The promise : love and loss in modern China

A spellbinding and magical narrative, this is the story of modern China through the women who lived through it. At the start of the twentieth century in China, the Hans were married in an elaborate ceremony before they were even born.

They went on to have nine children and chose colours portrayed in some of their favourite poems as nicknames for them – Red, Cyan, Orange, Yellow, Green, Green Tangerine, Purple, Blue and Rainbow.

Fate, and the sweep of twentieth-century history, would later divide them. Xinran begins with the magic and tragedy of one young couple’s wedding night in 1949, and goes on to tell personal experiences of loss, grief and hardship through China’s extraordinary century.

In doing so she tells a bigger story – how traditional Chinese values have been slowly eroded by the tide of modernity and how their outlooks on love, and the choices they've made in life, have been all been affected by the great upheavals of Chinese history.