Concubine of Shanghai
China, 1907. Sixteen-year-old orphan Cassia is sold by her aunt to a brothel. There, she works as a lowly maid for Madame Emerald until a powerful and dangerous client plucks her from obscurity.
Master Chang is the boss of the fearsome Shanghai Triad and he always gets what he wants. Despite her unbound feet and breasts, Cassia swiftly becomes Chang's favourite mistress. He showers her with luxuries as he embarks on her sexual awakening.
But Chang's world is violent and precarious, and those such as Cassia who depend on him are bound to his fate . . .
Hong Ying was born into a sailor's family in Chongqing on the Yangtze River in Southwest China. An author and poet, she began her career as a full-time writer in the early 1980s having studied creative writing at Lu Xun Creative Writing Academy and Fudan University.
She is best known in the English-speaking world for her novels: K: The Art of Love (which won the Prix de Rome in 2005), The Concubine of Shanghai, Peacock Cries and Summer of Betrayal. Her autobiography, Daughter of the River, has been translated into twenty-nine languages and many of her works have been turned into television series and films. Her latest memoir, Good Children of the Flowers, a sequel to Daughter of the River, won Asia Weekly's Top Ten Books of the Year Award 2009. She lives in Beijing with her husband and daughter.