My POOR GRASP OF MY FAMILY ROOTS AND THE CHINESE language paled in comparison to my cultural illiteracy. I didn’t know the difference between a Mongolian and a Manchurian, ancestries that my father’s side of the family claimed, or between the Ming and Qing dynasties (the last two Chinese dynasties, which ruled from 1368 to 1912), or Chiang Kai-shek and Jiang Zemin, whose Chinese pronunciations sounded nothing like their English transliterations. Though my parents often mentioned that I shared a birthday with Sun Yat-sen, I had no idea who he was, or why my parents and their friends from Taiwan always discussed the Kuomintang with such stridency at dinner parties, until I encountered them in a high school history book.

By the time I got to China, I sought to become more informed. But those “five thousand years of history” that modern Chinese loved to boast about remained for me as impenetrable as it was long. I knew that China defied easy explanation, and I had a general idea of its primacy in world history—the Chinese had a claim to several of the most important scientific and technological inventions in recent human existence—but these glories glinted like stars in a constellation I couldn’t decipher. Even the basic primers on Chinese history that I got from a teacher at the SMIC school left me cross-eyed with confusion.

So instead of trying to take the whole of Chinese history in one gulp, I picked at its edges until a thread separated—my family. Then I pinched it between my fingertips and started pulling.

MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER Liu Feng Shu was born in the Yangtze River town of Xingang, in the Jiujiang countryside, in 1867, the Ding—or fourth, according to the Chinese sexagenary cycle—year of the Qing dynasty emperor Tongzhi’s impotent reign. Gone were the days of wealth and territorial expansion. The Opium Wars had bankrupted and humiliated the country, civil order was undermined by a corrupt and antiquated bureaucracy, and the reckless rule of Empress Cixi had alerted the Chinese to the shortcomings of their culture and left them in the mood for rebellion. Despite the turmoil, the imperial examination system remained in place, a thirteen-hundred-year-old tradition that rewarded those who passed the grueling three-day test with positions in the government—possibly even inside the Forbidden City—regardless of family wealth or pedigree. The test was open to all, and even in the Qings’ waning days, becoming a scholar-bureaucrat secured one’s social and financial standing, so Liu’s father, a laborer, put everything he could spare toward his sons’ schooling at a local sishu, or private academy.

The network of sishus, heterogeneous, unregulated, and run by scholarly tutors in rural and urban areas alike, provided the bulk of primary education in China, imparting basic knowledge and Confucian morality. For most, a sishu offered the opportunity to encounter Chinese classics and achieve rudimentary literacy. For the few who could afford to study beyond the basic primers—parents paid tuition in cash or in kind—they were the first step toward possibly passing the imperial civil service examinations.

After ten years of study, Liu traveled to the county seat of Jiujiang for the annual county-level examination, carrying a basket with a water container, a chamber pot, his bedding, food, an inkstone, ink, and writing brushes. Guards patrolled the walled examination compound, in which hundreds of wooden huts—one per test taker—were set out in rows, and they searched each of the hopefuls for hidden papers before allowing them into their cells, furnished only with two boards that could be fashioned into a bed or desk and chair. There were no age or retake limits for prospective candidates, who ranged from precocious teenagers to stubborn elderly men. After the exam was distributed, a cannon sounded, and Liu started writing: eight-part essays on ancient texts, poems in rhymed verse, and opinions on past and present government policies. For three days, the only interruptions came from the proctors stopping in to mark and authenticate his progress with red stamps.

Liu received the second-highest score in the county and earned the title of xiucai, or “cultivated talent.” Those who passed the exam won the right to take the triennial provincial-level exam, after which a certain number would earn a place in the government. But because of Liu’s score, he was immediately offered a minor local post. Mindful of the reputation of Qing bureaucrats, as well as the tenuousness of the government, he declined. “I’m poor now, and if I accept this ‘little official’ position, I’ll remain that way,” he said. “And I won’t participate in corruption—I want to be able to feel the breeze through my sleeves. Just let me go home.”

The bureaucrats urged him to reconsider. He came from a poor family, with just a speck of land to his name. Did he really want to spend the rest of his life plowing with a writing brush? But Liu, a strict Confucian, figured that an overeducated man in the fields was still more virtuous than a cultured one taking bribes. He returned to Xingang and started his own sishu, where he became known for reducing or waiving fees for especially bright students. Just about every male in the village received some kind of training from my great-great-grandfather. “If you don’t go to school, you have no prospects,” he liked to say. “So go to school.”

