Good dose of history
The extraodinary life of China’s famous lady doctor
This novel takes us to 15th-century China, a fascinating and often brutal time when aristocratic women had their feet bound, rich men kept concubines that lived alongside their wives and eunuchs served in the Imperial Palace.
American-Chinese author Lisa See conjures up this extraordinary era in a tale that is all the more captivating because the woman at its centre really existed. Not everything is known about her life, of course, but the author is a brilliant storyteller and she fills in the gaps in Tan Yunxian’s real history with some wonderful fiction.
Yunxian is the daughter of an elite family
