Explore the real places in Beijing that appear in The Poppy War 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 Sinegard, Tikany, Speer, Golyn Niis, Khurdalain and 8 more.
Imperial capital and home of the Militia Academy
Rin travels to Sinegard to attend the elite Militia Academy after acing the Keju exam. She trains under Master Jiang, discovers her shamanic powers, and witnesses the beginning of the Third Poppy War when Mugen attacks. Sinegard becomes the focal point for the novel's first act as Rin struggles against classist peers and unlocks her connection to the Phoenix god.
Sinegard is the ancient seat of Nikaran imperial power, home to the greatest military academy in the empire. Its walls have stood for centuries, and its commanders have shaped every major war in Nikaran history. The city's upper districts are reserved for the elite, while the lower quarters teem with merchants and conscripts.
Sinegard represents the meritocratic promise that drives Rin's ambition—a place where a war orphan from the south might earn a place among the powerful. Its fall and corruption mirror the collapse of Rin's idealism and the empire's moral decay.
Rural southern village, Rin's hometown in Rooster Province
Tikany is the impoverished village in Rooster Province where Rin grows up as a war orphan under the oppressive Fang household. She studies obsessively to pass the Keju exam and escape an arranged marriage, eventually securing her place at Sinegard. The village represents everything Rin is fleeing—poverty, helplessness, and a predetermined fate.
Tikany sits deep in the Rooster Province, a farming community that produces opium poppies for the empire's trade networks. Like many southern villages, it bears the scars of the Second Poppy War and the Mugenese occupation, leaving generations of orphans in its wake.
Tikany is the origin of Rin's hunger and rage. Her desperate escape from it fuels every sacrifice she makes, and the memory of her powerlessness there haunts her decisions throughout the war. It grounds her as both a survivor and an outsider to the empire's elite.
Island homeland of the Speerly people, annihilated by Mugen
Speer is the island nation of the Speerly people, who were carriers of the Phoenix god's power. The Federation of Mugen committed genocide against Speer during the Second Poppy War, unleashing a biological weapon that killed the entire population. Rin learns she is of Speerly descent, which explains her shamanic ability to channel the Phoenix and fuels her consuming desire for revenge against Mugen.
The Speerlies were a warrior people bonded to the Phoenix, capable of calling fire that could not be extinguished. Ancient texts describe them as the empire's most fearsome soldiers. Their genocide by Mugen is both a historical atrocity and a spiritual wound—the Phoenix's rage at the destruction of its chosen people echoes through any shaman who dares call upon it.
Speer is the ghost that defines Rin's identity and her darkest impulses. The annihilation of an entire people becomes her justification for genocidal retaliation, making Speer the thematic heart of the novel's meditation on vengeance, trauma, and the cyclical nature of mass violence.
Nikaran city site of the infamous Mugenese massacre
Golyn Niis is where the Federation of Mugen commits its most horrifying atrocities during the Third Poppy War. Rin and the Cike arrive too late to save the city and discover the aftermath of mass slaughter, rape, and biological experimentation. The massacre of Golyn Niis breaks Rin psychologically and strips away any remaining restraint on her desire to annihilate Mugen entirely.
Golyn Niis was once a prosperous river city and a center of trade in the eastern provinces. Its rivers made it strategically vital, and its fall in the Second Poppy War was mourned across the empire. The Third Poppy War's massacre here became the defining atrocity of the age, whispered about in horror throughout the Nikaran Empire.
Golyn Niis is the point of no return for Rin's moral transformation. The city's destruction makes visceral the novel's argument that war produces monsters on all sides, and Rin's response to what she sees there defines her trajectory toward becoming capable of genocide herself.
Contested port city and key military front in the war
Khurdalain is the besieged port city where Rin and the Cike are deployed during the Third Poppy War. The city endures brutal fighting as Mugenese forces attempt to take the harbor and gain a naval foothold in Nikara. Rin channels the Phoenix in desperate combat here, and the Cike's shamans fight alongside the Militia in some of the war's most savage engagements.
