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Series

The Imperial China Trilogy

The Imperial China Trilogy traces the collapse, survival and reinvention of Chinese imperial power across three centuries. Manchu follows a European artilleryman through the fall of the Ming and the Manchu conquest; Mandarin moves to the nineteenth-century crisis of the Qing state; and Dynasty carries a Eurasian Hong Kong family from the Boxer Rebellion into Communist China.

Although the books were not originally published in historical order, the series forms a continuous panorama of dynastic change, foreign intervention, commerce and revolution. Elegant repeatedly places mixed families and cultural outsiders between Chinese and Western institutions, using their divided loyalties to connect court politics and warfare with business, marriage and private ambition.

Reading order

Books in this series (3 books)

Manchu cover

1. Manchu

Robert Elegant

3.9(63)

Francis Arrowsmith is an English orphan raised by exiled Jesuits and trained in the use of European artillery. Seeking fortune and a war in which to sell his skills, he joins a Portuguese expedition sent from Macau to support the failing Ming dynasty against the advancing…

Mandarin cover

2. Mandarin

Robert Elegant

4.4(41)

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…

Dynasty cover

3. Dynasty

Robert Elegant

4.4(49)

Dynasty follows the Sekloongs, a wealthy Eurasian trading family in Hong Kong, from the opening of the twentieth century into the 1970s. The empire founded by Sir Jonathan Sekloong passes to descendants divided by marriage, adultery, commercial ambition and competing ideas of national loyalty. Mary Osgood’s…