CHAPTER 1

From his black-windowed sedan roaring to the airport, Gao Yideng looked out on Beijing. Steel-and-glass skyscrapers, banks, hotels, international corporations and consulting groups flashed by. Ads and billboards blinked against the sky. The future was here. That which was irrecoverable the past had come to seem more desired, more priceless than ever. And Gao had a piece of it to sell.

The right buyer would give almost anything to possess it. The trick was making it happen.

He watched the Jichang Expressway, hands tight in concentration. Now one of the foreign porcelain experts had fallen ill on the plane and the other, the woman, was arriving alone. Perhaps she’d be more malleable by herself than the two of them would have been together. Not that Gao would lie to her. But there were many facets of this situation, those that were exposed, those kept from view. The bottom line was the art, and thank the gods, that was straight from heaven. It was extraordinary and spoke for itself.

He winced away from the part of his insides that grieved him. It was a dull knife scraping, the same place, familiar, like a well-worn knob of bone. He didn’t have enough. He never would. Not the blocks of real estate in Shanghai and Beijing; not the shares of computer companies. Every day of his life was a maw that needed more. He laid his hand across his stomach. And he’d had the dream once more last night.

In the dream he was always back in the famine of 1961. He was in the place he grew up, a Yangtze town, in a maze of alleys, with trailing trees and decrepit stone buildings.

And he was with Peng, his best boyhood friend. Out of everyone in his life, all those whom he...