'Twas On The China Station Books in Order

’Twas On The China Station opens in 1850, with China under extreme pressure. The Taiping rebellion is rising in the south, the Qing government is out of touch with what is happening across its own empire, and foreign powers are looking for advantage.

The first book, Building the City of Mammon, focuses on the creation of Shanghai as a Treaty Port. Wareham presents it as a muddy, hungry, fast-growing place where British, American, French, and Chinese interests collide. Trade, opium, religion, military threat, and opportunism all arrive together.

Shanghai is the prize and the problem.

George Mayhew stands near the center of the story, trying to build the city, grow the family hong, and make his fortune while dealing with pressure from the British Empire and Chinese authorities. In Intermission, the mid-1850s bring a pause rather than peace. The Taipings have reached the Yangtse and Nanking, unrest spreads elsewhere, and the fragile stability of Shanghai draws people in.

The series is about commerce as much as war. Wareham is interested in who builds fortunes when a city is being made, who pretends that trade is clean, and who knows better. The tone is sharp, practical, and uncomfortable in the way good historical fiction about empire often should be.

Read Building the City of Mammon first, then Intermission. The books should be read in order because the second depends on the first book’s portrait of Shanghai as a city being built while the wider country edges toward even greater violence.