A Palace in Peking

About the Book

A Palace in Peking is a tender and passionate story of love, friendship, and war. David Clierce is a talented musician who has grown up in Peking, China, the son of an American diplomat who gave up diplomacy to become a reclusive scholar of Chinese literature. Daria Krasnova is the illegitimate daughter of a White Russian mother exiled from Russia during the Communist revolution. Their love story unfolds during a brief period of China’s history when the ancient capital, Peking, was a relatively peaceful haven for adventuresome spirits from all corners of the earth.
The events and characters of the novel are fictional creations of the author’s imagination, but it would hardly be accurate to say that any resemblance to real persons or incidents is purely accidental. The individuality and eccentricity of members of the multinational foreign community and the personalities of Chinese friends and acquaintances provided an inexhaustible source of inspiration.
In this novel, the author seeks to evoke a truly magical moment in history: that vanished world in which a fortunate few were privileged to dwell, all too briefly.

About the Author

Margaret Zee writes of an era and a locale that she knew intimately from personal experience, and she writes with an ardor that no amount of scholarly research could generate. At the time of which Zee writes, the Forbidden City had recently been deserted by the last emperor of China and his court. The city’s great palaces, parks, and temples were vacant and no longer “forbidden” to ordinary mortals, but accessible to all and sundry. In spite of the decay of its ancient splendor, Peking was still a city of Oriental magnificence, retaining more than a vestige of the exotic beauty that made it unique in the world.