Mud and Title Deeds (Paperback)

Paperback. Shanghai, 1892. The Bund is not yet the famous waterfront of postcards and steamers. It is a strip of reclaimed mud and contested ambition in the heart of the International Settlement, a treaty port where foreign firms build on land they do not truly own, and Chinese merchants navigate a legal system that was never written for them.This sweeping historical fiction novel introduces Edward Winter, a debt-ridden English architect who arrives from London with a set of architectural drawings and a quiet conviction that engineering can overcome anything. What he finds is a city fractured into worlds: the International Settlement governed by foreign ratepayers; the walled Chinese city beyond the gates, where magistrates still rule by decree; and between them, a waterfront where every inch of soil is disputed, every title deed carries a hidden history, and every foundation must be driven by hand into the soft, black Huangpu mud.Gu Yanqiu knows that mud better than anyone. A Chinese comprador and land broker born in a canal town outside Suzhou, he has spent his adult life learning the language of deeds and boundaries, of ancestral graves and concession markers, of what foreigners can be told and what they must never know. When Winter proposes an unlikely partnership to erect the Bund's first modern office building on a lot everyone else considers worthless, Gu sees more than a profit. He sees a chance to stand as an equal partner in a city that has always treated Chinese men as invisible.But the mud has its own rules, and so does the men who control it.As the building rises, Winter and Gu confront forces that no blueprint can master. Harold Perry, a ruthless taipan whose firm has dominated the Bund's land trade for a generation, will sabotage, litigate, and burn to protect his monopoly. A devastating typhoon sweeps the foundation into the river and leaves the partnership in ruins. A legal battle over a single deed traces ownership back to the very first land sales of 1845 and reveals that the ground beneath every foreign building on the Bund was never quite what it seemed. And when the First Sino-Japanese War breaks out, the shockwaves reach every foreign firm in Shanghai, forcing Winter and Gu to choose between the partnership that built them and the nations that claim them.Through it all, the question at the heart of the novel remains simple and devastating: who truly owns the land? In a city where law serves privilege, where a Chinese man's testimony counts for less than a foreigner's signature, and where the most valuable real estate in Asia was once a swamp, the answer is written not in deeds but in the mud itself and in the blood of those who dug it.Mud and Title Deeds is the first volume of The Bund Land Saga, a sweeping historical saga that follows the making of Shanghai's iconic waterfront from the mudflats of the 1890s through the Republican era. It is a novel about the people whom history forgot to record: the architects who gambled on soft ground, the compradors who carried every secret in every deed, the merchant women who supplied the stone and timber, the laborers who drove timber piles into the riverbed by hand, and the cross-cultural partnerships that crossed every line the world had drawn.Drawn from years of research into Shanghai Municipal Council minutes, foreign consular archives, and the original land registers of the Bund, this meticulously researched story will appeal to fans of James Clavell's Tai-Pan, Janie Chang's The Porcelain Moon, and readers who love epic historical fiction about colonial Shanghai, the treaty port era, and the birth of modern China.Praise for The Bund Land Saga: "A vivid, meticulously researched portrait of a city being born. Jiang Ning writes with the sweep of a historian and the heartbeat of a novelist."<br Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…