This is a book about Western advisers in China. For over three
hundred years, from the 1620's to the 1950's, these men placed their
technical skills at the disposal of the Chinese. At the beginning of
the period they brought knowledge of the stars and of planetary
motion; at the end, they introduced the Chinese to aerial warfare and
the mysteries of the atom.
From the hundreds of advisers who labored in China, I have
chosen sixteen. Despite the range of their expertise — among the
sixteen were astronomers, soldiers and doctors, administrators,, translators, engineers and even one professional revolutionary organizer —
and despite the more than three centuries that their works span, their
cumulative lives have a curious continuity. They experienced similar
excitement and danger, entertained similar hopes, learnt to bear with
similar frustrations, and operated with a combination of integrity and
deviousness. They bared their own souls and mirrored their own
societies in their actions, yet in doing so they highlighted fundamental Chinese values. And they speak to us still, with a shared
intensity, about the ambiguities of superiority, and about that indefinable realm where altruism and exploitation meet.