He was a good teacher, and his sishu was highly recommended. He made a name for himself as a traveling scholar in the Yangtze delta cities of Suzhou and Hangzhou, where wealthy merchants paid him handsomely as a private tutor for their children. His income allowed him to chi chuan bu chou, or not have to worry about his food or clothing, which qualified as an comfortable life back then. He invested the rest of his money in land, accumulating a hundred acres in Xingang, on which sharecroppers raised wheat, barley, millet, sesame, and other grains. He also bought up most of the paddies in the Poyang floodplain, where they alternated rice and vegetable plantings. Between the two harvests, they grew rapeseed, and each autumn the blossoms covered the countryside with a blanket of gold, interrupted occasionally by the whitewashed walls and curved tiled roof of a Buddhist temple. Most families split the harvests fifty-fifty, but Liu kept only four bushels out of every ten, giving the remainder to the farmers, reasoning that they were the ones bearing the expenses and putting in the labor. Besides, his land, in concert with the river, lakes, and orchards of persimmons, sweet-tart loquats, crispy jujubes, yellow plums, and sugary “southern wind” oranges, already provided all the food he could eat, trade, or sell. As word of Liu Da Xian Sheng’s, or “Lord Liu’s,” generosity spread, sharecroppers flocked to work his land. His prosperity grew in a liang xing xun huan, a virtuous cycle.

Meanwhile the country verged on collapse. Much of China’s recorded history consisted of various peoples fighting for, conquering, and—because the territory persistently proved too amorphous and difficult to govern—abdicating control of parts of it or its entirety. Throughout the upheavals, an ambient continuity managed to survive. Cities rose and burned, and their importance waxed and waned, but they remained cities. Sacred places were revered, ignored, and then rediscovered and rehabilitated. Material possessions made of jade, ivory, wood, stone, and porcelain long outlived their makers, and royal collections of art and antiques were often subsumed and added to by newly victorious rulers. The imperial civil service exam, a thread of meritocracy that stitched together half a dozen dynasties, offered a pathway for all qualified men to make generational changes to their socioeconomic standings. The entire country was a palimpsest over which each successive regime had written a different legend, and for almost all of the oft-mentioned five thousand years of China’s recorded history, those former iterations simply receded underground, one stratum at a time, a slow accretion of something that, over the millennia, formed not just Chinese history but also Chinese culture.

Under the Qing, a Manchu people from the north, China reached its zenith of social, cultural, military, and economic power in the eighteenth century. This golden age spanned the reigns of three emperors, Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong, who, while not above the brutality, depravity, or immorality of their time, continue to be held up as the standard for effectiveness. By Qianlong’s rule, the Qing had consolidated double the territory the Ming had governed, including all of Mongolia and parts of Russia. Despite being foreign occupiers, the Qing became increasingly sinicized, and Qianlong anointed himself the preserver of Chinese culture and history. He was a ravenous collector of objects and penner of poems and was known to travel with paintings so that he could compare them to the actual landscapes. He closely supervised the imperial porcelain kilns in Jingdezhen and compelled artisans to impress him. As a result, the kilns made great leaps in creativity and technology during his reign.

Despite its reputation as insular and xenophobic, China had regular contact with outsiders and accepted foreign trade as an inevitability. Jesuit missionaries from across western Europe were fixtures in Kangxi’s court, serving as translators, scientific advisers, and cartographers. Qianlong also employed them as painters, musicians, and architects—so frequently that some complained of not having time for missionary work. As Qianlong became fascinated with exotic buildings, he commissioned Giuseppe Castiglione, a Jesuit missionary-cum-artist, to the Qing court, to design the Western-style mansions in Beijing’s Yuan Ming Yuan, or “garden of perfect brightness,” made of stone instead of wood, the Chinese building material of choice. The general manager of Beijing’s famed glass factory was a missionary, tasked with producing scientific instruments. The technique of painting on glazed porcelain, or famille rose, developed from European enamel technology.

