This is not a story about a hero. It is about a group of people struggling through the twilight of an empire.
A civil servant’s notebook never recorded in the official histories, and a “Clayden graduate” who lived from Humen to Chongqing.
In the nineteenth year of the Daoguang reign, at Guangzhou’s Thirteen Factories, Liu Dingjian, an official appointed through a donation, works as an interpreter between Lin Zexu and Charles Elliot. For the next seventy years, his name drifts like a ghost through the cracks in the empire: the First Sino-Japanese War, the Xinhai Revolution, the Beiyang era, Wang Jingwei’s collaborationist regime... He is no reformer, only a mistranslator: mistranslating foreign dispatches, imperial laws, and the truth of the times.
This is a darkly comic modern history of lies, silver, and knees, and the story of how a group of minor officials never recorded in the official histories bore witness, through their slipperiness and sheer will to survive, to an ancient empire’s long collapse from “Celestial Empire” to “Republic of China.”
