China, the Nineteenth Century: a vast, ancient empire closed to foreigners. Opium is the key for John Trader and his fellow Western adventurers: if he can sell his opium it will bring silver, and the silver will buy him the tea that will make him an unimaginable fortune back home and win him the love of his life. As China sinks into a miasma of addiction, good men try to save the Empire from foreign control, but battles, betrayals and tragedy follow and China is crushed by Western arms.
In the next sixty years the Empire's decline accelerates. This is the story of the men and women who rose to fortune and power from total anonymity in this time: Mei-Ling, the humble village woman who will become a mandarin's concubine; the Empress Dowager Cixi who seizes the throne as weak Emperors crumble before the foreigners; Lacquer Nail, the eunuch who loves her but will see his believed Summer Palace burned; Guanji the heroic Bannerman fighting the Taiping as their revolt rages across the great river valleys and cities of the endless land; Shi-Rong whose Confucian ideals are snuffed out and then reignited in the cauldron.
And, at the last, as the century dies, the Boxers rise with their insatiable hatred of the foreign imperialists. And here, at the end of his life, John Trader returns to Beijing. He has sacrificed much for his vast fortune. Now it's time to redress the wrongs of the past and, perhaps, to save the last person dear to him.
This is an unforgettable, sweeping tale of nineteenth-century China told from both sides of the divide. It is a feat of the imagination that shows us how things once were, and how modern China emerged from the following 120 years of revolution and rebirth.
