Long before she became one of the most famous women in the world - and the love of a man destined to become a King-Emperor - Wallis Simpson had lived an extraordinary life. Perhaps the most incredible part of it was when she went to live in China as the unhappy wife of a drunken US Navy officer and ended up leaving him and entering a world of hedonism, intrigue (both politics and sexual) and all manner of complex relationships amid the glamour - and dangers - of Shanghai and Peking during the Jazz Age. Rumours of her behaviour in China - notably the infamous ‘Shanghai Grip’ she was alleged to have learned in a high class brothel - would be used against her many years later.

Paul French, an expert in Chinese history, has researched every aspect of Wallis’s time in China and his book, Her Lotus Year, brings that lost world to life - and nails a few myths. It also explains how and why Wallis became the formidable woman that she was.

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