The Emperor’s Bones

Name: The Emperor’s Bones
Rating: 3.73 (204 reviews)

by Adam Williams Book 2 in the China Trilogy series.

First published 2005

Amazon

3.6(204)

In the early 1920s, Catherine Cabot arrives in China after nursing on the Eastern Front and witnessing the Russian Revolution. She is searching for her missing father, while her Oxford friend Yu Fu-kuei has entered the country as a revolutionary and Comintern agent. Their friendship, political commitments and competing loyalties become entangled with a love triangle and with men who intend to use Catherine to settle old scores.

The novel moves through treaty-port Tianjin and Shanghai, the May Thirtieth Movement, the First United Front, the Northern Expedition and the Shanghai Massacre of 1927, ending with the assassination of Zhang Zuolin. Warlords, Nationalists, Communists, Soviet advisers and Japanese agents compete for power as private quests become inseparable from national revolution. The second China Trilogy volume presents the 1920s as a period of idealism, espionage, betrayal and escalating civil war.

Historical Periods

May Thirtieth Movement30 May–late 1925 CE First United Front1923–1927 CE Northern Expedition1926–1928 CE Shanghai Massacre12 April 1927 CE Huanggutun Incident4 June 1928 CE