The Imperial China Trilogy: Manchu, Mandarin, and Dynasty

Robert Elegant

May 2018 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

The complete New York Times–bestselling trilogy of historical fiction set in China, from an award-winning novelist and Pulitzer Prize finalist in journalism.
 
Spanning over three centuries of Chinese history, New York Times–bestselling and Edgar Award–winning author Robert Elegant takes readers from the opulent courts and complex intrigue of the emperors to the bloody battlefields, and vividly recreates a richly detailed world where the quest for power and pleasure drives men and women to extremes of both loyalty and betrayal. In this special single-volume edition, the novels are presented in chronological historical order.
 
Manchu: In this New York Times bestseller, soldier of fortune Francis Arrowsmith joins a Portuguese expedition to aid the decadent and corrupt Ming dynasty in its fight against the Manchu invaders. He embarks on an epic adventure that will merge his destiny with the fate of China itself.
 
“Does for seventeenth-century China what James Clavell’s Shogun did for sixteenth-century Japan.” —The Christian Science Monitor
 
Mandarin: In nineteenth-century China, imperial rule is crumbling as the Opium Wars and Taiping Rebellion rage. On the streets of Shanghai, a Jewish silk merchant tries to save his Chinese partner from a false accusation and corrupt penal system, while in the imperial palace the “Virtuous Concubine” Yehenala contrives to bear the opium-eating, syphilitic emperor’s only son, thus laying the foundation for her elevation to the pinnacle of power in China as the formidable empress dowager.
 
“Exciting, historically accurate, a good read.” —The New York Times
 
Dynasty: A New York Times bestseller, this epic of love and adultery, money and power, set amid the revolutionary turbulence of twentieth-century China, from the fall of the last emperor to the rise of Mao Tse-tung, follows the Sekloong dynasty of Hong Kong, a trading empire founded by Sir Jonathan, the illegitimate offspring of an Irish adventurer and his Chinese mistress, in all its triumphs, tragedies, betrayals, and bloodshed.
 
“An action-packed novel . . . conjured up with perception and vigor.” —The New York Times Book Review
 

About the author

Robert Elegant was born in New York City in 1928. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania at eighteen and, after voluntary US Army service, studied Japanese and advanced Chinese at Yale and Columbia. In 1951, while he was at Columbia, his first book, China’s Red Masters, was published to wide acclaim. He arrived in Asia as a Pulitzer traveling fellow and became one of the youngest American reporters covering the Korean War, scooping the world in 1953 with his exclusive report that an armistice had been agreed upon.

Elegant’s subsequent career included stints as Asia bureau chief for Newsweek and columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Both Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger consulted him personally before Nixon made the decision to go to Beijing and reopen relations with China. He has published seventeen books of both fiction and nonfiction, most centered on China. A recipient of several major press awards, his books have been widely translated and many have become bestsellers; he also won an Edgar Award for a political thriller set in Vietnam. Elegant lives with his wife, Rosemary; shih-tzu dogs; and cats in Umbria, Italy, where he is working on more books; writers, he says, never retire.