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Beijing to Xi'an. Lofthouse also plaits his page-turning story with amusing cultural anecdotes that surely must have come from the author's personal observations of China ("Live here long enough, see crazy things") as well as his own experiences married to a Chinese woman, but does so with wit and deference, such as with the line "Robert tried to avoid watching Ayaou spitting out mice bones. He wondered if he could still kiss her after seeing her do that."

In fact, Lloyd Lofthouse is to be commended for writing a novel that so cleverly balances an engaging tale of culture and romance with a wealth of period detail that will educate readers about dynastic China as thoroughly as any university textbook. And while he may have a few more bestsellers to go before he can be compared with the great James Clavell, famed for his Asian Saga historical fiction series, Lofthouse knows his China, and definitely knows his Robert Hart.

What would become an "academic and then personal treasure hunt," Lofthouse spent nine years meticulously researching Sir Robert Hart's past before piecing together the lost years of his life that purportedly went up in flames when Hart burned the most intimate passages of his diary, including details of his affair with Ayaou.

Just as the Chinese prefer explanations that come around to the meaning in a circle instead of a straight line, Lofthouse prefers to keep the methods of his inexhaustible research under wraps, but rumors of Lofthouse and wife Anchee Min sneaking into a top-secret Communist Party archive in Shanghai to retrieve an official Red Guard dossier entitled "British Imperialist Robert Hart's intimate corrupted life" is just too delicious not to footnote in this review.

Sir Robert Hart, 1st Baronet of Ireland, resided in China for over fifty years as British Consular and Inspector General of China's Imperial Maritime Custom Service. As the architect behind China's railway network, postal service and education system, Hart was conferred numerous Chinese awards and titles, and also had the supreme honor to be both the first foreigner and the first non-imperial male ever to appear in the presence of Empress Dowager Cixi. As Anchee Min writes in her foreword to Concubine, "Few know that Sir Robert Hart was once a household name in Chinaa giant moral hero."

My Splendid Concubine depicts another half of Sir Robert Hart: the dark half that Hart himself relegated to ashes and the Communist Party of China put on trial half a century after his death. Conscious that historical fiction readers demand potboilers over academic fare, Lofthouse plays on Hart's notoriety, and obviously has fun while doing it.

But behind the scandalous, revisionist adventures My Splendid Concubine is a comprehensible and remarkably accurate narrative history of real-life man whom the author quite obviously admires, and in doing so presents an authentic story that readers interested in world culture can draw a number of invaluable lessons from.

As Sir Robert Hart came to China to run away from his past transgressions, so do we travel to escape, but we also travel to learn by immersion. And for those of us who do not have the luxury of drifting across the world, we rely on imaginative yet resourceful authors such as Lloyd Lofthouse to immerse us in times, places and persons whom might otherwise be forgotten in the dusty archives of the Red Guard.

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Learn more about this author, Tom Carter.
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