The Wondrous Elixir of the Two Chinese Lovers

“An audacious and mesmerizing story, meticulously researched and beautifully told.” —Simon Winchester

Ned Sheehan, an archaeologist, has spent years hacking through the jungles of southern Mexico with little more to show for it than a few broken Maya pots. But his luck takes a dramatic – and dangerous – turn when he uncovers two tombs whose occupants are Chinese and an ocean away from where they should be. One tomb belongs to Xu Fu, a famous Taoist priest who vanished on a quest for the elixir of immortality at the behest of China’s First Emperor. The other houses the emperor’s own mother, scandalously revealed to have been Xu Fu’s lover.

For Sheehan, this is proof of transoceanic links between the ancient civilizations of China and the Maya. But to his dismay, news of the elixir is all anyone cares about. It attracts a dangerous mix of fanatics: New Age crackpots, religious cultists, and tomb robbers in league with a Mexican drug cartel. All of them believe that the tomb’s clay tablets – the priest’s enigmatic and often bawdy memoir – contain a formula for the long-sought elixir. This modern-day detective story is woven into Xu Fu’s own account of how he was plucked from a celibate life in a monastery to sail across the Pacific Ocean in search of Penglai, the fabled Isle of the Immortals.