Ye Wenjie
Names: Ye WenjieWenjieYeGrannythe commanderTeacher YeProfessorher mother
First appears in Book 1: The Three-Body Problem, chapter 1 (1)
Appearances
What you know
Book 1: The Three-Body Problem
- Ch 1Ye Zhetai's daughter; held back by janitors from rushing onstage, she watched her father die and then placed his pipe in his hand.
- Ch 1She was a graduate student in the Astrophysics Department, and after her father's death she went to Professor Ruan Wen's door.
- Ch 1Ruan's home had once been a safe harbor for Wenjie to escape the storms of the outside world.
- Ch 1Wenjie finds Ruan dead and feels no grief, likening herself to a Geiger counter overexposed to radiation and reading zero.
- Ch 2Ye Wenjie is an astrophysicist serving in the Construction Corps as a logger; her father died two years earlier and she is politically suspect by family background.
- Ch 2Ye is a woman of few words, withdrawn, and feels the pain of felled trees; she sees the deforestation as madness.
- Ch 2Reading Silent Spring led Ye to conclude that moral awakening cannot come from humankind itself and requires a force outside the human race, setting her life's direction.
- Ch 2After Bai betrayed her, Ye was interrogated as the supposed author of the letter and knew she had fallen to the bottom of the pit.
- Ch 2Ye refuses to sign a document as witness to her father's conversations, saying she knows nothing about them, despite threats of being declared a counter-revolutionary.
- Ch 2Ye is an educated youth imprisoned for a crime involving a reactionary book; she is a physicist's daughter and has learned caution through hardship.
- Ch 2Ye refuses to sign because she sees her father's blood; she is left soaked in a freezing cell and loses consciousness in hallucinations.
- Ch 2Ye judges the document was not written by Wenxue but by someone cool and experienced, aimed at a political attack linked to national defense.
- Ch 3Ye wrote a 1966 paper in The Journal of Astrophysics on phase boundaries within the solar radiation zone and their reflective characteristics.
- Ch 3Ye was convicted of a counter-revolutionary crime and rescued by helicopter while feverish, then taken to Red Coast Base to be recruited for its secret project.
- Ch 3Ye immediately chose to enter Red Coast Base despite being warned she might never leave, feeling security there, separated from the world.
- Ch 8Ye is Yang Dong's mother, about sixty, graying and thin, a gentle old intellectual; she cares for neighbors' children and is addressed as Professor Ye.
- Ch 8Ye guessed the real purpose of Wang's visit was to see her dead daughter's room and kindly let him look without embarrassment.
- Ch 8Ye blames herself for exposing Yang Dong too early to abstract topics, saying her daughter's world was too simple and she had nothing to lean on when her theories collapsed.
- Ch 8Ye arranges for Wang to visit the observatory and gives him ginseng from an old friend from the base; Wang is deeply touched.
- Ch 9Ye saw her father die in the Cultural Revolution, was falsely accused at the Production and Construction Corps, returned to Beijing in the early 1990s and taught at Tsinghua.
- Ch 11Yang Dong's mother; an elderly woman who gives Wang comfort and offers to tell him about her experiences at Red Coast Base.
- Ch 11Says she was lucky in the Cultural Revolution, finding at Red Coast Base a place to survive.
- Ch 11Ye Wenjie says a book about Red Coast was irresponsible and often inaccurate, and she feels she should correct its errors.
- Ch 11Ye Wenjie spent years at Red Coast and begins telling Wang what happened to her there.
- Ch 12Ye studied astrophysics and taught herself electrical engineering and computer science; as a graduate student she helped test China's first small-scale radio telescope.
- Ch 12Ye became an indispensable technician in the Transmission Department, because other staff deliberately hid their competence to avoid being locked into core posts.
- Ch 12Ye is the only person at Red Coast Base not in military uniform, and is isolated because of her political status.
- Ch 12Ye was brought to the base because her solar activity prediction model was the most accurate in China and could help with solar interference.
- Ch 12Ye agreed to learn Red Coast's true nature, knowing it ended any hope of leaving Radar Peak.
- Ch 13She told Wang Miao the inside story of Red Coast; these documents were declassified three years afterward to provide background.
- Ch 14Married Yang Weining four years after entering the base; he and Lei died in an accident, and her daughter Yang Dong was born posthumously.
- Ch 14After leaving Radar Peak she taught astrophysics at Tsinghua until retirement; she feels the universe is empty and humanity alone, a view that left her conflicted.
- Ch 14Believes, like everyone who went through Red Coast, that Earth is probably the only place with intelligent life.
