Synopsis
Tientsin, early twentieth century. The port city carved into foreign concessions, each patch of ground owned by someone other than the people who actually live there. Shen Liangsheng moves through it all like he owns every piece — charming, loose with money, a merchant's son whose first instinct in any room is to calculate what's worth taking. Then he runs into Ch'in Ching, a schoolteacher, unremarkable on the surface, the kind of man easy to overlook. Except underneath that quiet manner is someone who genuinely loves his country, in an era when that feeling is becoming dangerous. They meet. Something…
