Book
Mandarin
First published 1983
In treaty-port Shanghai, the Jewish silk merchant Saul Haleevie tries to save his Chinese partner Aisek Lee from a false accusation connected with his mother’s suicide. Their business and families have survived cultural suspicion and commercial rivalry, but the Qing penal system turns private tragedy into a threat to everything they have built. Saul’s daughter Fronah meanwhile tests the boundaries of her Jewish-Chinese identity within the expanding foreign settlement.
At the imperial court, the concubine Yehenala manoeuvres to bear the Xianfeng Emperor’s surviving son and create the position from which she will become Empress Dowager Cixi. The Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion and the growth of Shanghai provide more than background: they expose the weakening authority of the Qing state and the new power of merchants, foreign concessions, rebels and court factions.
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