China Coast Trilogy.

China Coast Trilogy Shanghai The Chinese Box A Change of Flag Christopher New ISBN: 962-8783-07-6 Dimensions: 1304 pp, 208 x 145 mm Price: HK$383/US$49 "To many people Hong Kong is almost entirely a commercial city. The last thing it could spawn, they would have thought, was a literary masterpiece. But it now appears that the improbable has happened…" South China Morning Post

These three novels by the most important writer in Hong Kong in the past three decades together form the China Coast Trilogy, a rich chronicle of the British colonial experience in Asia. For the first time, all three books are being issued in a unified set under the Asia2000 imprint. Together, they constitute a deeply perceptive study of the colonial experience in Asia with all of its contrasts, a study in which the lives of rich and poor, Chinese and expatriate, are portrayed from one generation to the next, from the apogee of empire down to its final years.

		Shanghai takes the reader back in time. It follows the career of John Denton, who comes out to China from Britain as a young man to join the Imperial Customs Service. He makes, loses and then makes again his fortune and competes with the malicious Chen, leader of the Green Triangle gang, for the profits from opium. It is also the love story of Denton and his exquisite mistress, Su-Mei, who becomes his wife. Shanghai was on The New York Times Best-Seller List for eight weeks and 17 years later is still popular in Shanghai itself.

		The Chinese Box, the second novel in the China Coast Trilogy, is set in Hong Kong during the time of the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. Dimitri Johnston, half Russian, half English, fears he may be forced to leave, but that will please his wife Helen who hates the place. He meets Mila, a Chinese ballet dancer. As their relationship deepens, so too do the waves of Maoist violence that threaten to overwhelm the colony. Soon Dimitri and Mila are caught by history and compelled to make agonizing choices.

		A Change of Flag picks up the story of the Dentons, first told in Christopher New's bestseller Shanghai. Michael Denton has moved to Hong Kong where he has become a wealthy taipan. His sister Lily, formerly an ardent Communist, now wants to flee the mainland. The story is told against the backdrop of tense negotiations between Britain and China over Hong Kong's future, with a clear-eyed sense of history and a subtle understanding of the forces moving it.

Asia 2000 Has also published Christopher New's The Road to Maridur.

Critics Comments

"To many people Hong Kong is almost entirely a commercial city. The last thing it could spawn, they would have thought, was a literary masterpiece. But it now appears that the improbable has happened, and that Christopher New's China Coast Trilogy, though unrecognised as such on first publication, is just that - the definitive account of the British presence here in furthest Asia, and a literary feat of the highest quality....It is more memorable, for instance, than Anthony Burgess's acclaimed Malayan Trilogy, and deserves comparison with the Raj Quartet of Paul Scott...a genuine masterpiece" [more...]

South China Morning Post

"If you liked James Clavell's Taipan or Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet, you'll enjoy Christopher New's Shanghai. Filled with exotic adventure and intrigue."

St Louis Post-Dispatch

"There is nothing not to like and every reason to be excited about The Chinese Box. It is easy to read but not unsophisticated, short but not shallow. But best of all, it is only the latest of a series by [Christopher New] called the China Coast Trilogy."

Asian Wall Street Journal

"[Christopher] New is among the best non-Asian writers currently writing in English about Asia. His reprinted and future works are worth looking out for...[Of A Change of Flag] the definitive Hong Kong novel."

Far Eastern Economic Review

Readers Comments

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