"Edward Rutherfurd has enthralled millions of people with his grand, sweeping historical sagas that tell the history of an iconic place over multiple generations. Now, in China: The Novel, Rutherfurd takes readers into the rich and fascinating milieu of the Middle Kingdom. The story begins in 1839, at the dawn of the first Opium War. An English merchant arrives in the restricted port of Canton (Guangzhou), seeking to make his fortune trading opium....

"A spectacular story, the making of a dynasty, one of the great untold sagas of a gilded Jewish Bagdadi family-the merchant princes of the orient, that built a vast empire through finance and trade: opium, cotton, oil, shipping, banking, that reached across three continents, and ultimately changed the destinies of nations. For more than two centuries, from the 18th to the 20th, they were one of the richest families in the world, known as 'the Rothschilds...