The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China

Hsu, a first-generation Chinese American, returns to China to discover the fate of his great-great-grandfather's long-buried porcelain collection and, in the process, unearths the key to understanding his family's history over the past one hundred years of Chinese history In the tradition of the best works of history that uncover a forgotten family story, such as The Hare with Amber Eyes or The Lost, The Porcelain Thief recounts journalist Huan Hsu's journey through the old and new worlds of China to find hidden treasure, reconnect with his ancestry, and come to terms with his hyphenated identity. In 1938, when the Japanese arrived in Hsu's great-great-grandfather's Yangtze River hometown of Xingang, the family was forced to bury their valuables, including a vast and prized collection of antique porcelain, and to flee on a decades-long trek that would splinter it over thousands of miles and countless upheavals. Hsu, raised in Salt Lake City and armed with mere strands of a family legend, moves to China to work in his uncle's semiconductor chip business and begins to understand his family's history as he never has before. A conversation with his grandmother, the last living link to his family's life in dynastic China, ignites his desire to learn more about not only his ancestral heirlooms but also porcelain itself. Mastering conversational Chinese enough to launch himself into the countryside, Hsu sets out to separate the layers of fact and fiction that have grown up around both his family and China, and finally complete his family's long march back home. Melding memoir, travelogue, ethnography, and social and political history, The Porcelain Thief takes the reader along with Hsu as he travels throughout mainland China and Taiwan to learn more about his family's fabled porcelain collection and, as a result, about the great-great-grandparents and estranged aunts and uncles he never knew. The Porcelain Thief is an intimate and personal way to understand the bloody, tragic and largely forgotten events that defined Chinese history in the 19th and 20th century.