A Love Story: The China Memoirs of Thomas Rowley

In China, after a ferocious battle, an American lieutenant is forced to surrender to an all-female unit of Taiping rebels. These beautiful women warriors dressed in Hangchou and Suzhou silk were known as "the silken armies" and were fighting against the Manchu government in Beijing (Qing Dynasty). They then capture a beautiful English woman as well and parade Rowley and the woman from village to village as foreign-devil captives. Rowley is used as a slave and a horse and brutally whipped and harshly treated. But Rowley and one of the Chinese women fall in love. Rowley now fights with them rather than against them but is wounded and separated from the woman he loves and over the years strives to find her.

Many years after his death his memoirs of his adventures in China surfaced in a New York auction house. His story is one of love, romance, erotica and, in the beginning, discipline and humiliation at the hands of beautiful and dominating Chinese women warriors. His adventures took place at the time when the American adventurer, Frederick Townsend Ward, was eventually killed by the Taipings and replaced by the British general, Charles (Chinese) Gordon.