City of Broken Promises

在網路發達的繁忙社會中，網路書店已蔚然成為潮流。

當我們在網路上藉由網路書店購書同時，即使是市面上稀少的書，不用再像過往等待實體書店調貨，只要下了訂單，在幾天內就可以收到書。

前幾天在逛書店的時候看到但是我想在博客來買應該會比較方便，而且24小時都能買，再加上常常會有折扣及積點活動，

更進一步的是，現在博客來也和遍及全省的便利商店合作，我們可以指定方便取貨的７－１１等便利商店地點，數日內便可取得想要的書籍。

The city is Macao, the Portuguese settlement on the China Coast, as it was more than 200 years ago. The promises are those made by Englishmen to marry their Macao mistresses, only to leave them abandoned and their children bastards. Martha Merop and her English lover are unique in this period. He, son of the founder of Lloyd’s and cousin of the philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, was one of the first merchants to oppose the trade in opium. She, Chinese, abandoned at birth and sold into prostitution at the age of thirteen, became an international trader in her own right, the richest woman on the China Coast and Macao’s greatest public benefactress. This moving novel that captures the time and place so convincingly is a historical reconstruction of the years 1780 to 1795 when the two were together. It is based on oral tradition handed down through generations in Macao, and on documents that survive about them in Macao, Lisbon and London. Austin Coates identified Martha Merop’s lover, about whom little was known. The documents about him confirmed the traditional Macao story, and the outcome was this book.

作者簡介

AUSTIN COATES

Austin Coates (1922–97), a former senior British civil servant in Hong Kong, Malaya, and Sarawak, left government service at age forty to pursue a professional writing career. Widely regarded as the most distinguished English-language author in Hong Kong, Coates remained a long-time Hong Kong resident, later dividing his time between Hong Kong and Portugal, where he died. The City of Broken Promises is a companion to his two other books on Macao: A Macao Narrative and Macao and the British. Both these books and his other novel, The Road, are also available in the Echoes series from Hong Kong University Press.