Red Poppies

Ambitious, sensuous, filled with intriguing characters, panoramic settings, and high drama, Red Poppies opens a window on Tibet, dispelling many of the popular myths of a pacifistic society peopled by devout worshipers. Red Poppies is the story of the wealthy Maiqi family: its powerful chieftain, his Han Chinese wife, his first son and heir, and his second, 'idiot' son, the novel's narrator and unlikely hero. The time is the 1930s, the setting a stone fortress overlooking all that the family rules on the arid plains of inner Tibet, with its scattered populace of peasant farmers, merchants, and comical local lamas. A feud breaks out with a neighboring chieftain; an emissary of the Chinese Nationalists comes to the Maiqis' aid with the tools of modern warfare. In exchange, fields of poppies, valuable in the Nationalist-backed heroin trade, are to be planted instead of grain in a deal that enriches the Maiqis' lavish lifestyle and earns them dangerous enmity.