I thought this was a bit silly, although I learned things I didn’t know from it.
Like the existence of plant hunters in Victorian England, the markets all centred around Chelsea, and fierce competition to find, import and sell exotic plants. Like tulips, a few hundred years earlier in Amsterdam. I had no idea this happened.
But the novel itself is a fairly silly, swashbuckling adventure of a voyage to China, romance with a widowed Englishwoman, and return to the UK with a wife and the much vaunted Chinese ‘icicle tree’, followed by revenge on the mercantile ex employer.
A fairly old fashioned tale of adventure.
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