Dragons and Boxers is an historical fiction/martial arts adventure story set in China at the turn of the twentieth century, during the whirlwind of the Boxer Rebellion. It tells the story of Wayland Cooper, the son of American missionaries living in Northern China at a time when the nation is spiraling out of control. During the tumultuous events, Wayland is torn from his family and left critically injured. He’s taken in and nursed back to health by a Chinese family, and he soon becomes embroiled in the family’s internal feud, a vicious martial arts struggle that puts each of their lives at risk. The novel is set to be published by Earnshaw Books in January, 2020.
The video below was taken in Shanghai in 1901, and although most of my story is set in Tianjin, this gives a pretty good idea of what a Chinese city looked like at the time:
And for contrast, here’s some footage from Boston in 1903, which would have been the world that the Cooper family in my story had come from:
The Shaw Brothers movie The Boxer Rebellion is a great kung fu movie, and a surprisingly nuanced take on the historical events: