Volume six in an extraordinary SF series set 200 years in the future when China rules the world. With Triad bosses and assassins, emperors, whores and visionaries, it is part heroic epic, part technological thriller, part romance - a compelling tale of fallen empires and ordinary people unified only by the dark history of their time.
As Chung Kuo's population continues to swell, the Seven are forced to make further concessions; laws must be relaxed and the House at Weimar re-opened. Change is coming, whether the Seven want it or not. As the tides of unrest unleashed by earlier wars grow, DeVore secretly allies with Li Yuan's newly-appointed general, Hans Ebert. DeVore's schemes are slowly coming to fruition, but Ebert has his own plans: to depose the Seven and control the whole of Chung Kuo. It is finally a time for Change. In the long years before the War it had seemed inconceivable to challenge the Seven. But now? Now new currents of unrest have woken in the depths of the City, darker and deeper than those expressed by the War. Currents which threaten to tear Chung Kuo apart.