AustLit

'There can only be one winner in a battle. A truce, the Chinese say, merely delays the inevitable. In Korea, two brothers fight on opposing sides in a war where black-market profiteering is rife, and patriotism and honour have lost their meanings. When they depart the battlefield, one is a hero, the other a traitor. One brother, General Lee Kwan Man-hop, returns to the volatile political climate of Beijing and an uncertain future in the communist Peoples Republic of China. The other, Wing Commander James Merchant RAF, goes home to Hong Kong to restore a family business. Through China's turbulent years of the 1950s and '60s, Lee Kwan fights to protect his family from brutal oppression, while in Hong Kong, James Merchant's family empire is in danger of disintegrating. Strong women, the lovers of powerful men, join in the fight for its preservation, and indeed their own, as the Noble House of Merchant becomes a house divided. A house plagued with treachery and haunted by tales of a long-lost fortune in gold, supposedly the bequest of an illegal, secret, triad society. From the Korean War to the Cultural Revolution, Two Tigers, One Mountain is the long-awaited sequel to The Time of the Dragons and a dramatic story of a family dynasty on a violent course to destruction. From Hong Kong to London; from the foreign embassies of war-torn Seoul to the far-east elegance of Singapore; from the narrow lanes of Beijing slums, to the famous banking houses of Geneva, Two Tigers, One Mountain, like an opiate dream, is a fabulous tale of the Orient.'

Source : publication summary