocities to come, inviting the reader to track exactly when and how Rin crosses lines she once would have found unthinkable.
Island homeland of Rin's people, destroyed by the Phoenix
Speer exists in The Burning God primarily as a haunting memory and ideological reference point. Rin meditates on Altan's choice to destroy Speer's people rather than let them suffer further subjugation — a choice she both condemns and increasingly understands. Her growing empathy with this decision signals her own slide toward genocide as liberation.
Speer was an island nation of shamans who served as Nikan's elite warriors for generations, feared for their ability to channel the Phoenix's fire. When the Mugen Federation threatened to overrun and enslave them, Altan Trengsin called down the Phoenix and incinerated the island and all its inhabitants. The ruins remain uninhabitable, permanently scorched.
Speer is the apocalyptic horizon toward which Rin's journey trends — the place that proves fire can be turned inward as easily as outward. It poses the novel's darkest question: is death preferable to subjugation, and who has the right to make that choice for an entire people?
Center of Western colonial influence in the capital
The Hesperian Embassy in Sinegard is where Nezha negotiates the Dragon Republic's increasingly Faustian bargains with Federation representatives. Rin's intelligence agents eventually infiltrate it and discover documents proving the Federation's extermination plans for Nikan's population. The discovery galvanizes Rin's cause but also provides her convenient moral cover for ever-greater violence.
The Federation established its embassy in Sinegard after the Second Poppy War as part of the humiliating unequal treaties forced on the defeated Nikan empire. Over decades it grew from a small diplomatic mission into a vast compound staffed by missionaries, advisors, and intelligence officers. Its true purpose was always more conquest than diplomacy.
The embassy represents the novel's unflinching portrayal of colonialism as a system — not individual evil but institutional violence carried out by ordinary people who believe in their own civilization's righteousness. It grounds the fantasy in the very real history of Western imperialism in Asia.
More by R. F. Kuang: All R. F. Kuang books