A worker can be beheaded for spilling a liquid on the clothing of the Emperor or his wife or concubine, and the population at large has no power whatsoever against this and the countless similar laws. The book shows that China is ruled by invisible Emperors with the power of the gods.
Where else in the world would a father show his seven year old son how to kill himself quickly if an unbeatable enemy approached him. The emperors, the poor, the greedy and the religious stream before the reader in a fantastic panoply of the country and its customs, its politics and the everyday life of a people whose whole aim of living is to work, bribe or kill their way to a higher plateau of society.Ĭhina was, and perhaps still is, a country of contrast with heart-rending beauty and a populace that, certainly in the nineteenth century, lived amongst, and accepted, the most appalling brutality, even to themselves. China rises up like a lion in the mind’s eye. The story follows an extensive number of characters’ lives throughout the nineteenth century in China, so he cannot have had a real life experience of the country then, but he seems to have done it somehow. Reviewers like to quantify the strength, or lack of, an author’s research, and Rutherfurd’s is flawless and frighteningly revealing. Written by Edward Rutherfurd, the author of a number of geographically named novels such as Russka, Paris, New York and London, it seemed a daunting project to tackle as a review subject, and it took me until page 150 to realise I was reading a spectacularly glorious epic! It has 763 pages of packed text and is called, simply, China. It has no illustrations and the print is relatively small.
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