Jade A Novel of China Author:Pat Barr From the ancient courtyards of the Imperial dynasties to the booming treaty ports of the China coast, through the mountains of Kweichow and the bustling, mysterious metropolises of Shanghai and Peking, Jade is a novel as monumental, vast, and panoramic as the land of China itself. It is the story of Alice Greenwood, born the daughter of... more » English missionaries; as a child in Tientsin, she is caught up in the terrifying massacre of Christians in 1870, and sees her own father murdered and her family scattered by the mobs. Held hostage, she and her brother are taken to distant Hunan, where, a child no longer, she finds herself first a servant, then the young concubine of the patriarch of the house of Chu. It will be many years of captivity before she escapes ... only to find that she has little in common with the arrogant, stuffy Europeans who are supposed to be her own people.
We see the harsh clash of tradition and revolution through the eyes of a woman whose "unladylike" intelligence and originality make her notorious among the Chinese and British alike-a woman of great spirit and vision, ideally suited to bridge the chasm between two cultures that could not be more different. Alice will travel the length and breadth of China, and she will find love in many places: from infatuation with the man who initiates her in the rites of love, to Lin Fu-wei, the brilliant young radical whose passion she shares, but whose world she can never truly enter, to the Scottish journalist whose roguish devotion to adventure wins her heart for good. Yet only rarely is Alice understood completely by the men who love her. for above all, Jade is a tale of two worlds and a woman torn between them.
Spanning forty of the nineteenth century's most turbulent years, Jade captures the rich variety of the Celestial Empire: the harsh formality and exotic sensuality of a traditional Chinese household, the bleak Puritanism of missionary outposts, the narrow-minded bigotry and social frivolity of the Westernized treaty ports, the pioneer's rewards and risks of trading up the Yangtze, the idealistic optimism of the young intellectuals of Peking. Amid it all are the signs of an ancient and regal civilization crumbling around the edges, soon to be swept away forever by the tides of history.« less