Fragile Cargo
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  • Published: 1 September 2022
  • ISBN: 9781529197631
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $32.99

Fragile Cargo

China’s Wartime Race to Save the Treasures of the Forbidden City

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
20 Sep 2022
Audiobook
1 Sep 2022
Hardback
1 Oct 2022
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The gripping true story of the intrepid curators who saved China's art from the ravages of the Sino-Japanese War and WW2.

The gripping true story of the intrepid curators who saved China's art from the ravages of the Sino-Japanese War and WW2.

Fragile Cargo will share the as-yet-untold story of the brave people who saved China's art from the ravages of the Second World War, undertaking a perilous journey across the vast country in order to protect these fragile treasures. After the end of the war, and the beginning of the Communist regime, the Forbidden City curators were each faced with a stark choice: remain with their rescued artefacts in China, or flee with them to Taiwan. Depending on their choice, the curators' fates took startlingly different, sometimes heart-breaking turns.

Author and former BBC Beijing correspondent Adam Brookes draws on first-hand diary accounts and his own interviews with eyewitnesses to offer a new perspective on China's twentieth-century history, exploring the cultural, social and political impact of the war and the Revolution on the country's people and its art heritage.
  • Published: 1 September 2022
  • ISBN: 9781529197631
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $32.99
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About the author

Adam Brookes

Adam Brookes is an author and journalist, a former radio producer at the BBC World Service and BBC Beijing correspondent, whose writing draws extensively on his years in China and tries to unravel what goes on behind the scenes of intelligence and modern surveillance states. During his journalistic career he reported from over thirty countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea and Mongolia, for the BBC television and radio and was interviewed on multiple occasions by BBC News and The New York Times. He is the author of Night Heron, Spy Games and The Spy’s Daughter. He currently lives in the United States.

Praise for Fragile Cargo

Adam Brookes has an eye for a great story and knows how to tell it. Fragile Cargo cannot fail to delight... I enjoyed it enormously

John Keay, author of CHINA: A HISTORY

A compelling story of art, war and adventure. An extraordinary odyssey of the imperial treasures of the Forbidden City, protected by heroic and remarkable curators... Superb

Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR

A riveting read... With his meticulously researched and detailed writing, Adam Brookes takes us on a compelling journey through this extraordinary chapter of Chinese history. Fragile Cargo reads like a thriller... Gripping stuff

Alexi Kaye Campbell, writer of feature film WOMAN IN GOLD

So much more than a work of art history, Brookes's book illuminates the exceptional dramas of the Chinese front in the Second World War, a theatre of the conflict that is still insufficiently understood

Julia Lovell, Literary Review

Brookes... marries a reporter's grasp of detail with a novelist's narrative flair to bring clarity and readability to a complicated period of China's troubled history

Mail on Sunday

[A] gripping and meticulously researched account of an epic effort to transport delicate scrolls, paintings and carvings thousands of miles under the thread of bombing and invasion

Times Literary Supplement

A story of bravery and ingenuity, and equally of the critical role cultural heritage plays in forming and maintaining national identity.

Wall Street Journal