Those in the know can say with certainty that Wu Zhao's rise to power was steeped in blood. She had been a concubine of emperor Taizong. When his 21-year-old son, Li Zhi, became the ineffective emperor Gaozong, Wu Zhao became the young man's consort, used intrigue to depose his wife, Wang, and eventually had her as well as his second consort, Xiao, murdered. She took over Gaozong's reign after he had a stroke and from then on kept an iron grip on China. With the help of her secret service, this only female emperor China has ever known, ran a reign of terror. Informers, who were offered free passage to the capital to denounce possible opponents, supplied the victims. Within seven years she had staged a wholesale purge of scholars and high families. These were either killed or exiled, and their sons banned from high office. Corruption ran rampant. She was of course not the first ruler of China who employed such methods, and she was not the last. The latest, of course, points to our own time when under Mao, the cultural revolution led to the persecution of the educated classes, and the development of an informer-based secret serves. Even now, China still suppresses its citizens with the aid of informers, and trumped-up executions, under various pretenses, still take place, as do imprisonment on spurious charges. Corruption is so deeply ingrained that it seems impossible to eradicate it.

But, back to the novel. Wu Zhao is not the protagonist of The Walking Boy, but she hovers ever present in the background, and in the foreground. The narrator is a woman, Cold Flower, the protagonist is Baoshi, a youth, training as a Buddhist monk under the tutelage of the hermit monk, Harelip.

The boy is an unusual one, whose secret cannot be divulged, lest one gives away a part of the story that is important to the whole. To mature, he must venture out on his own as a novice pilgrim to the capital city, Chang'an. At the time, in what at this period of the tale encompassed China, there were two capitals, the western (Chang'an) and the easter, Luoyang. When the tale takes place, Wu Zhao had just returned to Chang'an. Baoshi's task on arriving there is to find the sculptor Ardhanari and bring him to Harelip. To get to Chang'an, Baoshi must travel on foot about 270 li (2 li = 1 km) through rugged terrain to reach the capital.

Eventually he will reach the foreign fang (foreign quarters) of Chang'an, where he will meet some very kind, seemingly strange women, who will help him. Here, too, there are still similarities to modern times. Cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, among others, still keep foreigners mostly in separate quarters, so as to keep the mingling between Chinese and foreigners to a minimum. Kwa weaves her novel in and out of the various sections of the Chang'an, in and out of the palace, and the various parts of the palace itself. There, Wu Zhao is at the beginning of her downward slide of power while she revels in the company of the Zhang brothers, whom she had taken as her lovers. If there is anything good that can be said about Wu Zhao it is that while she was ruthless in her dealings with the upper classes, she often was generous to the lower ranks. She recorded many of her thoughts for posterity, and while she aggrandized herself, she also made no bones about how she disposed of her rivals, Wang and Xioa. The description in The Walking Boy of this event is, in fact, based on truth, no matter how grisly it may seem to us.

The author describes the intrigues that go on in the palace, the lifestyle of its inhabitants and that of the city, with perceptive reality, and brings the period vividly alive. There are several stories within this story that also take us to the northeastern section of the empire, to a cave near Dunhuang, where sculptors work to create Buddhist images as part of a series of grottos now famous as the Mogao Caves, and to a Buddhist nunnery, led by an exceptional abbess, Ling.