Chinese porcelain, tea, and silk commanded top prices, paid for by silver, and by the eighteenth century China had become known as the world’s silver repository. But as foreign countries saw their treasuries dwindle in the procurement of these exotic goods, they sought schemes to equalize trade with China. One such scheme was addicting the Chinese to opium. The Qing court allowed for the importation of opium by the British, as it generated tax revenue, but it restricted the trade to the port of Guangzhou (known then as Canton), conducted through Chinese merchants instead of directly with the general population, and only during a certain season—terms that chafed the British, whose belief in their heavenly mandate surpassed even that of the Chinese.

This uneasy accord frayed as the Qing government grew alarmed about more and more of its population falling prey to the drug. The Daoguang emperor, Qianlong’s grandson, appointed Lin Zexu, a principled scholar-bureaucrat, as the governor of Guangzhou with an edict to stem the flow of opium into the country. Lin launched an aggressive campaign against the trade, arresting thousands of Chinese opium dealers and confiscating tens of thousands of opium pipes. When British merchants refused to halt shipments into Guangzhou, he blockaded them in the designated enclave for foreign traders and cut off their food supplies. After a month-long standoff, the British turned over more than two million pounds of opium—approximately a year’s supply—which Lin destroyed and threw into the sea. Lin also led expeditions onto ships at sea to seize crates of opium.

When Britain learned of the situation in Guangzhou, it demanded compensation for the destroyed merchandise and better trade terms. Over the following months, tensions escalated to the point that in 1839 the British foreign secretary finally declared war on China. It was too much to bear for the Qing, which had already begun to decline at the end of Qianlong’s reign. In this First Opium War, British gunboats operating with steam engines and modern firearms decimated the rickety Chinese defenses; China, despite having invented gunpowder, had failed to weaponize it with the same sophistication. The Qing court quickly capitulated and agreed to cede Hong Kong to the British, pay an indemnity, and open five ports to trade of all kinds, through which foreign missionaries flowed along with the goods and currency. Lin Zexu was the scapegoat and exiled to the country’s remote northwest.

Palace intrigue was as constant in Chinese history as change and was often the source of that change. In the latter part of his reign, Qianlong, for all his wisdom, had divested many of his responsibilities and much of his decision-making to a man named Heshen. Heshen was said to have come from a family of some means, though his education did not result in any imperial degrees, and he first went to the Forbidden City to serve as a guardsman. There he encountered Qianlong and within just a few years was promoted up through the most important positions in the imperial government, ultimately being appointed the grand secretary, the highest post in the government and akin to prime minister.

How Heshen attained such power and the favor of Qianlong, a man forty years his senior, was an enduring mystery. According to one legend, probably created by Qianlong’s critics, the pale, feminine Heshen reminded the emperor of his first lover, a concubine of his father, Yongzheng. In some tellings, Qianlong and Heshen also became lovers. In others, the old emperor, already mentally insolvent with age, was inexplicably taken with Heshen and showered him with affection and confidence, especially when Heshen’s son married one of Qianlong’s favorite daughters.

Whatever the case, Heshen took full advantage of his lofty perch. He filled the bureaucracy with family members and henchmen, and they stole and extorted public funds on a grand scale for more than two decades. Although Heshen’s clique was not the only corrupt one, it was one of the most powerful and, because of his most-favored status with the emperor, could act with impunity. Even when Qianlong abdicated his throne so as not to serve longer than his revered grandfather, Kangxi, Heshen remained the de facto ruler, and his rivals—even Qianlong’s son, Emperor Jiaqing—were powerless to stop him. It wasn’t until Qianlong died that Jiaqing, a progressive ruler facing the unenviable task of reforming a nearly bankrupt country wracked with rebellion, could finally prosecute Heshen and his cronies, and Heshen was forced to commit suicide.

So the Opium War wasn’t the sole event that precipitated the collapse of the Qing empire, but it was the most prominent in the narrative that the Chinese had of their country, containing all the ingredients—a foreign incursion overpowering righteous Chinese martyrs—to deflect attention from the self-inflicted wounds, discourage self-examination, and stoke nationalism at the same time.

The Qing court also had to contend with threats outside the palace walls. After the Opium War, a failed imperial examination candidate in southern China happened to read a Christian missionary tract. After digesting the ideas of divine creation and salvation, spiritual warfare, and the apocalypse, he claimed to have received a vision from God anointing him as “the true ordained son of Heaven,” arming him with a “golden seal and sword,” and instructing him to descend to the world to enlighten and save its people. This man, Hong Xiuquan, baptized himself one night in his courtyard and set out to preach his homegrown, warped version of charismatic Christianity. Hong traveled the countryside, attracting the disaffected and disillusioned and sowing the seeds for revolt.

