Lady of Ch'iau Kuo, Warrior of the South, Southern China, A.D. 531

This diary is about a young Princess in Southern China. It's a China different than today's, though, as it's not a unified country at all. There is Northern China, which had been unified but sort of fell apart, and then there's Southern China which consists basically of groups of various feuding clans.

The girl's Chinese name is Princess Redbird. She has some education under a Chinese master, Master Chen, who is a scholar and who takes a liking to her. She is able to speak some Chinese plus her own language, putting herself in a role where she can be used as an interpreter.

If that was all there was to her story it would still be interesting, but major difficulties arise in that one of the groups, the Dog Heads, are the most vicious of all and are threatening both her people and the Chinese. Various attempts to defeat them end in disaster and before long her own village is threatened.

Lady Ch'iau devises an extremely daring, dangerous plan that could save her village and the remnants of her people's army, but it involves using both young and very old people and lots and lots of poisonous animals against an army of attacking men and elephants.

There are a lot of things happening in this novel, and the story is quite exciting and interesting at the same time. It definitely shows how powerful Lady Ch'iau was, indeed ending up with her becoming ruler of Southern China for a long time. A fascinating, brave and extremely intelligent young woman and one of the best books in the series.

There is reference in the story to the writings of a Chinese named Master Meng. There was such a person and there are numerous books about him and his writings, but you should search under the term Mencius first as, for some reason, his name has been Latinized.

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