The Death of Woman Wang

About this book

Award-winning author Jonathan D. Spence paints a vivid picture of an obscure place and time: provincial China in the seventeenth century. Life in the northeastern county of Tan-cheng emerges here as an endless cycle of floods plagues crop failures banditry and heavy taxation. Against this turbulent background a tenacious tax collector an irascible farmer and an unhappy wife act out a poignant drama at whose climax the wife having run away from her husband returns to him only to die at his hands. Magnificently evoking the China of long ago The Death of Woman Wang also deepens our understanding of the China we know today.