Author: Robert Elegant
Title: Manchu
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Year: 1980
ISBN: 0070191638
Format: Hardcover with original dust jacket
Condition: Excellent
Pages: 560
Weight: 1082 g
Dimensions: 17 × 24 × 4.5 cm
Clean pages, strong binding, and a well-preserved dust jacket with some minor scuffs (see image 1).
Manchu by Robert Elegant is an action packed historical fiction and part of a successful trilogy that was a New York Times Best seller. This novel is both entertaining and is a great richly detailed historical epic that blends fiction with a depth of research, narrative scope, and cultural intelligence. R. Elegant, was a journalist known for his sophisticated, first hand understanding of East Asian politics and history constructs an expansive portrait of the Qing dynasty’s decline through layered characters, political intrigue, and vivid cultural detail.
This first edition hardcover with its original dust jacket is a substantial mid-century production, notable for its strong build, clean typesetting, and weighty feel. At 560 pages, it offers the kind of immersive, serious historical storytelling valued by collectors of 20th-century historical literature and readers seeking fiction grounded in real political and cultural dynamics.
From the Publisher: “In Manchu, the best-selling author of Dynasty takes the reader on an epic journey into the rich and exotic past of China in the seventeenth century. The time is not long after the Jesuits made their first successful missionary venture into China by converting to Catholicism many of the mighty-including the Empress Dowager and the powerful Prime Minister, Paul Hsü. A master story-teller, Robert Elegant combines historical truth and vivid imagination to re-create the intrigue, decadence, and corruption that led to the demise of the Ming Dynasty and the rise of the conquering Manchus.
“The human drama of Manchu is portrayed through the eyes of an adventurous young Englishman, Francis Arrowsmith. Francis, an exiled would-be Jesuit turned soldier-of-fortune, arrives in China hoping to quickly recoup his fortune, and thereby restore his family's wealth.
"It is an extraordinary novel about the realities of power and corruption, as well as the strength of the human spirit.
“Robert Elegant, author of the international bestseller Dynasty, was formerly the Hong Kong Bureau Chief for the Los Angeles Times. He lived in Hong Kong for twenty-five years, and has published eight nonfiction works on China.”