- Ch 21Ye Wenjie is the commander in chief of the Earth-Trisolaris rebels, gentle in manner yet commanding fanatical obedience.
- Ch 21Ye says the ETO's ultimate goal is for humanity to lose everything, including the ETO itself.
- Ch 21Ye says she learned Evans's real thoughts only late, and tried to keep the ETO united despite Adventist–Redemptionist differences.
- Ch 22After learning the true purpose of the Red Coast Project, Ye cut herself off spiritually from the outside world and devoted herself to her work.
- Ch 22She was requisitioned for Red Coast because of her graduate paper on a mathematical model of the sun.
- Ch 22She secretly continued nominal solar-interference research to keep access to the base library's foreign astrophysics journals while refining her solar model.
- Ch 22She realised the Jovian radio outbursts reached Earth twice, directly and sixteen minutes forty-two seconds later after solar amplification, so the sun is a radio amplifier.
- Ch 22She secretly used a maximum-power Red Coast test transmission aimed at the setting sun in autumn 1971 to test her theory.
- Ch 22Peterson's waveforms did not match the solar outage interference, and the conventional radio received no echo, so she believed her idea had failed.
- Ch 23Ye refused to forget her suffering and studied humanity's evil rationally; reading Silent Spring and foreign philosophy and history deepened her view of human nature.
- Ch 23Ye opposed nuclear weapons as an astrophysicist, believing human rationality was powerless against humanity's madness.
- Ch 23Ye married Yang out of gratitude, not love; her heart was like ashes, and she fell into a spiritual crisis and sense of homelessness.
- Ch 23Ye hid the alien messages in an encrypted subdirectory, replaced them with old noise, and secretly transmitted a message to the sun inviting the aliens to conquer Earth.
- Ch 23After sending the message, Ye fainted and woke in the base clinic to learn she was pregnant.
- Ch 24Ye is the ETO's commander; she recounts her first contact with Trisolaris and refuses to leave her comrades when the rebels demand her release.
- Ch 24Ye was arrested along with more than two hundred ETO members after the raid.
- Ch 25Ye Wenjie is a retired Tsinghua astrophysics professor, interrogated years later, who admits to killing Lei Zhicheng and her husband Yang Weining on October 21, 1979.
- Ch 25She had sent a reply to the Trisolaris message and was pregnant when she learned Lei had discovered the message; she hid her reply from his monitoring.
- Ch 25She says she felt calm while killing them, having found a goal to devote herself to regardless of the price paid by others or humanity.
- Ch 25Ye sabotaged the receiver's ground wire bolt to lure Lei over the cliff, then cut his rope with a hacksaw made of stacked blade pieces.
- Ch 26Ye's husband Yang and Lei were believed to have died in accidents; nobody suspected Ye, since she and Yang seemed a happy couple.
- Ch 26Ye tutored local village children at Red Coast Base after the entrance exam was restored, winning the admiration and gratitude of the villagers.
- Ch 26During a difficult birth Ye hallucinated three suns burning her, which she took as punishment for betraying humanity; villagers' blood donations saved her life.
- Ch 26Living with Qijiatun villagers, something thawed in Ye's heart; she shared a room with Feng and felt a measure of peace.
- Ch 26Ye was politically rehabilitated along with her father and returned to teach at Tsinghua, mainly for Yang Dong's education.
- Ch 26Ye never received another message from Trisolaris, and after leaving the base she could no longer receive replies; the past began to feel like a dream.
- Ch 26Ye sought out three of the four Red Guards who killed her father, wanting to hear them repent rather than seeking revenge.
- Ch 26Ye sought spiritual closure with her father's killers, but their words extinguish her last hope for human society.
- Ch 26After the meeting, Ye's doubt about her act of betrayal disappears and she adopts the ideal of bringing a superior alien civilization into the human world.
- Ch 27Half a year after returning to Tsinghua, Ye led the design of a large radio astronomy observatory and traveled with a task force to find a site.
- Ch 27Ye said that if there were more men like Evans, things would have turned out differently, a remark no colleague understood.
- Ch 27Ye told Evans that human civilization can no longer improve by its own strength and revealed the whole story of Red Coast and Trisolaris.
- Ch 28Ye accepts the role of commander in chief of the Earth-Trisolaris Movement, remaining calm and saying she will do her best.
- Ch 28Ye was lured to the Second Red Coast Base by a visiting-scholar invitation and helicopter pickup at Heathrow.
- Ch 29Ye is the ETO's commander in chief but only its spiritual leader; she does not handle operations or know its membership numbers.
- Ch 29Ye used her authority to try to patch over the Adventist–Redemptionist split, with poor results.
