Books published by Earnshaw Books Limited

When Yorkshireman Chris Ruffle decided to build a vineyard complete with a Scottish castle in the midst of the countryside in eastern China, he was expecting difficulties, but nothing on the scale he encountered. But build it he did, and the wine is now flowing.

More than 300 years ago, Taiwan was a controversial topic in London thanks to a stupendous fraud perpetrated by a Frenchman claiming to have been born there.

Manila, and the Philippine islands beyond it, has a rich history, filled with Spanish galleons, Japanese invaders, killer volcanoes, and a host of colourful characters and incidents that make the city a must-visit destination in Asia.

In 1974, out of the blue, Richard Kirkby got the opportunity to go to one of the most isolated places on the planet, Communist China. Then for more than three years, he watched from the inside as China dealt with the disastrous consequences of the Culture Revolution, the death of Chairman Mao, and the beginnings of the new world that followed.

1941 was a turning point for the world, but long-time Shanghai resident Ruth Hill Barr had no way of knowing that when she started her five-year diary on January 1st. This book includes the full text of Ruth's diary, revealing with detail the anguish and, incredibly, the continuity of life inside and outside the Shanghai camps during the war.

This three-volume work tells its history through the fascinating cast of characters both on and before the bench and the many challenging issues the courts faced including war, riots, rebellion, murder, infidelity and even a failed hanging.

Extraterritoriality had a huge impact, which continues to this day, on how China and Japan view the world. This book tells its history through the fascinating cast of characters both on and before the bench and the many challenging issues the courts faced including war, riots, rebellion, corruption, murder, infidelity, and, even, a failed hanging.

Foreign gunboats forced China, Japan and Korea to open to the outside world under mid-19th century treaties which included "extraterritoriality", rules forbidding local courts from trying foreigners.

The Chinese I Ching, the Book of Changes, is one of the oldest and strangest of all books, a masterpiece of world literature, a divination manual and a magnet for the deranged and the obsessive. In Sixty-Four Chance Pieces, novelist and philosopher Will Buckingham puts the I Ching to work, using it to weave together sixty-four stories of chance and change, each flowing from one of the I Ching's 64 hexagrams. Moving between myth, fable and travel-writing, Sixty-Four Chance Pieces offers an attempt to make sense of the maddening, changeable book that is the I Ching with tales of inventors and fox-spirits, ancient poets and non-existent rulers, kleptomaniac pensioners and infernal bureaucrats. Like the I Ching itself, this new Book of Changes is a puzzle, a conundrum and a journey of many transformations, where nothing is quite what it seems.

Chinese art's journey from mass-produced propaganda in the Mao era to market darling mirrors China's own momentous changes like few other disciplines. Today, in both art and Chinese society, commerce and politics coexist in a delicate balance, which some call sensible and others, say is selling out.

Original stories by Dan Washburn, Jonathan Watts, Simon Winchester, Nury Vittachi, Michael Meyer, Matt Muller, Alan Paul, Matthew Polly, Derek Sandhaus, Jonathan Campbell, Tom Carter, Mark Kitto, Pete Spurrier, Graham Earnshaw, Deborah Fallows, Susie Gordon and others.

In 1898 a young Englishman walked into a homosexual brothel in Peking and began a journey that, as he claims, took him all the way to the bedchamber of imperial China's last great ruler, the Empress Dowager Tz'u Hsi.