China was a glorious and a terrible place to live during the time of the Emperor.

It's 221 BC, and ten years of brutal warfare have brought a unified Chinese land. Emperor Ying Jeng, Imperial China's creator, disarms the people and commissions a road system to unite key areas of the empire. Weights, measures, laws, monies, and written characters are standardized in a system that will endure for 2000 years. Jeng also befriends Marcus Lucius Scipio, a Roman traveler who saves the Emperor's life on more than one occasion.

Eight years later, Marcus meets and soon falls in love with Ming Tien, a Chinese scholar and former nun. Ming returns his love, but she refuses to become a man's property through marriage-even after she finds out that she's carrying Marcus's child. She chooses not to tell him about the baby, and the lie haunts their relationship to its demise. A short time after their daughter's birth and subsequent adoption, Marcus and Ming can't help but renew their passionate affair. But when a drunken Emperor Jeng accosts Ming, her reaction has lasting consequences for all.

Peasants, local officials, aristocrats, and an organized crime syndicate are all caught up in this romantic drama of the empire's forging, vividly depicted through the eyes of a historian intent on documenting the life and times of the first Emperor of China.