- Ch 30Ye says she started the fire of the ETO but could not control how it burnt; none of its factions match her original ideal.
- Ch 30Ye planned to eliminate the Adventists from within the ETO but avoided attacking Judgment Day to protect the stored messages.
- Ch 31Ye Wenjie is interrogated after the operation; she hoped Trisolaris could reform human society, believing advanced science implies advanced morality.
- Ch 32Ye reads the Trisolaran messages and imagines the Trisolarans as humanoid, as the data gave no description of their appearance.
- Ch 33Ye Wenjie was reading messages from Trisolaris while the Battle Command Center meeting took place.
- Ch 35After learning the truth of Trisolaran civilization, Ye became silent and rarely spoke, but asked to visit the ruins of Red Coast Base.
- Ch 35Ye climbed Radar Peak unaided, refusing all help and resting only a couple of times, spending her irreplaceable vitality without pity.
- Ch 35At the cliff edge of Red Coast Base, Ye once killed two soldiers with her own hands.
- Ch 35Ye's heart is failing and she is near collapse; she uses her last strength to stay upright to watch one final sunset.
Book 2: The Dark Forest
- Ch 1Ye Wenjie, white-haired and retired, meets Luo Ji at Yang Dong's grave and passes on the idea of cosmic sociology before going to a final meet-up.
- Ch 1She says she has thought about cosmic sociology most of her life but never told anyone before.
- Ch 4Ye Wenjie proposed the cosmic sociology project to Luo Ji and gave him two axioms: survival is civilization's primary need, and civilization expands while total matter is constant.
- Ch 9Ye Wenjie's headstone bears only her name and dates, and lies beside her daughter Yang Dong's.
Book 3: Death's End
- Ch 3Ye Wenjie is Yang Dong's mother. She received heavily encrypted messages related to Trisolaris and only deleted, not shredded, the decrypted files.
- Ch 14Her transmission, which used the sun as an antenna, was the kind of signal that could be intercepted by listeners among the stars.
- Ch 70Four centuries earlier, Ye Wenjie watched a sunset at Red Coast Base in her final moments and called it humanity's sunset.
Connections
- family ofYe Zhetaidaughter
- family ofShao LinWenjie once called her mother
- friend ofRuan Wenadvisor and confidante
- related toRuan WenRuan is Wenjie's professor and a mentor figure
- enemy ofBai Mulinbetrays her to save himself
- member ofInner Mongolia Production and Construction Corps
- enemy ofDirector Zhanginterrogates her
- family ofWenxueyounger sister
- enemy ofCheng Lihua
- family ofYang Dongmother and daughter
- related toSha Ruishanformer student of
- member ofRadar Peak
- related toWang Miaotold him the inside story of Red Coast
- partner ofYang Weiningmarried
- leadsEarth-Trisolaris Organizationappointed commander in chief
- friend ofWang Miao
- family ofYang Weiningwife and husband
- enemy ofLei Zhichengshe murders him
- friend ofFeng
- ally ofMike EvansEvans joins Ye's cause after she tells him about Trisolaris
- member ofTsinghua University
Key moments
- Book 1 · Ch 1Death of Ye Zhetai
At a Tsinghua struggle session, Ye Zhetai refuses to recant; his wife Shao Lin denounces him and four girl Red Guards beat him to death with belts, as Wenjie is held back.
- Book 1 · Ch 1Wenjie seeks Ruan Wen
After her father's death and hearing her mother's mad laughter at home, Wenjie wanders to Professor Ruan Wen's door.
- Book 1 · Ch 1Wenjie finds Ruan dead
Wenjie enters Ruan's restored but damaged home and finds her professor dead from sleeping pills. Numb, she leaves, then notices Ruan has put on lipstick and high heels, reclaiming the symbols used to humiliate her.
- Book 1 · Ch 2Bai gives Ye Silent Spring
Bai Mulin shares his sorrow over the felling of a larch, gives Ye a copy of Silent Spring, and says he will write to Beijing about the Corps' destruction.
- Book 1 · Ch 2Ye copies Bai's letter
Ye returns the book and copies Bai's letter for him because his hands shake; she notices the Radar Peak antenna rising as she leaves.
- Book 1 · Ch 2Ye is interrogated
Three weeks later, Director Zhang confronts Ye with the letter signed 'The Revolutionary Masses' in her handwriting. Bai has disclaimed knowledge of it, leaving Ye to take the blame.
- Book 1 · Ch 2Cheng Lihua pressures Ye to sign
Cheng visits Ye's cell, offers leniency and shows a document about Ye's father based on Wenxue's reports, asking Ye to sign as witness. Ye refuses.
