The Courtesan: A Novel in Six Parts

A timeless novel of one woman who bridged two worlds in a tumultuous era of East meets West.


The year is 1881, the era of China's collision with imperialist Europe. Seven-year-old Jinhua is left alone and unprotected, her life transformed after her mandarin father's summary execution for the crime of speaking the truth. As an orphan, she is sold to a brothel keeper and grows up enduring the worst of human nature. When an elegant but troubled scholar takes Jinhua as his concubine, she accompanies him as emissary on an exotic journey to Vienna. Struggling against the constraints of tradition and her husband's authority, she opens her eyes and her heart to the mesmerizing strangeness of this new world and seeks to find "Great Love."
Sai Jinhua is an altered woman when she returns to a changed and changing China, where a terrible clash of East and West is brewing, and where her western sympathies will ultimately threaten not only her own survival but the survival of those who are most dear to her.
The Courtesan is an astonishing tale inspired by the real life of a woman who lived and loved in the twilight of the Qing dynasty. To this day, Sai Jinhua is a legend in her native China, and this is her story, told the way it might have been.