Khurdalain has long been the empire's most vital trading port on the eastern coast, its harbor bustling with merchant fleets and military vessels alike. Its strategic position at the mouth of the Murui River made it a prize contested in every major conflict between Nikara and the Federation. The city's sea walls bear the scars of generations of naval warfare.
Khurdalain represents the grinding, brutal reality of the war that Rin and the Cike are thrust into. It is where shamanic power meets military pragmatism, forcing Rin to confront the horrifying cost of using the Phoenix as a weapon and the limits of what power alone can protect.
Ancient stone prison sealing away broken shamans
The Chuluu Korikh is the sealed mountain prison where shamans who have been consumed by their gods are entombed alive in stone. Master Jiang warns Rin of this fate repeatedly as she pushes deeper into the Phoenix's power. Altan Trengsin, the Cike's leader, was once imprisoned here before being freed, and the site looms as the ultimate consequence of losing oneself to shamanic power.
The Chuluu Korikh—literally 'the stone garden' in the old tongue—was created in an ancient age when the Nikaran empire first learned to fear its shamans. Generations of warriors who called too deeply upon their gods were interred here, their bodies frozen in stone while their minds burned forever in the gods' realm. Shamans regard it with a dread that borders on reverence.
The Chuluu Korikh embodies the novel's central warning about the cost of power without restraint. It is the living consequence of the choice Rin faces throughout the story—to maintain her humanity or surrender entirely to the Phoenix. It also represents the empire's fear of those it cannot control.
Sacred mountain and site of shamanic initiation
Mount Tianshan is where Master Jiang takes Rin to undergo her shamanic awakening, guiding her through the use of psychedelic substances to open the pathways to the gods. It is here that Rin first truly contacts the Phoenix, experiencing the god's consuming rage and ecstatic fire. The mountain represents both revelation and the first step toward Rin's dangerous transformation.
Tianshan has been a site of spiritual power since before the Nikaran Empire was founded. Ancient shamans came here to commune with the Pantheon, and the mountain is riddled with caves used for ritual isolation and vision quests. Local tradition holds that the mountain is the place where the barrier between the mortal world and the gods' realm is thinnest.
Mount Tianshan marks the threshold Rin crosses from student to shaman, from ordinary to dangerous. Her awakening here is the pivot of her entire arc—the moment she gains the power she has always craved and begins to lose the self she never fully understood.
Ancient battlefield of legendary strategic importance
The Red Cliffs are referenced throughout the novel as one of Nikara's most legendary military sites, studied intensively at the Militia Academy. Rin and her classmates debate the tactics of the Battle of Red Cliffs, and the site serves as a touchstone for Nikaran military doctrine and national identity. The cliffs' history of fire and blood foreshadows Rin's own incendiary path.
The Battle of the Red Cliffs is the defining engagement in Nikaran military history, where a brilliant Nikaran commander used fire ships and wind to annihilate an invading fleet far superior in number. The red coloring of the cliffs is said by legend to be stained permanently by the blood and ash of that ancient battle. Every Militia student commits its tactics to memory.
The Red Cliffs function as a mythological mirror to Rin's story—a precedent for using fire as a weapon of total destruction against an overwhelming enemy. The site also reflects the novel's engagement with historical cycles of violence and the romanticization of mass killing that military culture perpetuates.
Federation of Mugen's staging city on the Nikaran coast
Arlong serves as a key base of operations for the Mugenese Federation's military campaigns into the Nikaran mainland. Mugenese forces launch assaults on coastal cities including Khurdalain from Arlong's harbor. The city represents the Federation's foothold in Nikaran territory and the terrifying reach of the enemy that Rin and the Cike must confront throughout the war.
