A Flower in a Sinful Sea

[3] In the revised version by Zeng Pu, the prolog describes an "Island of Happy Slaves" attached to the city of Shanghai that has a population of ignorant people who party and have savageness.

Milena Doleželová-Velingerová, the author of "Chapter 38: Fiction from the End of the Empire to the Beginning of the Republic (1897–1916)", wrote that "the prolog foretells the theme of the whole novel by a synecdoche".

Twenty years later, Jin Wenqing, a high official enjoying a luxurious life, gets into a relationship Fu Caiyun, a sing-song girl.

Meanwhile, Fu Caiyun, who cheats on him,[2] wins favors of several royal families, including Empress Victoria of Germany, and becomes friends with the Russian nihilist Sara Aizenson.

[2] Zeng Pu wrote that the five Jin Tianhe chapters "concentrate too much on the protagonist, so they at most describe an extraordinary courtesan, and along with her, a number of historical anecdotes.

[3] Zeng Pu argued that in his conception "the protagonist functions as the thread which I attempt to link together the history of the past thirty years.

"[6] The University of Hong Kong Libraries wrote that "Although Zeng Pu was an avid reader of French literature in the original, the influence of his Western models on NHH comes out most clearly in the transformations of traditional Chinese motifs.

[3] Characters in the Zeng Pu versions: Peter Li's essay on the book, "The Dramatic Structure of Niehai hua", published in The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century.

[16] Cordell D. K. Yee's review of the book argues that Li's essay shows "little evidence of symmetrical design, or even "dramatic" structure" and "seems to lose sight" of the argument stated, that the analysis process became "almost an end in itself".

An edition in French, titled Fleur sur l'Océan des Péchés and translated by Isabelle Bijon, was published by Éditions Trans-Europe-Repress (TER) in March 1983.