- Book 1 · Ch 2Ye punished with freezing water
Cheng douses Ye and her blanket with water and leaves her in the freezing cell; Ye hallucinates a flag-waving figure that changes between people in her life, and loses consciousness.
- Book 1 · Ch 3Ye Wenjie is flown to Red Coast Base
Ye wakes feverish on a helicopter with Yang and Lei, who debate recruiting her due to a lack of qualified personnel, and she is brought to Radar Peak.
- Book 1 · Ch 3Ye chooses to enter Red Coast
Lei offers redemption through work; Yang warns she may never leave. Ye insists on entering the base and the gates are shut behind them.
- Book 1 · Ch 3147th Red Coast transmission
Ye witnesses a transmission aimed at target BN20197F; a magnetron burns out, birds fall dead from the sky, and the transmission completes after about fifteen minutes.
- Book 1 · Ch 8Wang visits Ye Wenjie
Wang visits Ye's home, sees Yang Dong's tree-stump room, photo and birch-bark notebook, and hears Ye talk about her daughter's brilliance and death.
- Book 1 · Ch 8Ye arranges observatory visit
Ye phones her former student Sha Ruishan so Wang can observe the cosmic microwave background, and gives Wang ginseng as he leaves.
- Book 1 · Ch 11Wang visits Ye Wenjie
Wang drives to Ye Wenjie's home seeking comfort; she offers to tell him about Red Coast Base.
- Book 1 · Ch 11Ye Wenjie begins her account
Ye Wenjie says she wants to correct a flawed book about Red Coast, then starts telling Wang about her years there.
- Book 1 · Ch 12Lei explains Red Coast as a microwave weapon
On Radar Peak, Commissar Lei tells Ye that Red Coast is a giant microwave transmitter meant to destroy enemy satellites. Yang interrupts angrily.
- Book 1 · Ch 12Ye moved to Monitoring Department
Ye is transferred to the Monitoring Department, a far more advanced part of the base. Lei tells her its role and says he personally trusts her, over Yang's objections.
- Book 1 · Ch 12The truth about Red Coast revealed
Senior officers and Army Political Department investigators reveal the cover story was a lie. Ye agrees to be told the true nature of Red Coast and Yang explains it.
- Book 1 · Ch 14Ye recounts the decline of Red Coast
Ye tells Wang Miao how Red Coast was renovated, lost its secrecy and military interest, shifted to solar research, and was finally shut down for lack of funds.
- Book 1 · Ch 14Ye describes her loneliness
Ye describes the cosmic loneliness of listening to the universe's noise, which left her torn between valuing life and finding humans insignificant.
- Book 1 · Ch 21Pan Han accused at the meeting
At the ETO gathering, Pan admits killing Shen Yufei, argues for purging Redemptionists, and is accused by Rafael and Ye of Adventist betrayal.
- Book 1 · Ch 21Execution of Pan Han
Ye declares the Adventists must be dealt with, and a young bodyguard kills Pan by breaking his neck before the crowd.
- Book 1 · Ch 21Ye resumes the Red Coast story
Ye introduces Wang Miao to the rebels and says she will continue telling the history of Red Coast, which she has only begun.
- Book 1 · Ch 22Ye discovers the sun amplifies radio waves
Reading about Jupiter's radio outbursts, Ye matches the 16m42s delay to the sun-Earth-Jupiter geometry and concludes the sun's energy mirrors amplify radio waves.
- Book 1 · Ch 22Secret transmission to the sun
After Lei forbids the experiment, Ye uses a maximum-power test transmission at the setting sun in 1971, tells Yang, and checks for an echo.
- Book 1 · Ch 22Apparent failure and the signal's departure
No echo is received and Peterson's waveforms don't match, so Ye despairs; unknown to her, the amplified signal is already spreading into the universe.
- Book 1 · Ch 23Ye receives a message from Trisolaris
On a night shift, Ye notices an intelligent signal rated AAAAA, deciphers a warning not to answer, and spends four hours learning about Trisolaris and its migration plan.
- Book 1 · Ch 23Ye invites the Trisolarans to Earth
Ye conceals the received messages, then at dawn aims the antenna at the sun and transmits for three seconds, asking the aliens to come conquer Earth. She then faints and learns she is pregnant.
- Book 1 · Ch 24Army raid on the ETO cafeteria
Soldiers led by Shi Qiang storm the cafeteria and surround the ETO. Three ETO members grab nuclear bomb spheres from the sculpture and demand Ye's release.