By 1850 Hong had accumulated enough followers to earn the attention of the Qing court. The attempts to suppress him and his sect—which he dubbed the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom—grew into a conflagration that lasted fourteen years, claimed thirty million lives, and required a multinational force to extinguish. At its height, the Taiping had more than one million followers and conquered much of central and southern China, including the Ming capital of Nanjing, where they dynamited its famed porcelain tower and slaughtered forty thousand Manchu “demons” within the city walls.

Meanwhile the Qing had backslid on concessions from the Opium War. Foreign powers—foremost the British—sought even more expansive trade opportunities in China and responded to China’s diplomatic missteps with gunboats, sparking a second Opium War in 1856. The Qing court, preoccupied with fighting the Taiping, could muster little defense and made further concessions, opening more treaty ports, including one in Taiwan, allowing for foreign embassies in Beijing, and permitting unrestricted travel on the Yangtze River and in the Chinese interior. In the war’s final act, the Imperial Gardens were destroyed as reprisals for the imprisonment, torture, and execution of a British envoy and his entourage. Over three days, French and British troops burned and looted the grounds, which contained countless masterpieces of Chinese art and antiquities dating back to the very first Chinese dynasties, as well as literary works and records. A royal engineer who was part of the British forces wrote:

We went out, and, after pillaging it, burned the whole place, destroying in a vandal-like manner most valuable property which [could] not be replaced for four millions. You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burnt. It made one’s heart sore to burn them; in fact, these places were so large, and we were so pressed for time, that we could not plunder them carefully. Quantities of gold ornaments were burnt, considered as brass. It was wretchedly demoralising work for an army.

Only the stone structures of Castiglione’s Western-style villas survived. This complex of palaces had been five times the size of the Forbidden City and is regarded as one of the most magnificent lost treasures in history. A full accounting of the destroyed and stolen artifacts was never completed, as many of the records burned with the buildings; but many of the imperial objects—especially porcelains, which the foreign armies targeted—in Western museums and collections and circulating on the auction market today originated from those sackings, a cultural disaster that still resonates with the Chinese.

As the Qing tried to restore its empire, complicated by other rebellions, plagues, and disease, some progressive statesmen sought to modernize China. These “self-strengtheners” advanced frameworks for the country to adopt Western weaponry and military technology, incorporate modern science, and develop diplomatic strategies. The vision for a reformed China—boasting a healthy mix of traditional Chinese elements with Western ideas and technology—was there. Now it just needed the support of a strong central government to make it a reality.

But inside the Forbidden City, palace intrigues continued. This time it was a concubine—with whom all Chinese rulers consorted except for one, the Ming emperor Hongzhi—at the center, an exceptionally ambitious one who managed to attain real power. Cixi was the mother of all dragon ladies, born to an official family in Anhui, and who journeyed to Beijing as a teenager where she was selected as a concubine for Qianlong’s great-grandson, Xianfeng. Concubines were segmented into ranks, which determined the allotments of food, clothing, jewelry, cash stipends, and handmaidens they received. Cixi entered the palace as a low-rank concubine but ascended quickly after giving birth to Xianfeng’s only son, and when the child reached his first birthday, she was elevated to the second rank, with only the empress above her.

Xianfeng died shortly after the Second Opium War. Eight ministers were appointed to advise his heir, five-year-old Tongzhi, and Cixi was elevated to empress dowager with the expectation that she and the empress would cooperatively help the young emperor as he matured. But Cixi had by then gained a firm grasp of court machinations and quickly maneuvered to consolidate power. Following the coup, and after executing “only” three of the appointed ministers, Cixi issued an imperial edict affirming her as the sole decision maker.

Tongzhi remained the nominal emperor, but Cixi ruled from “behind the curtain,” as she would for most of the second half of the nineteenth century. Tongzhi was an unhappy, stifled young man who died at age nineteen, officially of smallpox, possibly of syphilis. His consort died a few months later, either by committing suicide or because Cixi had starved her to death. She was rumored to have been pregnant with Tongzhi’s son at the time. With no heir apparent, Cixi installed her nephew, Guangxu, as the new emperor.

