LANES AND TRAMLINES: THE BUND LAND SAGA A Novel of Colonial Shanghai Volume Two

Shanghai, 1901. The Boxer Uprising has drowned North China in blood, and refugees pour into the International Settlement by the thousand, coolies with nothing but the clothes on their backs, merchants with silver sewn into their linings, scholars who have lost everything. For Edward Winter, the English architect who built his first fortune on a mud flat along the Bund, the crisis is not a tragedy. It is an opportunity.
This sweeping historical saga continues the story of Winter's real estate empire. Seizing the land opened by the 1899 boundary expansion, Winter builds row after row of shikumen lane houses, narrow, solid, undeniably Chinese in form, undeniably his in deed. They sell out in weeks. Flush with capital, he bids for the city's first electric tram line, six kilometers of steel rail that will turn Shanghai from a walking town into a modern metropolis. His old rival Harold Perry, the ruthless taipan who once tried to ruin him, controls the Municipal Council faction that will decide the tender. Winter wins by a single vote.
But every victory carries a shadow. His Chinese comprador Gu Yanqiu, the man who taught him how Shanghai really works, watches in silence as Winter acquiesces in the demolition of an old Chinese neighborhood to make way for the tracks. Shen Yumei, the merchant's daughter who once stood beside Winter when everyone else turned away, finds her family's compound threatened by the route. When a rail strike turns violent and a Chinese worker is beaten to death, Perry scapegoats Gu Yanqiu and Winter, cornered by the Council, lets him fall. The cross-cultural partnership shatters.
Winter marries Eleanor Ashworth, the consul's daughter, and takes his place among the colonial elite. His trams run on schedule. His lanes fill with tenants. Nanjing Road blooms into a carnival of electric lights and department stores. But the man who built all of it cannot sleep at night. He has become what he once despised, a landlord who profits from privilege, a foreigner who calls China home but will never belong.
Then the world shifts. The Railway Protection Movement paralyzes his trams. In Wuchang, a bomb explodes by accident, and the 1911 Revolution begins. Shanghai declares independence. The Settlement hangs out its flag of neutrality, but neutrality cannot hold back history as the Qing dynasty falls. Property prices crash. Foreign capital flees. Perry empties the company treasury and sails for England, leaving a single note on his desk: To the winner. It was always a losing game.
In the fire and chaos, Winter finds Shen Yumei again. Gu Yanqiu, now a patron of the revolutionaries, returns the old land deed Winter has carried for thirty years, the deed that proves the Bund was stolen, not bought. Three men sit at a table on a Bund rooftop, watching the city burn below them, and understand that the world they built is already gone.
Lanes and Tramlines is the second volume of The Bund Land Saga, a sweeping historical saga of ambition, betrayal, and redemption in the city that became the Paris of the Orient. From the mud flats of the 1890s to the revolutionary storms of 1911, Jiang Ning brings to life the people who built and lost old Shanghai.
Drawn from meticulous research into Shanghai's urban development, the tram franchise battles, and the fall of the Qing dynasty, this character-driven novel will appeal to fans of James Clavell's Tai-Pan, Edward Rutherfurd's China, and readers who love epic historical fiction about colonial Shanghai, the treaty port era, and the twilight of foreign concessions.