If you’ve picked up this novel, you’ve stepped into one of the most turbulent, and least remembered, chapters of modern Chinese history. A brief backgrounder may help orient you before the first shot is fired.
The year is 1926. China is not, in any practical sense, a unified country. The last dynasty, the Ch’ing, collapsed in 1912, and what followed was not a republic so much as a slow-motion catastrophe. Regional military commanders, known as warlords, carved the country into personal fiefdoms, heavily taxed the peasantry, and waged almost constant war on one another for territory and revenue. The nominal government in Peking changed hands so often that foreign diplomats had difficulty keeping track of who their Chinese counterparts were.
Into this disorder stepped Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang, or KMT. After Sun’s death in 1925, his young protégé Chiang Kai-shek took command of the party’s National Revolutionary Army. In the summer of 1926, General Chiang launched what history would call the Northern Expedition. It was a military campaign designed to march from the KMT’s base in Canton (present day Guangzhou) and unify China by force under the KMT. It was an audacious undertaking, but in the summer and autumn of 1926, it was working.
The novel is set in and around the Wuhan tri-cities: Hankow, Hanyang, and Wuchang. These three cities, straddling the confluence of the Yangtze and Han rivers in Hupeh Province (present day Hubei), were the great inland commercial and manufacturing hub of China. The tri-cities were sometimes called the “Pittsburgh of China” for their industrial and commercial importance. Hankow, on the north bank of the Yangtze, was the commercial center. Its famous Bund (a riverfront promenade and docks) was lined with the counting houses, banks, and consulates of the foreign powers. Next to Hankow on the northern bank of the Yangtze, with the Han River flowing between them, lay Hanyang, home to China’s largest arsenal and an iron and steel works. And across the Yangtze on the southern bank, the ancient walled city of Wuchang served as the provincial capital. It was in Wuchang, in October 1911, that the revolution against the Ch’ing dynasty had actually begun.
By 1926, the foreign presence in Hankow had already begun to unravel at the edges. The “concession” system, those self-governing foreign enclaves carved out of Chinese soil in treaties after successive defeats in the nineteenth century, was showing its age. The German concession had been the first to go. China broke diplomatic relations with Germany in March 1917 and reclaimed German-held territory, a position confirmed by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The Russian concession followed a different path. After the Bolshevik revolution collapsed Czarist authority, China reclaimed the former Russian concession on September 23, 1920. The Soviet Union subsequently ratified the arrangement in its broader negotiations with China in the early 1920s.
So, at the time this novel opens, the Hankow Bund presents a layered picture. The British, French, and Japanese concessions remain active —foreign-administered, garrisoned, flying their respective flags, and operating under their own municipal councils and laws. The former German and Russian concessions, now Chinese-administered “Special Administrative Districts,” flank them on the map but have been under Chinese authority for several years. The great powers are still very much present; they are simply fewer than they once were.
Commanding the defense of the Wuhan tri-cities in August 1926 was General Wu P’ei-fu, one of the most powerful warlords in China, and perhaps the best-known Chinese military figure in the Western press. Educated, cultivated, and militarily capable, Wu was badly overextended by 1926. He represented the old order making its last stand.
Into this world I’ve placed U.S. Marine Corps Second Lieutenant Jack Gaines, assigned to the gunboat USS Patuxent of the Yangtze Patrol. Britain, the United States, France, and Japan all maintained armed river forces in China under treaty rights. Their mission was the protection of nationals and commercial interests. In practice, their presence made them reluctant witnesses to, and occasional actors in, one of the great convulsions of the twentieth century.
That’s the stage for the novel. The curtain goes up on August 28, 1926.
For more information and news of upcoming books, please visit: jrkendallauthor.com
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to XShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest
Monday, April 13, 2026
Why I Write
There is a particular kind of knowledge that accumulates slowly, over decades, without any clear plan for where it is going. You study a language because the military sends you to study it. You earn a graduate degree in Asian Studies for the same reason. You spend years in East Asia — observing, reading, absorbing — and you file it all away. Eventually, if you are lucky, the filing cabinet gets full enough that something has to come out of it.
That, in the simplest terms, is how The Dragon Gate Conspiracy came to be written.
I spent more than two decades as a United States Marine Corps officer. My undergraduate degree from Virginia Military Institute was in English — one of the “artier” majors at VMI, but the Marine Corps is surprisingly tolerant about what its prospective officers study. It turned out to be exactly the right foundation for a second career I didn’t know I was preparing for.
Later, at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, I completed a Master’s degree in Asian Studies. Add several years of language and defense studies training in Japan, and extensive travel in the region, and you end up with a fairly specific set of intellectual tools that often sat in the drawer before I found the right use for them.
The question, once I left active duty, was what to do with it all.
I had been drawn to the history of the Western presence in East Asia since 1992 and my first tour in Okinawa. Having grown up in Europe, it was a whole new world. Over time, I grew fascinated by the treaty ports, the foreign concessions, the gunboats on the Yangtze, the extraordinary cast of characters who ended up in places like Shanghai and Hankow during the first half of the twentieth century. It is a period that most Western readers know almost nothing about, which made it both a challenge and an opportunity. If you set a novel in World War II France or Cold War Berlin, your readers arrive with a mental map already drawn. Set it in Warlord-Era China, and you are drawing the map from scratch.
I decided that was a feature, not a bug.
The Dragon Gate Conspiracy is set in Hankow, present-day Wuhan, during the summer and early autumn of 1926. The city was then a patchwork of foreign concessions carved out of the Chinese interior by imperial powers: British, French, Japanese, Russian, German, and American. The KMT’s National Revolutionary Army, led by General Chiang Kai-shek and backed by Soviet advisors, was driving northward in what history calls the Northern Expedition. The warlord General Wu P’ei-fu was defending the city. The whole arrangement was about to come apart.
Into this world I placed a young U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant named Jack Gaines. He’s a Virginian, a professional, caught between the demands of his duty, an unexpected love affair with an American journalist, and a conspiracy that reaches further than he can initially see. Jack is, in some respects, a vessel for the things I know: what it feels like to be a junior officer responsible for men in an uncertain environment; how foreign cities look and smell and sound; the particular quality of attention you develop when events around you are accelerating and you cannot quite see where they are heading.
That is not autobiography. Jack Gaines is a fictional character, and his story is a novel. But the texture of his world — the culture, the political landscape, the physical city — is drawn from a long study of the historical record, and I like to think that shows in the writing.
The other thing I had, which no amount of research can fully substitute for, was direct experience of the region. Japan is not China, and the 2000s are not the 1920s, but years in East Asia leave traces that show up in unexpected places — the heat of a Shanghai summer afternoon, the sounds and smells of a night market, the peculiar expat experience of being immersed in a world that is not quite your own. Those details are harder to get from books.
The Dragon Gate Conspiracy is my first novel. It will not be my last. There is more of this world to explore, and I intend to explore it. I hope you will come with me!
— J. R. Kendall
0 Comments