For many Chinese, Cixi’s legacy, beyond her overprotectiveness, vindictiveness, xenophobia, and paranoia, was excess. Instead of imposing austerity while the government battled the Taiping and other existential crises, she oversaw the production of vast amounts of brightly colored porcelain from the imperial kilns for personal use. To commemorate each of her fiftieth, sixtieth, and seventieth birthdays, she commissioned dinnerware sets and matching boxes. Unsatisfied with her tomb, she ordered it reconstructed from scratch during the First Sino-Japanese War. She was said to have diverted funds designated for modernizing China’s outdated navy—which had been embarrassed again and again in engagements with foreign forces—to pay for the renovation and expansion of the Summer Palace, which became her personal retreat.

FAR REMOVED FROM BEIJING, Liu built the finest residence in Xingang, a sprawling complex of stone buildings arranged around a courtyard and encircled by a brick wall. The estate fronted the dirt road to Jiujiang and featured three pine trees, traditional symbols of longevity, friendship, and steadfastness, under which Liu often set out a bucket of cool water and jars of herbal medicine for travelers resting in the shade during the sweltering summers.

He married the daughter of a rich peasant family that had made its money selling Yangtze River fish. The Yangtze was full of fish back then, shad and herring and Chinese sturgeon, an ancient species that grew to more than ten feet long and a thousand pounds and is now nearly extinct. Each spring fish migrated up the river past Jiangxi to lay their eggs. The fertilized eggs hatched as they floated back down the river. By the time the fry reached Jiujiang, they were transparent needles, and the patriarch of the Yao clan went out around the fifth day of the fifth lunar month and collected these fry, which he sold to buyers from all over the country. His business grew until it became an area industry, but the man remained so thrifty that he would eat three bites of rice for every piece of salted black bean.

Liu became the benevolent dictator of Xingang. In addition to his teaching and land holding, he employed villagers, doled out extra bushels when they were hungry, acted as their legal representative, mediated their disputes, wrote correspondences for the illiterate, loaned money, and forgave the debts as often as he collected them. A skilled calligrapher, he wrote scrolls or proclamations for villagers without charge during the Lunar New Year. He was an expert with an abacus and helped merchants and shopkeepers with their accounting. Having trained himself in traditional Chinese medicine, he also served as the village doctor.

Every morning, after he finished his breakfast, Liu paid a visit to the Shi family’s general store to pick up his newspapers or check for mail. Then he might receive an audience of villagers in need of dispensation or adjudication. Or he took a stroll to inspect land for sale. One reason rural families had difficulty preserving their wealth from one generation to the next, aside from the gambling, disease, and drug addiction that stalked the countryside, was the inheritance system that split land evenly among the heirs. Over a few generations, even the largest properties were eventually parceled into insignificance, if they weren’t sold off to feed the heirs’ vices. Liu would then make his way into the village to spend the afternoon chatting with other elders, reading, or leisurely attending to the matters of a man with culture and means. He would return home to rest before dinner. His favorite meal was an oily combination of salted, pickled spinach with meat, steamed all day until it practically melted.

His wife bore him three sons—whom he named Ting Zan, Ting Geng, and Ting Gong; one meaning for the generation name of Ting was “Palace Courtyard”—and three daughters. The birth order of the first two daughters, as well as their birth dates, is lost to history. In those days, women seldom even had names, and Liu’s wife would have gone by her nickname or kinship term with family members or Lady or Madam Liu with others. Through a matchmaker, Liu arranged a marriage for his eldest daughter according to the tenet of men dang hu dui, harmony in social position and economic class. But the matchmaker failed to disclose that the prospective husband was a widower. When Liu’s daughter moved into her new home, she learned that she was the stepmother, which carried a terrible stigma. A widely circulated folk song, often the first one a child would hear, illustrated the disappointment of being or having a stepmother:

O Little Cabbage that withers in the fields,

I lost my mother at the age of three.

Living with father is still an easy time,

But I fear he will marry a stepmother.

Three years after he finds a stepmother,

Stepmother gives birth to a little boy.

Little brother is more fortunate than me,

He eats dumplings but I only drink the soup.

When I hold the bowl I think of mother,

And when I think of mother, I cry.

Stepmother asks why I’m crying,

And I say the soup is too hot.

