In vivid detail…examines the little-known history of two extraordinary dynasties.-The Boston
Globe Not just a brilliant well-researched and highly readable book about China's past it
also reveals the contingencies and ironic twists of fate in China's modern history.-LA Review
of Books An epic multigenerational story of two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai and
Hong Kong as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era from the Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist The Sassoons and the Kadoories stood astride Chinese business and
politics for more than one hundred seventy-five years profiting from the Opium Wars surviving
Japanese occupation courting Chiang Kai-shek and nearly losing everything as the Communists
swept into power. Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families ignited
an economic boom and opened China to the world but remained blind to the country's deep
inequality and to the political turmoil on their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad
to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men
and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling family rivalry political intrigue and survival.
