In the spring of 1943, Audrey Watson, a spirited young woman from Churchill's spy agency, set out from London on a journey that would change her life. Her destination was Chungking, a squalid but strangely romantic city on the Yangtze River and the wartime capital of China. At a tea party given by Madame Chiang Kai-shek, she met Max Oxford, an intelligence officer in the Royal Air Force, who had escaped from Hong Kong after it fell to the Japanese. In the mountains of southwest China, Max and Audrey began a lifelong love that would sustain them through good times and bad - through war, separation, loss, and Audrey's search for identity as a colonial wife in postwar Asia.