The daughter fell into a depression and died young. The middle Liu daughter was sent to a family of farmers as a tong yang xi, a child bride who was adopted into a family who either had a son or hoped to have one soon and then raised her as a future daughter-in-law; the arrangement subtracted one less mouth to feed from Liu’s ledger and demonstrated both the value of women at the time and Liu’s thriftiness. Liu’s youngest daughter had the benefit of being born much later, in 1910, just one year before my grandmother, when attitudes toward women had begun to change. She received a name—Ting Yi—and tagged along with Liu to his sishu every day, studying readers for girls while the boys learned Confucian classics.

In the tradition of Chinese scholar-gentry, Liu patronized the arts and collected porcelain by the crate. Jiujiang was the customs port that processed rice, tea grown on nearly Lushan (shan meaning “mountain”), and ceramics from Jingdezhen. Whether imperial pieces destined for the Forbidden City or export ware headed to a Victorian porcelain room, it all moved through small waterways from the kilns to Poyang Lake, then to Jiujiang, the gateway to the Yangtze, and the daily boats from Jingdezhen always seemed to have something for my great-great-grandfather. Flower vases with mottled, running red glaze. Cylindrical hat stands. Fine handmade figurines of countryside characters or Buddhist gods. Painted tiles of Chinese landscapes in different seasons. Blue and white jars for storing pickled vegetables or tofu. Tea sets, vases, decorative plates, and tableware. Visitors heaped gifts of porcelain on my great-great-grandfather. When a boat loaded with Jingdezhen porcelain sank near the docks, he bought up what the locals scavenged out of the river. The relative who worked in Jingdezhen during the tail end of the Qing dynasty brought crates of porcelain home with him to Xingang every Lunar New Year. And his subordinates were only too happy to curry favor with him by slipping him imperial pieces. It was illegal, but by then the Qing court had more pressing matters.

ON THE HEELS of the Opium Wars came the Qing’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, fought from 1894 to 1895 over control of Korea. China had historically dismissed the Japanese as a regional player, but while the Qing government was too busy stealing and squabbling with itself to devise a coherent and long-term foreign policy, Japan had reacted to its own brush with gunboat diplomacy, courtesy of the Americans, by industrializing and Westernizing at a torrid pace. The war was one-sided, the outmatched Chinese navy was once again decimated, and the Japanese won Taiwan as a concession.

Cixi had since named her nephew, Guangxu, as emperor. Although dominated by Cixi, Guangxu was a bright, curious young man with an open mind about international affairs, perhaps owing to his boyhood fascination with Western technologies like watches, clocks, and bicycles. The revelation that China was far less developed than its perceived subordinate—Japan boasted more railroads and telegraph lines than all of China—compelled Guangxu to make real the reforms that the progressive ministers in the court had been waiting for.

Guangxu issued a series of decrees intended to transform China into a constitutional monarchy along the lines of Meiji Japan, establish a Western university system, invest in infrastructure, and perhaps most controversially, overhaul the imperial civil service exam, by which nearly every official in the Qing court had attained his position. These edicts became known as the Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898, for the amount of time (technically 104 days) that passed before Cixi, who had ostensibly “retired” but sensed a threat to her kleptocracy, staged a military coup, placed Guangxu under house arrest, and exiled or executed most of his supporters. Guangxu spent the next decade of his life in a small, isolated palace in the Forbidden City tinkering with clocks and watches and waiting for Cixi’s death, after which he hoped to be restored as emperor.

In response to the series of indignities suffered at the hands of foreign powers, an ultranationalist movement sprouted in China, and with the twentieth century came the Boxer Uprising. The Boxers were disenfranchised peasants upset by the same social ills as the Taiping—economic desperation, the scourge of opium, a corrupt and self-interested government—and, like the Taiping, subscribed to a millennial outlook. In the decades since the First Opium War, foreign powers had forced the Chinese into importing opium, accepting unequal treaties, tolerating the dissemination of the alien religion of Christianity, and granting extraterritorial rights to their citizens when on Chinese soil; the country was perilously close to becoming formally colonized. The Boxers blamed the Qing, which skillfully deflected the fury toward Westerners. Boxers subsequently attacked foreign missionaries and Chinese Christians, whom they viewed as traitors, and burned churches and cathedrals. They stormed through the countryside and eventually marched on Beijing, besieging the legation quarter that housed foreign embassies.

