Condition: Acceptable. Please see the images for more details. May show signs of wear such as:
• Shelf wear or scuffing on the cover
• Creases, marks, or tears on pages or dust jacket
• Possible remainder marks or previous owner’s name/notes inside
Cover art:
Blurb: “AN EMPRESS sat upon her throne, the Dragon Throne that ruled four hundred million souls. The audience hall was vast, shadowed and dim.
A dankness mixed with the misted smoke of incense hung over the courtiers kneeling in rows before the Jadelike Presence. The Empress shifted slightly, restlessly, and a movement of unease went over the kneeling courtiers like wind over the reeds of the Winter Palace lake.
So brocade-bound and jewel-encrusted was the slight figure of the Empress that it was a marvel the slender body could sit erect or the small neck support the towering headdress from which blazed jewel-hearted, nodding flowers and tassels. The small figure was flat-chested, for according to custom her breasts were bound close to her body. Over her proud shoulders hung a cape made entirely of great pearls. Among those pearls, if one looked closely, could be seen a strange anachronism: pinned to her breast, where it lay snugly, primly, was an Occidental watch.
But the hands, the hands were signals, and many a courtier, gorgeous in his brocades with the embroidered plaques denoting rank, trembled as he knelt on his mat when he saw that the tapering, expressive hands of the Empress, glittering with their long jade and gold nail-guards, beat impatiently on the dragon arms of the throne. When those hands rested quietly, as the great viceroy Li Hung Chang expressed it, "When the Imperial Lotus Petals rest as though floating on the palace lake, I breathe like a man. But when they flutter as though a dust wind from the Gobi Desert was among them, my heart flutters in accord. For well I know that before night someone's head will roll in that same dust. And who am I to say it will not be mine?"
He spoke truth, did the viceroy. Heads rolled these days, many of them. And he for one had a deep sympathy for the brave and upright man who knelt in danger of his life today, the most admired, most sought-after and envied of them all.
As Jung Lu knelt, it was evident that instead of the customary animal-like posture in which the long sleeves simulating horses hooves rested on the ground, and the eyes never lifted above the ground, his was the easy posture of a man who has knelt much but not too humbly. It was known that he had been the favorite of the Empress. It was whispered that he had been her lover.”