The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China

347 Pages·2015·3.52 MB·English

by  Huan Hsu

Copyright © 2015 by Huan Hsu All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown
Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC,
New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random
House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-0-307-98630-6
eBook ISBN 978-0-30798631-3
Maps by Jeffrey L. Ward
Jacket design by Na Kim
Jacket photographs (porcelain shards): Jonathan Blair National Geographic Creative; Lyn
Randle Getty Images
v3.1
To my family,
the treasure I always had,
and to Jennifer,
the treasure I never expected to find
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Family Tree
Map 1 China: My Journey
Map 2 Liu Feng Shu’s Journey
Map 3 Poyang Floodplain
PROLOGUE
1 THIS IS CHINA
2 A CHICKEN TALKING WITH A DUCK
3 LIU FENG SHU
4 PANDA CHINESE
5 THE ORPHAN
6 STREET FIGHT
7 JOURNEY TO THE WEST
8 THE REAL CHINA
9 END OF PARADISE
10 FROM FAR FORMOSA
11 CITY ON FIRE
Photo Insert
12 FALLING LEAVES RETURN TO THEIR ROOTS
13 ALL DEATH IS A HOMECOMING
14 NANJING
15 NORTHERN EXPEDITION
16 A STUMBLE FROM WHICH THERE IS NO RECOVERING
17 THE NINE RIVERS
18 THE LONG VALLEY
19 XINGANG MARKS THE SPOT
20 CHASING THE MOON FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
A Note on Sources
Acknowledgments
About the Author
T C , and then the summer and fall
HIS BOOK RECOUNTS MY TIME IN HINA FROM 2007 TO 2010
of 2011. Although this is a work of non-fiction, any attempt to
reconstruct recent history is inherently subjective, and my guiding
principle was to tell a coherent story about China, my family, and my
search for my great-great-grandfather’s buried porcelain. Many of the
people and places in this book were visited a number of times over many
years. For the sake of narrative logic, I have in some instances
compressed the time between these encounters, omitted extraneous
details, or explained information out of time with its revelation to me.
However, descriptions of people, places, or encounters themselves have
not been altered, and the dialogue was recorded either as it happened or
soon thereafter.
A word on translations: Many of my conversations with Chinese
speakers took place in Mandarin Chinese. When translating the
conversations, I tried to be faithful to my partner’s intended meaning
and re-create it as I understood it in everyday English while also
preserving the unique qualities of their speech. The instances where
Chinese speakers use English are noted as such. I have used pinyin
transliterations except for names commonly spelled otherwise, such as
Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen, and the members of my family who write
their names according to Wade-Giles conventions.
Chinese kinship terms are manifold and complicated; depending on
the relationship, each family member has a unique term by which they
are called. I have simplified this by referring to characters either by their
given names or according to their relationship to me, except for San Gu,
my grandmother’s aunt. Full Chinese names are written with the
surname first, followed by the given name.
Finally, all dates have been converted from the lunar calendar to the
Gregorian calendar. And the conversion rate for Chinese RMB to U.S.
dollars for this book is 7:1.