The moderates in the Qing court opposed going to war with the foreigners, but Cixi overruled them and backed the Boxers. The fighting in Beijing lasted just one summer, during which the royal family evacuated inland to Xi’an, one of China’s ancient capitals, under the pretense of an “inspection tour.” When the Boxers were finally suppressed by an alliance of military forces from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, Italy, and Austria-Hungary, the country paid for it. Foreign forces occupied cities in northern China for more than a year, carrying out reprisal killings, raping, and collecting indemnities. Soldiers, diplomats, and even missionaries participated in what one writer called “an orgy of looting”; it was such a gold rush that an American church worker was even arrested by French troops for beating them to the punch in one village. The Imperial Gardens were pillaged and destroyed again. On top of it all, the Qing government was forced to execute some of its own ministers and pay yet another massive indemnity.

When Cixi returned to Beijing, she seemed to realize that the foreigners could neither be ignored nor repelled and finally enacted sweeping political reforms, many of which were more progressive than those suggested by the ministers she had eliminated just a few years before. Guangxu never reclaimed his throne. He died young and heirless, at thirty-seven and under mysterious circumstances. One theory was that Cixi, herself in failing health but still determined to dictate the terms of succession, had him poisoned. Cixi died the following day, just hours after installing Guangxu’s two-year-old nephew, Puyi, as the new—and famously last—emperor. By then it was too late for the Qing. In 1911, the country revolted, and the following year the emperor was forced to abdicate, bringing an end to feudal China.

THOUGH BORN DURING Tongzhi’s reign, Liu had come of age during the struggle between Guangxu’s progressiveness and Cixi’s conservatism, and someone of his intelligence could plainly see that Cixi’s muzzling of Guangxu was only delaying the inevitable. It might have been while he was working in the cosmopolitan Yangtze delta that he took good stock of the direction China was moving. Or perhaps it was living near a port city, where the locals liked to say they resembled the wandering Yangtze, their minds flexible and curious, perpetually moving and reshaping the landscape, bringing in new goods, people, and ideas. When Liu considered the fragility of the Qing regime and the waves of Western education, technology, and infrastructure that appeared to be as endless and unyielding as the tides, he must have concluded that Western educations, not the traditional Chinese schooling he received, would confer the greatest advantages to his three sons.

Likewise, China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War finally forced the Qing to acknowledge the importance of modernization, and railroads in particular. The Chinese had always been skeptical of railways, considering them eyesores that upset feng shui, brought far more nuisances than benefits, threatened the livelihoods of canal porters and ferrymen, and potentially provided access to invaders. The first rail line in China opened in the 1860s, connecting the American concession of Shanghai with Wusong, fourteen miles up the Suzhou River and now a district of the megalopolis; it was promptly closed after a train struck a local Chinese. The railroad reopened briefly in 1877, but the Qing government considered it a blight. At the time of the First Sino-Japanese War, China had only 370 miles of track.

But as Herbert Giles, the British diplomat and sinologist who developed the Wade-Giles romanization system that was the standard for transliteration until the mid-twentieth century, observed, “The Chinese, who are extraordinarily averse to novelties, and can hardly be induced to consider any innovations, when once convinced of their real utility, waste no further time in securing to themselves all the advantages which may accrue.” The Chinese also rejected the telegraph at first, partly because of similar feng shui concerns, but mostly because they didn’t believe such an invention had any real benefits. But once they learned that some wily Cantonese (a persistent regional Chinese stereotype) had enriched themselves by hearing the results of the triennial imperial exam in Beijing via telegraph weeks before everyone else, and then buying all the lottery tickets with the names of the top graduates, opposition to the telegraph crumbled. After that, Giles wrote, “the only question with many of the literati was whether, at some remote date, the Chinese had not invented telegraphy themselves.” And so it was that after rail lines helped move troops to quell the Boxer Rebellion, the Qing realized the utility of railways, and they expanded accordingly. By 1905, when Liu’s eldest son, Ting Zan, my grandmother’s father, was a teenager, China’s rail network had grown to more than three thousand miles of track.

Around the same time the Qing established the first modern institutions of higher learning in China, modeled after American and European universities, staffed with foreign faculty, and intended to close the scientific and technological gap between China and the West. To supply the expanding railways with trained engineers and managers, specialized colleges were created. With all the money flowing into railroads, my great-great-grandfather must have pegged it for a growth industry and had his two eldest sons, Ting Zan and Ting Geng, tested into the railway institute in the provincial capital of Nanchang, where they studied engineering.

