The Eunuch, written by China’s top foreign film actor Jonathan Kos-Read, is a murder-mystery whodunnit set in northern China in the 12th century, and features one of the darkest settings and one of the most intriguing plots I have ever come across. it was a pleasure to get it ready for publication, and it’s done pretty well so far. But the big news is that we have found a publisher for the novel in Chinese. The agreement has not yet been signed, so I won’t mention the name of the publisher, but it is associated with the largest audio book player in the China market, which won’t do it any harm. And the publication date has been tentatively set for March next year.

The story takes place in the imperial palace of the Jin Dynasty in the city today known as Kaifeng. The emperor is a Jurchen, a warrior horse-riding race from Manchuria which attacked the Chinese empire and took over all of northern China. The bloody body of a concubine is found in a corridor just outside the empror’s private quarters, and the questions are who did it, why and how. The detective is the Eunuch, and if he cannot work it out, he is probably himself going to get executed, because the way the murder is done it looks like the emperor did it. If you haven’t ready it yet, I promise you, you will not regret reading it.
But a first novel by an unknown author is always a hard sell, regardless of how good it is. And Jonathan is an unknown in the wide world. But in China, he is not unknown. He has a significant fan base, and over five million fans on various domestic social media channels, including the local variant of TikTok, called Douyin. That is a valuable marketing resource. So we spent some time looking for the right China publisher to work with, one that would understand the value of the author’s profile and the marketing potential he brings to the table. And we found the right partner.
Jonathan, meanwhile, has a team who feed videos onto his China social channels, and they will be working from now to prepare materials to accompany the launch of the Chinese version – almost certainly to be called 金宫案 – in English, it means something like the Case of the Jin Imperial Palace. the name plays off a famous whodunnit book series set in China by another foreign writer – Robert van Gulik, who wrote a series of books about Judge Dee, a magistrate in ancient China who has to solve mysteries and murders in the town he administers. The first book in the series was called 狄公案 – The Case of Judge Dee.
Jonathan Kos-Read has acted in more than 100 Chinese movies and many many TV series, in almost all cases of course playing the baddie. His most recent movie is called Sniper, directed by Zhang Yimou, and features him as an American sniper in the Korean War facing off against a Chinese sniper. Guess who dies in the end.
I first met Jonathan in 2016 when I was invited to moderate a discussion in the late and definitely much lamented bookstore in Beijing called the Bookworm. There were four panelists and the topic was foreign actors in China. Three foreign guys and one lady, but the lady was late. I was immediately struck by the fact that all three guys had solid beards, and I asked if that a requirement for being a foreign actor in China. The answer was yes, although the fourth actor arrived soon after and proved that the beard is actually only a male requirement.
Jonathan was the most articulate of the four, and after the event, he mentioned that he had a manuscript, and as I always say to just about everyone, I said send it along. As I read that early draft of the Eunuch, I was immediately struck by the darkness of the world he had created in the imperial palace, the sense of fear and foreboding, as our hero, the Eunuch detective, tries to figure out who killed the concubine. But the twist was that Jonathan said that he had based the world on the Chinese film industry, and the machinations he had seen and been a part of all through the 20-plus years he has been a part of it. I was hooked.
The next question is, how will Chinese readers respond to a foreign author writing a story set in ancient China? Will it feel appropriate and interesting, or inappropriate and presumptuous? The initial indications are the former, but you never know. The feelings of the Chinese people are sensitive, in a paraphrase of the famous Foreign Ministry phrase. And what of the story? It of course needs to be reviewed before publication. Will all elements of the story pass the test, or will some be viewed as in need of change, to meet China’s special conditions in line with the need to maintain stability and unity. Who knows? But we will soon. Watch this space.

The Eunuch to be published in Chinese

A quick sneak peak at our next book, to be launched on October 1 — it is called Chinese Sudoku, a title which sums it up pretty well. It is a book full of sudoku puzzles, but you have to fill them in with Chinese characters, not Arabic numerals. No ebook version for this title, alas. It’s a great way of practising the writing, recognition and use of traditional Chinese numerals.

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It was 15 years ago today… well, not perhaps to the day, but certainly Earnshaw Books had its genesis in 2006 on the back of the China Economic Review, which at the time was a big operation. Since then we have published over 150 books, and have many more in the works. Earnshaw Books has established itself as arguably the biggest independent publisher of English language books in Greater China, and we have gained a solid reputation for quality and interest.
It seemed counter-intuitive at the time, in the mid-2000s, to start publishing books just as the Internet was taking over and people appeared to be turning away from written tomes in droves. But so many of the things I have done in the past few decades have been similarly counter-intuitive. It almost seems as if I do some things in order to directly and personally experience the transition from one state to another. Business magazines being another example.
The initial idea for Earnshaw Books was to do reprints of a number of wonderful books from a century or more ago, written by foreign residents of China, relating stories and impressions of the country in that era. What struck me was how relevant much of what they wrote remained today, and I wanted to remind the new crop of foreigners in China at that point—the go-go years post-WTO and pre-Beijing Olympics—that they were not pioneers, and that others had passed this way before.
The first book we published as Earnshaw Books was Carl Crow’s Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom, a splendid start to the enterprise. Like so many other books of the 1930s, Carl’s had virtually disappeared from the public sphere, and I was eager to give him another run in the sun. I will talk about some of the other early books in later posts, but this one sold really well through bookstores in Shanghai and Beijing.
It was an era of some flexibility, China was moving, it seemed, in the direction of diversity and international inclusiveness, and there was a number of book stores in the major cities that would sell books for us. There were also a lot of foreigners around who were curious about this new world of China that they had parachuted into.
We provided books on a consignment basis, which means that they pay after they make sales and have the right to return copies. Not all of the bookstores paid all the time or were willing to hand back unsold books. But it was the beginning of a trend that could have led to an entirely different arrangement for China, one in which bookstores across the country could sell Earnshaw Books books, providing a separate view on China’s modern history to the new generation of college graduates.
A fraction of them would be interested, and a fraction of that number would feel confident enough of their English to buy Carl Crow’s Foreign Devils and similar books. But given the huge numbers of anything in China, that would still have been a substantial market. But it was not to be.
In the years since, the opportunity to sell books in the China market has shrunk. The import channels, in general, will not give approval for the import and sale of such books, even though they are innocuous. The reprints we did in that phase 15 years ago were clearly about China, and none of the gatekeepers were going to actually bother to read the books to find out if there was anything sensitive in them. It was and remains easiest for them to just say no. And so the market for our books moved offshore, and the dream of selling English books to a small proportion of younger educated Chinese people was, for now, shelved. But it remains a goal for the future.