Barbarians

My fourth historical epic is "Barbarians." Set in the China of the mid-nineteenth century, it explores the terrible events that followed the first translation of the Bible into Chinese. The true history behind this novel is stranger than anything a novelist might reasonably invent. Hung, a young Chinese man, broken in spirit and mind by his failure in the civil service examinations, went slowly mad. After exposure to evangelical Christianity, he became convinced that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. In fact, Hung founded a quasi-religious revolutionary movement that spread rapidly across Southern China. It took hold with such rapidity because he began to promise landless peasants what they wanted most - land. Within a few years he had gathered an army of a million men around him, and he took the southern capital of Nanking and even threatened to unseat the ruling Ch'ing dynasty. The second bloodiest war in all history ensued, killing three times as many people as World War One. I was interested in the setting of "Barbarians" partly because no one in the English-speaking world seemed to be aware that this momentous human event had ever happened. This was mainly due to timing: the attention of the British press was taken up by the war in the Crimea , and the United States of America had its collective mind on matters rather closer to home – the civil war. Another reason for writing the novel was to illustrate how a powder keg of political instability touched by an unforeseeable spark can lead to absolute catastrophe. If you're interested in discovering more about the background to this novel, try looking up the "Taiping rebellion." This was an extraordinary period in Chinese history, and “Barbarians” follows the exploits of two real-life figures, one an Englishman and the other an American, in Shanghai, while the politics of the Manchu court are centred upon the extraordinary girl, Yehonala, who rose from concubine to become the all-powerful “Queen Victoria of China .“