- Book 1 · Ch 24Bomb defused by deception
Da Shi claims her mother has been found, distracting the young woman. A shooter shoots near her, triggering only the conventional explosive. She dies, and over two hundred ETO members are arrested.
- Book 1 · Ch 25Lei confronts Ye over the message
Lei shows Ye the Trisolaris message on his terminal, accuses her of hiding it, and demands silence, offering to protect her husband and unborn child. She realizes he wants the glory of discovery.
- Book 1 · Ch 25Murder of Lei and Yang
Ye sabotages the ground wire so Lei descends the cliff. Yang joins him, and as both climb back up, Ye cuts the rope and they fall to their deaths.
- Book 1 · Ch 25Ye's interrogation
Decades later, Ye confesses to the 1979 killings to an interrogator conducting a criminal investigation and signs the record.
- Book 1 · Ch 26Birth of Yang Dong
After a difficult labor and near death, Ye gave birth to Yang Dong; Qijiatun villagers donated blood and Hunter Qi's family took in mother and baby.
- Book 1 · Ch 26Ye returns to Tsinghua
Ye and her father were rehabilitated, and she left Red Coast Base for Tsinghua, where she visited her mother Shao Lin and was coldly warned off by her husband.
- Book 1 · Ch 26Meeting the Red Guards
Ye invited three of the Red Guards who killed her father to the exercise grounds, hoping to hear repentance; they came, worn and faded.
- Book 1 · Ch 26Ye confronts the old Red Guards
Ye meets three former Red Guards at the exercise grounds. They recount their suffering and refuse to repent, saying they will be forgotten as history. Ye leaves resolved to bring a superior alien civilization to Earth.
- Book 1 · Ch 27Ye meets Evans in the hills
While surveying observatory sites, Ye visits the foreigner called Bethune and hears Evans explain his tree planting and Pan-Species Communism. The site is later rejected for human-environment reasons.
- Book 1 · Ch 27Evans's forest is logged
Three years later, loggers including officials cut down Evans's forest because it lacks legal protection, though he could stop them with his inheritance.
- Book 1 · Ch 27Ye recruits Evans
Responding to Evans's postcard, Ye tells him the Red Coast and Trisolaris story. Evans, despairing of humanity, agrees to join her, saying 'let us be comrades.'
- Book 1 · Ch 28Ye arrives at the Second Red Coast Base
Ye is flown by helicopter from Heathrow to the ship Judgment Day in the Atlantic, where about two thousand ETO members await.
- Book 1 · Ch 28Evans reveals confirmation and the fleet
Evans tells Ye that Trisolaris replied, confirming her story, and that the Trisolaran Fleet will reach the solar system in 450 years.
- Book 1 · Ch 28Ye becomes ETO commander in chief
Ye accepts leadership of the Earth-Trisolaris Movement, and the ETO fighters shout their slogan, formally beginning the movement.
- Book 1 · Ch 29ETO factions described
The ETO divides into Adventists, Redemptionists and a rising Survivors faction, each with different motives, and the Adventists and Redemptionists nearly fight a civil war.
- Book 1 · Ch 30Ye Wenjie's interrogation
Ye explains ETO factions, why Judgment Day isn't attacked, the Trisolaran fleet's slow travel, and reveals the two protons Trisolaris sent to lock human science.
- Book 1 · Ch 31Ye Wenjie interrogated
Three days later, an interrogator questions Ye about her hopes for Trisolaris, tells her Evans died and the Trisolaran messages were captured, and gives her an analysis to read.
- Book 1 · Ch 35Ye Wenjie revisits Red Coast ruins
Ye climbs Radar Peak alone with a group of visitors, finds the rusted antenna base and a small tablet, looks toward Qijiatun, and watches the sunset at the former base as her strength fails.
- Book 2 · Ch 1Ye Wenjie gives Luo Ji the axioms of cosmic sociology
At twilight at Yang Dong's grave, Ye Wenjie suggests Luo Ji study cosmic sociology, gives him its two axioms and two concepts, then leaves for her final meeting.
- Book 2 · Ch 9Luo Ji digs his grave
At the cemetery beside the graves of Yang Dong and Ye Wenjie, Luo Ji digs a shallow grave, sleeps, dreams of Zhuang Yan, and wakes feverish at dawn.
- Book 2 · Ch 9Luo Ji leaves the graveyard
At sunrise Luo Ji, relieved, stands, looks at the graves of Ye Wenjie and Yang Dong, and walks back; an ant is the only witness.
- Book 3 · Ch 3Yang Dong learns her mother's secret
Yang Dong secretly recovers Ye Wenjie's deleted encrypted messages and learns about Trisolaris and her mother's hidden role, but keeps silent.