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to see Hart himself as our understanding and our empathy. He is the tourist most foreigners in China strive to be in spite of our own intolerances, and while Hart's keen observations of 1850's China may be strikingly similar to those witnessed even in 2008 ("People don't change as the dynasty does," writes the ever-profound Lofthouse), bigotry no longer has a welcome seat at the table of the new millennium.

-TAKING BIDS ON VIRGINITY-

My Splendid Concubine is a thought-provoking novel about attitudes and cultures, but Lloyd Lofthouse is a masterful yarn-spinner as well, weaving a well-balanced dose of suspense and page-turning action. Posted as a rookie customs official in coastal Zhejiang province's Ningbo along the Yangtze River Delta, 20 year-old Hart is suddenly forced out of his sheltered office gig and finds himself involved in a skirmish against Taiping rebels, a true-life 15-year uprising by Chinese peasants against the Qing Dynasty government resulting in over 30 million casualties.

Himself a Vietnam vet, Lofthouse paints battle as blood-red as it surely must be. Armed with western muzzles "spitting jagged orange flames of death," Hart takes his first life, but not without the same dumbfounding, bile-inducing reaction that may have come straight from the author's own memory: "He had just killed someone. The thought numbed him for a moment. It was good that his weapons were thinking for him."

It is during this scene of bedlam that our protagonist meets Ayaou, a teenage boat girl whom Hart rescues along with her family. In turn, Ayaou's father offers her and her sister for sale as concubines to their protectors.

Hart is at once disgusted and stirred by the thought of "taking bids on her virginity," but admits to himself that "it bothered him more that he found the idea tempting." Herein lays the genius of My Splendid Concubine, for Lofthouse portrays the legendary Sir Robert Hart not as an icon of righteousness that his future bronze statue in Shanghai Square would convey to the masses, but as a layman conflicted between the values of his faith and the temptations of an exotic country, summed up in one lucid sentence: "Though it appalled him, Robert still wanted to understand."

The thought of purchasing a woman "like a chair or a piece of art" may disturb 21st century readers as much as it did Robert Hart two centuries ago, but the fact is that concubinage was a socially accepted practice. Chinese emperors traditionally kept thousands of concubines to enhance

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