Liu sent his youngest boy, Ting Gong, off to St. John’s University in Shanghai, an elite school tucked into a bend of the Suzhou River. St. John’s was registered as an American university, making it easier for graduates to pursue master’s or doctorate degrees in the United States, which attracted children from China’s most prominent and wealthy families. Upon graduating from the railway college, Ting Zan took a job managing the construction of a new rail line connecting Jiujiang and Nanchang, while Ting Geng went to work as a civil engineer for the provincial transportation ministry. Ting Gong, who majored in English and Latin at St. John’s, accepted a position teaching at the medical school in Nanchang.

Liu’s hunch was proven right in 1905, when the Qing government abolished the imperial civil service exam system for good, a cataclysm that removed one of the pillars of Chinese society and the only surefire, democratic avenue for class mobility. Having an imperial degree was still respected, but those who had studied at Western institutions or overseas became the new elite. The men returning to China with degrees from Harvard or Oxford—these were the ones that Liu’s crowd wanted to marry their girls to, and they weren’t looking for women with bound feet, a barbaric practice that became even more retrograde in this light. They sought educated women who could speak English, whom they could talk to, and who could accompany them abroad.

Liu arranged all the marriages for his sons, pairing them with prominent families in the area according to men dang du hui. The two families would meet with a soothsayer, who considered the birth years, months, days, and hours of the bride and groom and decided on the most auspicious date for the wedding. On the wedding day, the groom arrived at the bride’s house on a sedan carried by eight porters (less wealthy families used four-man sedans). The bride’s family would meet the sedan with her dowry ready. Ten men carried dozens of pairs of shoes for her and her husband (once a girl got engaged, she spent most of her idle time making shoes, and by the time of the wedding, she was practically drowning in them), wooden pans for washing feet, night pots, trunks containing blankets and pillows, and money for the groom’s brothers. The bride’s family cried as the sedan approached, the louder the better. Sometimes the family would pay others to join in the crying. With the sedan in front of the house, the bride was carried on the back of a male relative—she wasn’t allowed to touch the ground lest she walk off with the family’s good luck. After she entered the sedan, the doors locked, and they only unlocked once they reached the groom’s house.

Then began a series of banquets, first for the matchmaker, to dispense of the person who, according to a Jiujiang saying, was “tossed over the wall” once the bride arrived. The next morning was a banquet for the bride’s side. Villagers and beggars lined both sides of the main gate between the banquets to cheer, and rich families would toss silver coins at them like confetti. Then there was another extravagant banquet for the family and villagers. After three days of feasting, the bride returned to her new home, accompanied by a male relative who sent over a porcelain dowry jar for storing oil.

As the section chief of the Jiujiang-Nanchang line, Ting Zan earned a good salary, but in keeping with tradition, he sent most of his income back to his father in Xingang, setting aside just enough to care for his wife and three daughters. His brothers followed suit, and these three revenue streams flowing back to Xingang swelled my great-great-grandfather’s property holdings until he came to own most of the buildings on the main road of Xingang.

By his fiftieth birthday, Liu curtailed his teaching and bookkeeping to devote more time to managing his estate, which had grown to six families. His brothers’ lives had not been as prosperous, and they relied on him for help. The middle brother hadn’t made any effort to study the classics as a youngster and grew into an opium addict who spent his days idling with food and drink like the pampered son of an official. The youngest brother had studied diligently for the imperial exams but couldn’t manage to pass, and the repeated failures destroyed him. There were also nephews, daughters-in-law, grandchildren, a young daughter not yet of marrying age, and various servants to support.

Ting Zan’s work, while prestigious and well compensated, was also arduous. He spent much of his time in the field, where, in addition to the daily responsibilities of supervising the construction of the eighty-mile length of rail, he was tasked with settling disputes between the company and local landowners whose property stood in the path of the lines. If a cemetery happened to be in the way, those families demanded reparations. Ting Zan would lead excavations to first determine the veracity of the claims—locals would sometimes bury animal bones and claim them as their ancestors’ in the hopes of getting a settlement—and then arrange for the reburial of the remains in another location. He worked long hours, ate poorly, and eventually contracted tuberculosis. The railway was completed in 1915, four years after the birth of my grandmother, and Ting Zan retreated to an office in Sha He, the first southbound stop on the line.