Arlong was a Nikaran settlement that fell to the Federation during the Second Poppy War and was never fully reclaimed. Under Mugenese rule it was transformed into a military port city, its original Nikaran architecture torn down and replaced with Federation construction. Nikarans speak of it as a wound in the empire's side—a reminder of past humiliation and lost sovereignty.
Arlong represents the Federation's power made manifest on Nikaran soil and the stakes of defeat in the Third Poppy War. It also embodies the history of occupation and humiliation that has poisoned Nikaran politics and given demagogues like the Empress the fuel they need to consolidate power.
Secret base of the Cike, the empire's shamanic assassin unit
The Cike's hidden base is where Rin is brought after being recruited into the empire's secret shamanic unit by Altan Trengsin. She meets the other shamans—each broken and dangerous in their own way—and begins to understand what she has truly become. Altan drills the unit with brutal intensity, preparing them for deployment as weapons of war.
The Cike has operated in the shadows of the Nikaran military for generations, a unit of shamanic warriors deployed when conventional forces cannot suffice. Officially denied by the imperial court, they are given wide latitude to operate outside normal military law. Past Cike members who survived long enough became legends, though most died young and violently.
The Cike's headquarters is where Rin's transformation from student to weapon truly begins. The unit itself is a microcosm of the novel's themes—brilliant, broken people given terrible power and pointed at the empire's enemies, with no consideration for their own humanity or survival.
Militia forward camp in the southern war theater
The Nikaran Militia establishes forward camps in Rooster Province as the Mugenese invasion pushes deeper into the south. Rin passes through these camps during the war's escalation, witnessing the Militia's desperate attempts to hold territory against a better-equipped enemy. The camps reveal the gap between the glory of Sinegard's academy and the grim reality of war.
Rooster Province has been a contested frontier since the First Poppy War, its fertile plains and opium fields making it both strategically valuable and perpetually vulnerable. Militias have camped and marched across its plains for generations, and the local population has learned to hide their valuables whenever soldiers appear on the horizon.
The war camps in Rooster Province bring Rin's story full circle—she fights to protect the same southern lands she fled, confronting the gap between the escape she sought and the destruction that followed her. They also ground the war's grand strategy in the suffering of ordinary people.
Imperial administrative city in central Nikara
Hanang serves as one of the empire's administrative centers, through which military orders and imperial decrees flow outward to the provinces. Rin and the Cike receive orders routed through Hanang during their deployment, and the city represents the bureaucratic machinery of the empire that treats its shamans as assets rather than people.
Hanang grew to prominence as a waypoint on the imperial road network connecting Sinegard to the eastern provinces. Its governors have historically been appointed from the imperial court, and the city's administrative records stretch back centuries. It is a city of clerks and commanders rather than warriors or traders.
Hanang embodies the imperial system that uses people like Rin as tools—channeling power and destruction through official channels while maintaining deniability about its most brutal instruments. The city's orderly bureaucracy stands in stark contrast to the chaos the empire's orders produce.
Hidden retreat of Master Jiang in the Wudang mountains
Master Jiang's hidden mountain retreat is where he teaches Rin the true nature of shamanism, the Pantheon, and the dangerous art of calling upon gods. Jiang proves to be far more than an eccentric teacher—he is revealed to be the god Zhulong in human form, the Dragon of the Ninefire. His instruction alternates between cryptic wisdom and deliberate incompetence designed to slow Rin's dangerous awakening.
The pagoda exists in a space that is partly outside normal reality, accessible only to those Jiang chooses to find it. According to shamanic tradition, such places—called nodes—are where the membrane between the mortal world and the gods' realm has been deliberately thinned by sustained spiritual practice across generations. The pagoda's walls are covered in texts that predate the Nikaran Empire itself.
Jiang's pagoda is the site of Rin's philosophical education—the place where she learns both how to access power and why she should not. The gap between Jiang's warnings and Rin's choices defines her tragedy, and the pagoda represents wisdom that she receives but cannot fully absorb before the war demands everything from her.
More by R.F. Kuang: All R.F. Kuang books