Inspired by the wonderful objects that have punctuated his long career as a scholar and expert in Chinese antiques, Marcus Flacks melds the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of a Western aesthetic education with a lifetime spent in the study and appreciation of China's literati culture. In the resulting stories, princes fall in love, monks outwit bureaucracies and sinister covens conspire, whilst, in the wings, harried officials are shoring up the defences of a tottering empire. Reality and fable, antiquity and modernity and Chinese and Western thought and aesthetics combine in a heady mixture.
